Ann Kelley: Episode Link
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On this episode, we are speaking to psychologist, podcaster and author Ann Kelley. Ann will be discussing her new book and how to create healthy attachments with family and friends.
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to Hot Flashes and Cold Topics, everybody. We are really thrilled today to have Ann Kelley on the show. Ann Kelly has her PhD and she is a licensed psychologist with a doctorate from UT Austin.
And she also is coming out with a great new book that is secure relating. relating, holding your own in an insecure world, along with Sue Marriott,
her partner in life, as well as co -author and co -host of her podcast, “The Therapist Uncensored Podcast.” So welcome to the show today, Ann. – Thank you so much,
Bridget, for having me on and Colleen, I’m really excited to be here. – We’re thrilled too, and thank you. We had quite a time this morning getting all the technology and the times that you’re here with us today. everything and Anne is so patient and understanding.
So really, if you’re in the area of Austin, Texas and you’d need a good psychologist, I would go to her because she’s very understanding. You know, your book,
I was reading it when the turmoil that was all on our end, not on Anne’s end. I was talking, I said, I, when I got in touch with you, I said, oh my gosh, I am in the red zone right now.
now. And I need to get back to green. And that is something in your book, you talk a lot about attachment. I guess we’ll start with the attachment part of your book and being secure.
Yeah, we, the book primarily centers on us. The reason we titled it secure relating is secure relating. is about finding your most grounded wise self in moment to moment interactions with people.
And it is, you know, we, it’s easier said than done, right? Like, we all think, you know, I am, I’m going to stay cool and calm and collected,
and I am not going to, you know, stomp up the stairs after my teenager this time. I’m just not. not, right? And then lo and behold, we find ourselves doing exactly whatever it is we said we weren’t gonna do,
eat that whatever out of the refrigerator. And we can be really, really hard on ourselves, right? And actually we can be really hard on other people,
especially when we say, I’ve told you 15 times not to do that, you keep doing that, you must not care. You just don’t even think about it. And the truth be told, the part of our body that was developed early,
early in life is what we call our attachment system. It’s how we learn to keep ourselves safe. It’s how we learn more importantly to connect to other people and keep other people around. And it has deeply impacted those relationships,
deeply impact how we’re wired. And that’s what we mean when we connect. talk about attachment. Attachment can mean so many things out there in the in the in the common media but really it’s like how are we wired to connect how we wire to protect ourselves and we have found that the more you can actually understand your wiring in your early attachment things that seem chaotic and crazy about what you’re doing or what
your partner or your child or your boss or your partner or your partner or your boss or your boss or your boss or your boss or your boss doing. All of a sudden, a light bulb goes on. You have a way of seeing it more clearly and more compassionately and more importantly,
you have more options to do something different. You know, you talk about relational neuroscience. Is that, can you talk, first off, that’s a, I’m not familiar with that term.
So can you talk about what relational neuroscience is? Yes, it’s a great question. It is mouthful, isn’t it? We haven’t figured out too many other ways to say it, but relational neuroscience is about as humans or actually all mammals.
It is the way, the reason you call it relational neuroscience is relational is about how we stay in relationship to those around us because it’s vital to our survival,
right? Yeah, we have. to have others when we come to this world. That’s obvious. We’re babies. If we don’t have other people, we’re going to be in trouble. And so it’s about how do we keep in relationship with ourselves and our relationship with other people?
And we learn from a very early age how to do that, and it impacts our wiring, our neurobiology. There’s the neuroscience. How is our body wired? And it shifts.
We aren’t just born in the world. this world with certain wiring and that’s we get what we get and we don’t throw a fit. That isn’t the case, right? It grows. How somebody can attend to you, what kind of emotions are expressed to you,
how you are received with your crying as a baby informs your entire nervous system. Hey, does this work? Or does this make people run away from us? And the interesting thing about the neuroscience is as we start to learn,
oh, wait, every time I really scream and cry as a toddler, rather than my caregiver coming close and giving me comfort and warming my body,
they actually get really elevated and scared, or they get really angry and shut off. And so really our wiring learns, oh, over and over again,
it gets stored in the deepest part of our memory. that we can’t, it’s unconscious, but we do learn. So we, we learn what information to pay attention to, and we learn what information to ignore.
We learn how to regulate our emotions by that, and it literally is in our wiring. So when we say relational neuroscience is how is your body wired,
how is your brain wired, and how do we co -regulate each other? other in relationships? Kind of a long answer, isn’t it? No, but that makes sense. It does make sense.
I mean, you use so many great examples in your book about just different relationships between people and how they were raised. And there’s also in there,
you know, when I was reading it, I’m thinking, oh, no, I’ve screwed up my guests. Oh, no, I mean, I was like. like, oh, did I do that, or should I have done that?
But there’s also hope. There’s always hope. So can you talk about some of the things there that if you feel like, oh, I did this one thing or I go read too much,
that there is hope for certain situations? Can you share some of those? – Oh, absolutely, I’m so glad you brought it up because that’s one thing we tried so hard to not do in our book.
is to have this sense. And honestly, some of the information about attachment gets out there and it really scares people. Oh my God, I was not attending and I lost my temper so many times with my child.
I screwed everybody out. And that it’s just so, first of all, not true. We are so human. And honestly, research has shown that we just need to like warmly connect sometimes only 30 % of the time because…
it’s all about repair. It’s not about the initial thing. But going back to the neuroscience because I’m a little bit of a nerd, our body is learning throughout our lives.
It is not true what we learned as a child is the only thing that is going to happen to us all the way until we are in the grave. Our body is rewiring itself and learning new things. and shifting and changing.
So it’s so hopeful. It really, really is. First of all, the fact that anybody out there is listening and reading and like thinking about their child and what they did shows you are ready or in tuned and caring.
And my guests, your kids already know that. And that’s really what we need to know is that our kids know we care. And we send so much more good stuff than we do. We remember the bad stuff and we just hold on.
to it, right? And we think, oh my gosh. And it’s so easy to forget all the wonderful kind moments of hugging them when they hurt themselves or all the loving moments.
And those are all getting wired in honestly, deeply in their sense of self. But to answer your question is we, there’s so much hope. How we relate to each other on a day to day basis,
literally. literally can change the way our brain is wired and change the way our caring people in our lives respond. And so that is,
it’s full of hope. – You know, you said, just, I know you say this in the book, just recognizing, that is the first step. – Yes. – And you just said that again, just recognizing,
I know what’s happening here. I know what’s going on right here. That, that actually, actually helps and I mean just little things to say I know it’s how I know I’m going into this mode right now I know I’m getting very emotional right now can I bring myself back which leads to the can you talk about the red the green and the blue zones yes yes it could have seemed so fine why did we all of a sudden throw throw
colors in well you can see just try to just what relational neurobiology is. You either get interested or you get overwhelmed or you tune out because if you’re not really interested in that,
it’s too much for us to hold. We don’t walk around dealing with our partners or in thinking about neurobiology, right? So we use colors on a spectrum and we do that because everyone can imagine a spectrum.
spectrum of color, right? Like you there’s all these different shades, right? And so we don’t go from feeling our deepest,
most secure self to all of a sudden being hot and red and angry all at one moment. Right? We we travel that way. And we travel that way many times without recognizing it.
We don’t really recognize we had all these shades before we were really angry and raising our voice. Talk a lot about that or we get cut off. And so we use colors in a spectrum in our book.
You’ll see a spectrum to help you track. Oh wait, where am I? Where am I in the moment to moment? Because when we recognize just the fact that we’re aware of ourselves in a moment does wonders.
Because I don’t know about you guys often. We know most most of us, we feel something, we don’t even know what it is, but we feel that it activates us. And the first thing we do is we look around to see what’s causing it, and that’s the reason.
If you wouldn’t have done that, I would have been fine. So then my goal is to change you. If you would quit doing that, I’m gonna feel great. So stop doing it, right? But the truth of the matter is,
if we turn to ourselves first and really, really ground When I come to you and say you did this But this is upsetting. I’m gonna do it in a completely different way and I’m gonna be heard So we use colors and there’s a reason it’s just not random I’m gonna I’ll try to describe this really quickly use the the center is green You mentioned green earlier and that is the center of our spectrum and the reason we use
green is because it’s kind of our flow state Right when we’re in green obviously obviously lights mean you get to go, you’re safe, and so it’s our flow state, and that’s in our most secure place.
In the spectrum, if you travel one direction, you travel to further shades of red and reds where we’re hot. We thought of red because you’re hot, you’re activated, you’re sympathetically going at it,
right? And in that direction, it’s likely that when you were younger, if you lean that direction, so we were in green, you’re free to go, you’re free to go, you’re free to go, you’re free to go. one direction or the other when we get upset more often than not.
Some of us lean red, which means we tend to be, when we get upset, we tend to get more emotional. We’re very aware of our surroundings. We take in all sorts of information about what’s happened out there and we store it and we react to it.
And so that’s why it’s red. It’s a little hot. But you know what, when people think about it, it’s a little hot. about getting upset, we often think about getting angry, but there’s another direction on that spectrum. And this is the one I really want to talk about because it gets ignored and I actually think it gets promoted in our world.
And that’s going to the other side of the spectrum, which is a description of our nervous system. When we go blue, we start to downregulate. We start to bring our body in a more disconnected way.
from the relationship. So we get more logical, less emotional, more rational, a little bit more black and white thinking.
And we often think when we go blue, we use blue because we’re more cool and cut off that we’re right. And rational thinking is the answer.
And so the reason I like to talk about that is, often as somebody is more emotional in a relationship, they’re pegged as being too sensitive to, you know, too activated,
just calm down. We would be fine if you’d just calm down. The problem is your emotion, but the problem really isn’t always your emotion ’cause we are feeling beings and we wanna connect.
And often when we’re in the green and the red, we’re really wanting connection. we’re really wanting connection. And if you’re in the green and the red, we’ve been raised that our emotions are kind of weak and unfortunately lots of men have been raised more in that direction then they don’t even recognize that emotions actually threaten that so you’re feeling threatened and so you have all these strategies to cut yourself
off from those feelings and guess what it’s also to cut other people off so you’re often like you’re just being too sensitive And really what that is is we have to teach people that actually when you’re really in the blue,
you’re in the blue because you’re extremely sensitive. You’re extremely sensitive. You’re picking up these these these signs that somebody’s upset in the world and you think your job is to fix the problem or shut down the emotion.
So often in the blue you go to giving somebody the answer when they haven’t asked. for it, you know what I mean? Or you start telling them, we’d be fine if you just stop being upset,
if you’d be happy, really, our problem in our relationship is you’re unhappy. And if you were happy, we’d be great. And what we want people to understand is that’s actually probably built on your attachment system,
and the way you learned to connect, and that you learned to keep motions content. as safer and to keep your emotions contained you have to stop other people from feeling because if they get upset you feel you don’t like that so you got to stop them does that make sense oh yeah sure you know there are so many people that feel like it’s better to be right than to be attached to somebody and I think a lot of people
can say they have someone in their family who they don’t talk to because it was better to be right. What is that? Like, where is that in the color zone? That is such a great question.
It can be in both, right? Because some of us, let me start up by saying that we have, in the green zone, we’re more able to access our connections in our connection system.
And one of the ways to know that you are more in your own green zone, and we all have green zone living. None of us live in one place or the other, right? But when we start to get activated,
we travel either red or green, right? More often than not. When we’re in our green zone, we can access curiosity. We’re more flexible.
And the key is that you can be connected to yourself. yourself and other people. But as humans, when we start to get activated and we start to feel threatened, we lose that ability to be flexible because we’re just being told we’re threatened and we have to act real fast.
So I would say being right is usually on one side of the spectrum or the other. But to answer your question more directly, it’s usually more on the blue side. Often time when we live on the red side,
we have a lot of problems. little bit harder time connecting to ourselves and we trust other people a little too much when we’re activated. And on the blue side, we’ve learned, I can’t trust other people to be there.
So I got to be there for myself. And so being right makes me feel very confident and very secure. And I know what’s right and I’m going to tell you.
And so it’s a very blue side activation. [BLANK _AUDIO] it’s really interesting when people start to learn that’s actually a sign of insecurity right we think when we feel secure we are secure but truth of the matter is if we feel like we know the answer and we feel compelled to give it because if people could just understand the right way we would all be good that means we’re living we like to call it you’re kind
of living in the blue zone and And we want to help you learn how to warm your system up. Being in the right, if you think you are right,
everyone else is wrong. It likely means you’re living in a disconnected place. And that being in relationship with somebody else’s opinions and thoughts is too threatening.
And so being right means I don’t have to tolerate you. It means I can just push you away and like, I’m right, you either come over here and join with me and agree or you get away from me.
And you point out that that is where a lot of men fall, boys don’t cry, you know, don’t, you know, that’s be a man or whatever and and also it’s rewarded a lot.
So true. true. Yeah. You know, like you had an example of the book of the young man that. Oh, he does this. He’s so, you know, look how calm he handles these situations.
And it is rewarded. You know, it is in this world. I just feel like if we were more, if we could get more to that green, if you could show a little bit of emotion,
what that would do for the other side. And you have some great examples. examples in the book. The couple, Mia, was it Mia and DJ? – Yeah, yeah. – Oh my goodness. – Can you relate to them?
– It was so, you know, I was seeing stuff there. I was seeing people I know. I was seeing things that probably I do. Can you share a little bit about that story of Mia and DJ?
– Sure, sure. So in our book, we try to use, well, we don’t try, we do use. use examples. There’s not anybody specific, they’re all fictional, but they’re conglomerative individuals from ourselves and all the people we’ve worked with.
We can relate to every character in there. There’s not one character that we’re describing that we can’t relate to parts of it. And that’s our goal and to help you kind of walk through. So what you’re bringing up is me and DJ’s are a couple that are headed out for a date night,
night, a long needed date night. And in the journey of going to the date night, there’s all these things that happen that are beyond their awareness that create disconnection along the way,
but they’re unaware. And then date night, surprisingly, not surprisingly ends up in a little bit of a catastrophe conflict. They went out hoping for connection. That’s what they both want.
But, and yet, because they’re… unaware of their own needs the way they interpret information they end up ending the evening in real disconnect and it’s painful and I think we can all like you know we just so want to connect and why is it we end up so far away from each other and so what we do in the book is we walk through not only helping your you understand what happens,
hopefully, we eventually have them go to couples therapy. That does not mean everybody needs to go to couples therapy. That’s part of the reason we wrote the book. We want it to be accessible, not everybody can afford to,
they don’t have access to it. I’m obviously a psychologist, I’m a big believer in therapy, but I also know it’s a real privileged thing to have out there in the world and many people don’t.
And even if they. they do, oftentimes, like DJ in here, in this book is not real prone to wanna walk in and talk about his problems to a therapist. So we do walk them through going to therapy.
Part of my journey in that, our journey in that was to help people understand how positive it could be and how safe it can be. But it’s also as DJ, and you’re right,
more men lean blue, although we have plenty of one. we’re growing more blues. To be honest with you, we’re growing more people because of the disconnect, though the reliance on,
you know, moving away from the reliance on relationships and the more information, information, information. And when we are focused on information and not relational connection,
our wiring starts to change and we become less and less emotionally. emotionally available and connected. But the truth is we, our body knows no better.
Our bodies know that we need people. So what that does is it leaves us all more in a state of alarm whether we know it or not. So we become more reactive, more defensive,
and you know as we see in many parts of the world more polarized and in our own camps. camps rather than connecting and we really see us a pattern of going further that way and that’s why we’re really trying to focus on secure relating like finding your own grounded self right now so that you can have better relationships in your own home with your neighbors but also so we like to say with your favorite and least
favorite people well – Well, you know, you talk about the three Rs and we kind of touched on it. We touched on recognizing and we touched on reflection. Rewiring,
which is what you just kind of introduced, I think is kind of the next conversation. How can we rewire and have open up to deeper connections and attachments with people?
– So rewiring can happen at a moment to moment basis. basis, right? It is, it is, and as we rewire, as we have different interactions, we start to build different wiring,
you know, as somebody, if you think about it, as somebody becomes, I see this with couples all the time, they might come in and they’re just at each other and at each other and oftentimes people wait too long to go get help and their bodies have developed a bunch of beliefs and automatic reactivity because we continue to develop a nervous system and couples and parents and children can develop patterns that impact their
wiring for the good and they can develop really entrenched negative patterns that start to impact and when I say let me say how our body continues to to get wired is that where we place our attention,
what assumptions we make, what internal dialogue we have, and narrative we continue to believe, our body is a learning machine. It continues to learn.
Oh, every time you see this person, they’re threatening, okay, now when I see you, my body starts to respond and starts to… to build wiring to believe this person’s a threat.
And what’s so painful is that oftentimes people can have do that to one another. They can do it with the uncle at the family gathering who’s always in the right and shutting people down.
The minute you start to see your uncle, your nervous system shuts down and then you can start to devalue them and distance and lose them. relationship. How we can rewire in an everyday way is if I can securely relate to myself,
I really, really can change the dialogue even with that uncle or aunt and how that can really change our wiring is not just that we’re shifting the relationship,
we’re shifting our belief and in ourselves. And so our whole body goes, oh wait, because I’m able to do this differently, and because I’m able to calm down,
I kind of trust my body more. And if I can trust my body more, maybe I don’t have to stay in this more alert state,
which happens underneath the surface. And so as my body calms down, guess what I do? I start to interact more caringly and lovingly to people around me,
and through co -regulation, we like to call it like the co -wiring, then other people will immediately, and it really works. I can promise you that when you start to work curiosity instead of the answers,
answers and you’re able to go it’s really interesting you have that opinion I find it really interesting I’ll be honest I can feel my body it feels challenging I feel challenged by your perspective so I’m curious can you tell me how you got there why is it that you believe A B and C what got you there you’ve just become a safer person inside yourself because you’ve acknowledged that you felt challenged and then you
became a safer person to them. And then the irony is they have to go inside themselves. When you don’t say you’re wrong and you say, “How did you get there?” Tell me more and you’re really interested.
You can’t trick the nervous system. You have to find your own curiosity. But when you find curiosity, you will feel the conversation. shift to a deeper level.
And now we’re really talking about is probably pretty similar stuff. We all want safety and caring and safety in our schools. We all like we have a lot in common.
And when we can connect with what we have in common, we do shift our wiring. And the beautiful thing is we really will shift the wiring of people around us.
It has a triple effect. It has a trickling down effect. Do you find that when people get to that point, when they’ve rewired,
does that not only affect your mind and your body, but your health? Like, have you found that that helps in, like, just your illnesses or anything like that? Tremendously,
tremendously. Because of the culture, there’s not a coincidence. coincidence that women tend to outlive men because they rely on relationships more. We kind of trust that relationships are going to be vital.
And it’s painful because men deserve better. This is not an anti men message. Men deserve better. We deserve to shift that message to them and say your emotions are welcomed.
We want you. We’re here if you cry. But at your rate, it really affects our health because going back to what I mentioned earlier,
our body deeply knows that we need people. Even if our mind has said, I don’t need people, I’m happier alone. In fact, now that the pandemic is it,
and I get to stay home a lot more, and I don’t have to interact with anybody. Right. That’s great news. news. It isn’t great news because even if you’re not aware, consciously aware you need people,
your body is. So your body really will activate into a higher state of an alarm system, whether you feel it, and it impacts how we digest our food.
It impacts how we engage with people. It impacts our heart conditions. And that’s what happens when we’re alone or lonely. Our body does wither.
It’s just like, I kind of liken it sometimes because people can understand the idea of food, right? We don’t know we need food to survive. But if we are deprived of the access of food,
we often lose, we could lose our hunger. Actually, our appetite starts to cut off more and more and more. And we actually, our brain doesn’t tell us we’re hungry anymore.
but our body knows it is and so it starts to deteriorate. There’s a very similar reaction to emotions if we cut off and we get so logical we have everything delivered to our front door so we never have to go to a grocery store and really smile at a clerk and connect then our body learns oh you’re not going to access people I’m going to cut that part of your your system off and I’m going to really amplify the
part of your brain that needs logic logic and I think we all need to be really careful of that because it really is deteriorating our health.
It’s not always what we think is deteriorating our health. Relationships are key. Connection is key. I’d like to say actually connection. Is that what you hope that people get from the book?
That connection is key. Like why write this book? and what do you hope that people get from it? That might be my most favorite question. I’ve heard it a long time.
I wrote this book very much for that, that I don’t think there’s been, it’s not true, we’ve had a lot of evolution, a lot of pain in our world, so when we say today’s the most painful,
it’s not actually really true, but in my country, life, right, in my conscious awareness, this has probably been the most divisive,
destructive time period. And I and my co -author Sue Marriott are both concerned, as many of us are, that if we keep going on that direction,
it’s going to be really hard to come back from it. And And we feel that we’ve been, we’re incited in a lot of ways to be in our activated selves.
We’re incited by social media, telling you that you’re doing it wrong, you need to do it different, by the news who is always getting our attention by, by proclaiming fear of everything,
by trying to find our tribes by dividing and believing that our tribe’s right and your tribe’s wrong. So right now, now, we’re really concerned with the kind of disconnection A and the promotion that I think is happening by many people out there to say,
you should be in fear and hate other people and come join me. And the problem with that is it works if you’re not aware because we all need to feel like somebody knows better than us.
And if somebody can tell us easy solutions, come to me, I’ll fix it, we don’t have to think very hard for ourselves. Then we kind of stayed divided.
And our book, our desire for a book is nothing to do with politics, it has to do with all of us being responsible for granting ourselves finding our wise selves,
and being able to reach each other in a more connected way. and honestly to care about people we’ll never meet that are across the globe and to not fraction off and say we’re all one big community and we have to think of each other that way.
And we really feel like part of the answer is learning how to A, securely relate ourselves but also expect our leaders to do it. – Absolutely leaders.
– Any leaders, whoever they are. to be securely relating with those on the other side. Right? We need hope and we need people to bridge us,
not divide us. Wow. Well, when does the book come out? The book comes out April 30th. April 30th. April 30th.
Well, make sure that you check out this book, secure relating, holding your own and an Insecure World, and also check out their podcast. It’s the Therapist Uncensored Podcast,
and we are so thankful that you came to talk to us today, Anne, and we really appreciate it. Thank you, best of luck with the book. Yes, yes. Thank you.
Thank you so much. It was just a joy to be here to talk with you all. all. (upbeat music)