Kevin Thompson [00:00:00]:
Hey, welcome back to Change the eyes of podcast, where marriage and family were never meant to be a game of chance. It's been a little bit since Love Styles came out, and so I want to do a little brief mini series here, just kind of going over the basic ideas of what attachment theory actually is. Now that the book has been out, we've seen plenty of questions. Lovestyles, AI is out there. So how people are interacting with that and what it begins to look like. Love Styles is intended to be the simplest overview of attachment theory from a Christian perspective. So it's not a deep dive. Seriously.
Kevin Thompson [00:00:35]:
Some people read it and go, hey, everybody knows this and just kind of throw it away. But for somebody who's kind of trying to get their first understanding of what it actually means and what it looks like. And now very important to know. I'm not a counselor, not a psychologist. I do have classes in psychology, no doubt my undergrad and. And graduate school. But to me, the power of attachment theory is. I think it's the best secular explanation of what happened between Genesis 2 and 3.
Kevin Thompson [00:01:05]:
So God created the world. We're in the midst of perfection. Humanity sinned. We rebelled. And then sin impacted every aspect of who we are. And what is the impact if we were originally meant to be born into a perfect family? Perfect people born into a perfect family, and now we're not. Now we're raised by sinners. Now we are sinners.
Kevin Thompson [00:01:26]:
That had to complicate the whole aspect of what family was meant to be and how it was supposed to take place. And so what does that look like in practical ways to me? The field of psychology now with attachment theory has done a pretty decent job of explaining, here's the impact of what that looks like when on our lives and who we actually are. And so whenever I think about attachment theory, I kind of open the book with a story about a thermostat. But I can take this into my own personal life. Whenever I came to the job that I'm at now. So I got an office. Had been in the previous office for 20 years. So I got a new office, and for five, six months, I just noticed the office sometimes was cold when it shouldn't be cold, it was hot when it shouldn't be hot.
Kevin Thompson [00:02:10]:
And so right outside my door, there was this thermostat. And so I'd be cold, and I'd go out and I'd run the thermostat up, and it seemed like nothing would actually change the different season. I'd be hot, I'd Go out and run the thermostat down. And it seemed like nothing would change. And over and over again, I kept on trying to get it to work, and it wouldn't work. Well, one day as I was changing the thermostat, one of my bosses walked by and he goes, hey, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm cold in my office. I'm running this up. And he said, that's not the thermostat that goes over your office.
Kevin Thompson [00:02:39]:
The thermostat for your office is actually around the corner. The offices I'm in have been redone so many times that they've had to kind of patchwork the H Vac together so that the thermostat nearest to me actually was not the thermostat that was conditioning my room. I think that's a great example of what attachment theory begins to say. Our relationships now are all regulated by a thermostat. And in the most ideal setting, the thermostats that's regulating your relationship is the actual thermostat for that relationship. So that for me and Jenny, for instance, we are the ones regulating who we actually are. And yet so often what's actually happened specifically, we haven't done the work in our past to explore what's going on. The thermostat that generally runs a majority of our relationships today is actually the thermostat from our relationships in the past.
Kevin Thompson [00:03:39]:
And so a basic kind of concept now of what attachment theory says in practical terms is that the way you love today is how you were loved yesterday. And so in the first couple of years of life, you were formed. Now how what love felt like before you could even have words to speak or to say, before you understood what was going on, your brain was being trained that this is what love feels like. This is what love naturally, how it naturally begins to occur. And because all of us were raised by imperfect people, now all of us have some areas in our lives in which what we think love is, it's actually not. And other things that we might think isn't, love actually might begin to be. And so until you and I begin to kind of dig down and do the work to understand how do we view ourselves, others, God, how do we view our own needs? Do we have the ability to recognize our needs? Do we communicate those needs? Do we appropriately lean upon other people without an over expectation of thinking that they can do something for us that they actually can't? But at the same time, do we recognize we can't do this by ourselves? That we actually need, need to lean upon others. What's our viewpoint, our vantage point of all those kind of things.
Kevin Thompson [00:04:58]:
The attachment theory begins to help us understand what that actually means and what it looks like. And so in the book I talk about, I think it's important to me, many books on attachment theory don't talk about this so much. But I go back to the very beginning. John Bowlby is the one who kind of came up with attachment theory, the 1940s, 50s, around in there. And he had a researcher, Mary Ainsworth, and she created what's called the infant strange scenario, the infant strange situation. And to me, it really begins to explain kind of what this looks like. Many books don't explain it, but it's helpful for me, maybe it's helpful for you. So they were trying to create an experiment to begin to test this hypothesis that how our needs were met in the first couple of years of life and impacts how we view ourselves, others and God.
Kevin Thompson [00:05:48]:
I would say that's the simplest definition of attachment theory is how your needs were met and the first couple of years of life now influence how you view yourself, others, and God. And so they created an experiment where they had a little room, and in that room was a chair for an adult and a chair for a child. And then there was a table set up with all these toys for a child. And so the experimenter would bring in a caregiver and a child, let's say a mother and child, just for this sake. But don't get caught up in the gender. Could be a father and child just as easily. They would bring them into a room. The mother would be instructed, you sit here, you do not get up and play.
Kevin Thompson [00:06:24]:
You don't do anything like that. Don't encourage your child in any way. Just kind of act normal. But we're going to see what the child is actually going to do. And then the child will be kind of shown around the room, what they're able to play with and all the opportunities that are there. They go back and sit down next, tomorrow, then the. The experimenter would leave the room. And now obviously there's cameras set up.
Kevin Thompson [00:06:43]:
They're watching all of these things. And then there's a series of scenarios in which a stranger comes in the room. The stranger leaves at one point, the mother leaves one point, the child is just there with the stranger alone. And they're trying to figure out how does the child respond to all these changes in the situation that is around them. And you and I can just. If we have children, if We've been around. Children can guess what the response would actually be. So we would expect, in a normal situation, the mother and a child walk into a room.
Kevin Thompson [00:07:16]:
Let's say the child's two, three. A mother and a child walk into a room. The child's nervous in a space they haven't been in before. They kind of cling to the mom a little bit to get a sense of safety. The stranger, the experimenter, leaves. And now it's just the two of them. And. And eventually the child feels comfortable enough because the mom is comfortable to go explore, to go play.
Kevin Thompson [00:07:37]:
There's toys over there that are interesting and intriguing. Well, then a stranger comes in the room. And the moment a stranger enters, you expect the child to run over to the mom, cling to the child, to the mom. Now notice what's happening. The child is using the mother to figure out is this person safe or not. Think about why that would be happening. The child doesn't have enough lived experience to know, can I immediately judge this person as safe or not? So a child needs someone else with more brain development, with more life experience to begin to understand is this person safe or not? And so in a healthy situation, the child uses the adult to determine, how should I respond and interact? In this situation, what we can see is as the mom now interacts with the stranger in a calm way, peaceful way, she's happy, she's not stressed in any way. The child kind of calms, might even approach the stranger, might interact lightly with the stranger, might go back to playing in some way.
Kevin Thompson [00:08:40]:
Well, eventually in that situation, now the mom leaves, and so now it's just the stranger and the child. And so now that the child no longer has the adults that they know and trust to help them interpret the situation, we would expect the child to be panicked in this moment. Maybe they try to approach the stranger for comfort, but they feel unsafe in doing so. Maybe they go to the door trying to get mom to come back. We expect some turmoil. Well, then the mom re enters. And so we expect the child to run to the mom, to get comforted, to be calm. But eventually the child does, in fact, soothe.
Kevin Thompson [00:09:14]:
And so the stranger leaves, and the child once again goes back and plays. And in many ways, well, then the mother leaves the room. Now the child is all by themselves, all by themselves in a strange situation, we would expect the child to be panicked, to run to the door, not to be playing with toys, not to be calm, to really be dysregulated. In that moment, the mom comes back in. We Expect the child to run to the mom to get calmed again, but eventually they can be calmed. And so notice in all these situations that the child is being stressed. And we expect in a healthy situation for the child to be stressed, to be on the lookout, to be leveraging the parent now for their own kind of emotional well being, all those kinds of things. But here's something that the experimenters begin to see.
Kevin Thompson [00:09:55]:
In about half the cases, the child responded within reason of what they would expect. There might have been highs and lows, depending on the personality of the child, but generally speaking, the child responded in those ways. But half the time the child responded in ways that the researchers were somewhat intrigued by. And so sometimes when they would come into the room, the child never really could calm down. They just kind of clung to the parent the whole time. When a stranger came in, their distress really spiked and could never find a peace or regulation again. In many ways, they were far more dysregulated than what they would expect in another child. The other children, whenever they walked in, they just went to play.
Kevin Thompson [00:10:41]:
They really didn't connect, they didn't need the parent for their own safety and well being. When the stranger walked in, you could tell by watching the camera that they were leery in some way, but they didn't necessarily run to the parent and to get calm. And then on occasion, in really interesting scenarios, the child was dysregulated. They would run to the parent for safety, but notice this, they would stop about an arm's distance away. And it's from that infant strange scenario that we begin to get some proof to the basic kind of concept of theory of what attachment theory actually says. So attachment theory, first and foremost, we're going to divide it into two categories. And I primarily work at it in two categories, although we're going to see what the four actually are. So the two categories are there is secure attachment and then there is non secure attachment.
Kevin Thompson [00:11:35]:
So secure attachment is what we described from the get go of what the child expected to do. That a securely attached child has a good understanding of themselves, of others, that they can lean upon, others to trust, to interpret the room. So a healthy, securely attached child that now clings to the mom or the caregiver whenever they first enter into a strange room, uses the parent to interpret what's going on around them, but then can be free, can go play, can go beyond the parent's immediate proximity to explore, to see what's going on. All the good news, when a stranger walks in, they use the parent. Now again, for safety, to interpret how the stranger is. But if the parent's fine, and eventually the child is fine as well, a secure attachment ultimately is what we would just think of as a healthy love, as what we would expect to happen. But then a non secure attachment is all the other approaches, all the other ways that the children were interacting in ways that were pretty surprising to the researchers. And so underneath non secure attachment, we divide that into three basic categories.
Kevin Thompson [00:12:45]:
So non secure attachment can express itself in one of several ways. You have an anxious attachment, you have an avoidant attachment, and then you have a disorganized. So in the infant strange scenario, a child who's anxiously attached is overly clingy to their parent, takes longer to calm when distressed struggles far more to be isolated, to be by themselves. They desperately need the parent's presence now to have any sort of healthy interaction in, in what is taking place. And when that is threatened or taken away, they're dysregulated to such an extent it takes longer for them to calm. That's an anxious attachment. An avoidant attachment is where the child now doesn't seem to depend upon the parent as much like they're trying to take care of themselves. And so they'll go play faster.
Kevin Thompson [00:13:40]:
They will, while distressed, not run to the parent nearly as quickly to get calmed or be peaceful in some way. They will appear to be far calmer than maybe what's going on on the inside. That's an avoidant attachment. And then a disorganized attachment is when the child would come over to the parent and yet stay at a little bit of a distance, notice what's happening in that moment. Somebody with a child with a disorganized attachment, they desperately want the comfort that the parent can provide, and yet the parent is actually the very source of fear. So why would a child stay an arm's length away from a parent when they want to be comforted by the parent? It's because they don't know how the parent's going to react. And so by staying an arm's distance away, maybe they've been hit before, they're just staying in a more safer zone of some sort. So the infant strange scenario begin to kind of lay out what these three kind of basic forms of attachment actually begin to look like and how it began to work and play out in the lives of others.
Kevin Thompson [00:14:48]:
And so within love styles, we just kind of begin to look at a basic form on page 33 of what these four kind of viewpoints of attachment theory looks like. So you have A secure attachment. And this becomes a person that can give and receive love, can manage conflict, can seek comfort when needed. Their root belief with other people is, I'm safe with or without you, so I need others, and I'm going to have others in my life. But if that can't be you, I still have a sense of identity even without you. I don't have to have your love to be somebody. And yet I can accept your love. I can accept it into my life.
Kevin Thompson [00:15:29]:
I can love you. You can love me in reverse as well. Whereas an anxious attachment, they tend to cling more, they fear abandonment, they crave reassurance, and they always have this kind of core belief in relationships that you're going to leave me. You see, somebody with an anxious attachment has experienced the goodness of love, but it's been unpredictable. It's kind of like the illustration a lot of people use is it's like playing a slot machine where you never know what the outcome is. And the times that it hits gives you hope and makes you think, okay, maybe this is what it's gonna be like. But then it disappoints you other times, and there's a lack of predictability about it, which creates now not just the child, but also begins to create within the person this idea of man. I desperately have to cling onto you.
Kevin Thompson [00:16:22]:
I have to hold onto you more, because if not, I might lose you. And if I lose you, who am I actually going to be? So that's what an anxious attachment looks like. An avoidant attachment is somebody who withdraws. They value independence, they avoid emotion. And so their core belief is, man, you're going to smother me. So somebody with an avoidant attachment has felt the pain of what love can be. When love goes wrong, they felt the pain of it, or they've had their needs go unmet to such an extent that they've written the story in their brain that I should be able to handle this myself or I actually shouldn't have this need at all. And so they began to view relationships actually as a threat, as a danger to their own sense of agency, of their own sense of self.
Kevin Thompson [00:17:10]:
So why somebody with an anxious attachment is always trying to pull people closer to them? Somebody with an avoidant attachment, it kind of tends to, on occasion, try to push people away. So if you get too close to me, you might expose that I'm not enough, that I'm unworthy. You might begin to require vulnerability in such a way that I'm just going to kind of push you out I'm going to avoid the emotion, the vulnerability, the uncomfortableness, the connection. And I'm going to try to do this all on my own. That's what an avoidant attachment looks like. And then you have a disorganized attachment. And this really is a more unpredictable. Somebody with an anxious attachment, you kind of know how they're going to respond, even if it's an unhealthy way.
Kevin Thompson [00:17:57]:
Somebody with an avoidant attachment, you kind of know what their patterns or what their tendencies might actually be. But somebody with a disorganized attachment, it's not predictable to others because it's not predictable to themselves. And so there's this constant kind of push, pull. Imagine the child who feels danger now running toward the parent. So you think, oh, we're going to embrace, but then stopping short and going, but I don't feel safe enough to actually do that with you. And so there's oftentimes this is tied to trauma. The internal thought actually is that the one I love, they actually might hurt me. And think about what that would do not only to the brain of a child, but but also to the brain of an adult.
Kevin Thompson [00:18:43]:
If the one that I love the most, I'm now most scared that they might injure me or hurt me in some way. That sets me up for a tremendous amount of uncertainty and I don't know how to respond in the midst of the moment. So attachment theory now. So we're going to have these two kind of basic ideas we have secure and non secure. Non secure now expresses itself in three different ways. Anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. And all of us now have these attachment patterns in our lives. And here's something we talk about in love styles that is often a misnomer out in public.
Kevin Thompson [00:19:23]:
As this has become more popular within culture, people understand attachment theory more and more. Matter of fact, sometimes you might hear somebody say, oh, I'm anxiously attached, or I'm avoidantly attached. Well, that's not really the perspective that I think we should have, because attachment theory basically says certain relationship or relationships in general have a pattern of how we interact. It's the relationship that is defined, not so much me. So I am not anxiously attached. This is not a definition, a tag, like a tag on the back of my shirt. This is not a label that I now carry with me. There's a great.
Kevin Thompson [00:20:02]:
Dan Siegel talks about this all the time. There's a great danger in taking on this label and saying, here's what I am. Oh, I'm just anxiously attached for a Couple reasons. One, you could just begin to believe, well, that's who you are. So there's nothing I can do about it. And it can actually begin to excuse bad behavior that, well, just other people just have to deal with it. This is who I am. I'm anxiously attached or I'm avoidantly attached.
Kevin Thompson [00:20:22]:
You just have to deal with me in this way. Whenever we label a person that way, they can excuse bad behavior and actually can become a self fulfilling prophecy in which we just begin to live out that way because we've defined ourselves in that way. The other thing that we got to be very careful about in assuming a label is then we begin to misunderstand kind of who we are. The reality is that we all have a multitude of relationships and chances are that many of us have a secure pattern in some relationships and then a non secure pattern in other relationships. And so I know for me, I can look at some relationships that are extremely secure, others in which those relationships are more anxious based and then still others that they're actually more avoidant based. And so it's not like I can only do one thing. Instead, I have now kind of many roads that are open to me and I can travel down them, however I want to travel down them. And, and different relationships now take on the different roads.
Kevin Thompson [00:21:28]:
And so I would say for most people who are listening today that generally speaking, you have at least one or two secure relationships in your life, that you probably have some relationships in which you act in a pretty mature way and you have a right viewpoint of yourself, of others, of God. We always joke that everybody has at least one secure relationship. And if you have a relationship with a dog, if you own a dog, right? So you think about, we got a golden retriever a few months ago and you think about this golden retriever as loving, as kind as possible. I joke with Jenny all the time that I think golden retrievers are actually anxiously attached. I think cats are probably avoidantly attached. But this golden retriever just stays by our side at every single moment. But think about this. Think about if we're gone for a little bit and we come back home and Link, the golden retriever has now torn up a pillow.
Kevin Thompson [00:22:25]:
They've just destroyed this pillow. Whenever we walk in the door and see this destruction that is there, what do we feel in that moment? We feel frustrated. Now we're going to have to clean it up. We're disappointed. We thought we could leave the dog alone and now we can, or we have to lock it up in some way. It might change how we interact in the future. But notice what we don't do. We don't think to ourselves, oh, this dog did this to hurt us.
Kevin Thompson [00:22:49]:
This dog is out to get us in some way. We don't think to ourselves, you know what? Because this dog destroyed this pillow, I'm not going to talk to the dog for the next three days. I'm going to give it the silent treatment. We don't do that at all. And yet it's not unlikely if you're riding down the road right now with your spouse listening to this on Apple or Spotify that, that if one of you says the wrong thing today, it's possible that you may not talk to each other for the next 48 hours. Why is that? We would never do that to a dog. Well, we are securely attached to our dogs. We have a fair understanding of who we are, of who they are.
Kevin Thompson [00:23:31]:
We don't allow them now to define who we actually are. If they don't love us, well, we don't now see ourselves as unworthy. It doesn't rise within us or all this anxiety. We don't view it that way. We view the dog and ourselves properly. Why? Because that's a more secure approach. My guess is you have at least one or two friendships in your life in which you generally operate from a pretty secure perspective. And not only that, we probably, most of us actually operate probably from a pretty secure perspective.
Kevin Thompson [00:24:03]:
Whenever we're well rested, when our needs are generally met, when we're in a healthy spot, we tend to respond in that way. But then there are these other times and then there are these other relationships where we don't respond in that way, where we do take a different road that now would be a non secure pathway. And chances are for most of us, we lean a little bit more toward either a more anxious approach or. Or a more avoidant approach. Now, you can do both very easily. And I can illustrate that in my own life and might over this little mini series might illustrate that in my own life of what that looks like. I can be anxious or avoidant at any single moment. But there are some primary patterns.
Kevin Thompson [00:24:54]:
And so one of the things that we try to do here at change the odds. And specifically, whenever you see with Blaine and Adrian, we're doing a fight club. We're going to break down how a couple interacts. One of the things that we do is we see how their love style brought into this relationship whenever they're secure. What does that look like? Okay, this is what it looks like. But then for both Partners. Now, what does a non secure approach tend to look like? And generally speaking, chances are one tends to be anxious or avoidant and the other has a similar pathway of some sort. And when they're tired, when they're stressed, when they're not fully connected, they're probably not always operating out of a primarily secure attachment.
Kevin Thompson [00:25:37]:
And so what you need to discover, and you can go to changetheodds.com and you can take a love styles assessment to begin to discover, all right, what is my primary pathway? And this assessment, one of the reasons I love it is it's just 13 questions. So it's very short. But you take it with several relationships. And so it's 13 questions. You take it one time and you fill in your spouse's name so there's a blank when so, and so does this. Here's how I respond. You fill in the blank with that same person's name all 13 times and that will define how you respond in that relationship. Well, then I want you to take it again.
Kevin Thompson [00:26:13]:
And now maybe this time you put in a parent's name or a child's name. I would encourage you. Think, think about one of the worst relationships you've ever had. Put in that person's name and then what you'll begin to discover is, okay, there are times in which I'm securely attached. Here's what that looks like. But there are these other times in which I respond in a non secure way. And whenever that happens, what is my, we can call it maybe a secondary pathway. What is it that I tend to do in those other times that, that are unhealthy? Do I overly cling to a relationship? Do I tend to push people away? Am I disorganized? Can I actually look at it, that at times I'm actually somewhat afraid of the very person that I love, which produces an unpredictability which is difficult for them.
Kevin Thompson [00:27:03]:
And it's difficult for me as well because none of us know how I'm going to respond in this exact moment. So what might cause me to, to feel love in one moment might terrify me in the next. And that's what's inhibiting me from having truly healthy, happy relationships at this moment. If you will begin to have some introspection about how you're responding in present relationships, then you can use those patterns that are present now to begin to think back to your childhood to begin to say, okay, what, what might have impacted that to some extent. And so as I look at my own life, I can begin to see that in the most intimate relationships to me, I tend to be more anxiously attached. Not in all of them. I'm growing. But when Jenny and I first got married, you can very clearly see Jenny was securely attached to me and I was anxiously attached to her.
Kevin Thompson [00:28:01]:
I needed her approval for my own sense of identity. I was always afraid of, of abandonment, that she was going to leave me in some way. Now I can see some physiological responses that whenever we would be, if we were going to be apart in some way, if I was going to get on a plane and fly somewhere, get in a car and go somewhere, I would actually feel this nauseousness for the first 30 minutes to an hour as I was stressed in that moment. It was this fear of abandonment that was really driving me and who I was. You can see it, it's abundantly clear, you wouldn't have. Jenny could in a heartbeat begin to say, oh yeah, he, here's what Kevin actually began to look like. And so first and foremost, I began to see within my own life that these patterns of a non secure attachment, which then allowed me begin to ask, okay, where did that come from? So the questions that really drove me a lot while writing Love Styles was these basic two questions of who am I? And how did I become me? And so as we begin to answer those questions, we begin to actually take control of who we are and we begin to take the steering wheel of our lives. But as long as we don't understand who we are and how we became us, we tend to be enslaved to our past.
Kevin Thompson [00:29:20]:
And so the great news of Love Styles is if the bad news is that the way you love today is how you were loved yesterday, the good news is this. The way you choose to love today is how you will love tomorrow. So you will love tomorrow the way you choose to love today. So the beauty of attachment theory, especially from a Christian perspective, is while this might define characteristics in our lives today, it does not have to define who we're going to be tomorrow. Instead, and this is the power of the last chapter of the book, we have this ability to change. Your love style can literally change. And so while I began with a very anxious attachment to Jenny in a way that I desperately needed her approval, I would overly cling to her. And it had to be so confusing to her because her coming from a much more secure approach, couldn't figure out, why is Kevin so afraid that I'm going to leave him? Why does he need so much reassurance in the midst of this and think about what that will do If I interact with somebody from a non secure pathway, that creates doubts and questions in them of the relationship.
Kevin Thompson [00:30:36]:
And so notice how if we're not very careful, non secure pathways, anxious, avoidant, disorganized, can actually become self fulfilling prophecies where if I become overly clingy with Jenny, she could hypothetically eventually have enough of that and and be like, I'm done with this. And now the very thing I was afraid was going to happen, I have actually caused to happen. This is one of the aspects about attachment theory is non secure patterns attempt to avoid an outcome. And yet the way they try to avoid that outcome actually create the very outcome they're trying to avoid. And so the very thing I would not want my way of preventing that from happening actually causes that to happen. And so as you begin to explore kind of what's going on in your mind, your heart, in your past, see what's happening in the present, go to changetheodds.com, take the love styles assessment, take it multiple times with multiple relationships, specifically some of your worst relationships, and begin to recognize, all right, here's some of the non secure pathways I tend to utilize. And then use that to begin to look into your past to explore, all right, why is that present in my past? And literally you can begin to take the control of your life back over. But as long as those things go unresolved and unseen, they will continue to control you in every single way.
Kevin Thompson [00:32:01]:
You can pick up love styles on Amazon. Wherever books are sold, you can find it books a million places like that. It's the simplest explanation of attachment theory from a Christian perspective. But this kind of sets the tone of what an overview of attachment theory is. Come back next time and we'll begin to explore what does secure attachment actually look like and what does non secure attachment look like so that we can become more secure. And if you and I can understand our attachment theory and our attachment styles, our love styles will go a long way to changing the odds of our relationships. We'll see you next time.