How Your Childhood Impacts Dating, Relationships, and More
In this episode, we’re tackling an often overlooked aspect of health: relationships. We sit down with Dr. Robert Waldinger, Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, to explore how your childhood shapes your adult relationships. From romance to friendships to work, we break down how attachment styles affect every connection. We dive into the origins of attachment theory, the latest research, and practical tips to help you move towards a more secure style. Whether you’re dating, in a relationship, or just looking to improve your connections, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.
Our last episode with Dr. Robert Waldinger: The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Live Longer
Check out Dr. Waldinger's book The Good Life.
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Juna First we want to shout out one of our favorite reviews, Eddie. You're going to love this one. So do you want to do the honors?
Eddie Yes, Your Honor. Thank you to Tracy Rose for writing in Binge Listening. Well, I know that we sort of are down. I'm bingeing. But in this case, Tracy writes, I have never binged a show faster in my life. If I have free time. I am listening to Yuna and Eddie While this podcast is taught me so many things, I think my biggest takeaway has been the importance of exercise. yes, Tracy. I used to see exercise as an unfortunate necessity to losing weight, but after listening to you and Eddie, I have a whole new outlook on it that has nothing to do with weight loss. No food We Need to talk has been an important part of my journey to both living a healthier lifestyle and loving myself at any size. I'm getting teary here. I recommend this podcast to everyone. Thank you, Yuna and Eddie.
Juna But so now.
Eddie my gosh, you just made my month.
Juna So now is Eddie. All those times your hammering in exercise is paying off, I Amen. Thank you, Tracy. That was such a kind review. As you guys know, the reviews help other people find the show, and they make us feel really good. So if you have a bit of spare time and you want to tell us something about the show, please go ahead and use a five star rating and review.
Eddie I just want to point out to Tracy that exercise can be taken to an extreme. And I will cite my forthcoming participation in the Chicago Marathon.
Juna Yes.
Eddie Thank God we're getting to the end of the training.
Juna What's the date for it?
Eddie It is October 13th. Okay. It's coming up. It's coming up in just 4 or 5 weeks. Wow. And we're just getting through the long runs. Nice. That's where I get to listen to long novels and watch the day go by as I slowly make my way through all the miles that you have to do to train. So I'm doing it for the Achilles Internationale, which is an organization that over the I think the past 40 years has enabled over 150,000 disabled athletes to run the marathon, likely faster than me. Right. Whether they're having challenges to their mobility or to their vision or intellectual, whatever it is, that's what Achilles does. It's an international organization. It is such a perfect fit for my life's work as a rehab physician and my passion for exercising. So if you are able interested in supporting that, go to food. We need to talk.com. There's a little tab at the top. I love this one. It says Run, Eddy, run. And if you'd like to contribute, it would be most appreciated.
Juna And the link is also in our bio on Instagram. Guys, at food, we need to talk if you are interested. And now to the episode. Today we are joined by Dr. Robert Waldinger, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the program in Psycho Dynamics at Massachusetts General Hospital and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Dr. Waldinger, thank you so much for joining us again on the podcast.
Speaker 3 Happy to be here.
Juna Okay. So last time we had you on to talk about the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes for everybody. But in that interview you mentioned attachment theory. And my ears perked up because attachment theory is something that I hear all the time about on Tik-tok. And so when you mentioned it, I said, why is this a real thing? Which is why we wanted to have you back on to talk about attachment theory. So can we just start with on a broad level, what is attachment theory?
Speaker 3 Sure. Attachment theory came from a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst named John Bowlby. And what he was interested in was this phenomenon of how little children manage to stay connected to caregivers. And the first thing he looked at was some of the early work on animals. For example, baby ducklings imprinting on their mother and waddling around following their mother. And realized, yeah, in the animal kingdom, as animals get more and more complex, they need care and therefore they need to connect with a caregiver in order to survive. And what John Bowlby observed was that human beings have a long period of needing to be cared for in order to survive much longer than, you know, baby turtles who hatch out of their eggs and just crawl off into the ocean. And that's it. Right. So less complex system, but a system as complex as the human being requires years and years of care from a caregiver. All right. So what Bowlby noticed was that babies have ways of learning who their caregiver is and how to keep their caregivers around. So the idea of attachment theory is it's a way that babies naturally figure out how to keep their caregivers caring for them. Now, that may sound funny because, wait, I mean, caregivers want to care for their kids. We want to care for our babies, right? We We hope. We hope. But what about the parent who finds that a clingy, crying baby is horrible, that they just want to push that baby away? Or what about the caregiver who runs and shakes the baby awake to make sure the baby is still breathing in the middle of the night because they're so afraid the baby is going to die? So what do you do if you have either a caregiver who can't stand it when you reach out and want to be held? Or a caregiver who is so afraid of losing you that they're always checking. So what Bowlby noticed was that babies started to respond to those kinds of caregivers in certain ways. Normal caregivers allow the baby come. For it when the baby needs comfort. So let's say something scares a child. And the child starts to cry. The parent picks the baby up, cuddles the baby, and the baby calms down. And as the baby gets older, if you watch a toddler in a park, you'll see a toddler start to explore. They might be holding on to the mother's leg, but then they might get interested in something a few steps away, and they might toddle along a few steps to explore something they see. And then if they get scared, they'll run back and grab on to the mother again. This is sometimes called refueling, where the child gets the comfort they need, and then they go off and explore again. Yeah. So that's secure attachment where you need at times to remember. Yeah, my caregivers there. I'm fine. They've got my back and now I can go off and explore again. And so secure attachment is a system by which a child learns that the caregiver will be there, the caregivers reliable that they can whenever something goes wrong or they get scared, they can go back, but then they can go off and explore the world. And if you think about that as what we all need, in a way, we need people who we feel like will be there for us when we hurt ourselves, when we're scared. But they're there and they'll support us as we go out and take steps on our own. That extends to adults, right? Like, ideally, we'd have a partner that does the same thing. What if I tell my partner that I want to try something new? You could have a partner who says, you'll be lousy at that. You know you'll fail. Or you have a partner said. Yeah, you know, I hope you'll try it and let me support you. Right. So even as adults, we need people who support us in exploring the world.
Eddie Is the child a blank slate that's related only to the mother or the parents? Are we born with attachment styles?
Speaker 3 No, we're not blank slates when we. When we're born. Right. So some kids are more easily frightened and we think that may be temperamental. Some kids, almost nothing frightens them. They're fearless. And those kids just go off and explore the world and they don't really need much comfort. So I think we understand that there is inborn temperament that makes us more likely to be really afraid a lot of the time or to be super brave and maybe even reckless.
Juna Can you go through the other two attachment styles that you were going through, the avoidant and anxious?
Speaker 3 Yeah. So the avoidant attachment style, what it looks like is the child who doesn't need the caregiver. So they do these experiments where they have a mother and a baby playing in a room, and then they have the mother leave and another caregiver, a stranger, just sit there with the baby. And then the mother comes back. Some babies who have an avoidant style pretend not to care that the mother's back and ignore the mother.
Juna Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 No, those are. And you can it's. It's really easily demonstrated. There are some babies who are just like this. And toddlers often it's like, you know, 12, 18 month olds who do this test. It's called the strange situation where you have the mother leave and a stranger come and be with the baby. And when the mother returns, a secure baby will protest a little bit and, you know, cry like, why did you leave me? And then settle right down to playing again and hug the mother and settle right down in their fun. The avoidant child looks as though they didn't care in the first place, and they don't care that the mother's back. And they ignore the mother. What they find and the theory holds that these are babies who've gotten the message from the caregiver. I don't want you to cling to me. Don't need me too much because I'll get freaked out. I'll go away. And so that baby has learned to adapt by pretending not to need care. It doesn't mean they don't really need care. They just manage it in a different way by not giving any signs of it.
Eddie Before we get into important stuff like dating and long term relationships, does this work? Interspecies and what comes to mind? My kids are old enough that I really cannot remember after 30 years some of the details of their early attachment. But we did get a new puppy and the breeder sort of looked at our family and looked at the several puppies and said, you know, this one works for you. Does he have some knowledge of attachment theory? Like this one's less skittish and or is it just human to human?
Speaker 3 I don't think it's just human to human. I'm sure that breeders understand, you know, temperaments of puppies from a lot of experience. Right. And some puppies will thrive in certain environments in a quieter environment or a more rambunctious environment. For example, some puppies are really more easily frightened. And so you have a a wild and crazy family and that puppy might be totally stressed out, whereas another puppy might love it. Right. So I suspect that there are these kinds of differences and puppies, too, attached to mothers. Okay. There was a psychologist, Harry Harlow, in the 1950s who did experiments with baby monkeys and how they were raised. And he had some baby monkeys who were raised by their natural mothers. He had some baby monkeys who were in a cage with just a cloth mother and the cloth mother would, you know, she had a little spout where she they could nurse from the mother and all that, but it was just cloth. And then he had another set of monkeys who were raised by a wire mother, not even with a soft surface, just wire. But they got fed. And finally he had a mother, a wire mother, a monkey who, when the babies started tickling, would jerk and throw the baby off.
Juna My gosh.
Speaker 3 So, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this is. But. And so he was doing these experiments because what he was trying to show was that it matters a great deal how babies are raised. Right. And it matters in the animal world. This is to your point, Eddie, that animals and particularly primates have this. And so what he found was that the babies raised by wire mothers were much more screwed up, had much more trouble socially with other monkeys as they grew up, and the babies who were thrown off by their wire, mothers who were, you know, flung across the cage, those babies were so traumatized they were almost unable to engage socially with other monkeys. So what Harlow did and actually he was almost ostracized from the American Psychological Association because they believed that you shouldn't spoil babies by cuddling and nurturing them. This was in the 1950s.
Juna My.
Speaker 3 God. The reigning theory was that you could spoil babies by cuddling them, kissing them. You should feed them on specific schedules, whether they were hungry or not.
Juna My God.
Speaker 3 And then this all changed, of course, thank God. But Harry Harlow showed that how you raise a baby is hugely important for how they function through the rest of their lives.
Juna So I think we interrupted you again. We didn't get to go through anxious. I'm yeah.
Speaker 3 Well good anxious so anxiously attached are the babies who keep checking. So back to that experiment where the babies in the room with the mother. The mother leaves a stranger comes in and says quietly with the baby. And then the mother comes back. Secure babies will cry a little bit like, Why did you leave me? And then they'll settle down happily and play again. The anxious baby will keep running back and checking. Are you still here? Are you still here? Are you going to leave again? They can't come down in the same way that a secure baby can calm down. And so we think about an anxiously attached child as a child who. Is constantly checking to make sure that their support system is still there. And often they're the toddlers who can't leave their mother in the park to go explore something because they're too afraid. Because what if I tunnel off and then my mom isn't there when I come back?
Juna So when you talked about the avoidant babies pretending not to care, my first thought was like, how do babies know how to pretend like they're too little to understand what pretending is? So how do you know they actually care versus like they don't care? I don't know.
Speaker 3 So first of all, this is a theory. We can't get inside the mind of the baby and we can't ask the baby to tell us whether they care or not. Right. There have been some studies, though, of physiological parameters of things like heart rate, where they look at babies who seem not to care and they're not calm. They're more agitated physiologically. Now, again, we're still making an inference that that's because the baby actually does care. But what we know is that that baby is more physiologically aroused than the secure baby who's back to playing happily.
Juna Okay. That makes sense. So the videos on TikTok, right, are basically about how attachment style affects dating mostly. Yeah. And I just really, really this, like, really gets under my skin because it's kind of seems like you have no control over your attachment style or how you were raised and stuff. And then to have that have such a massive impact on your romantic life is just so abhorrent to me that I'm like, This can't be true. Like, you control your own actions and you control how you interact with people. So how could your childhood actually impact your dating life?
Eddie But, you know, you could also choose who to be in a relationship with.
Juna I know.
Eddie We're gonna have Dr. Waldinger advise you on your dating life.
Speaker 3 But I think that, you know, you're. You're asking a really good question, which is. Wait, these are. I have free will. I can choose. Okay. Yeah, you can choose. You can't choose what you feel. Right. Have you ever been able to really choose what you feel? I mean, now you can do cognitive reframing. There are ways you can calm yourself down. You can switch, you know? Okay. But basically, the arising of anxiety, for example, isn't something you just control. It happens. Then we have choice about how to manage that anxiety.
Juna Okay.
Speaker 3 So what you're talking about is not the choice of what you feel when you're dating somebody, but how you manage the feelings.
Juna I see.
Speaker 3 So what you could do if you know. Okay, I tend to be an anxious person when I date. I tend to worry that my partner isn't into me. And no matter what he or she does, I just look for signs that he's going to leave me. Right. If you know that about yourself, you may be able to temper that and say, okay, but let me see if I can get some realistic view of what's going on here between me and my partner. Is my partner really not into me because he or she has a work deadline and they need to work for an hour now. Or is my partner really giving me signals that they don't like me anymore? Right. And so what you can learn to do is manage your own feelings about it.
Juna Right? Yes.
Speaker 3 The other thing you can do is say, okay, I tend to not want to show love. I tend to not want to show somebody that I'm interested. That's not going to go well. I've seen that it doesn't go well because the other person thinks I'm not interested and they go away.
Juna Right.
Speaker 3 So maybe I need to overcome my natural instinct and start expressing more interest if I want this person to stay around. Even though when I was little, my mom would freak out if I clung to her. Right. So we can manage our reactions, but we can't usually manage the initial feeling. If that makes sense.
Juna That does make sense. It's upsetting, but it makes sense. Does dating a person of a certain attachment? So can it bring out aspects of your attachment style? Like I feel.
Speaker 3 Totally. Okay. So think about it. Let's say you are anxiously attached. Let's say you're always afraid that the other person is about to leave you and that they really are not into you. And let's say you, the anxious person, pair up with an avoidant person who's used to saying, I better not show any love. I better not show any interest because the person's going to go away. So you've got an anxious person looking for signs of abandonment. Tear it up with a person who says I better not give any signs of affection. And it's a mess.
Juna Disaster.
Speaker 3 Disaster. But these are pairing. Is that often happen. And one of the things that couples therapy can do is to help people see this, to realize what they're doing and how it makes things worse between them, and then to modify their behavior so that they're each more comfortable showing affection and staying in there.
Eddie Is that helpful? You're not. Are you thinking.
Juna So?
Eddie Are you going to change your profile and say I'm looking for a sexually attacked?
Juna It's just like everybody's looking for a securely attached. But I feel like they're so rare. Like, do we know what the actual percentages are of securely tracked people? Because obviously everybody would prefer to be with somebody. You want to put in.
Eddie Any of the specifications for this first.
Speaker 3 Unit? It's not so rare.
Juna Really?
Speaker 3 It's. No. The estimates are between 50 and 60% of the population is securely attached. The most recent estimate that I saw was 50% secure, 20% anxiously attached, 25% avoidant. And then there's another type of attachment called fearful or disorganized, where they give signs of both being anxious and clingy and being avoidant. About 5% of people are like that. And that seems to come specifically from childhood trauma, where you have someone who you're supposed to. Trust and love who's, like, abusing you? You know, the wire mother monkey who's throwing you off? And that person becomes someone who sends mixed signals of both clinginess and avoidance.
Juna What if, like, certain types of attachment are, for example, people find more attractive? Like, how do we know that? Like all the securely attached people, people think are boring because they're just like normal people. And although, like, avoidant types like have way more like with women because they like, play it cool, do you not? I mean, like maybe my perception is skewed because of how people find other people attractive.
Speaker 3 Well, right, But why do you find someone who's cool and distant, attractive? That probably comes from your own history? I mean, I'll give you an example. So in my own psycho analysis. Right. So in my psychoanalytic training, I was psychoanalysts, thank goodness, because I had a series of I had a series of relationships that didn't work out. And what I came to understand was that I was choosing people who were of a certain type who would behave in ways that made me want to withdraw. And so I was choosing over and over again the same type of person. I was choosing inappropriate partners. And when you learn that. So let's say you could learn, okay, I'm attracted to people who are cool and distant, but actually, I don't want that. That can help you. And you can start overriding those signals. This is a really cool person because they're kind of aloof, and you can say, Wait, wait, wait. I don't want that. I want somebody warmer and more present. Even though I'm not used to that. Okay. So it's possible to change what you look for and who you choose.
Eddie Professor Waldinger. Bob, this is such an amazing conversation. I'm kind of learning a lot personally, but we're going to have to take a quick break. Before we do, I just wanted to ask the.
Speaker 3 Listeners to consider sharing.
Eddie The episode with someone that you love.
Juna I'm sending it to everybody I know who's dating guys and my sister. We also shout out, I'm sending it to all the avoid attachment people I know because I feel like I know a lot. I'm going to say to all I'm sorry.
Eddie And we'll be back right after this quick break. And we're back with Professor Robert Waldinger from Harvard Medical School. Let me just reflect on something that's close to my thinking lately unrelated to this conversation. I'm training for a marathon, but that enables me to listen to lots of novels for hours on end as I run. As I think about the last 5 or 6 novels I've read. There's this common theme of the protagonist being abused, or as in their youth, right? You know, they've got, you know, unstable relationships would be a nice way to put it. And yet they find love. Yeah, they find the person who says, I'm not going to abandon you. You know, I'm not your father. I'm not your mother.
Juna You're such a romantic. That's what you read when you write.
Eddie It's all i, I, I run for a long, long time.
Juna That's a romantic.
Eddie Is that just. Is that a forever story? Is that what we're all looking for?
Speaker 3 Well, it's a forever story, in part because child abuse is so common. My. So 1 in 4 women has had some form of sexual boundary crossing in their childhood. 1 in 4. Right. And that's not counting emotional abuse, which is more common physical abuse, which is very common. And many of the people who become writers are people who think a lot about human relationships because human relationships have been problematic. And, you know, you write about what you know. And so many writers have themselves been in families where there was abuse.
Juna Is your attachment style, I'm guessing I don't know the answer to this, but is it something that you can change or is it only something that you can like? Like you said, you can try to change your preferences and you can try to temper your reactions, but it's kind of sad.
Speaker 3 That's such a good question. And people have wanted to know the answer to that for years now. There is some evidence, but it's hard to get scientifically that attachment style can change. And there's certainly anecdotal evidence, and that comes from therapy where people, when they choose a more securely attached partner, often they can move toward more secure attachment. So the idea is that a more secure partner can help you become more secure.
Juna That makes sense. And then opposite to that, I feel like I felt fairly securely attached. And I feel like dating apps have brought out all my anxious attachment style. Like, I feel like I was just, like, a normal, healthy person. But because so many people go out on dating apps now, I'm just like, Well, another one goes by see it like, you know, I mean, I feel like it brings out kind of like the worst traits of both anxious and avoiding attachment styles to be in these kind of low stakes situations, I guess.
Speaker 3 I bet that's absolutely right. You know, because we all have it in us to feel anxious, to feel avoidant. We all have that right. And it can be inflamed. And I bet you're right that the dating apps, certain dating apps do that to us and that we have to learn more about what they're doing and how to change that. How not either how to not use them or to use apps that don't do that where it's not so easy to just swipe left or right and and dismiss a person and ghost a person at least after you've made an investment for a while within chatting with somebody.
Eddie Could the three of us create yet a new dating app in which people do some sort of a screening and they declare where they are on this continuum of secure attachments or anxious or avoidant?
Juna I think a science driven dating app would be so great, but I think the reason they don't is because they make no money because it would actually work. And like the way they make money is by keeping people on the apps, right? I think that's why honestly, I can be like create them to not work because that's how they make more money because then people get memberships and they pay for all the extra features and all these things. I had another question. So I have two sisters and obviously we were raised by my mom and dad, but the circumstances of our upbringings were kind of different. Like me and my middle sister, both born Albania, and then my youngest sister was born in America when my parents were working a lot more because we had come to a new country and all these things. And I feel like we all have really different attachment styles, even though we were raised by the same parents. So does the circumstance of your parent, can that also impact the way they're treating you? Like if they have less time or they're more busy or whatever?
Speaker 3 Totally. Totally. Because it's it's circumstantial. It's not just who the parent is, but what happens to you in your upbringing. So let's say families go through periods of stability and then instability, you know, in your family may have gone through much more instability when your family first came to the U.S. because, I mean, what an enormous adjustment. Right, and transition. And so depending on how old you are, you know, the the if. Effects on you of that instability may be greater, right? So we think that the younger a child is the effects are stronger and more lasting. So if your younger sibling was really young when there was a lot of instability and anxiety, that's going to possibly get transmitted to her in a different way than to you. You were older. You had words, you had language. Maybe you were already in school, so you had teachers and other kids. Your world expands and there are more people to interact with.
Juna That makes sense.
Eddie Can we move beyond the dating towards. I don't know my concerns, which is later life. And the question I have for you is, what have you learned from the Harvard study of adult Development about kind of late life attachments? Because I know collectively the studies been following people only since, what was the 1937 38. Somewhere around there? Yeah.
Speaker 3 1938.
Eddie Okay.
Speaker 3 So nobody had ever studied security of attachment in couples in their 80s. And so we had couples in their 80s and we got a grant to study security of attachment and health. So we did detailed interviews with each member of a couple with lots of questions about, you know, do you feel like your partner is there to support you when you're afraid, when you're ill, when you try something new? How does your partner react? Lots of questions. What do you imagine life would be like without your partner? And these are people in their 80s, so they are thinking about what life would be like without their partner. And it was a wonderful study, first of all, because we got these very moving interviews. And what we found was that many of our couples were quite securely attached to each other. Each person felt comfortable, both depending on the other and letting the other depend on them, which makes sense because the people who weren't securely attached, some of those marriages were probably more likely to breakup. So the marriages that lasted for, you know, 50, 60 years were often the marriages where people were pretty securely bonded.
Juna That makes sense.
Speaker 3 But we expected that there would be more people who were anxiously attached, because if you think about it, you're in your 80s and you're saying, my God, what if my partner dies soon? Because that's likely to happen. But we didn't find anxiously attached people in couples. We found some avoidant attached people like I'm just it's not important to me like we're unavoidably attached person when we would ask and often this was like a man we would ask the man, Well, what do you think life would be like without your partner? And one answer we got was, Well, I don't know who would make my dinner.
Juna Yeah.
Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.
Eddie It's true.
Speaker 3 Well, it's true. But if that's all you got, if that's all you can think of, we labeled that as avoidant attach.
Juna Yeah.
Speaker 3 Like I'm not going to express anything about. My God. You know, I'd be lonely. I'd miss her. Right.
Eddie I'm flashing to the vignettes that they have in the movie When Harry Met Sally. Yeah, the old couples talking. I'd love to buy your story. Or was it maybe the other way around?
Speaker 3 Well, it's interesting, because when Harry met, Sally came out before we did our study. But I absolutely love those vignettes. It's just that's a that's a wonderful movie.
Juna If we'd said, do you think that the interest attachment styles, do you think that the anxiety just goes away as you get older because people become less anxious?
Speaker 3 Well, that's a good question. It's possible. So what we didn't do and of course, I wish we had done it was 40 years earlier. Right. Measure their security of attachment with each other even ten years earlier. But I think that's a real possibility, you know, that you just come to settle in and realize, okay, we're here for each other. We're just always going to be here for each other. It's why, you know, many couples just don't imagine divorce. Like they may argue and stuff, but it's like, no, that's just not on the table.
Juna Right.
Speaker 3 And I think that's a kind of settling in that can happen among many securely attached couples.
Juna Another question I have for you is why do you think that our attachment styles matter? Or like, why does it matter for us to know them? How will it help the listener to know their attachment style and how they approach their life?
Speaker 3 I think it's helpful for the reasons that we talked about earlier, that if you know that your style is to be clingy. And to see someone abandoning you even when they're not. You can learn to temper that. You can learn to really look at the evidence and hone your judgment so you can say, okay, no, this isn't something to get upset about with my partner. This isn't a clue that my partner's going away. All right? You can learn to temper that. Similarly with avoidance. If I know that, it's hard for me to say I love you. It's hard for me to show affection. I can make myself do it. And we know that you can learn to do it and that it so much it helps the other person.
Juna Okay. Another thing I'm really curious about is I feel like, again, this is coming from personal anecdote. I feel like my attachments with my friends and coworkers is so healthy. Like I'm never worried about my friends abandoning me or whatever. And if somebody is like busy, I don't take it personally and it's just very normal. But then I feel like in romantic relationships is where all the problems come out. And I was wondering why that is. Like, do romantic relationships for some reason trigger different attachment styles? Do they like bring out aspects of your attachment style and why do they do that versus other relationships?
Robert You're right. That is a great question and I think people have begun to study that because we used to think, well, your attachment style is the style you use with people everywhere, right? Friends, family. But we found that that isn't true. And if you think about it, it makes sense that some of the less secure attachment style might come out with an intimate partner because that's more like a caregiver. Whereas you begin to feel like, what if I lose? I don't want to lose this partner. You know, you could probably I mean, of course you don't want to lose your nearest and dearest friends, but there are other friends.
Juna Right?
Robert They're not the one and only mom. A caregiver is a one and only. And when you're dating, that person is potentially the one and only. At least in that category, right? And so it might arouse those feelings that you had for your caregiver more than a regular friendship would arouse those feelings.
Juna That makes sense for somebody listening who, when you're talking about the anxious attachment style or the avoid attachments and they're like, my God, that's me. And it's causing problems in their relationships. What are some things that they can do to help them be more aware and also show up differently in their relationships?
Robert Well, I would say the first thing is to just think about it. Reflect on it. You might ask people what they notice. If you have a close friend who will tell you the truth. Say, do you notice that I'm a certain way in relationships? You might ask your partner if you have a partner. You know, like, what's this like for you? You know, do you find me clingy or do you find that I don't really show affection very well? You can ask and see if the people who you trust will tell you and hopefully ask more than one person. Right. And then think about, okay, if I'm getting the message from more than one person that I am this way, how could I temper that? How could I do better at the thing that I'm having trouble with? If it's that I'm too clingy, how could I learn to be less clingy? But still hang in there in the relationship and be very present? If it's that I am too distant and keeping the person at arm's length, how could I learn to overcome my worries about saying I love you, about expressing affection and that it's possible to do that?
Juna And does therapy help with this?
Robert Yes.
Juna I think yeah. Yeah.
Robert Because therapy can help you see the patterns, first of all, because you talk with your therapist about. Well. And then it happened in this relationship and then this relationship. And, you know, because a therapist, I do therapy every day with patients. And what you look for as a therapist is patterns. So I want to know about each of their major relationships and I'll be listening for patterns. And then I will help reflect back those patterns. I'll also be watching how they work with me because some people are incredibly avoidant with me. Some people are incredibly clingy. And eventually you get to the point where you can talk about that, about what's going on right there between me and my patient. And that can be very helpful.
Eddie That's what I want to continue the conversation about when we go to our bonus episode.
Juna Okay. So we're going to have to pause on this main episode for now, but we're having so much fun, so I can't wait to get to the bonus. Thank you so much for joining us today. Again, Dr. Waldinger, you've given us so much to think about, as always.
Robert It's been fun to talk and your questions are great.
Juna Thank you so much to Dr. Robert Waldinger. You can find links to his work and his book, The Good Life on our website. If you want to hear our bonus conversation where we talk all about therapy and how it can help you and whether or not everybody needs therapy, which they answer might surprise you. And then we also dive into politics, of all things. It was like.
Eddie Well, we're not so political, but we couldn't resist.
Juna Yeah, it was a crazy conversation, but it was a really good conversation. You can go to food. We need to talk.com/membership or you can click the link in our shownotes. You can find us on Instagram at food. We need to talk. You can find me on Instagram at the official Yoona and Yuna, Jayda on YouTube and TikTok, and you can find Eddie.
Eddie Finishing his long runs and listening to his novels.
Juna Woo! I didn't know you were such a romantic listening to your.
Eddie It keeps me going.
Juna It's the Food We Need to Talk is produced by me and Rebecca Seidel, and we are distributed by PR X.
Eddie Our mix engineer is Rebecca Seidel.
Juna We are co-created by Kari Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie For any personal health questions, please consult your health provider. To find out more, go to food. We need to talk.com. Thanks for listening.
