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Copyright 2013 Dr. Diane Poole Heller dianepooleheller.com 2

Recipes for L.O.V.E. Diane Poole Heller, Ph.D Every relationship can at times be difficult to navigate, but the one thing that can always be relied on to build on, restore, or nurture your attachment is love.

I thought of giving you some essential tips, made easy to remember by using LOVE as an acronym for a few simple and effective implements that can keep your relationship alive, healthy, and meaningful:

L, for • Limbic to limbic: Our ability to receive, feel, and show love originates in our

emotionally sensitive, limbic brain. Emotions are contagious—and easily caught and spread. Limbic resonance grows by sharing your deep emotional states with your partner. Practice lightness, a vital part of personal interaction. As Daniel Goleman says, “Laughter may be the shortest distance between two brains.”

• The 5 Love Languages: This seminal book series by Gary Chapman clearly articulates the main ways people tend to express their love: physical touch, acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation, receiving gifts. Recognizing your love language—and your partner’s—can help you communicate with more grace and finesse. Speaking your partner’s love language means going out of your way to do things in the style your partner can best receive. If your partner’s language contains words of affirmation, try giving your partner a compliment every day.

O, for • Oops! Initiate and receive good repair attempts as soon as possible so as to heal

misattunements and build relationship resiliency. As Stan Tatkin says in his new book Wired for Love, one of the 10 commandments of relationship essentials is “Thou shalt correct all errors and not make dispute of who was the original perpetrator.”


• Orientation: Shift your orientation away from the instinctive defensive response that can be triggered in relationships—because our brains are biased toward survival of threat—and toward regaining and sustaining openness. Defensiveness makes us feel constricted, feel fearful, or feel avoidant, whereas cultivating our willingness refuels our receptivity to our partner.

V, for • Valuable downtime and uptime together: Remember how to up-‐regulate your

partner when the partner needs help accessing their own aliveness, and remember how to down-‐regulate the partner when anxiety takes over. For example, to get energy moving, try playing some catchy music or using affectionate touching or tickling to bring some giggles to life. For more soothing downregulations, emphasize taking the nervous out of the sympathetic nervous system. Hugs, massages, hot baths, or candlelit conversations will do wonders for strengthening the bond between you.

• Victory: When injuries occur and get repaired, make it so you both benefit. Discover true mutuality by figuring out solutions in such a way that what is good for me is also good for you. As Tatkin recommends, search for the win-‐win versus the compromise. Hint: It involves shifting your partner toward friendliness and away from threat. The solution needs to be meaningful and worthwhile for both of you. “Many a war has been avoided with a friendly smile, a well-‐placed touch, and a reassuring voice,” says Tatkin.

E, for • Emphasize novelty: According to Norman Doidge, Bill O’Hanlon, and Joanie

Borysenko, you get a dopamine blast from newness. Maintaining a long-‐term relationship means you’re going to have to do certain things to inject some novelty into it. Learn something new about your partner’s passions and dreams. Support and participate!

• Electronic touching is okay, but Embracing for at least 20 seconds or Emotional connectedness with Empathy is much better. Never underestimate the power of eye contact. New research from Helen Fisher stresses how important frequency of face-‐to-‐face contact is in building stronger attachment bonding with our partners or kids or family or friends to stay healthfully tethered.

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Take the Attachment Style Quiz developed by and discover your adult attachment style: secure, avoidant, ambivalent/anxious, disorganized attachment.


Diane Poole Heller, Ph.D interviewed by Cheryl Blossom, MA 1 Cheryl: Welcome, Diane. Tell us about your recipe for love. Diane: There are a couple of things I think are really important that haven’t already been talked about a lot in books, and the current understanding we have in neuroscience is really helpful: that for most people, the brain tends to be somewhat primed or

tilted toward anxiety or fear. Our threat response tends to be a scanning of the threat, which is just one way we keep ourselves safe. That’s a natural, biological function. People have that kind of response a lot more than others do, because if you were raised in a household that was dealing with, say, addiction or violence or boundary crossings—or any situation in which a parent had unresolved trauma, where parents were still afraid themselves and had a kind of emergency room energy—the attachment system of the child can’t bond to that, and would tend to withdraw or become disorganized. The reason why that is relevant for us as adults is that according to the thinking and attachment theory nowadays, we actually are in the same dyadic attachment template when we’re in our adult partnerships as we were in our early childhood. So sometimes it’s really helpful to understand what each person’s history was. It doesn’t mean our history has to control us, but that we can sort of honor that and help people heal from it. It has great potential for healing in a committed adult relationship. So one of the take-‐homes from that little piece of neuroscience understanding is that some people’s brains—if they were raised in a prosocial family—will develop a lot more pro-‐relationship skills, even as infants and children. Such people just have that wired into their brains already, and they function more from secure attachment. Other people will show insecure attachment if their parents have certain deficits. People are human beings, so it’s not about blaming parents. You have to go all the way back to cave people if you’re going to get on the blame track, but it is an intergenerational problem. We learn from our parents, and we do the best we can. Remember we have to be in attunement only 20 to 30 percent of the time for the attachment bond to be pretty healthy. 1 Biographies of Diane and Cheryl provided at the end of interview.


The caveat to that is that during the other times—when you’re out of attunement—you need to practice repair. John Gottman says that any couple can learn how to manage the “oopses” and the “ouches” by repairing them as quickly as possible. It doesn’t matter who repairs first, but repair can happen relatively quickly. Then the relationship has 80 percent more chance of a sustainable well-‐being. So I think that’s a really important point—and one that’s based on research. Gottman didn’t just pick that number out of a hat. He’s one of the main relationship researchers in the field. So I always say to my students, “Right now, if you could invest your money someplace and get an 80 percent return, you wouldn’t even be listening to me for one more word. You’d all be running off to the bank to invest your money.” Cheryl: Yes. Diane: So if you can take one skill and learn how to initiate a good repair or how to receive a repair when someone is trying to repair with you, even though the person may not be doing exactly what you would like the person to do, you can count on having a higher level of well-‐being in your relationship. So, one of my three tips is what to do about repair, and I suggest that people develop repair rituals. Even when I give a wedding present, I might create a potential repair ritual as part of the gift because I think this is so important. It could look like anything. It could be a code word they share. It could be something romantic. I could pick the word watermelon to mean “I’m sorry” or “I’m receptive now,” and it wouldn’t matter. It’s just something they’d recognize that means, “OK, I’m ready to have a reconciliation here. I’m calmed down now and I can talk to you,” or “I’m willing to listen.” It could be as simple as keeping a candle someplace in the house that’s your special place, which you light when you’re ready to move into a repair, or it could be plopping a rose in a vase to signal love and openness. I treated a woman who was shorter than her husband. When she was ready to mend an argument, she would stand on the first step of the stairs in their home and just wait for a hug, because for her, hugs were what repaired hurt feelings.


The development of repair rituals is important. Repair rituals emphasize the fact that we’re not expecting each other to be perfect. I work a lot with those who’ve undergone traumatic experiences, as well as those who have specific relational trauma. When I was doing consulting after the Columbine High School massacre, there were big debates on TV about the bad influence of violence on television. But then—and I remember being

impressed by this—there is an even worse message that one editor suggested as the most damaging thing the Hollywood culture media did: and that is repeatedly having a storyline in which people need to have a little disagreement initially—because in the beginning they don’t even like each other—but then somehow wind up connecting.

Once they get married, the idea is that they ride off into the sunset—as if everything is sort of done then, as if everything that follows is going to be OK, and as if they’ll live happily ever after. The editor made the point, and I tend to agree: setting up that idea—that as soon as you’re married, everything is going to be OK and delightful and nonproblematic—is not a good message, because when you make a huge commitment to somebody, that’s when the work really starts. Cheryl: Game on. Diane: Exactly, game on. Game on is exactly what I would say. I’ve really gotten into understanding attachment theory in the past eight years by reading and studying with all sorts of people: Dan Siegel, David Wallin, John Gottman, Allan Schore, Stan Tatkin, Ellyn Bader, and many others. According to attachment theory, it takes about a year, sometimes a year and a half, for development of the early infant-‐to-‐parent attachment system that is dyadic—which means it’s between two people—to kind of raise its head. The other person is reasonably permanent and your go-‐to person, and once that recognition happens on a biological, psychological, soulful level, then all of the issues that were unresolved from your original attachment situation or learning are triggered and poke their heads up. Often, there’s a honeymoon period for a year, and some of that is based on actual chemicals in the body and in the brain. But some of it is based on the attachment system. It doesn’t really come into place in terms of the woundedness that might be unresolved, or in terms of other interpretations your attachment system is going to make from implicit memory, which means it’s nonconscious. It can become conscious, and that’s what we do in the attachment workshops I hold. The program I developed is called Somatic Attachment Training & Experience (SATe) or previously DARe.

The development of repair rituals is important. Repair rituals emphasize the fact that we’re not expecting each other to be perfect.


Professionals learn how to work with adults, and also with themselves. It’s really important to create a safe environment for therapists to work with their own attachment histories. When you’re doing a course, you open these issues, as it is a part of everyone’s human journey. You’re automatically in a relational field and your attachment system is involved. Therapy IS a dyadic, deep relationship and

needs to be a safe place for therapists to explore this sensitive territory personally, to work on their own histories and their own relationships—personal relationships. And it helps them so they can then better help clients; to teach their clients, through the ripple effect of their own work, how to have healthier relationships. I’m committed to the idea of healthy relationships for everyone. I was glad to receive your e-‐mail about thoughts on relationships. Cheryl: That’s great. Diane: I’m so into learning how to enhance relationships, personally, in therapy and globally. I have been traveling internationally since 1995 doing these trainings because there’s an epidemic of loneliness. I think there’s a certain existential loneliness each of us has to deal with, and yet it seems that we deserve and can have, can learn, the skills of how to be happier and how to act on the potential for well-‐being in relationships. So that’s what I’ve been studying nonstop for years. Cheryl: That’s excellent. Diane: So part of it is, first of all, not just having this idea—and this is the Hollywood piece we were talking about—that it should be easy, and if it’s not easy, it’s our partner’s fault or it’s our fault. It’s by definition a little challenging if you didn’t have an ideal secure attachment to begin with. Some people do have that, and it’s like finding, hitting, striking gold because one person’s secure attachment tends to pull the other person into the secure attachment, but you don’t have to already have secure attachment. You can learn secure attachment. Siegel says that through his research, and Tatkin also talks about it: that you can have two people coming from insecure backgrounds but who can learn to function in secure attachment, and that’s really important.

So part of it is, first of all, not just having this idea—and this is the Hollywood

piece we were talking about—that it should be easy, and if it’s not easy.


One writer said you can learn to love just like you can learn to ride a bike, and I think that’s great. You can learn it. It’s a learnable, teachable capacity and, again, it points out that we don’t just automatically know, and we don’t just automatically understand why sometimes we get really triggered—because so much of it comes from implicit memory, the nonconscious part of our body’s encoding. It’s encoded before we even had a mind to understand what got encoded. Any book in this field talks about secure attachment as well as safety. Then all sorts of capacities open up in us in the brain for regular functioning, but especially relationship connection, connection to self, and connection to others when we feel safe. What that means is that we have to go into what I call amygdala whispering, which is calming the alarm-‐anxiety part of the brain that we all tilt a little bit toward, because the brain is oriented to keeping us safe. It sometimes trumps our need for attachment.

So we have to be careful not to trigger the fear-‐based threat response in our partner’s amygdala; we also have to know what triggers ours, and help ourselves find ways to be reassured and calm down. So there’s (1) dealing with the inherent threat that people react to, (2) intentionally learning not to trigger your partner’s threat, and then (3) you and your partner learning how to calm each other down and bring each other back into safety. Sometimes that means bringing energy into the relationship if someone shuts down.

That might be an up-‐regulation in the nervous system; for other people, if they’re going into anxiety or anger or rage or too much anxiety or panic it would be a down-‐regulation. Tatkin teaches a lot about the practical aspects of co-‐regulation, and I teach and work with developing that capacity for self-‐ and interactive regulation of the autonomic nervous system, So I think that’s really an important thing to bring into a couple’s dynamic and is a really big focus. I know you probably know all this. I mean, certainly a sense of humor and laughter would be really important, with the limbic-‐to-‐limbic connection: having an emotional attunement with each other and with safety, as well as private and public playfulness. One of the most important things for bringing couples into secure attachment is having more playtime. In the United States, we’ve gotten so work-‐oriented because

So we have to be careful not to trigger the fear-

based threat response in our partner’s amygdala;

we also have to know what triggers ours, and help

ourselves find ways to be reassured and calm down.


economically we’re stressed—and now, with growing economic pressure, that’s happening globally, too. But we need to have more face-‐to-‐face time, not so much Skype-‐to-‐Skype time, but face-‐to-‐face playtime, when we’re not tasking each other. I think one of the problems in long-‐term committed relationships is that we start becoming functional units for the things we have to do to keep our household, careers etcetera going. That’s part of it, but we sometimes shortchange the playful part and the playing itself. I even make this a homework assignment for my students. I’m really serious about it. I want couples to try to double their playtime or make sure they have one day a week—or one evening a week or whatever they need—for play. But they must really make sure they’re increasing their playtime. Stan Tatkin emphasizes this. Couples should make it as big a play zone as they can for themselves together. This is important in American culture because we tend to be workaholics. Cheryl: Yes, exactly. Diane: What I find really helpful is that we can LEARN the skills of secure attachment and practice with each other. The American culture is so tilted toward an excess of autonomy, perhaps starting with our beloved “pioneer spirit”. This perpetuates the idea that we should do things ourselves. For instance, you have a little repair problem in your house. We pay people and bring strangers into the house to fix things, instead of being a

community’s residents helping each other. I have initiated an orientation where I live, that we all help each other as much as we can manage within the neighborhood, and that it is okay to ask for help. Most of us have a sort of shame about asking for help. We have a Declaration of Independence, and I always joke that we also need a “Declaration of Dependence.”

Cheryl: Interdependence, yes. Diane: Yeah. You have to have the capacity to depend and to ask for your needs to be met because it’s realistic. It’s reality-‐based for one thing. Nobody is supposed to be completely independent. It doesn’t work and it’s not true.

We have a Declaration of Independence, and I

always joke that we also need a “Declaration of

Dependence.”


So we need to have the capacity for independence and the capacity for dependence; and then, if both of those are in balance, we have the capacity for interdependence, which is really, really important in couple relationships. And we should be meeting each other’s needs as much as we can. That doesn’t mean we don’t also do our own autonomy thing, but we have so much orientation to what I call reactive autonomy from the way our culture is set up that even just the idea that you need something is foreign. I always joke, “As if need is a four-‐letter word.” I mean, it is a four-‐letter word but it’s not a bad four-‐letter word. We need a balance of true autonomy and mutuality that also can hold meeting each other’s needs. This needs to be reciprocal in adult relationships as partners. Humor is essential and it certainly takes a sense of humor to be human; especially to be me. My mind is so funny—how I see myself react sometimes, how serious I can get—when I take a step back is really quite funny. I think a lot of disidentification—and healing—happens when we can take and honest look at ourselves and eventually find the laughter. My friend, Howard Richmond, a psychiatrist and talented stand-‐up comedian, recently told me that Carol Burnett said, “Humor is tragedy plus time.” I love that and feel it is so astutely true. I’d like my chapter to read as if it were the Erma Bombeck of relationships. Cheryl: Excellent. This is great. Diane: The other part of it is—my talk is not as organized as I might like it to be, because I’m talking extemporaneously. But the other part of secure attachment is to figure out how you to nourish the attachment bond between you and your partner, and that takes what I call gourmet-‐level contact nutrition, which involves how you use your tone of voice. Ideally our voice is modulated, reassuring and not scary. Best to have a quick sense of humor instead of a quick anger response, being able to do the repair, using a calming prosody in your voice, being careful how you use your tone of voice. When women get stressed, usually not consciously, they get shrill—a high pitch designed to signal danger, originally. That’s from tribal days when we had to alert the tribe that something was wrong. Men tend to lower their voices and actually kind of boom. Men get loud and that signals the amygdala to “Watch out!” But usually neither gender is aware they’re changing their voice, and the problem is that such voice change will trigger the partner into threat, over arousal and constriction. It’s

But the other part of secure attachment is to figure out

how you to nourish the attachment bond between you

and your partner


designed to, and it will trigger the partner’s amygdala for fear. Once you’re afraid, your stress response is on and you may actually move out of the pro-‐relational part of your brain. This is a physiological shift. So I’m always telling therapists, “Look, you must know how to help shift your clients physiology from frozenness, immobility, collapse and/or shutdown—that can occur when you feel your life is threatened—toward regaining active protective responses such as fight or flight, or even

finding one’s voice, which can overcome stuck passive responses. This valuable knowledge comes from Stephen Porges’ research on the important relationship between threat and our ability to connect, called the Social Engagement theory. You have to move people up and out of the primarily defensive part of their brain and into where they can initiate and complete active responses to feel safe again. Then they will naturally go into the medial prefrontal cortex to access the pro-‐social and pro-‐relational capacities necessary for relating. Many people have these relational capacities, but the threat response circumvents this potential. They have the “wiring” for relating but they don’t “have the lights turned on” in the brain in that area because they’re too scared. As they calm down and the amygdala relaxes into a safer experience, there is a shift toward natural social engagement—meaning that you are in contact with your self and also may become very interested in being in contact with others. This information is essential for working with couples. To the extent one or both partners may be stuck in a threat response, they will only be interested in passive survival or active defense, which leads to the desire to fight or to flee; and neither of these will ultimately help the relationship to heal. They’re too triggered into their lower brain, the reptilian brain that’s really managing threats and is not pro-‐relational. If the therapist knows methods like Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, or my model called Somatic Attachment Training, then they can help clients access the part of the brain that is most available and skilled in relating. This increases the chances for success and repair in relationships significantly. When you’re afraid, you’re more concerned with surviving the next moment. Imagine being chased by a leopard—you are not going to stop to have a nice chat with your partner. It’s a biological thing. It’s not about being selfish. You’re more concerned about whether you’re going to survive the next five minutes than you are about resolving some conflict in a relationship—especially if it’s the relationship partner that’s making you feel scared. Then you really are going to go into either withdrawal or attack. That’s


what will happen. Or you’ll shut down or dissociate, which will make you unavailable to yourself and disconnected from our partner. Cheryl: Well it’s all fascinating—even hearing about the whole possibility of repair and what secure attachment is. Diane: One of the metaphors I use is that we’re all in the same human soup on low boil. So how do we help ourselves cook in the right direction? I mean it’s really everybody, and I tell therapists in the trainings, “Look, it’s only an accident of profession that you’re the therapist and they’re the client. We’re all on this human journey together. We therapists all have the same issues our clients have—maybe with some variations—but as a human in a relationship, we all have the same issues because most people have insecure attachment issues or a few relational limitations to some extent. And we have to realize that we all have some difficult blind spots we bring to our relationship. Stan Tatkin likes to say, “Everybody is high-‐maintenance”. Don’t kid yourself. If you get into a relationship, you are also high-‐maintenance. He says we’re all feral. We’re unparented and feral. He’s hysterically funny. But seriously, we enter a relationship knowing we have to somewhat re-‐parent each other and learn the skills of secure attachment if we didn’t have them naturally in our families, which a lot of people didn’t. Statistics now show that 51 percent of the population is now dealing with avoidant attachment orientation in their primary relationship. That’s really high. Cheryl: That’s pretty high. Diane: We just aren’t living in nourishing relationships enough. I believe I will be studying how to support healthy relationship for the rest of my career because the least understood aspect of human connection is the relational field. What really happens “between us”? I think people know a lot about body awareness now that they didn’t use to know. They know a lot about cognitive skills. They know a lot about emotions. They even know a lot about spirituality, such as the awareness of awareness, mindfulness and different spiritual states. I think that has been somewhat accessible, but the area where people have the least amount of true knowledge and maturity is relational. And I don’t mean that in a critical way. The problem is we think we already know how to relate—or should know—and don’t seek the skills needed to “get good at love”—which fortunately can be learned. We need to learn about the relational field: the things that happen between us, in us

I believe I will be studying how to support healthy

relationship for the rest of my career because the

least understood aspect of human connection is the

relational field.


when we’re together. How do we maximize that perception and understanding? How do we move toward growth and maximize what can happen in a healthier relationship? You need support for your relationship. I think it takes a village for a relationship to prosper, just like they say it takes a village to raise children. I think you need to have people around to support your relationship and also people you look to who already represent secure attachments. They’re like signposts for you that you can model after and then hopefully, eventually, we ourselves can become models through secure attachment. But it takes work to get there and to not think of ourselves as damaged, or to diagnose ourselves as an insecure attachment style. That’s not helpful, but just how do we respond to a healthier relational field, and how do we create a healthier relational field to respond to in our relationship? That ripple effect goes out to everybody around you. When I’m teaching, if I can stay in that presence and embody / express secure attachment most of the time, the whole group starts moving in that direction and then they start doing it more and more with each other. It’s a very contagious positive ripple effect. The more we do it, the more we can help others—clients, parents, partners, too. That’s another whole topic, because I know you’re not focused on kids and parents. If we could get secure attachment going in a good direction from the beginning between new parents and their children, we could probably change what happens in human dynamics in a generation or two. Cheryl: That’s so great. Diane: That’s what I would love to see happen. If you could take a quarter of the population and all they did was make sure moms and dads and kids were supported and in secure attachments… and then the next year, another quarter of the population did that and on and on… however we work out the details to ensure most kids got a great start so that they experience relationship as reasonably safe, reliable, contactful, present, playful, and attuned with repair practiced when needed—all that makes for secure attachment. If that was a major priority everywhere—and then also in adult relationships—in a couple of generations, we’d have so much more help on this planet, because where we really get our juice from is our relationships. All loving relationships have these ingredients.


If you’re in a committed, loving relationship, many feel you have an advantage over those who remain single or become divorced. Even friends don’t support marriages in the right way. I could do a rant on that. I think people sometimes are trying to support their friends, but they’re not supporting marriage or the relationship, and they’re not looking at what the potential is or how to strengthen the attachment bond… often it’s just too easy to talk people into divorce. This is not a good thing. Sometimes, of course, separating is necessary—hopefully not before we really give connection a chance. We are hardwired for love and connection, not isolation. Our brain is a social brain and grows and heals in connection to other brains. Sometimes healing our relational template formed in childhood happens in the relational field of therapy and one of the most nourishing places for healing ourselves is with our adult relationship partner.

We are love and there are ways to help us dive deep and express our nature. We deserve to have love in our lives and we can learn to experience love more directly. The ripple effect of love is the best contribution to our human tribe we can ever hope to make.

Here’s to generating a Tsunami wave of contactful connection and togetherness! ______________________________________

We are love and there are ways to help us dive deep and express our nature.


Biography & Contact Info Diane Poole Heller, Ph.D., is a world-‐renowned author, presenter, and expert in trauma resolution and adult attachment. Diane is noted for her ability to communicate complex topics with humor and clarity. Her workshops feature interactive lectures, multimedia presentations, and live demonstrations in actual healing sessions. Dr. Heller began her work with Peter Levine, founder of the Somatic Experiencing Training Institute. She has lectured and taught around the world as a somatic experiencing trainer and as a special topics presenter, most recently with her popular Somatic Attachment Training Experience (SATe) series (formerly known as DARe) on adult attachment. She now offers also a 4-‐module certification program. The SATe is a series of groundbreaking somatic adult attachment workshops for therapists, who learn essential skills for helping their clients develop stronger secure attachment styles, resulting in more joyful and happier adult relationships. These inspiring, interactive workshops provide practical applications and strategies for confidently addressing clients’ attachment styles. Dr. Heller is available for workshops, speaking engagements, and private phone consultations. Cheryl Blossom, MA, has a master’s degree in psychology and has been a therapist and motivational coach for 35 years. She is the founder of the Blossom Institute and the producer of the Relationship Wisdom courses. She is best known as a transformational catalyst. She has worked at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco and the U. S. Department of Defense in Monterey, California. She has also taught relationship workshops and seminars across the U.S. and England. She is the regular relationship expert on the TV show The Plush Life and the radio show Skirted Issues. Cheryl is the author of A New You: A Guide to Personal Transformation and Kiss Your Fights Goodbye. In addition, a chapter on her relationship wisdom is included in Lisa Sasevich’s New York Times best seller The Live Sassy Formula. http://RelationshipWisdom.com


For more information about Diane and her upcoming teaching schedule

and training DVDs please visit or contact

dianepooleheller.com

[email protected]

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