CIIS Public Programs Podcast

 Transcript

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land.

At the heart of every healthy, fulfilling relationship lies the unshakable knowledge that we can trust another person with the care of our whole well-being. Yet most of us arrive at our relationships with triggers, traumas, and old patterning that can make this kind of intimacy challenging.

Renowned psychotherapist and couples therapy expert Stan Tatkin explores all the common complaints and conflicts we encounter in our relationships and provides key insights on how to navigate even the most contentious topics with understanding and respect in his latest book, In Each Other’s Care.

In this episode, Dr. Tatkin is joined by licensed psychologist and CIIS Associate Professor of Community Mental Health Elizabeth Markle for a conversation offering insights for therapists and couples alike about repairing relationships and reigniting love.

This episode was recorded during a live online event on June 1st, 2023. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs just like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Dr. Stan Tatkin - Hello, hello.

Elizabeth Markle - Hello, hello, Dr. Stan Tatkin. Thank you so much for being here with us this evening.

Dr.Tatkin - Thank you. It's good to meet you.

Elizabeth - Yeah. Well, I'm so grateful that we have some time here to have a conversation. I'm hoping our conversation can really be sort of wide ranging.

Dr. Tatkin - Me too.

Elizabeth - Great. So I'm wondering if you can start by just telling us a little bit about who you are and how you came to be interested in dating and partnership relationships.

Dr. Tatkin - It's strange, isn't it? If you're like me, you look backwards and everything makes sense. You go forward and nothing makes sense. I think it's the fog of the present and the future. So, I actually come from a show business family—in music. And so I grew up in music, was a professional musician for most of my young years until I was 26 and then I quit. And I floundered and then I had my best friend at the time was a studio musician, as was I, and he was a psychologist. And he introduced me to a fellow called Hal Stone. Some people might know that name, voice dialogue. And Hal was my first mentor and suggested I go back to school and get my ticket. So I did at around 29, 30 and I never looked back. I loved this field and I still do. So I was trained early in systems, structural and strategic family systems, which is in PACT, my approach, and Gestalt Psychotherapy, which is in my approach. Group Psychotherapy, which isn't, but there are some things that from the Tavistock group that are very much a part of PACT. And then I lucked into finding a place at the John Bradshaw Center. There was an opening, and I was very lucky. And at the time I wasn't really that into John, but I started to get there, and I was a lead group psychotherapist at two hospitals and really cut my teeth on being in a hospital, inpatient working two and a half hours, each, well no, two, two and a half hours intensive ab reactive group psychotherapy. And boy, that was really something. And because we attracted a lot of access to people, I became enamored with James Masterson who developed self and object relations therapy. And so I immersed myself in that work and focused on personality disorders. And he became a mentor of mine, then drugs and alcohol, I lucked into that program too, being a director of a drug and alcohol program. Anyway, fast forward, Alan Shore became another mentor of mine, and I got knee deep in attachment theory, infant brain attachment, infant brain development and attachment theory. Arousal regulation was something that I started to become fascinated with and in neurobiology. Everything changed from there. Got into prevention work through the Watch, Wait and Wonder program up in Canada where I thought that's where it is, work with infant care and infant-caregiver dyads and the prevention of personality disorders, eating disorders. And they had a very hard time getting people to come in at this country for prevention. And so I switched to adult coupling, adult pair bonding, which I found there was just about a one-to-one similarity between infant attachment studies and marital outcome studies. And so, there you go. Also I went through a divorce around that time. And so I was also motivated to figure out what happened. And so, in my interest to find out what went wrong and combining my studies, I started to develop PACT, which is a polytheoretical approach that incorporates things I just told you along with social justice theory, psychodramatic work, and more. So we can talk about some of those things.

Elizabeth - Oh my goodness. Well you have done it all. And that is one of the fascinating things about being in the psychological field is that we're doing it, but we're living it, right? We're living our relationships. We're living our divorces. We're raising children. We're interacting with friends in our own pair bonding context. So, I appreciate you naming that as part of your process.

Dr. Tatkin - I think we pick what we do based on what we need to know.

Elizabeth - Don’t we though. Well, okay. So you've written a whole number of books and many of your earlier works talk about attachment and developmental neuroscience and secure functioning and from a sort of an intellectual and a research perspective. And one of the things I love from the intro in this book is that you say this book is a hands-on repair manual. So, I'm wondering if you could just say a little bit about how you'd contextualize this book as part of the larger arc of your work.

Dr. Tatkin - I think this is a pandemic book. I wrote this during the pandemic, and truth be known, this came out of a three contract deal. And there was one more book that was supposed to be written and it was supposed to be the transcribed version of Relationship Rx, which was a direct to audio book. Turns out audio doesn't transcribe very well to written. So, I had to scrap the whole thing, and I decided it'd be kind of fun to write, you know, according to all the complaints that I see in my clinic. And then to really focus on the two main things that I started to be concerned about during the pandemic with what I saw around me and what I experienced with my couples. And that is relationship structure. I found that couples are the only union—or alliance—where people will get together without a shared purpose, without a shared vision, without an idea of themselves apart from feelings and emotion, right? We got together because we're in love. And that's great. And I am really a romantic, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the adult primary attachment system, feelings, love is not enough. In fact, it actually can be a problem and it should be run like any kind of a union among free people, based on terms and conditions. And yet, couples don't do that. And so, two major problems I saw that will crash and burn any union or alliance is a lack of a purpose. Why we're even doing this thing, right? Deal kind of a deal or no deal. And the manner in which you and I will interact when one or both of us is under stress. This has to do with a neurobiological issue of threat because like other mammals, we have an acute survival instinct, and a brain that has what's called a negativity bias. And so we're easily threatened, small t threat by faces, voices, tone, movements, gestures, words, phrases, and that this factors into all relationships, but especially the primary attachment relationship, which is different than any other. So, I thought I'm going to focus just on this, and drive that point home.

Elizabeth - Beautiful. I'm wondering if we could lay just a little foundation and pick some language we want to use to speak about this.

Dr. Tatkin - Sure. Well, in the first book, Love and War, we talked about, you know, use the traditional nomenclature for attachment that Ainsworth, Mary Ainsworth used, you know, insecure, ambivalent and insecure, avoidant and secure and different variations that have come along since then. In the second book, I change it to something of a nautical theme because I figured that people probably didn't appreciate hearing things like angry resistant. You know, it's not, first of all, it's hard to say, and it sounds pejorative. It really isn't when you study infants. When you see infants, you can see the anger and the resistance in the body, but adults, I think, take it differently. So, I decided to make it islands, anchors and wave, islands being the anxious avoidant. People forget that side of the aisle is anxious. Anxious ambivalent is wave and then keeping with the nautical theme, secures are considered anchors. So we can use that terminology because it's a little friendlier.

Elizabeth - Wonderful. Well, I so want to get into all of this around relationship structure and shared principles of governance, which I love as a nonprofit leader, because I think about these so much around a nonprofit and I haven't necessarily applied them to the relational world. But before we go there, I want to bounce an idea off of you. I think, you know, most of the literature around attachments tends to speak about attachment style as a trait. Like you are a person who tends towards being a wave or you are a person who tends toward being an island. And that makes sense. And what I feel like I see in relational dynamics is that people polarize each other on a continuum. So if you have two people who tend to be anxious, one of them will out anxious the other, and the other will become more avoidant. Is that your experience as well? Could you speak to that?

Dr. Tatkin - Absolutely. Because, you know, like most research that looks and tries to categorize people, whether it's, you know, some kind of a medical condition or it's a psychiatric categorization, is really trying to look at aggregates of people, not real people, aggregates of people. And then we come up with a basic idea of where to locate somebody. So attachment or any developmental model for therapists is very, very useful to locate the general area that somebody might be in. But in order to locate an actual person, you need people skills. And right. Otherwise, it's just a category. When you get into systems, two or more people, all of these break down because you're dealing with a phenomenological inner subjective system that cannot be understood simply by looking at the individuals. The system becomes its own animal and begins to react to itself. So quite rightly, people who are secure will bounce between being islandish in the distancing group and being clingy in the clinging group, right? Or waves. That is a function of being relatively secure, if not secure. And the dynamics between two individuals who are constantly shifting and changing depending on their state, depending on time of life, depending on a lot of factors, either clinging or more distancing, and that will get the other person to do or what appears to be insecure attachment. So, here's the thing that's important is when looking at attachment in a couple systems in a two person system, we're looking at people who cannot do anything other than what they're directed to do based on an intense, constant fear of either being smothered, engulfed, co-opted, having their independence, their autonomy, their things taken from them, or preoccupied continuously with rejection, punishment, abandonment. And those are the people that we will pay attention to clinically because they're predictable. We know what they're going to do based on what they're afraid of. And that's what's lovely about developmental theory is that if we understand it, we can pretty much guess from a person's presentation what their experience in childhood, infancy might have been like. Doesn't mean we're right, but it's a good guess. And then we investigate. Also gives us a good idea of how we might predict what they'll do under certain circumstances. The same with personality disorders, because people who are rigidified by their fear, by their need to protect themselves, whether it's pain avoidance or pleasure seeking, are predictable. They're directed by their avoidance of pain, and so they're compelled to do the same things again and again. That's actually a feature, both in love relationships, but also clinically. Here's the problem. I didn't appreciate when I wrote Wired for Love, the human need for categorization, but also the general tendency to use categorization as a cudgel, as a mallet, a hammer to beat each other up with.

Elizabeth - Oh, amen. Yeah.

Dr. Tatkin - And themselves. We live at a time where the popularization of medical and particularly psychiatric and psychological terms are being used on social media in a way that's wildly misunderstood to otherize people. That part I don't like being a part of. I think it's good to know I'm inclined to do certain things because I'm afraid I remember what happens to me when I depend on somebody to take responsibility for those behaviors, those reflexes, because they're not secure functioning. They generally lead another person to feel threatened. Good for me, bad for you. And it's good for me to know you and to know what you're afraid of so I don't reinforce it and I also know how to help you. These are the reasons I wrote about attachment, orientation, organization. Unfortunately, it's the most popular thing from the book because people love these terms and love to self-identify and identify their partners.

Elizabeth - Yeah, we sure do. Well, I so appreciate the nuance you're bringing to that and the normalization of some fluctuation between feeling and enacting more anxious or more avoidant states, but it not necessarily being a locked in trait.

Dr. Tatkin - Right.

Elizabeth - Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Tatkin - In Each Other's Care, I really wanted to emphasize that the real problem in relationship isn't personality, isn't gender, isn't sex, isn't culture, isn't religion, isn't whether you're an island, anchor, a wave, or a duck or a dog, it is the human primate. The human condition is the problem.

Elizabeth - So good. Yes, you have a chapter called The Problem of Being Human, aka Why We Are All Pains in the Ass. And I love that so much. Yeah. Do you want to say a little bit more about that human nature piece?

Dr. Tatkin - Well, if you're a student of anthropology and history and civilizations and how hard it's been to get people to get along and not rob each other, rape each other, steal from each other, do bad things, it's always been a social structure, a container, whether it's, you know, fear of God smiting you, that's fine if it gets you to behave properly, or laws, you go to jail. But, you know, there's always been something that has countered the human primate tendencies, which are built into our species, and that is, one of them is selfishness and self-centeredness. It's always been there, always will be there. Being moody and fickle and opportunistic. Opportunism is built into our species. Check out a two-year-old, a three-year-old. Imagine, God forbid, giving that child an AR-15 and all the rights of an adult. It wouldn't last very long because those children really exemplify what we are. And that is, like I said, opportunistic, xenophobic. We get upset about our racism and deny it. It is built in. We otherize anybody, anything that is too complicated, too different from ourselves, or as Harari says, too familiar to ignore, too difficult to tolerate, and then we otherize. We do that with our neighbors. We do that with our partners. We even do that with our kids. So, to not understand that is to be unprotected and to be naive. We should always plan for our devils, and so should partners in a couple, not your angels. Stress is the factor. And as soon as we are under stress, we will revert to a one-person psychological system of I, me, mine, and you, you, you. Every time. That's normal. That's everywhere. That's the problem. And to understand it is to be able to harness this, understand our own mind is part of growing up. That our mind plays tricks on us, that it tells us things that are not always that important or true, at all, right? And that we make things up constantly, including the lovely

part of a relationship, but also the not so lovely part of why you're flawed, right? And what's wrong with you and why I'm unhappy. Oh yeah, it's because of you.

Elizabeth - Of course it is.

Dr. Tatkin - So, this I wanted to drive home because I am worried about not just couples, but also where we are right now in our own country.

Elizabeth - Yeah, the psychological principles and the foibles of humanity are things you're speaking to that don't just emerge in primary relationships, although we sometimes give ourselves more license in pair bonding to act poorly than we maybe do in our professional settings.

Dr. Tatkin - That's because adult pair bonding is the only system where there is a very long memory going all the way back to infancy. That's the attachment issue. It's also a memory. But also entitlement, expectation, the feeling that we're family, which we're not, we're strangers. So there are all these mistakes of the mind that's normal, but can be catastrophic if we don't understand it.

Elizabeth - Yeah, yeah. It's really kind of a wild setup if you think our earliest patterning is of being very small and helpless and when we were upset, all we could do was yell and then yell louder, and then somebody made it better. What kind of conditioning and learning is that? If we were lucky, somebody made it better. We sort of bring that into our adult partnerships that if we protest louder, there's an expectation that you should make it better.

Dr. Tatkin - That's interesting because if you study babies, and I did for some time, I recommend everyone do that who's in this field. You start to see this in the clinging group. The clinging group. One of the features is a lot of signal. They signal loudly and they signal strongly because they had to, in their early formative years before they can remember actually. And the folks in the distancing group we see as stopping signaling very early, it's muted. They no longer signal in their face. They don't want to protest. They adapt quite differently. It's not rocket science. You see it over and over again with these babies and these very young children. And that's really what we are, is grown-up children. Same thing happens. So, the signaling thing is really key in the attachment world.

Elizabeth - Yeah, ok. So that's who we are. That's the conditioning we have. How on earth do we make it work when there's two grown-up children in a system trying to get along? If you had your three minutes with the whole world listening, what would you say is the path to health and happiness and sanity and partnership?

Dr. Tatkin - At the top is if you are an alliance in a union, part of that is a duty to show up and to be a working member of that union. In this case, there's only two unless it's polyamorous. There are more people, that's fine, but there's still not a hundred or thousand. You are the executives. You are the generals. You are the top bosses. You are the legislators. You shape and mold your world. You shape and mold what the relationship should be and what your culture should be, not anyone else. That takes care of all the other factors because it doesn't really matter. In the end, it doesn't really matter if you are insecurely attached. What matters is that you're forming an alliance that has a purpose of protecting each other from the quite dangerous environment, always has been, unpredictable, indifferent to your interests. The two of you are creating social contracts to ensure the things you want to ensure: your safety and security, your happiness, your physical wellbeing, your creativity, your joy. Everything. Two people can decide to do that if they wish, but they have to agree. They have to find a way to find where they are the same and where they agree. Unfortunately, because we're energy conserved animals, we do the least amount necessary. We're lazy. And we would rather look at where we disagree and where we're different. That's an illusion because we're always different and we always disagree. Where do we agree and where are we the same? Smart people that are unionizing others know this. Otherwise, it would never get people to join. It would never get people on board. If you think about how this country was formed, and just the romantic version, but there's some truth to this. How do thirteen colonies get round up to give up their cushy life, especially if they're further in than the East Coast, to fight the British, to join a union? They have different cultures, these thirteen colonies. How is that done? How do they lock each other in and find where they would agree and where they are the same, where they would both profit from this? That's a lot of work. You're only two people—or three or four, depending on your arrangement. Come on. Why can't you do that? We can all do that. Everyone can do that. That's been done throughout human civilization. Couples for some reason, people just don't think this way. That's—the answer is, in an adult relationship of free people, it's based on terms and conditions, deal or no deal. Not love. What are we going to do for each other and what are we never going to do? So say us both. Two people can do that and they have to do that. Otherwise, they'll fight. If you and I are pointing in two different directions and we want two different things in a relationship, we're not going to get along. It just makes sense. I'll be operating according to what I think this relationship is and you'll do the same. So, this is, I think, the most important thing and then we can get to why it's so hard. But first, people have to understand how unions and alliances work across the board and have to play by those principles. It's a team sport. It's not a solo sport.

Elizabeth - Got it. Well, I love this around really thinking through shared purpose, shared vision, shared principles of governance. What are our agreements? If I can play devil's advocate, the thing that comes up for me is that early on, it's easy to sort of name these principles and values and here's what we're up to. Then fifteen years later, when somebody gets sick or there's a financial crisis, the interpretation of those principles can be very different. I don't know if you have the magical contract that lays out every detail that you do in the beginning, but how do you navigate when fifteen years down the road, you have very different understandings of what that means?

Dr. Tatkin - People change. And part of this is looking ahead, looking downstream and not just looking at what's in front of you. What could possibly go wrong? We're going to change. Things are going to happen. We're going to go through developmental stages. If we're different ages or if we're out of cohort, that's ten years, we're going to go through these changes differently at different times. That's a consideration. The question is, are we planning as we go? Are we constantly looking ahead and not backward to see what's next? Are we in constant contact with each other to make sure that the relationship is what we want it to be and that we're constantly molding and shaping it like a block of clay? You and I are constantly shaping it to our desire, not somebody else's. That is more likely to work in the long run than any other system. There's no guarantee. There's never a guarantee, but there is a likelihood in insecure functioning relationships that they will not last long or if they do, one or both people won't be happy. This we know. So, it's hard to do secure functioning. It's hard to be at the helm and to be both drivers, no passengers, to be both generals, having to share power and work collaboratively and cooperatively. But there is no other system, if you really think about it, that can work in the long run. Any other system turns out to be too unfair, too unjust, and too insensitive to last, and will accrue a lot of memory of resentment, injustice, and threat. And if the unfairness doesn't get you, the biological problem will, and that is we start to build up threat cues to the point where we cannot even be in the room with each other without our heart rates and blood pressure going up because we've accumulated too much inflammation and too much threat. So, that's why I say either of those two things, if they're not in place, will destroy any union.

Elizabeth - Okay, there's so much to talk about here. I realize we're using the terms secure functioning and insecure functioning. Would you just take a moment and sort of flesh those out?

Dr. Tatkin - Secure functioning isn't the same as secure attachment. Secure functioning is a set of social contracts based on social contract theory and social justice. Social justice as it pertains to the couple or the system only, not the greater system of social justice. Get into that with my students very often. We have to look at what the couple considers fair and just, not what we consider fair and just. There are a lot of couples I see that do things I don't think are very fair. They're okay with it. It's none of my business. People could decide on, you know, there's one master and the other person is more of a servant. I don't like that. But if that's part of their culture, and they fully agree and I've vetted them to see if they're being honest and if it's really true, I can't speak about it. Right? The two of you could be drug addicts and barfly couple. You're drunk all the time. You're stoned all the time. You're fine with it. I don't touch it. I worry about your safety. And if there are kids in the house, then I worry about theirs. Otherwise, it's none of my business. If one of you has a complaint, and feel that something's unfair or insensitive, now we have business. Now we have something. Because that's a matter between the two people and that's where I come in. So, we take no stance in terms of what people decide is a good life and what they believe is right. But they have to come up with what they think is right and what they think is a good life, not somebody else's. And most people come to the table with no idea except their earliest one, which is the one provided by their family of origin.

Elizabeth - Okay. So, secure functioning is what has to be generated between the two people and then enacted day in and day out.

Dr. Tatkin - Relationships don't exist except in our heads. It's an abstraction. You can't take a picture of a relationship. You can only take a picture of people. So if it's a shared mythology, you and I better have the same mythology. Otherwise there'll be trouble. Just like we have to have the same idea of what is a good life or what we should or shouldn't do. If I want polyamory and you want monogamy and I can't get you on board and you can't get me on board, that's a deal breaker. It cannot work. It cannot. It's like a cancer cell. Neither are wrong and neither are right. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with we're pointing in different directions and we're expecting to be able to solve problems together and create new things. And that's not going to happen. Same thing if there's, I want a baby. I've always wanted children. You hate children. You'll never have children. And then we go buy a house, which is what people do. That's a recipe for trouble. Because we're just not going to be able to work together. It just makes sense. So those are the things that have to be vetted, and people have to be very honest about, which is really, really hard. All of it's hard.

Elizabeth - Absolutely. So there are those big structural things that are deal breakers and would be deal breakers if we were paying attention from the beginning. And then the way you structure this book, there's a bunch of this sort of foundational information in the beginning and then there's the conflicts, right? You go through sex, money, cleanliness, timeliness, politics, all of it, and you sort of walk us through an interaction and then break it down. Could I read one of these interactions? Partly because they're brilliant and funny and a little painful. Yeah. Would that be okay for us to look at? So the complaint is my partner drives like a maniac and the scene is a couple's in the car driving through a rainstorm. Partner A says, “Please put on the windshield wipers at high speed. I can't see what's in front of us.” Partner B says, “I can see and that's all that matters.” Partner A says, “You're going too fast. What if a car stopped ahead?” Partner B says, “I have the automatic system set. It'll detect an object that approaches.” Partner A says, “What do you mean by automatic system? This is not the time to use that. That's for good weather and good vision. Please don't do that.” Partner B says, “You're going to have to trust me. I know how to drive.” Okay. And this goes on, right? And it just gets more and more agonizing to listen to.

Dr. Tatkin - You know what's funny is that the other day we were here in Hawaii and I did the same thing. I did just that. I said, “But I can see,” and Tracy, my wife, she knows about secure functioning. She knows that you can't do that. I said, “You're right. Sorry.”

Elizabeth - Okay. So this is not one of those deal breakers, right? But these are the things that drive people up a wall. What does secure functioning look like in that kind of context?

Dr. Tatkin - Well, to say what I said is one person thinking. It's good for me, but it's not good for my partner. In a two person psychological system, there's an acknowledgement of interdependency. We have the same things to gain and the same things to lose. We are in each other's care literally. And so it's absurd because first of all, the passenger clearly has no control. We could go probably back to the days of the buggy whip and people probably fought in the wagons. Why are you doing that? There's a mud there. It's going to spray on me. So, this matter of being in control, and I'm in control and you're doubting my ability, it has been around. But it is absurd when you think about it. It's no sweat off of my back to respect and to care for the person who was a passenger has no control. And so these are the things that we will do, all of us. And some people might think this is strictly male, but it really isn't. It really isn't. And so a two person psychological system is one where it has to be good for me and you, or I will pay for it. I will. It doesn't make any sense. Anything I do to you comes right back to me. There's no separation there. We are separate individuals, but we're bound by having the same things to gain and the same things to lose. If I do something at your cost, I'm going to pay for it. There's just no way around that. So we consider it self harming, to think of only oneself, because we're not alone. Everything we do impacts the other person. And we have to think like we would, well, the military, special forces. You cannot be in special forces unless you drink the Kool-Aid, which is you're nothing. The person to your left and to your right, they're going to save your life. That's what's important. And so they embed in the culture, this idea that this is an interdependent group. Your lives depend on it. The same thing in other groups too, right? Teams, same thing. You can't have somebody acting as if they're the only person on the team. That destroys morale and it loses games. So it destroys the purpose. This is a reorientation, a cultural and moral reorientation to we're bound together. Our fates are tied. Therefore I have to think of you at the same time I'm thinking of myself or you will confuse me as an adversary. And that's exactly what happens when we think in terms of one person system. It is good for me. It's really threatening to you. And so, yeah.

Elizabeth - Well, I am glad we're just naming how big of an orientation issue this is because in this day of conversation about self-responsibility, autonomy, not being codependent, individuation, empowerment, the list goes on, that the idea of being clingy or needy or codependent is sort of like, oh, God. So yeah, how would you guide people towards really thinking in a healthy two-person psychological system?

Dr. Tatkin - It's not a matter of health. It's a matter of tactical, practical, can you exist? Can you get anything done? We've come a long way. Our culture has shifted from a traditional life of complementarity and, you know, independency to independence. Murray Bowen, let's get away from the lack of differentiation and stop talking about we, I, me, you, what do you think? And that led to, that was part of the culture. If we look at the politics of the time, our psychology shifted in lockstep with it. So then we get to gestalt and, you know, you do your thing and I do my thing and if we should meet in the middle, so fine, that's great. And then we went too far. We started to deny the nature of what we know about human primates. We are pack animals. We are dependent animals. Any allusion to anything else is just a fantasy. It does not exist. There is no such thing as a self-made person. That's hogwash. So we started to deny our nature and when we do that, problems will arise. So the idea of collectivism or interdependence is not codependency. We're bound by the same principles and the same laws, agreements that we make based on fairness and justice, equality, shared power, shared authority. You can't do that. I can't do that. Codependency is one direction only. I will do all these things for you and I hope you'll return them, but I don't command you to. And if you're not going to do that, I'm out. No deal. Interdependency are two separate individuated individuals who can tolerate pain, can tolerate grief, can tolerate differences and know how to work with them by holding each other to the same fire that we agree to. That is a discipline and a rigor that is different. Right? We're still independent, autonomous individuals. We're expected to be, but we're bound as a team, as a survival team, as a creative team, as a parenting team to work together or nothing works. Nothing works. Right? Think of a potato sack race. If you and I can't work together, we don't go anywhere. We fall. That's it.

Elizabeth - Yeah. And what you spoke of is that the consequence of not doing that is that our nervous systems start to confuse each other for adversaries.

Dr. Tatkin - Absolutely

Elizabeth - And you wrote, threat perception is the single most underrated cause of relationship distress.

Dr. Tatkin - Yeah. It is.

Elizabeth - Yeah, would you say more about that and the whole idea of leading with relief?

Dr. Tatkin - So if I don't, if you feel in this system, in this system that I'm talking about, if you and I are partners and I act as if I don't care about your interests or your concerns or your worries, you will start to harness and use your own personal narrative to protect your interests. I will compel you to do that because I'm doing it. We'll square off and we'll be adversarial. Everyone will do it. It doesn't matter where you are in the globe. Everyone will do it. So that's folly in a two person system, in a team where we have to do things, we have to work together. If I hurt you, and that doesn't mean whether I think I did, but if you feel hurt by me, misunderstood by me, and I don't fix that as real, you will start to see me as a threatening person. Everyone will do that. Therefore, it's in my best interest to care about your perception as real and apologize, fix it, repair it, make amends, make it right, do something to relieve you right away. And there's two reasons for that. One, long-term memory is formed by adrenal subproducts and adrenaline and glutamate. Anything that's too intense and lasts too long, stays online too long, will go into long-term memory. If I don't fix something with you immediately and I let it sustain, I created that memory in you. And you're going to remember this for a long time and refer to it when anything similar comes around. Now, I may blame you for this, but that's stupid because I caused it. It's my doing, not yours. So, if we don't repair things right away, this is a practical, tactical thing, we're actually forming long-term memory in the other person, which we're going to have to litigate in the future. So that's one problem. Two, if we are, that's interpersonal stress that's being created in inflammation, literally inflammation by the way. If I don't fix this with you, you start to build a sense of danger and threat, which shortens lifespan. So interpersonal stress, we have to remember, chronic interpersonal stress leads to a shorter lifespan. You know this leads to a breakdown in all systems, cardiovascular, inflammation, auto-immune systems and just… Diabetes is a-

Elizabeth - Endocrine?

Dr. Takin - Metabolic. Thank you. Same thing, a metabolic problem. So those four systems are going to be compromised and we're going to hit the medical system early. From something called allostatic load. Allostatic load is the price we pay for having to adapt to lives, slings and arrows. Interpersonal stress in our relationship, which represents home, is it has to be reduced to a home because the world is stressful and you and I represent home. We cannot afford to increase threat and allostatic load because it's pointless. Why be pair bonded? Right? The outcome is very similar to loneliness, which we now know also shortens lifespan, leads to mental illness and physical illness. So there's a real practical biological reason here. And then of course, there's a trajectory with couples that do not take care of stress quickly, do not get in and out of stress fast. They have to know how to do this and how to talk about stressful topics without going to war. Very hard to do, but the alternative is worse. The alternative is bad. So we have to learn the rules of engagement and how to talk with each other in a manner that's collaborative and cooperative, even when we're under great stress. Otherwise the wheels come off and we won't handle the weather that's coming.

Elizabeth - And that's sort of what you do throughout this book is break down in these conversations, where did it become war and what other paths could have been taken that would have been constructive and lead to quick relief and repair?

Dr. Tatkin - Here's a quick example. Here's an example. You and I start to talk about something that bugs us or a problem with our kids or something. If you and I start working on each other instead of the problem, that's war. If we don't work on the problem as a third thing that we're working on together, as a puzzle, and we work on each other, immediately we go to war every time because nobody likes that. That's considered threatening. And we do that all the time. I think if it wasn't for you, then that wouldn't have happened. If you'd only be this, if you'd only be that, I think you're the problem. So that's what we do and that's something we can't afford to do in this kind of a system. Try it and see.

Elizabeth - Yeah, absolutely. Well, you wrote, it's one partner's responsibility to make the other partner feel safe and secure. And as I thought about this, I'm always looking for places in my own life where I struggle with this. And what came up for me is where a need for safety and security is in direct conflict with another need like vitality or adventure or connection. And to make it personal, we all come in with baggage or with trauma from earlier in life. When I was sixteen, I had a partner break an agreement, cheat on me at a party. And now I'm forty years old and when my partner's off at a party and I'm not there, I'm nervous.

Dr. Tatkin - What did the original do at a party?

Elizabeth - He broke an agreement by being sexual with somebody else.

Dr. Tatkin - Bastard.

Elizabeth - Agreed. But he was sixteen and I was sixteen. So now I'm a forty year old who has some stress, some trauma, some distress in that very particular instance. But I'm loathe to ask my partner not to go do things that bring them love, joy, vitality, the goodness of life. So this is a simple example of needs being in conflict and not necessarily being rational needs, but just being like, hey, this is distressing. How do you advise people on these things?

Dr. Tatkin - First of all, that's normal. We're memory animals. Everything we do is by memory. Very little we do with critical thinking. We even pick by memory. We even stay away from somebody by memory. You look like somebody I don't like, so I stay away from you. You look like somebody I love. No, I want to meet you. Everything we do is by memory. So it makes sense. We are formed, our behavior is formed, by our experiences with everybody that made us feel great, intensity again, or horrible, intensity, long term memory. So that makes sense.

And that's going to happen. That's part of the reason why love relationships are the hardest because it has a long memory and we're proxies for everybody that came before. We're avatars, actors, each having the bite that fits the other's wound because of the way we actually select each other. So very hard, very hard. But there's an opportunity here for healing and for dealing with memory and not inflaming it. Is it not fair to talk to a partner about what will keep us both feeling safe and secure at all times? At all times. Because if we don't do that, we cannot create anything. We can't influence each other. We can't do much. Safety and security is the bedrock of relationships. Without it, we don't trust each other or we wonder and that takes time, energy, expenditure, stress and it makes everything much more difficult. So that has to be protected at all times. What would make us feel protected? Doesn't mean you can't go to a party. But I want to make sure that I'm your person, unless we have a different agreement. Unless we, right? All things predicate, is predicated on what we designed. You and I designed as our structure. We're the architects. And so we find where we agree and we're the same. And then we work downward to what we can do that's good for both of us, win-win. And we modify as needed. Working that way gets out of jealousy, gets out of trying to control another person. Good for me, good for you. But let's start where we agree. Do we both want to feel safe and secure? Yeah. Do we both want to be free of having jealousy stimulated by thirds? Thirds meaning if we're a dyadic system, anything that competes with our system, right? And if so, how are we going to deal with those, right? So everything is talked about in that way. You can come up with something that protects yourself and your partner at the same time that is not restricting. Now here's the thing. If I don't take seriously that I'm in charge, I'm responsible for your felt sense of safety and security, which I can prove is true. Don't go back to that's my responsibility. It isn't. This is all interpersonal folks. It is much more efficient for me, for you to be in my care and for me to guarantee safety and security for you. And when I don't fix it, you do that for me. Then it's in my best interest to always shore that up with you. Because if I don't, you're going to start to act very strange, right? Because of feeling insecure or unsafe. That's going to be a burden for me because it's going to be harder for me to work with you because you're feeling insecure. When we feel insecure, especially in attachment realm, that's an existential matter. And we think it's about love. It isn't. It's really an existential threat because attachment is a biological mandate to stick together. We think it's love. It isn't. It's a survival issue going all the way back to infancy. If mommy dies, I die. So we have to understand that attachment both brings us together or holds us together, but it also keeps us together even when we shouldn't be. It's the I can't quit you biology. Therefore we have to respect it. Otherwise there's trouble. So it's in my best interest to make sure you are constant. If I see a flash of insecurity, I'm on it. You are my person. You are my person. You're the most important person to me. I would not do anything to threaten that. That would be suicide for me. So guaranteed if I'm doing that, there's much more freedom for me and you. A lot of people won't even do that. And then they see their partner as jealous and stingy and rigid, not realizing they're creating that problem.

Elizabeth - Right. It's such a downward spiral from there.

Dr. Tatkin - Yes.

Elizabeth - Yeah.

Dr. Tatkin - This is how we work. Any other thing is a fantasy.

Elizabeth - Yeah. Okay. The choice to sign on to partnership and truly to attachment with somebody is massive. And so much of the suffering that I see around relationships is I'm in and I don't know if I should get out or I'm contemplating going all the way in and I don't know. Is this the person? Are we aligned? You know, do we go for this or not? How would you guide people to navigate that question of in or out?

Dr. Tatkin - Well, first of all, if this is the beginning of a relationship, keep in mind that in the beginning during courtship, we're actually on endogenous drugs.

Elizabeth - We're high all the time. Yeah.

Dr Tatkin - We're high. And our judgment is completely caput, which is why we have our social network to vet for us. always been done that way. You ask your friends, what do we look like together? Do you like the way I am? Do I see myself with this person? Do you like this person? Young and old, male, female, everybody, you want their feedback. This is how it's always been done. So that's a checks and balances for you. The question about whether I'm in or out shouldn't be anything other than, is this person playing fair? Are they a good faith actor? Because if they're not, that's not somebody I can be in the foxhole with. Remember, our lives depend on each other and I could go down the line and prove that when we're together in this kind of situation, unless you have a different arrangement. So a lot of this is not a luxury, it's a necessity. If you are thinking differently than I am, if you want something different, again, that's a deal breaker. We either have to sell each other and get each other on board completely, or we can't do it, just can't. So that's one. Two, if you're with a bad faith actor, somebody who doesn't, somebody who doesn't hold, keep to agreements, but be careful because in my experience, most people who don't keep agreements, the fault lies in the agreement process. Most people are very poor at making proper agreements. You cannot, you have to do it formally. You have to do it in a way that's rigorous to be convinced that you're making this agreement because you want this selfishly for yourself. I want this selfishly for myself. It can never be you're doing it for me or I'm doing it to escape a problem. That will never work. We have to drink the Kool-Aid and convince I'm adopting this principle, this value, this guard rail because I believe in myself. That's what I want to be. That's what I think is right. That's what I think is good. Otherwise, I'm not going to come through when I don't feel like it. So secure functioning is basically a set of principles based on a purpose or set of purpose, right? Not emotion. That we do because we both believe it's the best thing we could do or the right thing we could do, even though it'll be the hardest to do. That's a good life. That's growing up.

Elizabeth - Oh, that's a good closing line there. It's not about does this person make me happy? Do we have chemistry? Are we compatible? Are we both signed on to creating a good life? Go ahead.

Dr. Tatkin - My wife and I live this. So obviously we have to, otherwise we're phonies. It's hard. I'm as stubborn and selfish as anybody else. I'm a pain in the ass. But we do this and I can tell you the love I have for my partner is earned. It is not the same that I had when we were in junior high and high school because I had a crush on her. It is totally and completely earned every day, our respect for each other, our admiration for each other every day. That's because of what we do based on discipline, based on what we understand. It is hard to do, but I got to tell you, it is so worth it. And it's going to make me want to cry. It is worth it. It's worth every bit of the effort because those are feelings that sustain. They're not just passing like weather, waiting for it to, oh, I fell in love with you again, which won't happen unless you build in behaviors, principles, guardrails, things that you're going to do every day, not because you feel like it, but because you know it's going to be rewarding and increase your lifestyle and increase your happiness. That's what I want for people to learn.

Elizabeth - What could go wrong indeed? Well, thank you for making this your life's work. Thank you for all you've written about it. If folks are looking to get a copy of the book, we always recommend your local independent bookstore. CIIS has a partner bookstore that's Marcus Books in Oakland. Thank you so much, Stan. Thank you to everyone.

Dr. Tatkin - You're lovely to interact with. You just are, and you have a great smile.

Elizabeth - Oh, thank you. You're kind and it's really, really a pleasure to hear from your work of many years. So thank you to everyone and good night.

Dr. Tatkin - Good night