Secure Relating: Holding Your Own in an Insecure World

Introduction

We invite you to join us on a transformative journey—a pilgrimage really—that will deepen security inside yourself and with your favorite (and least favorite) people.

At our core as human beings, the very foundation of our neural wiring causes us to crave love and belonging. From the moment we enter the world we seek connection—it’s our very first and most basic survival strategy. This innate drive continuously influences how we engage in relationships, build communities, and find meaning in our lives. We are most inspired toward our best self when we feel grounded and experience a deep sense of security inside ourselves and in the relationships around us. In fact, when we feel secure, we are compassionate, flexible, benevolent, and connected to the well-being of the collective—whether that’s the we in our primary relationships or the we in humanity.

It is also true that our core biology is designed to automatically switch into a focused self-protective mode when we feel threatened, and oh, do we feel threatened. Our nervous system is being stoked into alarm and we have a lot of reasons to feel shaky these days. This free-floating anxiety causes us to unconsciously armor up and lose access to the goodwill we mentioned above. Connection goes by the wayside when we are focused on defending ourselves or those we love.

Secure Relating is about stabilizing and protecting your most evolved and grounded sense of self, especially when we are being incited to regress to the most primitive parts of our nature. In the chapters ahead, you’ll learn to build and sustain a competence fueled by security that will benefit everyone: you of course, but also your kids, romantic partner(s), friends, family, colleagues and your community. You’ll discover strategies to help you better co-regulate (instead of co-dysregulate), communicate more effectively, and even respond to conflict with a modicum of grace.

To do this, you’ll need to discover more about your unconscious defensive patterns and ways to transform them into conscious strengths. However, this isn’t just a feel-good self-improvement guide meant for personal growth alone. As you’ll discover, Secure Relating is also a call for collective action. If each of us were to build our capacity to stay in our most secure state of mind, we could resist the seductive pull toward emotional cutoffs and malignant polarization that is being created inside us and around us.

This is urgent because if we allow ourselves to sink into chronic emotional activation, we fuel the problem rather than being an active part of the solution. Blame, cynical mistrust, and hopelessness are contagious. They corrode our interpersonal relationships and can be exceptionally destructive when unleashed on a larger scale. Our bodies aren’t wrong—chronic arguing or ongoing disconnection with those closest to us is painful and a cause for alarm. The horrors of war, environmental devastation, and racial violence should activate us; but staying in a chronic state of alarm doesn’t help. In fact, it diminishes our collective strength.

When we are unconsciously defensively activated, we lose access to discernment and nuance and are prone to jump into action, a quirk that gets intentionally used against us. It’s a familiar strategy in politics—igniting fear and mistrust surpasses evoking hope and inspiration in its effectiveness to galvanize us to pick sides, rally, and show up to vote. Marketers and media outlets also strategically employ the concept of scarcity and our own insecurity to seize our attention, move us to act, and thus bolster their financial gains. Add to that social media algorithms and relentless news cycles that narrow our worldview and amplify our differences, inflaming our mistrust and exaggerating our need for self-protection—a cycle that demands our ongoing vigilance and alarm.

From this insecure and defended state of mind, criticism evokes defensiveness, blame invites childlike counter-blame, and relational bitterness and resentment become accepted as normal. To cope, we may isolate, band together in collective hate, or mobilize against those others we are being directed to fear. This self-focused armored dance becomes a cycle reinforced by others stirred up and in the same boat, a toxic loop perpetuating itself.

Fortunately, this isn’t the whole story, and it’s definitely not where this story ends.

These destructive and sometimes paranoid behaviors flourish in an environment of scarcity and threat. However, lower that high sense of danger and you’ll begin to see something very different emerge. Mindful attention evokes connection, understanding invites intimacy, and care fosters warmth and generosity.

A secure state of mind enables you to care about, advocate for, and be generous with people close to you and those you’ll never meet. In this way, making the deliberate choice to prioritize secure functioning over myopic self-preservation is a powerful action that can disrupt, and even reverse, the unrelenting fear and pain that creates the defensive activation cycle we see spinning around us today.

Protecting our more secure state of mind and helping others do the same enable us to become a meaningful part in something greater than ourselves. This isn’t about being nice or settling for something less than you deserve; it’s quite the opposite. Secure relating is about gathering the full force of our understandable fury and collecting our wits to act effectively rather than adding fuel to the fire with impotent rage. From our more resourced mind we can better care for ourselves and hang on to others even if they are totally regressed and acting out from their own self-protective armor.

Think about it.

If the person you are fighting with shifts even slightly toward compassion and connection, it makes a subtle difference inside of us even if we don’t want it to. It’s a superpower we can cultivate. These tiny ripples of security contain ingredients to transform shaky relationships, and collectively, they can make a difference in this pained, insecure world.

Honing Your Superpower

The problem is, even when we know better, we don’t always do better. It takes honest and often uncomfortable self-examination, and you’ll need support to traverse the depths and learn to unstick yourself from these patterns. This is probably not your first rodeo—you’ve likely worked on these things before and even gotten better, but before long you drift back into more automated, unproductive, and sometimes destructive habits. It’s hard to hold your own when there are underlying forces inside you and around you holding you back.

This book is dedicated to unraveling why and when you lose access to your secure functioning, what your particular obstacles are, and how you can help the best parts of yourself stick around and stay in charge.

Modern Attachment

Truly understanding what motivates and discourages us will take more than a five-steps-to-change process. It’s a journey that requires honest self-examination and an understanding of how humans develop and navigate close relationships as adults. That is why we’ve incorporated decades of clinical experience and the most important findings from various relational science disciplines. Of these, attachment, the psychobiological foundation of one’s sense of self that impacts how we relate as adults, stands out as one of the most crucial strands of study and is among the most researched and influential psychological concepts to date.

It refers to a mostly unconscious evaluation of oneself and one’s faith in the world. People tend to think of attachment as a category and thus a static personality trait, but in reality, we are highly complex and contradictory creatures who defy simple labels and who learn and evolve based on cumulative and current relational conditions. In this book we focus on states of security and defensiveness, not just categories, and we emphasize how to cultivate that wiser and fiercely compassionate sense of self no matter your diagnosis or personal history.

In Secure Relating, we incorporate and update more than a half century of research on attachment with the more recent findings from studies that show how our minds work and impact one another (relational neuroscience). We bring in the important elements of historical context, class, and culture that differ from attachment but have similar biopsychosocial impacts, and ground the ideas on a base of intersubjective psychotherapy in a concept referred to as Modern Attachment. Finally, and most importantly, we translate all this complexity into an easy-to-understand framework designed for practical application in your life today.

High Investment, High Reward

We need insulation from the strong gravitational pull toward reactive anger, apathy, groupthink, shared mistrust, hopelessness, and the pervasive paranoia that has led to our current polarization and division. Secure relating starts with quieting the noise within you so you can engage in an honest reexamination of your assumptions about yourself, the stories you carry, and the policies you’ve adopted when it comes to dealing with other people. This practice will give you needed skills to hold on to your best self as you deal with your spirited child, angry partner, or your own reactions as you take in the latest distressing world news.

We will deliver the hows and whys, but ultimately, what you gain from this work will depend on the interpersonal risks you are willing to take. We are built to resist questioning our own story, and, by definition, we aren’t conscious of the unconscious forces that are mucking about in our sense of self and trust in others. We wish merely reading would bring about profound, lasting change on its own—we’ve tried! Actual experience and measured interpersonal risks create real change: high investment, high reward.

Why Us?

For more than three decades, we’ve studied what works in healing humans. As professional therapists, we’ve had the privilege of walking beside a variety of people on their highly individualized journeys toward authenticity: adults, adolescents, couples, thruples, families, peer groups, and decades of interpersonal process groups (these are therapy groups where members openly discuss their thoughts, feelings, and experiences—particularly as they relate to others in the group). A back-of-the-envelope good guess is that combined, we’ve clocked more than forty thousand hours of sitting with beautiful souls as they work deeply to emerge from real suffering and begin to make meaning of their time on this spinning planet. These experiences have filled us with hope.

Dr. Ann Kelley is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in relational work with individuals and couples, while Sue Marriott is a licensed clinical social worker, certified group psychotherapist, and a geeky enthusiast for group therapy. We are not bashful about saying that we love our clients and are enriched by these deeply intimate relationships.

Our passion for bridging the psychological sciences beyond the scope of our clinical practices led us to start our podcast, Therapist Uncensored, in 2015. The show’s success has surprised us—with more than eight million downloads in 270 countries, we’ve come to realize that many people are interested in the science of relationships and are especially eager for help using the most relevant findings in their daily lives. This platform has brought us into expansive and meaningful conversations with a range of highly respected scientists, clinicians, cultural leaders, and interdisciplinary experts in various fields. See appendix 1 for a list of just some of the leaders who have deeply informed our thinking, work, and lives and who have joined us for in-depth interviews on our podcast. We aim to bridge those unaware of these resources with the originators of the work, so these and many other interviews related to attachment, trauma, and relational neuroscience are freely available for readers wanting to nerd-out with a deeper dive at www.therapistuncensored.com.

To be sure, it’s with earned humility that we join you on this journey. We know the messy pitfalls of intimacy personally because besides being cohosts and coauthors, we are a married couple working together, living, loving, laughing, arguing, and raising a menagerie of kids, nieces, nephews, pets, and plants together. We know what works to bring back closeness in times of conflict, but that doesn’t mean the intellectual knowledge always saves us during challenging relational moments from reacting in embarrassing ways—just like the best of us.

To add important context: We are a same-sex married couple raising kids in a blended family with a rainbow of people that make up our full family, and, like so many who have come before us, we’ve been on the front lines in LBGTQ+ advocacy. However, as white, cisgender, middle-aged (and still sassy!) women who can easily blend into the straight majority (aka pass), we are aware we have built-in advantages and unearned privileges that shape our perspectives. We are dedicated to actively supporting and uplifting those whose skin color, body, or gender expression diverge from the social norm, and we commit to continuing to recognize and work to dismantle the oppressive beliefs and harmful attitudes we’ve absorbed and continue to benefit from. One of our aims within these pages and through our platform is to use our privileges to amplify the perspectives and voices of individuals who have historically been overlooked and underrepresented.

This pilgrimage toward building greater internal security can be unsettling, but it delivers. In therapy-speak it’s referred to as earning security. As witnesses of many who have tried and succeeded on their quest toward earning more relational security, we can attest—if you stick with it, you will change and grow, and it’s worth the effort! So, no matter your age or life experience, we assure you that it is possible to heal and change—starting right now.

The Science That Won’t Make Your Eyes Cross

When it comes to the science of relating, what we have is a digestion problem, not a supply problem. Researchers and clinicians are constantly advancing our understanding, but distilling these findings into something practical and accessible for ordinary life is challenging. It’s difficult to find resources that don’t oversimplify the beautiful complexities of attachment and human development or that aren’t meant for clinicians or researchers. Those conversations can make the information seem inaccessible or, at the very least, not all that helpful to the average person.

That’s where we come in.

We’ve spent years refining how to translate these rich resources. In this book, we are delivering what we think will be the most useful information in a way that we hope maintains the integrity of the science but can also be applied directly in everyday life and relationships.

The Plan

The book is divided into three sections that roughly mirror how real change happens, a process called the 3-R healing spiral of change: recognizing, reflecting, and rewiring.

Part I: The Power of Awareness

This is the brainy part of the book.

Besides learning about how our brains impact one another and catching up with contemporary attachment science, in this first section you’ll find a framework called the Modern Attachment–Regulation Spectrum (MARS for short) that integrates the most essential need-to-know components into visuals that are easy to understand. You’ll grasp how powerfully we’re impacted moment-to-moment by the implicit neural networks formed in our earliest years and how that does—and does not—play out in our adult relationships.

You’ll also meet a few lively characters who will help you realistically see how these dynamics play out in real life as we follow them through parts of their secure relating journey on the pages ahead. Finally, you’ll see how systems, not individuals, are responsible for creating inequity and insecurity and how culture and context impacts us on a biological level.

This takes you on the first portion of the healing spiral, Recognition, because well, sometimes . . . we just don’t.

Part II: Building Agency

Here we get practical and apply all that brainy material you learned in part I. This is where it gets more fun, and some of you may want to skip straight to this section for the more direct deliverables. We collect your lightbulb aha moments and look for patterns and reexamine stories about ourselves and other people. Reflection is the part of the healing spiral where you actively explore your own triggers and look for your part in stuck patterns of thinking or fighting.

Rather than resting in the certainty of our position, we engage in curiosity and exploration. This part is about kicking the tires and getting at what’s underneath. During this phase, you’re open to looking more deeply at your own assumptions and expectations and are secure enough so that you can question what you think you know.

Each chapter in this section goes more deeply into the gradations of coping trends we cover in part I. We look at how the different styles of defenses interact, and it’s where you’ll get more exploration of why you are the way you are and how best to build and hold on to your most secure functioning when others around you are not.

Part III: Creating Deep Change

Rewiring goes beyond just intellectual understanding or the lightbulbs of insight and is where significant and sustained change takes place. To rewire our nervous system (which we literally can do), it requires some interpersonal risks and new experiences, such as taking in the love we usually let bounce off, learning to actually listen and let someone influence us, or trusting ourselves to speak up.

Rewiring is ultimately experiential and somatic and requires a good dose of vulnerability. It is often the avoidance of the pain rather than the experience of it that blocks us from our most enlivened self, so we will push you a little to get out of your comfort zone because we assure you, the payoff can be nothing short of life-altering.

Each chapter in part III is a deep dive into healing. We start with healing as an individual, then move to healing interpersonally, and end with a chapter on rewiring toward a healthy community.

It’s Not Me, It’s My Amygdala!

We say on the podcast, It’s not me, it’s my amygdala. It’s a humorous one-liner referring to the part of our brain that causes us to lose our rational mind at times, but more importantly, it conveys a serious and valuable perspective shift. You aren’t intentionally choosing to act in ways that seem needy or push away your loved ones—it’s truly your brain doing its job. From a social or community perspective, you might try this with whatever group is driving you crazy right now: It’s not them, it’s their amygdalae. The solution for the amygdala is always the same: increasing felt safety.

This book continues in that direction, helping to de-shame human folly while lifting and challenging us to step out of the muck and into our full adult human functioning. It can be helpful to know you aren’t alone; there are many of us fighting to hold on (or quickly get back) to our secure selves no matter what rapids we hit as we go. This is a journey we take together.

Let’s do this!

Part I:

Recognition—The Power of Awareness

1

The Earning Security Journey

Imagine with us for a moment: You’re sitting on your couch engrossed in your screen when a slight movement on the wall to your right catches your attention. Your gaze instinctively shifts and falls on something you’ve never seen before—a strange, rather elegant insect. Its unusual shape captivates you, so you lean in closer for a better look. Its long, graceful antennae extend from its head and remind you of a butterfly, but its iridescent shell is more beetle-like, glistening with an array of captivating colors. You are mesmerized by this otherworldly creature and are struck that you’ve not encountered anything like it before. Then you remember your cat, who loves to stalk and capture bugs, so you consider catching this little guy to take it outside to protect it.

Your reverie is interrupted, however, as it lifts its head and fixes its large eyes on yours, causing a wave of uneasiness to wash over you. Its body twitches as those eyes remain fixed on you, intensifying the sensation that this encounter is taking an unnerving turn. Neither of you move; it’s as if you are suddenly in a stand-off.

In an unexpected burst of movement the insect takes action. It either jumps or flies—you can’t tell which—and quickly whirs by your ear, landing on a spot behind you.

Your startle was comical. Embarrassed by your cartoonish involuntary flinch, new thoughts flow through your mind—what if it sprays some crazy bug chemical at you, or jump-flies at your face again!

Your hand flies out and reflexively smacks the insect to the floor. You consider fetching that jar to take it outside, but the damn thing recovers quickly and begins to fast-crawl in your direction. You definitely don’t like this weird thing after all! Not only did it infiltrate your house, but what if it’s the first of many? What if it scurries under the couch and has a bunch of creepy babies? You cringe only slightly as you hear its carapace snap under your shoe.

This multilegged stranger went from being a fascinating creature you were enjoying and wanting to protect to an invader you squashed in just a matter of seconds. With the slightest (perceived) provocation, your underlying defense circuit hijacked your interest and reverie.

But you aren’t a bug hater; you were quite drawn to it. So how did you end up squashing the poor little guy, and what does that have to do with secure relating?

Protection and Connection Circuits

This, in a nutshell, is how two essential circuits within our nervous system influence our daily interactions and experiences. The first, the connection circuit, draws us toward exploration, bonding, and belonging. The second, the protection circuit, helps us recognize potential dangers and respond accordingly.

When you first encountered the bug, your connection circuit sparked to life, and curiosity popped forward, guiding you to a pleasant exploration of this alien being. You enjoyed a sense of excitement and wonder. However, it took only a bit of creepy eye contact and a twitch for the protection system to kick in. Then, when the bug started moving toward you, it felt like a full-blown problem. The alert signals in your body changed your perception of the creature dramatically. What was once a curious discovery became an invading threat, justifying its abrupt, brutal end.

These same reactions can happen in our everyday interactions with people (minus the brutal ending of course). Everything is smooth sailing in the connecting state of mind, but then something makes us uncomfortable, and it’s as if scary music turns on in the background. We see things differently and interpret events with squinty eyes as we erect a shield so as not to get hurt. However, all this happens outside of our awareness—we think we’re being totally rational, and the problem is out there—the bug—rather than within, which is shaped by our own interpretations and perceptions.

What Is Secure Relating?

Secure relating refers to a state of mind, a healthy and balanced way of connecting and interacting with yourself and others in relationships. It is not a description of personality; it is a verb describing a way of interacting with the world that comes from a grounded place of agency, connection, and self-awareness. In a secure state, your mind can hum along, enjoying its natural proclivity to be close, and your nervous system isn’t distracted, readying to defend against an incoming threat. Communication comes freely, and you are receptive to the needs of others.

When you are in a secure state of mind you don’t necessarily feel secure, but you are aware of your own internal activation and can be curious about it. At the same time, you are aware of others as separate and distinct from you, with their own insecurities and sense of self that is important but different than you. When in a secure state of mind, it feels calming to you and others and is physiologically a healthy place to hang out. However, it’s a destination you aim for and, when not there, paddle toward. It is not a place you find and just move into.

For those who enjoy lists, here are a few characteristics that describe when you are in that well-rounded, balanced secure state of mind:

Emotional Regulation: You are less likely to lose your mind when stressed and can generally express feelings and needs without being overwhelmed by intense emotions in yourself or others.

Autonomy: You can usually be close and connected to others without feeling trapped, and you are generally comfortable on your own.

Empathy and Compassion: You have general access to care and can express it—for both you and others. You don’t lose yourself to it and are likely able to take it in and value it when it comes your way.

Effective Communication: You are relatively transparent and say what you mean with care.

Trust and Reliability: You have confidence in others’ reliability and trustworthiness, and others find you safe to turn toward emotionally.

Adaptability: You can be flexible and open to compromise and problem-solving without feeling like or becoming a doormat.

Boundaries: You can generally set and hold them with respect for yourself and others.

Conflict: You are in touch with your ability to confront with care and accept feedback constructively.

We like to say that you are your right size. Rather than trying to shrink yourself to protect someone else’s ego or puff up and seem bigger than you really feel, secure relating is about being your right size—just your right size, nothing more and nothing less. When you are your right size, you can handle much of what comes your way or you can ask for help with it without your ego getting in the way. You can also shift comfortably from solitude to connection and back again.

That said, being in a secure state of mind does not mean always feeling secure. You still experience the difficult emotions that come with the slight from a friend or a slammed door from your teenager, but you can generally maintain your thinking and connections despite feeling unsettled. You can recognize that you are being reactive, slow down, and move to a more deliberate position to reflect and hear the other side.

Here’s a good one: in a secure state of mind you can embrace someone else’s idea and not feel diminished, and you can let people lend you a hand whether or not you actually need it. Generally, it’s the balance between thinking and feeling and being connected to yourself and others simultaneously that are hallmarks of a secure state of mind.

It’s easy to describe but, unfortunately, not so easy to maintain.

We tend to save our worst selves for our closest others. We can be stubbornly zipped up, disregard how we’re affecting others, ruminate on what others may think, shut down, feel overwhelmed, collapse, attack those we feel hurt us, and hate righteously. Even if we already have a healthy, nurturing, significant relationship, maintaining it at a secure base level is challenging because much of what goes wrong between two humans is driven from below conscious awareness. Our very human but highly problematic tendency to defend and blame operates deep inside the brain, causing us to double down on a common fatal flaw: a certainty, when we are defensively activated, that we are right and the other person is wrong.

Let’s say Sue is in a mood. What do you think Sue does if Ann gives her feedback that she’s being short and a bit dismissive—thank her for her accurate and keen insight? Very doubtful.

Like most of us, if Sue’s already in a dismissive mind-set, she probably isn’t especially open to unsolicited feedback at that moment; her protection circuit is running and is content to stay slightly defended. However, if she were in a more secure state of mind, Sue would likely be much more receptive to Ann’s pointing that she was acting moody. She’d be able to pause and perhaps consider what Ann said. She’d be capable of wondering, Maybe Ann’s on to something, good to know. Or maybe Ann is off base and instead, it’s more a signal that she needs something different from Sue. No skin off Sue’s back either way. Because she’s in a secure state of mind, she’s open to getting to the real issue: Ann wants or needs something different from her.

When you are functioning securely, complaints from your partner are much less threatening, the stakes are much lower, and you know you have the resources to manage whatever comes next. Importantly, relating from a secure place of connection creates safety, and makes communication more open and pleasant for everyone. And it changes us at the biological level, bathing important body systems in nutrients that help them function at their best.

Learning to operate from the possibilities of authentic connection and realistic hope (in other words, relating securely) rather than automatically engaging from a place of unconscious defensiveness (or relating insecurely) can create a powerful cascade of positive change. If Ann complains to Sue about something, and Sue genuinely catches it and responds with some modicum of skill, guess what happens to Ann? Even if she was riled up before, this type of kindness and feeling of being understood comforts her and takes the wind out of her sails. Just like negativity builds on itself, so does felt safety.

Even though it can bring out the best in others, secure relating is a state of mind that emerges inside you and doesn’t require anyone else to be different. Others can cooperate and relate in this flow with you—or not. The more practiced you are at gaining this grounded sense, the better you will be able to hold your own with increasing strength no matter the circus around you. While this can sound easy, grounding ourselves first takes awareness of our patterns in the connection and protection systems and how they are showing up in our everyday relationships.

Secure Relating Versus Secure Attachment

As you can see, secure relating is not a diagnosis or a set of techniques. It is not dependent on any childhood experience and is not the same thing as secure attachment. Attachment is a pivotal concept in human development that emphasizes the profound impact of close relationships throughout our lives—especially the caregiver-infant bond. Secure attachment is a category from attachment research associated with having a trusting relationship with early caregivers and patterns of trust in oneself and others in adulthood.

Secure relating goes beyond early attachment research categories. In fact, we don’t just fall neatly into one category in all relationships, we continue to evolve and develop throughout our lives. This is great news for us because anyone can relate securely, no matter their history, because secure relating is a state of mind that can be fostered and practiced. Yes, those fortunate enough to have a secure attachment history have an edge up on resilience, but no one lives there all the time—there are plenty of times they won’t be relating securely, either. And even the most relationally injured adults can access a secure state of mind; it’s a learnable skill and is accessible to everyone! This practice of developing a more consistent style of secure relating is often referred to as earning security.*

Rather than thinking, Sue is securely attached (she’s on that earning security bus and is working on it!), instead consider whether or not Sue is in a secure state of mind. Granted, that actual language is a little therapist-y, but the concept is face-saving and, frankly, more accurate. After all, people don’t identify exclusively as one thing or stay in only one state of mind—we are complicated. And this way, when we slip out of this grounded, wise state of being, it’s okay, we can learn how we fell off and get better at knowing how to get back there.

Hustling toward a secure state of mind is an ongoing process. It’s a forgiving dance that involves consciously scooting back to feelings of connection, safety, and trust once you notice that you’ve drifted into a more defensive stance. Sometimes things are too stirred up, and the path back to connection might seem intractable. When someone gives their side of a story, for instance, and they leave out essential details from your perspective, how do you let them just keep going? Surely it would feel better to jump in and give them the more accurate accounting of events so they can see how unnecessary their feelings of disappointment really are?

Secure relating includes recognizing that you’re feeling defensive, dealing with your own activation, and making room for others even when it is challenging. In this case, it would look like catching yourself before butting in to add your perspective–a master move! It might involve clarifying that you will share your perspective afterward so you can settle into listening, or recognizing you can’t listen right now and asking for some time to settle down before continuing the conversation. It’s flexible and imperfect, which is wonderful.

For each of us, this will look different because we all operate with unique neurology and physical and emotional abilities. Secure relating involves learning your own unique history and abilities and deepening your understanding of others’. For some, closeness with others is not the end-all for feeling safe, especially for many whose brains may function differently than the majority, such as those with autism or attention deficit disorder or severely traumatized individuals. People in marginalized communities have had their healthy adaptive patterns pathologized because they were different from the so-called neuro-normative, Western standard. And if your community is oppressed and unprotected, growing up vigilant is adaptive, not dysfunctional. So, context always matters.

Nevertheless, it is safe to say that a secure state of mind involves relating from a foundation rooted in biologically determined feelings of capability and trust in yourself and safe others.

You Can’t Do This Alone

Confidence is often overrated. Just because you feel confident doesn’t necessarily mean you are in a secure state of mind. In fact, overconfidence can blind us from self- and other awareness as our I know best thinking is comfortable but probably not as true as we’d like to think. When we