Attachment in Adolescence

Adolescence is a time of distance from the family of origin and identification with a peer group. So what are the perils and benefits of attachment during this developmental period? https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/mental-health/teen-attachment-disorder/   Transcript you're listening to psych with mike for more episodes or to connect with the show with comments ideas or to be a 0:06 guest go to www.cyclicmike.com follow the show on twitter at psych with 0:13 mike or like the facebook page with mike now here's psych with mike 0:19 [Music] welcome into the psych with mike library this is dr michael mahon i am here with 0:24 mr brett newcomb hello i have too many pens well you know freud has an explanation 0:29 for that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar that's what they say but sometimes not huh 0:36 how are you today i'm good so anything uh new and exciting going on in your life 0:41 not a thing yeah life is just bland is that well bland or just 0:48 stable good yeah yeah yeah so not blank life is good yeah life is good and you're wearing a pink shirt today for 0:54 anybody who is watching you on the youtubes i've always liked the color pink do you yeah 0:59 you don't feel uh conscientious in a pink shirt 1:05 no yeah well i always feel conscientious uh conspicuous is it oh well well can't 1:11 you i mean yeah conspicuous yes or or uh 1:17 uh what would what would you call it if you were were worried about what other people thought not conscientious 1:22 well yeah okay anyway it doesn't matter all right so uh good segue though 1:29 yes because we we're going to talk about um 1:34 attachment i would say that's because i'm a professional exactly uh you know 1:41 that the foundation of what i believe in 1:46 psychotherapy is emotional regulation i believe that that emotional regulation 1:52 is the result of how you are how you internalize the external objects 1:58 so you're the quality of the relationship with the primary caregiver when the child is young 2:05 and we talk a lot about how childhood trauma and this emotional regulation 2:12 developmental process can cause issues when the child is developing one 2:19 of the things that we've never talked about and i found an article about it and then i thought oh yeah we definitely should talk about this 2:25 is how does this affect the developmental process during adolescence 2:30 and i know that you were talking about this morning that 2:36 when you were young you felt like that 2:42 the movers and shakers of the peer group that 2:48 you were associated with didn't really give you a lot of positive 2:53 feedback no uh if that's what you heard i didn't say it clearly okay 2:59 i grew up in a large suburban high school yeah when i got to high school and adolescence 3:06 that was very cast organized i grew up in a southern town where 3:12 your social standing could be measured by how far away from the railroad tracks you lived the closer that you lived to 3:19 the railroad tracks the poorer and less socially acceptable your family was 3:24 but when they put us in high school they lumped us all together so people had to have identifiers we had groups that we 3:30 belong to we had letterman jackets for band and for athletics and debate team 3:36 and and what have you to find little sub categories and clicks and so on 3:42 i was acutely aware of how all that played out when i was in high school because i read all the time 3:48 and i had a curiosity about how does this work and what i was telling you is that by 3:55 definition i was relegated to the lower socioeconomic 4:00 community because of where i lived what my father did for a living how much money we had those kind of things 4:07 but intellectually i was put in accelerated classes so i was mixed in with 4:13 kids from the upper social spectrum who who tended to get put in those accelerated classes 4:21 and i was commenting that it used to frustrate the heck out of me because sometimes i would tell a joke 4:27 that i thought was funny and they would all sneer about how low class i was and 4:32 how horrible it was that i told that joke and it wasn't couth and you know nobody would laugh and 4:37 everybody act like they smelled something bad and then later over the course of the next day or two i would hear various 4:44 ones of those individuals tell that joke and have it laughed at as if it was 4:49 hysterical because they were telling it within their own social subgroup 4:55 so there was no cross-boundary there that had to be acknowledged but you 5:01 have said many times that you didn't feel as though the quality of the emotional 5:07 relationship that you had with your primary caregivers growing up was positive 5:12 yeah and did you feel as though that impacted you 5:17 during adolescence when you were in junior high school or high school i don't know that i thought about 5:25 it that until years later uh when i was in junior high in high school 5:31 what i and that's probably fair i don't know that anybody does that that anybody i 5:36 mean i don't i was obviously not consciously aware of the quality of the 5:41 relationship that i had with my primary caregivers and the effect that that had in high school i know that during high 5:48 school i felt profoundly like 5:54 the things that i knew from my family of origin didn't make any sense 6:00 in the context of things that i was learning in high school so i grew up 6:06 in a violent alcoholic family one of the rules of the alcoholic family is you never talk 6:12 outside of home about home you don't talk about what happened at home last 6:18 night you don't talk about the way your father behaves or your mother behaves or any of that stuff you just don't say anything about it 6:25 so because i read all the time i learned i remember vividly in the third grade 6:33 that you could read and go away somewhere and so i could read a story 6:40 about something in ancient history or something in another country and transport myself to that place and 6:47 be caught up in that book and not be in the environment that i was in so i read 6:53 voraciously most nights i read a book in overnight just read all night 6:59 a lot of nights and uh would try to incorporate within my personality 7:05 presentation traits uh that i read in the books that the hero had 7:12 uh dialect dialogue information whatever 7:17 so i consciously created an identity a public persona for 7:25 being at school that was different from the person that i was at home 7:30 so do you do you know 7:35 did you know then have you thought about it in retrospect and do 7:41 you know now how you were able to come to that that realization for yourself where you 7:47 actually would read the books and then select specific personality traits 7:54 i think that's pretty unusual i don't know i only have my own experience right well 8:00 what i know is there was a a boy that went to it's almost like you re-parented yourself by reading the 8:06 books yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that's pretty unique i learned it from somebody else 8:13 there was a boy in the third grade that was bullied by everybody including myself 8:20 trying to fit in trying to socialize with that group of aggressive nine-year-old boys 8:27 and i noticed this kid would go out at recess and climb to the top of the jungle gym we had an old-fashioned 8:32 jungle gym in the playground and sit up there at recess and read a book and he would be out of reach of 8:38 everybody most of the boys would go off and play ball or tag or what have you and the girls would go off in little 8:44 groups and do whatever they did i kept watching him and so one day i asked him i said what are you doing and 8:49 he said i'm reading and i said why and he said because i'm not here 8:55 so i thought oh that's interesting and so then i got a couple books and read them and 9:00 started to realize i didn't have to be there either i could do it at home i mean my father could be in a drunken rage and breaking furniture and knocking 9:07 people around i could sit in my bedroom and read a book and not be afraid so so the article that i sent 9:16 is actually a science-based article and it talks about the attachment with the primary caregiver 9:24 the quality of that attachment and that's you know all goes into john bolby and mary ainsworth's 9:30 attachment theory so you have secure you have the ambivalent and then the resistant attachments and then the 9:37 disorganized we don't really look at disorganized much because that's pretty pathologic so the insecure attachments 9:44 are the ambivalent and then the resistant and then how that plays out during 9:50 adolescence but we know now that these attachments and specifically trauma 9:58 has a real biological impact on the development 10:04 of the brain physiological development and yet i think you and i both would say 10:11 that our histories with our families of origin were difficult traumatic 10:17 and yet i think we turned out pretty good so 10:22 clearly there are ways that you can compensate for that but then there are 10:28 some people who really struggle with that and then they get to adolescence and i just i i just weep 10:36 for the individuals that were like you and me that didn't find 10:43 some way of being able to transcend that so my father was married to 10:49 married five different times and in the course of my early childhood 10:56 regularly i mean when i was nine years old i came home and they'd all moved away yeah i mean the house was empty i 11:01 mean you tell that story and and and i know you to be a person who doesn't 11:07 tend towards a hyperbole no that's an absolute literal story i know and and and i just think of a nine-year-old 11:14 coming home from school and the house being empty and not knowing where in the world everybody went yeah i 11:21 thought we've been robbed it's just that's that's i i don't even know how to wrap my head around that well so but 11:26 that wasn't the point of i don't know what to say um 11:32 i want to say that i don't know who can't identify especially in infancy 11:38 who was the object in object relations theory 11:44 who provided the consistent nurturing presence in my life what i do know is that as i grew up 11:52 there were teachers and scout masters and coaches who 11:59 played significant periods of support 12:04 that gave me positive reinforcement and a sense of security about capacity yeah 12:10 about intelligence about performance about courage whatever and the books that i read 12:18 gave me an understanding for how to manipulate the environment at 12:24 home and differently manipulate the environment in school so that i felt more safe 12:32 and more capable of moving through 12:38 the social hierarchy one of my absolute expectations in high school because of 12:46 where i lived and the circumstances of small southern town was that i would get a college education 12:52 to be able to get a job that would pay me enough money to live in a different social custom level 12:59 uh so that's what i did i mean i knew i had to otherwise my my destiny uh was the 13:05 script that was written for me by generations of my family none of whom had ever gone to school right and and no one in my family ever 13:12 went to school and i and and i hear very profoundly what you're saying about there were teachers there were coaches 13:19 there were other persons adult persons in the environment that provided you with an example that 13:26 you could use in place of that external object you know i i 13:31 really felt like i was was bumbling through you know grade school and junior high 13:38 school and then uh you know went to high school and started playing football mostly because 13:45 i was trying to get my dad's attention yeah but every year that i played and i 13:50 tell people all the time the only thing that stopped me from being able to 13:55 play professional football is a general basic lack of coordination 14:01 i was i am not what you would consider an athlete but i 14:07 played every year and i worked hard and every year that i played football at the 14:12 end of the year i got the most improved player award which is what you give to 14:18 the guy right who who is not going to get it but and i was willing to do anything that a 14:24 coach asked me and and they and i won these awards and i really genuinely 14:31 attribute that to profoundly changing my conceptualization 14:37 of myself because i wasn't getting that anywhere else and i don't know what would have 14:43 happened to me if i hadn't done that so i i'm thinking in particular and it's just it's a good 14:50 time to have this conversation because a lot of conversations out right now about teachers yeah and the role that teachers 14:55 play in society i had several teachers in high school in particular 15:02 that reached out to me and said you have these abilities you have to learn how to 15:07 navigate it so that you can get something out of it one of whom was the school librarian 15:14 and i became a volunteer library assistant and became the president of the arkansas junior librarians 15:21 association through her support and auspices which means nothing 15:26 to anybody now but it meant a lot to me then mm-hmm uh 50 years after i graduated my high 15:32 school i went to a high school reunion first time i'd gone back 50 years later so i'm having dinner with 15:37 some friends and we were talking about school and i said well mrs carpenter elaine carpenter mrs carpenter was such 15:43 a significant person in my life i wish i had been able to tell her that and somebody said well you still can't i 15:49 said what do you mean i thought she was dead no she's not dead so i called her mm-hmm and i said i want 15:55 to tell you you steered my life into the survival lane 16:01 and you helped me become a teacher and you have helped me reach other kids and 16:06 i want you to know that 50 years after you worked with me your lessons are still echoing into generations of kids 16:13 you've never met five years later i heard from one of her 16:18 sons she had died and he said i just want to let you know my mother 16:23 uh became senile to the end of her life toward the end of her life there were very few memories that she could hold 16:30 and she held the memory of your phone call wow and it she repeated it to me every day 16:36 the last few weeks of her life about how important that phone call was and what it meant to her 16:42 that you had called her and you told her she was that seminal in your life yeah 16:47 and that's what i want to say is if you have a teacher who has touched 16:53 your life who has reached you at whatever level of education let them know 16:58 tell them because they do an incredible service to all of us and 17:04 they need more respect so let's take our break and when we come back i'm going to tell you my story all right 17:10 oh because i was your teacher yes [Laughter] hey everybody dr michael mahon here from 17:16 site with mike and i couldn't be more excited to talk to you about athletic greens which is a new sponsor we have 17:22 here on the show i started taking athletic greens watching some youtube videos and doing my own 17:29 research i wanted to add something to my daily workout program to give me some energy and to support gut health and 17:37 that was the one thing that kept coming up again and again with athletic greens is the guy who started the company 17:43 did a bunch of research because he was having some gut health issues that he couldn't get any resolution for he 17:50 developed athletic greens and it's just exploded from there so it's 75 17:56 superfoods vitamins minerals probiotics whole food sources that's all in one 18:02 daily scoop you put it in eight or twelve ounces of water you shake it up and you drink it the taste is very very 18:09 drinkable i actually enjoy it and i have been using it and my energy 18:15 levels have just been through the roof i really like athletic greens because of 18:20 some of the sustainability things that they do so they buy carbon credits and 18:26 you know to help protect the rain forest which is something that i really like but if you order athletic greens in your 18:34 subscription you're going to also get a year's supply of their vitamin d 18:39 supplementation and five free travel packs and that vitamin d is so important 18:45 during those winter months when we're not getting enough sunlight we've talked about how that decreases your mood and 18:53 increases depression and that can be a real deal changer so you go to 18:58 athleticgreens.com emerging that's athleticgreens.com 19:04 e-m-e-r-g-i-n-g that's the psych with mic promo and 19:10 you're going to get that additional vitamin d support for a year and five 19:15 free travel packs so take control of your own health today and as always if 19:21 it's friday it's psych with mike okay we're back so you know 19:27 uh i hadn't originally thought about this in the context of the current 19:34 societal uh zeitgeist but you're you're absolutely right this is a great time to 19:40 and this wasn't why i had originally thought about this topic but you but this is a great great segue or great 19:47 avenue to go down you know my son is a teacher my son is a teacher in the 19:53 school that you started your teaching career yeah which is amazing to me 19:58 but uh so i i have a great and respect for teachers and i i don't know why 20:05 while you were telling this story this came to me i do not remember i remember the name of 20:12 the all the names of every football coach i ever had i do not remember the name of a single teacher save two 20:20 when i was living in granite city illinois going to washington elementary school 20:25 which doesn't exist anymore there were two teachers there that i actually remember mr dixon and mr 20:32 swabota i know these are real people because downstairs in my workshop i actually 20:40 have a ruler that has swaboda written on the back of 20:46 it that was a ruler that he gave me when i was in fourth or fifth grade and 20:52 the reason why these names stay with me is because we were having a 20:59 discussion in a class about 21:04 origins and mr dixon had who taught social studies was talking 21:11 about you know origins and he was asking kids in the class 21:16 what is your family origin and he got to me and i 21:22 said i've known jim beam i said you know i don't think i have an origin and he said 21:29 your last name is mahan and i said yeah he said that's irish and that was the first 21:35 time that anybody had ever given me any kind of a compass 21:40 to be able to think about in terms of who i was 21:47 and and and that changed my foundational perception of 21:52 myself finally i could say oh my family comes from ireland i'd never known that no one in my family ever 21:59 talked about such things yeah so then mr swabota taught math 22:05 but i would go to summer school every year not because i had to i made great grades 22:11 but because i didn't have anything else to do so back if i walked to school every day 22:17 which is what we did back then they would let me go to school and so over the summer i would just walk 22:24 to school because i didn't have anything else to do and i would hang out there and in mr swabo's class we didn't have 22:30 air conditioning and so we would open all of the windows and turn on these gigantic fans and sit on 22:39 the floor and turn out all of the lights and during summer school mr swabota 22:45 would read to us the hardy boys and nancy drew mysteries 22:51 and i would go every day just to be able to go 22:56 and sit on the floor and have him read to us that's one of the more important things that parents can do yeah 23:03 and and my kids will tell you to this day that there was not a single day that 23:10 went by in either one of their lives that they can remember from the time that they were born until they started 23:16 school when i did not read to them that's really important and i was i i 23:24 these memories that that that i i hadn't thought about these things until you were telling me this and you're 23:30 absolutely right those were seminal things that's the impact of teachers and 23:35 so whatever people think about teachers right now in our society and i can't even imagine a more difficult time to be 23:42 a teacher and i think about this with my son every day i mean if if somebody walked into a school that my 23:49 son were teaching at with a gun i i don't know what i would do well it's not that's not the only issue 23:56 you also have the issues about he's a social science teacher does he use critical race theory uh what does he 24:01 teach about the transgendered and other sexual orientations or realities what does he 24:07 teach about what's going on in our society because there's rage in the community about how what 24:13 should be taught and how it should be taught and how pathetic teachers are and how they're all on some kind of liberal 24:19 agenda and change the world and destroy christianity and so on i i think it's a 24:25 horrible time to be a teacher but i would also say thank god for the teachers absolutely 24:31 who were seminal in my life i mean yeah i i don't even know 24:37 and thank god for the opportunity to tell elaine carpenter what yeah it meant to me well i was just thinking you know i 24:42 i don't think i could find these gentlemen i i may try and and see if i can 24:48 can can discover uh uh but you know just the the fact that this is 24:55 all coming back to me is making me recognize that you are absolutely right 25:02 in those fam when those family of origins are not good where are you getting somewhere to go 25:08 yeah and and thank god that you and i had teachers in 25:14 our lives let's also make the point coaches our teachers yeah and if you had coaches who encouraged you and got more 25:21 out of you than you would normally give that needs to be acknowledged and validated yeah yeah yeah yeah mr 25:27 jennings and mr robbie do that my coaches were debate coaches yes i know because you're so much more intellectual 25:33 than i am uh more verbally verbally astute i think yeah yeah and you know what but 25:40 i mean we're obviously i'm making light of that and i shouldn't because there's no question that choir debate 25:49 those kinds of pursuits are just as legitimate as playing football 25:56 or soccer or baseball amen yeah but uh 26:02 okay so i i teach college i 26:08 i call myself a professor well the college calls me a professor um i don't think of myself as a teacher i 26:15 don't feel did you feel like that teaching college was the same as teaching high school 26:24 teaching is teaching the content 26:29 is what you present but what you do is make connections with your students 26:35 and open windows for them maybe i feel like it's different because i feel like by 26:41 the time they get to me in college most of that 26:47 formulative development has already taken place i don't feel like i'm probably making the 26:53 same kind of impact because 26:59 if you're the second third or fourth grade you have a very limited range of access 27:05 to world experiences the older you get if you're in the 10th 11th and 12th grade and that's same 27:10 thing with doing counseling with adolescents they can find other 27:16 reference points to pay attention to and other things to invest themselves in than you and your opinion of them and by 27:23 the time they're in graduate school that's even a broader challenge yeah so 27:29 you have the opportunity you present your material you're committed to knowing what you know and you're offering that to the people 27:35 that say i want to know what you know but it's still the dance of relationship 27:40 and the effort to open windows in their mind 27:45 but i think that both of us then are saying that 27:52 these individuals who are spending time with our children 27:58 in these classrooms from first grade until high school 28:04 are the people who have the ability to potentially correct 28:10 damage that may be being done to those individuals in their families of origin yes yeah absolutely and that any teacher 28:18 who might be hearing this and and hopefully this will be disseminated broadly and other and lots of teachers 28:24 will hear it any teacher that's hearing this do not take that for granted don't 28:30 undersell the potential impact of that because you have two people who had horrible family 28:36 of origin stories who are sitting here saying that we attribute our ability to 28:43 have transcended that to the teachers that we knew in our lives yeah 28:49 and and that's i i just can't imagine something that is more profound than 28:55 that i wish more people saw it that way so 29:02 do you think that that's what caused you to want to be a teacher absolutely oh okay 29:09 i don't think i ever knew that yeah and not that one no no yeah yeah yeah two or three other 29:15 teachers did the debate coach but i'm saying teacher you had a much more 29:22 profound understanding that these teachers had given you something that you didn't get 29:28 from your family of origin then i did until i was much older 29:34 i'll have to accept your analysis there well but i'm saying because it drove you to want to be a teacher absolutely yeah 29:40 and and i'll tell you i love teaching high school as much the day i quit teaching high school 20 29:46 years down the road as i did the day i started yeah but i don't think i would teach high school today yeah 29:52 yeah it's changed too much it's changed too much and and uh it's just amazing to me 29:58 there's too many agendas too many uh righteously indignant people and people 30:05 managing headphones hedge funds are just making out like 30:10 robber barons and we can't pay teachers a living wage that's unbelievable it's you know we we 30:17 our culture doesn't value it no we've we need to have a come to jesus meeting 30:22 about what we think the priorities are in life but that's not 30:27 a topic for this show for today all right hopefully uh people enjoyed that and if you are a teacher and you 30:36 have a perspective that you would like to share with us we would certainly be open to that you can get us 30:42 psych with mike.com as always the music that appears in psych with mike is written and performed by mr benjamin the 30:49 clue we would love it if you would go on to the apple podcast find psych with 30:54 mike and rate us leave a review but most importantly please go to the youtubes if 30:59 you haven't already done so and subscribe to the show that is super super beneficial for us and as always if 31:07 it's friday it's psych with mike