00:00:00 Stan
We’re more predetermined than we would like to think. We’re constantly pushed around by memory, by experience, by our own narratives that we create. By our heritage, by nature, repeats itself. So we’re going back generations and generations. Then genetics, it is chaos theory. There are all these things that are directing our behavior that we don’t really know, but most of it’s happening when below our awareness and without our permission.

00:00:29 Leila
Which leads to a lot of fights.

00:00:31 Stan
Which leads to a lot of stupid things. Right? We’re incredibly brilliant in so many ways, what we can do with our minds. And we’re incredibly stupid much of the time, just bumbling around automatically being reflexive and memory, based sometimes 99% of our day. And so we’re making errors continually with communication, with perception, with memory, it’s terrible. We fight over these three things, unnecessarily, because we have to be right, but none of those things are correct. We’re mostly misunderstanding each other most of the time. All of this is about, you know, the three legged race moving together or we don’t move. That is how teams are played. That is how this is played.

00:01:20 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma Podcast. Stories of transformation and healing through compassionate inquiry. Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m Rosemary Davies -Janes and in this new episode of our relating series. I am delighted to welcome both my CI colleague and co host, Leila Bahri-Lucas, and our guest, Dr. Stan Tatkin. Now, in previous episodes in this series, we’ve explored Compulsive Sexuality and Polyamory. And today we will delve into a relating option that many of our listeners will be much more familiar with, monogamy and marriage. Stan, welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast and thank you so much for joining us.

00:02:16 Stan
Thank you for having me.

00:02:18 Rosemary
It’s our pleasure. I’d like to introduce you by sharing some highlights from your bio, which is included in full in the show notes. Stan, you’re a clinician, an author, a researcher. You are the developer of… do we say P.A.C.T. or PACT?

00:02:33 Stan
PACT is fine.

00:02:35 Rosemary
PACT, okay. And the co-founder of the PACT Institute, you were an assistant clinical professor at UCLA at David Geffen School of Medicine, and you maintain a private practice in Southern California and you lead PACT programs both in the US and internationally. And you’re the author of eight books, I think?

Stan: 
About that.

Rosemary:
I counted them, and all of those books are listed in the show notes, and we’ll be talking about some of those later. So, Stan, what would you like our listeners to know about you that’s not included in your bio. Who are you?

00:03:08 Stan
Oh, I was a musician. I grew up in a show business family, so I recorded a lot. I was a drummer until I was about 26, and then I quit music.

00:03:17 Rosemary
That’s an unusual story. Normally musicians don’t quit music. So is it. Is there no little rhythm that stayed with you?

00:03:24 Stan
I got to do a lot of things. I feel very fortunate. And I burned out early, so because I started very young and a lot of events were going on at the time that caused me to get out. And then I wandered around a bit and started to do acting and writing and directing. And then I went back into music, shortly, and then into this field and never looked back.

00:03:49 Rosemary
Wonderful story. Thank you for sharing. Now I’d like to introduce my co host and Compassionate Inquiry colleague, Laila Bahri-Lucas. And Laila is a Certified Compassionate Inquiry Practitioner and a Relational Life Therapy Counselor. Leila supports couples through difficult moments. She has a specialty in infertility, blended families, and the many challenges of family building. She brings CI depth into the couple space together with the full relational framework that she trained in through Terry Real’s RLT. Lala, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:04:24 Leila
Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here with you, Rosemary, and with Stan.

00:04:28 Rosemary
Leila, I understand you’ve been following Stan’s work for some time. Can you share a little bit of that history?

00:04:34 Leila
I think it was in 2012 that I read your book Wired for Love, and I recently rediscovered it on my bookshelf, opened it up, and realized that I had underlined every page in a different color. I think at the time when I read it, it was like… like a light bulb. Wow. I could completely basically resonate with everything that you said. One of the reasons I was interested in co hosting today is, because I feel that so many people feel alone in their relationship struggles. And Stan, you have this way of normalizing how hard relationships can be, reminding people they’re not defective, that basically that we’re just human. And in my own work with couples, I see how comforting that is. So joining this conversation today is really meaningful to me. Thank you.

00:05:29 Stan
Thank you. It’s in the second edition, by the way. I was able to go back and update a lot. So you’ll probably hear some of that today.

00:05:39 Rosemary
That’s good to know because I, when I was researching, I saw the first edition was 2012 and the second edition’s just last year, 2024. So does that mean Laila needs to go buy a new set of highlighters?

00:05:49 Stan
Or just listen to it. It’s me reading the book, so.

00:05:52 Rosemary
Oh, even better. Even better.

00:05:54 Leila
I like that.

00:05:55 Rosemary
Yeah. In addition to all of the wonderful people we have here, this is going to be a very interesting episode as it’s scheduled to release on December 25th. So I have a feeling it will be a true gift to all of our listeners who struggle with monogamy at times. And I’ve been there, and I know the struggle. And Laila and Stan, you must both see this playing out with the couples that you work with.

00:06:19 Stan
Yes, absolutely. Monogamy is not, we’re not wired exactly to be monogamous, anything but. But it’s a choice, right? It’s a decision that two people, or more, make. But there better be a good reason for making that choice, because when you make a choice, you boost the things that you are not going to do. And you better have a good reason, a personal, personal value, a personal stake in it having nothing to do with the other person. A lot of people have a hard time defending their choices if they have to do it without using the other person.

00:06:57 Rosemary
Yes, very true. Very true. And at this time of year, as we come into the holidays, that adds more pressure. Would you like to speak to that a little bit? How people experiencing that pressure, family pressure on their marriage, can get through the holidays with more joy, more of the joy that we’re looking for.

00:07:15 Stan
What I really recommend couples always do is pepper. We use pepper to mean Predict, Plan, Prepare and Revise or Repair as needed. In other words, you’re going to point to having a great holiday together. And now you predict what could possibly interfere with that, what could go wrong, and you plan by taking everything that could go wrong, first with the two of you off the table. If this happens, we do this, if that happens, we do that. And then you now think about other people. Who else could ruin our time? How do we deal with them without harming them? So we have a plan going in and we prepare just before walking in the door. If everybody did this, they would have a better time with pretty much everything.

00:08:03 Rosemary
Yeah, that sounds like a great plan. So thank you. And Leila, would you like to comment on that? Because you’re face to face with these people going through these struggles as well.

00:08:13 Leila
Yeah, I very much like what you said, Stan, about a plan. Not all of us have time to plan, but yeah, the thing that comes to mind when you say this, Stan, is around. What if things don’t go to plan? I think you mentioned repair.

00:08:30 Stan
Yeah. If you or I make a mistake, we’re ready to repair it immediately.

00:08:34 Leila
If I may add another question onto that, what does real repair look like to you, Stan? Because many people understand repair as in, saying sorry or, just moving on. But what does real repair look like?

00:08:50 Stan
Real repair looks like falling on your sword, without saying anything other than that. I am really sorry, that was not cool, I shouldn’t have done that. And you have every reason to be upset with me. Again, I’m very sorry. So that’s – full stop. No, let me explain. Or I’m sorry you saw it that way, or I wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t done this, or I think you took it the wrong way, or anything like that. I feel terrible if I hurt you. People usually don’t care when they’re hurt what the person who did it feels like. Right. And it’s a discipline of doing that correctly without adding anything else that would take it away. The second most important thing is if it repeats, that the two people, the two person job makes sure that it cannot happen again with either partner. Right. Neither of us should be able to do that again. That second part again requires thinking in terms of prevention, learning, and you said it, most people don’t have the time, won’t use the time to predict, plan and prepare, which is available to all of us. And it does change everything when you do it. And also, people don’t learn from their mistakes by putting something in that would prevent either of them from making those mistakes, or to do harm again. That’s like a post mortem that we do at the hospital. Right? And only couples don’t really do this. Only couples don’t do a lot of the things that other unions in a free and fair voluntary alliance would never do, go into it without a shared purpose, a shared sense of, ‘Who are we?’, and ‘Why are we?’, and, ‘Where are we going?’ Most couples don’t do that. And so this is one of the reasons why love relationships don’t last. And if they do, they’re not happy, or safe and secure because of those two reasons.

00:10:48 Rosemary
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So basically you’re saying married couples tend to treat their marriage very casually. They’re flying by the seat of their pants, basically, and just acting and reacting. And it’s funny because as humans we overthink a lot of things, but it seems like we underthink our relationships in a marriage.

00:11:07 Stan
Well, if you think about it, relationship doesn’t exist in the physical world. It’s an invention, like most things that we’ve created. An invention in our minds, and then we manifest it. So a love relationship has to be designed by the two designers. These are design issues, but they don’t design their relationship. They don’t define their role. Do we share power and authority and responsibility? Or is it a general and a soldier? Is it a driver and a passenger? Or are we both drivers? And then, what comes at the very top? Is it the relationship? Is it our kids? Is it ourselves? Is it our careers? God? What? But they have to agree. It can be anything they want since they’re the architects, they just have to do that declaratively, not tacitly. And they have to agree and be honest about it. Otherwise it won’t work.

00:11:58 Rosemary
Yeah, thank you for that. I found a couple of quotes. One is yours, one is from Gabor Maté. And they’re different words, but I think they say the same thing. I’d like to share those with you. Gabor says in his book Scattered Minds, “Couples choose each other with an unerring instinct for finding the very person who will exactly match their own level of unconscious anxieties and mirror their own dysfunctions and who will trigger for them all their unresolved emotional pain.”

00:12:28 Stan
Pretty fancy.

00:12:29 Rosemary
Yeah. It’s an observation. But what you offered is a little bit more than just an observation. There’s hope attached to it. There’s, there are next steps. Because what you said is, and I love this. “When we recite our relationship vows, perhaps we should say, I take you as my pain in the rear with all your history and baggage, and I take responsibility for all prior injustices you endured at the hands of those I never knew, because you are now in my care.” And that’s from, Wired for Love, your book that we were talking about earlier. You also said, and I love this, too, “There’s no perfect partner. What makes a partner right for you is a shared willingness to create a secure relationship. If you’re both willing to go all in together, you are perfect for each other.” So I wonder if you’d like to comment.

00:13:17 Stan
Perfectly imperfect. Good enough is perfect, and we’re all disappointing. We… disappointment is in our heads. Right. We all have minds that compare and contrast, which is a feature in hunting and gathering. A bug in happiness. And we all have minds that are always aware of what we don’t have and what is missing. That’s a feature, again, for survival. It’s a bug when it comes to happiness. And so our minds are really the big problem here, in the human condition. The human condition writ large. We’re very good. Very nice when we’re happy, you may not want to be around us when we’re unhappy. We are by nature warlike creatures that are selfish and self centered, moody and fickle, opportunistic, xenophobic. We otheri-ze very quickly, are easily influenced by groups and exploited. What could go wrong? I usually say if you’re a human primate, you’re an asshole somewhere, and by somebody’s account. And so the problem is that we don’t plan for our devils in marriage. And devils we are, if we’re under enough stress and distress. And that’s not because we’re bad. It’s because we have an always on survival instinct that is constantly sweeping for threat, and love relationships will provide that, if nothing else, by accident. And then we start to build memory, threat memory, which then begins to accrue if people don’t watch them.

00:14:50 Leila
I was thinking about when couples are under a lot of pressure and Stan, in my case, I work with a lot of couples going through infertility. 

Stan:
Oh, that’s hard

Leila:
Parenting, blending families, you name it. They often start misreading each other’s tone or intention. So what actually helps partners slow down and see each other more clearly in those moments?

00:15:14 Stan
Two different questions.

00:15:15 Leila
Yes.

00:15:16 Stan
Tone. Prosity. One of the reasons that tone gets on our nerves eventually is because the auditory cortex is proximal to the amygdala. And so it’s the first trigger of trauma, first trigger of alarm. And voices, sounds are going to do that. However, it’s an illusion. These are one of the things we start to understand about our minds that many times there are false flags. And in fact, most of the time. And we’re misled by fear, we’re misled by again, survival instinct. And so it must be overridden. Basically. there are lots we have to override if we know what’s good for us. Otherwise we’ll follow every impulse and again, we’ll be threatening if we do that. So yeah, it’s common. But you can build in guardrails. I give you permission. Next time I start to talk in an elevated voice or use that tone, I give you permission to say “stop it” and I’ll know exactly what you mean, and I pledge now I will cooperate immediately and I’ll change my tongue. How’s that? That will work because I can’t know when I’m doing it, but you can. And that would then train me out of it, if that is going to happen at all. But at least it, it prevents me from doing that, because it offends your sensibilities, which Is secure functioning and I have to take that seriously. One person’s yell is another person’s whisper. We’re all different animals. I have to work with the animal I chose. You’re different from me.

00:16:43 Leila
It sounds almost like the biggest threat for us humans, is almost the otherness.

00:16:50 Stan
Oh yeah, we otherize like that. As Yuval Harari says, anyone who’s too familiar to ignore but too different to live with, we want to get rid of. That could be our kid, that could be our partner, that could be our neighbor. We do that easily. In social media you see it all over the place. There’s otherizing constantly. There’s co-opting psychological, psychiatric, medical terms to use as a cudgel to beat men and women up. It’s really nasty. And so that’s what we do. And that’s one of the things we always have to build in, either to our culture norms, to our laws, to keep us from, from doing what we tend to do. And that is we tend to be racist, we tend to be otherizing, we tend to be all of that. And that’s everybody, me included. Anything other than that is denial. That’s how we’ve always been and so that’s one of the things we have to really watch out for. Part of our devils. Hard to do but necessary to hold onto the relationships we covet.

00:17:55 Rosemary
I’m going to jump in here quickly and just share that my daughter got married on Friday, just this past Friday.

00:18:03 Stan
Mazel tov.

00:18:04 Rosemary
Thank you! I know what she’s getting. She and my son in law, they’re going to get some of your books as Christmas gifts because I think that’s really important. And the one I saw when I was researching was, Baby Bomb.

00:18:16 Stan
Baby Bomb is for the first baby.

00:18:19 Rosemary
Yeah, I experienced that when I had my first baby and I thought I was prepared because I was a stepmom for gosh, nine years before I got pregnant with a child of our own. I thought, okay, I’ve been a practice mom, I know how to do this. But what I didn’t account for was the impact having a baby on my husband at the time who had been my number one priority up until then and he couldn’t handle being number two.

00:18:45 Stan
From twos to threes. When we go from dyads to triads, there’s often trouble in the reatict system. So yeah, he gets, he’s no longer number one, which is…. But he is if he understands his role. And his role is to support you who is supporting the baby because your attention has to be on them.

00:19:03 Rosemary
Exactly. Yes. So it. I. That’s another one that. I’m going to get that one for myself because it would be nice to have an explanation, like very much after the fact. But it’s always. And I know what happened from my other work, but I’d love to. I’d love to read your words on it.

00:19:18 Stan
Yeah, it’s natural and it’s common and it’s something to actually predict and prepare for.

00:19:24 Rosemary
Yeah, it’s. It was a struggle. It was just. It was an ongoing struggle. And we split up by the time our child was four because it’s just…. It was just every day, just. It was like ongoing, and it wouldn’t quit. And I didn’t have the tools you and Laila have just been discussing, of knowing how to handle this. I was just. It just… It was just exhausting. And I’m wondering, Laila, does this ever happen when you work with a couple who are on the infertility journey, they finally get pregnant, the baby is born, and then after all that stress and anxiety of the infertility route, the arrival of the baby damages the dyad of the couple?

00:20:06 Leila
Yes, of course. It happens actually, more often than you think, because the journey of infertility doesn’t necessarily end for the couple when the baby arrives. There is a lot that we carry forward, from however many years pre-baby. So I always say that however we come into the journey, into the infertility journey as a couple, steady, solid or volatile, is how we are going to move through that journey. And the arrival of the baby, as we all know, it’s a lot of stress. It’s a lot of joy, but it’s also a lot of stress on the couple. So it doesn’t automatically make everything all of a sudden warm and cozy. If anything, there’s a lot of residue for many couples from that kind of journey. And my husband and I, we luckily were able to go through couples therapy during most of the years during our infertility journey, which really helped us tremendously, literally to survive it, and then to thrive. But couples therapy was the way to go for us

00:21:09 Stan
By the way, that’s another example where deliberate design comes in. Because if the relationship, if they haven’t set up shop for baby right, they’re going to run into trouble. And again, why don’t we do this? Why do we not do what’s necessary to prevent troubles that we can actually predict will happen? Because of energy conservation. Energy conservation is a biological law that tells us to do the least amount necessary. Right?

00:21:39 Leila
We’re kind of winging it.

00:21:42 Stan
Who has time for this? I gotta go to work. And yet it is crazy when you think about what happens when people don’t design it, and the load bearing increases. There are natural couples that are very good at this until load bearing increases and then the wheels come off because they’re unprepared. They have no structure, they have no agreements. They have no ways of protecting each other from each other. And again, in no other world where people are interdependent would they ever do that. Only couples. And again, this is energy conservation. This is worldwide. This is species wide.  Literally do the least amount necessary. Which is why after we automate each other in love relationships, we drop our formalities and act as if we’re relatives, family. We’re not. We stop courting. Why do it? I got the gig?  We stop being present and attentive because we’re onto new novelty. There’s nothing new here. We stop looking at the other person’s face. I don’t know if you know this. We store an image of our partner’s face for weeks and months without really looking at it. And so all of these things by nature, that are directing us to go to sleep, to do the least amount, is what will lead to taking for granted, being unhappy, not really being present and losing that loving feeling. Because behavior lags to tell the feelings. And that’s why there are these forces that are there all the time that interfere with our relationships that we have to know about.

00:23:17 Rosemary
Yeah, I’d be very interested to speak about the PACT training. Oh, I know. Layla has a story. Layla. Actually, why don’t you go ahead and share your story with Stan.

00:23:27 Leila
When I was looking at different trainings, years ago, couples therapy trainings, I briefly looked at the Gotham training. There was relational life therapy. There was the. I think it’s called the developmental model by Ellen.

00:23:40 Stan
That’s Ellen, one of our actually closest friends. Ellen and Pete. Yeah.

00:23:45 Leila

And then there was also PACT, and I think yours. Maybe that’s changed now, Stan, but I think yours is only open to licensed and pre licensed therapists.

00:23:58 Stan
That’s for accreditation.

00:24:00 Leila
Oh, that’s for accreditation. Because Rosemary and I, we were talking about the fact that a lot of modalities, IFS also Compassion Inquiry. There’s a few others.

00:24:10 Rosemary
Yeah. Thomas Hübl’s work, Timeless Wisdom Training. It seems that there’s a trend that trainings that were previously only open to clinicians are now opening to counselors and coaches and just spreading the word, like, giving people the tools at different levels to what were available before. And I was wondering if PACT is open to those types of people as well.

00:24:35 Stan
We started that way.

00:24:37 Leila
Oh, I didn’t know that.

00:24:38 Stan
Yeah, yeah, it started that way even though it was aimed at mental health professionals. So we want to do a program for coaches, for mediators, for educators. But we’re a small unit, we’re a small organization and we lack the people power which we’re now building as we grow our faculty. And that’s always been the problem, is resources. We just don’t have the funds to get these programs quickly off the ground. We have to go step by step. That’s just the nature of doing training programs. And things are not like they used to be. So it’s not for not wanting to do this. It is actually because we need people to be able to make those programs work. So yeah, they’re in the works.

00:25:23 Rosemary
Yeah, that’s really good news. Stan, who will benefit most from PACT training? What is it that you offer that will appeal to certain types of people?

00:25:33 Stan
It’s science based. It’s neurobiology, attachment theory. But also we focus a lot on the autonomic nervous system, which is the big issue that’s sub-psychological. That’s happening at lightning speed. In fact, most everything that we do live is happening at lightning speed. And there’s no way to know what we’re doing at any given time because it’s faster than thought. These are subcortical processes that are driving us every day. We’re more predetermined than we would like to think. We’re constantly pushed around by memory, by experience, by our own narratives that we, that we, create by our heritage, by nature repeats itself. So we’re going back generations and generations. Then genetics is chaos theory, right? There are all these things that are directing our behavior that we don’t really know, but most of it’s happening below our awareness and without our permission.And yeah…

00:26:29 Leila
Which leads to a lot of fights.

00:26:32 Stan
Which leads to a lot of stupid things. Right? We’re incredibly brilliant in so many ways. What we can do with our minds. And we’re incredibly stupid much of the time. Just bumbling around, automatically being reflexive and memory based. 99% of… Sometimes 99% of the day. And so we’re making errors continually with communication, with perception, with memory is terrible. We fight over these three things unnecessarily because we have to be right. But none of those things are correct. We’re mostly misunderstanding each other most of the time. That’s a fact

00:27:08 Rosemary
You may have one of these, but you’re just inspiring the image in my brain of a pie-chart and there’s this 1% teeny little slice that is where the other, the partner, gets to influence us. But otherwise we’re driven by our ancestral patterning, our memories, our nervous system, our fears. Like all of this…

00:27:32 Stan

Particularly under stress. Particularly under stress. We do better when we’re relaxed and feeling safe and secure, which is important because that is co-regulation. So my job with you, if you’re my partner, is I have to watch you. If you start to go south, if you start to become, by my view, the least bit unsafe in that moment, I no longer can influence you. That’s a fact. Right? With even just a little bit of cortical steroids in the brain, I don’t care about your interest. Same with you. And that’s how easy it is for us to get into fight or flight. This is a very, again, a very acute system that operates without our permission. But we have to know it exists. Otherwise we’re going to make… We’re going to do terrible things without intending to.

00:28:23 Rosemary

Yeah. May I reflect a quote from Wired for Love that addresses just this point just to reinforce it. You said,  “In the context of couples, research in this area suggests how we as partners can manage one another’s highs and lows. We don’t have to remain at the mercy of each other’s runaway moods and feelings. Rather, as competent managers of our partners, we can become expert at moving, shifting, motivating, influencing, soothing and inspiring one another.”

00:28:53 Stan
That’s a two person system.

00:28:54 Rosemary
Yeah. And that’s so hopeful. It’s so exciting, really.

00:28:59 Stan
It’s hopeful. But here’s the rub. The only way to really do this is to… I have to take care of myself and you at the same time, or you will confuse me as an adversary. And that is true. That’s hard to maintain. That’s hard to do, especially under stress for the reasons I said. And so if we’re under stress, we will tend to revert to a one person system of I, me, my and you. And there are all sorts of traps here that we will all fall into, me included, that we have to know about. Otherwise again, we ruin our relationships. This is harder than people would like it to be, because we’re talking about doing the right thing when it’s the hardest thing to do. That’s what we’re leveling up to. Right? That means we’re using a different executive that can put off gratification for something better, that can tolerate pain without acting it out, that can grieve losses and not be angry all the time. And that can tolerate differences. You’re not me. You are not me, therefore I’m going to be disappointed. Right. Because there are places we cannot meet. That’s always going to be that way. It’s impossible to be otherwise. And so we’re talking about growing up and being an adult and dealing with the hard, cold facts of life. Disappointments, frustration, differences. People are a pain in the ass. So am I. Right? But that’s not the problem. The problem is threat. That if we’re threatening, that’s going to be a game ender. That’s the problem. You can be annoying, but you can’t be threatening. And it’s very easy to be perceived as a threat.

00:30:42 Rosemary
Yeah. And that could be as simple as physical size. Men tend to be larger than women.

00:30:46 Stan
That’s the thing with helplessness. Helplessness will always lead to aggression, which is why we have to be experts on each other. So I don’t feel helpless. So I can handle you no matter what. There’s nothing you could do that I wouldn’t know what to do without using a stick or a whip. That’s competence. But that’s… I have to know. That’s my job. And that’s part of survival, by the way.

00:31:11 Rosemary
Yeah. And fawning only goes so far.

00:31:14 Stan
Say again?

00:31:15 Rosemary
Fawning only goes so far.

00:31:17 Stan
Fawning. All right. No. I have to know what to do. When you’re in the grips of something.

00:31:21 Rosemary
Yeah. You can’t just try to appease. You have to. You need more tools than that. And most of us don’t have the tools. So I’m very excited by what you’re sharing..

00:31:31 Leila
Yeah. This reminds me of something you have said many times, Stan, which is that human relationships can survive fights, but they cannot survive. I think you said the loss of safety and security.

00:31:44 Stan
If it sustains.

00:31:45 Leila
If it sustains.

00:31:46 Stan
Yes.

00:31:47 Leila
So couples need to protect each other.

00:31:50 Stan
Yes. At the very bottom, safety and security has to be locked down by design. Otherwise, without that, we can enjoy anything. And it’s going to erode any kind of good feeling because of safety first. And so first and foremost, we have to be a survival unit. It’s you and me against the world. We are radically protective of each other because we can, by agreement, and the alternative would not be good.

00:32:18 Leila
Right. And I believe you also said that fighting is actually necessary.

00:32:21 Stan
Not fighting per se, but disagreeing. Conflict. Fighting connotes people being dysregulated. Right? We want to avoid that by design, by predicting and planning for it. That you can eliminate systematically reason for fighting. Right. Coming with policies and principles, duh, duh. But it doesn’t occur to us, oh, we argue about how to load the dishwasher and then somebody asks, do you have a policy on it? No. Anyway, I digress. All these things that can solve tactically, these issues people, don’t think of because they are pointed in a different direction. They’re not oriented towards teams. This is teamwork. This is a three legged race. This is… everything I do has to be by previous agreement with you and permission to enforce or you will fight me, in a free and fair union. That’s true. Not a dictatorship.

00:33:14 Leila
Love demands democracy.

00:33:16 Stan
It demands equality and shared power and authority. Otherwise, watch out, keep your eyes open at night, because people will not do well under those conditions.

00:33:27 Leila
I was thinking, I actually have a lovely husband who sometimes appears threatening to me because he doesn’t fight or he doesn’t like to argue. Does that make sense, for me…?

00:33:37 Stan
Conflict, conflict avoidant, conflict avoidance, very threatening.

00:33:41 Leila
So I can at times perceive that as threatening.

00:33:44 Stan
It is, it is. It’s a good strategy. It’s learned in infancy, in childhood, that’s a good strategy. Then it’s terrible for adults because it is threatening. You can’t engage, can’t solve problems, you can’t know what’s going on, you can’t do anything. And the person who’s doing it is doing it automatically, because that’s how they adapted to neglect. Usually it’s neglect that breeds things like conflict avoidance. Early childhood When you study babies, you see this starting right away. All the adaptation to attachment values or lack of attachment values, early, as you see it changed right now before they can remember this, people can. And then of course it repeats because it’s the same person’s caregiving. So these things are quite embedded in the body. They’re reflexive, but they’re changeable. They are plastic.

00:34:35 Leila
Yeah, I poke, I poke, I poke.

00:34:37 Stan
Which is why secure functioning is necessary. Because without secure functioning, which is simply a group of social contracts between people, there isn’t enough safety and security for development to move forward. So you cannot become more secure in those relationships because the system starts to react to itself. And so they’re locked in, compelled to react the same way that they expect the other person or the other person expects them to react. And therein lies, again, these loops that human beings get into.

00:35:10 Leila
That makes a lot of sense. You just mentioned secure functioning. And that brings me to the question of how does that work with non monogamy? Is there a specific way of going about secure functioning when you’re exploring polyamory?

00:35:23 Stan
Consensual, non monogamy. The consensual… So the way this works out is we’re herd animals that tend to pair bond, but not all of us do, right? Polyamory, groups, cultures, they do not necessarily do that, but they still have to design that relationship in terms of governance. Who’s at the top, who decides. Free flow of information has got to be up there at the top of the principles. Otherwise that takes that relationship or those relationships down. So they still have to know what they’re doing, they have to know who’s in charge, hopefully all of them. Everything is fully transparent and people are doing things with permission ahead of time, and they have enforceable rules, otherwise they won’t work. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a tiny system like a dyadic system, or a larger system, such as a group or a country for that matter. It’s harder and harder with larger groups, which is why you absolutely need to have shared purpose and vision all the time. Otherwise people will start to pick at each other and they will fight. And so only a shared purpose, we’re working on, this is what we’re doing. And this is because we want to win, we want to make money, we want to survive, we want to succeed. Whatever it is, that flattens differences and that’s what keeps us in line and focused. Whether it’s a rock and roll band or it’s a dance troupe or it’s an Olympic team, or it’s the cop car partners or the military or a business. Always it’s that way. Otherwise people will either leave because there’s nothing in it for them, or they will feel maltreated, because the balance of power is wrong, or they’re not going to get what they want. And so shared purpose and shared vision is always a necessity with human beings when they’re together. Otherwise they fragment. What’s happening in our country currently, without a stated purpose and shared vision for all people, we’ll begin to tribalize. And that’s when civil war happens, right? It’s a failure in leadership, of having a message that all people can buy into. Of course, the message here in the United States, well meaning is actually false, right? All people are not equal according to the real thing, not as stated, that we do otherize and there are people who are tortured, literally biting casts, outsiders talking about people of color, women, the greatest longtime group of subordinates to white males. This has been going on forever. And so as long as that exists in reality, there will be problems, because in truth, there is not equality there. That’s why we’re starting with a small unit. There can be and should be. Larger groups. It gets harder and harder. However, changing the present and the future is what… is actually all we can do. What’s done is done. But to learn from the past and to change the future is the key here. And that’s what people do not do. That’s what we can do and we don’t do it. That’s the only thing you can do with memory, that terrible memory, is to change the present and the future. And then in terms of neural pathways, those neural pathways get relegated dirt roads. They’re still there, but they’re no longer being animated by cues, threat cues. That’s the only thing we can do. And yet that is the most important thing with couples, with all of us. What are we going to do next?

00:39:01 Rosemary
Yeah. And it seems that with the chaos that you referenced in our societies right now, and it’s happening all over the world, there’s chaos everywhere. It seems that the invitation to create the structure within a coupledom within a familydom is like… When you mentioned that earlier, my body had a response to that. My whole somatic reflection was like, move toward… I want that. So if I may ask a very practical question, you’ve got eight or nine books out there. If a couple is listening, they want to look into creating this agreement. They want to create some structure, they want to put some rules in place for their marriage. Which of your books would you recommend that they turn to? Which… are there any that spell it out clearly?

00:39:48 Stan
All of them. I’d say the last book, In Each Other’s Care is almost solely about that. It’s a collection of common couple complaints we’ve seen in my clinic, but it’s basically using the same formula in terms of what went wrong and what to do about it. And so that book really does… It just doesn’t have the science in it in terms of attachment and arousal regulation. It assumes people have read those books.

00:40:14 Rosemary
Great. They’re all in the show notes. So I just invite anybody listening, go on Amazon, check out the descriptions and pick which speaks to you. 

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00:41:11 Stan
Can I say one thing? There… There is no way that we’re going to change the world. It’s never going to happen. What we can do is change our world and that is our family, our community, our friends. That is within our control. At least to the degree that it could be. Right? Because it is a process. But that is where we can be safe. That is where we can be with like minded people. As long as it’s not otherizing again, that’s what we can control. And if we can, we should.

00:41:45 Rosemary
Yeah. So if we use a romantic metaphor, Rose can redesign the raft to make room for Jack so that he doesn’t have to sacrifice himself. They can be saved together..

00:41:57 Stan
Damn! Oh!

00:42:00 Rosemary
Yeah. That always seemed wrong. Very romantic, but wrong.

00:42:03 Stan
Can you just get in there with him? It’s not going to sink. And if it does, we’ll go from there.

00:42:10 Rosemary
Yeah. Then it’s shared. Exactly. Laila, do you have more questions for Stan?

00:42:17 Leila
Yeah, I just wanted to quickly ask you, Stan, about the relationship between self regulation and co-regulation. In Compassion Inquiry, we talk a lot about self regulation. In RLT as well, we each take accountability and we are each responsible for our own triggers. You talk a lot about co-regulation.

00:42:36 Stan
I’m not in agreement with that.

00:42:37 Leila
That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you. How do you see that relationship between self regulation and co-regulation?

00:42:43 Stan
We by nature co-regulate in close distances, right? Eye to eye, face to face and skin to skin. It starts early, starts in infancy. When we do that and we’re operating in that way, we’re regulating each other’s systems. Why? Because we’re wired for that. I can see what’s going on in you before you know it. You can see what’s going on in me, before I know it. Therefore, it is much more efficient for me to know how to regulate, down regulate, upregulate you and you me, than it is for me to work on myself in real time because that’s not as fast or efficient, and my eyes off the ball. So you could be only so good at self regulation, but in our relationship you’re fine, because, maybe I’m the master regulator. Who cares? It works systemically. Right?

00:43:33 Leila
And so how does that work, Stan? In today’s world, when I can speak for myself and for myself in arguments with my husband, which often can start off via WhatsApp. The world of technology.

00:43:44 Stan
Yes.

00:43:45 Leila
I’m sure you’ve seen that a lot in the couples you work with. A lot of arguments start off…

00:43:49 Stan
Yeah.

00:43:49 Leila
Where you don’t actually see each other or whilst driving the car.

00:43:54 Stan
I did a TED talk on this. Never get into emotional conversations when driving because you will fight. It’s a setup. We’re legally blind here. And the amygdala fires more often a face at a glance aside. And plus one of us is using resources and it can’t work. It never could. So pull over. Anyway. Go on.

00:44:13 Leila
No, I was just thinking about technology and how we often have discussions over text or WhatsApp where we can’t actually see each other.

00:44:20 Stan
We’re visual animals. We error correct through the visual field. Our error rate goes up without the visual field in close up. Right. Not distance. We can’t see as well at a distance. We have to be relatively close to read each other’s pupils and face, which we do automatically. We don’t have to think about it unless we have a problem in that area. And so Co-regulation is a natural process of attunement. Misattune. Attunement. Misattunement. Attunement. Right. It’s happening very quickly without our noticing. Only when we stay misattune for longer than a few beats do we start to get threatened. And usually we’re good at recovering together. So this is a two person job. Right? I can’t handle my triggers. When I’m triggered, you’re in the best position to return me to safety. If I could, I would. I can’t. Therefore you’re the one who’s up. And if you can’t do it and you’re triggered, then it’s my turn. So at any point, either of us could have done something to shift that trajectory, and didn’t. Better luck next time because that you can actually practice, you can actually predict and plan for the next time. And so all of this is doable. You just have to know what you’re up against and what must be done. But it requires effort and time. Sorry.

00:45:40 Leila
I was just thinking, what if both are really triggered, which happens often at the same time.

00:45:47 Stan
There’s a plan for that too.

00:45:48 Leila
I knew it.

00:45:49 Stan
And that’s best done in session, where we get people into those situations. All we have to do is mildly activate them. Because it’s a memory state issue. Right? They have to be in the state of mind that they’ll be in when they go live, in order to remember it. This is not very hard to do, and we have them practice it over and over again. We even call it the difficult partner exercise. You’re going to make your partner as difficult as they can possibly be for you. And you’re going to practice, with my help, on how you’re going to deal with them, to protect yourself without harming them at the same time. That can be done. It has to be thought ahead. You can’t wait to go live. When you go live, you’re going to do exactly what you always do, just like performance. If they didn’t practice for the live situation on stage, they’re not going to do well. They have to practice that over and over, again because they’re going to be under conditions that they are not usually under, and so they have to be replicated in some way. Same with us. Same with us. When we go live, we’re animals, we go right back to what we automatically do. That’s why you have to think ahead. Predict what could go wrong, based on what has, and then what could go wrong based on what hasn’t but could. We do that all. Tracey [Dr. Tracey Boldemann-Tatkin, PhD] and I do that all the time. And I guarantee you that by design, our relationship is not only safe and secure at all times, most every now and then slips with repair. And we’re happy in the relationship, by design. And we do things, we predict, plan and prepare before we walk in any room. And you can be sure that our time is preserved. Other people’s mileage may vary, but we basically handle everything together as a team, and that’s what makes us powerful. We work together. Two can do much more than one, but only if they collaborate and cooperate with each other. Otherwise they’re not better, they’re going to die sooner, because of interpersonal stress. So all of this is about… three legged race moving together or we don’t move. That is how teams are played, that is how this is played. And not everyone wants to do that. And I say good luck to them.

00:47:58 Rosemary
That’s a beautiful metaphor. A three legged race. Anybody who’s tried to run one and you’re not in sync with your partner, boom, you’re down with that first, second step.

00:48:07 Stan
Yeah. It’s not a solo sport, it’s a team sport.

00:48:10 Rosemary
And we plan as humans. We plan vacations, we plan family gatherings, we plan so many things. We have the skills.

00:48:19 Stan
It’s so amazing that we don’t do it. And it changes everything. Folks, just remember, PPPRR, big P, big two P’s, Big R. Right? Predict what could go wrong. Plan for it. Come up with a war room strategy. Right. If, then, if something happens, we could have predicted. We have a plan for that, too. All right, we’re going to meet in the bathroom. Nobody knows. Right? And prepare just before you walk in. Never rely on memory. Memory sucks. Remember, when we walk in that room, stick by me. If this happens, if I get cornered by drunk Uncle Bob, you know, to come get me. And we’re going to work together. Nobody needs to know. Nobody needs to know. It’s theater. But we’re going to do this. And we’re awesome. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve done this with our daughter and managed to control the seating arrangement at a Thanksgiving dinner to avoid a person we adore, but not when they’re drunk. And we managed to do it without anyone knowing.

00:49:18 Rosemary
I’m just feeling such a pull towards that. The collaboration, the camaraderie.

00:49:21 Stan
It’s fun.

00:49:22 Rosemary
It is. And it’s like you guys know what’s going on and you’ve got a plan and nobody else knows. It’s so cool.

00:49:28 Leila
It’s like the couple bubble. Is that what you’re talking about, Stan, when you talk about the couple bubble?

00:49:32 Stan
The couple bubble is the safety and security system and the co regulation system. That we’re responsible to each other first and foremost. That, if we are not happy and we’re not safe and secure, nothing else, nobody else will fare well. Our kids, definitely not. Our work, our health, definitely not. Other people we’re around. They’d rather be with people that get along with. Everything and everyone depends on us working well together. And if you frame it that way, then you can see yourselves as something greater. We too, both of us are in charge of everyone and everything because everyone and everything is affected by our state of mind and how well we work together, period. That gives us a shared purpose.

00:50:15 Rosemary
Definitely. We’re coming to the end of our time together, sadly. This has been so much fun.

00:50:20 Stan
What else is there to talk about?

00:50:21 Rosemary
But is that… you’re actually giving me hope. It was funny. I was doing some official business and I was asked my status and I said divorced. And they said only once. And it’s like, once was enough. Not like, how many do you need to repeat messing up in a marriage? Once is plenty for me.

00:50:38 Stan
Zsa Zsa Gabour. 12-13. Mickey Rooney. 12-13.

00:50:42 Rosemary
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But next time I want to get it right. So you’ve inspired me. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you or that Laila hasn’t asked you that you’d like to put out there for our audience?

00:50:54 Stan
Just to say that both Laila and I are really in the field of prevention. That’s why I went into this because I studied babies and I wanted to actually work with mother infant parents and they wouldn’t come in. And the next best thing is working with the couple because change the couple, you change the kids, you change the trajectory. So we’re really into prevention but also we are changing that small world because a couple work should be training, should be coaching, should be prevention work because all we’ve got is protecting their future, even though they’re mired in the past. The past isn’t where it’s at. Only the future matters.

00:51:32 Rosemary
I think you’ve just given us the pearls of wisdom for our audience.

00:51:36 Stan
Now I have to live by them. Oh God.

00:51:38 Rosemary
We typically ask at this point in the podcast if there are a few words you’d like to leave for people to contemplate. You’ve shared so much already today. I’m just wondering, is there anything that you’d like to wrap up with?

00:51:50 Stan
Yeah. Science calms me. So does history. Fact. Most of us are not doing anything purposely. And most of what happens in relationship isn’t personal. It feels personal. It isn’t. And I could prove that just by using video playback. And so cut each other a break here. That we are being pushed around by nature and by our own nature. And we’re mostly misunderstanding each other. And that’s all of us, me included. And so design the thing, build it. Do not just rest on your laurels. It’s crazy to do that. Crazy. You would never do anything like that in the other world, right? It matters to everyone, and especially the two of you, that from the ground up you build this thing and you constantly lock things down as you run across problems.

00:52:43 Rosemary
Very well said. Thank you. Leila Bahri-Lucas, thank you so much for being with us today. Dr. Stan Tatkin, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast.

00:52:54 Leila
Thank you so much.

00:52:56 Stan
Thank you.

00:53:03 Rosemary
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