“Raising Securely Attached Kids” with Eli Harwood
What if the secret to more connected parenting isn’t about getting everything right — but about showing up enough to make things right when you don’t?
In this week’s episode, Rachael Clinton Chen talks with Eli Harwood, aka @attachmentnerd — licensed therapist, award-winning author, and one of Instagram’s most trusted voices on attachment and parenting.
They dive into how our own attachment stories shape the way we relate to our kids, why being “good enough” really is enough, and how creating space for repair and consistency beats striving for perfection every time.
With a blend of science, personal stories, and down-to-earth advice, Eli reminds us that secure attachment isn’t about flawless parenting — it’s about presence, patience, and showing up again and again.
Whether you’re navigating the younger years, parenting teens, or unpacking your own childhood experiences, this conversation offers hope, grounding, and a fresh perspective.
About Our Guest:
Eli Harwood is a licensed therapist, bestselling author, and highly sought-after educator who has more than 17 years of experience helping people process relational traumas and develop secure connections with their children. She is on a mission to help make the world a better place, one relationship at a time. In addition to her clinical work, Harwood also offers online courses and in-person retreats to help individuals better understand their attachment styles and build stronger bonds. She has also served as a faculty member at The Denver Family Institute and is the author of “Securely Attached.” Eli has three children, one husband, two cats, and an extraordinary number of plants.
Visit her at AttachmentNerd.com where you can listen into her podcast, join the Nerd Herd, or even book an attachment coach. You can also follow her on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook @attachmentnerd. And don’t forget to check out her books: Securely Attached: Transform Your Attachment Patterns into Loving, Lasting Romantic Relationships and Raising Securely Attached Kids: Using Connection-Focused Parenting to Create Confidence, Empathy & Resilience.
Episode Transcript:
Rachael: Good people with good bodies. We’ve talked a lot about attachment on the Allender Center Podcast, about the role it plays in our development and our healing. And in fact, attachment theory is core to our Narrative Focused Trauma Care methodology. Personally, I am swimming in thoughts about attachment as a stepmom and a mom of a toddler and in my marriage, in my friendships, certainly as I think about what it means to be healing in my family of origin. So today I am thrilled to be joined by Eli Harwood. You may know her as the Attachment Nerd on Instagram and Facebook. She’s a licensed therapist and award-winning author who lives in Colorado with her husband, Trevor and their three children. Eli has been nerding out on attachment research for the past two decades and is on a mission to help make the world a better place, one relationship at a time. Eli, I am just so thrilled to have you on the Allender Center Podcast. Your presence, your writing, and your resources, they’re just so accessible and empowering. You make secure attachment feel like a possibility and you look fabulous while you’re doing it, which also just brings me a lot of joy. So thank you for joining me.
Eli: Thank you so much. It’s so good to see you.
Rachael: Likewise. I don’t know if many people would know that we actually went to school together, graduate school, which is crazy because it actually was almost 20 years ago now, which I don’t like to think about. It makes me just feel really old. But yeah…
Eli: Another lifetime ago.
Rachael: Another lifetime ago. You now, to most people, would be known as the steward and host of all things Attachment Nerd. And I’m wondering if you could tell us about your journey into attachment theory and what drew you to making this something of your life’s work.
Eli: Yeah, I mean, I like to joke that I have come by this obsession naturally because my family system is made up of a lot of inherited insecure attachment patterns. It was actually when I was at the Seattle School that I took a human development class, and in that course they were laying out all the different attachment patterns and it was like this light bulb for me, like, oh my gosh, this is the thing. This is everything. And at that point in time, the conversation wasn’t really attachment focused. I think we were just becoming trauma focused in the field, but I felt so compelled to the information because it was such a part of my own self understanding of going, oh, this is why I have this experience in my close relationships that doesn’t really match up with some of the other ways that I relate in the world, but that really plays out in these contexts. And so I just started learning about it and it became my focus clinically, and it’s just what I’ve always been interested in. And I think Allender Center, the Seattle School, our interest is in our stories, specifically our relational stories. And so that just dove tails so perfectly with attachment research. And so I’ve spent the last almost 20 years doing that. And then a few years ago, in 2022, I just hit a point in my career where I felt, I don’t know, a heaviness. A heaviness of what it is to continue to work through the loss and the heartache and the impact that people experience in not having secure relationships with their caregivers growing up developmentally and then within marriages and sweetheart relationships, friendships. And I thought, I want to be a little bit on the prevention side of this. I’m a little weary. I’m just weary. And so I thought, well, maybe I’ll just start. I still, this memory of sitting in my kitchen, my husband’s there, I had twin 2-year-olds at the time, and I’m just looking on Instagram and I’m like, wonder if anyone who uses the name attachment nerd? It was just like, what came to mind? And I was like, Nope. I was like…
Rachael: It’s such a good name.
Eli: Well, and it also fits for me is that I never want to come across as I know more than you or I’m better than you. I’m above you because I am just a work in progress still. I’m always working on my own relationships and my own stuff. So I like the nerd thing because it pokes fun at me, but I also really have been nerding out on this information for a long, long time. And so I just started running my mouth on the internet trying to educate people with kind of little tidbits. And it was fun. I was a theater kid in high school, so there’s something, it brought out this part of me that hasn’t had a stage. I found a stage again, and ultimately my goal was to be able to write and kind of share some of the things I’ve learned sitting with people using an attachment lens that I just love. So yeah, that’s kind of the journey.
Rachael: I want to say thank you because you came on Instagram, which is really funny because I was a new, very new mom, and I too have learned a lot about attachment and so grateful for folks like Abby Wong-Heffter who brought that into the Allender Center because it’s such a necessary expansion of our understanding of story and trauma and style of relating and all the things. But someone was like, have you listened to Attachment Nerd? And I was just so desperate for anything. It was just like anything to help me. And I was like, Eli, Attachment Nerd, this is so great. Because it’s like when you’re in those throes of early postpartum, it’s like I was like, I can’t read a book right now. I just need someone to talk to me and break it down. This brain is not capable.
Eli: Yes.
Rachael: It’s like everything’s fragmented, everything’s minute to minute. I was just so grateful for you. One of the things that just feels so true about attachment, so paradoxical and dynamic, but you bring that robust interconnected process into a really kind clarity, not just through your content, but also how you show us, you kind of mirror this is what secure attachment looks like. What misconceptions about attachment theory do you encounter most frequently, both from professionals and parents? And what if you could say, I most want you to know this about it, what would you say?
Eli: Well. There’s a couple of things. So one misconception is that, hey, exactly what happened to me in childhood is going to be exactly what I do with my kids or that everybody has just one particular attachment style. This is a little bit complicated and I won’t go too nerdy, but there are two bodies of research. There is a body of research from the developmental tradition, and there’s a body of research from the social psychology tradition, and they are different studies. So the developmental research studies a relationship. So the science is studying dynamic between caregivers and children and then looking at how on longitudinal levels, those dynamics then affect what the second body of research focuses more on, which is the mentalities and the mindsets and the individual patterns that play out in adulthood, which we call styles. So sometimes it gets a little bit confusing. So there are terms in this first body of research that are never used in the second body of research and vice versa, and they don’t actually correlate.
Rachael: Which is really helpful if you’re someone that’s kind of like maybe people have been sprinkling an attachment, sometimes people do try to correlate the terms and then it just starts feeling like, I don’t know what we’re talking about.
Eli: Yes, it gets very confusing. So the majority of my training is in the developmental research. I had the honor of studying under Alan Sroufe, Dr. Alan Sroufe at the University of Minnesota and getting trained in the strained situation protocol research, which was fascinating to me. And one of the things that I found really helpful, and this is helpful for everyone to understand, is that every single child is attached to somebody in some way, shape, or form. Now, children that have extreme neglect, they are still attached to whoever it is they have and how they handle that relationship is a coping mechanism. So as we talk about attachment insecure versus secure, I like to think of it as, okay, this is the best way that you have had up until this point. This is the best way to maintain closeness to the people you’ve had access to. So if you have only had access to people that are extremely squeamish around emotions, the best adaptation for that is to be avoidant of sharing your emotions or responding to somebody else’s emotional cues. If you’ve had people who were unpredictable, sometimes they’re there, sometimes they’re not. The best adaptation is to be hypervigilant in your relationship, scanning, looking, are they going to leave me now? Are they going to leave me now? So I think never looking at attachment insecurity as something that you did wrong or something that was wrong in your pattern, it was an adaptation. And also as you start to kind of process, where am I at now? Where am I at relationship to my children? Not going into a place of self-condemnation around that either. It’s like this is actually a really adaptive skill you’ve developed and you can change that skillset in relationships where the other person is as willing to grow as you are or secure. So when we are moving towards security, I think going, oh, okay, this is happening for me right now. What does that meaning don’t freak out like, oh no. Oh no. There is a fluidity to it. And I think also the black and white, you are this or you aren’t this, that’s not real. It’s like we move in and out of these totally patterns and there’s kind of an overall, I like to use the metaphor of a knitted blanket. If you look at your relationship with your child or with your partner and you hold up, let’s say this blanket’s been knitted with specific different spools of yarn, and sometimes there’s some yellow and sometimes there’s some red, but overall the majority of the wool was blue or green. If I’m going to hold up that blanket and say, what color is this blanket? You’d be like, it’s a green blanket. Is there some red and yellow in there? Sure. But it’s a green blanket. Nobody is knitting a fully green blanket. A fully green relationship. That’s right. That’s not how our relationships work. So it’s about getting as much green thread in there as you can, and sometimes the beginning of the blanket is blue and you’re like, oh crap, get some green thread and start knitting. And yes, there’s still going to be some blue in there at times and just keep going, keep trying. And they can be very long blankets depending on how long your life is. It’s like keep knitting.
Rachael: Yeah. Well it’s so funny because I joke with, I think I’ve said this on the Allender Center podcast before, and I joke with Michael, my husband about this, but before I got married, I got married at 37. I lived alone. I had done a lot of really incredible, actually my last round of therapy in my mid-thirties was all around attachment. I thought I was going in to deal with a more present trauma, which I was, but it was taking us all the way back to some early attachment stuff and it was so powerful, so intense, so transformative. I had secure friendships. I would’ve said, oh yeah, I’m really securely attached. So this is kind of one of the cool things about attachment, because attachment changes depending on the relationships and context you’re in. I get married, I move across the country, I become a stepmom. This was four months before COVID hit
Eli: Have mercy.
Rachael: And I joke in the most compassionate, not non-judgmental, non-shaming way with Michael all the time. What was it like to go from having two kids to three or like seven really? Because just, oh, the attachment wounds, forming a new romantic relationship, becoming a parent overnight to two older kids who were on the cusp of preadolescence. Whatever part of me felt like, oh, all this time I have to figure out why did I get so mad work about this thing or why I’m in this conflict in real time when things were just coming at me, I felt so young, I felt so insecure, it was just almost like a new layer of attachment healing that I got to be in. And I still get to be in the midst of, especially now that I’ve added a toddler to the mix, which is all new things. And I think you teach this and mirror this, and especially in both of your books talk about this so well, that attachment is a developmental process and it is different based on the relationships we have. Another reality, I think you name really well, and I just want to take a moment to just hear more from you, is you highlight the diversity, the cultural differences… if we’re in the midst of neurodivergence or adoption or just different realities of attachment, that there really isn’t a one size fits all. And I would love to hear you speak a little bit more to what you’ve learned and how you would help people understand those realities.
Eli: Well, lemme say this, I see attachment as the most helpful human instinct outside of eating, sleeping, drinking water, and avoiding oncoming threats. So because what attachment does for us both when we’re young but also as grownups is it keeps us in a group, it keeps us with other people. So it’s this very primal way that we survive, that we evolve, that we thrive even. And so within that instinct, there is going to be a lot of diversity based on the context we’re in. And so if I was thinking becoming a stepparent I think is one very easy way to have your attachment wounds reopened or opened up initially. So is adopting a child with attachment trauma because inherently in both of those situations,
Rachael: Absolutely
Eli: You are having to establish safety for a child and they have the instinct to test you in every possible way because in their little nervous systems, it’s, hey, things don’t always work out. They know that that is a known experience in their body. And so they’re needing to sense, well, what happens when and what happens when, and they’re not doing this maliciously or consciously, but they need to know, are you someone I can fully rely on or not? And because of their past losses or changes, there is a different way that they’re going to push at that sense of connection with you. Culturally speaking, we have a lot of past traumas as a white European woman in the United States of America, my family trauma is pretty far back in terms of the cultural experiences of trauma. But I can think through within my family, like my paternal grandmother’s parents immigrated from Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. They were Germans living in Russia, so they have immigrant trauma all over the place. There was a uncertainty about where do we belong? Who are we? How do we do these things? And so there was a strong instinct to keep your feelings to yourself because you’re making an impression wherever you go. I think if you have studied Black culture and the African-American experience thinking about how many families were torn ascender under slavery in the United States, and so what’s that attachment legacy and how did that affect the way that parents relate to children, right? Because of context. If my child might be taken from me young, early and they might have to endure certain types of trauma, I’m going to relate differently to my child, not because I don’t love my child, but because I love my child. So I think there’s story upon story upon story as we come into attachment. There’s our familial story, there’s our cultural story, there’s our current context story. So I think always looking at ourselves and others when we talk about attachment with a lot of nuance, what is the meaning there? Where are you coming from? What I really appreciate about attachment research over time is that it, unlike a lot of science, it continues to be replicated. The studies continue to be replicated, And we continue to get new data about how what we think we know is validated across cultures, across races, genders, adoptive versus non adoptive. So generally, I feel pretty confident at this point that we can say a couple of things cross cultures, which is that the human instinct to form close relationships as an adaptation is universal. The impact of the quality of the connection in our relationships, on our nervous systems and on our life development, it’s universal. The nuance of how that plays out, it looks different in an Asian culture than it’s going to look in a European culture. It’s going to look different in culture to culture, but within the culture, there are sets of rules that if you know the culture well, makes sense. And the transmission of “I will be here for you” is the core experience of a secure attachment across culture. So I have friends who would describe the way in which an Asian parent would feed them and the ritual of transmission of love and support through food. And the key there is that the child understands that that’s what’s happening. So if I’m in a relationship with someone who’s culturally different than me and they’re trying to love me with food, I may not receive that love in the same way. I love food. I actually probably would receive it that way. But if I am in that culture and I understand the meaning of it, it gets translated into that relationship. So yes, lots of variance and there’s always more to learn about this, but I would say the core essence of what we know about attachment is it is a human experience. And the experience of either feeling secure with a caregiver or not is a human experience, and it’s about what lives in the mind of the caregiver. And in partnership, it’s the same thing. It’s like, do I live inside your mind? Are you able to see me accurately, hear me accurately? Empathize with what is going on for me, make sense of my world with me? And can I do that same thing back in that mutual recognition that we hear about in psychoanalyst analysis? Are you with me? Is there a with-ness here and a quality that I can rely on you?
Rachael: Yeah, I love how you talk about attachment going both ways, which I think I find hopeful on the days when I’m like, I’m not doing this well, this has impact. I think it is one of those hard things when you are someone who knows enough to know too much almost. I keep coming back to how you point out in the research, I’ve heard this from other people before. Actually to form secure attachment, we have to get it right a third of the time. That’s good news for me. And I think maybe for other people who would say, yeah, my nervous system’s still undergoing a lot of healing and I have all the best intentions in the world, but I know it’s like it’s the impact…
Eli: And its coming back. It’s being able to. So I love, alright, in the attachment research, one of the most important words we use is attunement, which is the ability to accurately catch the emotions of somebody else and understand them in such a way that they feel felt by you. The original theorists who were trying to decide what to call this phenomenon, they’re watching happening, they wanted to call it synrythmeia. And I think that’s such an interesting coloring of what it is: sync and rhythm. Synrythmeia. The sense that I can get in sync with you. I think about musicality, it’s like when something’s off pitch and you’re like, oh, I can hear that. That is not the tone or whatever. In our relationships kind of asking the question, are we making music together? Or is our music clashing? And so what I tell myself is 30 to 50% of the time, the sound should be resonant between me and the people I love 30 to 50% and that would be considered secure. The rest of that time. I don’t know, we’re busy, we’re disconnected, we’re trying to get the dang laundry done, whatever, or we’re missing it. But when we’re having those missing moments that we are attending to them when they come up, that we’re able to not overreact or underreact to them that we’re able to go, I hate fighting with you, I really missed that. I’m so sorry. Can I have a do-over? Can I try that again or I’m really going to work on that. I see that.
Rachael: Yeah. Yeah. So one thing I kind of feel like I’m really not trying to be a super fan.
Eli: You’re hilarious.
Rachael: It’s just that I am in this stage, one of your Instagrams, you said you were just emphasizing it’s about connection over control. And for someone who leans towards anxiety, which will always put me a little bit more oriented towards fear and control, just in my own nervous system. And certainly I’m learning about my parenting style, especially with teenagers, my husband will be like, okay, so you’re moving towards fear, which is why you’re wanting to control through fear. There’s maybe some other options. I’m like, there are no other options, but I had this experience with you. So that’s become a mantra for me. That’s actually just been really disruptively playfully helpful, but I’ve just come back to it so many times. But it’s like the other day I was rushing Evie, she’s not even three yet, she’s about to be three. It’s like these transitions, especially having teenage brothers, it’s just like we’re constantly like, we’ve got to go, we’ve got to go. But I had just gotten out of meetings to connect with her and we were playing and then I was like, all right, we got to get shoes on. And she just left to go upstairs and I’m like, she’s being disobedient. She’s not listening to me. I just am instantly moving toward behavior modification. I have all the grace for myself and why this is happening. I’m like, if you don’t come back down here, I’m thinking through consequences, which again aren’t bad. I go upstairs, she’s in her room, she’s kind of ignoring me, but she’s playing with her little pizza and I’m like, Evelyn Grace Chen, we have to go. And she just looks at me and starts crying and I’m like, okay, I’m missing something here. I don’t think this is just about rebellion or defiance, connection over control, connection over control. What does she need? What does she need? And I just get down the floor and she’s like, you want some pizza? And I’m like, oh God, okay, we still really have to go because your brother’s waiting on us. But there was some way I was able to go. She just got to start playing with me. She wants to keep playing. She knows getting in the car, she has to get in the backseat in her car seat. We’re off and running. And it was a heartbreaking moment because I couldn’t really repair in the way I most wanted to, which would’ve been let’s just stay and play and I’m going to let you have this connection you long for, but I could at least acknowledge her sadness and her frustration and her being missed. I just wanted to connect with you. And I thought if I came up here to make pizza, you have to come further away from the door and we can play more with me. And I think those moments are when I can actually attune and be like, oh, there’s something deeper here. They have actually been very, she actually did feel like I could see a shift in her, just her body, her language, her kind of resilience to be like, I’ll get in the car for the 72nd time to go pick up my brothers from something because I can definitely swing to the other like, oh, the way I keep you safe is I just give you whatever you need and which won’t hurt.
Eli: You can’t because that’s not your reality. I had twins and that’s been a whole thing because
Rachael: I’m so sure
Eli: What I would love to do in a moment, I often can’t because I’m dealing with two sets of developmental needs at the same time, or not sets of developmental needs, two children with the same developmental needs at the same time and a 10-year-old. So I kind of do that same dance where it’s like, how do we meet all these needs? So you said, I didn’t get to repair that way. I wanted to, and I would argue you did repair. I think this is really important for people to hear that repair is not, I see what you’re feeling and therefore my reality ceases to exist and your reality only exists. And I think when you’ve grown up in homes where control was the currency, and I get it honestly, I used to have less compassion I think for a lot of authoritarian type parenting when I was younger, before becoming a parent, becoming a parent, I’m like, oh, I get it. There’s something about just being like, no, I’m the boss, you do what I tell you to because otherwise we’re all going to lose our bloody minds because when we enter into the nuance of being connected, it’s way more complicated. It’s algebra, it’s not addition and subtraction. And so being able to sit in these moments and go, wait a minute, I have two other kids, so I have to meet their needs. This is what has to happen right now, but I don’t have to respond to her response to that in a punitive way. There’s room for your feelings even though there isn’t necessarily time for your agenda right now. And so I’m going to scoop you up. And that’s where you get creative. And with a three-year-old, I mean it’s like you run upstairs and you play a chase game and you put someone’s underwear on your head and you’re like, yeah, under my monsters here and I’m kidnapping you to the car. And they laugh and you tickle ’em while you do it and you get them buckled in and they didn’t say, yes, I understand fully that you are a responsible parent that needs that this need is a bit more important than my desire to play. She’s not supposed to be able to do that. But I think if you were raised in an authoritarian based home in a control based home, it feels very foreign to be authoritative. It really does. Because if you’re authoritative, you’re saying, I trust myself and I care about what you feel, so I’m going to trust the decisions I’m making, and I am in charge of creating synchronicity with you instead of I make the decisions and you better get in sync with my decisions. It’s like I’m going to hold my decisions, but I am in charge of the synchronicity. I’m going to help you get on board with this, even though it might be trickier or it might take some time. And I dunno, if you’re raising small kids and you aren’t having moments where you feel like pulling your hair out and banging your head against the wall, please write a book. Please tell me anyone out there, anyone out there. That’s just how it is. But I think that’s where attachment research is so reassuring to me is like, okay, but at the end of the day, do my kids know that I find them delightful and I want them, do they know that they can come to me when they are in tenderness or in distress? That’s language from the research in tender or distressing states? Do they know I will be responsive and receptive and soothing to them? Do they know? Do they consistently sense that I will provide the structure they need in their environment in order to feel safe? And at the end of the day, do they also know that I can be a little cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs when I’m overwhelmed and sensory? Yes, they do know that twice this week my son has said it didn’t like the way you just talked to me. And both times I was like, you’re right. And I just say, that makes sense. I hear you. I was really overwhelmed. We should not have bought chickens before we left on a two week road trip. Anyway, side note.
Rachael: Well, I appreciate you just named structure and you say in your book structure is nurture’s best friend. And that was really good for me as someone who being authoritative is a struggle because it feels like I feel almost like I’m just constantly overcorrecting also dictator this task master to indulgent when I can’t actually be like, no, it’s your job to provide the structure and you can do this.
Eli: Well, something I don’t think a lot of people understand is that the more indulgent we are, the more at risk we are for becoming dictator. Because being indulgent, it’s not sustainable. So if you’re like, okay, you can stay up. Okay, you can stay up, okay, you can stay up. And then you hit that fourth night where you’re like, I said, it’s time to go to bed. I’ve been letting you stay up for four nights. Now I’m drawing the line. And your kid’s like, what? No. And they push back and then you’re like,
Rachael: Really?
Eli: I give you everything and you are not listening to me? And I don’t do this well all the time. Honestly. I sometimes wonder if I have ADHD that’s a different podcast or conversation,
Rachael: A worthy one.
Eli: But I don’t structure. I do well in structure, but it isn’t my instinct to set it up. But I’ve noticed with my kids, it’s like if it’s Saturday and we’re waking up to zero plan, we are going to have far more emotional dysregulation and tension than if there is some form of structure for the day, Hey, here’s what we’re doing. First thing we’re doing, we’re making breakfast together. Second thing we’re doing, we’re going to make a puzzle. If there’s just something there to rely on, it creates a sense of peace for kids. But if it’s just willy-nilly, it’s like, well, what about they get anxious about things they don’t want to do, but also things that they might want to do that feel exciting and overwhelming. And so learning how to say, this is our routine. This is what we’re doing as much as possible. And there’s room for flexibility in there, especially as they age, but this is how we do it. No, we do buckle our seat belts when we’re in the, we do wear our helmets when we’re on our bikes. We do speak to each other with kind words when we’re angry, even if that’s something we’re still learning how to do, and it takes a process. These are the expectations that we have. And the more you establish that there is no food in the living room because mom likes her rug. Sorry. Okay.
Rachael: That is real. And I think in some ways you can tell me, we can also scratch if you’re like, nope, we’re not talking about that. But it’s like I think people bring up things like gentle parent. They make connections between attachment building, secure attachment with in parenting and gentle parenting. And there is kind of, especially across generations, right? Because I know I’ve had so many conversations with my mom where if I mentioned something, what she hears is what I did was wrong or the way I was taught to do it was wrong or it wasn’t valuable, or I don’t have anything to teach you. And I think a lot of what you’re bringing is what helps people understand what is it that we’re talking about. It’s not just indulgence. It’s not that there aren’t consequences or structure or moments where there’s conflict that has to be engaged. It’s not just…
Eli: Or needs of the parent. I think a lot of people think like, oh my gosh, if I’m meeting my kids’ needs, it means what they want is always the priority. And I put sort of a list of in my relationship to what my kids, their needs come first. My needs come second, their wants come third and my wants come forth. And those last two can flip flop sometimes. Sometimes my wants come first just because sometimes my wants are very close to my needs. And so we’re playing around in that and there’s no way to scientifically quantify that, But we’re doing the best we can to give our children an experience that they have a parent and that the word parent means I take care of you and teach you how to take care of you. Your mom’s reaction is common. It’s also probably telling something about the way that she was taught to think about herself. So things were thought of in lump sums. You either succeeded or you failed. You’re either good or you’re bad. It tells us about her theory of mind. Our goal as parents is to be able to give our children a theory of mind that has complexity and nuance. Sometimes we mess up, sometimes we nail it. We’re always worthy. Our intentions are different than our impact. My plan when my kids get older is to do a lot of, oh yeah, I hear you. That makes sense that you felt that way. You really wish I didn’t work so much, or you wish this, it isn’t that my kids go, you were the perfect parent. Everything you did was…
Rachael: I know, I’m 100% trying to set aside a little fund for my therapy when my kids are ready to start having those conversations so that I can, there should be like…
Eli: Yes, there should be two funds, funds for their therapy and then funds for our therapy about their therapy. Wait, what you think? What happened? Okay. And here’s what we see across a lot of longitudinal research is that if you are able to hold your child’s mind inside your mind and heart, so what they feel and need exists and matters at a level that is not overwhelming to you. It doesn’t make you hypervigilant and intrusive to them, but that is like, I see you, I hear you, you exist. I get it. That they will feel a sense of rest in your presence. I think we can all think of people in our lives who are capable of seeing us not in an idealized way, but in an accurate appreciated way that’s like, oh, I just want to be around that person because it feels good to be myself with them. And so if we’re doing that well enough, our kids are going to complain still about things we did and didn’t do in seasons of our life. I mean, I had twins at the height of the pandemic and my extroverted 4-year-old, I saw him as a giant, I saw him as a 12-year-old. I was like, kind of like, can’t you do things on your own? I’ve got two babies and no help. And I’m a little overwhelmed right now. There was some rupture there. I will guess that there’ll become a point where he’ll kind of process You threw these two babies into our very happy, blissful process lady, and they were hard. And my job is not to say, oh, but I really, it’s like, yeah, it’s also not to say, well, do you know what I was going through? Just like I’m going to continue to hold his mind in my heart from little to big as much as I can. And when I can’t, when I drop, it to come back and pick it back up and make that repair.
Rachael: And two things about that. You write a little bit more about that in your book. And it was really powerful because I think sometimes when we think about ruptures, we think about moments or a scene and sometimes ruptures a season or it’s playing out over a season in marriages and parenting and being children of parents. And I think that was something I was like, okay…
Eli: That’s reassuring.
Rachael: … Repair is actually still possible even when it’s been a season.
Eli: I mean, imagine, no matter how old you are, imagine your parent coming to you and saying, you know what? I wish I could have done differently and meaning it and getting it. I don’t know anyone. I mean even people who are estranged from parents because that was the right choice to make because caregivers were so abusive that that’s the right choice, I think would still say, yeah, that would feel nice. Not necessarily I want them back in my life, but there would be something healing about that. So I mean, I’m a bit of an optimist, but I’m like, it’s never too late to offer our kids our attunement to them, even if our attunement to them is, it’s so painful for you to be around me that you don’t want me in your life. Okay, I’m hearing you instead of trying to convince you, you shouldn’t feel that way. I think, I dunno, there’s going to be a lot of repair happening in my life with me and my children throughout the years. I just know that I’m just too human for that not to be true.
Rachael: Oh, absolutely. I remember one time Dan said something like, make no mistake about it. Your children will go to therapy because of your failure of love, because of your humanity, but maybe the goal could be that they’re not going to therapy for the same reasons you went to therapy. Maybe we could do some like…
Eli: My hope is that when my kids go to therapy or need to feel feelings about me, that it’s just with more clarity that it’s just easier. I had to work through all the…
Rachael: And the language
Eli: I had to actually beat my dad with a stick being like, that was traumatic. What happened. That was traumatic. Like, no, you were fine. Yours knew who you were. No, this is. And finally, at some point he’s like, oh. And the goal is that our kids have less labor to do in convincing us that what they feel is real and matters.
Rachael: Yeah, absolutely.
Eli: And maybe there’s a world down the line years and years from now where our profession becomes obsolete because it exists within community so regularly that why would you ever pay for it? You can get it anywhere you need it, but for right now, it’s a great resource. I think it’s the way that we’ve adapted to our need for community and village that we just don’t live in anymore.
Rachael: Yes, absolutely. And I just want to reiterate what you said. It’s never too late. I know I work with people who are coming to their own healing as adults and then reflecting back on their parenting and how they parented. Especially I work a lot in spiritual abuse when people have been in kind of religious systems that have said, this is the way to parent. And basically if you don’t, you’re harming your kids. You’re sinning, you’re going to lose relationship with God.
Eli: You’ve made your children idols. You love your children more than you love God if you blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh yeah. I mean the number of times I’ve had to work through that with folks,
Rachael: And I just think for people, there’s so much grief involved when you can’t necessarily go back to your kids’ childhood, but there’s the powerful, beautiful, I actually think God-designed thing about attachment, that it has almost like a quantum reality to it in our nervous system.
Eli: I was listening to Shari Franke’s book, I don’t know if you’ve listened to it, but so Shari Frankie is the daughter of Ruby Franke, who was this internet influencer who abused her children to this cult dynamic, this whole thing. But I can hear in her the pain. She’s got pain from what happened, but the lingering pain towards the end of her book is her mother’s inability to just acknowledge what she did. And I think that that’s the quantum reality is if we can just say, oh, this is what happened, and it’s not, I am a terrible person. I failed. I intended this harm. I mean, 99% of us do not intend that harm to our children, and yet we harm them. And that’s part of our own growth is being able to go. So I think you may not have been able to give your child a secure experience early on, but you can still become the child your parent needs now as they process that. And my mom really did that with me when I was going through writing all my papers at the Seattle School and breaking down everything. I called her up one day and I remember I could hear in her voice how hard it was for her to do this, but I was like, I need to explain to you what it was like when this and this and this were happening. And she was like, okay. And she just listened and she, at the end of the call said, I’m so sad that’s how you felt, or, I’m so sad that that is what you felt happened or whatever, however she said it. And she’s told me later years later, that was the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life because she was doing every single thing she knew to do to break cycles with me and my brother. But she had very limited resources to do that, and she had severe mental health issues in the mix of that. And so what she was able to do wasn’t what she hoped she was doing. It was something else. And so I think that is why I’m still close to my mom. She’s writing the preface to my next book because she was able to be the parent I needed then, even if she couldn’t be the parent, I needed to feel secure early on. She became the parent I needed to feel secure as I was healing from those things. We can always offer that to our kids.
Rachael: And that has implications in our nervous system that holds those memories. And it’s just really powerful. Well, I know I’m so aware of our time. I have so many more questions, but I will, again, I just have questions around how do we help our kids with the reality of the world that we’re living in right now? And I know that has developmental implications, all kinds of questions, but I think what I would most want our listeners to hear from you is, yeah, what is next for you in your work? You said you have another book, what’s coming down? And also just where can people find you if they want more access to what you’re doing in the world?
Eli: Yeah. Well, so you can always find me running my mouth for free on Instagram and Facebook primarily. I do TikTok sometimes, but I forget. So there’s not as much on there. And my website is AttachmentNerd.com. So I am working on launching a program there that I’m calling the Secure Parent Program. That’s I a six week kind of set up course so that I’ll tell you when to do things. None of us are able to do things on our own these days. It’s like, here’s do this module, do this module to just help you reflect what is it I actually need to know and do for my kids to feel secure with me, and how can I silence all the other noise about parenting that really doesn’t matter. And then my next book is coming out, well, I have actually two things. I have a mother-daughter journal coming out, which I’m really excited about, and there will be a parent-child journal soon, but it’s not in the works quite yet. That’s really designed to help you have some of these deeper conversations because sometimes it’s helpful to have it in writing. So it’s a pass back and forth journal you write and go back and forth.
Rachael: Very cool.
Eli: And then my next bookie book is called How to Deal with Your Beep So Your Kids Don’t Have To.
Rachael: Oh, Okay.
Eli: And I think’s year in for that one, it’s like encyclopedia style where it’s like I go through a lot of the tricky emotions that we feeling. It’s basically like how to be an emotionally mature parent and then some of the habits that we need to break. And then there’s lots of further reading on each topic. So you can choose your own adventure and read through like, oh, I need to deal with the, how do I deal with my anxiety chapter, but I don’t really need to deal with the numbing chapter because I don’t really do that. So that’s coming out in April. So you can sign up for my email list on my website if you want to get notified. And those are all the things.
Rachael: And you also have folks who have kind of done some, who do attachment type work. If people are wanting to reach out with coaches, they could actually pursue some one on one work.
Eli: Yes. If you’re looking for someone specifically to kind help you walk through like, Hey, what’s going on with my, how is attachment playing out in this scenario and what could I do? AttachmentLabs.com I have a group of folks there.
Rachael: It’s awesome. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for your presence and work in the world and
Eli: So good to be with you. Ditto.
Rachael: Yes, hopefully more conversations to come, but grateful for you.