We are made for relationships. And psychiatrist, researcher, and clinical therapist Dr. Dan Siegel (UCLA) has found that emotional realities of our earliest attachment relationships reverberate through the rest of our lives. By opening up brain science and what he calls “interpersonal neurobiology” he’s helping people find emotional healing and wholeness, deep connection, and stable life-giving relationships.
“Our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are, the sense of self, where you focus your attention, what gives you a sense of purpose.
Relational integration in a family leads to the growth of neural integration inside the child's nervous system. Every time you say regulation—like regulating emotion or your mood, regulating attention, thought behavior, self-understanding, morality—it depends on integration in the brain. So the neural integration is the basis for optimal regulation, but it comes from relational integration.
We all can follow Picasso's suggestion, which I think is really beautiful: The meaning of life discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away.” (Dan Siegel)
In developmental science, there are lots of debates between nature and nurture. And Dr. Dan Siegel’s groundbreaking work in interpersonal neurobiology demonstrates that we are naturally wired for nurture—and furthermore, we cannot thrive without it.
Over the past five decades, he has sought to explain through attachment theory and a study of the brain, how relationships shape our feelings, thoughts, memories, stories and personal narratives, and how all these offer an opportunity for us to integrate all of our personal subjective with the world outside us.
Our relational tendencies and inner being are malleable—always growing and changing. We are under construction our entire lives, and that’s good news for those of us who feel the weight of loneliness, relational struggle, or the challenges of mental illness.
Dan Siegel’s work helps us become deeply present to others—in friendships, romance, or parenting—by becoming deeply attuned to your inner life, including all of our emotions, plans, pain, and our ongoing and evolving stories.
His research shows that caring and attuned relationships provide a safe and secure environment in which we can experience integration and gain insight into what is most meaningful to us. He calls this concept “mindsight”—how we gain an inner sense of self is intertwined with how we relate to others.
And he offers how mindfulness and meditation are important to this process of becoming intraconnected. Life today is characterized by isolation and fragmentation, but Dan’s wisdom and practices offer helpful guidelines on how we can grow whole—and persons in deepening, reciprocating relationships.
Dr. Dan Siegel is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He has authored numerous research articles, books, and accessible materials that apply what we know about the brain to our most sacred and significant relationships. His many books include the groundbreaking introduction to interpersonal neurobiology, The Developing Mind—as well as Mindsight, Parenting from the Inside Out, The Whole Brain Child, and his most recent book, Intra-Connected.
In this conversation with Dan Siegel, we discuss:
About Dan Siegel
Dr. Siegel is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. An award-winning educator, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of several honorary fellowships. Dr. Siegel is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization, which offers online learning and in-person seminars that focus on how the development of mindsight in individuals, families and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes. His psychotherapy practice includes children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. He serves as the Medical Director of the LifeSpan Learning Institute and on the Advisory Board of the Blue School in New York City, which has built its curriculum around Dr. Siegel’s Mindsight approach.
He is author of many books, including, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive, Parenting from the Inside Out: How A Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive, and his most recent, IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging.
Show Notes
Pam King: We are made for relationships and psychiatrist, researcher and clinical therapist. Dan Siegel has found that emotional realities of our earliest attachment relationships reverberate through the rest of our lives by opening up brain science in what he calls interpersonal neurobiology. He's helping people find emotional healing and wholeness, deep connection and stable life-giving relationships.
Dan Siegel: Our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are. The sense of self, where you focus your attention, what gives you a sense of purpose. Relational integration in a family leads to the growth of neural integration side, the child's nervous system.
Every time you say regulation, like regulating emotion or your mood regulating attention, thought, behavior, self. Understanding morality. It depends on integration in the brain, so neural integration spaces for optimal regulation, but it comes from relational integration. We all can follow Picasso's suggestion, which I think is really beautiful.
The meaning of life is to discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away.
Pam King: I'm Dr. Pam King, and you're listening to With And for a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance towards spiritual health, wholeness and thriving on purpose.
In developmental science there are lots of debates between nature and nurture. The work of Dan Siegel demonstrates that we are naturally wired for nurture. Furthermore. We don't thrive without relationships. This is vital to our spiritual health and thriving because Dan's work explains how we can only be and become ourselves in the context of nurturing and caring relationships.
Dan has authored very accessible materials that apply what we know about the brain to our most sacred and significant relationships. He's the author or co-author of many books, including his groundbreaking introduction to Interpersonal Neurobiology, the Developing Mind, as well as Mindsight Parenting from the inside out, the whole Brain Child.
In his most recent book, Interconnected, he explains through attachment theory, how relationships shape, how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, and how we tell the story of who we are. I am so aware that people are going through life in such an isolated autopilot kind of way, burying and hiding their pain, their anxiety, ashamed, or afraid to admit it to themselves, let alone share that with another person.
For those of us feeling isolated, lonely, or cut off, you are not a finished product. And Dan explains how our relational tendencies and inner being are malleable. We are under construction our entire lives. Whether we're talking about your children, your spouse, your partner, or friends, you need to be deeply attuned to yourself.
We need to be self-aware of who we are, our emotions, our pain, and our ongoing and evolving story. In our current era that is so characterized by fragmentation and isolation, Dan's wisdom and practices offer helpful guidelines on how we can grow whole, how we can become persons in ever-deepening reciprocating relationships.
In this conversation with Dan Siegel, we discuss the connection between the mind and the brain and why that matters for our thriving. Coming to terms with big, challenging emotions, especially fear the neurobiology of interpersonal relationships. How psychological integration creates flow and harmony and helps us deal with chaos and rigidity.
The scientific connection between focused attention, open awareness, and compassionate intention. He walks us through a mindfulness exercise. He calls the wheel of awareness. And we discuss how that impacts not just our own spirituality and relationships, but also society as a whole.
Dan, welcome to the show. I am beyond honored to have you with us. You have been luminary to me as a scientist who's made pretty technical and scientific information approachable to people, and one who has pioneered, obviously in interpersonal neurobiology, which has given us so much insight into how we become more human.
And just really grateful to have you here today.
Dan Siegel: Well, thank you, Pam.
Pam King: I'd just love to ask you personally, why do you find yourself thinking about human development attachments? Interpersonal neurobiology, where did that come from in your life?
Dan Siegel: Uh, on the personal side, I think it came from being in a very complicated family like many of us have, and trying to figure out, you know, what in the world was going on.
As I moved through adolescence, I was just really fascinated with life, like friends. How did they grow up in the families they grew up in? How did we relate to nature? So I used to spend lots of time in Los Angeles where I was growing up in Creeksides and going in canyons and just being with nature, and so I was fascinated with living things.
Pam King: Dan Siegel's work on emotions, relationships, and secure attachment begins in a familiar place that will feel very close to home for some of us. It's those complicated relationships in our earliest family life and experiences and speaking out of characteristic depth and vulnerability. Dan opened up quite a bit about the emotional and relational atmosphere he grew up in, which had a deep undercurrent of fear.
I actually would love to, if you don't mind, you mentioned a complex family.
Dan Siegel: Well, you know, Pam usually I don't talk about that because it's so personal. And also I'm a therapist. So I don't wanna burden my patients. I have a very active therapy practice with knowing my own background, so I don't give the specifics.
And when my father was alive, I didn't talk about it at all. But now that he's passed for almost over a decade, I'm willing to say some general statements, just that there was a lot of anger and a lot of terrifying things. A lot of disconnection and despair and confusion, and everyone's sort of scrambling just to survive, that kind of thing.
My mom's still alive. She's almost ninety-four. She's very sweet. She's given me permission to say whatever I want. Hmm. But I also don't wanna put her in the awkward position of having to explain how a family could be scary under her watch. And that's, that's a painful thing she and I talk about. And I'm blessed to have her still alive, and I'm blessed that she's given me permission to say whatever I want.
Wow. So I was able to learn. Kind of the developmental origins of my family's dynamics.
Pam King: Oh, absolutely. Fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. But Dan, thank you for sharing that. That feels very precious. And I've, I have not heard you say that, but I always feel like you speak and meet with people out of such depth.
Dan Siegel: Yeah. Thank you. Pam. And I, sometimes I feel like it's not so fair to Mm-Hmm. Not be more disclosing. And I guess I take the same thing about when I work with patients, whether we're going through attachment stuff or how temperament turns into personality, I. I'm happy to share what is useful for their growth.
Mm-Hmm. Just like in this conversation, I'm happy to share more if you want, but it's, it really is not about me. It's really about what do we learn from our own personal exploration that we can offer for the benefit of others.
Pam King: The experience of working in a suicide prevention service opened his eyes to the pain and existential crises of others.
The realities of mental anguish, the darkness that moves in like thick clouds in the atmosphere of our lives. And as a young person studying biochemistry and its impact on an external lived ecosystem, he was compelled to deepen his understanding of the brain and its impact on our internal and relational ecosystem.
Dan Siegel: I think the most pivotal moment in that personal journey. Was as a young adolescent, I was in college early and during the day I was working in a biochemistry lab to try to figure out why salmon could hatch in freshwater, but survive the transition to saltwater. And then at night, I volunteered to be on the suicide prevention service.
Mm. And the way we were taught to communicate with people who are in a crisis and how that communication, that connection, could change a person's sense of hope so that they decided not to end their lives, or in fact, they'd feel so much pain that they couldn't bear it anymore and they would end their lives.
That experience of being on the suicide prevention service. At the same time working in this biochemistry lab, yeah. Made me feel like there's gotta be some fundamental mechanisms influenced by the environment. So I just at that moment realized that the social life of the personal to suicide prevention service was some kind of atmospheric condition.
I always felt could be so deeply related to the experience, for example, of the saltwater environment versus the fresh-born environment that a fish was hatched in versus how they moved into the ocean world. So for me, it wasn't that hard to try to think deeply about what is the mental anguish beneath the motivation to end your life.
It was that mental pain or what Ed Schneidman would later call psychic pain. So now Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General, has declared that we're in the middle of a. An epidemic of loneliness. Mm-Hmm. And that loneliness is like the new smoking. So you can see, wow. Even with this analogy of smoking, leading all lung disease and heart disease, we also have this idea of the atmosphere of our relationships with each other being a deep source of the way the mind breathes and grows into health.
When I went to medical school, I was really hoping that this, you know, deep commitment to seeing the connection between enzymatic reactions and emotional connections would have a space because medicine was about healing and relationships between the physician and the patient. But it wasn't to be, I mean, at least where I went to medical school, there was very little interest in the emotional life of the patient or the student.
So I dropped out, went on a journey to actually pursue other careers, but ultimately it was a time when John Lennon had been assassinated. Hmm. And I realized, wow. And this was, um, December 8th, 1980, that wow, if the mind of his assassin could have been so disturbed that it would go out, travel to New York City, find the true John Lennon thinking in that person's mind, he was.
The fake Lenin he had to kill. Mm-Hmm. And then kill John Lennon of all people who was singing so much about love and imagining our lives into peace. And that kind of woke me up to saying, wow, even though the mind may be absent in the medicine I was learning, the mind was literally a matter of life and death.
And could I go on a journey to try to. Say, what is that mind and what would a healthy mind be?
Pam King: Dan's early work helped to shape a burgeoning field of interpersonal neurobiology at the outset of the quote decade of the brain, the 1990s, which are oh, so trendy these days. And by looking developmentally at how the human mind takes shape in relationship with our earliest caregivers, he began asking a core question, what is the relationship between the mind and the brain?
I'd love to turn our conversation a bit to how our minds take shape, and particularly the role of these early caregiving relationships. I'd love to hear you unpack some of that early science on mind development and how brains are shaped biologically, how that impacts our minds in the roles of those early relationships.
Dan Siegel: Yeah. Kind of building on this both personal and professional journey. What became clear to me in my childhood, I think was our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are, the sense of self, whatever you call those things. Feelings thinking, narrative meaning making, where you focus your attention, what gives you a sense of purpose.
If you put all those under a general term mind, so we're not distinguishing them. Thinking from feeling and saying, feeling is not the mind, it's the heart or something. Instead, we would say that anything that's within subjective experience like feelings and thoughts, you know, would be under the general term.
Mind. If you say, how does the mind develop? Then you're talking about development of feelings. Patterns of thought and the way you narrate who you are. Just to mention three things. What became clear to me in a personal way that then became woven into ultimately what I would do professionally, both as a clinician, becoming physician and then a psychiatrist, and then a child and adolescent psychiatrist, and then working as a psychotherapist alongside my training as a scientist, which was in attachment research, which is the study of how caregivers such as parents interacting with children shape them.
So when I was first training in attachment research in 19 eighty-nine, the people studying parent-child relationships didn't have much interest in the brain, and the people studying the brain didn't have much interest in relationships. Mm-hmm. It was puzzling to me and it felt as a budding therapist.
Fundamentally wrong to equate the mind with brain activity. Even though when I was trained in brain science, my neuroscience professor David Hubel, who when I was in school with him, won the Nobel Prize for studying how experience shapes the structure of the brain. Well, what is experience and why was it that one set of experience could lead the mind to develop in this direction?
Another set of experiences very different would lead to the mind, our feelings, our thoughts, our ways of thinking about who we are. Narrating our lives would set off in a different direction. So what, what could we understand about experience that might shape sure, the structure of the brain, but that we were immersed in something much more than brain activity up in your head.
There were amazing things you could learn about the brain that were really relevant for understanding mental life as we've defined it, the way you think, feel, behave, what has meaning, how you narrate who you are. I found it really exciting to be with these attachment researchers. And at the same time, I was able to study with memory researchers and brain researchers and all sorts of folks.
And ultimately, when I was asked to be the training director in child psychiatry at UCLA, I brought all these people together, 40 people to try to ask the question, what in the world is the true relationship between the mind and the brain? And it's a long story, but the bottom line of it is there was no agreement on what mind is, but there was a shared understanding of what the brain that term means.
So the group didn't wanna meet anymore. No one could concur on what they meant by the word mind. And you know, an anthropologist might see mind as a social function as a sociologist did. A neuroscientist in the room, she would say the mind is brain activity. And a psychiatrist in the room might say the same thing.
So even though they had no agreement, I, I thought, how could they all be correct? How could scientists studying, let's say relationships, whether it's an attachment science or sociology, or anthropology, how could they be correct saying the mind is relational, which feels right as a therapist that feels, yeah, that's right.
But a neuroscientist also could be correct in saying, yeah, the mind is neurological. How could the same thing be both? So I took myself for a walk. So I'm walking along the beach and I'm looking at the waves. And I'm thinking, what am I really seeing when I see these waves? Right? So imagine walking down the beach, this beautiful sand, and I see a wave way out by the horizon, and this swell is coming forward, and then it's like a hundred yards away, and then 50 yards away, and twenty-five yards away, then 10 yards away.
Now it's 10 feet away. Now it's crashing on my feet. So I'm thinking what actually crashed on my feet? And I say to myself, what's the wave you saw a hundred yards away and crashed on your feet? And then I'm walking out going, more waves are crashing. I'm going, but that's an illusion. That's wrong. It's so wrong because the water molecules that I saw with my eyes going up and down, those aren't the same water molecules that came all the way over here to the shore.
Mm-Hmm. It's not the water molecules that I saw with my eyes. It's the energy that is moving those water molecules. It may be based on the wind, but in any event, it's the energy transmitted kinetic energy from the wind to the water, and it's the energy that I'm feeling at my feet, even though it's transmitted through the molecule.
So then I thought, if it's energy that I'm feeling as it crashes on my feet, and if it's energy I'm seeing out there, then maybe that's the answer to how something could be both neurological and social, that it's about energy patterns and that the skull nor the skin are barriers that impede the flow of that energy.
So just like I can feel the energy of the wave crashing on my feet because it activates the receptors in my feet that then go up my peripheral nervous system, up my spinal cord up into my brain, and then the brain in my head, and then I'm aware that I'm sensing something in my feet. That is the energy actually that came from way out there.
So skull nor skin block energy flow. So then I thought the system that might be the mind is a system of energy flow that isn't just brain activity like the neuroscientists have been saying or. That hypocrisy said 2,500 years ago, and William James repeated. What if that's part of a much larger story?
Pam King: It was, in thinking about this long-standing Philosophical question of the mind and the brain from an integrated scientific perspective, that helped Dan see a pattern in his patients who were coming to him for emotional and mental healing, but they were stuck, blocked, and beset by all sorts of difficulties.
But he began. To see that either chaos or rigidity or some combination of the two was preventing a harmonious flow of thriving in their lives.
Dan Siegel: When there's a formation of energy flow, meaning flow means change, and that system is both embodied and it's relational. So then I thought, if the system is both embodied and relational, what's the mind aspect of it? You know, and we have of course subjective experience, we have consciousness, we have information processing.
So those are all what are called emergent properties. One of the emergent properties of a complex system is called self-organization. And I remember being in this very room and reading this book on complex systems. It's a mathematical book, and it said that optimal self-organization is an emergent property of complex systems.
And I thought, whoa, what does that really mean? And it said. Optimal self-organization creates this kind of basically harmonious flow. It creates flexibility, adaptability, coherence, meaning it holds well together over time. It's energized and it's stable. And if you rearrange all that in these this order, you get the acronym faces and it's like a river on one bank of the river.
Outside of that faces flow of harmony is chaos. And on the other bank is rigidity. And then I went absolutely nuts. I remember screaming in this room and I said, oh my God, because I had noticed all my patients either came for chaos or they came for rigidity or some combination of the two. And that means that mental health is when you create optimal self-organization.
And mental unhealth is when you move either chaos, rigidity, or both because you're blocking that. And then the question was, what does math tell us is the way you create optimal self-organization. And it was. An amazing moment to read that in a math book. It said, when you differentiate and link, and they didn't have a name for that.
And I've worked with mathematicians begging for them to have a formal math name, but they don't have one. So I just named it integration that when you balance differentiation on the one hand with linkage on the other, and the crucial issue is when you connect through the linkage, you don't lose the differentiation.
So it's not like blending, it's not like a smoothie. It's more like a fruit salad integration creates the faces flow of harmony. And when you block integration, you go to chaos and rigidity. So that's I think, how an optimal healthy environment cultivates integration in the child, in their relational experience.
And here's the simple statement. Relational integration in a family leads to the growth of neural integration side, the child's nervous system. Every time you say regulation, like regulating emotion or your mood regulating attention, thought behavior, self-understanding, morality, all that stuff, it depends on integration in the brain.
So neural integration basis for optimal regulation, but it comes from relational integration.
Pam King: Integration. It's kind of a buzzword these days. It's so easy to just rattle off in business science, education, politics, religion, and self-help. But this concept of integration is truly transformative and can serve as an important target, an end goal or purpose that a very important aspect of thriving.
You do use the phrase integration in the world a lot. I'd love if you could just elaborate on that.
Dan Siegel: Well, integration is simply a system enabling its components to be differentiated and then linked and in the linkage they don't lose the differentiation. So it'd be like being in a room with people of many different racial backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, and embracing.
Incredible richness of that diversity. And then in the linking experience, the incredible harmony that arises when there's this unity in diversity. And so that would be a social aspect of integration. Integration with nature means you realize that there are differentiated needs of the different species on earth.
And when we excessively differentiate it as humans to build factories, for example, so we can produce plastic stuff that then can't dissolve away, we're actually violating the fundamental principle of integration of the world. 'cause we're excessively differentiating humanity from nature. Even say words like man and nature, which is an example of a linguistic phrase.
That keeps on reinforcing this non-integrated way of being so that the chaos and rigidity we're experiencing is because we're not integrated with nature. Within all of nature, we have this intra-connected way to be. Those are two examples of what I mean, integration in the world.
Pam King: How do environmental factors impact our human development and growth from infancy to childhood, to adolescence, and even into adulthood? Dan began to see that these things like the physical and psychological safety of your home, your parents' emotional attunement to you as an infant, the quality of communication between you and your primary caregiver, these factors shape.
An attachment style, which refers to our habits and patterns of relating to others that in turn impact all of our other relationships and experience. I know our listeners are thinking, Hmm, how does this relate to my life? How was this part of my experience or not? So might you give us some insight about how a relationship between a caregiver and an infant or a toddler might produce this type of relational and then neural integration that you're looking for.
How does one parent to enable this to happen?
Dan Siegel: Yeah. Well, I've written, I guess, six parenting books, and they're all based on what we just talked about. When parents are present and realize there's no such thing as perfect parenting, but when they can show up and be present and have kind of inner understanding.
That allows 'em to literally integrate themselves from the inside out. They're then able to show off and be present and offer interactions with their kid where they let go of rigid expectations for their child. Being this way or that way doesn't mean you're laissez-faire parenting. No. It means you're present, that you can absolutely have a set of values that you're trying to teach, but you're really trying to know your particular child when a child is seen by you in that way, they have this beautiful experience.
A patient of mine coined this term, but of course I can't tell you her name, but I can see her right now. Feeling felt is the subjective experience When you have that as a kid, feeling felt is the crucial experience that allows a child to show up for themselves in life. What you can look at then is when a child can express herself and be seen by you as a parent, then she's able to distinguish between her inner life and your inner life.
So you don't have to mirror her and act like you are her, but you are present. You attune, meaning you focus on her inner experience. You resonate, meaning you're shaped by her, and that develops trust. Anyway, that's the fundamental ingredient that allows for neural integration to grow in your child's brain.
It isn't all about parenting. Some of it has to do with the constitution of the child. A lot of it may, but still what the research shows even on that is that how you're open to who your child actually is and bring this curiosity, openness, acceptance and love. Curiosity, meaning you're wondering, who is my child openness?
Here's who my child appears to be. I'm open to that, accepting once I'm open to it and I receive it. I'm, I say, okay, I accept it. Whatever variable we could bring up right now. Not a football player, an artist, uh, not this gender orientation, that gender orientation, you know, not this sexual drive. What all the different ways kids are finding their own unique ways of expressing an authentic way that they are, you know, when parents can be curious about it, open, accepting, and loving children thrive.
Pam King: At some point in each of my conversations, I always ask my guests what is thriving? And because Dan brings a whole system of thinking from the neurological all the way to the psychological and spiritual, I was especially excited to hear how Dan would respond.
Okay. A word you and I use in common a lot is thrive.
And I would be really curious to hear from your perspective, how you would define thriving.
Dan Siegel: You know, just to start with the abstract, the, the abstract way of thriving is where we learn to live as a verb and don't get seduced into believing that we're nouns. And that caution about nounification and that movement to the liberation of verbification is everything.
So everything I'm about to say in the practical level about thriving comes from living as a verb. Whether you're talking about how you narrate who you are and you think exactly who you are, and, and people say, know thyself, you know, well sure know thyself, but know thyself not as noun, but as verb. Now there's a vulnerability we all have because we're all driven for certainty.
So as a parent, what we wanna be careful of is our expectations are not driven by an understandable longing for certainty. And why is that a problem? Because as. The artist Rashid has written on the Brooklyn public library, the foyer, when you come, come into it. Mm-Hmm. She says, having abandoned the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander.
Part of I think, really wonderful parenting for having children thrive is to be willing to wander with them through the journey of life, rather than holding on clinging. Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. Grasping this flimsy fantasy of certainty, which we develop that fantasy because life is scary. Life is full of uncertainty, but we get safety by being able to predict, and if we can predict, we possibly can protect.
So it's understandable. The mind wants certainty, so it can guarantee survival in a way. The irony is thriving happens when you let go of the flimsy fantasy of certainty, and you. Allow yourself to wander as a verb through life, rather than creating artificial structures of nounification like I am this way, or My child must be this way, or This is what I hoped for my child to become when she becomes an adult.
So to be present in many ways is to let go of the flimsy fantasy of certainty. So on a practical level, some of the steps a parent can take to do that are, number one, the research would suggest that the best first step you can do is to understand what your experiences were when you were a child. Mm-Hmm.
And not only understand what those experiences were for you, how they felt, the impact they had on you, but how did you adapt to them? What ways did you get wounded or get disappointed? And then how did you protect wounded aspects of who you are? How did some of those aspects of you get mountified into what some people might call self-states or hearts or facets that are stuck, and then how can you liberate them?
So that inner understanding also invites you to say, why would I do this? Because I can't change the past. So this is a ridiculous request You're making. Pam and Dan understand where I've been in the past when the past can't be changed. That's kind of a waste of time. Why don't I just forget the past?
Just create myself anew. If it that, if it were that easy, that would be great, but the fact is we each have not only attachment experiences, at least a third of the population that weren't optimal. So we've had to deal with that in certain ways that can remain with us as adults. But even if we've had optimal attachment calls, secure attachment, we all have what you can call a personality.
So this framework that I've been working on for many years with some colleagues, we call it patterns of developmental pathways. And it looks at the fundamental move out into the world where you're alone in the world. No matter how great your parents are, you still get hungry and you have hunger pains compared to being in the womb where you still have to breathe or you die compared to being in the womb when you don't even have to breathe, you have to have connections with other people, or you die in the womb.
You didn't have to worry about that. So the worry-free womb for most of us is kind of like a sense of wholeness just being. But once you're out in the world and you're what we call a working for a living, it creates this thing. 'cause think about it, what happens if your body doesn't breathe? You die.
What happens if you don't eat? You die. What happens if you don't have someone protecting you in their connection with you? You die. So literally, once you're born, once you're out of the womb. And now you're working for a living. You're alone in the world, and everything literally is a matter of life and death.
It's hard. Oh my God, is it hard!
Pam King: Life is scary. Life is full of uncertainty. We all know this, but accepting and internalizing this truth and then adapting and finding our agency. Flexibility, empowerment, and connection is how we stay on our path to wholeness on a daily basis.
Dan Siegel: We've identified three subcortical networks that involve agency, which is a drive for empowerment, bonding, a drive for connection and certainty, a drive for safety. That what we found in surveys, which is really fascinating, is a certain percentage of people will find that the emotion when agency is frustrated, which is irritation, frustration, anger, rage, fury, let's just call that the anger group.
That's one certain percentage of people and say, yeah, I, when I'm stressed, I tend to get angry. Another group, the bonding group, these are ABC, so you can remember it. Agency is the A group, the vector, we call it a bonding, is about a drive for connection and that's frustrating. You feel separation, distress, loneliness, sadness, and when it's extreme panic.
So another percentage of people say, yeah, that's my go-to place. When I'm stressed, I get sad in all its variations. And then the third group is very different. It's the C, the certainty group. And when they get stressed, they experience anxiety, anticipatory anxiety, I don't know what's gonna happen or fear.
Or absolute terror, and they'll say, yeah, they'll raise their hand. Yeah, I, when I get stressed, I get scared. I've asked this sort of randomly, and you get about a 90% hit rate where people will say, one of those three is especially dominant when I'm stressed out. So that's just very interesting that you get a a 90% hit rate.
That anger, sadness, or fear, one of those is dominant for, it looks like general population. Now. Um, what we think is going on is that one of these subcortical networks, agency bond and connection, I'm sorry, certainty gets activated when you're out of the womb because you're striving to get whole, but you're not whole because you're working for a living.
Now this gets very practical. So thriving is not only about ensuring your relationships are integrative, and you can have that experience for your children by making sense of your own childhood yourself as a parent, but. It also means these patterns of developmental pathways. And then the journey is not only understanding what happened with your parents when you were a kid, but now to say for yourself, what is my tendency?
What's my proclivity? And when you understand, oh, my propensity is in the certainty vector, which is true for me, or this other person's vector is for bonding, which is true with a good friend of mine or another person. I know her. Her propensity is for agency. When I get stressed, I get scared and full of doubt.
When the other person's get gets stressed, he gets really sad, but the other person gets stressed. She gets really angry. Now, once you begin to understand these subcortical networks that are beneath the cortical ways that we adapt, suddenly everything starts to become really. Clear and really interesting and something you can do.
So in terms of practical, then it liberates you to say, okay, I may have a propensity that is driven by my not being whole and not being one with the womb anymore. And I'm not trying to get back in the womb, but I'm trying to get to wholeness. And this feeling I have in life is I constantly feel like, whoa, something's not right.
Well, no kidding, if you don't do something in this world called human life, you're gonna die. And it's interesting because three S's of secure attachment that I've written about for years correspond each of these vectors in ways that when I was working with my colleagues to finish up this book, suddenly went, oh my God.
Each one of those S's corresponds to each one of the vectors. Now we can put it together. The obvious one is the vector for certainty is about fear. So obviously S safety. Yeah. This was surprising. Soothing is really about bonding, but being seen is the agency one. We just don't know yet exactly the developmental mechanisms here.
So we have to keep an open mind that it may be that subtle differences in being seen soothed and safe that we just haven't teased apart yet are actually the cause of people developing these different personality patterns. Or it may be genetic, or it may be a combination of the two, or maybe it's your siblings or maybe it's the world events.
I mean, we don't know. You have to keep a really open mind. We really don't know how this blend of temperament and attachment seems to be involved in the cultivation of personality.
Pam King: That's fascinating. I, I, I'd love to pick up on something you keep alluding to is some of the uniqueness about our current era.
Both. When you talk about people feel uncertainty, people not feeling seen. You mention Vivek, Murthy's comment on our pandemic of loneliness. I might think in your words, it's a pandemic of relational or neural integration. If people are so lonely, they're not having the opportunity to do that integration.
That's so important and there's so much change. People are frustrated and angry that they can't be agentic and pursue their purposes like they used to because there's been so much upheaval and changes. Your notion of the river of harmony and flow and that people either go rigid or chaotic in these times that are insecure and changing and volatile.
How do people know where they are in the river?
Dan Siegel: Yeah, Pam, it's a great question. I think we can start just by reminding ourselves that you know who we are really is energy flow. I. There is a body we're born into that is living within an atmosphere of energy flow. And we also have this body so that it's very natural that sometimes, as we're saying, integration will not be so prevalent and you'll feel chaotic in a day.
I had a very chaotic day the other day, you may feel rigid, you can get a reactive state. Someone close to you doesn't do something you're expecting, you get reactive. The kindness I think we need to start with is to say, we're not talking about achieving in thriving, some permanent state of being in the river of integration.
So you're always feeling harmonious. But if you go out for a walk like I did this morning with my wonderful dog, she and I are out walking. The flowers are blooming, and with a good friend, we're talking about something very meaningful. It's painful, but it's real. The sky is. Shimmering with clouds and each step, I'm feeling like incredibly grateful to be alive.
Even though we're talking about something hard, I'm thinking, what a gift this is. I'm filled with this sense of love and deep awe basically of, wow, this is just amazing to be here. Now, I would call that thriving right now. Another day on that same walk, I might be really fretting about something with one of my kids, with my wife, with work, with my mom.
Something really important in my life that I'm just preoccupied with and I don't notice the flowers. I feel rigidly preoccupied with some very negative view in my vector. One of the propensities is to do worst-case scenario thinking. So my subcortical drive for certainty pushes up into my cortex, and now I am.
As Mark Twain once said, "having these horrible things happen in my life, some of which actually occurred," um, so the human cortex can generate a narrative, which actually is the traumatizing feature of our life. Our own brains attempt to grab onto certainty. That flimsy fantasy of certainty, actually for those in the vector of certainty like mine, it just pushes upward from the subcortical, millions of year old history into the cortex and says, be certain, be certain.
Be certain. Well with a cortex that's learned about the nature of the world. Now, getting to your point of what some people call the VUCA times, we're in v-U-C-A volatile meaning things change really fast. U is uncertain, and uncertain means you just don't really know. C, complex means you could study everything and you still wouldn't know.
So it's not about you don't know enough, it's that even if you knew everything, complex systems are nonlinear and you just don't know, you can't predict. And a related thing is A, ambiguous. Even if you read like the thirty-five things that if you did have time to read those things and say, oh, this must mean X, No, it's ambiguous.
Maybe it means Y, maybe it means Z, So it's ambiguous, so volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Yikes. What started as a military term that the journalists now use that we can all use VUCA for someone, in my vector of certainty, it can drive you nuts. VUCA just activates everything about survival, but someone in the bonding world, it can drive you into distress.
How can I guarantee the people I love are gonna be okay? And we have our relationships going. And if you're in the agency vector. We can all be in all those vectors, by the way. It's just where do you start out with initially, especially under stress, your agency system. That's a drive for empowerment. It's gonna feel threatened all the time in VUCA times.
So we each may experience the VUCA context of the current moment with this propensity towards anger, towards sadness or towards fear, depending on our temperament and how it predisposes us to a certain PDP pattern of developmental pathway. And the work then is hard. But think about it this way, some studies suggest that in a given day, the amount of information many people receive, for example, on the internet is more than 300 years ago, what people would receive in a lifetime.
Well, our brains have not evolved much in 300 years, but our information flood is overwhelming us. So I find it really helpful. To intentionally minimize my exposure to social media, my exposure to the regular media, so newspapers, for example, or radio or television. And I find my day goes better when I've really had some kind of mastery over the flood of things that actually I can do nothing about.
And that knowing about them doesn't inform the way I can contribute to the world. Actually, now we all can follow Picasso's suggestion, which I think is really beautiful. There's a phrase from him, the meaning of life is discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away. Mm. That's beautiful.
There are things to do. Find out where your special gift is, whatever it is. Making a garden, making your neighbors happy, whatever the gift is, but then cultivating that and making sure it's about. Giving to others in the benefit. And I say the word others with quotes around it because I mean, in the book Intra Connected, what I try to point out is that the self is not just in the body as a me, it's also a we.
And so when you're giving quote to others, unquote, it's actually you're giving to because you are your neighbors and you are the plants and animals around you. It's not just that you're connected to nature, you are nature.
Pam King: One of our goals for this podcast is to not only increase knowledge and insight, but implement transformative practices that embed that knowledge in fruitful ways, insight and action that leads to spiritual health and thriving. So I asked Dan to elaborate on the specific practices that can bring together focused attention, open awareness, and kind compassionate intentions.
For many years now, he's studied the effects of different mindfulness practices, what psychologists would generally call interventions, helping people implement an exercise or practice, and then measuring the positive results. And one of the most transformative exercises he's discovered is a habit he himself practices every morning. It's called the Wheel of Awareness. If you'd like to work through the wheel of awareness at your own pace. We've added a few suggested links to our show notes, and you can find many more similar exercises or spiritual practices on our own website, thethrivecenter.org.
Dan Siegel: So focused, attention, open awareness, and kind intention are basically training the three fundamental aspects of the mind, attention, awareness, intention to be in certain ways, attention to be focused, awareness to be open, intention to be kind. So we have a practice called the Wheel of Awareness that does all three, and we've had lots and lots of people do it.
I've done it in person with over 50,000 people before the viral pandemic hit. So. How does it work? Attention basically has four components to it. And when we say focused attention, we mean being able to sustain the focus of what's called focal attention, which means attention into awareness to sustain it, number one.
Number two, to detect a distraction when you've become distracted and are no longer sustaining attention. Number three, let go of the distraction. And number four, redirect attention to your intended object of awareness. That's basically the four components, and they have four different networks in the brain, so that's an important starting place, but it's not an ending place.
A second component is the second pillar, which is opening awareness. And what this means is you learn this incredibly important skill to, in our view, imagine a hub of the wheel as the source of knowing. Just as a visual metaphor. And the rim is that which is known. And on the rim you have four segments that include different energy patterns.
The first segment is from outside the body, like what you hear, see, smell, taste, and touch. Then the second rim is Introception, awareness of the internal energy patterns inside the body, your lungs, your heart, your intestines, your muscles, your bones, things like that. The third segment is thoughts, emotions, memories, you know, mental activities that are probably mostly happening up in the head.
And then the fourth segment, we try out feeling into the relational field. Um, and this is also where you build kind intention by bringing a positive regard to people. People you don't know the community, and it's very integrative. So the wheel was designed to be an integrative practice, and in fact, the brain becomes more integrative, literally.
Differentiator has become linked. When you make these statements. So we believe that when done authentically, when you say, may all beings be happy, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be safe. May all beings live with wellbeing. You know, may they flourish and thrive. But if you really say it with meaning, then you're actually creating a loving state inside you.
So that combined with this advanced practice where you bend the spoke of attention, you're moving the singular, spoke around to link the differentiated areas on the rim, but then you bend the spoke around into the hub itself. When you really look deeply at the 50,000 person survey and what people say when they're in the hub, they describe.
It being empty, but full. They describe it being timeless. They talk about love being their God. They talk about being home, peace, joy, the sense of ease connected to everyone and everything. And so when I looked at all the neuroscience, trying to figure out what is that hub of awareness really coming from a brain activity, I couldn't find anything.
Nothing. Anywhere. I looked at every neuroscience study I could find. Nothing correlated with timelessness or empty, but full where there is no variable of time empty, but full. I think because people are describing the feeling of it being the formless source, that's the empty of all form. That's the full, it is the place where all possibilities sit.
So every day I practice if something's happening at work or in my personal life or you know, I tell this example to where if there's a speed trap and then a cop, a policeman gets me a big ticket, even though it was 50 miles an hour and then there's a sign for thirty-five and there's no way to slow down in time.
And then he's just standing behind the tree and gives me a ticket. I've gotta go to my hub or I'm gonna be really upset because now I'm gonna go to Dr. Traffic school. So I go to the hub as I'm slowing down the car this, this things because his lights are spinning and I got my hands on the steering wheel.
I say to myself, don't take your stands off the steering wheel. Go to your hub. And I start feeling this incredible sense of love. Just feel this openness. So, I mean, that's a little teeny example, but when you practice the wheel, you can access the plane of possibility. This the hub. In a moment's notice,
Pam King: Dan points out the repeated experience people report when regularly doing this practice is love for me. That deeply resonates. With the heart of the Christian contemplative tradition, which has been practiced for thousands of years in quiet monasteries filled with prayer and the stability and simplicity of the contemplative life.
What this research reveals to me is the potential that all of us have for a taste of this stability and simplicity, even in the midst of what might feel like a frenetic and fractured life. And so I do find that for me, it's something that I have to cultivate the ability to be still, to sit in silence.
And I do find that focusing on senses and awarenesses that I'm more used to can enable me to go into a stiller place. And then I am almost able to regulate in a sense of going to that calm interior. I think heightened is the word that I might think of that from within that place. There might be a heightened awareness.
Of the sensations color sound, it takes on a fresher or newer quality.
Dan Siegel: You know, the beautiful thing about what you're saying is that, you know, when you do a practice, it, it's just a very simple but profound practice. And then when what you get is an opportunity to experience what the mind may truly be, this emergent unfolding that on the rim, you may say, I have a narrative of who I am as Pam or who I am as Dan.
And unfortunately that rim-like narrative can create its own rigidity. If it's too fixed in a noun-like way. So when you do a practice like the wheel or whatever practice suits you and you get access to the hub, suddenly you can see from the hub's openness, this noun-like set of boundaries. Mm-Hmm. And then you come to realize, and I tried to write this in the interconnected book that are.
Vulnerability to see the self as an entity rather than a process. So as a noun rather than a verb, is because one outcome of seeing identity as an entity is certainty. And because of the VUCA world we're in now, I think people are creating much more intense noun-like selves. And it explains the incredible polarization we have that you can, whether you're looking at politics or racism, whatever you're looking at, people are so divided because they're grabbing onto this noun-like view of who they are.
Then they're trying to stay with people who are noun-like entities, like them, look like them, believe like them, and then they follow leaders that might, no matter what they do, they don't care 'cause that leader represents this or that. And then we're all divided rather. Going to the place where we're truly connected to each other beneath these superficial but important distinctions that are important.
Meaning they're making people kill each other. Mm-Hmm. Oh, absolutely. These constructed distinctions give you this illusion of certainty, like, my end group is better. So, so this illusion of certainty is understandable, but potentially destructive. And so the hub, what's so exciting about it is it's an experiential immersion in connection.
And while growth and resources may be limited, connection is unlimited. And the thing that's amazing about the hub, and this is where it's so interesting to look at the plane of possibility mechanism, that's really what's going on in the hub, is that while it's maximal uncertainty, so it may freak people out or clinging to certainty to try to have survival, this place of maximal uncertainty is actually a synonym.
For freedom and possibility. And the amazing thing, Pam, is that the most common word people talk about coming from that hub, this plane of possibility is love. And imagine living from that place. That's the way to thrive, absolutely, is to live fueled by love. A simple way that
Pam King: I will talk about thriving is the process of leaning into love of self love, through connection with other love, with your perception of the transcendent God, humanity, whomever that might be, and then living that love out as your unique self with and for others.
So leaning into love ultimately has to do with the sense of being interconnected. Our experience of loving and being loved, reciprocating love with other persons, with creation, with your understanding of the transcendent or God, and then living out that love dynamically. One of the things when I think about thriving is experiencing this love and adapting and growing and living it out.
Using that phrase from Picasso, like pursuing your purpose, offering your gift to others. So we realize that this living and this giving, it's a generous posture that we're doing this with and for others, we can't do it alone. My question is, in the wheel of awareness is meaning and purpose found in that hub?
Dan Siegel: On a deep level, in Picasso's quote, you say the meaning of life is finding your gift. But you could say that find your gift is the way you create more integration in the world so that from the body you're born into, you might do that through gardening. You might do that through music, you might do that through painting.
You might do that through teaching. You might through it through being a therapist. You might do it by helping people build their buildings. I mean. It's all for the sake of creating more harmony in the world. Mm-Hmm. Right. So if the meaning is finding your particular way of channeling energy to create more integration in the world, then the purpose when said, when Picasso says, is to give the gift away.
Mm. It's to allow the gift to create more integration in the world. Not just be alone in your room. Right. Making your music or studying environmental science just in your room. It's like, well-being and thriving come from creating more integration in the world.
Pam King: I think as a developmental scientist, I often think of the importance of adaptive.
Developmental regulation that people are adaptively regulating and that is always perpetuating mutually beneficial relations between an individual in the broader world. And that's what I hear you articulating in terms of this being able to find meaning and to pursue it in a way that furthers the well-being of the world and others.
Dan Siegel: Yeah, exactly. Because I mean that phrase integration made visible as kindness and compassion. Then the inner compass of life then, and not randomly said, you know, when you say lean into love, you know the manifestation of love is kindness and compassion. Right? So love is like this vital force I think that lives within the plane of possibility.
And then when we channel that into life, it's channeled as kindness and compassion. So we're, I think we're speaking exactly the same language. And so in that sense, integration made visible is kindness, compassion, integration expressed is love.
Pam King: Toward the end of our conversation, I wanted to ask Dan about his views on spiritual health, and I found his response fascinating. His vision here appeals to what we share. Dan wants to blur the lines between the me and the you and the we to find a more expansive category. For what it means to be human and what it means to be spiritual.
One that has the potential to transform not just interpersonal relationships, but even global public life. For Dan to be interconnected isn't enough. It assumes too many boundaries between us. For him, were intra-connected. Connected within a spacious human whole
understanding that we are humans that are embodied because we've been embedded and shaped in the context of relationships. How do we have and pursue spiritual health with all that we've been through and that all we're perhaps aiming towards in life?
Dan Siegel: Yeah, I think, you know, it's always important I think, to ask what people mean by words like spiritual or religious.
Can I turn it back to you for a moment and say, W when you ask me spiritual health, I can respond and what it means to me, but what I wanna know is what it means to you. So I can try to have my response really be directly responding to how you see that phrase.
Pam King: As a psychologist would say that spirituality has much to do with our experience in response to one's perception of what is transcendent, which could be metaphysically other or not.
But as I'm asking you, I'm thinking of this capacity to. Embrace, engaged, be formed by and give to others. Whether that's creation, whether that's humanity, whether that's people, whether that's God, how do we stay connected and engaged as people have been wounded and broken and might have limited mindsights and have different ways of coping?
Dan Siegel: Yeah. I was asked to teach at a spirituality and science conference, and your way of viewing the word spiritual is parallel to this broad notion that some workshop participants described to me and pretty much said the same thing. A life of meaning beyond just surviving and a life of connection beyond just the skin in case body.
So I said, oh my gosh, if spirituality is connection and meaning, sign me up. Especially if you take the word meaning and say meaning. Is the gift you've discovered of how you can create through your bodily experience more integration in the world, and purpose then would be giving it away. So in that sense, spiritual thriving for me is someone who is on a journey.
It's when they are creating more integration in the world through a lived realization that who they are, their identity is not limited to their skin encased, individuality. So then when they're living in a way that promotes the wellbeing of individuals beyond just the individual in the body in which they were born, then they see those individuals as actually who they are and they stop othering them.
And then the greater good in quotes, is actually the good of the self when the self is both the me and the we. If you really dive deeply into trying to be simple, you say, well, if spiritual life be a life where I realize I have an inner aspect of my subjective experience, perspective, and agency, that's the me and I have an inter aspect of it.
That's the we and I am as much a we as I am a me. And when I put those two together, I get the integrated identity of an intra connected we, me plus we. So it's a simple word. It ends the wheel of awareness practice. But what people have described with the funny little word and we is it allows them to give up what seemed like an impossible challenge.
So spiritual growth then is letting go of society's statement to you. And it's why we often need retreats to retreat from the societal message that who you are is just your body. And the irony is. When you do centering prayer or other contemplative practices that you do sitting on a cushion or walking alone in a forest, you come to realize that who you are is not just that body sitting there, not just that body walking around.
You are the whole of eternity. And for me, that's what's spiritual growth involves feeling into that, not just reading a book about it or thinking about it or saying it, but just feeling into the truth of we as our interconnected identity.
Pam King: It's not just feeling it, but allowing that feeling to actually inspire action and agency that Promotes more integration in the world.
Dan Siegel: Oh, beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. To share the gift. Absolutely.
Pam King: Dan, thank you so much. This has just been wonderful. Thank you.
Dan Siegel: Thank you for having me. It's an honor.
Pam King: Dan Siegel's, interpersonal neurobiology offers a transformative opportunity for integration and reciprocity in our world today. His call to cultivate a rich and integrated inner understanding can widen our views of ourselves and the world we inhabit and change it for the better. The key takeaways that I will carry with me from this conversation are the following.
We are embodied creatures with glorious brains that we're still only beginning to understand caring, attuned relationship. Can create opportunities for us to be and become who we are, realizing our deep connection to others, there's a constant balancing act between chaos and rigidity, and the path of spiritual health is marked by a steady recovery of harmonious flow.
A process called integration when life is scary and we need safe relationships to ground us. Help us attune and regulate and navigate the most challenging circumstances. And finally, we need a new paradigm for reciprocal relationships in society. Seeing the ways we're intra-connected, knit together with and for each other,
With & For is a production of the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary. This episode featured Dan Siegel with very special thanks to Chelsea Knost. This season, new episodes drop every Monday. For more information, visit our website TheThriveCenter.org, where you'll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose.
I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the Thrive Center and our with and for podcast team. Jill Westbrook is our senior director and producer. Lauren Kim is our operations manager. Wren Jeurgensen is our social media graphic designer. Evan Rosa is our consulting producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy.
I'm your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.