Create a shorthand of expectations
“The five pillars of a secure life are: consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable—or CARRP. I have a friend, we’ve been friends for a really, really long time. Around COVID time, there were times when we had ups and downs in that friendship. But now we have this new language of CARRP.
“Because of this book launch, I’ve been so busy, and I think he called me twice, and I hadn’t responded. I hadn’t called back. And he called me again the other day, and he said, ‘Well, you haven’t been as responsive. You haven’t been CARRP lately.’ And I owned it. I immediately apologized, and I said, ‘You’re totally right.’ I explained what was going on, and that I’m so sorry.
“He said, ‘No, no, it’s fine.’ But, in the past, without having this language, he might have sulked and not said anything. And if he had said something, I probably would’ve responded defensively. And there were periods of our friendship, we’ve been friends for 20 years, that we were estranged. But, here, all of a sudden we had this language that we can use that so quickly repaired the situation.
“We had the tools, we had the language, I acknowledged it and then made more of an effort to be more present—all because of understanding this framework of how to keep what our brain needs for relationships to feel secure.”
Text the people who always text you back
“I was on a podcast with this guy and he said, ‘Friends text me, and then sometimes I don’t respond for two weeks, and then they are like, Is something wrong? Did I do anything wrong? Which is understandable, because it activates errors in the brain of distress and sub-scrutiny. He didn’t understand that. He didn’t really understand how their brain works.
“This is about something that our brain needs, and it can’t control. Instead of trying all the time, again and again and again, to get water out of a rock, basically, we have these other secure people in our lives that we don’t pay much attention to, because so much of the attention goes to trying to fix something. Part of secure priming therapy is to teach people to shift their attention. Sometimes it’s like a tiny movement. I’m not going to text this person again. I’m going to text the person who always texts me back.“
Be aware of your texting cadence
“Once someone sends you a text or a message, the clock starts ticking. To me, at least, you need to respond. [The amount of time you take to respond for each person] is very different. That’s the trick. We are very socially savvy creatures, extremely so. We have an idea of a baseline, of a baseline interaction with every different person. We have an idea of what our attachment baseline is, and that’s what we expect. If you email someone once a week, then you don’t have to feel that you have to email them back right away, because they’re not going to expect that. There are different levels of baseline that you create that you can then adhere to, and that works.