It takes 20 minutes for someone to self-regulate. But when you're co-regulating with a trusted partner? Milliseconds.
That striking contrast came up during our recent Ohio EFT community call, and it set the stage for one of the most organic and illuminating discussions we've had in months. We'd planned to dig into attachment theory—the foundations, the misconceptions, maybe even Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation. Instead, the conversation took on a life of its own.
Kaira Gramley brought everything into focus with a story from the night before. She'd been loading her two-month-old infant daughter into her husband's car after a group outing—stroller in the trunk, baby in the car seat, keys tossed in the trunk without thinking.
Then the trunk closed.
Then she realized the doors were locked.
With her daughter inside.
Screaming.
"I've never been in this situation before," Kaira told us. "And the first thing I said is, 'I got to call my husband.' I'm very dysregulated. I don't want to leave her at all. And just hearing his voice for a second was really calming to me."
The story got better—or stranger, depending on your perspective. When she called the police, the dispatcher turned out to be her cousin. "In my moment of distress, I am trying to have this casual conversation," she laughed. "And it's actually calming me down because he's laughing with me, saying, 'How could you get your baby stuck in a car so soon?'"
Twenty minutes later, the door was open. The baby, exhausted from crying, fell asleep in her mother's arms almost instantly.
This wasn't just a harrowing parenting moment. It was attachment theory in action. Jeff Goad put it perfectly: "When we have a really upsetting experience, when we feel like there are people around us who are calm, who are supporting us—that's what really calms us down and brings us to that sense of safety. It's when we're really activated and we feel alone or rejected that it starts to land in the nervous system in a way that's going to stay."
Jill Niswonger made the clinical connection explicit: "The two people you turned to were regulated individuals. Your husband could have dysregulated—he could have jumped to 'What did you do?' or 'How could you have done that?' But he stayed regulated. I wonder if that is the key—at least somebody's in their zone of tolerance."
Patterson Hicks introduced Dan Siegel's "lid flip" metaphor—when the prefrontal cortex goes offline and we can't access our thinking brain. "When your lid flips, their lid flips," he explained. "And so we kind of start to break down and normalize the cycle to say, 'Hey, here's what's going on here.' The cycle's the enemy, not the partner."
This led to a moment of vulnerability from Garrett Price, an MFT trainee and new Graduate Student Board Member for Ohio EFT who admitted what many of us have felt: "Sometimes I cannot be that regulated person in the (therapy) room with some of these things I hear. There's almost that pressure to be the secure base, and it makes my own dysregulation cycle worse."
The Zoom room's response was immediate and compassionate. "I'm sorry—it doesn't go away," Christie Orosz chuckled. Jeff offered practical wisdom: "Sometimes naming what's happening for me is helpful because it gives me an opportunity to model what it looks like when I notice dysregulation and what I'm doing to regulate it."
By the end of the hour, we hadn't touched half of what we'd planned. No discussion of Ainsworth's experiments. No deep dive into assessment tools. But what emerged was something better—a reminder that attachment isn't simply an academic concept we explain to clients. It's something we live, in and out of the therapy room, every time we reach for someone in a moment of distress and find them reaching back.
As Christie put it: "We are harmed in relationships and we are healed in relationships."
Now on with this week’s Ohio EFT Newsletter:
There’s A Better Way For Couples To Talk About Money.
by Anna Martin on November 24th, 2025
Ramit Sethi, a personal finance author and coach, offers four lessons to help you stop arguing about money in your relationship and start living a “rich life” together.
More Teens Are Taking Antidepressants. It Could Disrupt Their Sex Lives For Years.
by Daniel Bergner on November 24th, 2025
Research on adults who take S.S.R.I.s shows they tamp down sexual desire. Why aren’t we studying what that could mean for adolescents who take them?
Is My Husband A Narcissist? He’s Self-Centered And Lacks Empathy.
by Joshua Coleman on November 24th, 2025
The term narcissism gets thrown around so often that it can lose meaning — but for those who live with a truly narcissistic partner, the experience is anything but trivial.
I’m a Psychoanalyst. This Is What Technology Is Doing to Us.
by Steven Barrie-Anthony on November 24th, 2025
I’ve long thought about technology’s human impact in my roles as a psychoanalyst and a scholar of religion, and formerly as a tech journalist and research director. One constant I’ve found is how technology brings a kind of alexithymic fog — alexithymia being the condition of having difficulty identifying or being able to express one’s emotions. This isn’t universal, and the emotions we’re pushing away aren’t always the same. But it happens in a startlingly consistent way.
Sex Had Become A Chore. Then They Started Reading Romantasy.
by Catherine Pearson on November 24th, 2025
The wildly popular fiction genre allows readers to talk openly about yearning, sex and desire. And it’s spilling over into their bedrooms.
My Wife and I Planned Our Retirement Perfectly. Then She Got Sick.
by Glenn Ruffenach on November 24th, 2025
A former Wall Street Journal retirement columnist shares the hard lessons he has had to learn about life after work. (Note: I can’t think of another story I read this year that hit like this. If you read only one article from this week’s newsletter, this should be it.)
The Ohio EFT Virtual Call Is A Week Earlier Again Next Month - Friday, December 19th.
by Ohio EFT on November 24th, 2025
Join us at 9:00am on Friday, December 19th, for our continuing online discussion about Emotionally Focused Therapy. It will be a week earlier than usual due to the Christmas holiday weekend. We’ve been taking a journey through the 9 steps of EFT, covering Step 3 back in October. However, in November we changed it up a bit and tackled something big: “Everything You Wanted To Know About Attachment But Were Afraid To Ask”. The conversations was so spirited we thought we would continue this month with “Everything Attachment - Part 2”.
We’ll include the link in the December 8th edition of our newsletter .
Why Every Family Needs A Code Word.
by Julie Jargon on November 24th, 2025
Authenticating the voice on the other end of the line is critical in an age of deepfakes.
This Year’s Thanksgiving Surprise: Half Of The Guests Are Stoned.
by Ellen Gamerman on November 24th, 2025
What started as a secret trip to smoke pot before dinner has mushroomed into a full-blown commercial holiday. Behold the ‘cousin walk.’
