“Modern Attachment Parenting” – A New Book By Jamie Grumet

Photos courtesy of Jamie Grumet

Where Were You When The TIME Cover Of A Breastfeeding Mom Broke The Internet?

Jamie Grumet with her sons, Aram (left) and Samuel (right).

In 2012, an internationally-raised, second generation attachment-parented Los Angeles mom stepped onto the cover of TIME Magazine with her three-year-old son to model for the world what species typical, full-term breastfeeding looked like. While culturally normative breastfeeding has been missing from America’s real life experience for generations, Jamie Grumet’s real life experience shaped her worldview and spirit to boldly advocate for the human family’s billion year-old plan for lifelong wellness: breastfeeding.

Where were you when you first heard about the TIME cover? I remember sitting in a parking lot glued to a radio show wondering if I was hearing the broadcast correctly. If this is true, I thought, and TIME Magazine featured a breastfeeding mom on its venerable cover in celebration of attachment parenting’s 20th anniversary, then I guess my work as an activist is done. I can go home and take a nap.

Not.

The worldwide fallout from the magazine cover, and purposefully antagonistic headline, “Are You Mom Enough?”, became the Cover Shot Heard ‘Round The World, (Kindred’s 2012 interview with Grumet). In the months following the shoot, Grumet and her family suffered harassment from internet trolls and paparazzi, as well as gratitude from parents and championing support from surprising places.

Today, eight years later, Grumet is a single mother of her now teenage boys and living in San Francisco. In her new book, Modern Attachment Parenting, she shares the truth of her recovery from the trauma of the TIME cover, her immeasurable compassion for parents, and a grounded, field-tested review of attachment science within the context of modern American life. The book features a foreword by Alanis Morissette and an introduction by Attachment Parenting founder, Dr. William Sears.

In our interview below, you will hear Jamie reflect on her experience and her wish for Americans to realize that, “while our village is not enough“, parents are in fact “enough.” This interview is in celebration of October’s Attachment Parent Month events. Check out Kindred’s resources for more on attachment science and support, along with our entire 15 years of materials on Kindred dedicated to restoring human connection. Support our nonprofit work here.

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An Interview With Jamie Grumet: Transcript


In This Interview:

“Yes, You’re Enough. It’s the Village that Isn’t Enough.”

Alanis Morissette: On Her Foreword To The Book

Parenting Through Judgement

An International Worldview of Attachment

Attachment Parenting An Adopted Child

Attachment Parenting As A Single Mother

Adult Attachment: No, You’re Not A “Lost Cause”#


LISA REAGAN: I am delighted to revisit with you after all of these years, and I am so very happy to be holding in my hand your new book, which is an amazing gem, Modern Attachment Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Raising a Secure Child. This is a wonderful, very modern take on attachment parenting. Thank you for this book. 

JAMIE GRUMET: Oh, gosh, thank you so much for the kind words. I am really, really proud of it. It was a huge labor of love and the people who were involved in helping me with it, it just was a dream come true for me, honestly.

LISA REAGAN: In this book you tell your story about the TIME Magazine cover shoot that, for those who don’t remember, in 2012, Jamie was on the cover of TIME Magazine nursing her 3-year-old and for her, this was modeling what was normal for her because she is a second generation, attachment-parented daughter. Is that right? 

JAMIE GRUMET: Yeah, yeah. I was breastfed until I was at least five, possibly six. We don’t remember because weaning just was not an issue; it just happened so gradually. But yeah, that’s what my parents did with me and I co-slept with them. I mean, it does not mean that you’re an attachment parent, but the tenants that Dr. Sears wrote eventually, they followed those just naturally. It was an instinctual thing that my mom had. They just nailed parts of development just so, so well and I really appreciate it because it helps me with my relationships to this day. 


“Yes, You’re Enough. It’s The Village That Isn’t Enough.”


LISA REAGAN: And you go into that in the book. This is a comprehensive guide to raising a secure child and it is really about these baselines for lifelong wellness, the optimal actions you can take as a parent to support biological imperatives for your child. What you address, which I think is the modern part of this book, is the truth, not just the truth about how traumatized you were by that TIME cover shoot – how you were attacked and what your family was put through – but your agony over showing up as a mother in this culture, in this instinctive evolutionary way. The compassion you have for parents is on every page of this book as you tell your story. 

JAMIE GRUMET: Thank you for saying that. Yeah, it’s interesting because it is not that I love children, it is really with the mothers, and fathers too. But I feel like especially with women. They are so trying their best and really, no one is really wanting to make a wrong move and that is where you see the anger and the judgement coming from ­­– is this place of insecurity and fear. I  focus on loving and being gentle with those new mothers, because we’re not failing, it’s that society is failing us and we just have to adapt to it while it is changing right now. 

It is an interesting time in the world because I think that there is going to be a huge culture shift. This is the time that we can really make moves to support women better because there is going to have to be a new normal anyway. People keep saying that term; it’s just kind of obnoxious, but at the same time, there are things that are just going to change permanently even after this pandemic is over, and I think one of those things is being a better community.

LISA REAGAN: Right. To that point, one of the features in The Atlantic this month, is What America Asks of Working Parents is Impossible. The article features this screaming head broken into pieces. It was an excellent image to go with that article. Wyou’re saying about trying to find some new normal is going to require us first to own that we haven’t supported families, mothers, fathers, children, and our statistics for wellness in this country bear that out. We’re at the bottom of all developed nations for family policies, according to UNICEF’s rankings.

What’s happening now with the pandemic has really brought to the surface a lot of these failures of our social safety nets and public policy to support parents. In your book, you go through this in a number of ways. I should say that on the cover of your TIME Magazine cover, was the phrase “Are You Mom Enough?” You address that in your book, and you say, “You’re enough, it’s the village that’s not enough.”

JAMIE GRUMET: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you’re more than enough. We are social species. We cannot survive alone, our well-being goes down. Even if we have every single thing that we need to survive, we typically die earlier when we’re not in community. We have health issues that pop up, and overall mental health is extremely low, because that’s just how we have been created. That’s how we’ve evolved and we need to start embracing that rather than this idea of complete autonomy, which I think is this very misunderstood thing. 

We need to find our way, our wholeness, on our own. That is the issue too, with companies with jobs, forcing people to live lives that aren’t theirs the majority of the week and then put a little bit of space in for their family and for just them. So, then they’re not even the main character of their own story. That’s the sort of autonomy we need to feel whole all of the time, every single part of our life. It is not even that we’re overworked, it’s just the lack of ability to feel you are integrated into every part of your life every single day of the week. We are all part time parents when moms need to go to work and leave their children.  There is something about that, that has really stuck with me, just to see the guilt that gets weighed on people who are trying to just survive is so heavy and it does not need to be like that. We can be a capitalist country and we can be industrialized and all of that, but we have to start reexamining how we take care of each other and how we treat our employees. 

LISA REAGAN: Right. Well, there is an interview on Kindred with Joan Williams, who has pioneered worklife law for mothers and fathers and she says that the worker model in the United States is based on toxic masculinity values. This is why we have this culture that does not support families. Don’t even bring up your family, no you’re not going to get a sick day, paid leave, maternity care, health care, childcare. 

Twenty years ago, when parents discovered attachment parenting through Williams Sears’ books, I knew I had to make a choice of going into an office in pantyhose or taking care of my baby. I could do my job at home, but not very well, but I wanted to be with my child, especially after reading Sears and Jean Liedloff, and a lot of the books that were coming out about this neurobiological piece that you don’t get to do again with children. I wanted to create wellness, but back then parents in my circles did not understand, or talk about, the systemic nature of our Dominator Culture and what we were really up against. At Kindred, we now call this impossible choice the Bio-Cultural Conflict. We didn’t coin that term, Joseph Chilton Pearce did. But we are made to choose between biological imperatives and cultural imperatives. Cultural imperatives of paying rent and surviving. Your book, I think, softens the martyr mom expectations and says no, no, no, this is Modern Attachment Parenting. Your personal stories are fantastic, and you’re very humble in sharing them. 

JAMIE GRUMET: Yeah, and you know what, I think that the principles that Dr. Sears wrote about, I think that was kind of the foundation or the ground. People like to be told what to do, so those are extremely helpful. But I think that they have been banged into us so much that they’ve gotten kind of twisted and people think that is all attachment parenting is. I was hoping to carry AP into the modern world because attachment parenting now has become part of mainstream culture, even if it is misunderstood. This is really like, yeah, you know those things, but here is why humans did them to begin with and you don’t actually have to do them technically, you just have to understand how they work and then you can choose and adapt them to your home and to your life. It is a little bit more empowering for the parent, I think. M

LISA REAGAN: It really is. I love your section in the book on myths and misperceptions. You take these on one at a time.

JAMIE GRUMET: Right. There are a lot of things that need to be fixed and but, the exchange that we are gaining something culturally, like a car is a great example of that. We can cover a major amount of ground every single day if then, we are not just hunter-gatherers, walking and doing low impact cardio anymore. But then there is something that gets taken away too, and that is our low impact cardio and heart health. We have to adapt to something new, which is like a treadmill. Sometimes those are boring and tedious, but still worth it for, you know, modern times. I would not stop using a car just so that we would have low impact cardio again. So, there are certain things that we may give up that are part of our biology that we need and we can kind of mediate with something else and then there are some things that I think are just broken that we need to revert back to and a lot of that is parenting. 


Alanis Morissette: On Her Foreword To The Book


LISA REAGAN: One of the things that is really precious about this book is the forward by Alanis Morissette, who shares how she saw you on the cover and thought, “I need to reach out to her”. (Read the foreword here.)

JAMIE GRUMET: It was really isolating. I was really alone, but still supporting attachment parenting. The first time, I remember my ex husband was reading something and I guess Alanis Morissette said something about me. I had never met her before and he was like, “Alanis Morisette said that she agreed and said everything positive about you.” I was like, “What?”, and then she wrote an entire article for the Huffington Post and was extremely kind when she was talking about me in it.

This was before we had met. Then we happened to share the same pediatrician, so she asked for him to connect us and so he did and now she’s my best friend. She’s like family. She’s like my sister. But, again, it was her complete and full immersement and understanding as a scholar, not only as an expert in attachment parenting, but she is a true academic. She really really had put in the work to understand attachment to where she had enough empathy to think about me, too, and I think that says alot about her. 

LISA REAGAN: Can you talk a little bit about the aftermath of the TIME Magazine cover, because I know in your book, you talk about realizing you were still recovering from birth trauma and again, being raised as a second generation attachment parenting child, you’re modeling what you know, and in celebration of the 20th anniversary of attachment parenting back then, but there were some real dark times after that cover.

JAMIE GRUMET: Oh, it was awful. I think that I couldn’t eat. I got down to like 80 pounds because I was just so stressed out. It is a strange feeling of not being able to… it felt like impending doom. It was just this massive, massive amount of anxiety and it went from my post-birth trauma that wasn’t being treated, because at that point, it had been over three years. But everything got refocused into the trauma from the aftermath of the cover. Not wanting to play the victim was a really important thing for me and I did not have the understanding at that time or that age.

I look back at myself and I think of how sweet Alanis was. I didn’t want to make it look like, “How dare they”, or “Poor me”, or anything like that. I willingly knew and chose to do this, but I wasn’t expecting the aftermath. It was okay that this happens and you kind of just have to suck it up and deal with it and not say anything negative because that was your choice. Really trying to just own the fact that I did that even if I was not happy, but there was still an immense amount of trauma from a lot of other things and I needed to acknowledge it a little bit better and I needed to take care of myself more.

And that’s what we teach boys, just to suck it up and move on, you know It’s like, life isn’t fair, and it’s not. And by understanding our trauma and healing and growing, we’re not playing the victim. We are literally just acknowledging why we feel or we behave the way we do and we can use that as power to really change our entire well-being. I wish that I was around for my 26-year-old self when all of that happened, but I wasn’t. 

LISA REAGAN: You are here now for a lot of 26-year-olds with this book. You really really are. 

JAMIE GRUMET: I hope so. I know. And that’s the one thing that makes it all feel kind of like it’s worth it, even after I had HELLP syndrome. Working overseas even with women who were dying of preeclampsia and being able to provide something to the effect that, it wasn’t even that they were experiencing the same thing as me, it was just that I understood that I was surviving because of where I was living at the time and situationally, I was really lucky. Being able to help other people who have gone through similar things as me or just to help prep other people and help them be more prepared than I was, that is healing for me too. 


Parenting Through Judgement


LISA REAGAN: Well, in this section in your book on Parenting Through Judgement, you talk about how you came out the other side of the trauma by returning to your instinct, and the attachment parenting background supported you through that return to yourself. 

JAMIE GRUMET: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it’s so funny, and I think that’s why being securely attached is also, I think, why things hurt the way they did – because you have people that are like, “I can’t believe, this is just about attention”. We are social, we need attention, but it wasn’t like I exploited attention, and that doesn’t feel good because I was attachment parented. Right?

The reasons I was not dealing with it was because I don’t have some sort of antisocial personality disorder where I could actually feed into all of that negative attention and, you know, get off on it in some way. It was the irony of that, but it also helped heal me, too. Fame is such an addictive thing, too. I see how things go wrong for people who are lay people like me who weren’t expecting it, or people who have sought fame and they’re already traumatized is probably the reason they’re seeking it. I think even Alanis said it, they just get re-traumatized by the fame. It is not a pleasant experience at all, but it is addictive, and those are all parts of insecure attachment and attachment issues in adults, which can still be healed. It’s just a lot different when you are dealing with those stages of development and you’re getting them when they’re children or in very early months of attachment, too. I goes into that in the book as well. 


An International Worldview of Attachment


“… putting a bunch of insane women together in a moms group and expecting all of them to get along, first off, or support each other, is the most insane, crazy idea that I’ve ever heard in my life. What you see in other cultures is elders, younger women, even men pop in here and there too. You see that everybody in the community is taking care of this baby and mom is the primary caregiver, but she is also allowing this child to get raised by different generations with her and she is not exhausted, like it is here. Because we are hoarding this child and then expecting to get all of our emotional support with a bunch of people who are not doing well either, frankly.”

– JAMIE GRUMET

LISA REAGAN: Right, so earlier you were talking about how your travel around the world also prepared you and not just your childhood, for having this normalized view of attachment and biological parenting. Can you speak to that for a moment? 

JAMIE GRUMET: Yeah, I was traveling with my parents since I was very, very little. I think I might have spent my second birthday in France. I have been able to have this really privileged life from the beginning, of being able to see other cultures and from all ends: from extremely wealthy, developed Western countries to very underdeveloped countries. I have been able to observe what I have witnessed in each place and that helped me solidify my views. I was already parented like that, so it didn’t seem jarring to look at, which it is normal, if you haven’t been exposed to it, but for me, it was just so normal.

When I was living in Ghana, the youngest that you would find a child weaned, and that was if most of the time, was three. Three was basically typical and there’s reasons for it in places where nutrition is not the same as it is here, but it does not make any difference that it is still positive here. It is just not about survival, life and death survival anymore as it is in another place, but you also see the community aspect of cross-nursing and wet-nursing and really how it brings an entire community together because everybody takes care of everyone else’s children. No one is tapped out because of that too.

You don’t put a bunch of moms in a mom group with all six-month-old babies. Your hormones are making you insane. Your hormones are trying to keep that baby alive right now. You have this child that is coming into the world very early compared to other primates, and your body is basically making you feel a little nuts. That’s the way it is.

And so, putting a bunch of insane women together in a moms group and expecting all of them to get along, first off, or support each other, is the most insane, crazy idea that I’ve ever heard in my life. What you see in other cultures is elders, younger women, even men pop in here and there too. You see that everybody in the community is taking care of this baby and mom is the primary caregiver, but she is also allowing this child to get raised by different generations with her and she is not exhausted, like it is here. Because we are hoarding this child and then expecting to get all of our emotional support with a bunch of people who are not doing well either, frankly.

LISA REAGAN: Which is why Dr. Sears – and you pointed this out in your book under balancing and boundaries – put in his work in all caps, IF YOU RESENT IT, CHANGE IT.

JAMIE GRUMET: Yes.

LISA REAGAN: Because that’s not the culture we’re in.  We don’t have allomothers, as they’re called, waiting to step in for us. 

JAMIE GRUMET: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s just, if you are feeling resentful towards anything, yourself, your child, first off, that’s normal. You are not a bad person. You are not weak or anything like that. There is something wrong, so you have to change it to adapt. Night weaning is a great thing. I wouldn’t have been able to breastfeed as long as I could if I did not night wean Arum around two, I think, because I hadn’t slept in two years at that point. I thought it would just stop on it’s own and I was like, “No, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.” And I was like, you know what? I’m a crazy person now. I think they say if you don’t sleep for two days straight, you are certifiably insane, and I was like, it’s been two years of this happening and I am for sure insane. Yeah, yeah. 

LISA REAGAN: I was a ninja mom – just trying to get out of bed without creaking anything so he didn’t wake up. 

JAMIE GRUMET: I know, I know! I know. You breathe and they wake back up and you’re just like, I don’t understand how this happens. Yeah, there were just so many different things that I did that I think people thought I was crazy for doing them, but they just made my life a little bit easier. I wore Aram as long as humanly possible in the Ergo baby front pack the whole time during his naps. I was like, I could be as long as I want, he didn’t wake up in there, and it did kind of hurt my back eventually when he got too big, but people were like, why don’t you just put him down and you could have alone time? I was like, that adds more stress to my day than just carrying him around while I’m doing the dishes, or whatever, which I could do and he wouldn’t wake up, it was crazy. So anyway. 


Attachment Parenting An Adopted Child


“You realize, at that point, he has just lost literally everything. He has lost his culture, his language. He has lost anybody who looks like him. At that point, just coming into our family, there’s all this trauma of not having his mother anymore. Breastfeeding was the one thing from home that I could give him.”

JAMIE GRUMET

LISA REAGAN: Well, you know, another really rich section in this book is attachment parenting an adopted child because you got to do that. 

JAMIE GRUMET: And that was kind of a learning experience even for our adoption specialist and for me and I met some moms who had done it before me too, but we were all figuring this out together because there is not a lot of information on it, too. So that was really exciting for me to be able to talk about, because I do think that it’s a little unusual, especially with an older child, you don’t expect that. It was an international adoption. So, being able to have him raised in an attachment style, which is how he was raised from birth on before he came into our family, that was really really rewarding for me. And he’s so sweet now. 

LISA REAGAN: That’s really nice. It was a continuation of care for him. 

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JAMIE GRUMET: It was something else. Like being able to breastfeed him, which was completely encouraged by our adoption specialist. She was like, give him everything you would give your biological son. So, seeing that he was still suckling properly was really interesting because it meant for sure that he had been breastfed recently. They lose the ability to suckle when a lot of time has passed. You realize, at that point, he has just lost literally everything. He has lost his culture, his language. He has lost anybody who looks like him. At that point, just coming into our family, there’s all this trauma of not having his mother anymore. Breastfeeding was the one thing from home that I could give him.

It really helped Aram understand and solidify Samuel’s place in our family because it was the thing that Aram got from me. So, when he saw that, I think he saw that he wasn’t a friend coming over to play, Samuel was his equal and that really helped us all attach to each other.

It takes a minute. You can’t just give someone a baby and expect them to immediately bond with that baby, or a small child. I kept thinking that I was babysitting someone’s child when he came home. It was just took a second and I just kept thinking, “When is his mom going to come pick him up?” And then I’d be like, oh my gosh, you can’t believe, it’s just this feeling of you’re watching someone else’s child and then your brain starts to adapt and develop and just latch on. It sounds silly even to say now, because Samuel and Aram are exactly the same. I don’t think of them differently. I don’t look at them differently. I think of them both as like my blood, too. So it is just this thing your brain wires to, to connect. 

LISA REAGAN: You know, I have watched your children grow up over the years and they are becoming young men now. 

JAMIE GRUMET: They’re more than young men now. I mean, Samuel is like a full grown adult now. I think he’s like six feet tall now. His voice changed. It is so funny. He has become really really close as a friend, too. I am still his mom, it’s not like a buddy buddy thing, but I have so much fun with him. I feel so lucky to even have them and to appreciate these stages. It’s really sad to see old videos though. I found one the other day and I was looking at them and I was like, “Oh my gosh, they are so cute. Did I know they were this cute then? Why didn’t I know they were this cute?” Actually, I was talking to Alanis about it, and she was like, “It’s because we are just all trying to hold it together then that we can’t even realize it.”

LISA REAGAN: Yeah, oh gosh. 

JAMIE GRUMET: I was like, “Why didn’t I know this at the time?” I was beside myself with how cute they were. Why wasn’t I thinking this everyday? And it was just because, we are so tired that we are just trying to keep it together and take care of them.


Attachment Parenting As A Single Mother


LISA REAGAN: Your family situation changed in the last couple of years, so another group that you are able to speak to are single mothers and single parents.

JAMIE GRUMET: Yeah, I got a divorce in that time frame too. I mean, that’s a big group of people. A lot of the time, attachment people stay married. I mean, my marriage was the strongest when we were the most hardcore, in the midst of attachment, when the children are most needing it. When they grow up, it’s a different sort of attachment, right? And the child has more autonomy. But from two to five is a really big big age for attachment and that is when my marriage was strongest, honestly, with my ex-husband.

I think people think that AP causes divorce or it is too much focus on the child and it is really not. I was the happiest in my marriage and so was – I can speak for Brian – to say, that was probably the strongest time in our marriage as well. There are just so many reasons of why we got divorced that have nothing to do with our family. I think that is something that needs to be talked about too. There are alot of single parents, and it definitely does make it harder, especially if you are not co-parenting and it is just you solely parenting and you want the attachment, it can be really complicated. So, just trying to speak to them. I don’t have that situation. I have a coparent that is just as present as I am, so I wanted to be as kind as I could without making it sound like I knew everything about that situation as well. 

LISA REAGAN: Right. Well, I know Dr. McKenna and his sleep study talk about single parents and working parents. One of the reasons that he does his cosleeping studies is because it is normal in his country for parents to come home and want to have the bonding time that they’re able to get with their babies and children is at night. So this piece of the single and working parent and being able to do attachment parenting and being able to have this piece of it has been addressed by him. And, of course, you do as well in your book. 

JAMIE GRUMET: Yeah, and that’s the big thing. I didn’t realize with the divorce how different it would be. Then suddenly, it’s abnormal, it’s really not supposed to be like that: having your children leave you for a portion of a week or whatever the time frame is. That’s not normal, no matter what, there’s a grief to that. But it is, right? It just sometimes happens. And so, for me, I didn’t realize how much co-sleeping with them when they were little really helped me to reconnect, because I was getting as much time as I could with them.

But now, Aram is finally too old to sleep with me. You know when they are little and they just want to jump in bed? He has no interest and that was really hard for me because that was how I was reconnecting with them when they came to my house.  So, I have noticed it because I don’t have it anymore – how big of a deal it really is. So Dr. McKenna goes into very specifically if you’re breastfeeding what’s safe and what’s not safe, and I put this in my book, and that really does matter.

LISA REAGAN: That’s right. We have all kinds of interviews and articles from Dr. McKenna and he had a new safe sleep book that came out last year. 

JAMIE GRUMET: I know, I love him. I just adore him so much.


Adult Attachment: No, You’re Not A “Lost Cause”


LISA REAGAN: Awe. I know. Well, again, I am so happy that this book exists and that you were able to pour so much of your heart and experience and compassion into it for parents. I am just wondering, is there anything else that you would like to share? 

JAMIE GRUMET: I am trying to think. I think that for me, I have been discussing this with some of the funniest people because I’ll meet them and it’s a totally different industry, but alot of them are men. They will find out about me or the fact that I have this book, or the fact that I am considered a parenting expert, which is still funny, I mean, I’m an anthropologist, but I still think it’s funny because of how much I’m not really in the world of moms, like in that world of parenting and baby items and things like that very often. I am in a different kind of social time of my life. So it is really sweet when people start asking me those questions, and it is before they have kids alot of the time, and they’ll be really interested in what I have to say. A lot of the people are concerned if they are lost causes because they did not have that sort of parenting, or they have had alot of trauma. And that’s not true. We all have some sort of attachment issues. 

LISA REAGAN: Yes, we do. 

JAMIE GRUMET: If you have insecure attachment, that’s common. I think most of us are anxious avoidant. That is just because of our society. It is not even necessarily your parents, but it is just the trauma that we face as a society as a whole. You can still correct that, you can still heal from that.

There are a lot of books in the resources part of my book about secure attachment in adult relationships, too. That attachment is about you. Connecting as a community is how we operate like a well-oiled machine. So, society will heal from our connection. We will get better from it. Everything reverts back to attachment as a foundation for making us functional and healthy. You are not a lost cause if you have an attachment disorder, which we all probably do, and just to look into it for yourself as well. 

LISA REAGAN: That’s right, and you’ve said that might even be your next book. 

JAMIE GRUMET: Yeah, that’s something I would really like to focus on is adult attachment because it is so misunderstood. In the academic world, there is a lot of research on it, but it really has not gone mainstream for a lay person and if I have a gift, it is really just connecting people in a way that isn’t intimidating. That’s how I really think of it too. It is not me getting  down on my knees and explaining it to a child. It’s really how I view and understand the science and then apply it to my own life, because I need that too.

LISA REAGAN: And what we find out anyway, is that we grow up with our children. You get to do your own childhood over again anyway, so you may as well understand these things. 

JAMIE GRUMET: It’s so healing. Absolutely, even with adult relationships, friendships and romantic relationships, it is so healing. So using those people wisely is always a good idea as well. 

LISA REAGAN: Thank you so much again for coming on and talking with us. I just love this book. Kindred will be posting some excerpts from it over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for those. Thank you, Jamie!



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