Why Some People Resist Relational Neuroscience {EP 241}

Robyn: So let's talk about that today. Why is this hard information for some folks to believe? You know, how can we connect with folks who are skeptical or outright rejecting of this relational neuroscience, while also staying true to our own beliefs and our own values. I'm sure you've had the experience of trying to maybe share some of this information with somebody or, you know, offering something that it can actually feel a little bit provocative, right? This idea of like all behavior makes sense, or no behavior is maladaptive, or even, you know, regulating connected kids who feel safe do well, you know, Ross Greene's way of describing that, right, like kids do well when they can, and maybe you've had a really strong adverse reaction to one of those ideas. So first of all, let's just normalize that, because the first time I heard my mentor Bonnie Badenoch say no, behavior is maladaptive. Wouldn't say I had like this overt negative reaction, because I did really trust her, but I did have, like, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense to me. Reaction like these behaviors are pretty darn maladaptive. And if you've read Raising Kids With Big, Baffling Behaviors, you've heard the story. I mean, I had previously been trained with the word maladaptive, and we use that word in a very positive way. Actually, it was a very generous way of of seeing these kids behaviors and acknowledging that they started as something adaptive. They started as a protective behavior, protective response, and and it made a lot of sense where they started from. It was just that they were no longer adaptive, and now they were maladaptive. 

Robyn: And that made a lot of sense to me from a science perspective and from an attachment theory perspective. And so to hear this mentor I really, really trusted, she said, no, behavior is maladaptive. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So skepticism makes sense, right? In fact, it wouldn't be great if we all just believed exactly what somebody told us, right? It makes sense to have some skepticism, but you've also probably been met at times with just outright hostility or rejection. I know, again, I certainly have, I have, you know, when I was practicing as a therapist and I was seeing clients regularly, occasionally, I would have a client who is absolutely opposed to some of these ideas, and occasionally, people will reach out to me still and let me know that they think these ideas are complete hogwash. So let's talk a little bit about why. Why this resistance is happening beyond the surface level of they've never heard it before. They just don't believe it. Right? Let's go deeper than that, and not because I want to equip you to have a better debate, but because, like everything else, I think that they're that that behavior makes sense, and when we can understand what's driving that behavior. It helps us stay more in a compassionate place, more in a curiosity place, more in our own Owl brain place. 

Robyn: That means we're going to be able to stay more connected to that person, and whether or not they're open to hearing some new ideas, if we meet them with a nervous system of safety and compassion, that that matters, that that really matters, just like it matters in our kids, even if we don't see immediate behavior change. Polyvagal theory tells us that the nervous system is longing to rest into safety and connection and social baseline theory tells us that connection and connection mode is our default. We're expecting it when it's not available. That's actually a cue of danger and interpersonal neurobiology tells us that we're always moving towards integration now without deep diving super far into each of those concepts right now, what I'm going to offer up is the way that these theories interact with one another suggests that our nervous systems are actually really drawn towards relational neuroscience. Our nervous systems actually know the truth that relational neuroscience is offering us. Our nervous system knows that we're wired for connection, right? That we're wired for safety, that we're longing for safety, and when we're feeling safe. We're open and available for connection and cooperation. Our nervous system knows these pieces. Our nervous system knows the truth of relational neuroscience. 

Robyn: This actually is why it can feel both so right and so threatening, because it really does land and connect and resonate with the nervous system. Coherence does that when the nervous system is met with a truth that it inherently knowns, it's bringing coherence and coherence is like a like a relief. It's a knowing, right? Like, oh my gosh, yes, of course, that's true. So these ideas offered by relational neuroscience bring our bodies this this knowingness. It resonates and it contradicts so many of our ingrained beliefs, so many of the things that we were taught when we were growing up, when we were being parented, when we were going to school, if you're doing this work professionally, so much of what we've been taught about people, humans, relationships, you know what people are at their core? How we get people to act good instead of bad, right? Relational neuroscience actually contradicts so much of that, and that's hard to make sense of. It's hard to make sense of this core in our bones knowing, and have it contradict everything we've kind of always known and also everything we've always been taught by people that we really trust. So many of us were raised by parents who were also doing the very, very very best that they can with the capacity of their own nervous system, with what the information that was available to them right, doing absolutely the very best that they can. But we were raised inside a culture of punishment, inside a behaviorist kind of world view that people behave good if they're rewarded, and when people behave bad, they need to be punished so that they don't behave bad anymore and only behave good because they're punished when they behave bad. And if we listen to those ideas very closely. What we're hearing underneath all of that is that their core people are bad, and if we don't create pain or suffering, they're going to continue to be bad. You know, the reason people are good is because it is. More pain and suffering to be bad, right? Because of the inflicted punishment that other people are imposing.

Robyn: That the message underneath that is that at at our core, we are bad. And the message underneath relational neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology is actually the opposite. Relational neuroscience says that humans are good when we are feeling safe, when we are feeling safe, we have capacity for a relationship and cooperation and interconnectedness, and not just have capacity for it, but that's our preference, and that that it helps us be our best selves. That's how our brains develop. All that kind of stuff. Now, relational neuroscience certainly doesn't suggest that people always act good. That's, of course, not true at all. There's obviously lots of things that are bad and lots of things that people do that are bad. What relational neuroscience says is that's not because that person's a bad person, it's because their nervous system is responding in exactly the way that it believes it needs to, based on their current experience of safety and all of their previous experiences put together, right? And again, also, relational neuroscience isn't saying well, because that's true, and because people are always doing the best they can. If they're doing very bad, we just say like, well, I guess that's the best they can do. That's not true at all. Relational neuroscience says we still have boundaries, we still have expectations, but how we approach that person, how we see them, how we implement those boundaries. Right? The energy behind that shifts if we have this belief that people are doing the very best they can, and that all behavior makes sense, but y'all this science is really in direct contradiction to how so many of us were raised, and how so many of us were taught about, you know, what to believe about humans, whether we were taught that very overtly and concretely, or if it was more covert, a little more subtle, just sort of the implicit, a kind of just how we were existing in the world. Was inside these beliefs, right? That people are bad and they only do good if they're punished, right? We kind of existed inside of that. 

Robyn: And then, of course, some people, some of us, were told that very overtly and very directly. So now to be confronted with some other ideas can be very disorienting, to be able to hold together some new truths with how deeply they contradict everything that we taught we're taught growing up. I mean that that leaves us grappling with this question of, oh my gosh, was was everything I taught wrong? And that is very threatening, not just to the way that we're parenting, but to our core beliefs about being in this world we create in a way like this energetic self, and part of how that energetic self is knitted together is based on some of these core beliefs that orient us to how we move through the world. And so those core beliefs get shaken up a little that can really threaten kind of, our sense of self, our sense of who we are, and some folks have enough safety in their inner world and in their environments, right? They have enough felt safety to be able to grapple with that contradiction, and some folks don't. For some folks the possibility of examining those long held beliefs, and for some folks, the possibility of having to kind of undo everything we thought we knew about how the world works. For some folks, it's just too threatening. We don't have the safety to do it, and so we hold on, sometimes very tightly, to these old beliefs, because of protection mode, because of protection mode, because of shifting and moving into curiosity and considering the possibility like this is about being right or wrong. It's about curiosity and shifting into possibility. For some folks, moving from protection mode into connection mode, like that is just too threatening. It's too vulnerable. It really creates so much dysregulation in our in the inner world that they protect against that dysregulation by by holding on to these beliefs. 

Robyn: You know, it can be really hard to develop new ideas about people, but also about parenting, because it starts to threaten the way that we were parented, and it leaves us vulnerable to questioning, well, what about the ways I was parented and what about what I learned about myself because of how I was parented, and what about what I learned about my parents? Right? That as kids, we are really biologically driven to trust the people taking care of us, and if we kind of have to choose between, do I trust you, or do I trust myself? Mostly kids default to, well, I guess I can't trust myself. I have to trust you. And in some ways, what we're talking about is I'm trusting you, and the story that you're telling me about myself, which is, I'm a really bad kid. I'm a really bad person, and the only way I will act good is if you hurt me, whether that be physically or emotionally, right? And kids aren't necessarily noticing that. That's what they're learning about themselves, but that is what they're learning about themselves. And then to become an adult and to be in a parenting role yourself, or just to be, you know, offered some of these new ideas from relational neuroscience, means we really have to ask, like, oh, wait, maybe that wasn't true. Maybe that wasn't true. And that brings up so much. It brings up so much about our sense of safety, right, and how we believed certain things. It can bring up so much grief and realizing that our needs weren't met, that we weren't seen for who our true core self is, which is a really precious, amazing person who, when feeling safe and connected, that true self can emerge. 

Robyn: And y'all grief, you know this grief is powerful, grief feels bad, and sometimes that grief can just feel too big. And so we resist these ideas. We resist these ideas from a relational neuroscience. It's a way of protecting ourselves from an experience that feels so big that we can't manage it. I mean, this isn't just about our kids' behavior and our parenting. This is about how we view human nature, morality, justice, and our worldview, and what we think and believe about those things is is very intimately linked to our identity, our sense of self, our sense of safety. You know what we know about the world and how we move through the world, and some of us, again, some of us have enough safety to start to question if some of those things are true, or if some of those things could be different based on information we have now, right? Some of us have enough safety to to ask those things. Some of us don't, right. Some of us don't have enough safety in our nervous system. Some of us have just way too much vulnerability in our own nervous system to be able to consider such a shift, right? The the shift, the questioning, the curiosity, it is so destabilizing, and resisting those ideas can help us maintain our own kind of internal and external stability.

Robyn: So far, I've talked about kind of, like, really big, really big ideas, right? But the truth is, is also, like, you know, relational neuroscience is makes sense when you're in connection mode. And a lot of folks just simply aren't spending a lot of time in connection mode right now, right? And so think about, maybe our educators, and everything that's happening, you know, in in the lives of our educators, you know, professionally, and what they're navigating right now, and what they're, you know, trying to do every day when they go to work, it makes sense that they are spending, some of them, a lot of time in protection mode. And so if you have an edging, you know, or working. With an educator, your child has a teacher who's spending a lot of time in protection mode because of everything that's happening now in 2025 and they were schooled in a completely different paradigm. And they were raised in a completely different paradigm. It makes so much sense that your child might have a teacher who is very, very, very committed to behavior charts, very, very, very committed to point systems, very, very, very committed to interpreting your child's behavior as willful disobedience, right? It just makes so much sense that that's how that they're, you know, how they're seeing and viewing things. When folks are really entrenched in protection mode, or they're really dysregulated that they just simply don't have the capacity to take in new ideas, we become really committed to what we already think also are, the more dysregulated we get, the more our brain pulls from previous neural networks. 

Robyn: So I'm trying to, like, choose my words really carefully so that I'm not confusing. The more dysregulated we are, the more the brain will activate and light up previously stored neural networks, neural networks that have had a lot of activation in them, right? And so if we were raised to believe people are bad unless we hurt them and get them to act good, that's a lot of years of learning that that's a very well worn neural pathway. Now we're getting some new information, we're having some new ideas, and we're making new neural pathways about our beliefs, but they're not near as strong. They're not as well worn, right? And the more we just the more dysregulated we get, the more in protection mode we are, the the more we default to those kind of older, more well worn neural pathways. It's just simply how it works. This is all about neurobiology, right? It's not about rigidity or stubbornness. I mean, those are words we could use to describe the behavior, but those behaviors aren't coming from the place of a person being bad, right or difficult. They're coming from a place of of protection, of protection mode. We have cultural values of working hard and and tough love, right? And and again, this kind of all circles around that pain is what makes people good and like everything, there's an element of truth to that right to strengthen the stress response system. For example, there has to be stress. We get stronger when things are hard. So there's always an element of truth basically to everything. But we're so committed to the idea of tough love, for example, that relational neuroscience can just feel like an attack on cultural identity, and when you're in protection mode, things feel very one or the other. It's hard to rest into the true place, which 

Robyn: is what I just said, right? Like, yes, stress is not always bad. Stress does grow the stress response system. Stress makes us, you know, more capable, and stress is how we grow our frustration tolerance and all that kind of good stuff. But when we are chronically in protection mode, it's hard to hold all those truths at once that, yeah, we do need stress, but we need titrated stress. We need stress. That's what Dr. Perry talks about. Is predictable, moderate, controllable, right? And when stress goes beyond predictable, moderate, controllable, it stops being healthy. Stress that grows the stress response system. And these things are really contradictory to a lot of our cultural identity, and it can also leave us, you know, if we start thinking about new ways of seeing behavior, it can leave us feeling like, well, great, what am I supposed to do? Right? If we're if, if we don't change behavior through punishment, I have no idea what else to do, because we haven't learned a lot of other things. So all of this kind of comes together, and then it's like everything else, it starts to make perfect sense, right? It starts makes perfect sense. Why some folks feel skeptical or resist the ideas, right? And some folks. Hear some of these new ideas about relational neuroscience and seeing behavior in a new way, and they immediately start to feel shame, right? They there's, there's a way that they're like, Oh, if what you're saying is true, that means everything I've done is bad and terrible and wrong, and then I feel a lot of shame about it. It can be again, it's hard to sit in kind of the both and that we can learn new ideas and we can acknowledge that there's some things we did in the past that now that we have new ideas, we would do differently, right, without also collapsing into shame. And when you spend a lot of time in protection mode again, it's hard to hold all of those things together as true, and then becomes much easier to collapse into shame, and so we do things to protect against that shame, like, for example, being skeptical or rejecting the ideas of relational neuroscience. 

Robyn: So the next time you are connecting with somebody who seems skeptical, or who seems outright resistance or even critical, or kind of like making fun of try to remember some of these ideas, not because it's going to help you change their mind because, but because it's going to help you stay regulated. You stay more connected to your owl brain, and because that's good for you. Now, a while ago, probably a couple years ago, at this point, I did a podcast episode about what to do and your partner is not on board and that that episode is very specific to like, co-parenting partnerships, but the ideas and it could be applied to other folks. So if you're ending this, this podcast episode, you're like, okay, great, but then what am I supposed to do next? If I find myself connected to somebody who's really skeptical, go check out that episode again, even though it's about partnerships and largely about co-parenting and the ideas, and it can be transferred to other relationships and and same if you're a Club member, we have a pretty in depth masterclass about this concept, and we can apply it to other folks in our lives, but also y'all in the club. We have a masterclass about schools and working with schools. And we're using a lot of these same ideas in there, right? If you're encountering somebody in schools. And again, you could apply this to other relationships, who's feeling really skeptical or really resistant. You know, what are some ways that we could continue to connect with that person. 

Robyn: So again, if you're in the club, go to the on demand library and look for those master classes that will help you kind of deep dive into this topic a little bit more and give you some actionable ideas of what to do next. So of course, if you're not in the club, you could, well, you could come join us, but also you could come and join the free resource hub. RobynGobbel.com/freeresourcehub has like 20 plus resources. There's a lot of downloadable infographics I have, like the all behavior makes sense infographic, which is really a summary of these relational neuroscience concepts, but then also infographics on what felt safety is and what co regulation is, and what self regulation is actually and reframing oppositional defiance disorder, right? There's all these resources that you could use to support you if you are encountering somebody or you're in relationship with somebody who's feeling really skeptical, and that person is important enough in your life or in your child's life, that that you want to spend some energy, you know, trying to connect with them and trying to offer them some of these new ideas. So if, again, if you go to the resource hub, RobynGobbel.com/freeresourcehub, there's about 20ish, a little more than 20 free resources that could help you when you find yourself in a relationship with somebody who's feeling very skeptical or very resistant. 

Robyn: So here's what I want you to walk away with today, the resistance, the skepticism. It's not an indication of some kind of flaw that person has. It's an indication of how hard their nervous system is working to protect them from something that feels even scarier, even scarier. Our nervous systems really do know the truth. They really do know the truth, and we also have to trust that people's nervous systems are taking this information in at exactly the right pace that they can for them. And some folks, it's like, the instant they hear it, it's this huge sense of relief, like, Oh my gosh. It's like, I've been longing to hear this. I these ideas my whole life. Thank goodness. Some folks have that reaction, and maybe you had that reaction, and some folks have a much more resistant, skeptical reaction. We just really have to trust that their nervous system is taking it in in exactly the pace that is right for them. Well, if you are new here to The Baffling Behavior Show, baby, this is the first episode you ever stumbled upon. What you're going to want to do next is one subscribe to the podcast. That way it'll show up every week in your podcast player when a new episode is released. You can go to RobynGobbel.com/podcast and you can use the search bar there for other topics you're interested in. You can go to RobynGobbel.com/starthere, and you can subscribe to my 10 episode start here, podcast which will bring you on kind of a curated journey of being introduced to some of these new ideas. 

Robyn: Again. You can get yourself a copy of Raising Kids With Big, Baffling Behaviors anywhere books are sold or and, or you can come and join the free resource hub for RobynGobbel.com/freeresourcehub. And of course, if you could use more support, more connection, more co-regulation with me, as well as with other folks all over the world, then you're going to want to come and join us in the club. RobynGobbel.com/theclub, of course, I will get all of these links down in the show notes so you can easily, easily access them. And y'all, I will be back with you again next week. Bye!