How do we build strong, healthy relationships? What is our contribution to the relationships we participate in within our families, workplaces, and most intimate relationships?
In this blog, you’ll read a condensed transcript of a conversation Juli had with Dr. John Van Epp about his Relationship Attachment Model (RAM), and the five key bonding forces involved in healthy relationships.
Prefer to listen? You can also listen to the full conversation here.
Juli:
I’d love for you to give an overview of what this model is and why it’s unique from how we typically approach relationships.
John:
It was, you know, all the way back in the 1980s, I had just started working in a clinic for counseling. It struck me as I was counseling people that they would have confusion about their relationship. I was really steeped in relationship theory and had a lot of info in my head from all of my coursework. But when I was sitting with somebody I was trying to simplify it all. [I thought] is there any way we can reduce this down to something and make it visual because the relationship world is so invisible? So out of these interactions came a chart.
I’m gonna give five words that describe five key bonding forces that operate in every single relationship. So the first one is how you know somebody and I will say these are two-way streets so I know you Juli and you know me but we haven’t talked for many many years so that wherever the ‘know’ level was 16, 18 years ago, it is a lot lower today than it was then, right? So the range reflects how much you know somebody, and time, togetherness, talking; those three T’s greatly impact whether it’s going up or going down. And even in a marriage married couples can start falling out of the ‘know’.
When the ‘know’ is going up, in a lot of ways you would say it is a major contributor to how you feel connected or bonded or close. So if I have a friend, and I’m interested in them and they’re equally interested in me, and we stay in the ‘know’ and we share a lot, a lot of people would say after they’ve met and shared something with a friend that was receptive and received it and also reciprocated, you walk away feeling tighter, closer, more what I would call bonded. So these five areas starting with ‘know’ are what we call relational bonds because they are the very glue, the contributor to how you feel connected. It is what a relationship is. It’s a bond. It’s a connection.
The second one is ‘trust’. So just to differentiate, you can know somebody a lot and the more you know them, the less you trust them. What you get to know can deflate your trust. But there are people that maybe you don’t know very well, like I have to have surgery next week, and I don’t know my surgeon very well, but my trust hopefully is high in him.
So trust, what is trust? Trust is in your mind, you form almost like an image or a representation of who that person is. We do it automatically. It’s part of, in psychology, what they call an attachment theory. When a newborn is first forming an image of the caregiver, they call that a model.
It’s a representation and it is that image that becomes a template for how they then form attachments. So it’s a big part of how we are attached. So when I’m not with my wife of 45 years, I don’t need to know exactly how she feels every moment of the day because my mind knows her well enough that it plays out. Like if I’m coming home and I think she’s upset about something, I’m playing out already. It’s what produces expectations, right? It’s this mental representation. Well, that’s what produces trust. So you can know a person a lot, but in your mind, your opinion of them, that representation tells you that they are not trustworthy in one way or another.
So that’s ‘know’ and ‘trust’. Now, ‘rely’ is more of how you meet needs, like what you do, and how you are dependable. So to use my surgery, if I know my surgeon a lot, but I don’t trust my surgeon, I have a belief that he’s not gonna do a good job, but I’m going under the knife, then my reliance on him is a super high, which is a very anxiety provoking valley. Knowing somebody a lot, trusting them a little, but relying on them because somehow your lives are intertwined and you have to depend on them for something that you don’t believe they’re gonna do a good job on. And so that could be a coworker, right? And there, I think you describe the tension in a lot of marriages too. Our lives are intertwined and I know you well enough to know that I don’t feel like I can trust you in this area, but I’m still relying on you. that’s tough. I found that in that little valley, that ‘high know, low trust, high rely’, there’s something in us as human beings that insight and understanding doesn’t always solve, but it gives us a sense of empowerment.
‘Commitment’ is the fourth one. So commitment is not just, you know, the vows that you made, because this model applies to every relationship. So you have commitment and friendship. So friendships fall apart because commitment begins to waiver and our other commitments crowd it out, right? We can only have so many commitments and things get crowded out, but it’s the priority, the heart priority, the time priority, the investment. And it is also the way that we put a label. There are labels. This is my life-partner. This is my spouse. This is a person that I am most…etc. Labels do carry, you know, certain levels or ranges of commitment, certain meanings of commitment. And you hope you live up to them, right? So you honor those labels, but ‘commitment’ has a practical heart side of priority investment.
And then the last is ‘touch’. And so that could be, if it’s a parent-child, that could be affectionate touch, friendly touch, playful touch. I have one eight-year-old grandson that hugs like crazy, and he gives the best hugs and long hugs. I mean, he’s just this hugging, loving guy. And then I have a five-year-old grandson that he’ll never hug me. He’ll punch me and do multiple punches, and he’ll grab me and he’ll throw me around. And I’m like, I love how he ‘hugs’ me. So you know, we have different ways of showing, love through touch. And I would also say touch is also presence. So eye contact and how present you are with a person. It’s because we’re physical beings, relationships have a physicality, but we’re also sexual beings and touch can be sexual. All those five areas: know, trust, rely, commit, touch. Touch, whether it’s sexual, we definitely know from research, sex triggers, chemicals in the brain, even arousal triggers those chemicals. It’s extremely bonding and it actually prompts the other levels. If you looked up on YouTube, you know, ‘friendly touch and oxytocin and trust’, they would call oxytocin the trust molecule because as you touch it activates oxytocin, which activates another bonding area in my model, which I would say is a major bonding area. So these, they all interact.
And bottom line is this, once you understand, these major bonding areas of relationship, it empowers you to know what you’re in charge of. And that’s really the core, I believe, we have to be actively engaged in running the relationships that we have.