Empowered Relationship Podcast: Your Relationship Resource And Guide · Dr. Jessica Higgins

ERP 499: Regulate to Relate: Building Embodied Safety in Love — An Interview with Aubrey Aust

·47 min·3 clips

Resentment can reveal a deeper attachment longing, not just entitlement.

1. Empowered Relationship Podcast episode 499, 'Regulate to Relate: Building Embodied Safety in Love,' centers on embodied safety in intimate relationship. 2. Dr. Jessica Higgins hosts and interviews Aubrey Aust, a writer and NYU master's candidate in relational psychology and philosophy whose work links theory and lived experience. 3. The episode asks how relational safety starts in the body and how couples can build co-regulation, trust, and long-term intimacy. 4. Aubrey says her academic path began in political theory, where she studied systems of power and desire on a structural level. 5. She explains that her focus shifted inward toward how rupture, trust, care, and connection show up in personal relationships. 6. Jessica Higgins connects Aubrey's framing to her own dissertation on conscious intimate relationship and to her earlier study of attachment research. 7. Aubrey defines relational safety as an internal sense of 'I can breathe around you' and says emotional closeness and intellectual understanding are not the whole story. 8. She invokes Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory and neuroception, naming tone of voice, facial expression, breathing patterns, and response timing as cues the nervous system tracks before thought. 9. Jessica and Aubrey also discuss Susan Johnson's EFT work and the claim that much communication is nonverbal. 10. Aubrey says social baseline theory shows that humans regulate in relation to the people around them and that co-regulation is built inside relational ecosystems. 11. The conversation repeatedly returns to the mismatch between knowing something intellectually and feeling safe in real time with another person. 12. Aubrey says many people live from protective strategies such as hyper-independence, over-functioning, shutting down, avoiding conflict, and constant people-pleasing. 13. She describes those strategies as adaptive at one point in time but capable of blocking authentic intimacy later. 14. Jessica names her own experience of using intellect to mask activation, and Aubrey agrees that this is common because the body is often not being listened to. 15. Aubrey recommends starting with small embodied checks such as noticing chest tension, voice speed, or going quiet when cues of unsafety appear. 16. She also gives practical regulation tools like pressing fingers together, grounding the feet, scanning the room, deepening the exhale, or asking 'What do you mean by that?'. 17. Jessica and Aubrey connect curiosity to resentment, expectations, and entitlement, and Aubrey says resentment often points to clearer needs and desires. 18. Aubrey says the most common underlying wish is closeness or connection, and she emphasizes that rupture and conflict are normal parts of relationship repair. 19. The interview stays calm, reflective, and instructional, with Jessica often offering examples from client work and Aubrey responding in a slow, soothing cadence. 20. Listeners who want practical language for attachment, nervous system regulation, and repair will likely engage with this episode, while people looking for a fast, entertainment-first conversation may not.

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