You & Therapy: A Deeper Look
Our past courses surreptitiously through our present life experiences. We carry in us not only our own histories, but those of our ancestors as well. I'm not exactly talking about genetics though, at least not the commonly conceptualized definition of it, anyway. I'm talking about the attachment relationships amongst previous generations, as well as those of your primary caregivers. You see, it's vital to keep in mind that along with the conscious, spoken narratives of our family histories, there is also an unconscious and intricate "feeling history," which is unspoken, poorly understood, and frequently unintegrated into our life stories.
This "feeling history" spans multiple generations and is comprised of the world (and people) one is born into. There is a climate present, made up of social and emotional circumstances, and people are the product of these. Sometimes these are traumatic, like being born into a family with many losses, or growing up amidst violence, or extreme poverty. Few would deny that such experiences will affect a person's view of life and relationships.
As human beings, we learn about ourselves and "ourselves with others," very early on. When our needs for connection, nurturance, safety, and mutual regulation are reliably met, it produces a secure attachment, a pattern of relationship that is usually predictable into our adult relationships.
If, on the other hand, the caretaker has a limited capacity to stay attuned to the infant, or in some way rejects or can't handle its needs or reactions, the baby will infer that there is something wrong with its own behavior, that perhaps they are "too much," "too needy," or "bad" in some way. These primitive "thought-feelings" will encompass the baby's feelings about themselves as well as their feelings about themselves in relationship with another, since these experiences are occurring within an interpersonal context. This discordant pattern of connection leads to an insecure attachment, with subcategories that include anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment, and sometimes a pattern with elements of each.
As you might have guessed by now, early patterns of insecure attachment are predictable into adulthood. Insecure attachment behaviors are as varied as the human beings who possess them, and beyond the scope of this writing, but you can be assured that problematic (and often repeat) relationship experiences are born of early disrupted or ambivalent attachments.
"...early patterns of relationships give us our first working knowledge of who we are, providing the foundation of our self esteem..."
Because early patterns of relationships give us our first working knowledge of who we are, providing the foundation of our self-esteem, troubled early attachments cause problems or challenges across many aspects of a person's life. They are often at the root of such varied issues as drug addiction (or other addictive behaviors), mental health disorders, compulsions, depression, anxiety, and relationship problems.
To add frustration to all of this, these patterns often occur before we have words and a cognitive structure into which to import them. We can't know that our mother's rejection of us as a baby (or child, or adolescent) had to do with her own traumatic history of rejection by her early caretakers, or that our father's alcoholism had to do with his own troubled early attachments or substance abuse issues within his family. All we feel is their detachment, or an angry gaze that meets our attempts to connect. We are left with a gut feeling of fear and a sense that we have done something terribly wrong,. that there is something terribly bad about us. And thus begins our interior picture of ourselves; our story about who we are and what to expect from the world...
People usually come to therapy because they are having some type of problem, often recurrent, in their personal or professional relationships and are at their wits end as to what to do about it. They may desperately want to get rid of some unruly part of themselves that they have identified as the source of their problems. And while I can empathize with wanting to quickly remove something that causes one distress, I feel it would be a mistake not to explore what these "problem parts" have to say. They can contain important aspects of one's story, which may include a sad (and/or rage-filled) history of abuse, neglect, loss, or disconnection, and the incomplete processing and mourning over these experiences.
These series of past events, usually operating out of our conscious awareness, can be at the root of many of our problems in personal and professional relationships. To refuse to listen to this part of our story would be to continue a legacy that the limitations in our early environment started, namely that our experiences and perceptions are not important; that one just has to "get on with things" and "forget about it."
Well, "getting on with things" works up to a point, but the heartbreak of early trauma and loss has a way of reappearing in a million guises, disrupting your life and/or relationships.
This is where the compassionate heart, curious ear, and skilled mind of a therapist can come in handy. The therapeutic relationship can help you put all these disjointed and poorly understood parts of the self in contact with one another so that we might construct a deeper and more authentic narrative of your life, painful elements and all.
While it is true that in knowing more, you may have to face certain truths that you'd rather not think about, paradoxically, in accepting these truths, you will gain a greater understanding of yourself and your relationships, as well as insight into unhelpful responses and behaviors.