Shame, pain and guilt have a lot to answer for. I remember thinking that a while back when I heard of someone who had committed suicide and his family hadn’t known what had driven him to it because, on the face of it, nothing was amiss. There seems to be so much we humans keep hidden because of shame, pain and guilt.

V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), who wrote The Vagina Monologues, an episodic play that began in the 1990’s and speaks in many voices and in many ways about violence against women, said recently:  

“If something doesn’t exist you can do anything to it. If something only exists in the dark you can rape it, colonise it, own it and destroy it. Once you declare Vagina Monologues you’re saying vaginas have voices, they can speak, they can be seen, and they can be visible.”

Her feeling is that making the invisible visible is a very scary thing, especially in a time when people wanted women to be controlled. As a child she suffered violence, sexual abuse and humiliation at the hands of her father. As an adult she is determined and says “I’m not going to have shame, I’m going to be powerful, funny, I’m going to own it”.

In a world where movements like Black Lives Matter and Ni Una Menos are gaining traction, there continues to be a lot of big-T trauma being outed so to speak. Yet, in tracking the human rights movement back to Cyrus the Great, who freed all slaves in Babylon and declared in 539 BC that people should choose their own religion, it becomes painfully obvious that we humans are not quick learners.

I suspect that is because behind all big-T trauma lies little-t trauma. I’m talking about the kind of trauma that derives from the more insidious kinds of behaviours that result in adults who feel the need to take power from others (by projecting and deflecting their own pain) in order to feel worthy in themselves.

I call it insidious because I think we each have our own little stories, which seem so benign in the face of the stories of the horrific big-T trauma we hear about every day, yet shapes lives nonetheless.

Although I grew up with two parents who loved me and wanted me, I felt loved conditionally. As I said in Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, for a long time the predominant theme of child rearing has been about teaching children to be good and fit in.
​
So growing up conditioned to “be good and do not upset my parents” seems a typical experience. Certainly I didn’t feel like I was in any better or any worse a position than any of the other kids I grew up with. Grooming us kids to fit in and be good members of society was where it was at. 

However, in terms of the development of the human psyche, growing loving and connected adults first requires kids who have a healthy sense of self and safety.

It’s not the forced sleeping and eating schedules I remember, though I suspect my body does, it’s the anxiety I felt being around my mother (who was the one at home looking after us most of the time). When I read Dr Maté’s words “it’s not our children’s behaviour but the anxiety it elicits within us that we have to learn how to manage” I knew I’d finally found an explanation for what I sensed my whole childhood.

Left on her own with us kids, my mum was always hyper-tense, it was like entering an alternate reality as she wasn’t like that around others. I learned to anticipate how things might play out and to be as perfect as I could to stay out of trouble. Looking back through adult eyes I can connect the dots to her own childhood, something I only really learned about when she was dying.

Although I had always sensed my mum’s dislike of her father (who had died when she was seven), she never told me anything specific until just before she died, when she said “I remember sitting on the floor drawing, and hearing the crack behind me, and seeing your gran go from one side of my peripheral vision to the other”.

Trauma begets trauma. I know because when I had my own kids and they needed my positive attention all the time, I came unwound. I found myself getting angry at them, yelling at them and wandering around chuntering the same way my mother used to chunter – even using some of the same words.

That “oh my, I’ve become my mother” moment was a wakeup call. Instead of putting it all on my kids, as I’d had done to me, I decided to take full ownership of my behaviour before it became ingrained and marked the pattern of another childhood.

Basically, I had to reparent myself. If I caught myself reacting, I’d stop mid-yell, apologise for yelling and actively work to calm my triggered nervous system. I explained to my kids what I was doing. They may have experienced schizophrenic behaviour but I figured that it was better than experiencing me putting it all on them.

I also made myself a chart and got my kids to decide whether I got a tick for talking to them respectfully. They still had boundaries, but I was getting better at holding them in a healthy way. In short, I made the invisible visible.

When my youngest daughter had a bout of meltdowns recently and started lashing out, I was inspired by a story I’d heard from relationship expert Terry Real, I said:

“Hey, you’re my daughter, I love you and I’m always going to love you. But it’s not ever going to be okay for you to yell and scream and lash out at us like this. You know dad and I grew up with too much yelling and screaming and we work hard to make this a better environment, what do you need right now to help you calm down?”

We are committed to breaking the chain of pain, but it’s not always easy. I don’t know about you, but my litmus test has always been who I am at home, that is where any mask I’ve been subconsciously wearing falls.

It is easy to blame other people and circumstances, but most of the time I’m emotionally charged it’s because I’ve triggered the little child inside who is subconsciously trying to be good to appease her inner parents.

“When we give ourselves permission to stop being the obedient daughter, we become the responsible adult.” Glennon Doyle

I suspect that is the case for most people when they are emotionally charged and it’s out of kilter with the actual circumstances. Well, either being obedient towards or rebelling against the inner parent.

When I look through my adult eyes, once the emotional charge has passed, I find I’ve either not had or I’m not holding a healthy boundary and I’ve over reacted towards the person or circumstances.

For example, when I had to catch a return flight home the other day, I was in a pretty triggered state because of the time constraints involved. As I child I was always being hurried along by mum, who used to speed walk everywhere with us, and was always anxious in case we were late.

I even have recurring dreams about not being able to get packed in time to catch a flight. So when my partner saw me having trouble packing the cases and said “you’re shaking”, I was aware that I was in a traumatised state, my body remembering.

While we caught our taxi and go to the airport in plenty of time, my nervous system was still on high alert, anticipating getting through check in and safely home (flying not being a favourite thing of mine at the best of times).

When one of our bags registered slightly overweight – and the others being underweight - I will confess I had a momentary meltdown. The airline we were flying with is really pedantic about the 23kg limit, and the choice is to repack your bag there on the check in floor or pay an $80 excess fee.

Having felt like I’d just survived something in getting the bag packed in the first place, there was a moment when I had to shift gear to get the job done. That moment felt like a slow motion freefall, and the airline worker’s calm but directive voice cut through to restart my system. She said “it’s okay; it’s only a kilo or so, find a couple of books or toiletry bag and put them in your other bag.”

Part of me wanted to scream “it’s not okay!” but another part of me knew the futility of my resistance so I obeyed and moved past the moment. After the emotional charge had calmed I was extremely grateful I hadn’t completely humiliated myself by expressing the full blown tantrum I’d wanted to have.

But it also made me realise I hadn’t actually catered to my needs by organising the help I needed to pack and get us back to the airport, instead I’d just taken it all on my shoulders, and I then wanted to lay that anger and resentment at the feet of those I travelled with. I became aware that, on the inside, I was waiting for my hard work to be noticed, resentful it wasn’t an old well worn pattern.

Lesson learned, I resolved to organise things quite differently the next time we took a trip, having each person pack and unpack their own case instead of playing the martyr.

This is the essence of small-t trauma. It lives within, invisible, reigniting the well worn thought patterns and pathways in my nervous system. But by making the invisible visible, becoming conscious of what is really at play, and learning how to react differently, I can create newer, healthier reactions that empower and serve me - and those around me - much better.

What is within you that would benefit from being brought into the light?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Is Your Responsibility and Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Someone, who knows I’m interested in childhood trauma, recently told me she thinks I should “just let go of negative memories”. Another person wondered, if something was so lacking in my relationship with my parents, how am I not experiencing greater dysfunction or even death, which he proposed was statistically more likely than being able to draw intelligent conclusions.

Interestingly I have never said nor felt that my childhood was negative, it was normal, with some good memories and some not so good memories; and I certainly had two parents who wanted and loved me. They were just two people doing the best they could, parenting in the normal way.

So I decided to write this as resource for people like me who do personal work in order to move past any suboptimal wiring and fulfil my potential, while some look on in bemusement wondering why I would feel the need to do any work when I had such a normal childhood.

Normal doesn’t mean optimal, and can be as traumatic within our bodies as a readily recognised trauma. In fact, I believe this is society’s biggest opportunity for growth.

For a long time the predominant theme of child rearing has been about teaching children to be good and fit in. This is all very well, but it is best done after a healthy sense of self and safety has been established, and this appears to be little understood.

Feeling safe relates directly to the nervous system, the command centre of a human’s flight-fight response. Neural pathways connect one part of the nervous system to the other and neural pathways do not care whether parents/caregivers intentions are good or how much they love their children; they simply start forming in response to the child’s reaction to how well (or not) their needs are met.

“As a child”, as Dr Gabor Maté explains, “we are born feeling our connection to our parents and we are reliant on them for survival. Being rejected by them in any way, big or small, is devastating. So when we are rejected, we have a choice, to reject them or reject ourselves (or more likely parts of ourselves). But we can’t reject them as our survival depends upon them.”

Some examples I gave recently: there is the baby who is left to cry, the baby or child who has to eat to a schedule, the child who wants their parent’s attention and will do anything – positive or negative – to get it, the child who is given no opportunity to explain their side of the story, the child who is left alone to think about their actions, the list goes on. These are all normal, everyday occurrences, not things an adult necessarily thinks of as rejecting their child.

However, if I put my adult self in those shoes, imagine I am so upset I’m crying and everyone ignores me, how do I feel? If I’m not hungry (or feeling sick) and I’m made to eat how do I feel? If I am trying to get someone’s attention and they ignore me, how do I feel? If I appear to have upset someone and yet they won’t communicate with me, how do I feel?

None of these feel comfortable; at one extreme they actually make me question my very existence (especially if they are regularly occurring situations) and, at best, make me feel isolated and unimportant in the moment. So it’s not hard to imagine how utterly devastating such things are to a baby or small child who is completely dependant on that adult to meet their needs.

This creates a type of developmental trauma, which is sometimes known as small-t trauma. This kind of trauma is normal in our society, and it happens bit by bit over time.

Then there are the inherited patterns of behaviour in parents that children react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to. These are essential for survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life, and will certainly get passed on unless the cycle is broken.

The best description I’ve seen of these is in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, he describes four archetypes (on a scale of aggressive to passive) that are “control strategies we each develop in order to stop others’ draining our energy”. He says “It’s often easiest if you start by taking a look at which strategies your parents employed:

• Intimidators threaten verbally or physically and come on too strong, making others frightened. They are so wrapped up in their own anger they don’t care what is happening inside the other person.
• Interrogators constantly question, criticize, nag and find fault, making others self conscious and eroding their confidence.
• Aloofs shut down when confrontation happens. They often withdraw physically or verbally, forcing others to struggle and dig to find out their true feelings.
• Poor Me’s tend to guilt trip, projecting themselves as the helpless victim in need of care and attention. This makes others feel guilty even if they know there is no real reason to feel this way.

Each of these are linked with the corresponding strategies that created them, and that they create. For example, Intimidators create Poor Me’s appealing for mercy, or, the child will endure until they are old enough and big enough to fight back, creating another Intimidator, and so the cycle continues”.

I suspect no one wants to feel like a victim or held hostage to their past circumstances, but rejecting the idea that unconscious reactions in childhood may have inadvertently created limitations or unhelpful belief patterns and behaviours is a missed opportunity for growth.

The kinds of common subconscious unhelpful belief patterns that get perpetuated are: I’m unworthy, I’m too much, I’m alone, I don’t have, I’m powerless, I’m not wanted, I’m invisible, I’m bad, I don’t belong, I’m a burden, I’m crazy, I’m different, I’m not enough, I’m a failure, I’m not important, I’m inferior, I’m not loved, I don’t matter, I’m not safe and/or I’m worthless.

Claire Zammit and Kathrine Woodward Thomas created a fantastic document that goes into each of these in much more depth and is well worth a read.

This is not our only trauma of course, I just think it’s by far the most common and least recognised and – bottom line – the one that needs addressed in order to grow and evolve from the other types of trauma we create.

One therapist told me she has worked with children who have no apparent developmental issues but instead inherited predispositions to emotional dysregulation (having emotions that are overly intense in comparison to the situation that triggered them). Considering genetics does, on the face of it, seem sensible.

But as you may deduce from what I have written above, I find it hard to imagine that most people are not in some way affected by parental – usually well meaning – interactions in our early years. I am also not keen on the genetics argument; it feels too much like a free pass to behaving poorly on an all-too-regular basis, when I truly believe that (if you can read this) it is within your gift to change how you react when triggered, and also in fact your responsibility.

Remember those neural pathways? As in the seemingly normal and benign examples I gave of rejection, these became very entrenched in my system throughout childhood, as my nervous system did what it needed to continue to do to keep me feeling safe.

I can’t change those pathways that fire ever time, say, someone criticises me (which is exactly the kind of situation in which I may have emotions that are more charged than the situation warrants). However I can:

• Become more aware of my reactions and start to understand if and why I overreact
• Take responsibility for helping my body feel safer, using techniques to calm/regulate my nervous system
• Learn new ways to respond, like learning how to have compassion and to have and hold healthy boundaries

I cannot change my reactions through a decision alone; it requires awareness, curiosity, focus in learning new skills and persistence.

Also bear in mind that no child is born with emotional regulation, so it’s having a parent or caregiver who cannot model effective coping skills that puts a child at risk of emotional dysregulation.

Upon suggesting we educate future generations on the impacts they have on newborns and young children through secure attachment and attunement, the therapist I was talking to was concerned that would put huge pressure on parents and create a sense of blame for those who are doing their best.

I believe each person is always doing their best (in any given situation, with the cards they have been dealt and with what they know). But it is the adults (not the children in their care) who have the capacity for reflection, insight and change, to develop healthier coping styles.

That said, even with good intentions and good emotional regulation it is inevitable people will suffer other types of trauma in the journey through life. But, overall, people would begin with a sense of safety and self, and that would make a huge difference to the way other trauma is dealt with and, in fact, whether it is even created.

Therapists like Dr Terry Levy, who runs the Evergreen Psychotherapy Centre, won’t work with children until they’ve worked with the parents. They also use a life script that gathers the kind of information that is relevant to getting to the heart of the types of dysfunctional beliefs and behaviours at play in a person’s life.

For me it's not about "oh look at my trauma" in the sense of "isn't it terrible". As light-touch as my experiences are (in comparison to some of the atrocities that happen to people), they have shaped me deeply. I see how I have been limited by my own beliefs and trauma reactions within my body, it has kept me playing small, from fulfilling my potential and acting from a place of compassion.

So I can wholeheartedly appreciate that if light-touch trauma can do that, what a slam-dunk the big-T trauma (sexual abuse, violence, war or political violence, natural disasters, serious accidents, life threatening illnesses etc) causes.

Now the real key for me is this. Big-T trauma and its effects are becoming well recognized. But little-t trauma, especially normal developmental trauma, remains largely unseen and yet lives within almost every single person on the planet today. It creates disease, chronic pain and illness and it stunts our ability to address systemic issues within our relationships and within our society.

That is why I share my experiences and insights, to shine a light on the microscopic stuff, the irritating sand in the oyster shell that are our pearls of wisdom, our key to compassion and evolution.

Could I be wrong? Sure there’s always room for a misread of reality because it’s all about perspective. But if this resonates with you then I have every confidence that with awareness, curiosity, focus in learning new skills and persistence, you can fulfil your potential in every area of your life.

As family therapist and author Terry Real says “We may not (right now) be able to bring peace to the Middle East or to Syria or whatever else but we can bring peace to our living rooms. So start with your life. And your life is your relationships. So learn how to do that and do it really well.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Life Really Does Support Your Deepest Desires (And How to Access Its Support), You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Is Your Responsibility and Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A while back I started some intensive chiropractic work in a bid to see if I could unwind some of the chronic pain I experience in my right shoulder, having tried a few other avenues unsuccessfully.

While I can appreciate its effectiveness in unblocking my nervous system (every session is filled with satisfying releases of tension along my spine and in other parts of my body), I’ve also become aware that the pain I experience cannot be attributed to a single event so it’s not so easy to let go of, it’s more like peeling away the layers of an onion.

If I had had an accident that had created pain, treatment like this could ease it relatively quickly. But when the cause is more a series of events that could be physical, mental and/or emotional, the path is less clear. Worse, I have a suspicion that the events are not necessarily relegated to past experiences, they may well be current day thoughts, actions or feelings that I’m (as yet) unaware of as being related.

To this end I asked the chiropractor whether she knew anyone locally who does somatic therapy/retraining. Somatic therapies are ones in which the body (the soma) is the guide, and the key is connecting the physical symptoms with a conscious narrative and feelings.

This led to an interesting observation on her part about common patterns she sees in bodies and the biggest issue she observes in the pursuit of getting back to a fully reset/healthy state (for want of a better expression). That is that people don’t make time to fully process their feelings, she says, so they get stored like another layer on the metaphorical onion.

As a person who has tended to be very in my head as opposed to my body, I have only recently begun to appreciate what she means. Until a few years ago, feeling what was happening in my body was generally secondary to me, and very unconscious, my body needed to be talking very loudly indeed to hear it.

But as I’ve begun to regularly meditate I’ve definitely become more aware of the connections between my mind, body and emotions. A key piece of advice I’ve heard from many quarters is, when I’m triggered about something, focus on where I’m feeling it in my body.

This has a couple of benefits, one is I start to become aware of patterns within me, the second is it brings my attention back into my body and calms my nervous system.

There are some great visuals out there that show what’s happening in a body when particular emotions are felt. In this Bright Side article it shows how emotions like happiness, love, anger, anxiety, depression, fear, disgust, shame, pride, contempt and jealousy show up in our systems in terms of blood flow and the effects.

For example, it says “when we are frightened, the blood literally drains from our face, making us pale. This happens thanks to the autonomic nervous system, the flight-or-fight control system. When we face a trigger, blood vessels pinch off the flow to our face and extremities, sending blood to our muscles and body so we are ready for either flight or fight”.

As someone who internalises a lot of my emotions, I’m aware that my nervous system has been in flight or fight mode for much of my life. And instead of taking the time to actually feel that, as the chiropractor pointed to, it was more that the baseline feeling within my body was a state of anxiety.

But to give a specific example, just the other day I read a negative personal comment condemning my perspective. The first thing I was aware of was a feeling akin to a general anaesthetic being pumped into me. The feeling started in my tummy and washed up and around my chest, and my thinking brain shut down. I felt startled, frozen.

Without attaching too much of a story to it, because every emotion comes with a story, I was aware on the edges of my consciousness that there was a familiarity to this feeling, but I just wanted to be present to what was actually happening in my body. My mind wanted to jump in and solve this; in short it wanted to keep me safe.

But what was obvious was that the well worn path for my norm in this kind of situation was to either push it down and get on with something more productive, or to start getting indignant and angry about it to propel me into action.

At this point, despite the allure, I resisted taking that well worn path, the chiro’s words still freshly ringing in my ears, and I just sat with the feeling and let it intensify while remembering to breath into where I was feeling it the most. It was uncomfortable, painful even, I can understand why I wanted to avoid feeling this feeling.

But after a few minutes of just leaning into it, like being hit by a wave, it started to subside. I could feel the ebb as feeling returned to the rest of my body and my brain started to come back online. I knew instantly that this reaction was an echo of unfair criticism directed at me as a child.

But as Glennon Doyle said “When we give ourselves permission to stop being the obedient daughter, we become the responsible adult”. I did not need to respond from the wounded child. This was not a person who was genuinely seeking to understand my personal conclusions, there was nothing to answer to, and so I let it go. For once, my body need not add another layer, weighing me down further.

As I was sharing this observation with my partner, we reflected on the many times in each day when we each might each feel discomfort or pain, and we push it to the side out of habit, not allowing ourselves to actually feel what is going on.

Traffic, that is something that pushes my partner’s buttons, and he spends a lot of time driving in it. Learning where that tension comes from (the narrative in his head), and how to healthily disperse it, is the optimal way forward.  

And that is what appeals to me about somatic therapy as it connects the psyche with the body, looking at cause and effect and how to approach things differently. Despite pioneers like the Peter Levine working in this field for decades now, it is still a relatively uncommon discipline among therapists.

But that is not to say that I can’t make progress. Just as I did the other day, if I use my body’s signals to tune into what else I have stored there in a bid not to feel the pain in the moment, there is much to be learned.

It occurs to me that our bodies’ carry a wealth of information, far more than our minds can consciously process. As such, learning to read our body’s signals can make an excellent doorway into our personal and collective growth.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Take Your Broken Pieces and Make a Beautiful Life, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, What is Your Body Telling You? and Why You Should Consciously Engage in Body Talk. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“When people treat you like they don’t care, believe them.” Samuel Rodenhizer

One of my big discoveries in the last year was this premise that some of us internalise feelings, thoughts and emotions, whereas others externalise them. What I’ve found, put simply, is people who internalise things feel pain; people who externalise have troubles (usually because the people around them are in pain).

I’m an internaliser, and I’m hyper-attuned to other people’s feelings. I used to live in hope that people would see just how hurt or upset I was, the same way I could tell that they were upset at me, and – in the same way I would seek to create harmony – they would seek to create harmony with me. But it’s often not the case, especially since I seem to attract people who externalise their feelings.

The best explanation I have found for this dynamic/ coping style/ way of being in the world, takes this back to how well caregivers tune into a child’s needs from the cradle through the school years. When I ask myself:

• Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me?
• Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not?
• Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way?
• How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

This gives me an indication of how attuned my parents were to my needs. Big clue here is that parenting until the late twentieth century predominantly treated kids as an empty vessel who needed moulded to fit society. A child’s feelings did not feature so much as the drive to be good, to fit in and most definitely – as I quickly learned - not to upset the apple cart (being my parents and their anxieties).

So, as Teal swan says, “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm (otherwise defined as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

Understanding this helped me to understand my partner (and others) more, because he is an externaliser. There was many a time he would project something onto me and cause me pain, or I would be feeling pain from an interaction from some other quarter, and he just couldn’t empathise.

Something relationship expert Terry Real (founder of Relational Life Therapy) talks about in his series Fierce Intimacy, and Wendy Behary in her book Disarming the Narcissist, is that people who externalise their pain (Terry refers to their behaviour as grandiosity), projecting it onto others, need motivation to change.

They agree that people who externalise don’t feel bad, in fact Teal Swan goes so far as to say “the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble”.

Terry Real says the kind of conversation he has when working with someone who has this coping style might go along the lines of “What kind of father did you have? What kind of father do you want to be? It must really kill you to realise that – in this family – you’ve become your father. What kind of relationship do you want your kids to have with you?”

He has a saying “Pass it back or pass it on. If we don’t wrestle this together, the people who are going to be most damaged are your children.”

For both my partner and I this has become our biggest motivator for change, we don’t want to pass on our dysfunctional ways of being in the world to our kids. We want our kids to have healthy self esteem, healthy boundaries, compassion and empathy for their fellow beings and the creatures and planet around us.

Figuring out what my limitations are, as a result of the way I subconsciously reacted to the people and my environment growing up (psychologists call this maladaptive schemas), and weeding them out, has been part of a healing journey.

As an adult I found myself longing for acceptance, validation and recognition of who I am, what I need, what I feel and what I achieve. I was longing for support and connection, and a feeling of safety to be vulnerable. I began to understand that the way I was being in the world was basically subconsciously attracting repeat experiences into my life as opportunities to have a more successful outcome.

Once I became conscious of a lot of these patterns of beliefs and behaviours, and why I had developed them, it became a lot easier to see where I was shooting myself in the metaphorical foot.

But as Terry Real says, “it takes more than putting our past in the past, it takes skills to have healthy relationships with people, and skills can be learned”. He explains “There’s a skill in learning to love yourself, there is skill in learning good boundaries, there are skills in learning how to stand up for yourself with love and how to respond with generosity instead of defensiveness”.

I was asked by someone why they found themselves having to discard friendships, because she seemed to be attracting friends who could only talk about themselves and never asked about her. She couldn’t figure out how some people could focus so totally on themselves.

I shared with her that I’ve found it takes getting good at expressing and holding my boundaries to get what I need from relationships and, for that, I’d definitely recommend both Evette Rose’s Healing Your Boundaries and Terry Cole’s Boundary Boss.

But I also really like Terry Real’s approach where, in Relational Life Therapy, he teaches relational empowerment, the golden rule being “What can I give you to help you to give me what I want?”

While that is indeed empowering, he also admits that one of the core skills required in any relationship, and he calls this the proto-skill, is shifting out of that triggered part of you (the wounded child that is the knee-jerk reaction, automatic, unthought, compulsive response) back into the adult part, with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex that can think and make deliberate decisions.

Regardless of the new skills I’ve learned, I was somewhat heartened to hear him admit that one of the things he personally still finds hard is containing that desire to react when his wife comes at him with a triggered self-righteous energy. He says:

“Containing that impulse, settling into my adult, holding myself with warm regard, holding her in warm regard (even though she’s out of her mind), and doing whatever I can to make things better, that moment right there, that’s a tough moment.”

The point is, though, it can be done. And while some people seem not to care about others, I find it useful to remember it’s just a coping style, and I am often able to have compassion for why this is the case (if not in the moment, enough to keep me in the game in some longer term relationships).

I also have figured out my boundaries, what I am and am not willing to put up with, what the deal breakers are and what I’m willing to do about it. I am getting better and better at speaking my truth and holding those boundaries. What I know for sure, though, is I cannot change anyone else; the only thing I can change is how I think, feel and react.

Ironically the more those of us who do care about others can connect in with ourselves and honour our own needs, wants and desires, and can hold those who seem self absorbed accountable in a loving way, the more aware of our own needs and those of others we will all become.

In addendum, I observe we all have the capacity to internalise and externalise, just the same as we all have the capacity to be narcissistic or people pleasers at times. It’s perhaps more helpful to think of these things in more general terms rather than as definitive labels. For example, as a newborn and young child, I internalised a lot of pain, shame and guilt, but as an adult I often subconsciously projected this outwardly when triggered (meaning I experienced emotions that were overly intense in comparison to the present situation as it had re-triggered the pain I internalised as a child and I then put that pain on/blamed something/someone else). Different circumstances and different people elicit different responses depending on what they echo from our earliest experiences of feeling safe and seen. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.