
If this is how you feel, first all of all I want to tell you that you are not alone in feeling this way even if it may seem in the moment that no one else can relate and secondly, there is absolutely relief to be found and you can develop strong healthy connections.
Where does it all start?
While there are multitude of reasons for why we develop these patterns, one of the big factors is our environment when growing up. Think back to your own childhood. Did you experience the following?
Presence. And not just physical but very importantly – emotional presence. Did you see a lot of someone mirroring you, reflecting back to you, staying present with you through your life, being interested in you, spending quality time with you? Or did you feel lonely and insignificant a lot of the time, waiting for your parents or primary caregivers to become available?
And two things are important here. One, it’s not about having the perfect parents who did everything right 100% of the time. Not at all. As a species we are very resilient to deal with stressors. It’s about your needs going consistently and systematically unmet and you taking on that model of the world – “Love is unavailable to me”, “I’m insignificant”.
It’s also important to remember that it’s not always about your parents not having the skills to do so, but they could simply be unavailable due to working a lot, stress factors happening around your family at the time of your growing up. And it doesn’t make your experience any less traumatic.
What I want to stress here and what happens often with people who felt neglected and abandoned earlier in life – there is a tendency to minimize and rationalize our own experience. And this blocks our access to those painful emotions that we suppress and what is needed for healing to occur. This is not about blame, this is about owning your emotions and experiences.
Emotional safety. We’re not going to discuss physical safety here as this is an absolute baseline but emotional safety still often gets overlooked. Did you feel safe in expressing your emotions and needs? Especially as a child could you act like a child? We are not meant to regulate our emotions well as children, we rely on parents to help us develop this ability. And if our caregivers cannot give us space to throw a tantrum and hold space for us to learn to self soothe – this is going to cause a large amount of dysregulation in later life. This is where small stressors can have a significant impact on us, and seemingly small things can overwhelm us with emotions and make it harder to calm ourselves down.
Sometimes our caregivers have trouble with their own emotions and they will as a result become very uncomfortable with us expressing our own feelings. For example, if your Mother was not allowed to express her anger, she can become uncomfortable, fearful or resentful of the child expressing it. The family system can play into this strongly. If “children are seen and not heard” runs in the family – this pattern can be passed down generation through generation. If, at some point in life, it was unsafe to feel fear because the family needed to survive, now fear can be shunned and this can manifest in constant background anxiety that goes unrecognized. The patterns are plenty and each person and family system is unique.
Healthy boundaries. At some point, quite early on, during childhood, we start to realise that we are separate from our caregiver, our Mother. And this is a crucial step in our development. For the caregiver to understand and allow the child to go through the process of separation and individuation while staying open and warm. To allow the child to say “no”, to explore, to develop an understanding of where their needs and desires are. And when a caregiver is not ready for it, or starts to impose their own wishes and is uncomfortable with the child exploring – this is where trouble can start.
These are just some of the examples of how we can form these patterns of low self-worth and feeling isolated in adulthood, unable to form authentic deep connections. In summary – this is often down to never having felt safe in a relationship, where our core needs have gone unmet or were shunned. Next, we will explore how you can start working with this pattern, stay tuned!
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