Family “is our first social school.” Before we are even aware that we are supposed to be talking to someone else, fighting with someone else, giving love to someone else, we are watching the grownups. We are watching and learning the invisible script, the internal model, that we then carry around with us, shaping our expectations, anxieties, and automatic responses to others as adults:
The Architecture of the Early Plan
Childhood is where we learn the foundational rules of human contact. We learn from both the content of our caregivers' teaching and the way they model their behavior and respond to our emotional communication.
Communication styles-were feelings talked about in your family, or did your family sweep things under the rug? If a family expressed conflict through silence, the children of those homes tend to grow up to see silence as a weapon or a form of abandonment. If a child was raised in a high-conflict explosion, then those adults tend to be hypervigilant, waiting for the fallout.
Emotional Availability: Were your feelings of disappointment, worry, and rage acknowledged or ignored? Children whose emotions are denied tend to develop a stance of independence, feeling that others are unsafe. They tend to have difficulty establishing intimacy, feeling that to open up is to be weak.
Attachment Styles: The Echoes of Early Caregiving
Developmental psychology demonstrates that the quality of our initial attachment to primary caregivers becomes the template for our eventual attachment style, the way we conceive of safety, intimacy, and closeness in adult relationships.
Secure Attachment: it is a healthy attachment style that can occur during infancy. The infant is willing to be close to and comfortable around others and accepts comfort when needed. In a future relationships, it leads to healthy, warm, and trusting relationships.
Cumulative Child Root: Caregivers who were responsive, emotionally available, and dependable consistently and predictably.
Adult Manifestation: Secure adults can express and receive love, work through conflicts effectively, establish and maintain boundaries without fear of intimacy or loneliness.
Anxious Attachment: Individuals with an anxious attachment may have difficulty recognizing and identifying their own feelings, which may result in less information to compare with their partner's feelings. In addition, they are often concerned their partner will reject them, which could complicate the matching process.
Childhood Root: Unpredictable care and attention; affection was contingent on the mood or stress level of the individual providing care.
Adult Manifestation: Anxiously attached adults long for intimacy but are afraid of losing love. They might scan for subtle changes in a partner's tone, need excessive reassurance, and keep the peace at the expense of their own well-being.
Avoidant Attachment: This form of insecure attachment develops when a child learns to be independent and cannot trust anyone to respond to their needs. The avoidant child sees himself/herself as self-reliant and their parent as disengaged and distant.
Childhood Root: Caregivers who were neglectful, hypercritical, or bombarding, such that the child was left to bottle up their needs and learn to comfort himself/herself.
Adult Manifestation: Avoidant adults are ruled by independence at one time. When their feelings become intense or if there is potential for conflict, they begin the process of withdrawal, retreat, or shutdown to shield themselves from their pain.
Insecure attachment style: Disorganized attachment patterns are most common among people who experienced neglect or traumatic events during early childhood. Disorganized personalities often struggle to trust others after early exposure to negative treatment.
Childhood Root: Caregivers who evoke fear rather than safety (e.g., extreme unpredictability or trauma).
Adult Manifestation: Adult patterns tend to reflect the child's experience. However, adults often desire intimacy but aren't comfortable with it, creating a pattern of “pulling away and coming closer” in one’s relationships.
Unconscious Roles We Bring into Adulthood
Families are interdependent systems where children take on certain fixed, native, unspoken roles to keep the system in order. Unless we're consciously self-aware, we will continue to reproduce these very same roles in our adult relationships and work connections:
The Hero / Achiever. The child that tried to gain attention by being good, responsible and high achieving. As adults they feel constantly exhausted, responsible for the happiness of all others and just unable to ask for help.
The Caretaker / Peacemaker: The child who learned how to ease tension and focus on everyone else’s needs. As adults, peacemakers often become codependents, learn to have difficulty saying “no,” and bury their own anger and resentment because they never get their own needs met.
The Rescuer If an adult has been raised watching a “screwed-up” or defenseless relation, he or she is prewired to pursue intimate partners who also seem “broken,” attempting to “rescue” them, and confusing helping out with love.
Breaking the Cycle: From Automatic Reactions to Conscious Choice
Aware that your past influences your life is not to blame your parents, your family history. Actually, parents are also living their own unhealed blueprints. The point of awareness of your family blueprints is to make an empowered choice to live different stories instead of repeating the automatic behaviors.
Find your triggers: Notice when you react inappropriately to a buddy or a partner. Think: “Is what I am feeling right now mine or is it a holdover from my past?”
Write Your Hidden Rules: Dabble on paper what you were brought up to believe about love relationships e.g.“When I get angry, people will leave me” or, “If I‘m useful, people will love me.” Once written out, consider if these rules still fit with who you are now.
Do micro-practice: If your tendency is to leave (avoidant pattern) stay an additional 5 minutes in the room to express yourself. If your tendency is to rush to action and fix things (peacemaker pattern), try stepping back and letting others take the reins.
Your childhood family story may have written the first few chapters of your life, but this story doesn‘t need to hold the pen forever. True healing happens when you‘re aware that the old ways that once protected you as a child are no longer suitable for who you‘re becoming as an adult. So you thank them for what they have done for you and compassionately begin integrating healthier ways of loving into your present life.
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