Perspective Is Hardwired
It’s been said that perspective is everything. But really how does a person get a perspective in the first place? It’s locked and loaded, hardwired actually. By the time we’re six years old, humans show an emerging capacity to think about things in relation to the self and the outside world. When an infant has a secure home atmosphere where caregiver(s) are attending sensitively *enough* to their needs, fostering playful moments, providing a sense of security, protection and helping them make sense of their daily experience-this all is optimal for healthy development. It sets the stage for self-reflection capacity, a balanced adult viewpoint toward childhood caregiver(s) and experiences, and positive adaptation to life. Great! Attachment research puts these persons at around 50% of the general population around the world.
Derailed Perspective
When caregivers, for whatever reasons, don’t provide an optimal early atmosphere, what then? Here are some possible scenarios. Perhaps the main caregiver(s) habitually place their own needs above the child’s. Maybe there was a major illness, and the parent was unavailable to the child for a critical period of time. Or say the caregiver was suffering from the effects of their own past trauma, so they were occupied mentally and emotionally with that throughout their child’s formative years. Maybe the early childhood atmosphere was chaotic and/or violent, with the child being exposed to abuse and/or being abused. There are many ways a child can be derailed into adaptations (s)he needs to make in order to survive the best they can.
Mirror Mirror, On The Wall
Michael, one of my Millennial therapy clients, came to me as his marriage was falling apart after just two years, and he claimed he was “just fine” with his wife—except that she was “changing the rules.” Michael’s wife complained to him that she was sick of his withholding feelings and, according to her, their “soulless” sex. He also wouldn’t talk meaningfully about their marital relationship. Michael said with a slow, even deeper tone, “I’d rather die than do that” rolling his eyes within a crescent moon. His cocked-forward presence on the edge of my pleather couch wreaked, “Fix it for me, doc!” It was clear Michael needed to self-reflect and adapt if he was going to save his marriage. And so it went forward. Willing to even come to therapy to save his marriage, I was asking him to take a curious, friendly look inside; this was tantamount to mutiny as evidenced by his response to my next intake question.
I point blank asked Michael why he thought his marriage was failing. “She knew who she was marrying. I’ve never been a big talker about feelings anyway. [several seconds passed as he stared into space] I guess I’m the strong, silent type. And by the way, I think I’ve always been pretty good for her in bed! She gets off nearly every time.” He didn’t answer my question as asked. This was not a surprise.
Adaptation Is Everything
The way Michael and we all adapt to upbringing is to maximize the easiest way to get needs met from parents. For him, the rules of bonding meant he shouldn’t show his vulnerability or organically talk about his feelings. That was not positively reinforced and was most reliably rejected. I discerned that Michael got hugs sure enough, but not because he needed them. His parents provided well for his material needs, safety and security, but were quite rejecting of his inherent value on the whole. There was pressure for him to achieve, be strong, and excel in sports in order to gain reassurance and approval. “My parents were wonderful, ” as he bared a toothy smile, yet he was unable to back up this assertion with even one specific childhood memory. I asked him similar follow-up questions about his wonderful childhood experience, but he was psychologically blocked from remembering any specific evidence for his original assertion. Instead, he offered vague memories of mom cooking; this is what we term “instrumental caring.”
Why did he respond to me in this fashion? To self-reflect on the actual experiences of his childhood meant Michael would have to make sense of and emotionally digest the conditioning by his parents, including the moments of rejection. He didn’t yet have that skill set or capacity to tolerate that kind of discomfort with an embodied knowing. Subconsciously, Michael sensed going inside like that was taboo. I believe he had an avoidant attachment as his adaptation in early childhood which he also has kept and guarded all these years.
When infants/children get the message over time that noticing their vulnerable feelings does no good to get their needs met, they generally deactivate awareness of feelings because it makes life much harder to get needs met! By the time Michael had gotten romantically involved with his future spouse, he had a lot of practice and was an expert at cognitively shutting off from realizations of vulnerability, not valuing or noticing or naming (especially) vulnerable feeling states.
As the saying goes, “Old habits die hard.” Even if there’s a stiff price to pay (e.g., Michael’s marriage), change is often resisted because the default modus operandi is really difficult and viscerally threatening to give up. The innate fear of abandonment for violating the original bonding contract with parents (Michael’s scenario: minimize vulnerability, don’t talk about or notice vulnerable feeling states, be strong and don’t need others, etc.) is kicked up loudly. In Michael’s early childhood, feelings needed to stay repressed to keep parents in proximity for safety, security and survival. When he showed up to my office, the same bonding contract was still valid.
Flip The Switch
A deep, subconscious survival threat becomes activated if the rules for bonding change like the way Michael’s wife wanted them to in order for her to stay in the marriage. My job was to help him identify for himself the original bonding contract with his parents, and to help him see that he’s now free *and safe* to retool his bonding patterns. It’s a positive proposition after all! The weighty paradox facing him was that to change was really threatening to his subconscious sense of survival, but to not change was threatening the survival of his marriage.
People are allowed to change their interior landscape, and it doesn’t necessarily take the assistance of a therapist to do that either. The alchemy of a positive, ongoing relationship with another safe, secure human can afford meaningful interior change. A self-reflective capacity and ability to work with embodied feeling states can certainly develop organically through relationship. Often times it’s a school teacher who is attuned to a child, a foster parent who provides a corrective emotional experience, or even a spouse who is able to stay the course in an atmosphere of compassion. Michael has me to help him now. I don’t know if his marriage will last, and I won’t promise him that it will last if he does his internal work. What I can promise him is that by breaking the rules of his original bonding and learning how to feel into a different way of being, he has the best chances of both personal evolution and a better marriage relationship.
Bottom line: break the rules of original bonding for a better life if you want!
Photo by cindy baffour on Unsplash