Attachment Wounds Pt 2

(Or what I did over summer vacation)

If you grew up with a pretty secure attachment to a primary caregiver, you know that your feelings and needs matter but do so everyone else’s. You can see the balance and take turns.

If you grew up without your needs and feelings well attended to, you had a choice- fight like hell to get your needs met somehow or cut off from them and learn to do without. 

We want our kids to know we are there for them and will respond to their needs but where does the balance fall? What about our needs, our feelings? I hear so many parents making enormous emotional sacrifices for their kids (often in response to feeling that their parents didn’t make enough for them.) We have to resist having the pendulum swing from one extreme to the other.

Babies are bottomless pits of needs and require immediate responsiveness. By the time a kid is 18 months old they are actively engaged in the work of learning healthy relationship boundaries.

MINE! Or when do I really have to share?

NO! When do I get to do what I want and when do the needs of the family/others matter more?

NOW!  How can I trust that my needs will be met but that not necessarily right this very minute?

I CAN DO IT/NO I CAN’T DO IT I want to be independent but I also want to know that you are there for me.

And then we, both kids and adults spend our whole lives figuring out how to deal with the huge feelings we have around when we have to share, when others don’t share with us, when our needs compete with other’s needs, when we want what we want when we want it and people disappoint us and when we want in the same moment to be dependent and independent. It is complicated stuff this balance.

In the calculation about just how important our needs are, it can really help to know how accurately we are calculating. Are we overly focused on making others happy at our own expense or are we more likely to freak out a bit if we feel like our needs might not be taken seriously? I was working with a client recently seems to almost always calculate “yeah my needs aren’t that important” and we figured out that the best way to deal with this err in calculations is to give him a “handicap” like in golf. Calculate the whole is this important or not so important then add 5 points handicap to the “my needs matter” side to make up for the fact that the balance is way off.
This summer I have been working on adjusting my own “not that big a deal” balance calculation. I often brag about being the Queen of Self Care but recently, in light of my own discoveries around my adult attachment style it is clear that I might be the Queen of Self Care but part of why I seem to need so much freaking self care is because I am not asking anyone else to give me a hand. By paying more attention to the quiet whisper of maybe this is important and adding my 5 point handicap I have been able to say no more often and ask for more help. I would love to tell you that this is a wonderful experience, I feel healthier and way more balanced. Mostly, like most opportunities for growth- so far it is just freaking me out and making me really uncomfortable. But in a good way.