Hurt People Hurt People
So many of us unconsciously seek out early developmental healing from childhood wounds through our adult love relationships, but that doesn’t work because it isn’t possible to parent adult partners.
Children—Only—May Be Parented
We have to put in the work, ourselves, to identify and learn how to meet our own needs in order to become fully autonomous and develop a solid sense of self.
Being autonomous doesn't mean being alone—people need people—but it does mean feeling complete and capable of handling whatever upset inevitably comes your way, and having the self sufficient capacity to look inward, acknowledge and respect your emotions and value your subjective experience as complete unto yourself as your own authority.
Children May also Be Parentified
When we are not seen as children and instead we are busy taking care of our parents emotionally in order to ensure a roof over our heads, this makes us indispensable to them, but our needs may go unmet, sometimes so painfully so that we are cut off from our feelings and we may not even realize that we have any needs at all. We may instead feel superhuman and nonemotional and jump to offer to carry the load for others, even at our own expense, even as our needs go unmet.
Or we receive the message, loud and clear, that we are too sensitive in reaction to our chaotic environment, and we push down our emotions because for some reason others don’t seem very interested in our kind of suffering. But just like we can’t control our thoughts, we can’t control our feelings, and the only way truly through them is acceptance. We must however be in total charge of our actions as adults and take full responsibility for them.
There Is No Such Thing As ‘Too Sensitive’
We talk about childhood in therapy because those early relational patterns set the blueprint for how we will interact in our love relationships as adults. We examine how our needs were not met, not in order to place blame, but to see what went awry and what may be trying to master in adulthood in our current relationships by trying to fix now what got derailed then, even if it’s all a projection. Therapy helps to weed out projection from lived experience in effort to help us become entirely responsible for ourselves.
Our Parents Were Failed Too
No matter how rosy our early memories may be, every single person is somehow let down in childhood—some much more tragically so than others—and all we can shoot for is good-enough parenting. Even with the best of efforts, accidents, mistakes and traumas happen. Life throws us curveballs that—if we choose to let them—really can make us stronger. We can work to overcome limitations that are not our fault by refraining from placing blame and pointing fingers, and by meeting our own needs and becoming self sufficient.
