Defending protects & blinds us from our wounds

How often do you take feedback from others? 

What are you willing to admit you need to work on in your relationships?

How aware are you of people’s experience of you in relationships?

Are there things that are patterns across relationships that others have told you?

Are there specific relationships that seem to be the only spaces where you have difficulty?

These are just a few examples of reflective self-work prompts. As we develop and grow, we don’t always take the time to reflect on our relationship data. We often take the time to think about our own experiences, but what about how others receive and experience us? 

From both a trauma-informed and attachment-based lens, this is important data. How others experience us is intimate and important information. Now, to be clear-this is not a recommendation to live your life according to others or to be a people pleaser or to be hyper focused on being what other people want. Not at all. This is a recommendation to consider how the people in our lives that we love dearly experience us. This is a conversation to apply to safe and trusted relationships in our lives.

How others experience us is often different from how we see ourselves. As humans, we are used to who we think we are and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Read that sentence again. Sometimes, as a result of trauma or strained attachment relationships, our perspective can get skewed and we can even find ourselves in denial about how we come across to others. Experiences related to trauma, grief, and attachment involve very intense emotions. Our nervous system will seek ways of being in relationship that feel or give the illusion of feeling protection, even if those behaviors cause strain in our relationships. Take example anger. Boy oh boy, will we defend our righteousness to be angry. We will give a whole speech about why we are right and why that anger was warranted- often without ever stepping into a space of reflection to understand truly what is bothering us. And then we will double down when a loved one brings it to our attention-completely losing out on a moment to acknowledge what is happening inside the relationship and someone else’s experience of us. Another one is control. Anyone willing to admit this is a space they cling onto with the jaws of life? Control is a natural response to trauma. It also gives us the illusion of safety. While it may provide that illusion, it makes our relationships tough. 

When we are so focused on defending ourselves, we often are not available to receive feedback. **Again-this is within the context of safe, meaningful, and loving relationships.** When we are not available to receive feedback, we are contributing to the strain in our relationships. We are communicating back to the relationship that we aren’t safe and need to self-protect through defending. By deciding defending ourselves is the most important thing, we also rob ourselves of safe but difficult conversations. Working through receiving feedback in safe spaces not only helps us better understand where our wounds are, it also validates that the relationship truly is a safe place. Not only that, it allows for personal growth. That’s the thing about safety, it lowers the need for self-protection-if we will let it. 

I encourage you to return to the questions above and spend some time. 

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

Think About How You Think

A common part of therapy is identifying how we think. Exploring our thoughts helps to identify patterns that may be problematic and adding to symptoms of conditions such as anxiety and depression. Doing this sort of exploration is often eye-opening, as it can reveal the framework our mind applies to the things we experience. Often these frameworks are distorted but feel real and accurate to us nonetheless.

For example, a common problematic thought pattern is referred to as dichotomous or “black-and-white” thinking. This pattern is rigid, and assigns things into two categories such as good/bad, yes/no, right/wrong, all/nothing. They are called problematic or distorted because they are riddled with mistakes. Take black-and-white thinking- if we only look at things through that lens-we completely miss any compromising, middle ground, or duality. Problematic thought patterns not only increase anxiety and depressive symptoms, they also make it more difficult to cope/regulate through distressing emotions.

While this sort of identification of thought patterns is common in therapy modalities that are cognitive focused, the conversation goes a bit deeper when working through an attachment-informed approach. When I am working with clients, not only do I focus on identifying problematic thought patterns; I also focus on identifying the relationships that influenced them.

You see, the meaningful relationships in our lives influence how our brains perceive things. For instance, if we grew up with a caregiver that was very black-and-white in their thinking, we can find ourselves also adopting that strategy. Thought patters are learned in the brain overtime, and they will feel natural and automatic. It isn’t until we step back, reflect, and examine how we think, that we can identify where distortions show up. Often these thought patterns also align with how we felt our emotions were handled by our caregivers. Did you grow up with some emotions being labeled as good and others as bad? Did you have a caregiver that ignored the details/context to your emotions and instead responded with a “this is right and that is wrong” mentality? Our thought patterns not only influence how we think, they influence how we feel, and how we respond to both ourselves and to others!

Similar to attachment styles, our thought patterns are also capable of change with consistent investment and effort. Today I invite you to sit with this black-and-white thinking example a bit more. Is this something you can relate to? Here are some reflective prompts to support diving in a little deeper!

How did my caregiver(s) respond to my emotions?

Did I agree with how my caregiver(s) responded to my emotions?

What did my caregiver(s) misunderstand or fail to see in my times of distress?

When I experience more distressing feelings, like anxiety or depression-do I apply this pattern? (right/wrong, all/nothing, good/bad, yes/no)

How does black-and-white thinking influence my relationship with others?

How does black-and-white thinking influence how I respond to my own emotions?

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen.

Dr. C

I said leave me alone, why didn’t you stay?

We all can relate can’t we? The moment when someone asks if we are alright and with our words we say “I’m fine!” but with our behavior we show we are the opposite of fine. Guarded body language, lack of eye contact, short responses, irritable tone of voice-despite our words, our behavior often tells the true story. In the world of attachment, we refer to this as a miscue in a relationship. Rather than appropriately cuing that we are in fact not fine, we lie. If this has happened to you, well; welcome to being human.

Why do we miscue? A lot of reasons. Lack of safety, insecurity, doubt we will get our needs met, fear we will be dismissed, our own discomfort with vulnerability-just to name a few. Miscuing is a form of self-protection. A bit ironic right? In order to protect ourselves from the pain of not getting our emotional needs met, we lie about our emotional needs-which only ups the ante that they won’t get met.

I want to give a disclaimer here-this conversation is intended for the meaningful and trusted relationships in our lives. I am specifically referring to miscuing within our meaningful relationships, because there are certainly reasons to miscue in other interactions (for example an interaction at work or with a stranger). This is directed specifically at the relationships in our lives we have decided are meaningful.

The thing is-meaningful unfortunately does not always equal safe. I’m going to say (write?) that again: meaningful does not always equal safe. As mentioned above, a reason we may miscue is the lack of safety/security that our needs will get met. If we’ve decided a relationship is meaningful, and we find ourselves miscuing-what about that relationship is lacking that would make us feel more secure/safe to accurately cue our emotional needs?

This is where some good reflection and time with ourselves can be so helpful. When we miscue, are we doing so because the relationship has failed us? Do we have data that this person has continuously failed to meet our needs (I say continuously because we all do and will miss the mark in our meaningful relationships)? Are we miscuing because we fell into the human pattern of projecting past experiences of pain onto our current relationships? Have we had conversations with the people we have meaningful relationships with to teach them about what makes us feel safe? This is worth repeating as well: relationships require us to teach one another. Let’s normalize teaching the people we love what we need!

It gets even more tricky though, because before we can teach someone else what we need, we need to know what we need. Holding ourselves accountable for how previous experiences have impacted us is part of the work that safe relationships require. And let’s talk a quick minute about being on the other side here. In the meaningful relationships in our lives-do we know when our loved ones are miscuing? Have we learned what their needs are? Do we pay attention to the behaviors of our loved one as much as we do their words? As much as we want our loved ones to meet our needs-we’ve got to hold ourselves to the same standards.

Relationships are tricky and we won’t always get it right. The goal is not perfection, the goal is safety. Here are some reflections to support building safety and decreasing miscues in your meaningful relationships:

Are there relationships in your life that come to mind when you think about miscuing?

What are the reasons that contribute to you miscuing in your relationships?

Do you tend to miscue certain emotions (for example embarrassment or worry) more than others (for example happiness or excitement)?

Are there past relationship experiences that make it hard to feel safe in current relationships?

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen.

Dr. Cunningham

Do you have a relationship with your mental health?

As a clinical psychologist, I can appreciate how the internet/social media has aided in increasing awareness and knowledge of mental health. With a quick search, you can learn about symptoms, diagnoses, and treatment plans for any mental health condition. While this is great, it isn’t sufficient and often gets in the way of what is most important in my opinion.

And what is my opinion exactly? That- understanding, identifying, and labeling how we feel, think, and behave is only a part of taking care of our mental health. Another part, (which I am biased to believe is the most important part); is establishing a relationship with our mental health. Pause here-have you ever asked yourself that question? “What is my relationship with my mental health?”

In the midst of information overload, I often see high levels of intellectualization of mental health content and deficits in the development of a personalized relationship. Clients, people in my personal life, as well as myself (yes, me too- spoiler-a PhD does not make your void of being a human) can fall into this trap. We can have so many facts and terms regarding mental health and still carry very high levels of avoidance and suppression with our emotions. It’s one thing to rattle off diagnoses and symptoms, it’s a whole other thing to know them for yourself intimately.

My background is rooted strongly in attachment. I fiercely believe that our mental health is a direct reflection of the relationships in our lives, including; our relationship with others and our relationship with ourself. Part of that relationship with the self-is the relationship we each have with our emotions. Our attachments from childhood often are the blueprint for this relationship. How we were responded to by our caregivers is the very data our nervous system uses to learn overtime how we respond to ourself. This is fascinating and at the same time can be overwhelming to untangle.

Back to the question at hand: “Do you have a relationship with your mental health?” Maybe, maybe not. Either way-I invite you to engage in a reflective exercise (come on, give it a try). Think about the range of emotions we can experience and pick a few (perhaps anger, sadness, fear, and embarrassment).

Spend some time with each one and reflect on these questions:

What do I feel when this emotion comes up?

How do I respond to this emotion?

Is this an emotion I suppress?

How does this emotion make me feel about myself?

Be mindful, lead with love, & don’t forget to listen.

Dr. Cunningham