Why do we focus on relationships?

The Petrie Dish of Personhood

If you are curious as to why we focus on relationships, we hope this might help. From the moment we are born, we are wired for connection with our parents/caregivers as the source of our ongoing survival. Every interaction we have with them offers a guide, message, or blueprint for how to make sense of self and others. Our nervous system, brain, sense of self, and maps for connection are in a profound process of growth and development and we rely on our parents to navigate this process.

As we engage in thousands of interactions with family across childhood these experiences shape our personhood, often without our conscious awareness. Over time, these patterns help us know who we are, what is loveable and valuable about us, how to manage emotions, what we can expect from others, who will come for us in moments of need, and how to navigate the challenges of life.

In an ideal world, we will all experience caregivers who are nurturing, engaged, structured, and willing to challenge or push us to grow. 

No parent is perfectly attuned to the needs of their child and it is not healthy to be! In the absence of missed needs, we would never learn how to regulate ourselves and become independent. None of us have a fool-proof map and every child is different. It’s not if a need will get missed, it’s when. In fact, research shows that secure attachment only requires attunement 30% of the time, and for all the things that are missed, we can lean into repair to restore our connection.

Many parents were/are wounded children themselves, inheriting maps with holes and skewed messages about self and others. Human beings are usually doing the best they can with what they have, which typically means the maps we hold about ourselves and use to interact with our partners and children will inevitably have some flaws too. This is the challenge of being human and we always have the choice to do something different or change an intergenerational pattern.

We make space for all the gifts, strengths, and skills that emerge out of your relational experiences.  We also make space for the ways in which you learned to adapt, protect, and survive the inevitable ways in which your parents did not always know how to meet your needs or support your unique personhood at any given moment. 

Where more significant misses have occurred, or you have endured trauma or abuse, it is even more important to know that the messages you received are not the truth of who you are and not the only story about what is available to you.

We are invested in helping our clients explore their experiences so they can better understand how they got here, what to keep, and what might need some adjustment. When we work with parents, we make space for your experiences of being parented, what you want to emulate, and where you want to show up differently. Being willing to get some support in the overwhelming realm of raising human beings is such a gift to your child, inner child, and family as a whole and we always feel privileged to be in it with you. x.

To offer further organization on the power of relationships, here are some of things we all need from our parents/caregivers, and how tall an order parenting truly is: