During a therapy session, I’ll ask specific questions about my clients’ relationships with caregivers in childhood and their relationships today as an adult – both with those same caregivers and with others.
The reason for paying attention to early childhood relationships is because it is during those early years that we establish thoughts and beliefs about how we think others will treat us and what we think about ourselves in the process.
More broadly speaking, during our early relationships, we begin to form a blueprint of how we should interact with others and how others will interact with us.
Attachment Theory and Early Relationships
John Bowlby, the first psychologist to coin the term attachment theory, essentially laid the groundwork for understanding early relationships’ impact on how we relate to others in adulthood. (You can read more about attachment theory in some of my earlier posts on this topic.)
Essentially, those who study attachment theory say that we either feel secure or insecure in our relationships.
Someone who felt secure and safe as a child tends to have long-lasting friendships and relationships as an adult. They also have good self-esteem and share feelings openly with friends and family.
Someone who generally felt insecure, unsafe, or anxious in their relationships as children may have problems with intimacy as adults, difficulty expressing themselves in relationships, and are more unwilling to share their thoughts and feelings with those close to them.
Applying this to your Life
If you believe your childhood relationships were generally unhealthy, leaving you feeling insecure as an adult, here are a few things you can do to mitigate their impact:
1. Identifying good people you’ve met. When you feel insecure in your relationships, one thing you can do is to identify the relationships in life where you felt safe or people in your life that you could trust, even if only partially. Reminding yourself of healthy relationships from your past can reassure you that you’ll be OK.
2. Identifying role models. Many people had difficult childhoods but now have healthy relationships as adults. Being able to name and identify examples that contradict your belief systems will start the process of changing your thoughts about relationships and provide evidence that healthy relationships are possible.
3. Nothing is permanent. A third strategy is to remind yourself that your past does not dictate your future; what you experienced as a child does not have to predict what you will experience as an adult. All relationships change and evolve, and so can you.
Summary
We are products of our environment. Yes, some aspects of our personality are influenced by our temperament or biology. Still, the way we behave and treat others is, for the most part, a product of how we were raised and how we interpret those experiences.
However, just because you may have had a challenging or chaotic environment in childhood doesn’t mean you will also have complicated and messy relationships in adulthood.
You need to remember that your past relationships with caregivers and others influence how you form relationships as an adult, but by no means is this absolute and fixed. Anything can change, especially the way you relate to others.
Richard
I’ll be writing about relationships for the next few posts. So, if you have any questions that you’d like answered, click here.
If you’d like to explore the pattern of your relationships in a safe, confidential, private setting, check out our associates and see if there’s anyone you might want to work with.