Everyone deserves to be loved, especially people who didn’t experience love growing up. We all deserve friendship, love, attention, appreciation, nurturing care, safe touch, comfort, and someone to be happy with. All people deserve to feel special, chosen, admired and wanted by others. Everyone should celebrate their birthday, their good qualities that they love, and their truth is valid, even if the people they hurt hurt themselves. So much.
All children deserve to be children who should not grow up or take on the responsibilities of adults prematurely. Everyone deserves privacy, agency over their lives, independent decisions, and control over their lives. We all deserve the opportunity to pursue our dreams. And everyone is entitled to the basic human rights set forth in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Sadly, the fact that everyone deserves these things doesn’t mean everyone gets their just desserts. Those of us who have grown up with multiple high-level attachment needs have at least experienced what it’s like to grow up with caregivers who neglect, abuse, withhold, prevent love, or abuse, abuse, abuse, abuse, or abuse, or abuse, or abuse, or abuse, or abuse, or abuse, or abuse, or abuse. We may feel survivor’s guilt because we loved someone who went through hell during childhood, and when we have our own challenges, we can’t understand what we love. It’s all wrong sadly, because no child has ever done anything to deserve that kind of child abuse, and it’s understandable for those of us with compassionate hearts that the hard grief of a difficult childhood can make it hard for someone to love later.
Every bead that survived childhood is trying to make sense of “why me?” Most of the answers our culture throws their way only make them worse, especially spiritual explanations.
“Your soul chose your abusive parents for your spiritual growth.”
“Your abuse is Karmic payment for past life misdeeds.”
“God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.”
“Your attacker is actually your teacher.”
Such ways of trying to make sense of a tragic tragedy are insensitive and even harmful to survivors of abuse. Through no fault of their own, not all children meet their initial attachment needs. When they don’t, they grow up with a broken heart. They cannot distinguish. They also put damaged nervous systems that don’t develop as they should, which can make them more active and overactive. They may develop many other developmental problems that are not their fault. They see other children with loving caregivers and can understand why they are not attractive enough to their parents to give up loving intimacy, and encourage many things they are proud of.
Because children have customized everything, there is very little you can understand that has nothing to do with them. So they make a story that they are ugly to the bone, unattractive, damaged, worthless, not good enough or good enough to attract their parents’ love, the way other children do. This basic omission has a major impact on the relationships of survivors of severe pain for most of their lives, which can cause survivors of severe grief to struggle with relationships later in life. How could they do it? No one has ever taught them “how” to have a healthy relationship, so instead, they have to disable related skills that can be done at a high cost. The price of acceptance can cause those who survive painful pain to sell their authenticity, give until they are reduced, give in to their needs, seek, protect, and fulfill themselves in order to find love. It can also cause people to seek other people to dominate, control, power, abuse, and exploit.
They say that the wounds that happen in the relationship need to be healed – in the relationship. Ideally, relationship therapy with a private therapist who knows how to deal with issues of transference, projection, obsessing, and abusive behavior tends to be better. But many trauma survivors cannot afford the more expensive treatments that insurance often covers, such as Ifs, somatic vision, the partial communication model, and advanced, low-cost combination therapy.
That’s why I’m bringing in my daily parts maker Emma Harper to help me lead a weekend peer-to-peer training to appreciate IFRS parts. This approach to peer support is already happening across China. They call it “inner peace training,” as a way to reduce the taboo of psychotherapy or trauma treatment common in many Asian countries. Since the focus is on building more internal harmony and less discrimination between our parts, it can help to deal with what you need, such as asking someone who needs it, calling someone what can be supported, setting and Enforcing clear boundaries, and engaging in recovery in relation when we are unavoidable and offend our peer support partners- because we are human and we make mistakes.
Learn more about peer to peer training components here.
It is not easy to learn these skills related to someone who is very close to you – such as your spouse, parents, children, or siblings. The opportunity to make Ifs members work with a peer support person is that there is some distance there. There is little risk, if anything goes wrong. You can try new ways to communicate – and get feedback. And you can find someone who will at least try their best to empathize- and witness, mirror, and confirm parts of you – maybe even confirm and help you safely.
Emma and I wrote a 13 page document on the “how to” of peer review, which I shared with Dick Schwartz, who was impressed with it and asked for a copy. When I shared it with Harvard Psychiatrist and lead trainer Frank Anderson, MD, he said something like “Oh Yeah, you just wrote down how to love a heavy person.” He said that these are the tools that survivors must learn to be healthy in relationships, and these are the ways of communicating with the people involved that they must practice in order to heal their lives of communicating with their parts.
If this sounds like something you’d like to try, you’re invited to join us on November 1-2 for a closer. We will be giving you the opportunity to “fast track” potential parts that work for you to find someone you love. Or you can learn skills and do this with someone you already know, who do you think you are dating. We’ll be giving you all the tools, and Emma and I will copy exactly what we do to each other – and then give our students a chance to practice on each other, with feedback from us.
Save $100 when you sign up now.
