This year I resolve to:

• Look in the mirror and pick out one thing I like about what I see each day.

• Consider my own needs and wishes in every situation, even those in which I end up deciding to put the other person first.

• Say “no” when I need to say “no”, even if that’s disappointing to someone else.

• Remember that my imperfections don’t reduce my worth.

• Treat an urge to binge or to restrict as a signal that something’s bothering me and I need to figure out what it is and attend to it in some way.

• Give some energy each day to something I care about that has nothing to do with weight.

• Ban the use of verbal abuse when speaking of myself.

• Give myself credit for one thing I do well and/or feel proud of (unrelated to food or weight) each day.

• Do my best to remember that recovery isn’t a straight–line process; slips and even relapse are a respectable part of a learning curve.

• Find a new way each day to remind myself that my weight has nothing to do with my worth.

My very best wishes for a happy, healthy New Year!

Susan

This is a second post addressing people who have learned to feel wary and possibly avoidant of close relationships. You might not be surprised to learn this is an extremely common experience among people with eating disorders. One allure of food and/or dieting is that they can seem more reliable than people. If this is true in your internal world, finding your way to more solid ground when it comes to other people will be an important part of a strong recovery for you.

In my earlier post I discuss relationship “maps,” unconscious internal guides that tell us what to expect from others, based on childhood experience. If, for example, your experiences were frightening or disappointing, exploitive or without affection, at least a part of you will anticipate being frightened, let down, exploited or unloved in adult relationships. Unfortunately, when either your conscious or unconscious mind expects certain outcomes with people, you can be stunningly accurate in finding people who match those expectations. Or you might only notice when someone matches a threatening expectation, ignoring or discounting all the times they behave in more positive ways.

Changing the pattern

Relationship beliefs and patterns that make others seem dangerous and/or perpetually disappointing are difficult to change, partly because they operate so automatically and unconsciously and, even more so, because there is so much threat and self–protection associated with them. Three big jobs await you if you choose to challenge these patterns in your own life:

• Achieving awareness If your internal relationship map habitually warns you that others are dangerous or disappointing, it’s time to stop and take a good, long look. It may feel hard—and risky— to believe, but the problem is in your map, not other people in general. Your first and biggest job is to discover that people in general didn’t teach you to be mistrustful; your personal history did. This awareness is the key to all the other changes that follow.

• Challenging beliefs and perceptions Your second big job is to challenge the false alarms and misguided perceptions inherent in a map made faulty by relationship trauma. Your unconscious mind, in an abundance of caution, has taken the position of expecting a repeat of your worst relationship wounding. As an unintended result, it leads you to select people who reinforce your fears or to notice selectively; that is, to only see that which matches your beliefs. Or to misconstrue what you actually see, perceiving menace or bad faith where there is none.

• Changing automatic behavior Your third big job is to change habitual interaction patterns that only serve to prove your frightened and pessimistic expectations of others. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the guy whose tire blew out on a country road? He decides to try to borrow a jack at the farmhouse he passed earlier, but on the way he convinces himself of how unhelpful and uncaring people are. By the time the unwitting farmer answers the door, our driver shouts furiously, “So keep your darn jack!”  This teaching tale represents just one of many ways our fear­–driven behavior can become self–fulfilling prophecy. The first tragedy is to be wounded in our earliest relationships; the second is to perpetuate the wounding through our own behavior in adult life.

Updating a faulty map

The most reliable way to change a relationship map that regularly sends you false alarms is within a safe, reliable relationship such as you find in therapy or a therapy group. This is easy to say, but takes a lot of grit and courage to do. It’s not like the fears go away just because the setting or people mean to be safe. And even people who mean to be safe make mistakes or inadvertently step on tender toes. But this is precisely where the map revisions and healing can come from.

Increasingly, the therapy world is focusing on how to be helpful with early relationship trauma. Examples of therapy approaches that put relationship healing front and center include interpersonal analysis, interpersonal therapy (IPT), AEDP, and many of the trauma therapies. If you are interviewing a therapist, you should ask how he or she works on treating relationship trauma and see if the response makes sense to you.

It always amazes me when people who have suffered considerably in early relationships somehow manage to “let the right one in.” Against the odds they choose people who don’t reinforce the old expectations, who are loving, devoted and affirming. Also against the odds, this traumatized person tolerates inevitable missteps in the other and endures the terrible fear that it’s all a mirage or will inevitably be taken away. If a person can stay long enough in such a relationship, the old map begins to shift to take account of the new reality.

Of course, the other part of map updating, whether through therapy or other healing relationships, is the revision of your image of yourself. Learning that you can cope with relationship letdowns that were too hard when you were a kid makes a lot more risk–taking possible.

Changing a relationship map that’s based on trauma is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. And it always takes longer than you think it should or that you think you can stand. But it will also have the biggest payoff in the rewards and nourishment you can let into your life and the sense of confidence you’ll have in yourself.

My warmest wishes to you in this and all else you seek to accomplish in the coming year!

Susan

Sometimes relationships actually are dangerous. Sometimes a person’s history leaves them vulnerable to picking partners and friends who inflict physical and/or emotional harm. Those aren’t the people I’m focusing on today. Today I’m thinking of those of you for whom the very idea, let alone the real deal, of connecting to others feels dangerous. I emphasize the word “feels”. The normal rough and tumble of relating —disappointments, hurts, losses—feel like they can just destroy you. It feels so real and frightening that you either avoid relationships altogether or regularly find yourself overwhelmed and despairing when you try them. See if any of the following sound like you:

• You are so frightened of being rejected, you can’t allow anyone to know you well.
• You are so frightened of being let down, you can’t allow yourself to rely on anyone.
• You learned long ago that your needs will be ignored, denigrated, or experienced as too much by others, so you’ve taught yourself not to need or want anything from anyone.
• You are highly suspicious of others’ motives toward you and frequently interpret what they are saying or feeling in relation to you in a negative light; for example, you might regularly think people are trying to take advantage of you, or are ridiculing you, or are not taking you into account.
• People frequently accuse you of being “oversensitive”.
• If someone you care for says or does something that seems insensitive, they can suddenly feel like your enemy.
• Though you want a relationship, in the end the risks feel like they outweigh the possible rewards.

Nobody is born with beliefs and fears like these. They are the result of what we call relational trauma; that is, when those you relied on in childhood for ongoing care were hurtful, frightening or not there enough. An adult can withstand  running into experiences like these. Ideally hurtful or unsupportive people are weeded out and healthier others are chosen. Let’s look at how it’s different for children and why it has such an enduring impact.

Your “internal map” of relationships

We don’t enter the world with any expectations of what it’s like to be with other people. We build these expectations bit by bit from our daily experiences with caregivers. Eventually, repeated experience takes root as an unconscious “map” that tells us how experiences with other humans are likely to go. Later, experiences with peers and outside authority can reinforce or modify the map. If we’ve had enough support and affirmation for who we are and what we need as kids, we generally grow into adults who expect relationships to be rewarding and who don’t take it personally when they aren’t.

Of course, many people aren’t so lucky. If you have only a few weak spots in the map, you can still get enough from relationships to make them seem worthwhile. I reserve the term trauma for experiences that were truly overwhelming. Traumatized, overwhelmed little people tend to grow into adults who can easily be overwhelmed by relationship adversities.

The dependency effect

Why do early relationship failures pack such a wallop? We start life full of needs. We also start life in a helpless state and are completely dependent on caregivers—usually parents—to meet our needs. The key to how failures of caregiving can be traumatizing to little people is this state of dependency. The fact that infants and young children can neither meet their own needs nor protect themselves from harm makes the quality of caregiving a matter of survival. Our brains are programmed through evolution to pay very close attention to anything related to survival. Since the caretaker relationship is experienced through the lens of survival, failures in the caretaker relationship can be felt as life­–threatening. If only it were possible for a small mind to know that if things aren’t so hot now, better times might lie ahead. But for infants and small children, the caretaker relationship is the world, so lessons learned are installed as if they apply to everyone and for all time.

The amygdala effect

Deep in our brain’s is a tiny part called the amygdala. (Great name, right?) Among the many jobs of the amygdala is to keep track of anything that has ever been threatening to us. The amygdala is part of our archaic survival system, one we share with other species. When the amygdala encounters anything in the present that once threatened or overwhelmed us, something we never got the better of, it throws an internal alarm. That’s the famous alarm that sends us into fight, flight or freeze. The amygdala is extra cautious, too. It doesn’t have to perceive an exact replica of that old threat. The current threat may only need to resemble the original. For instance, if you were relentlessly criticized and made to feel inadequate as a kid, somebody merely disagreeing with you in the present may feel unbearably threatening.

Adult relationships

Though we grow out of our childhood state of dependency, we never lose our need for others we can rely on, people we can turn to for affirmation, acceptance and caring. We  are hard–wired as humans to seek these kinds of connections. They feel vital to our sense of well–being. But if your relational map is trauma–coded, you are being warned away from relationships with the same or greater urgency as you are being moved toward them. It can feel like an irresolvable dilemma.

The good news is that even if you are terrified of relationships now, you can learn to feel safe with others. You can update that relationship map and can learn skills that will help you master situations that feel threatening. Please join me in my next post when I’ll go over how people do that.

Warm regards,

Susan