The Self You Let Behind

Posted on by helpingsoul

On Self-Abandonment, and the Slow Work of Rebuilding Trust With the Inner Child You Once Had to Leave

An essay for the person who took care of everyone else and learned, long ago, to leave themselves — and who is now ready to come back.

There is a particular kind of person who is endlessly reliable to everyone but themselves. They show up for their friends, their family, their colleagues, their clients. They remember the birthdays, carry the emotional weather of the household, anticipate what others need before others know they need it. They are, by every external measure, dependable. And if you asked them whether they are reliable to themselves — whether they keep their own promises, tend their own needs, show up for their own inner life — the question would land strangely, because the honest answer is no, and they have rarely let themselves see it.

This is self-abandonment. It is one of the quietest and most common wounds I see in my clinical practice, and it is rarely named directly, because the person living it looks so functional from the outside. They are not in obvious crisis. They are simply, persistently, not home to themselves. And underneath the competent surface, there is a part of them — young, hurt, long ago left to fend for itself — that has been waiting a very long time for someone to come back.

This essay is about that leaving, why it happened, why it was not a failure of character, and how the slow work of return actually happens. It is for the person who is ready to stop abandoning themselves and does not quite know how to begin.

How the leaving happened

Children do not abandon themselves for no reason. They do it to survive.

Imagine a child in a home where the adults could not, or did not, reliably tend the child’s emotional needs. Perhaps a parent was overwhelmed, ill, addicted, grieving, or simply emotionally immature. Perhaps the household ran on tension, and the child learned that keeping the peace was their job. Perhaps the child’s own feelings — their fear, their anger, their needs, their grief — were unwelcome, dismissed, or dangerous to express. In a home like that, a child faces an unbearable problem. They have needs and feelings, and there is no one with the capacity to meet them, and expressing them makes things worse.

So the child does something intelligent and costly. They set themselves aside. They turn their attention outward, toward the adults, toward managing the environment, toward being good and helpful and undemanding. They become exquisitely attuned to everyone else’s state and increasingly unaware of their own. They stop bringing their needs forward, because their needs are not safe to have. In effect, they leave the vulnerable, feeling, needing part of themselves behind — locked away somewhere quiet — because carrying it openly is too dangerous.

This is the original self-abandonment. And it is essential to understand that it was not a flaw. It was a survival strategy, and it worked. The child made it through. The parts of them that needed care were set aside precisely so the rest of them could function in conditions that did not allow for a fully feeling, fully needing child. The leaving was the cost of surviving, and the child paid it because they had to.

Why it did not stop

The difficulty is that the strategy did not end when childhood ended. The child grew into a capable adult, and the adult kept running the program. They kept attending to everyone else. They kept their own needs quiet. They kept the feeling, vulnerable part of themselves locked away, because the system had learned, at the deepest level, that this was how to be safe and acceptable.

And so the adult continued to abandon themselves, day after day, year after year. They overrode their own exhaustion. They dismissed their own grief. They postponed their own needs indefinitely. They made themselves reliable to everyone except the one person who most needed them. Each small act of self-abandonment was minor on its own. Across decades, they accumulated into a person who is genuinely not in relationship with themselves — who has, in a real sense, left the building.

Meanwhile, the part that was set aside in childhood did not disappear. It is still there. It is still young, still carrying the original feelings and needs, and still, after all this time, waiting. This is the hurt inner child, and the relationship between the capable adult and this waiting child is the relationship this essay is about.

Why you cannot simply decide to trust yourself again

Here is where many people, full of good intention, stumble. They recognize the pattern. They resolve to change. They tell themselves, often quite sincerely, that from now on they will tend their own needs, keep their own promises, show up for themselves. And then, within days or weeks, the resolve collapses, and they conclude that they have failed.

They have not failed. They have simply misunderstood how trust works.

Consider what you would think of an actual person who had abandoned you, repeatedly, for years — who had broken promise after promise, who had never once put your needs first — and who then announced, one day, that everything was different now and you should trust them completely. You would not believe them. You would be foolish to believe them. Trust, with a person like that, would have to be rebuilt slowly, through small actions, repeated consistently, over a long time, before you would dare to rely on them again.

The inner child is no different. The young, hurt part of you has watched the adult abandon them a thousand times. From that part’s point of view, the adult is not trustworthy. The adult has the track record of someone who leaves. When the adult suddenly announces a new era of reliability, the inner child does not relax and believe it. The inner child, entirely reasonably, waits to see. And this is why willpower and resolution fail. You cannot declare trust into existence. Trust, even the trust between you and yourself, has to be earned.

Why the acknowledgment matters

This is also why the work of return must begin with an honest acknowledgment, not with a promise of perfection.

When a person tries to reconnect with their inner child, the instinct is often to make a grand reassurance: I will always be here for you now, I will never leave you again. The intention is loving. But the inner child has heard the adult’s confident declarations before, and a promise that large, from someone with this particular history, is not reassuring. It is the very kind of overpromise that has been broken before. It asks the child to extend a trust that has not been earned.

What the inner child actually needs to hear is the truth, spoken gently. Something closer to this. I know I left you. I left you a long time ago, and I have left you many times since. I need you to know that the leaving happened because I had to survive, and back then, leaving you was the only way I knew. It was never your fault. You did not deserve to be left. And I want you to know that I am working on this now. I am not going to be perfect at it. I will probably still leave sometimes, especially at first. But I am learning to come back. I am learning to show up. I know that trust takes time, even between me and you, and I am willing to earn it slowly, in small ways, for as long as it takes.

Every part of that acknowledgment is doing necessary work. Naming the leaving tells the child their experience was real and is not being denied. Naming the reason — survival — frees the child from the belief that they were left because they were unworthy. Saying it was not the child’s fault addresses the shame the child has almost always carried. And the honest, modest promise — I will not be perfect, I am learning, trust takes time — is the only kind of promise the child can actually use, because it is the only kind that will not be broken. A child who is promised slow, imperfect, genuine effort, and then sees it delivered, can begin to trust. A child who is promised perfection sees the promise fail and trusts even less.

How trust is actually rebuilt

If trust cannot be declared, how is it rebuilt? The same way it is rebuilt between any two people who have been estranged: through small, consistent, repeated acts that demonstrate, over time, that things are genuinely different.

This is gentle, unglamorous work, and that is precisely why it succeeds. It is not a dramatic transformation. It is the slow accumulation of small kept promises.

It looks like noticing, once a day, what you actually feel, and not immediately overriding it. It looks like keeping one small promise to yourself — a short walk you said you would take, a few minutes of rest you said you would allow — and keeping it because you said you would, the way you would keep a promise to someone you love. It looks like pausing, when you are about to abandon yourself again, about to override your own exhaustion or dismiss your own need, and choosing differently in that one small instance. It looks like the scheduled dates with yourself — time set aside to grieve, to play, to tend your own body — kept consistently enough that the inner child begins to notice you are showing up.

Each of these is small. None of them, alone, rebuilds the relationship. But the inner child is watching, and the inner child counts. Every small promise kept is logged. Every small act of showing up registers. And slowly, over weeks and months, the evidence accumulates on the other side of the ledger. The part of you that has been abandoned begins to notice that this time, the adult keeps coming back. Not perfectly. But consistently enough. And consistency, repeated over time, is the only thing that has ever rebuilt trust, anywhere, between anyone.

When you do fail — and you will, sometimes, because no one does this perfectly — the work is not to collapse into shame. It is to do exactly what you would do with a person you had let down and genuinely loved. You acknowledge it. I left you again. I am sorry. I am still learning. And then you return, and you keep returning. The returning after the failure is itself part of how trust is built. The inner child does not need an adult who never falters. The inner child needs an adult who always, eventually, comes back.

The particular grief of having left yourself

There is a grief that arrives in this work that deserves to be named on its own, because it is different from any other, and people are often unprepared for it.

Much has been written about the grief of having had parents who could not meet you. That grief is real and important. It is the grief of what someone else failed to give. You mourn the attunement you did not receive, the safety that was not provided, the childhood you did not get. In that grief, you are the one who was wronged, and the wrongdoer is someone else.

The grief of self-abandonment is different, and it is harder, because in this grief you are on both sides. You are the child who was left. And you are also the one who did the leaving. You mourn the years you did not live as yourself, the dreams you set down, the needs you overrode, the body you pushed past or used against itself, the decades the young part of you spent waiting alone. And you mourn all of it knowing that your own hand was in it. The person who abandoned you, this time, was you.

This doubling is what makes the grief so particular and so difficult. There is a strong pull, when it arrives, to slide from grief into self-blame, to turn the mourning into another occasion for the inner critic, to say to yourself: how could I have done that to myself, what is wrong with me. This is the moment to hold, with great care, the truth this entire essay rests on. The leaving was survival. The child who first set themselves aside did so because there was no other way through. The adult who kept abandoning themselves was running a program installed long before they had any choice in it, a program that, for years, was doing its best to keep them safe and functional. You did not abandon yourself out of cruelty or weakness. You abandoned yourself because, at the time, in the conditions you were in, it was what survival required.

And so this grief must be held the way all the rest of this work is held: without blame, with compassion for the one who is grieving and also for the one who did the leaving, because they are the same person and that person was doing their best. You are allowed to mourn the cost of your self-abandonment fully. The lost years are worth mourning. The forgone dreams are worth mourning. The ways you treated your own body and mind and spirit as though they did not matter are worth mourning. Let that grief come. It is honest, and it has been waiting, often for a very long time, for permission to move.

What makes this grief bearable, and ultimately freeing rather than crushing, is that it is not happening in isolation. It is happening at the very moment you are coming back. You are grieving the abandonment precisely because you are no longer abandoning yourself. The grief is the sound of the leaving ending. A person still fully abandoning themselves does not feel this grief at all, because they are not yet present enough to mourn. The arrival of this grief is evidence that you have returned, that you are here now, that the part of you which can mourn the leaving is the same part that has finally come home to stay. The grief and the homecoming are happening together. That is why, painful as it is, this grief can be trusted. It is the grief of a reunion, not of a loss without end.

What you are rediscovering

As this trust slowly rebuilds, something is recovered, and it is worth naming what it is.

The part you abandoned in childhood was not only need and hurt. It was also aliveness. It was your spontaneity, your capacity for play, your access to your own desires and preferences, your unguarded feeling, your creativity, your unmanaged joy. When you set the vulnerable child aside to survive, you did not only lock away the pain. You locked away the vividness. The capable adult who runs on duty and self-abandonment is often, underneath, a somewhat colorless place to live, because the color was in the part that got left behind.

So the work of returning to the inner child is not only the healing of an old hurt, though it is that. It is also a recovery of life. As the child begins to trust that you are genuinely back, they begin to bring their gifts forward again. The play returns. The spontaneity returns. The access to your own real preferences and desires returns. You begin to feel more vivid, more present, more like a person inhabiting their own life rather than performing it. This is the rediscovery. The self you left behind has been holding, all this time, not only your wounds but your aliveness, and when you come back for one, you come back for both.

A closing thought

If you recognize yourself in this essay — if you have been reliable to everyone but yourself, if you can feel that somewhere inside you there is a young part that has been waiting a long time — I want to say two things to you.

The first is that the leaving was not your fault. You were a child in conditions that did not allow you to stay. You did what you had to do, and it kept you alive, and there is no shame in it.

The second is that it is not too late to come back. The inner child is still there. They have been waiting, and the waiting itself is a kind of hope — they would not still be waiting if some part of them had given up on you entirely. You do not have to return perfectly. You do not have to promise what you cannot deliver. You only have to begin, in small honest ways, to show up. To acknowledge the leaving. To keep the small promises. To come back after you falter. To let trust rebuild at the pace trust actually rebuilds.

The self you left behind has been waiting all this time to be found. You are the one they have been waiting for. And you can begin, today, to come home.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

A Practical Guide to Being Heard and Hearing Others

Posted on by helpingsoul

Communication Tools for People Whose Brains Are Wired Differently — and for the People Who Love Them

A practical companion piece that brings together what I have written about interest-based attention, communicating across different attention architectures, and the research on what great listeners actually do. This is a working toolkit rather than an essay.

This guide is built for a specific situation. Two people who care about each other are trying to communicate, and their brains are wired differently. One may have ADHD or an interest-based attention system. One may have a trauma history that shapes how they hear and respond. One may simply process information at a different pace or in a different style than the other. The conversations keep going wrong, and neither person fully understands why.

This is a practical toolkit rather than an essay. It synthesizes three areas of my previous writing: the nature of interest-based attention and how it differs from the conventional model, the work of communicating across different attention architectures, and the research on what genuinely effective listening involves. It is meant to be used rather than only read. Return to it. Try the tools. Notice what helps.

Part one: understanding the architectures in the room

Before any communication tool can help, both people need a shared understanding of what is actually happening between their two nervous systems and attention systems. Most communication breakdowns are not caused by lack of care. They are caused by two differently-built systems trying to interact without understanding how the other one works.

Interest-based versus importance-based attention

Many people, including most people with ADHD and many people with complex trauma histories, have what is sometimes called an interest-based nervous system. Their attention is reliably engaged by interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and passion. It is not reliably engaged by importance alone. Telling an interest-based person that something is important does not summon their attention the way it summons the attention of an importance-based person.

This is not a character flaw or a failure of caring. It is a structural difference in how the attention system allocates its resources. The interest-based person is not choosing to tune out the important-but-boring conversation. Their attention system genuinely does not engage with it in the same way.

If you are in a relationship where one person is interest-based and one is importance-based, naming this openly changes everything. The importance-based person stops interpreting the interest-based person’s drift as not caring. The interest-based person stops interpreting their own difficulty as moral failure. Both can begin to work with the actual architecture rather than against it.

Pace and processing differences

People process at different speeds and in different styles. Some people think out loud, generating their ideas through the act of speaking. Others think internally and present conclusions only after processing. Some people need time to formulate a response and experience being pushed for an immediate answer as genuinely disregulating. Others lose the thread if a response is delayed.

These differences are not preferences that can simply be overridden. They reflect how the individual nervous system actually processes. The conversation goes better when both people know which style the other has and stop expecting the other to perform their own style.

Trauma-shaped hearing

A person with a trauma history often hears communication through a protective filter. A neutral question can land as criticism. A request can land as a demand. A pause can land as withdrawal of approval. The trauma-shaped system is scanning for danger, and it sometimes finds danger in communication that was not dangerous.

This matters for both people. The trauma-shaped person benefits from knowing that their hearing is filtered, so they can check their interpretations rather than acting on them automatically. The other person benefits from knowing that their neutral communication may be landing as something harsher, so they can be more explicit about their actual intent.

Part two: tools for being heard

If you are the one trying to communicate something and you keep feeling unheard, the following tools help.

Lead with the headline

Interest-based and busy listeners often lose the thread if the important content is buried in the middle of a long preamble. State the core of what you need to say first, in one sentence, then provide the detail. I need to talk about our budget, and here is what is concerning me is more effective than five minutes of context followed eventually by the actual point.

Name the kind of conversation you are starting

Tell the listener what you need from them before you begin. I need to vent and I am not looking for solutions. Or I have a problem and I would actually like your help solving it. Or I need to tell you something difficult and I need you to just listen for a few minutes. This single sentence prevents the most common communication mismatch, in which one person wants to be heard and the other person starts problem-solving.

Choose the moment with the listener’s architecture in mind

If the person you need to talk to is interest-based, do not start an important conversation when their attention is already engaged elsewhere. If they have a trauma history, do not start a hard conversation when they are already activated. The same words land completely differently depending on the state of the listener’s system when they arrive. Timing is not a minor factor. It is often the difference between being heard and not being heard.

Make requests specific and concrete

Vague requests do not give the listener anything to act on. I need more support is hard to act on. I would like you to handle the morning routine with the kids on Tuesdays and Thursdays is specific and actionable. The more concrete the request, the more likely it is to be heard and met.

Check what landed

After you have said something important, ask the listener to tell you what they heard. Not as a test. As a way to catch the gap between what you said and what arrived. The gap is often significant, and catching it in the moment prevents the accumulation of misunderstanding.

Part three: tools for hearing others

If you are the one trying to listen well, particularly to someone whose brain is wired differently than yours, the following tools help. These draw directly on the research about what genuinely effective listening involves.

Clear your internal noise first

Before an important conversation, take a breath and set down whatever you have been thinking about. The listener who is mentally elsewhere cannot produce the quality of attention that genuine listening requires. A few seconds of deliberate clearing changes the conversation that follows.

Remove the distractions

Phone in another room. Laptop closed. The presence of a phone, even face down, has been shown to reduce the felt quality of connection in conversation. The conversation you are about to have deserves the removal of competing inputs.

Listen as a trampoline, not a sponge

The best listeners are not silent absorbers. They are active participants who ask questions that help the speaker discover and clarify their own thinking. Ask questions that promote insight. Reflect back not just the words but the meaning underneath them. The speaker should leave the conversation thinking more clearly than when they entered it.

Tolerate the silence

When the speaker pauses, do not rush to fill the space. The deeper material often arrives in the second wave, after the surface content has been spoken and the speaker is willing to access what is underneath. The capacity to sit with silence is one of the most powerful listening tools available.

Ask before you solve

Even when you can see exactly what the speaker should do, ask them what they have already considered, and ask what they want from the conversation. The speaker who feels heard often arrives at their own solution, or becomes far more receptive to outside input once the hearing has occurred. Premature problem-solving is the single most common way that well-intentioned listeners lose the conversation.

Watch the body, not only the words

The majority of communication is nonverbal. Notice the speaker’s face, posture, breath, the small physical signals. When the words say one thing and the body says another, the body is usually more accurate. Listening with the eyes as well as the ears is foundational to deep listening.

Acknowledge the emotion explicitly

When you can identify what the speaker is feeling, name it and reflect it back. It sounds like this has been really exhausting for you. The felt sense of being seen — of having one’s internal state accurately recognized by another person — is one of the most regulating experiences a nervous system can receive.

Part four: tools for the conversation itself

When two differently-wired people are in a conversation that matters, the following structural tools help the conversation hold together.

Regulate before you engage

Conversations that begin from an activated state rarely go well. Before a hard conversation, both people benefit from regulating. A few slow breaths with the exhale longer than the inhale. A short pause. The conversation that begins from two regulated systems is a different conversation than the one that begins from activation.

Take silence when you need it

If you feel yourself becoming activated mid-conversation, you are allowed to take silence. Three slow breaths, counting four on the inhale and seven on the exhale, repeated three times, takes about a minute. The silence regulates you and often gives the other person time to settle as well. Silence in a conversation is permitted. It frequently produces a better conversation than pushing through the activation would have.

Name the process when it goes off track

When a conversation has become heated or confused, you can step out of the content and name the process. I notice we are both getting activated. Can we slow down? Or I think we are talking about two different things. Can we figure out which one we are actually discussing? Naming the process, rather than continuing to fight about the content, often resets the conversation.

Repair when something lands wrong

When something you said landed harder than you intended, name it and try again. That came out sharper than I meant. Let me say it differently. Repair is one of the most powerful tools in any relationship. The capacity to recognize when something has gone off track and gently bring it back is what distinguishes relationships that endure from relationships that erode.

Schedule the hard conversations

Important conversations do not have to happen in the moment of activation. For many couples and families, the most difficult conversations go far better when scheduled — a set time, both people regulated, distractions removed, both people having agreed in advance to discuss the topic. The scheduled conversation prevents the ambush dynamic in which one person raises something hard while the other is unprepared.

Part five: a note for differently-wired couples and families

If you are in a relationship or family where the attention architectures genuinely differ, the most important tool of all is the shared understanding that the differences are real, structural, and not anyone’s fault.

The interest-based partner is not choosing to forget the important task. The trauma-shaped partner is not choosing to hear criticism in a neutral question. The internal-processor is not choosing to be slow. The think-out-loud partner is not choosing to be scattered. These are the actual architectures of the actual nervous systems in the room.

When both people understand this, communication shifts from a contest in which each person tries to get the other to communicate their way, into a collaboration in which both people work with the actual systems present. The interest-based partner uses external structure and reminders without shame. The importance-based partner stops interpreting the other’s drift as not caring. The trauma-shaped partner checks their interpretations. The other partner becomes more explicit about intent. Both people, understanding the architecture, can build a communication system that actually fits the people in the relationship rather than fighting the people in the relationship.

This is the work. It is learnable. It takes practice. And the relationships that do this work — that build communication systems fitted to the actual people involved — become significantly stronger than they were when both people were trying, with the best intentions, to communicate in ways that did not match how the other person was built.

A closing thought

Communication across different brains is one of the more demanding things two people can attempt. It is also one of the most rewarding, because the felt sense of being genuinely heard by someone whose brain works differently than yours — and of genuinely hearing them in return — is one of the deepest forms of connection available.

None of the tools in this guide is complicated. All of them take practice. Choose two or three to begin with. Work with them. Notice what helps. Add more over time. The accumulation, across months and years, builds a communication system that fits the actual people in your life.

The goal is not for everyone to communicate the same way. The goal is for differently-built people to understand each other well enough to build something that works for the specific brains in the specific relationship. That is possible. It is worth the practice. And the connection it produces is worth the work it requires.

Related reading: This guide draws on my previous articles on interest-based attention and on what great listeners actually do, both available at courageous-arts.com, and on the broader literature including the work of Stephen Porges on the social engagement system and the research on neural synchronization in conversation.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

The Mother Who Cannot Let Her Daughter Bloom

Posted on by helpingsoul

Maternal Envy, the Daughter’s Emerging Sexuality, and the Slow Work of Naming What Most Mothers and Daughters Will Not Name Aloud

A substantial revision of an earlier 2010 post on mother-daughter envy. The original was a personal reflection. This version is clinical, drawing on cases at appropriate distance and on current research that the 2010 piece did not yet have access to.

In my clinical practice, I have sat with a particular kind of grief many times. The grief of an adult daughter who has slowly come to recognize that her mother envied her. That the mother who was supposed to celebrate her emerging womanhood instead competed with it. That the mother who was supposed to teach her that her body was good was the first person to communicate, through small gestures and large ones, that her body was a problem. That the mother who was supposed to want her flourishing instead, in some difficult-to-name way, needed her to not flourish quite so visibly.

This pattern is not rare. It is not, despite the cultural insistence that all mothers love their daughters unconditionally, a marginal phenomenon. Maternal envy of daughters is a well-documented dynamic in clinical literature. It just is not often discussed openly, because it violates one of the most protected cultural narratives we have — the mother as the unconditional source of love for her child.

This article addresses what the pattern looks like, where it comes from, how it affects the daughters who lived through it, and what the work of recovery and repair can look like for both parties. The territory is sensitive. It deserves both clinical precision and the recognition that mothers who envy their daughters are themselves usually carrying significant unprocessed material from their own lives. The work is not to identify mothers as villains. It is to name a dynamic clearly enough that the people who lived through it can recognize themselves and begin the work of healing.

What maternal envy of daughters looks like

The dynamic shows up in many forms. None of them is universally diagnostic on its own. The pattern emerges from accumulation rather than from any single behavior.

The mother who criticizes her teenage daughter’s clothing not for actual modesty concerns but because the daughter’s emerging body is genuinely attractive and the criticism is the mother’s way of damping the attention the daughter is receiving. The criticism is framed as protection. The felt sense underneath, often unconscious to the mother herself, is something closer to resentment.

The mother who, when men in public respond to her teenage or young adult daughter’s appearance with attention or cat calls, shames the daughter for inviting the attention. The implicit message: your body is the problem. Your appearance is the problem. The fact that you are being noticed in ways I am no longer noticed is a flaw in you rather than a function of biological aging in me.

The mother who undermines her daughter’s accomplishments with subtle critique. The straight A’s that are met with concern about the daughter’s social life. The scholarship that is met with comments about how lucky she was. The successful relationship that is met with skepticism about whether the partner is good enough. The pattern is not consistent criticism. It is the precise targeting of whatever the daughter is most flourishing in.

The mother who competes with her daughter for the attention of the same men. The father whose attention the mother needs and who is suddenly noticing the maturing daughter. The boyfriends or husbands whose admiration the mother monitors for any indication that they have noticed the daughter. The dynamic produces specific kinds of damage in the daughter, who learns to dampen herself in male company in order to avoid triggering the mother’s reaction.

The mother whose stated values and lived behavior contradict each other around female sexuality. The mother who preaches abstinence while the daughter knows the mother lost her own virginity at fifteen. The mother who shames the daughter for sexual exploration while the mother herself has a complicated sexual history that is not openly acknowledged. The hypocrisy is its own teaching — it communicates that female sexuality is shameful for the daughter while available for the mother, that the rules apply differently in different generations, that the mother’s right to her own sexual history does not extend to permission for the daughter’s.

Where this dynamic originates

Maternal envy of daughters does not come from nowhere. The mothers who carry this dynamic are not, with rare exceptions, monsters. They are women carrying their own significant unprocessed material from their own lives. Understanding where the dynamic comes from is essential to the work of recovery, because it allows the adult daughter to name what happened without having to demonize the mother who happened to her.

The mother who was not loved well by her own mother often carries a particular kind of injury that surfaces when her daughter reaches the age the mother was at when the mother’s own injuries were forming. The daughter’s blooming activates the mother’s unhealed adolescence. The mother does not consciously decide to envy her daughter. The envy arises as a somatic response to seeing in her daughter what she did not get to have in herself.

The mother whose own youth was traumatic or curtailed often experiences her daughter’s freedom as an unbearable contrast. The mother who married too young, who became pregnant before she was ready, who had no opportunity for education or self-discovery, who was sexualized as a child — these mothers may genuinely love their daughters and may also carry a specific grief about what they themselves did not have, which makes the daughter’s having of those things activating.

The mother whose marriage is unhappy, whose own sexual life has been disappointing, whose physical body has aged in ways she has not been able to accept, often finds her daughter’s emerging sexuality intolerable in a way she cannot fully articulate. The daughter has what the mother is losing. The daughter is at the beginning of what the mother is ending. The biological mathematics of aging produces a felt sense in the mother that, unprocessed, can manifest as competition with the very person she is supposed to be welcoming into womanhood.

The mother whose cultural and religious framework treats female sexuality as dangerous often has more conscious access to her envy because the framework gives her permission to express it as concern. The criticisms can be delivered as protection. The shame can be delivered as moral teaching. The mother can simultaneously envy her daughter’s freedom and condemn her for having it, without having to feel the contradiction directly.

None of this excuses the harm. Naming the origins is not the same as forgiving. It is the recognition that the mother who envied her daughter was usually a woman who herself had been failed by the women who came before her, and who has not yet done the work that would let her break the pattern. The recognition allows the adult daughter to hold complexity — both that her mother caused real damage and that her mother was herself damaged. Both can be true.

How the envy affects the daughter

Daughters who lived through maternal envy carry specific patterns into adulthood. The patterns are not unique to this dynamic, but the dynamic produces them in characteristic shape.

Self-dampening. The daughter learned, early, that her flourishing produced consequences. The good grade led to subtle critique. The boyfriend led to undermining. The accomplishment led to attention being shifted away. The adult daughter often unconsciously continues the dampening. She underdresses for events where she might shine. She undermines her own accomplishments in conversation. She makes herself smaller in the presence of women, particularly older women, who feel similar to the mother.

Sexual ambivalence. The daughter learned that her body was simultaneously something to be protected and something to be ashamed of. Her emerging sexuality was met with both watchfulness and condemnation. As an adult, she often carries complicated relationships to her own sexual desire, her own body, her own right to pleasure. The straightforward access to her own erotic life that her mother did not allow her to develop in adolescence has to be developed, painfully, in adulthood.

Difficulty receiving from women. The daughter who experienced her mother as a rival rather than as an ally often struggles, as an adult, to fully trust other women. Friendships with women carry an undertow she may not be able to articulate. Compliments from older women trigger old wariness. The capacity to receive care from female mentors, female friends, female therapists has to be built deliberately because the original maternal template did not allow it to develop naturally.

Hypervigilance to other women’s reactions. The daughter learned to monitor her mother’s emotional state continuously, because her mother’s state determined how the daughter would be treated. The adult version of this is the woman who is exquisitely attuned to how other women are responding to her — who notices, before they themselves notice, when another woman has registered her in some way. The capacity is genuinely useful in some professional contexts. It is also exhausting, and it reflects a developmental history in which female regard was always conditional and never safely received.

Difficulty with her own daughters, if she has them. The pattern is intergenerational. The daughter who has not done significant work on the dynamic she lived through often passes some version of it forward. The work of breaking the cycle is conscious work and is rarely complete in a single generation. It requires recognition, grief, often clinical support, and the deliberate development of capacities the original conditions did not produce.

The work of recovery for the adult daughter

If you recognize yourself in this description — the adult daughter of a mother who, in retrospect, envied you — the work of recovery is real and possible. It is also slow. Several elements support the work.

Grief is the first task. The adult daughter must allow herself to feel the specific grief of having had a mother who was not capable of unconditional welcome of her flourishing. This is harder than it sounds, because the cultural narrative around mothers protects them from this kind of recognition. The grief includes the loss of the mother the daughter needed, the recognition that the actual mother could not be that mother, and the acceptance that no amount of effort on the daughter’s part as a child could have produced the welcoming response she needed.

Naming what happened, clearly. Not to confront the mother — that may or may not be appropriate depending on the specific relationship — but to name it to herself, with someone who can hear it. Often this is in therapy. Sometimes it is in journaling, in conversation with a trusted friend who has lived something similar, in the slow private work of articulating to oneself what had not previously been allowed to be named.

Working with the somatic legacy. The dampening, the sexual ambivalence, the hypervigilance to women — these live in the body. The work of restoring access to fullness in adulthood requires somatic attention. EMDR for specific memories that carry the weight. Somatic experiencing for the chronic patterns of holding back. Parts work for the internal voice that has internalized the mother’s criticism. Attachment-focused therapy for the relational template that filters all current female relationships.

Rebuilding the capacity to receive from women. This often happens through specific relationships — a female therapist who consistently welcomes the client’s fullness, female friends who do not require dampening, female mentors who genuinely celebrate the client’s accomplishments. These relationships are corrective experiences. They slowly teach the nervous system that female regard can be unconditional, that flourishing in the presence of another woman does not have to produce consequences.

The relationship with the mother, in real time, becomes its own ongoing question. Some adult daughters find ways to maintain limited contact with the mother while protecting themselves from the worst of the dynamic. Some choose more substantial distance for periods of time, or permanently. Some find that the mother, herself doing her own work, becomes capable of a different relationship in later years. There is no single right answer. The right answer is the one that allows the adult daughter to continue her own healing without being repeatedly retraumatized.

On the rare possibility of repair between mother and daughter

In some cases, repair is possible. It is rare. It requires the mother to do her own work, to recognize what she did, to take responsibility for it, and to find a way to genuinely welcome her daughter’s flourishing now even though she could not welcome it then. When this happens, it is significant. It does not erase the original damage. It does add a new chapter to the relationship that allows both women to continue knowing each other on different terms.

More commonly, the mother is unable or unwilling to do this work. She may deny the dynamic entirely. She may agree to it superficially without changing her behavior. She may simply not have the resources to face what she did and what her own life produced in her. In these cases, the adult daughter does her own healing without the mother’s participation. This is possible. It is also harder than healing with the mother’s participation would be.

The cultural pressure on adult daughters to maintain close relationships with their mothers regardless of the cost is one of the things that prevents necessary healing for many women. The right amount of contact with the mother who envied you is whatever amount allows you to continue your own work without being repeatedly returned to the original wound. For some daughters, that is regular contact with appropriate limits. For others, it is significant distance. For others, it is no contact at all. None of these is morally superior. They are different responses to different relationships with different mothers.

A closing thought

The mother-daughter relationship is one of the most consequential in any woman’s life. When it goes well, it shapes the daughter’s capacity for self-love, for trust in other women, for owning her own flourishing without apology. When it goes badly, particularly through the specific dynamic of maternal envy, it shapes the daughter’s life in ways that take years of adult work to unwind.

If you are the daughter of a mother who envied you, the work of recovery is real and worth doing. You did not deserve the dampening. You did not deserve the shaming. Your flourishing was always welcome by the universe, even if it was not welcome by the woman who was supposed to welcome it first. The work of recognizing this, of grieving what you did not get, of slowly building the capacity to flourish in spite of it, is the work of becoming yourself.

You did not deserve to be dampened. You deserved to bloom.
It is not too late.

Further reading: Estela Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood. Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence. Terri Apter, Difficult Mothers. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness. For clinical support with attachment and maternal trauma in California or Florida, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Love Is a Capacity, Not Only a Feeling

Posted on by helpingsoul

What Eighteen Years of Clinical Work Have Taught Me About How the Capacity for Love Is Built, Blocked, and Restored

A substantial revision of a 2009 post on love. The original was a young writer’s reflection. This version draws on what clinical work has taught me about why the capacity for love develops easily for some and is significantly compromised for others, and what kind of work restores it.

Most writing on love treats it as a feeling. The intoxicating rush of new attraction. The steady warmth of long partnership. The fierce protectiveness toward a child. The bond with a friend who has known you through years. The reverence for whatever you understand as larger than yourself. All of these are real. All of them are part of what we mean by love.

What is less often written about is that love is also a capacity. The feelings we call love require a particular kind of internal architecture to be felt, received, and given fully. The architecture develops, or fails to develop, based on the conditions a person has lived through. Some people arrive in adulthood with the capacity for love largely intact. They can feel love when it arises in them, receive it when it is offered, give it without the felt sense that doing so will cost them something dangerous. Others arrive in adulthood with the capacity significantly compromised. They may experience strong feelings that resemble love — attraction, longing, attachment, even devotion — without being able to fully receive love when it is offered or give it without protection.

This article is for the second group, and for the clinicians and partners who love them. The capacity for love is not a fixed trait. It can be rebuilt, slowly, in adulthood, when it has been compromised by early conditions. The work is real. It is also possible. What follows is what I have come to understand about why the capacity for love is compromised in some people, what blocks it specifically, and what kind of work restores it.

What love actually requires of the nervous system

Before discussing what blocks the capacity for love, it helps to name what love asks of the body. This is more than feelings. It is the specific somatic conditions that allow love to occur.

Love requires the capacity to remain present in your own body during emotional contact with another person. When someone you love looks at you with care, your nervous system must be able to receive that look without flinching, dissociating, or deflecting. The eyes meeting the eyes. The face responding to the face. These small relational moments are not decorative. They are the substance of how love is communicated between bodies.

Love requires the capacity to feel emotion long enough for the emotion to be received and integrated. The warmth that arises when someone you love walks into the room must be allowed to be felt. If the system reflexively dampens warmth before it can fully register, love does not land. The feelings may exist briefly. They do not accumulate into the felt sense of being in love with someone.

Love requires the capacity to remain in connection during difficulty. When the other person is distressed, your nervous system must be able to stay near them rather than fleeing into protective distance. When you yourself are distressed, you must be able to reach for the other rather than withdrawing into self-sufficiency. The capacity to remain in relationship during the hard moments is what distinguishes love from preference. Preference is easy when conditions are good. Love is the willingness to stay in connection when conditions are difficult.

Love requires the capacity to receive what is offered. The compliment that lands rather than being deflected. The hug that lasts rather than being cut short. The act of care that is allowed to register rather than being countered with reciprocity. Many adults who have spent their lives giving but not receiving find that the capacity to receive is the part that needs the most work. The giving is familiar. The receiving feels foreign or even dangerous.

Love requires the capacity to give without expectation of immediate return. Not in some saintly self-sacrificing way. In the simple sense that love offered with the felt requirement of being returned in kind is something other than love. The system that has learned to track every act of care to make sure it is reciprocated cannot fully love. It is in a state of chronic accounting that love cannot survive.

What blocks the capacity

Several patterns can produce significant compromise in the capacity for love. The patterns often overlap. People rarely show only one. Recognizing the patterns is part of how the work begins.

Insecure attachment from childhood. The infant who was reliably met learns that reaching produces reception, that the other is available, that connection is safe. This learning becomes the somatic foundation for adult love. The infant who was not reliably met learns something different. The system that learned, in childhood, that reaching produces inconsistent or harmful response carries that learning into adulthood. The capacity for adult love is shaped by what the original attachment relationships taught the body to expect.

Trauma that has not been processed. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, severe neglect, witnessing of violence, sustained emotional cruelty, and other traumatic experiences produce specific compromises to the capacity for love. The body that has been hurt by intimacy learns to defend against intimacy. The capacity for love can remain, but it operates under the constant supervision of a protective system that interrupts love before it can fully arrive. EMDR, somatic experiencing, internal family systems, and other trauma-focused approaches address this directly when the underlying material can be processed.

Defenses against affect. Some people develop, in childhood, a phobic relationship to feeling itself. The protective system intervenes preemptively to prevent any emotion from becoming fully felt. The dissociation, intellectualization, performing, or somatization that results blocks not only difficult feelings but also love. You cannot fully feel love if your system reflexively dampens feeling itself. The work of building affect tolerance, which I have written about elsewhere, is a precondition for the capacity for love to develop.

The parentified child or deity child pattern. The child who was assigned, explicitly or implicitly, the role of caretaker for a parent who could not be the caretaker often grows into an adult who cannot fully receive love. The internal architecture is organized around giving. Receiving has not been allowed to develop. The capacity to be loved, in this pattern, is compromised even when the capacity to love others may be intact. The work involves the slow restoration of the capacity to receive.

The internalized critic that interrupts love. Many adults carry an internal voice that responds to moments of being loved with shame, doubt, or the conviction that the love will be withdrawn if the loved person learns the truth about them. The voice was usually learned from a parent or caregiver who treated love as conditional, who criticized rather than supported, who communicated that the child was lovable only when performing acceptably. The adult version of this voice interrupts love in real time, often before the love can be felt. Working with this voice — naming it, understanding what it is protecting, eventually softening its automatic activation — is part of the work of restoring the capacity for love.

Performing identity. The adult who has lived in conditions that required constant performance — professional contexts where evaluation is continuous, families where being lovable required being impressive, relationships where love was conditional on output — often loses access to the part of themselves that could be loved without performing. Love that requires the beloved to keep producing in order to deserve being loved is not quite love. The performing identity has to learn to relax for love to be fully received.

What restores the capacity

The capacity for love can be rebuilt in adulthood. The work is slow. It is also genuinely possible. Several elements support the work.

Therapeutic work that is itself loving. The therapeutic relationship, when it works, is one of the most reliable conditions under which the capacity for love can be rebuilt. The therapist’s consistent presence, the reliability of being received without judgment, the willingness to stay in connection through difficulty, the genuine care that is professional and bounded but real — these provide the corrective experience that the original conditions did not. Many of the most meaningful changes in my clinical practice over the years have happened not because of any specific technique but because the client has experienced, over time, the felt sense of being loved by a therapist whose care for them was genuine and reliable. The therapeutic relationship becomes the laboratory in which the nervous system learns that love is possible.

Somatic work that builds the underlying capacity. Hand on heart practice. The slow rebuilding of interoception. The deliberate practice of remaining present in the body during emotional contact. The capacity to feel without dissociating, to receive without deflecting, to give without immediately needing return — all of these are developable through somatic practice. The body learns what it was not allowed to learn in childhood, in adulthood, with patience.

Trauma processing where unprocessed material is blocking the capacity. When specific traumatic experiences are interrupting current relationship, processing the underlying material through EMDR or other trauma-focused approaches often produces noticeable shifts in the capacity for love. The work is not about love directly. It is about clearing the protective system’s continuing alarm response to material that has not yet been integrated. As the alarm quiets, love becomes more available.

Parts work that addresses the internal architecture. The critic that interrupts love. The protector that defends against intimacy. The caretaker who cannot stop giving. The deity child who cannot receive. Each of these parts has its own history and its own protective function. Recognizing them, naming them, developing relationship with them rather than trying to eliminate them, allows the system as a whole to soften. The parts that have been blocking love do not have to be destroyed. They have to be heard, honored for what they have been protecting against, and slowly released from the protective duty they no longer need to perform.

Corrective relationships in adulthood. The friend who consistently shows up. The therapist whose care is reliable. The partner who remains present through difficulty. The community that welcomes you without conditions. Each of these relationships is a small repetition of being received. The repetitions accumulate. Over months and years of being consistently met, the system updates. The body that learned not to expect love begins to expect it. The capacity grows.

Time. The work of restoring the capacity for love is not quick. The protective system that has been running for decades does not soften in weeks. The body that learned, early, to defend against love does not relearn in months. The capacity grows over years of sustained work. Patience with the timeline is part of the practice. The work is real. The capacity is genuinely developable. And it requires the kind of patience that the protective system itself often makes difficult.

What love looks like when the capacity is functioning

People who have built or rebuilt the capacity for love describe specific qualities to their experience of it.

Love arrives without effort. The warmth toward the beloved is just there. It does not have to be summoned or produced. It is the steady underlying quality of the relationship rather than an intermittent state that has to be regenerated.

Giving does not deplete. When you do something for someone you love from a place of full capacity, you often notice that you feel more connected and alive afterward rather than less. This is the signature of love operating from genuine fullness rather than from depleted reserves.

Receiving is possible. You can be cared for without immediately reciprocating. You can hold a compliment without deflecting. You can be the recipient of attention without managing it. The body has learned that receiving is allowed.

Difficulty does not collapse the connection. When you and your beloved are in disagreement or difficulty, the connection remains underneath the conflict. You can fight and stay in relationship. You can disappoint each other and still know that the relationship holds. The capacity to repair rather than to flee or destroy is built in.

Presence is available. You can be with the person you love without performing, without managing your appearance, without monitoring how you are being received. The capacity to simply be there with them, in your body, fully present, is one of the gifts that comes from doing this work.

Love feels like coming home. This is the phrase that many of my clients have used over the years, after years of work, when they finally arrive at the felt experience of being able to receive and give love from a capacity that is genuinely present. The home is in the body. The home is in the relationship. The home is in the capacity itself, which once felt foreign and now feels native.

A closing thought

If you have read this far and recognized yourself as someone whose capacity for love has been compromised by the conditions of your earlier life, the work is real and worth doing. You are not broken. You were not made in conditions that allowed the capacity to develop naturally. You have lived a life in which love has been complicated, difficult to receive, difficult to give, or different in some way from what you have read in the books and seen in the films.

The capacity can be rebuilt. Not perfectly, not all at once, not in a way that erases the original conditions. In a way that allows you to experience, over time, what love can be when the architecture is functioning. The patience the work requires is real. The reward is also real. And the experience of being able to fully love and be fully loved, in adulthood, after the work has done its slow rebuilding, is one of the genuinely sacred experiences available to a human being who has done the work to deserve it. You deserve it. You always did.

Love is not only a feeling. It is a capacity. And the capacity is yours to build.

Further reading: Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts. Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love. For clinical work in California or Florida that addresses the capacity for love specifically, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Understanding Objectification in Relationships

Posted on by helpingsoul

This article from Mirror of Intimacy by Alexandra Katehakis & Tom Bliss wonderfully explains how objectification may be helpful and harmful not only with our lover but with strangers on the streets, service industries professionals and the like.  picture depicting objectification

“Being objectified gave me a certain sense of humility, and made me feel ignored and unnoticed. At the same time, it made me aware of how and when I do this to others. Sometimes I do it to my friends, when I call them for the express purpose of talking about myself. I almost always do it to customer service reps. And I often objectify barristas: you are just something that happens between me and my latte.”  ~ Melanie Curtin

An object is a thing, usually made of material that can be seen and touched. But an object can also be a person we direct feelings towards. Thus, the one we love can be our “love object” in the most literal sense of the word. But when we target a person as an item of our physical desire–a sexual object to be had–we’ve reduced him or her to a thing to be used for our gain. We all recognize this type of objectification as cold and calculating, serving our carnal needs without any regard for the other. But we often ignore that when we become habituated to this pattern of sexuality we have, ironically, made ourselves into objects, and will find ourselves being used sexually or otherwise, and discarded afterward. Over time, such sexual encounters bring despair to both parties.

In contrast, when love and attachment inspire objectification, being the love object can be exciting and fun. All too often people feel offended by being objectified in any way. But when we comfortably embody our sexuality, objectification by our lover feels like a compliment. To achieve that experience, we must leave any shame about our body or sexuality out of the bedroom. Confidence, self-knowledge, and an appreciation of our sexiness and beauty let us view, and give, our self as a love object in a healthy way.

Receiving adoration for our corporeal body requires a high level of self-love. Typically we associate using one’s body seductively as a power trip. But when we transform our energy into genuine, relationship-based power we experience our self differently, as an admirer–like our lover–of the body we were given at birth, the body that transports us through life, the body that is the altar of sexual pleasure and delight.

Questions to further assess your personal view on how you may or may not objectify others. 

  1. What does it feel like to be objectified?
  2. Where do you feel your emotions in your body?
  3. When have you noticed objectifying someone else?  What was that experience like for you?
  4. Describe in detail beliefs you have around objectification and where their origin.  How have those beliefs helped or hindered your relationships?

The questions below address possible issues with your body and your lover’s body.

  1. In what healthy ways do you objectify your lover?
  2. When you look at your lover’s body, what do you see? What do you tell him or her about the effects his or her body has on you?
    In what healthy ways do you objectify yourself?
  3. How do you adorn and prepare yourself for sex?
  4. How much effort do you put into cultivating your consciousness and your appearance for yourself, and how much do you do it for your partner?

What Actually Builds a Lasting Partnership

Posted on by helpingsoul

A Therapist’s Reflections on What the Research and Eighteen Years of Clinical Work Have Taught Me

A substantial revision of an earlier 2009 post on meeting and marriage. The original used a prescriptive timetable that real relationships rarely follow. This version draws on current research and clinical experience to describe what actually produces lasting partnership across many forms.

In 2009, I wrote a post that mapped what I thought of as the path from meeting someone to marrying them. The post laid out an eight-step timeline — meet, build friendship, set boundaries, develop respect, love revealed at nine months, marriage at one to two years. The framework reflected what I believed at the time about how the strongest relationships developed.

Sixteen years of clinical work later, I would not write that post the same way. Several things have changed.

The most important change is the recognition that relationships do not follow timetables. The couple who knew they were going to marry within three weeks of meeting can have as durable a partnership as the couple who took five years to decide. The couple who lived together for a decade before committing to marriage may have stronger fundamentals than the couple who married within months. The timing varies. The fundamentals do not.

The second change is the recognition that lasting partnership takes many forms. Marriage is one. Long-term cohabitation without legal marriage is another. Partnerships within queer relationships have their own histories and forms. Polyamorous and non-monogamous structures, when they work, work according to similar fundamentals as monogamous partnerships. The legal and cultural form of the relationship matters less than the underlying dynamics. The work of building something that lasts is recognizable across forms, even when the forms differ significantly.

This refreshed essay describes what I have come to understand about those underlying dynamics, drawing on current research and on the work I have done in my practice with couples across many configurations.

The conditions that produce lasting partnership

Several conditions, present together and developed over time, produce the kind of partnership that endures.

Friendship as foundation

This was true in the 2009 post and remains true. The strongest partnerships have a deep friendship underneath them. The capacity to enjoy each other’s ordinary company. The genuine interest in each other’s inner lives. The willingness to spend time together that is not about romance or sex but simply about being with this particular person.

John and Julie Gottman, who have studied couples in their laboratory at the University of Washington for decades, identify friendship as the foundational element of relationships that last. Their research consistently shows that couples who maintain what they call a sound relationship house — the underlying friendship and shared knowledge of each other — weather conflict and transition far better than couples whose connection is primarily passionate or primarily logistical. The friendship is not opposed to romance. It is what allows the romance to continue across decades.

Secure attachment within the relationship

Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy and has spent her career applying attachment theory to adult couples, identifies the felt sense of secure connection as the central work of lasting partnership. Each partner needs to know, in their body, that the other is reliably there — that emotional reach will be met, that need will not be dismissed, that distress can be brought to the other and will be received.

Building this kind of security is the work of years. It develops through small repeated experiences of being met. The partner who turns toward you when you reach out, even when they are tired. The partner who returns to repair after a conflict rather than letting the disconnection settle. The partner who notices when something is wrong before you have named it. These small moments accumulate into the felt sense of being securely held by the relationship itself.

For partners who arrived in the relationship with insecure attachment patterns from childhood, the work is more demanding. The nervous system that learned not to reach has to learn to reach. The nervous system that learned to defend against connection has to learn to receive it. The relationship itself, when it is functioning, becomes the corrective experience that updates the original conditioning. This is slow work. It is genuinely possible, particularly when both partners understand what they are doing.

Respect as daily practice

Respect is the felt experience of being treated as someone whose thoughts, feelings, and choices have weight. It is not the same as agreement. Two partners can disagree substantially and still treat each other with respect. They can fight hard about what matters to them and still convey, throughout the fight, that the other person remains worthy of consideration.

The Gottmans’ research identifies contempt — the felt sense of looking down on the partner, dismissing them as beneath you — as the single most reliable predictor of divorce in their studies. Contempt is the opposite of respect. When it enters a relationship and is not addressed, the relationship is on a trajectory toward dissolution that is statistically very difficult to reverse.

Maintaining respect requires daily attention. The small ways you speak about your partner when they are not in the room. The small ways you respond to them when they share something with you. The small ways you handle conflict when you are tired or activated. Respect is built or eroded in these small moments. It is rarely built or eroded in dramatic events.

The capacity for repair

All relationships experience rupture. The strongest relationships are not the ones in which rupture never occurs. They are the ones in which both partners have developed the capacity to repair after rupture has occurred.

Repair is its own learnable skill. It involves the willingness to recognize when something has gone wrong between you. The capacity to take responsibility for your part without becoming defensive. The willingness to make a genuine acknowledgment of harm caused, however unintentional. The patience to let the other person have their own response to the repair attempt without controlling how they receive it. The follow-through that demonstrates the repair is more than words.

Stan Tatkin, who developed the psychobiological approach to couples therapy, writes extensively about repair as one of the central practices of lasting partnership. His framing — that secure functioning couples treat each other’s regulation as their joint responsibility — points to something important. The repair is not just about the specific rupture. It is about the ongoing maintenance of the relationship’s underlying safety. Each successful repair tells both partners that this relationship can hold difficulty. Each failed repair, particularly accumulated, communicates the opposite.

Differentiation alongside connection

Esther Perel has written extensively about the tension in long-term partnership between connection and otherness. The relationship needs both. Partners who completely fuse — who lose their individual identities into the relationship — often lose desire for each other over time. Partners who remain too separate, who do not actually allow themselves to be known and to know the other, miss the depth that long partnership offers.

The work is holding both. Maintaining your own friendships, interests, and inner life that are separate from the relationship. Continuing to develop as an individual across the years rather than freezing into your role within the partnership. And also doing the work of genuine intimacy, allowing yourself to be known and to know the other deeply, building the shared history that only long partnership can produce.

Differentiation is not coldness. It is the capacity to be fully present in the relationship while remaining recognizably yourself. Partners who maintain this capacity often find that their desire for each other endures across decades, because the other remains genuinely other rather than dissolving into a version of the self.

Shared sense of meaning

Lasting partnerships typically develop a shared sense of what the relationship is for beyond the immediate enjoyment of being together. This may be raising children. It may be building a business or pursuing creative work together. It may be participating in religious or spiritual community. It may be navigating significant challenges — illness, loss, large life transitions — that the partnership has helped both partners through.

The shared meaning is not always articulated. Sometimes it lives in the unspoken understanding that this relationship has been the container for the life both partners have lived. The relationship is not just a source of pleasure or companionship. It is the structure within which a life has been built. That kind of meaning, accumulated over years, produces a depth that newer relationships cannot match no matter how passionate they are.

Commitment as ongoing choice

The 2009 post talked about hundred percent commitment as the defining feature of marriage. I would say something slightly different now. Commitment in lasting partnership is not a one-time decision made at the altar or at the moment of agreement to be exclusive. It is a daily choice that gets remade across the years.

Every long-term partnership goes through periods when one or both partners genuinely consider whether they want to continue. This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the partnership is real and consequential. The partners who continue across these moments do so because they have made the choice to continue. The choice is not always certain. It is often made in conditions of doubt. But it is made, and remade, and remade again across the years.

This framing changes how we understand commitment. It is not the absence of doubt. It is the willingness to act in the direction of the partnership despite the doubt, and to bring whatever the doubt is about into the relationship rather than carrying it alone. The strongest partnerships have rooms in them for the difficult conversations about the partnership itself.

What I would tell a younger version of myself

If I could speak to the therapist who wrote the 2009 post, I would tell her several things.

The timeline does not matter. What matters is what happens within whatever timeline the relationship actually unfolds along.

Marriage is not the goal. The goal is a partnership that allows both people to live in a way that feels genuinely theirs, with someone who knows them and is known by them, across the long arc of a life.

Friendship matters more than passion. Passion comes and goes in long partnership. Friendship, properly tended, deepens.

Repair matters more than avoiding conflict. The couple who never fights is rarely the couple whose relationship lasts. The couple who fights and repairs is.

The work continues. There is no moment when you have arrived at a lasting partnership and can stop building it. The building is the partnership.

If you are in the early stages of a relationship

If you are in the early period of a relationship and trying to determine whether this person could be a lasting partner, here are the questions worth asking yourself. Not on a timetable. Whenever they become relevant.

Is there a genuine friendship underneath the chemistry? Do you actually enjoy this person’s company when you are not romantically engaged with them?

Can you imagine being known by this person at the depth that long partnership requires? Are they capable of receiving you, and are you capable of receiving them, beyond the surface?

How do they handle conflict and repair? Are they capable of taking responsibility for their part in difficulty? Can they offer genuine acknowledgment without becoming defensive?

Are their values and life goals genuinely compatible with yours, or are you assuming compatibility that has not actually been tested?

Do you feel respected by them in the small daily moments, and do you respect them similarly? Is there any contempt in either direction that has begun to enter the interaction?

Are there patterns from their family of origin or yours that you can see playing out in the relationship, and is there room to work with those patterns together?

Do you both have the capacity to maintain your individual lives within the partnership, or is one or both of you losing yourselves into the relationship?

These questions take time to answer honestly. The relationships that last typically allow the time for these questions to surface and be addressed. The relationships that move too quickly past these questions often arrive at the larger commitment with answers that have not been earned.

If you are in an established partnership

If you are in an established partnership and reading this article, the questions are different. The work is not whether to commit. The work is how to sustain what you have built.

The same elements apply. The friendship needs continued tending. The attachment security needs daily renewal. The respect needs to be protected from the small erosions that accumulate over years. The repair after conflict needs to remain a practice rather than something that has become rare. The differentiation needs to be preserved so that you do not lose yourself into the relationship. The shared meaning needs to be allowed to evolve as the lives you are living evolve. The commitment needs to be remade rather than assumed.

Couples therapy can be useful at many points in lasting partnership — not only when the relationship is in crisis. Working with a clinician who understands attachment, who can hold both partners’ nervous systems at once, who can address the somatic dimensions of long partnership rather than only the verbal ones, often produces real growth in relationships that are already functioning. The work is not about fixing what is broken. It is about deepening what is already real.

A closing thought

Lasting partnership is one of the most demanding things a human being can attempt. It is also one of the most rewarding. The partnership that endures across decades does not endure because it was easy or because both partners are uniquely well-suited to each other. It endures because both partners have done the daily work of building and rebuilding it across the years.

If you are in a relationship that is working, honor it. Tend to it. Notice what makes it real, and continue investing in what makes it real. The relationship is not a destination you arrive at. It is the daily practice of choosing to remain in it, to develop with it, to be changed by it across the years.

And if you are searching for a lasting partnership and have not yet found one, the search is real and worth doing. The conditions that produce lasting partnership are recognizable. With enough self-knowledge and enough willingness to do the work, the conditions can be met. The path is rarely linear. The destination, when it is reached, is worth the journey.

Further reading: John Gottman and Julie Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and What Makes Love Last. Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight. Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity. For clinical work with couples in California or Florida, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

How to Speak Clearly When Things Get Heated

Posted on by helpingsoul

 

A Practical Approach to Assertive Communication, Updated for What I Have Learned in the Years Since I First Wrote About This

A substantial revision of an earlier 2014 post titled 6 Tips to Improve Communication with Difficult People. The skills are largely the same. The framing has matured.

In 2014, I wrote a blog post called 6 Tips to Improve Communication with Difficult People. The skills in it were sound. The framing was a product of its moment, and there is one thing I would change before anything else.

The word difficult, in that title, located the problem entirely in the other person. The reader was the reasonable one. The other was the difficult one. This framing was popular in self-help writing of the era, and it has not aged well, for two reasons.

First, almost no one is purely difficult. The person who feels difficult to you is usually someone whose own nervous system is activated, whose own communication patterns developed in their own history, and who is responding to you according to dynamics that include both of you. Naming them as difficult flattens what is actually a co-created pattern.

Second, the framing implicitly excuses the reader from examining their own contribution. The communication you are struggling with is rarely produced by the other person alone. Your response patterns, your tone, your timing, your assumptions about what they meant — all of it is part of what is happening. Naming them as the difficult one closes off the more useful question, which is what would shift if you changed something about how you are showing up.

So this refresh begins with a different framing. The skills below are for any conversation that has become activated, whoever is producing the activation. The goal is not to learn to manage difficult people. The goal is to learn to communicate clearly when the conditions for clear communication have started to deteriorate — which can happen with anyone, including yourself.

Where assertive communication comes from

Most of us did not learn assertive communication in our families. We learned other things. We learned to suppress our own thoughts and feelings to keep the peace. We learned to manage other people’s emotional weather to keep ourselves safe. We learned to say yes when we meant no, to swallow what we needed to say in order to stay connected to someone we feared losing. We learned to be invisible when visibility had been costly.

These patterns were not failures of character. They were survival adaptations. The child who learned to suppress her own voice did so because her voice was unwelcome, mocked, criticized, or punished. The body that learned to swallow what it needed to say was protecting the relational connection that the child needed to survive. The adaptations made sense at the time. They worked. They kept the child safe.

As adults, the same adaptations cost us. The voice that learned to suppress itself in childhood continues to suppress itself in adult relationships that could actually receive it. The body that learned to swallow needed words continues to swallow them with the people who could actually hear them. The conditions have changed. The system has not yet updated.

Learning assertive communication as an adult is the work of updating the system. Slowly. With practice. With the recognition that the skill was suppressed for survival reasons and is being rebuilt now under different conditions. The skill is learnable. The work is real. And the relationships in your life that can survive your assertiveness will become stronger as you develop it. The ones that cannot will reveal what they actually were.

Regulate first

Before any technique, before any acronym, before any specific words you might use, the most important element of assertive communication is the state of your nervous system. Words spoken from activation almost always fail. The technical content of what you said may be perfect. The delivery, shaped by the activation in your body, will land as something different. Your face will signal something other than what your words say. Your tone will carry the urgency that came from the activation rather than the steadiness that effective communication requires. The other person, sensing the activation, will respond to that rather than to your content.

The single most important thing you can do before initiating an important conversation, or in the middle of a conversation that has begun to get heated, is to regulate. Not perfectly. Just enough.

If you can, take the conversation somewhere quieter. Walk away if necessary and return when you are calmer. There is no rule that important conversations have to happen in the moment of activation. Most are better when both parties are regulated.

If you cannot leave, take silence in the conversation itself. Three deep breaths, slow, with the exhale longer than the inhale. Four counts in, seven counts out, three cycles. About a minute of silence. Silence is allowed. It often produces a different conversation than the one that was about to happen.

Notice your own body. Is your chest tight? Your jaw clenched? Your breath shallow? These are signs the system has moved from social engagement into mobilization. From this state, the words you say will not land the way you want them to. Regulate first. Speak from steadier ground.

The skill itself — what I called PASARR in the original

With the regulation in place, here is the structure of an assertive exchange. The original post called this PASARR — Pause, Acknowledge the Truth, Stay True to Self, Ask for a Request, Repeat, Repair. The acronym still works as a memory aid. The content of each step is essentially the same now as it was then, with some refinement.

Pause

Before you respond to what was just said, take a moment. Notice your own reaction. Notice what wants to come out of your mouth. Notice whether what wants to come out is actually what you mean to say, or whether it is the reflexive defensiveness, justification, or compliance that your earlier conditioning trained you to produce.

The pause is short. Sometimes only a few seconds. But it is the space in which choice becomes possible. Without the pause, your response is automatic. With the pause, you can choose.

This is a learnable skill in its own right. People who have spent decades responding reflexively often need to practice the pause many times before it becomes natural. The early attempts feel awkward. The other person may notice the silence and ask if you are okay. You can say yes. You are just thinking before you speak. This is allowed.

Acknowledge what is true

If the other person has said something that contains accurate information, acknowledge it. This is not capitulation. It is not agreeing with the entirety of their position. It is acknowledging the specific kernel of truth in what they said.

If your partner says you have been distracted lately, and you have been distracted lately, do not deny it. Say yes, I have been distracted. Tell me more about what you have been noticing. This acknowledgment de-escalates the dynamic. It signals to the other person that you are not going to fight them on every point. It also clears space for the actual conversation, which is usually somewhere underneath the surface complaint.

If your boss says your work has been below standard, and you can identify one specific instance where this is true, name it. *You are right about the report I turned in last Tuesday. That was not my best work. The presentation I delivered on Thursday, on the other hand, was strong.* Specificity matters. Generalized criticism becomes more workable when met with specific acknowledgment of what is true and specific clarification of what is not.

If the other person has said nothing accurate, you do not have to invent something. But often there is something accurate in even the most charged communication. Finding it is part of the work.

Stay true to yourself

Use I statements. Not the cliched I-feel-when-you-do-this format that has become a parody of itself, but the genuine practice of speaking from your own experience rather than reporting on the other person’s behavior as if it were the only fact in the room.

Instead of *you never listen to me*, try *I have been feeling unheard in our conversations this week*. The difference is significant. The first is a global statement about the other person that they will resist. The second is a report from your own experience that the other person can engage with.

This is harder than it sounds, especially when the activation is high. The instinct in difficult conversation is to focus on what the other person is doing wrong. Learning to redirect that energy toward what you are actually experiencing is part of the practice.

Ask for what you want

After acknowledging what is true and speaking from your own experience, name what you would like to be different. Specifically. Concretely. In a way the other person can actually respond to.

*When you are late and do not call, I find myself worrying and getting angry. Would you be willing to text me if you are going to be more than ten minutes late?* That is a specific request that the other person can say yes or no to.

*You need to be more considerate* is not a request. It is a vague criticism. The other person cannot do anything specific with it. They will respond defensively because the statement does not give them a path to action.

Specific requests, made from a regulated state, with acknowledgment of what is true and speaking from your own experience, are the actual mechanism by which relationships shift over time.

Reflect and repeat

Ask the other person to share what they heard. Not as a test. As a way to ensure mutual understanding. *Can you tell me what you are hearing me say?* They will often paraphrase back something slightly different from what you meant. This is information. You can clarify. They can clarify what they meant when they said the thing that activated you. Over time, the gap between intent and impact narrows.

Repair

If the conversation has gotten heated, if either of you has said something that landed harder than intended, name it. *That came out sharper than I meant it. Let me try again.* Repair is one of the most powerful tools in any relationship. The capacity to recognize when something has gone off track and to gently bring it back is what distinguishes relationships that endure from relationships that gradually erode.

Repair does not require either of you to be the one entirely at fault. It just requires the willingness to attend to what is happening between you and to try again with more care.

A note on what makes this hard

Reading these steps, you may notice that none of them is complicated. The skills are simple. They are also profoundly difficult to do in the moments when they would help most.

This is because the moments when you would most need these skills are also the moments when your nervous system is most activated. The pause is harder when you are flooded. The acknowledgment of truth is harder when you feel attacked. The I statements are harder when the urge is to focus on what the other person is doing wrong. The request is harder when what you really want is to be understood without having to make a request.

This is the work. You practice the skills in low-stakes moments so that they are partially available in high-stakes moments. You catch yourself, sometimes after the fact, and reflect on what you might have done differently. You return to the practice. You get better, slowly, over years.

And in the meantime, you are not failing. You are practicing a skill that most of us were not taught and that takes most adults a long time to develop. Patience with yourself is part of the work.

Where to begin

Pick one upcoming conversation that you anticipate being difficult. Before it happens, rehearse what you want to say. Use the structure: pause, acknowledge what is true, speak from your own experience, ask for what you want.

Notice your own state before the conversation begins. If you are activated, take five minutes to regulate first. Walk. Breathe. Place your hand on your heart and your belly. Do not begin the conversation until your system is closer to baseline.

Have the conversation. Notice what worked. Notice what did not. Notice where the practice was easy and where you reverted to old patterns. None of this is failure. It is data.

Repeat with the next conversation. Each one builds capacity for the next. Over months and years, the skills become more available. The relationships that can hold your developing voice will deepen. The relationships that cannot will reveal themselves.

And the felt sense of speaking your truth, in a moment that requires it, from a regulated state, with care for the other person and care for yourself, is one of the most powerful experiences available to a person who has spent decades silencing themselves. It is worth the practice. It is worth the awkward early attempts. It is worth the patience the work requires.

In love and dignity, speak the truth — as we think, feel, and know it — and it shall set us free.

— Melody Beattie

Further reading: Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger. Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability and difficult conversations. For the companion piece on detachment with love, see The Art of Detachment with Love on courageous-arts.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Service and Gratitude as Lifelong Practice

Posted on by helpingsoul

Why Giving Back to Others and Acknowledging What You Have Received Are Foundational to Sustained Growth — In Recovery and Beyond

A substantial revision of an earlier 2014 post on the twelfth step of Alcoholics Anonymous. The principles are sound. The framing has been broadened to address recovery and growth in their many forms.

The twelfth step of Alcoholics Anonymous, in its original wording, reads: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

When I first wrote about this step in 2014, I was attending Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings as part of my own work. I was trying to understand my father, who has been in recovery for many decades, and trying to understand the legacy of growing up around his alcoholism. The twelve-step framework gave me one lens for thinking about the principles of sustained recovery — practical principles that have remained meaningful to me, even as my clinical work has expanded into other territories of healing.

What I have come to recognize, in the years since, is that the principles in this final step are not unique to recovery from alcohol. They name something true about how sustained growth actually works, for anyone doing meaningful inner work. The specific frame of AA is one expression of these principles. The principles themselves apply much more broadly. They apply to anyone in recovery from any addiction. They apply to anyone doing trauma recovery. They apply to anyone working through grief. They apply to anyone trying to live a more conscious life than they were trained to live.

This article is a broadening. The twelve-step community will recognize the source material. Anyone outside of that community can engage the same principles in their own context. Both readings are valid.

Recovery as continuing rather than completed

The original twelfth step recognizes that the work does not end when the immediate crisis is over. The recovering alcoholic who has stopped drinking has not finished. The work continues for the rest of their life. Maintaining the change is a daily practice rather than a destination.

The same is true for recovery from any meaningful pattern. The person who has done significant work on attachment trauma does not finish that work. The patterns may quiet. The reactivity may soften. New responses become available. And the underlying conditioning, formed across childhood, continues to surface periodically in ways that require continued attention. The work becomes a practice rather than an event.

This is honest. It is also, in some ways, freeing. The pressure to complete the work — to arrive at some final state of healing where the past no longer affects you — is a pressure that produces shame when the work continues to be needed years later. Recognizing that this is how sustained recovery actually works removes the pressure. You are not failing because the work continues. The work continues because that is what the work is.

Service as the natural extension of recovery

When someone has done significant work and arrived at greater stability, the question of what to do with what they have learned becomes meaningful. The original twelfth step answers this question directly: carry the message. Help others who are still in the early stages of the work you have completed.

In the AA context, this means becoming a sponsor, attending meetings to support newcomers, sharing your experience and strength and hope. The frame is specific. But the underlying principle is broader. The person who has done significant work has something genuine to offer others. The offering is part of what sustains the person’s own continued recovery.

This is not theoretical. There is research support for the observation that helping others produces durable benefits for the helper, sometimes more than the helped. The act of using your experience in service to someone else integrates the experience in a way that solitary processing does not. Telling your story to someone who needs to hear it makes the story more real, more integrated, more useful. The service is its own form of practice.

This applies regardless of the specific recovery context. The adult who has worked through their own attachment wounds becomes valuable to other adults doing similar work. The person who has navigated significant grief has something to offer others facing loss. The person who has come out the other side of any meaningful struggle carries knowledge that, shared appropriately, helps the people behind them on the path.

The service does not have to be formal. It can be the conversation with a friend who is struggling, where you share what you learned in your own version of that struggle. It can be the listening you offer when someone needs to be heard. It can be the patience you extend to someone earlier on a path you have walked. The service is whatever you do with what you have learned, in genuine response to what someone else needs.

Gratitude as the practice that sustains everything else

The other principle named in the twelfth step is gratitude. The recovering alcoholic, having received help, is asked to recognize what they have been given. This recognition produces a particular kind of stability. The person who can acknowledge what they have received does not have to carry the alone-against-the-world stance that often precedes addiction and other forms of struggle.

Gratitude, properly understood, is not a positive-thinking practice or a forced sunny disposition. It is the honest recognition of what is true. You are alive. Someone helped you. The conditions for your current state, whatever it is, include the contributions of many people, many circumstances, many fortunate alignments alongside the difficult ones. Acknowledging this is not optimism. It is accuracy.

There is also research on this. The work of Robert Emmons at UC Davis, who has been studying gratitude for several decades, has shown that consistent gratitude practice produces measurable changes in well-being, sleep, relational satisfaction, and physiological stress markers. Gratitude works in the body, not only in the mind. The system that regularly acknowledges what it has received functions better than the system that does not.

The practice does not require elaborate ritual. A short list at the end of the day. A specific acknowledgment to someone who helped you, given to them directly. A pause before a meal to recognize what is on the plate and who contributed to its arrival there. The simple acts, repeated, accumulate.

On the AA framework specifically

For readers who are themselves in AA or another twelve-step program, the original principles continue to apply. Sponsor someone if you are ready. Attend meetings consistently. Practice the steps as the lifelong path they are designed to be. The community offers something significant — the shared experience of others who have walked the same road, the regular practice of the meetings themselves, the structure that gives the principles their ongoing power.

For readers who are not in a twelve-step program but who are doing other forms of recovery or growth work, the same principles apply with appropriate translation. Find your equivalent of the meeting — the therapy group, the somatic class, the community of others doing similar work. Find your equivalent of the sponsor relationship — the mentor, the trusted friend further along the path, the therapist who has accompanied you. Find your equivalent of service — the role you can play in supporting others in their own work. The forms differ. The functions are the same.

I would also acknowledge, having written about this in other recent posts, that the language of the older twelve-step literature can sometimes feel harsh by current standards. The framing of alcoholism as disease, of the person in recovery as defective, of the surrendering of will to a higher power as the only path to sobriety — all of this works for many people and lands as shaming for others. Current trauma-informed understanding offers more compassionate framings of the same underlying work, recognizing the early conditions that often precede addiction and treating the addictive behavior as an intelligent if costly survival adaptation rather than as a disease to be cured.

Both framings can be held. Twelve-step community remains genuinely valuable for many people, even when the language sometimes lands hard. Trauma-informed framings offer additional language that some people find more accurate to their experience. The work itself, in both frames, is similar. The principles of service and gratitude apply to both.

Reflection questions

If you are doing recovery work in any form, the following questions may be useful for your own reflection.

Who has helped you in your work, and how have you acknowledged their contribution?

What have you learned that someone else might benefit from hearing?

Is there someone earlier on a path you have walked, with whom you could share what you know?

What does gratitude look like as a daily practice in your specific life?

How do you handle conflict differently now than you did before your recovery work began? What helped you develop the new capacity?

What is your relationship with the community that has supported your work, and how do you contribute to it?

When you imagine yourself five or ten years from now, what kind of presence do you want to be for others walking similar paths?

These questions are not a test. They are openings for reflection. The answers may come quickly or may take weeks to surface. Sit with them as feels right.

A closing thought

The principles in this final step, whether you encounter them in AA or in some other framework, are pointing at something true. The work of sustained growth is lifelong. The service to others is part of how the work sustains itself. The gratitude for what you have received is the foundation that keeps the rest of the practice from drifting into ego or fatigue.

Most of us were not taught these principles directly. We learned them through our own struggles, through the help of others who walked alongside us, through the slow accumulation of experience that comes from doing the work over years. Naming them clearly is part of what makes them transmissible — what allows them to be passed forward to the people who come after us on similar paths.

Whatever path you are walking, the principles apply. Continue the work. Help others where you can. Acknowledge what you have received. These three practices, held together, become the architecture of a life that does not need to escape from itself. The escape, eventually, becomes unnecessary. The life is the one you actually want to live.

Further reading: Alcoholics Anonymous and the broader twelve-step literature. Adult Children of Alcoholics. Robert Emmons, Thanks: How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier. For the broader work on compassionate framings of recovery, see related posts on this blog including The Art of Detachment with Love.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Happiness Is Not a Mood: What Thirteen Years of Reading the Research Has Changed in How I Understand Joy

Posted on by helpingsoul

A revisit of an old post on happiness — what I had right, what I had wrong, and what thirteen years of research has changed in how I understand joy.

In 2013, I wrote a blog post called Optimize Brain Function and Create Happiness. It was a list of twenty-five things — meditation, journaling, gratitude, exercise, kindness, supplements with specific dosages, positive thinking, eye contact, power posing, and so on. The post did well at the time. It captured what was current in the cultural conversation about happiness then. And reading it now, more than a decade later, I see that some of what I wrote has held up beautifully and some of it has not.

This post is a revisit. Not a replacement of the original — that one is still there if you want to look at it. A genuine rethinking of what I have come to understand about happiness in the years since I wrote it. The work I do as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist has changed me. So has the field. Some things that seemed straightforward in 2013 are more complicated than I knew. Some things I did not yet understand have become central to how I think about wellbeing.

Here is what has changed.

What I had right

Small changes still matter. That was the heart of the 2013 post and it remains true. Daily practices, repeated over time, produce more change than dramatic interventions. The brain and the body respond to consistency more than to intensity. A short daily meditation done for months produces results that a long retreat experience does not match. A gratitude practice of three things, written down most evenings, accumulates into a different relationship with one’s life over a year.

The basics still matter. Movement, sleep, hydration, time in nature, reduced exposure to chronic stress, regular meals — these are not glamorous interventions. They are the conditions under which the nervous system can function. Without them, no amount of mindset work will reach the underlying physiology that determines so much of what we call happiness.

Other people matter. The 2013 version of the post emphasized surrounding yourself with positive people, and that observation has been deepened rather than overturned by subsequent research. The single most consistent finding in happiness science over the past two decades is that the quality of your close relationships predicts your well-being more reliably than almost any other factor. Not the number of relationships. Not their visible success. The felt quality of being loved, seen, and known by the people closest to you.

What I had wrong

I framed happiness as a choice, full stop. “Happiness is a choice,” the original post said. It is not entirely wrong, but it is not entirely right either. Happiness involves choices, certainly — daily practices, attention to what fills you, willingness to engage in relationships that nourish you. And it is also significantly shaped by genetic factors, by current life circumstances, by physiological conditions that no amount of choosing can override, by trauma history, and by the social and economic conditions in which a person is trying to live.

Telling someone who is depressed that happiness is a choice often produces shame rather than help. The choice framing works for people whose baseline state is already pretty stable and who can benefit from small adjustments. For people whose baseline state has been compromised by depression, anxiety, chronic stress, unprocessed trauma, or serious medical conditions, the choice framing can be actively harmful. It implies that their suffering is, in some way, their own fault. It is not.

I included specific supplement dosages. I would not do that today. Blog posts are not the right place for supplement recommendations, both because the research has shifted on most of what I listed and because the legal and ethical standards around supplement advice have tightened appropriately. Anyone considering supplements should talk to their doctor or to a licensed nutritionist who can assess them as individuals rather than reading dosing recommendations from a blog post.

I listed twenty-five things. That was the format of 2013 blog writing, and lists still have their uses. But for a topic as layered as happiness, the list format can flatten what is actually a deeply nuanced subject. The list suggests that happiness is the sum of these twenty-five practices done consistently. It is not. Happiness is more relational, more physiological, more contextual, and sometimes simpler than a list of practices can capture.

What the field has learned since 2013

Sonja Lyubomirsky, who is one of the most influential happiness researchers working today and a Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside, has spent the past decade refining what she calls the architecture of sustainable happiness. Her work shows that happiness interventions do produce real change when sustained over time — but the change is more durable when the interventions are matched to the person doing them. Gratitude practices work better for some people than for others. Acts of kindness produce more benefit when they are varied rather than routinized. The how matters as much as the what.

Most recently, Lyubomirsky has published a book called How to Feel Loved, co-authored with Harry Reis of the University of Rochester. The book, released in early 2026, makes a striking argument grounded in decades of research. The single most reliable difference between happy and unhappy people is not money, success, or even health. It is whether they feel loved — felt loved, in their bodies, in ordinary moments, by the people closest to them. “To feel that the people in your life truly get you, value you, and love you,” Lyubomirsky and Reis write, “is what makes life worth living.”

This finding has changed how I think about happiness. It also resonates with the trauma and attachment work I do daily in my practice. The people who struggle most with happiness are very often people who, for reasons rooted in their earliest relationships, do not feel loved at a felt-sense level — regardless of how much love is actually present in their current lives. Their nervous systems were calibrated by early conditions to filter out the love that is being offered. The work of becoming happier, for these clients, is not a matter of adopting more positive practices. It is the work of slowly developing the capacity to feel love when it arrives.

Barbara Fredrickson, at the University of North Carolina, has shown through decades of research that positive emotions, even brief ones, produce measurable changes in cognition, social behavior, health, and resilience. Her broaden-and-build theory describes how moments of positive affect open the mind and build durable resources over time. More recent work from her Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab has focused on what she calls positivity resonance — the felt sense of shared positive emotion between two people in conversation, in eye contact, in the simple moments of being together. These small shared moments are not decorative. They are the building blocks of the longer-term well-being that all the other practices try to produce.

What I would tell my 2013 self

Keep the small practices. They matter. Add to them the recognition that happiness is not primarily a matter of individual optimization but of relationship — to your own body, to the people in your life, to whatever you understand as larger than yourself.

Stop treating happiness as a target. Treat it as a byproduct of a life lived in close connection to the things and people that genuinely matter to you. The targeting itself, paradoxically, often gets in the way. People who aim directly at happiness frequently miss it. People who orient their lives toward meaningful work, close relationships, and genuine presence often find happiness arriving, more or less on its own, in the spaces those orientations create.

Be honest about what is not yours to fix. The chronic depression rooted in unprocessed trauma. The anxiety that has somatic components requiring medical care. The deep loneliness that small practices alone cannot reach. These conditions deserve respect, not optimization advice. The right response is often professional support — therapy, medical care, sometimes medication — rather than another daily practice.

And know that the small practices are still worth doing. The gratitude. The breath. The walk in the morning. The person you love. The work that means something to you. The thirteen years that have passed since the original post have only confirmed how much the small things matter — and how much they need to be set within the larger context of relationships, conditions, and the genuine work of becoming oneself.

Where to begin today

If you are reading this and looking for one practice to begin, here is what I would suggest. Once today, pause and notice one small thing you genuinely appreciate about someone in your life.

Not a polite thought. An actual felt sense of appreciation. Then, sometime today, tell them.

Briefly. Specifically. Without needing them to respond in any particular way.

This single practice, repeated regularly over months, produces more measurable change in wellbeing than almost any other single intervention I know. It builds the very thing that

Lyubomirsky and Reis identify as central — the felt sense of being loved, which arrives when we extend love in ways the other person can receive. Each act of specific appreciation is a small revision of the relational climate of your life. The climate, over time, is what we call happiness.

That is what I have come to understand. Happiness is not a mood. It is a relationship. With yourself. With others. With the conditions of your life. The work of building it is real, and the work is slower and more relational than the lists suggested. And it is genuinely worth doing.

Further reading: Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research is available at sonjalyubomirsky.com. Barbara Fredrickson’s Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at UNC is at peplab.web.unc.edu. For the clinical perspective on how nervous system regulation underlies the capacity to experience happiness, see my companion piece on thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

 

Your Brain on Love: The Surprising Neuroscience of Attachment

Posted on by helpingsoul
Dopamine, oxytocin, neural synchrony — discover what your brain is really doing when you fall in love and how neuroscience explains why some bonds last a lifetime.
Have you ever drifted into a dreamy thought of someone you recently met? You can’t explain why, but they just pop into your head. You feel a surge of joy, a slight queasiness in your stomach, and your face lights up with each playful thought of your new mate. A rush of neurochemicals stimulates this euphoric behavior.

Is this stage of love fleeting or can long-term committed relationships uphold blissful adoration?

The Stages of Modern Relationships

Whether you identify yourself as heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bi-sexual, there are various stages to each relationship. According to research, during the initial meeting, it takes between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to decide if you want to move to dating and/or sex and not always in that particular order. During this lustful stage, testosterone and estrogen drive your behavior.

As your attraction deepens and you decide to become sexually exclusive or not, your stress response stimulates the release of the neurotransmitters; adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, and serotonin.

Throughout this stage, your stress response is activated. Blood levels increase with adrenaline and cortisol, hormones secreted by the adrenal glands. The secretion of adrenaline and cortisol provide that rush of energy, increase in heart rate, sweaty palms, and dry mouth when you suddenly think of or startlingly bump into your new attraction.

What Neuroscience Has Added 

Recent advances in Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), pioneered by Dr. Dan Siegel, reveal that our brains are literally shaped by our closest relationships. The attachment patterns formed in early childhood — secure, anxious, avoidant — are encoded in neural circuitry and predict how we show up in adult love.

Even more striking: cutting-edge hyperscanning research shows that the brains of romantic partners actually synchronize with each other. When you feel truly seen and held by your partner, your nervous systems are resonating together. This is co-regulation — and it’s as biological as a heartbeat.

“Our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are.”  — Dr. Dan Siegel

The Good News

Attachment styles can change. Bonds can be repaired. The brain’s plasticity means that with the right support — and the courage to stay present — long-term love is not just possible. It’s neurologically wired for it.

Dopamine

The neurotransmitter, dopamine is increased with ‘love struck’ mates. Dopamine stimulates an intense rush of pleasure, triggering desire and reward. A brain on cocaine has the same effect.

“couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention and exquisite delight in smallest details of this novel relationship” ~ Helen Fisher

Serotonin

Serotonin plays a key role in this early stage of love. Low levels of serotonin explain those constant thoughts of your lover. According to Dr. Marazziti from the University of Pisa, blood samples of couples that claimed to be madly in love for less than six months were comparable to the blood samples of patients who have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Furthermore, newly love-struck couples often idealize their partner, magnify their assets and overlook flaws.

“It’s very common to think they have a relationship that is closer and more special than anyone else’s.” ~ Ellen Berscheid

Oxytocin

Next, a couple decides upon exclusivity, engagement, living together or marrying. The attachment of the twosome instigates the powerful hormone, oxytocin.

Oxytocin is released during childbirth and creates the bond between a mother and her child. The chemical is also secreted by both of the sexes during cuddling, hugging, and sex.

Oxytocin is important because couples that exhibit high doses of oxytocin have a strong bond and attachment that can withstand the ups and downs of life. For the release of oxytocin, it takes between 19 and 23 seconds. Thus to ensure your couplehood survives the test of time; hug, cuddle and have sex regularly.

Vasopressin

Finally, vasopressin sets the stage for long-term committed couples. The hormone is released after sex and like oxytocin creates stable bonding with your partner. Vasopressin also creates the actions of devotion and protection.

The stages of a relationship change as do the release of chemicals in the brain. The surge of dopamine in the initial lustful state creates a rush of pleasure that stimulates, even more, desire and reward. Adrenaline causes the physical reaction of sweaty palms, racing heart, and dry-mouth.

Serotonin creates those compulsive, idealizing thoughts of your partner and oxytocin makes for strong bonds. Finally, vasopressin deepens the connection and generates long-lasting love.

Therefore it is possible to love and to be in love with your partner ‘til death to us part.’ Give your loved one a 30-second hug every day to ensure your love lasts.

If your bond is broken, your trust shattered, or your connection lost, couples counseling can help to mend bonds, build trust and connection again. Email april@thecourageousself.com and let’s get started.

Want to go deeper into the neuroscience of love and attachment? Read the full article over at The Courageous Self ↓

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