Many of us are aware of our avoidance but don’t know what to do about it. We ask ourselves: How do we get better? How do we heal?
Here’s one answer that was very surprising to me: through conversations.
If you’d have told me a few years ago that conversations were crucial to healing avoidance, I would have laughed in your face or cried in despair.
My marriage was filled with difficult, emotional conversations. They were torture to me.
When we started therapy, one of my first questions was: is it really necessary to talk things through so much? Can’t we just let things go and move on? Shouldn’t it be easier than this?
Yes, they are necessary, our therapist replied. No, you can’t just let things go and move on. The way out is through, he said.
Through conversations.
Now, some years later, I understand why he was right.
Conversations are a crucial, in fact indispensable, part of the process of healing avoidance.
Here is why.
Avoidance is an adaptive response to the felt lack of safety in intimacy. This lack of safety stems from early relationships where our individual personhood, our very sense of self, was negated or compromised in profound ways by caregivers.
Faced with harsh, mis-attuned or self-absorbed caregivers, we stifled our needs and self-expression and bent ourselves to the needs of others instead.
Neuroscience now tells us that the development of a secure, stable, resilient sense of self depends on attuned relationships with our primary caregivers.
Secure caregivers see and appreciate their children as separate and autonomous individuals. They see into their children’s unique and separate inner world, their feelings and ideas, their needs and preferences, and they respect, listen to, and delight in them.
Through this kind of parenting, children learn that their individuality and their inner world matters. They learn to expect that their voice will be heard, their feelings are important, their needs will be met.
They learn to understand and regulate their emotions, to discern and express their values, opinions and preferences, and to expect all of those things to matter, to make a difference, to be received and respected in love.
I believe most if not all of us suffered significant deficits in this type of caregiving. Certainly, I did.
Instead of learning to be fully ourselves in relationship, we learned to do the opposite: to stifle our needs, cut ourselves off from our feelings, and fall quietly into submission.
We learned to withdraw, to rely on ourselves, to become self-sufficient.
We learned to find peace in solitude. Withdrawn and alone, we could relax.
Except.
The capacity to relax into ourselves and express ourselves *in relationship* was never developed. The brain structures associated with mutual connection were not fully formed. The wiring for secure relationship was left undone.
Conversations are how we fix this.
They’re the way we complete the development process that was delayed and obstructed by shortcomings in our upbringing.
They are the practice by which we learn to understand and express and assert the fullness of who we are in relationship.
They are the mechanism by which we learn to give our presence and love to others without disappearing or drowning in the process.
They are how we rewire our brain for secure attachment.
Bit by bit, one healing conversation at a time, we build mature contact with our inner world and learn to share and express.
We start feel safe, relaxed, and comfortable in our own skin in relationship, knowing that we know who we are, what we want, what our needs are, what we want.
Our nervous system senses this growing stability in our sense of self. It senses that intimacy is no longer the threat it once was. Gradually, it allows us to let people in and draw them closer.
Avoidance stops being a matter of survival.
The safety in intimacy that should have been ours as children is restored to us as adults.
Until eventually, miraculously, one day, we find ourselves in new territory: experiencing actual pleasure and well-being in relationship, actively seeking out connection with others, finding that our life is enhanced and our heart is expanded through relationship with others.
Conversations have this healing power.
Not all conversations, of course. Conversations can also be enormously damaging and destructive. They can reinforce the patterns we are seeking to replace and reenact the trauma we are seeking to heal.
I am talking about healing conversations.
And that’s what I’ll write about in my next post: the anatomy of conversations that heal. What they look like and sound like, why they are so counter-intuitive and hard at first, and what gets in the way of experiencing them more regularly in our relationships.