Why emotions matter: The language of attachment and healthy relationships

Attachment science shows that the ways we relate our adult relationships are shaped by our earliest family and generational patterns. Specifically, how our parents and caregivers related to emotions; and if they shared, didn’t share, or how they shared, emotional experience.

Do you have any of these tendencies?

  • To get triggered in relationships and either withdraw from conflict, or escalate conflict quickly

  • To push your feelings down and not process them or fully understand them

  • To get overtaken by emotions or spiral in negative stories about them

  • To dismiss the importance of yours, or other’s, emotions

  • To overfocus on feeling some emotions but not others (sadness but not anger, for example)

  • To not share your feelings openly in relationships and avoid emotional intimacy

  • To not know how to share emotions skillfully in a way that promotes closeness and trust

…Then you’re not alone!

Generally, we as a collective culture are in our early stages of learning emotional fluency and safety.

Often, our parents and ancestors were too busy surviving in the material world to be able to care for emotions. It wasn’t their fault.

But the consequence is many of us are lacking in emotional awareness, emotional safety, regulation, and expression - or we’re trying to do these things in our relationships but we need a little support!

What happens when we don’t process our emotions? They get stored in our body!

Much like undigested food, undigested emotions create stagnation and toxicity.

This is not metaphoric toxicity, it is literal. If we live with unprocessed fear, anxiety, anger, resentment, sadness - these emotions create stress hormones and muscular tension that gets stuck in our bodies.

Over time, you may notice symptoms such as anxiety, depression, getting triggered in relationships, lack of intimacy in relationships, too much conflict in relationships, chronic pain, and more.

Recent science even shows that digestive and skin issues can be linked to unprocessed emotions.

Counselling provides a safe attachment relationship in which old, and new, emotions can be processed and cared for together. We humans are extremely relational creatures. When we feel together, we heal together.

When you invest in your emotional health, you, your body, your mind, and your relationships all benefit for the long term.

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Somatic empathy as medicine: Healing complex trauma through feeling together

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Trying to understand people only from a cognitive place, without somatic empathy, can end up being like analyzing under a microscope.

Maybe you’ll see something in a lot greater detail, but it’s not going to heal and nurture whatever you’re looking at.

Health care practitioners can do harm if they don’t practice somatic empathy.

In my own personal journey of healing complex trauma many years ago, I would encounter well meaning, but dysregulating practitioners who would ask me questions from their mind, but not their body.

I wouldn’t sense them opening into feeling my inner experience with me.

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Co-regulation: The key to better communication and less fights

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Co-regulation: The key to better communication and less fights

Co-regulation is where two people can calm and balance each other’s nervous systems when communicating, creating a positive feedback loop of feeling safe and connected. It’s skillful body-to-body communication.

Co-regulation is essential to prevent conversations or arguments from turning into distressing fights. Conflict is healthy and generative if we can stay safe and connected; it’s destructive if it turns into feeling unsafe or like there’s a rupture in the relationship.

When we can soothe each other’s nervous systems throughout a conversation, understanding and negotiation of both people’s differing contexts and needs become possible.

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How to Reparent Your Inner Child

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How to Reparent Your Inner Child

It’s normal to want to push away old painful feelings. But here’s the thing - these feelings are the young parts of ourselves, still burdened with painful emotions.

Healing comes not from pushing the young parts away or judging them - but by responding to these parts with compassion and emotionally attuning to them.

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Attuning to the body releases pain and suffering

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Attuning to the body releases pain and suffering

When we listen to the body within the context of the therapeutic relationship, we gain a deeper understanding of what we need and how to try to meet those needs; and we can discern whether our feelings are relative to the present moment or if they are old feelings arising from unmet childhood needs.

Frequently, feelings are confusing because some of them are arising from unprocessed past experience. Getting “triggered” is an indication of this. Psychological or emotional material remains unconsciously stored within the body-mind because we went through periods of time when we were alone and it was too overwhelming to process and feel our feelings. Or, our ancestors may have gone through trauma and we are processing this ancestral trauma now.

Any experience that is overwhelming and creates intense emotions that we, or our ancestors, are/were forced to bear alone is registered in the personal or collective body as trauma. To cope, our bodies survival patterns of fight, flight, freeze or fawn get activated. These patterns are initially mechanisms of protection; if they become chronic, however, they become mechanisms of ongoing stress and disconnection. These patterns often prevent us from being able to relate to ourselves and others in the ways we want to.

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Taking responsibility for intention and impact in relationships

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Taking responsibility for intention and impact in relationships

If we want safe and attuned relationships, we have to be willing to take responsibility for both our intention and our impact.

The practice is to compassionately look at how someone else is affected by how we’re showing up. It doesn’t mean getting overtaken by guilt if we’re unskillful, but to be gentle with ourselves and keep adjusting and learning.

The easiest way to tell what our impact is? Just ask the other person. “How are you feeling? How is what I’m saying or doing landing with you?”

Listen to the answer with not only your mind but your body as well - look, feel and sense the response. Paying attention with our whole being is how we start to cultivate attunement.

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Mutuality mindset: the key to healthy relationships

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A core principle of a healthy, securely attached relationship is mutuality. Mutuality is the rule of “it has to be good for me AND you.”

Practicing mutuality is crucial with the big decisions in relationship. What may be less obvious but just as important, however, is acting with mutuality in the small interactions. Each time we engage with each other, can we try to do it in a way that’s good for me and you?

It’s challenging because the little, daily interactions are subtle but complex, and happen hundreds of times each day.

For example, conflict commonly happens when partners come home from work and trigger each other. Has this happened to you - barely a minute has gone by before one or both of you is frustrated and upset?

Here’s a mutuality practice to create daily interactions that are good for both you and your partner/friend/colleague/family:

1. Check in with yourself and get clear on your emotional, mental and physical state, and your needs and capacity before you interact.

2. Don’t expect that the two of you have the same capacity or needs.

3. When you meet, clearly communicate where you’re at internally, and invite the other person to do the same. Clarify capacity and needs for both people.

4. Talk about and negotiate how you’re going to engage in a way that is good for both of you before you engage.

Adopting a mutuality mindset builds safety and trust. Talk about mutuality in your relationships and frequently ask the question: “what does it look like if both of us get cared for?” Be proactive about creating moments that work for both of you.

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Creating anchors for wellness

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Creating anchors for wellness

The more anchors we can create, the less likely we are to be tossed around by the ever changing winds of life. The idea isn’t to cling to anchors - they too are vulnerable to change and they will naturally come and go - but to mindfully create time and space to nurture them. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount of time and space. Making small tweaks each day creates less resistance for our overwhelmed brains, and makes the changes more sustainable and long lasting.

~ Love is built, not found. ~