Healing Generational and Attachment Trauma through Therapy
Do I need to talk about my upbringing in therapy?
Yeah, you kinda do.
It’s not necessary to fill ALL your therapy time exploring how the parenting you received impacted you, but to spend some time here means uncovering important clues to your functioning.
Doing so can provide invaluable information about how and why you developed certain parts of your personality, and how you may function in adult relationships. As far as therapy is concerned, awareness is the path to change. Understanding how you adapted to the parenting you received is an important step towards self-compassion. Perhaps we are in therapy to address current relationship struggles, but before that, we have to understand and empathize with the reasons that we developed these patterns in the first place.
These patterned responses may be barriers now, but back then, as children, they helped us survive emotionally and relationally in the family system we were born or adopted into.
Therapy can help us do the following:
Understand why your Child-Self needed to develop certain relationship patterns within your unique family of origin
Thank your Child-Self for being extremely adaptive and surviving the best you could
Work with your Adult-Self to change patterns based on current reality and desired state of functioning
What may it look like in therapy to explore my unique upbringing?
Some common examples include:
Understanding generational trauma
Exploring attachment styles
Identifying and challenging messages passed down about emotions
The experience of having emotionally immature parents
The experience of having a critical parent
The experience of having a stoic or unresponsive parent
What is generational trauma anyway?
One huge piece of the puzzle is understanding something called Generational Trauma.
The main points to explore are as follows:
The psychological effects of trauma can be passed down from generation to generation.
This means, what happened to our parents, grandparents, and beyond, not only impacts how our parents functioned during our upbringing, but also how we function within our surroundings now.
Some examples of generational trauma include the passing down of patterns related to OR psychological effects of: domestic violence; physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; PTSD; substance use; poverty; codependency; emotional immaturity; poor emotional awareness; poor communication around emotions; repressed anger; attachment problems; depression, anxiety; identity confusion; and mental illness
Why does this matter? This matters to build self-awareness AND so we can start to reframe how we have interpreted our parent’s behavior. If our parents were not capable of showing love towards us, we may have initially interpreted this as evidence that we were not lovable. Often, once we learn about generational trauma, we can better understand that our parents were blocked in how they could receive and show love based on their upbringing, as were their parents were before them. Then, we can begin to reframe our story of not being lovable, into something more realistic – that we are lovable, but our parents’ love was hindered by their own trauma.
Attending your own therapy is something to be extremely proud of. Those who work on their own trauma are also working to end the cycle of generational trauma and protect their children and their children’s children. We should give ourselves credit for engaging in the challenging, rewarding journey of therapy to disrupt generational trauma and model new and different ways of responding to the world.
Attachment Styles
If you’re seeking therapy with the hopes of healthier relationships, attachment theory is often an important component of the work you do. Look for a therapist with a specialty in Attachment or Attachment Trauma.
Information about attachment theory is greatly credited to researchers John Bowlby (1907-1990) and Mary Ainsworth (1913-1999).
As babies and young children, our attachment systems are pre-wired to respond to our caregivers in a way that helps us stay safe and keep our caregivers close and/or calm. Depending on the health of our caregivers, certain (predictable) patterned responses can wire into our implicit memory system and become the template for how we approach almost all relationships.
We categorize these predictable, patterned responses into four main categories:
1) Secure Attachment
Parents were consistently attuned to their baby/child. These children develop into adults who value both self and others, and can engage in healthy relationship patterns.
2) Anxious Attachment (also called preoccupied)
Parents were inconsistent in meeting baby/child(s) needs or parents were over-controlling. These children develop into adults with fears of abandonment, hyper-vigilance about getting their needs met, and an internalized sense of being “needy.” Often times in a relationship these adults will value others above themselves.
3) Avoidant Attachment
Parents ignored their baby/child or were actively suppressed. These children develop into adults who often reject or refrain from emotional warmth and have an internalized belief of “I can’t depend on anyone.” Often times in a relationship will be distant or push others away.
4) Disorganized Attachment
Parents were frightening or frightened; abuse may be prevalent in the home. These children struggle to develop a coherent response to relationships and can be a mix of both anxious and avoidant (push/pull behaviors).
The good news? Attachment style is malleable. Often with the help of therapy one can earn a more secure attachment style. How? Through processing their trauma, practicing self-compassion (good relationship with self), and engaging in relationships where safety and consistent support is present.
Messages about emotion
Every one of us received and internalized messages about emotions and how to navigate emotional experiences. This was modeled in the home we grew up in. These lessons were not explicit or verbalized, instead they were the underlining, emotional culture of the home.
Some examples include:
It’s never OK to show emotion
Emotion is weak
Everyone has to be OK all the time (pick yourself up by your boot straps)
Anger is never okay
Emotion should be shut down immediately
Anger is the only appropriate emotion – more vulnerable emotions are unacceptable
Men do not show or respond to emotion
Keep things to yourself - including your experience of being hurt/victimized
The most emotional person “WINS” and gets the most support (center of attention)
Whoever is the biggest victim gets all the power, attention, and focus. This is a culture of “one-upping” where expressing hurt is met with a response of how another’s hurt is more significant
Once we learn these messages from our unique family of origin, we can begin to re-learn different ways of experiencing, expressing, and navigating our emotions.
Emotionally Immature Parents
Therapy can help you determine if you had emotionally immature parents and how to heal.
What are some clues you had emotionally immature parents?
Their needs came first or were the only needs that mattered
They did not keep/model healthy boundaries. This could be physical or emotional boundaries.
They were unable to take accountability for their actions or show insight into their own behavior.
They had/have traits of a personality issue such as Narcissism or Borderline tendencies.
There can be many different consequences of having emotionally immature parents, but a few of the more common ones include:
Parentification – You, as the child, learned that you were responsible for the adult needs of the home, including meeting the needs of your parents. This could be physical needs (ex. cleaning the home; caring for younger siblings), or emotional (calming your parents down, keeping them from feeling bad/lonely/angry). You may be more apt to then, as an adult, put the needs of others above your own needs. Perhaps your needs are ignored completely and you abandon yourself to make other people comfortable.
Codependency – where your worth is dependent on meeting the needs of others and sacrificing your own needs repeatedly.
Disconnection to emotional self - Parents responded negatively to your early efforts to get your needs met so you learned to deny, ignore, or question your own needs and emotions. You then live life disconnected from emotion, or untrusting of your own internal experience.
The Critical Parent
What happens when we have a critical parent? We learn that our worth is connected with doing well, looking good, being perfect, or not making mistakes. We learn the best or only way to receive love is to not screw up. Also, we need a way to remind ourselves to be perfect even when our critical parent is not immediately present - so psychologically we create a critical part of the self to keep us on our toes. This means we may have a voice in our head that is self critical and likely critical to others. We are critical to others, because we have learned that high expectations keep us safe/loved, so we project that onto others, even those (especially those) we care about.
In therapy, we can begin to uncouple this critical part from our whole identity. Meaning, we can see this as a protective part from childhood and begin to lovingly challenge its need to show up in the present moment. Self-compassion work can quiet this voice towards self and others.
The Stoic or Unresponsive Parent
Lack of attunement by parents teaches us to question our emotional, wise self. Emotions are a type of inner wisdom. Learning to be curious about our emotions can help guide us in responding to the world around us. If our parents do not respond to our expression of emotion, and instead maintained a stoic, rejecting, or unresponsive stance, we may have learned that emotions are unhelpful, BAD, lack meaning, or have little value. As adults, we may be completely disconnected from our inner, emotional world. We may have difficulty connecting with others, and/or using our intuition to guide us. In therapy, we can begin the process of reconnecting to our emotional wiring, learn to understand and appreciate the role of emotions, decrease negative messages about emotion, and thus become wiser, more intuitive versions of ourself.
Important to Remember
There is so much hope for those who brave the challenging work of exploring their inner world by looking at their upbringing and understanding how they developed certain parts of self. Through self-exploration and therapy, we can gain insight and undo some of the protective patterns that may be keeping us from our happiest, most connected version of ourselves.
“Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” - Brene Brown