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In the same way we might see clients struggling to communicate their emotions with their loved ones, they may have also experienced something completely disengaging when it came to their own emotional pain.
Use today’s blog as a way to understand how it might feel to hear these things from someone you feel safe with. If you haven’t worked with a counselor before, maybe this insight provides a doorway for you to acknowledge your own insecurities and understand if you do feel safe reaching out to someone for emotional support.
There might’ve been, or still are, points in your life that you tell yourself, “I feel so insecure.” Speaking human to human, we can acknowledge something so long, to the point that we ultimately believe there is something innately wrong with who we are. Now, as a counselor, the statement itself comes with many challenges—the first, being how we might be relying on ourselves to have the conversation about what’s wrong with us.
As children, we don’t always understand how to reach out for that comfort when we’re unsure of how we’re feeling. Reading, and going through various articles about attachment theory, we can see how it’s vital that we have a sense of trust in turning to a primary caregiver for that guidance and comfort.
Ex. When a child falls down and scrapes their knee for the first time, their body is having an innate response to the incident— physical pain. When they reach out for comfort, their parent may respond along the lines of, “Oh my goodness, what happened? It looks like you really hurt yourself, let me help you.”—And then, the parent can band-aid the wound and talk to the child about the emotion tied to that physical response.
In the same way we might see clients struggling to communicate their emotions with their loved ones, they may have also experienced something completely disengaging when it came to their own emotional pain.
Ex. Like the child who scraped their knee for the first time, they’re reaching to their caregiver for emotional support, a cry for help— but the response leans towards, “Oh, stand up! You’ll be fine,” “Walk it off,” “You’ll be okay,” or, “I’m sorry that happened.”
While a comforting sense of sympathy may be the beginning step to emotional comfort, an “I’m sorry,” met with little sense of empathy or regard for the feelings, can lead to a child losing trust in their caregiver for emotional support. Although we may not be aware that we’re stepping away from our primary support figures, when our emotions are neglected, we lose sight of any source of validation and acknowledgement of our needs.
The same way a child may experience this source of insecurity in the relationship over time, they learn to bottle up their emotions, until the point that they start to shut down, withdraw and close themselves off from connecting to anyone around them. They might bottle them up to the point that they become overwhelmed, having that conversation with themselves— “Why do I feel this way?” “I’m not sure what to do,” “What did I do wrong to not deserve this comfort?”
Eventually, we see ourselves fighting to understand if we’re completely insecure, broken, unfixable or undesirable. This sense of shame comes from cycles and cycles of bottling up emotions that caregivers or loved ones disregarded or left untouched.
We, in some way, have provided space for our clients to see how parents, unintentionally, disengage or disregard our emotions at times. But, when they’ve received a similar message, not to address or share their vulnerability with their loved ones, it has a dramatic, even traumatizing effect, on how we reach out to those in our adulthood.
It is our responsibility to help clients get to a space where they can build a sense of empathy for themselves, as well as the individuals in their lives they wish to build a secure attachment with. When we felt pressure to turn to our own minds for emotional comfort, trying to find what we need when we’re feeling that pain, we got easily overwhelmed or distressed about how to take care of ourselves.
We want you to understand that a healthy level of reaching out when we have the thought, “I feel so insecure,” provides a doorway for those we love to rebuild a new sense of security and safety in our hearts. Although we may not sense the underlying pains at all times in our lives, we can acknowledge that we deserve to have someone let themselves into our lives to help us find comfort and understand, “when you fall down or feel pain in this relationship, I will reach down, pick you up, and try my hardest to understand what’s going on and how to comfort you.”
Please reach out if you’re needing that sense of security or safety in your life or your relationship(s). Relying solely on yourself or building a sense of loneliness when it comes to your pain is difficult, and we want to help you find a safe space to process your pain. If you’re experiencing something along the lines of what we’re addressing here, or you need that doorway to comfort, please reach out and schedule and appointment with us.
Thanks
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