TRAUMA & FAMILY DYNAMICS
You see everyone else more clearly than you see yourself.
It's almost funny, the way our childhoods are normal, until we share a story that makes a room go quiet. Or someone else shares a story and your mind almost erupts with wait that was an option?!
There's a loneliness to having caregivers who did their best and had real struggles - ones that led to your own.
You might not relate to the word trauma. You just know your relationship with your childhood is... complicated. That you hunger for something essential you never quite got, despite having parents who tried their best. Maybe your parents were just hard on you. Maybe they had their own limitations - alcoholism, hoarding, trauma of their own that spilled over.
You just know the end result: scanning everyone around you to see what people are feeling, people-pleasing and de-escalating conflict automatically, not really knowing what you need or being confused at your emotions and physical sensations.
How did I get here? is something I hear a lot.
Together we will sort through how your responses today were shaped by experiences back then - getting to the source for real change. This process includes grieving the childhood you didn't get, but it also opens the possibility to a more authentic relationship with them moving forward. One that also honors your needs, boundaries, and experiences instead of just theirs.
You know their feelings and needs,
but you don't know what you want to eat.
You were the most regulated person in the household - at age 10.
It creates a complicated dynamic for the rest of your life when, as a child, you were responsible for soothing the person who was responsible for feeding, clothing, and sheltering you. When we have parents with drinking or substance abuse problems, hoarding behaviors, emotional dysregulation and self-absorption, we have a household of chaos and unpredictability.
Young you just knew you needed to be safe. So you learned to scan, to soothe, to get your needs met by prioritizing their needs until one day you woke up as an adult and couldn't find yourself anywhere. Your needs and opinions and yearnings had been silenced for so long, they'd gone dormant.
And now you might be angry or sad or maybe just disoriented and confused.
This isn’t about
Do I stay or do I go?
It’s about: Who am I? What does this nervous system need? What is important to me?
You might love your family deeply still and want to keep a relationship. I am not here to pressure you to cut ties.
The work starts with the confusion and the loneliness and the what now? From there, we can help you create new, more honest relationships with people in your life.