It’s Never too Late to Heal: Transforming the Relationship Stories of Our Lives

If nurturing didn’t happen for you when you were growing up, you can cultivate those experiences now as part of your healing process. It is part of the healing work we need to do to change the world.

While so much of parenting feels like we’re making sure our children eat their vegetables and don’t hit their siblings, we need to take a wider viewpoint and see that how we accomplish these things is perhaps more important than what our children are doing. In order to be responsive to our children’s needs, we need to be nurtured and resourced ourselves. If nurturing didn’t happen for you when you were growing up, you can cultivate those experiences now as part of your healing process. It is part of the healing work we need to do to change the world.

What do we need to heal? How we can heal our relationship stories, change how we feel in our own bodies and in our connections to each other, especially when raising young humans?

And if you’re not raising children, you were once a child and this applies to you, too. We need nurtured humans to create a healthy society, which includes those who chose not to bring a child into the world themselves, those who are at other stages of life with older or grown children, and grandparents.

And so we begin.

Most of us grew up without having our developmental needs met. We survived into adulthood without thriving, often missing skills for nurturing ourselves and our relationships.

For many people, it becomes a badge of honor like a battle scar, often with the words, “_____ (insert terrible thing) happened to me and I turned out fine.” It then becomes an excuse to perpetuate the harm that was done to us on the next generation of children in our care.

While I am also referring to terrible abuses, and emotional or physical neglect, I am primarily referring to experiences that our society doesn’t outwardly believe are harmful because they’re so common. For example, instead of being met with kindness and patience when you were struggling, perhaps you were met with harshness, told to stop crying or you’d be given something to cry about. All these kinds of experiences leave a lasting imprint and show up in our present-day relationships, especially in times of stress.

The good news is that there’s a lot we can do to repair those wounds and to heal in present time. While you can’t go back and change what happened (or didn’t happen) back there, back then, you can do a lot now to change how it feels for yourself and how you make sense of what happened.

The best news is that whatever happened or didn’t happen for you, it’s never too late to heal and transform your relationship stories starting now. And honestly, it’s never been more urgent to do our healing work. Somatic therapist Linda Thai says, “Personal healing is collective liberation.” And we’re definitely in a time right now where collective liberation is critically important.

Our personal healing work has even greater importance when we are parenting or raising and caring for growing humans. The more we heal, the more we can support the resilience of these growing humans who will be navigating unknown and unknowable challenges in the future. We know from the research that resilience comes from having needs met, rather than trying to make a child independent too early. Nurturing is the key to healing ourselves and also the next generations.

But how do we do this healing work? It feels daunting to even think about trying to heal all the things that happened that shouldn’t have happened (traumas- little t or big T) or to heal all the things that didn’t happen that we needed (undernested, as Darcia Narvaez calls it).

Thankfully, we don’t need to heal everything that ever happened to us, but we can begin by bringing awareness to what is being touched on in present time. It gives us the opportunity to heal, to integrate something that happened that shouldn’t have happened and to rewrite the stories of unmet needs by meeting them in present time. And when we can see our old wounds and do our own healing work, we’re less likely to pass on those wounds to the next generation in our care.

We cannot talk about healing without talking about story. We usually think about story as the factual words that are told about an experience. But we’re going to focus on the story in your body, the story we show, and how we make sense of what happened to us, which may not be logical.

Michael Trout of Infant-Parent.com has been working with families as a psychologist for decades. He shared the idea of what I call a “hidden story,” which isn’t an historical story or one based on the facts of an experience. It’s how the person made sense of what happened.

It’s the story a child tells himself or herself, and it can begin when the child is very, very young. It happens when the child is primarily living in their right (emotional) brain, not the left (logical) brain. The things that happen later only reinforce this story, and the story can’t be changed by logic.

Michael Trout said: “It’s not what happens to you, it’s how you make sense of what happened.”

To help you understand what I mean, I’d like to invite you to imagine that beginning around the time of your conception, you’re given a wooden box. This box is filled with the experiences you have throughout your life, recording what happens to you and around you. It isn’t full of historically accurate experiences, but instead how you made sense of what happened.

You might have learned that when you cry, you lose connection. Or that you don’t have a problem, you are a problem. Or that when you take care of someone else that you are seen by others. Or that other people’s needs are more important than your needs.

Also in the box are tools that you used to cope with stress- do you approach someone for support, do you make yourself small or invisible? These tools may be helpful or unhelpful, but they’re what will come out when they are needed and they may or may not be appropriate for the present-day situation that you’re in.

The wooden box represents your body, and the contents are activated by your senses. A smell, a sound, a sight, a taste, a touch can send you into the hidden story, even if it doesn’t make logical sense.

And when you have a child, it’s as if they have a key to the box- good, bad, indifferent. Being with small humans activates how you made sense of the world when you were little and how it felt in your body. Sometimes it can often feel like your child is pushing your buttons to aggravate you. In reality, your child is touching on that which already exists inside of you. Some children will bring out certain feelings, stories, experiences more than others. It is going to happen. Parenting a child presents an opportunity to grow yourself up and heal whatever is inside you that needs to be healed.

If you choose not to look in the box, to discover the hidden stories in your body, you will most likely repeat what was done to you. If that worked well and you had generally responsive parents and you have an “easy” child who is a good personal fit for you, you may end up ok. But if you want to parent the child you have in a responsive way, you’re going to need to look at your stories. This is especially important if what happened to you in general or at specific times isn’t how you want to parent, or if you felt like your parents or caregivers didn’t get you.

Why does this matter? When your needs weren’t met, it can be difficult to parent your child responsively.

Even if you don’t remember anything from the developmental age or stage, your body remembers (The Body Keeps the Score). What this means is that you may be parenting your child and something happens that doesn’t seem like a big deal. For example, your child spills their cup of milk, or they throw their cup down and it makes a mess. The nurturing parent side of you wanted to get down on the floor and help them to clean it up using gentle words; however, your actual reaction of yelling or throwing things feels out of proportion for the situation. Your child crying may illicit a reaction of repulsion instead of a desire to nurture them.

We’re made to feel shame for these reactions and that doesn’t help anyone. We wonder what’s wrong with us that we’re having such a strong reaction to something. It’s not about what’s wrong with you, it’s what happened to you (or didn’t happen to you that you needed). And when we can see that it’s about something that happened and not about an unfixable flaw in ourselves, we can find a way forward.

Finding a way forward is the subject of my 4^th book, It’s Never too Late to Heal: Transforming the Relationship Stories of Our Lives. In the book, I help us all to see how our early experiences show up in our relationships throughout our lives and what we can do about it. We’ll look at the ARCH framework to help guide the process of healing so you know what to do when your hidden story is being touched on in present time.

A= Awareness and Acknowledgement

First, we need to be aware that something is not working in our relationship. And we need to acknowledge how we’re feeling, even if only for ourselves to begin.

We need to allow ourselves to feel our feelings about whatever is happening. Maybe you feel angry about the milk or your child’s feelings. Maybe you feel sad that you’re not responding the way you want to. Or perhaps you’re feeling afraid of what will happen if you don’t stop the behavior. Allow yourself to feel the feelings. They’re there for a reason and your job is to let them move out of your body in a way that doesn’t hurt you or anyone else.

R= Resource and Regulate

Allowing feelings to move and also acknowledging that you didn’t handle something the way you wanted to can be difficult depending on how you made sense of what happened to you. Finding something to support your body to feel safe enough to allow your feelings to move and then safe enough to settle is also important. Resourcing can look like connection with a safe person, an animal, a place in nature. Maybe it’s feeling your feet on the earth or holding someone’s hand. You also may need to move your body and yell! This is about supporting your nervous system to settle or to mobilize according to what is needed in the moment.

C= Connect the Dots, Complete the Stress Cycles

Now it’s time to open up your box, to connect with your body and see what’s inside. What does the situation that just happened remind you of? What feelings and sensations do you notice in your body? Have you felt like that before? When? What happened? What did you need then? Is that something that you need now? Is there a story that comes to the surface that you’re telling yourself about what happened? Write it down. Share it with a friend and ask them to just tell you what they heard you say so you can hear it back at you. Go to a Healing Story Circle so you can have good reflective listening to hear yourself and your story.

And if you don’t have any stories or body sensations you can connect with, complete stress cycles. One easy way to do this is to squeeze all your muscles while you’re holding your breath, slowly letting the air out until you spontaneously take in a deep breath. You don’t need to have a specific situation in mind to do this exercise, and it helps to release the tension in your body. Releasing the tension shifts your physiology and helps you to be more present.

H= Heal

This is where repair comes in along with rewriting the story of what happened, how you wanted it to go, and how you make sense of what happened to you. In Connection Parenting, this would be where Rewind-Repair-Replay happens. Go back and do the situation over again the way you wanted it to go.

For example, if you feel anger that your own mother wasn’t there for you in the way you’re showing up for your child, what do you need to do to move the energy around the feelings? Do you need to write a letter that you don’t send to your mother, expressing all your feelings? And then share with your partner or a friend who can hear you? Or is it a conversation you could have with your mother?

No matter how we approach the healing, we have the opportunity to integrate something that happened that shouldn’t have happened and to rewrite the stories of unmet needs by meeting them in present time. And as we rewrite our own stories, possibilities open for us to create a new story with our children.

It’s by changing what happens in our homes every day that we change the world, one family at a time.