Sublime

Therapists who are trained to see people as complex human beings with multiple characteristics and potentialities can help them explore their system of inner parts and take care of the wounded facets of themselves.

Rogers stated his central hypothesis in one sentence: “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.”

In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev

Children become attached to whoever functions as their primary caregiver. But the nature of that attachment—whether it is secure or insecure—makes a huge difference over the course of a child’s life. Secure attachment develops when caregiving includes emotional attunement. Attunement starts at the most subtle physical levels of interaction between

The third layer comes into view when we look at how we mother ourselves and find the same deficits that were present in our actual mothers. We see that we don’t know how to support or encourage ourselves, don’t know how to be patient and tender, don’t know how to take into account our needs and limitations. Here, there is a hole in our inner mother

As you can see, working with early attachment issues is very delicate business, and clearly not every therapist or form of therapy is suited to it.

A secure attachment combined with the cultivation of competency builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life.7 Securely attached children learn what makes them feel good; they discover what makes them (and others) feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they feel and h

By their questions and their attention, their careful probing and investigative stealth, the therapist tries – harder than anyone may yet have done – to discover how our presenting problem might be related to the rest of our existence and, in particular, to the turmoils of childhood. Over many sessions, a succession of small discoveries contributes