Sublime

He cannot rely on his own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of his own real needs, and is alienated from himself to the highest degree. Under these circumstances he cannot separate from his parents, and even as an adult he is still dependent on affirmation from his partner, from groups, and especially

Nonetheless, meeting your needs is still an important step in healing yourself, not only to help you understand why you have the needs, but also for increasing self-acceptance and self-love.

the doctor’s unanxious recognition of the child’s predicament, what Winnicott calls elsewhere ‘appreciative understanding’, is itself an intervention. The doctor is ‘meeting need with appropriate action, or studied inaction’.34

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

It is as though at the end of his life the issue he had always struggled with, of separation and connectedness, had changed from being an inter-psychic problem between mother and child, to being an intrapsychic problem about a person’s relationship with the core of himself.

Many of us didn’t grow up with safe and secure attachments because our parent-figures were impacted by their own earliest relational environments in which many of their needs were not met. As a result, our physical and / or emotional needs weren’t consistently identified or tended to in early childhood.

What’s missing for this child, however, is the experience of being contained and protected by a loving, but larger, force. This larger force was either absent (neither parent could contain the child), or the larger force was not loving (the parent attacked or disconnected from him), or the larger force betrayed him (the child’s love was used to

Psychoanalytically oriented therapists look for the causes of such traits within the individual’s character. But relational recovery views “character” as little more than a compendium of internalized relationships.