A key factor in couples counseling effectiveness is how each partner understands their own story. How do you understand what happens to you in your own life? Most likely, you tell stories to give meaning to the experiences that you have. Sharing stories with your partner builds a bond and deepens mutual understanding. We all tell stories differently, and how we narrate our experiences reveals a great deal about our attachment patterns.
To understand how you tell your story, it helps to explore your earliest attachment relationship. For instance, what do you remember about your childhood experiences, whether positive or negative? How do you describe those experiences now? Who is the person in your life who influenced you most as a child, especially before the age of 10? Your primary caregiver, usually a parent, helped shape your earliest understanding of relationships. How you tell your story now defines how you see yourself, whether that is accurate or not.
What is that voice inside your head? This inner voice can be called your personal narrator, the one that makes sense of your experience. Your personal narrator tries to make sense of your experiences and the relationships that shaped you. Your personal narrator isn’t always accurate about the events you’ve lived through. For instance, a cold mother might lead you to believe something was wrong with you, rather than with her care. An accurate narrator would recognize that a lack of parental care says something about the parent, not the child. You deserved to have a caring and nurturing mother, and you deserve care and love in your life now. If you work to deepen and clarify how you understand yourself, the key people in your life, and significant experiences you’ve had, your personal stories can expand and become much more meaningful. Rather than dwelling on the past, you can actually break free from patterns that no longer serve you.
Exercise
Picture yourselfback in your childhood, before the age of 10, and think of an image when one of your key caregivers was telling you a story during and after a significant event. A securely connected caregiver helped you form a positive, stable sense of yourself and relationships. The caregiver helps you develop meaning in your life. Research shows it’s not the events themselves that shape you, but how you understand and make meaning of them. Your narrator shapes how you see yourself and how you connect with others.
What are the best ways to make a marriage or relationship work?
Your brain develops fastest in early childhood, especially between birth and age three. Your caregivers lay the foundation for how you manage feelings and connect with others. We call a healthy foundation from a caregiver a “secure base.” A secure caregiver helps you manage emotional reactions by mirroring and soothing them. Reflecting is the term we use for “making sense” of the event or experience.
With a secure caregiver, you develop confidence in yourself and trust in relationships. The caregiver “models” healthy patterns of adaption and flexibility the become ingrained in you. Ideally, all of us would have grown up with a secure caregiver providing these key lessons and experiences to us.
Early Relationships and Their Effects
However, if your caregiver didn’t help you manage your feelings, or help you reflect on events in your life in an accurate way, most likely you experienced what children in an insecure connection feel–shame about the experienceinstead of understanding the context and the meaning of the situation and the key characters in the story.
A caregiver who retells stories helps a child understand experience and build self-knowledge. Stories involve events, characters, and the meaning we assign to both. The narrator helps the reader understand the events and the experiences of key characters.
As adults, we usually tell our story with words. As a child, if your caregivers helped you understand what was happening to you in upsetting situations accurately, you were most likely able to calm down relatively quickly. You’d understand what happened to you, and you’d more likely be able to predict what may happen to you in the future.
Perhaps you have experiences as a child that you couldn’t understand or give meaning to. Without a caregiver providing a healthy narrative voice, it’s unlikely you could manage what you were feeling, or accurately understand what you were going through. As a child develops, they forms the capacity to create a personal narrative based on the voice of the key caregivers in childhood. In the end, how you as a child told your story reflects how you came to understand your world, and how you learned to manage your feelings.
How to save a marriage or relationship, even if it is failing
The way you tell your life stories reveals the way you have come to understand the events of your life, in the past as well as the present. Even if you’re struggling with what you think is a failing marriage or relationship, if you focus on how you can make the failing marriage or relationship better instead of whether or not you should stay in the relationship, you’re much more likely to succeed in making improvements. How you tell the story of this process can have a significant impact.
As yourself the following questions about your current life, and see how your answers may influence how you see things in your relationship now:
· Do you describe your experiences from a distance, or do you emotionally relive your experiences as you retell your story?
· Do certain issues trigger intense feelings in you that stem from unresolved events or themes, even though they may have happened long ago?
· Do you remember many details about your early life?
· What feelings come up when you tell the story of your early experiences?
How would you answer the questions? How do you feel as you’re answering them? What do your answers mean to you?
Going Deeper
Your life story can give you clues about how your present world is shaped by your past. How you tell your story and how you emphasize different aspects can reveal the way you have come to understand your world, meaning your self-esteem, relationships, and the world as a whole.
Read more in Daniel Siegel’sexcellent book, Parenting from the Inside Out. Need more help? Call or fill out our contact form, and we’ll help you get started today at the Loving at Your Best Plan. You may also visit our sister site for gay couples therapy. Share this page with a friend or family member by clicking the icons below. Let us know what you think as well by clicking the “comment” button. Read reviews of our therapists from unbiased, anonymous clients by clicking “Reviews.”
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