How you tell your personal stories reveals how you connect and attach in your closest relationships? You organize the experiences in your life through a voice that narrates a story inside your brain. The people closest to you as a child shaped how you tell your story as an adult. For most of us, our caregivers as a child are our parents.
It Only Takes One
Fortunately , it only takes one healthy caregiver to help a child grow up with a secure, healthy sense of self and relationships. If it isn’t a parent, this caregiver might be an aunt, uncle, teacher, or mentor. What matters is that they consistently reflected your value back to you, and helped you see the worth of close relationships.
Does Your Past Matter?
Researchers wanted to know how much the histories of parents influenced how they act now toward their children. Mary Main and her colleagues created the Adult Attachment Interview, which asks parents to tell the story of their own childhood. Parents who understood their own early experiences overwhelmingly raised secure children. What mattered far more than the actual details was the parent’s own understanding of those early experiences.
Early Relationships and Their Effects
What this Means: How you tell the story of your experiences in your life matters much more than the actual experiences you encountered as a child.
The Affect on Your Relationship: If you’ve come to truly understand your early childhood experiences, and have resolved issues that were challenging or difficult, you’re much more likely to embrace closeness and intimacy as an adult in your love relationship. Research shows that having even one healthy caregiver, someone who offered worth, love, and stability, significantly increases the likelihood of happiness in adult relationships. You would grow up with a strong sense of self-worth, and believe that close relationships can last and be fulfilling and rewarding.
How does this help your relationship or marriage? A key part of the Adult Attachment Interview is that it measures how you understand yourself to another adult, not how you explain your history to your own child. The researchers focus on how you tell your story, not just the content of your story, which reveals how you view closeness in love relationships.
Recognizing the Patterns
Do You Understand Your Own Narrator? How you tell your story, according to an overwhelming amount of research in long-term studies, can help you understand how you experienced your own caregivers as a child. In your childhood, you probably encountered various adults in different ways, though the most significant influences usually stem from parents.
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Comment: Did you have a healthy caregiver in your life as a child? What did they do to help you feel secure and valued? Share your experiences in the comment section below, and help others have a clear model of well being.
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