Change

Sorry I haven’t been around for a while. I’ve been in retreat, going through a period of intense personal transformation – and change.

What occurs to me is how paradoxical it is that strategies that saved our lives and our sanity as children, so ingeniously devised, have exactly the opposite effect when we are adults.

What worked in your family, the coping mechanisms you adopted then, will work against you now you are not living in that family; they will not get your adult needs met in a functional way. Those coping mechanisms, being dysfunctional behaviours, will only work in dysfunctional relationships, which means there will always be a price to pay.

So the process of change, of getting your realistic needs realistically met now, requires examining the dysfunctional methods you learned, used and assumed as a child and transforming them into their opposites, turning them on their heads and exchanging them for functional strategies that work in the present and are appropriate for you as a capable and independent adult, not as a helpless and dependent child.