My Listening Perspective

As a therapist, part of my role is to help frame and organize your experience, so that your thoughts, feelings, and behavior come into clearer focus and you understand yourself better. The more we understand ourselves, the more freedom we have to make decisions in alignment with our values, and we also become better at caring for ourselves. When I talk about my listening perspective, what I’m referring to is a set of ideas from the field of psychology that help me put your experience into perspective. If you're not someone who is very interested in theories, it’s no problem! I will find ways to offer these ideas to you within the context of our work so that they are directly relevant to you and you can make use of them.

From the moment we are born into this world, we are human-connection-seeking. We are hard-wired to search for and maintain proximity to other humans for warmth, support, affiliation, and safety. This is an instinct, in much the same way that birds learn to fly and spiders learn to spin webs. It is an automatic quality of being human, and part of our heritage as mammals. It is one of the reasons we have managed to ascend to the top of the evolutionary pyramid, surviving for thousands of generations by way of mutual collaboration within a collective. As infants, connection seeking is critical for survival. We scream or cry when we are alone, cold, hot, hungry, uncomfortable or in pain. We are totally dependent on connection to our caregivers, and we fight to maintain that connection with the limited forms of communication available to us. As we grow, our minds and bodies become more sophisticated. This opens up new pathways and possibilities for connection through language, adult sexuality, and increasingly dynamic forms of engagement with friends, partners, and the broader collective. Connection isn’t just about survival, it is also about joy, satisfaction, pleasure, and fulfillment. 

Given that we are wired for connection, we are also wired to avoid rejection, abandonment, and loss. We find these experiences painful, sometimes even unbearable. Even as very young children, we pay careful attention to what behaviors bring reward, validation, and approval, and which behaviors bring condemnation, punishment, or rejection. We also pay attention to the parts of us that seem to garner love and affection, and the parts of us that bring condemnation or shame. 

At the same time we are having all these experiences with our parents and / or caregivers, we are also developing our sense of self, and our self-esteem. We are learning if we are worthy of love, connection, and human bonds, or if we aren’t very worthwhile at all. Whether we believe we are worthy, is very dependent on the types of experiences we are having with those we love and depend on. Generally speaking, when we have parents that are stable, reliable, loving, and responsive to our needs, we grow to believe that we deserve this type of treatment from those in our lives. If we are disregarded, devalued, ignored, or dismissed, we grow to feel that we must not be very worthwhile, and that people are going to treat us accordingly. Our parents are like a mirror, and the ways that they interact with us come to define how we see ourselves. 

Clearly, our early experience has a huge impact on our development. Throughout our lives, we carry with us the voice, gaze, and sentiments of our earliest relational influences. By the time we’re old enough to go to school, we’ve already formed some big ideas about the world, what to expect out of others, and whether or not we’re worthwhile. These expectations are like a roadmap, setting us on a trajectory, and defining many of the ways that we think, feel, and behave in our relationships along the path to adulthood. Some elements of this roadmap formed so early in life, that they are not entirely conscious because it came together before you had access to language and autobiographical memory. To add another layer of complexity, the roadmap is augmented along the way by experiences with other important influences, like friends, teachers, role models, colleagues, and romantic partners. 

My listening perspective is influenced by several psychological theories that deal with the issues described above. Namely, attachment theory, object relations theory, and intersubjective theory. Don’t get too caught up in those fancy and overly academic terms. Psychology is most useful when it’s relatable, and I’ll work to decode these ideas so you can relate to them. One of the things we do in therapy is try to make your internal roadmap more consciously available to you. By understanding the influences that have shaped your sense of self, we can better understand why you feel the things you do, engage in unwanted patterns, and/or feel stuck in a mental or emotional rut. With this new insight and clarity, we can begin to work out of the predicament you are in, and towards a life that feels more connected, authentic, and vibrant.