Why Relationships and Connection are Important for Healing.

What has been broken in relationships needs to be healed in relationships.

„Everything you need is within you.“

„All you need is your own approval.“

„You don’t need anyone else.“

Sound familiar?

Whilst there is a grain of truth in statements like these, they can also invite us to go deeper into one of the main coping mechanisms:

Over-independence.

Over-independence is a result from lack of trust in other people. 

When we grew up in an environment where our needs didn’t matter, we adapt the belief that other people will not provide for us. They can’t be trusted. They don’t have your best interest at their hearts.

So what do we do?

We close our hearts. We focus only on ourselves. We might become absolutely self-centered. We pray to gods to have our needs met instead of asking other people upfront. We don’t show others our authentic and vulnerable self. We try to control our life (because everything else is out of our control). We don’t ask for help and try to do everything by ourselves running into a burnout or manifesting illnesses…and so on.

Maybe we chant, dance it off, meditate, find love within ourselves, do breath-work and yet we feel somewhat alone. Isolated.

These are all coping strategies.

Those practices definitely have their time and place and can be helpful to self-soothe and to regulate our nervous system (I practice some of them too). However, if we only keep on coping, we’re not healing.

To truly heal we often have to experience the opposite.

This means having another person see, understand and validate our pain, when in your past our caregivers weren’t able to do that (which created the belief that nobody cares about us and therefore isn’t to be trusted in the first place).

To heal means to experience that people do care about us. To learn that it is safe to open up, be vulnerable and to need others.

In the end we are a social species. We do need a sense of connection to others in order to thrive. There is nothing „weak“ about needing that.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness. Peter A. Levine

This means that isolation is what creates trauma, not the painful event itself. In order to heal, we need that empathetic witness. We need that safe connection whilst processing our pain or trauma. You don’t have to do it all alone. You can learn to feel safe in relationships.

Are you willing to give it a try?

Much love and support,

Sarah