healing happens in relationships, but all relationships are not healing

Healing happens in relationships but not every relationship is healing or can be healed.

Who we are is a direct result of the relationships and environment we grew up in. Our sense of self is built from the ways others see us and interact with us, our identity built on interactions with culture. Our brain is wired for attachment and how our attachment figures respond to us will determine how we relate to the world. Simply put, there is no I without WE.

How we feel, for example, is not just an internal isolated experience but rather a response to and an understanding of how we interact with life around us.

Some argue that at the core of addiction and eating disorders are attachment wounds, relational difficulties that are now being communicated via alcohol or food.

Self-help tries to tell us that we can heal alone, within our own minds, simply by inputting certain concepts. But I believe if self-help has worked for you, it’s not because of the concepts but because of the relationship you developed with the teachings, the teacher, the community and/or with yourself.

If you have experienced any type of healing in the past, without a doubt, whether you have been conscious of this or not, it is because of relationships. Because you were seen, heard, mirrored, held, understood, or attuned to in some important way.

Our emotional health therefore is interconnected to our relational health. It is the relationships around us that help us cultivate inner joy, self-love and life satisfaction.

Now, that does not mean that every relationship is inherently healing. And it doesn’t mean that every relationship needs to be healed for us to be healed, or that every relationship can be healed.

And it doesn’t mean that relationships that end mark a failure to heal. (In fact, sometimes the ending is the healing.)

It does mean that inner healing requires relational healing, that we cannot and should not expect ourselves to be able to do it alone, and that a nourishing, rich inner life is deeply interconnected to intimate thriving relationships. How we do this when relationships feel scary, overwhelming and chaotic is highly individualized and the best way to make sense of it is within a supportive, professional relationship.

XO

Thaís