Many of the clients who come to see me are, in their social circles, the shoulder for others to cry on. The one people come to for help, to vent, for help problem-solving, for affirmation.
For people who have unmet needs for connection that go a long time back, they can wind up in a bind where they both want connection and fear it. They struggle to take in nourishment, because they’ve learned it will go away. If you have some of these struggles, you may cycle between caretaking and clinging.
When a person is rejecting toward the depth of need you express, you may wind up in a self-fulfilling prophecy where you believe your needs are too much, so you suppress them. But then, someone comes along that makes you feel that yearning. You express it, they pull back, and it seems to confirm that feeling you had all along anyway: “See? No one cares about the real me. I best just pull back and be what others want.”
And of course you’d feel bitter — what the people you give to don’t see, and what maybe you don’t always see either, is the heartbreak that this kind of chronic giving and dissatisfaction comes out of.
It’s not just that you give to others. It’s that you take from yourself. It’s not just that you surmise other people’s feelings. It’s that you’ve given up on expressing (or even knowing) your own.
And it’s not just that you care for others: You may, deep down, feel that others cannot be depended upon to care about you if you’re anything other than attuned to them. You’re afraid to miss a cue from someone, afraid not to dial in the “person they seem to want.”
This strategy, coined by Lawrence Heller as the “Attunement Survival Style,” isn’t borne solely out of compassion. It’s borne also out of deprivation. It originates in a very small person who has cried for help, has voiced hunger, has asked for comfort — and has been rejected or ignored often enough to assume that *no one is coming to help.*
If you have this style, you limit your own needs — “I can make do with whatever’s available.”
You limit your awareness of your own needs – why be aware of a need if your deepest belief, borne from your youngest experiences, is that they won’t be met anyway?
You may have learned at this same young age that the people who were not available to give you the care you needed actually did seem to want something from you. We do what we need to do to maximize the love and care we can receive.
If, for whatever reason, your parents just weren’t able to meet your young needs and wants, they probably had unmet needs and overwhelm of their own. And whether they meant to or not, they leaned on you.
You learned that it was best not to express yourself. But that you had much to gain by learning to anticipate others and to give what they wanted.
As a grown-up, you have considerable capabilities. You know how to give. You know how to sense what others want. You know how to read a room. You appear to know how to regulate yourself — if people don’t recognize that this “regulation” is a heck of a lot less like relaxation than it looks like — and a heck of a lot closer to simply deflating or shrinking yourself to fit what appear to be the needs of the people around you.
How does this style show up in the counseling office?
If you are struggling with this style, you probably are pretty watchful for what your therapist might want. You’ve learned to find the need others have and meet it.
Of course, this is tricky if what your counselor is pulling for is authentic communication from you or for you to express emotions — because you’ve learned that that stuff doesn’t work! Clients who struggle with this may appear poised, attentive to the counselor.
Or they may appear a bit resigned — leaning toward sadness and a sense of resignation or futility. A bit of “eeyore” can show up in people with this need — “No one will care anyway; why even try.”
It’s a challenge to express or even feel a strong emotion. You sometimes come to counseling and are super eloquent about the needs of everyone in your life, putting apt, colorful words to the feelings of others. You can empathize all day long.
Then the counselor, hearing all this insight into others, asks you how *You* feel — and all of a sudden, it’s as if feelings are a foreign language. It’s easy to talk about others — almost impossible to talk about you.
Or you may feel a pull toward the counselor, a desire for them to find you. But then the most confounding thing happens when they do seem to “get you” — you either find yourself wanting an increasing amount from them — or you find that their care is just not “good enough.”
It’s not your fault. It’s not their fault. It’s a memo from your young self, a feeling memory, a warning: “Hey, don’t let this person get too close. Because they won’t stay.”
“Hey, you should get every drop of care you can, because it’s all going to come crashing down real soon.”
It’s a frustrating bind to find yourself in, wanting care, fearing care. Wanting attunement from someone else, fearing that it will go away.
You fear it will go away because, a long time ago, it did.
You may fear it going away too because it’s gone away so many times since. It’s gone away because people couldn’t meet the young place in you that had so many unmet needs.
So what do you do if you have this style? How do you learn to express your authentic wants when you’ve learned they won’t be honored?
How do you feel when you’ve learned it’s best not to?
How do you formulate hopes and dreams for counseling if you’ve learned that hoping and dreams just lead to more devastation when you weren’t ever helped to fulfill them before?
Well…..Building compassion and an awareness of the deep intelligence in both your pull-back and your “neediness” are important. Often, people are so deeply ashamed of their “needy” side — but if we can look at it as the authentic experience of a very young place in you, it will help to diminish the shame. If we can help you put words to all the desperation of that place, and to understand it for the feeling memory it is, it will help you differentiate that from the here and now.
Counseling for this style also involves finding your anger and your grief. It’s as if a part of you has been frozen in time, way back when you were too young to even put any of this into words. And that part has stayed stuck, still, inhibited — waiting for someone to show up and help. Despairing that any help will ever stay or be enough.
So we get to know that part. And we help you to find your grief, your anger. We help you to stop collapsing and resigning yourself to scraps. We help you to find what *you* want apart from what others want.
We help you to find you. And to take in the care from others that is available, and to give in ways that feel truly balanced — that don’t cost you your own life force.
This isn’t an easy process. But it’s deeply satisfying.
What I know about you, if you have this style, is that you have depths of joy and depths of passion you’ve never really seen before and that others don’t know.
And as we get to know you, a delightful person will emerge. You won’t feel like a shell or a robot trying to fulfill others. You’ll find what you want.
You might learn to disagree with your counselor, even, to express an opposing viewpoint.
You might find that you have anger you’ve never really realized, and that that anger is a cue to things that were or are unfair in your life. And this will let you advocate for yourself more powerfully.
You may discover even simple things — like what you like to eat, what kind of movement feels nourishing to you.
You might reclaim an old hobby.
You will most likely find much deeper friendships as you begin to share more of your own true passion and vitality.
And you will most likely have a whole lot more energy as you learn to stop shrinking away from your true self.
There is help for attunement survival style. It’s gentle. Kind. And it helps you to tune into yourself.