Author: Michaela Lonning

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.

“It’s like I was invisible.”

“I could speak up, but I’m not sure it would matter. What would I say anyway?”

From the time we’re young, we ideally start to learn about our impact on the world. Think of the baby who throws their spoon on the floor from their high chair. Mommy picks it up — and the baby gleefully drops it again.

Or the toddler who puts some pressure on a block and….it falls! Cause/effect. More to the point, “I made a difference. My actions make a difference.”

Then there’s the emotional impact we make. We smile and someone coos at us. We cry and someone consoles us. We form a fist and someone names our feeling: “You’re feeling angry.” And they help us understand why. “You’re angry that Timmy took your toy away.”

Through millions of interactions like this, we learnt that our feelings are comprehensible and our behaviors make a difference.

But what if these interactions are short, or blaming, or confusing?

People who had inattentive caregiving get a feeling that their words and actions don’t matter. When you feel that nothing you do matters, when you know in your bones that your reactions are unlikely to get results, you fade out and stop feeling like you are a mover of your own world. You may flail about in life or in tasks, because the feeling that your actions can’t matter makes whether you complete any one strand or not irrelevant. Your thoughts, your words, your feelings, and your very essence are almost choked out of being. Instead of a sense of moving your world, your vitality gets locked within you.

Since your feelings and impulses are held in instead of being expressed out here, they get expressed inside you through a morass of suffering. Tension. Pain. Restlessness. Inexplicable worries. You live in a haze of feelings divorced from their cause, instincts divorced from a sense of agency to act. But the feelings don’t evaporate so much as they amorphize — you feel “awful” or “tired” without knowing why.

People who had scary caregiving get a sense that they have an impact but that fails to come as a relief. Imagine that a kid drops his spoon from his high chair. His mom, who last time responded with glee, now responds with indignation. “How could you do this to me?” Or an older kid speaks up with an idea and is slapped down: “No one asked you.” If this is our world, we become frightened of our place in it. It’s as if our actions create all kinds of unforeseen consequences, many of them bad. As kids, we just don’t have the perspective to look at these people who take us out of context and to say to ourselves, “Wow, I was really doing something good — and then these people got angry. They must be threatened somehow by my competence.” Or, “Hmm, I was feeling happy and then I got slapped down for something trivial. Perhaps I’m in a shaming environment because of some kinda fear they have of letting me become my true full self.”).

In the neglectful environment, a kid doesn’t think, “These people aren’t responding to my emotions or my behaviors. This is obviously an indicator that they’re limited in some ways.”

Kids can’t assimilate that information. They instead decide some very damaging things: “My happiness is a bad thing.”

“My anger is destructive and will push people away.”

“My words don’t matter.”

“What I do makes no difference.”

It doesn’t help that we’re also not trained to look for the why to how we feel or don’t feel. Our culture is one of surface explanations without any comprehensive look at root causes. We have diagnoses but no clarity. We can come to believe that our sense of shiftiness or pain or restlessness or exhaustion are the whole story — not a symptom of energy that got cut off somewhere. We will give you words for your robbed vitality, but we will not ask who robbed you or look at how you can reclaim your sense of self.

(Of course there are disorders that impact people’s physiology. Of course! This article isn’t about that. This article is about being given a diagnosis of “fatigue” without a look into the cause of the tension giving rise to it in the first place, whether that’s physiological or emotional or some combination. We’re trained to say, “I have chronic fatigue” as if that’s a cause when it may well be an effect: “I’ve had the vitality drained out of me.” It’s like diagnosing a car as “motionless” without checking to see if it’s out of gas or if something else is going on.)

Say that you got these ideas from the time you were young — these ideas that you don’t matter. That your feelings don’t make sense. That your anger itself is destructive, or that your tears garner withdrawal or scorn instead of the comfort you deserve.

Perhaps you find yourself in counseling and you’re that “motionless car.” You know you’re stuck. You know you feel “bad.” But you’ve lost the framework for the feelings. You come in with beliefs that it’s hopeless.

You also come in with beliefs about relationships, and this is a really big deal in counseling.

Because every time your therapist responds to you with the attuned response to what you are truly feeling and doing, you get a sense that you matter. That your feelings have a cause. That your behavior and your thoughts and feelings have an effect on you and on others.

But any time your therapist misses what you say or fails to note a shift in you or a reaction to what they say, they may accidentally play into this very old story you carry inside. This story that you don’t matter or that your feelings, the shifts in your behavior and energy, are not worth looking into.

It doesn’t matter how amazing the modality is that your therapist works with at this point. They can help you to expand within yourself, to breathe more deeply, to learn coping skills. But your sense of having an impact, of mattering, doesn’t shift. So you remain in hiding.

On the other hand, say your therapist just lights up when you walk into the room. Say that they look at you with curiosity, and when your eyes shift, their eyes take that shift in. They look at you with regard. And they treat your feelings as if they matter and as if they are being caused somehow in the here-and-now with them. They say, “You just pulled back there, and changed the subject pretty fast. Can we take a look at what happened just now to cause you to pull back here with me?”

Say your therapist responds with some level of real emotion to your interaction with them. They are moved by your words. They shift in response to how you are with them. They help you map out the cause and effect in a non-shaming way. They are helping you to restore a sense that you matter. And that another person can hold their own with them. You learn that it turns out that your vitality, your feelings, are not too much. They’re not invisible nor are they dangerous. You come to embody yourself in a new way because you know you matter.

Diana Fosha refers to this as “feeling felt”. Your therapist feels on your behalf and they feel your movement toward and away from them.

This helps restore your sense of cause/effect in a really hopeful energizing way.

Unfortunately, so many times, therapy unintentionally becomes a confirmation of some old story of our feelings and our actions not mattering.

Say that you’re talking with a therapist and they echo back everything you say. “I feel scared.”
“Yeah, you’re frightened.”

“Yeah, I guess I don’t know what to say here. Uh….”

“Yeah. You don’t know.”

You have learned nothing here! Your words aren’t being mapped to a real interaction happening right now in this moment.

They’re giving you nothing to work with.

Or say that you come in to your therapist and they have some cool modality and they’re positive their method works. They fit you into some kinda category, give you some kinda treatment, and you sit there letting them do this thing “to” you. They don’t note the waves of anger or withdrawal or feeling you show unless it fits into their idea. You learn to fit yourself to their modality. You do not learn that you matter and that a person’s actions are contingent on yours.

This even happens by accident. You get this sense that your words don’t matter, and you have a hard time forming goals for counseling. So your counselor quits asking you what you’d like to work with. They fail to address it that somehow, for some reason, you seem to wait for others around you to tell you what to do. This position in life robs you of a lot of opportunities. You don’t take initiative. But worry now with this therapist — for they have a flipchart! A protocol! A way of understanding you without you having to talk.

No matter how good their flipchart or their understanding is, your passivity isn’t looked at. You don’t learn how going helpless and small impairs relationshps. You don’t learn to understand that compliant behavior as a response to a world where you learned that to move was dangerous or ineffectual. You repeat the same pattern. People stuck in this mode will go to multiple life coaches, therapists, healers, nutritionists, self-help seminars — because they’re still the victim of the notion that their movement is ineffectual, that others must be hired to move “on” them rather than with them.

Good counseling will help you to get a sense of cause and effect. You’ll feel your actions mattering to your therapist. You’ll begin to notice the links within you between your emotions and your nervousness. The links between your impulses and your fatigue when you suddenly deflate or the link between your repressed feelings and your sudden outbursts when the feeling suddenly whoosh out.

They’ll help you know that your movements, your actions, your interactions, matter to them.

If you feel like you’re going around in circles in your life or you have feelings or do things that seem sourceless, you’re living in a less than fully realized life. Out of touch with yourself, your feelings don’t get to become words that can make an impact. Your passions don’t turn into projects that support a bigger vision. Your life is drifting by. You’re sitting on the sidelines, afraid to be disregarded or pushed down.

Good counseling can help you get a sense of you again. Good counseling can help you to see and feel that your feelings have causes and meaning. That what you say makes a difference. That what you do matters. That what others do and say matters to you. You begin to care how people treat you. You begin to treat yourself differently. Inexplicably “misery” becomes much clearer: I’m feeling angry because that person didn’t keep their word” or “I’m having an idea and I’m going to express it.”

You don’t have to keep going through different healers. You can if you want to. But if you find a sense of your impact in the world and a sense of the world’s impact of you and how to move within that, you won’t feel that constant need for “one more fix.” You’ll be living from who you are. You’ll be experiencing emotions that make sense and lead to actions — actions you take on your own behalf and on behalf of the world. Good therapy teaches us not that feelings lead to therapy — but helps us find how to transalte our feelings into actions.

This is content from a newsletter I sent out that I decided to make available here on my website too. I hope you enjoy!

Hi there!

Readers of my website have been giving me feedback, and I’ve been discovering which of my writings seem to sing to people most. Lucky for me, those are my writings about connections. Attachment. The tangles that happen. The beautiful hopes and yearnings we have for connection, and how we can also feel so much conflict, ambivalence, even rage, in the middle of those yearnings.

Lately, I’ve been learning on two different framework on working with these tangles. One of them focuses on tracking second-by-second changes, to notice what helps each client to feel connected, seen, heard, safe. We actively make sure that we feel together in our work, that you feel connected and not alone. One of the premises of this work is that we can work through most any pain, except when we feel all alone with it. So we work to undo aloneness, second by second. We work to help the client to find the deepest yearnings, how to gently work around anxieties, holding the fear without letting the fear have the final word…..And this work helps you to find your deepest truths. About yourself, about connection. About who you truly are and what you truly want.

The other training is an extension of a training that those of you who’ve worked with me found SO helpful: A somatic approach. The last training I took was about how to recognize and work through trauma as it may show up in your body and your life today. It’s offered clients a profound understanding of how to embrace your body, how to regulate yourself — recognizing the signs of triggering, finding ways to resource yourself, finding ways to find your center and to find calm and safety when those storms from the past infringe on your present.

The extension on that I’m taking now goes SO much deeper, and offers profound ways to recognize and work with struggles around identity (Who am I?) and connection (Is it safe to connect? Is it okay to be vulnerable? Can I get my needs met? Are needs even okay?!).

This work also helps us to identify those kinds of hurts that can come before we have words. We find ways to compassionately find those hurting places that sometimes need something more than “talking about it”. We work with ways for your grown-up and me to together find those parts — and offer them a new experience. One of protection, perhaps, or connection, or resonance, or arms reaching out to welcome them.

Or one of having someone else big enough and strong enough to help, to take charge, to organize the work at hand. So that it’s finally safe to rest and stop feeling that ever-present need to be “all together” and “all grown up” (Which is exhausting for those of us who started to take that role on when we were little!)

That dang pattern of self-reliance can be a big deal. Lots of us who help others a lot and have learned to attune to others have learned this self-reliance — and many of us know how to practically run our own therapy (been there, done that!)! The lovely thing about this training is it’s teaching those of us in it to see right through that — and to recognize that the way to intervene kindly is also to be firm, focused. It’s new for me, and gives me scope beyond that “warm fuzzy helper” vibe. It’s been so fun! Transformative for me, transformative for clients.

I’m also returning to school this Fall, which makes for some schedule changes. But for now, I do have openings! You can schedule with me right on my page online – I’m here for you!

I’ve been enjoying discussing with some of you how my work differs from “Mental health treatment” – and it’s pretty simple. There’s a clear agreement I make with you that we’ll work with helping you to feel at home in your body and in your relationships – more connected, more authentic, more you. And that I’m happy to support you in finding different help if you want or need something more along the lines of “diagnosis and treatment”.

Thanks so much to all of you who have been supportive, loudly (with your impassioned emails!) or quietly. I so appreciate you, and would love to hear from you about what you might like to see more content about.

I’ll be in touch!

Warmth and Excitement,

Michaela