A client walks into my office.
She sits down, hunched over.
Her face is pale. Her hands shake.
I say “hi,” and, she says “hello” almost robotically, a fake smile covering her face.
Then she looks down, away. Then stares at me, trying to keep eye contact. She’s heard, after all, that it’s only polite.
Her issues? They vary.
People with the “connection survival style,” a phrase coined by Laurence Heller, often talk about a feeling of emptiness, and say, “I want to find out who I am.”
Sometimes, they pride themselves on not needing anyone, but they are starting to feel twinges of longing, or they’re starting to develop a close relationship.
But as their connection grows, so does their fear. Of being too much. Of losing their independence. Often, it’s a fear too old, too primal, to put into words.
She may have very well-rehearsed social skills. Or she may be huddled in her home most of the time, maybe spending most of her time with animals, or on nature trails.
Whether she presents as sophisticated and poised or she presents as ill-at-ease, she’s likely dealing with the most fundamental of our emotional needs as an infant:
She didn’t get the level of connection she needed to really feel like she could be herself.
She may not feel that she has a real self.
She has been trying like mad to mirror others, in hopes that, by approximating the moves of connection, she’ll find her way in, find her way to being welcome.
At the same time, she’s terrified to reach out. Terrified to want. Terrified to connect.
Longing mingles with dread. Possibility and hope mingle with fear and despair.
She has a deep yearning for connection. But she fears connection too. Because it wasn’t dependable when she was young.
Maybe her parents were ill, or preoccupied. Maybe they weren’t nice to her. Maybe they communicated to her, with their hurried way of tending to her young needs, that she was a burden. Maybe her birth had complications, leading to a less-than-warm and welcoming vibe in those very first moments, or she was ill as an infant.
Are you struggling with the connection survival style?
Here are some indicators that you may be:
- You feel like you don’t know who you really are.
- You struggle with feelings of meaninglessness, emptiness.
- You sometimes feel spacey, or like you’re floating, or disconnected somehow.
- Other people feel foreign to you somehow, like you “don’t belong here”. Relationships don’t make intuitive sense. You don’t feel welcome or a part of things, no matter what. You may have learned lots of ways to compensate for this, but at heart, you feel like you’re acting somehow, going through the motions.
- You experience unexplained fatigue, tension, and aches and pains.
- You aren’t in touch with feelings of hunger and fullness. You may under eat or overeat, or forget to eat until painful hunger takes over, or until you’re physically weak.
- You experience fear of interacting with others and try to avoid social situations.
- You long for closeness to someone, but once you do get close, you get scared. Fear of abandonment creeps in, or anger at unmet needs, or you cycle between feeling exhilarated and disconnected.
- You feel this underlying sense of dread in the pit of your stomach almost all. the. time. It may attach itself to different things happening in your life, but it seems wordless, source-less, ever-present. Sometimes it’s a dull background feeling, and sometimes it almost overwhelms you.
- You feel a lot of shame about wanting anything, about making yourself known, about speaking up — about many things. You may, deep down, feel ashamed for existing.
Two Subtypes of the connection style
Or, in other ways, two common ways people escape the pain of their unmet connection needs:
- Intellectualizing. You escape into the world of your thoughts. If people ask you how you feel, you tell them what you think. If you start to feel something, you start working to think your way out of it. Maybe you analyze everything. Maybe people tell you, you overthink things. When the longing in our hearts feels crushing, we go elsewhere: One place we can go to is the safe world of thinking. Maybe you’ve developed research skills or hidden in the world of books. You probably have a great breadth of knowledge. But somehow, all that knowledge hasn’t brought you closer to knowing who you are.
- Spiritualizing. If this is a way that you’ve worked to meet your connection needs, you are likely very sensitive to the spiritual world. While this is a gift and a resource, Laurence Heller also hypothesizes that you may be so skilled in picking up on spiritual things because it “has never felt safe to land on the planet.” Not feeling connected to people, you connect to God or spiritual beings instead.
Here’s the good news…
We all have a fundamental need to connect, and we have the ability. You do too!
The struggles you have just indicate that the need hasn’t been met for you. The ways it’s getting met now may still feel too “loud,” too “wordy.” Because in our first few months, we need softness, welcome.
It’s possible you didn’t get enough nurturing for you to quite land within your own body and your own experience.
Your shame isn’t based on a badness in you, even though it feels so deeply that way. It’s based on very young stuff. When we’re too young for words, we can have these very scary, big, feelings. But in that time of our lives, we don’t have the ability to differentiate those bad feelings from us. Those feelings feel like the whole world!
As we get older, we start coming up with reasons we feel awful. One reason we can come up with is, “I must feel awful because I am awful!”
Also, if we feel unwelcome or unable to deeply connect for long enough, we can start to give up hope, without being able to give up the need. If we give up the need, we start feeling that our need is bad. That we are unwelcome, unwanted, unlovable.
But that’s not the case.
The case is that, for whatever reason, you missed out on something we all need when we’re young.
(This can happen for all kinds of reasons, even in really good families, by the way!)
This can change.
It takes time, it takes gentleness, and it takes patience.
It takes a safe relationship. Some people find this through a pet, and then later, they find a partner.
Some people find this first in therapy or coaching that focuses on connection to their bodies and their emotions and to another person, safely, incrementally, step by step.
The connection survival style is a set of ways you learned to adapt and survive, when your needs weren’t being met.
Now, the task is for you to connect to yourself, maybe for the first time.
Sometimes, this starts with very simple things, like body awareness.
Often, we need a “safe enough other” in order to do this.
A therapist who understands something about this survival style and how to work with your emotions, your body, your nervous system, and your spirituality — will have a good chance of helping you to navigate your way safely, gently, and gradually — into connection with yourself, and with others.
It’s beautiful work. Because the wounds of the connection survival style are preverbal, the therapy work we do around it is often difficult to put into words too.
But when people experience this work, they notice some things start to shift:
- They start to feel a sense of safety, of welcome, first with me, and then with others.
- They may notice changes in body temperature, like feeling warmer. Sometimes, they hadn’t noticed they felt cold! But the warmth, they notice.
- They notice and tend to their bodily signals, like hunger and tiredness.
- They begin to reach out for connection with others, and to feel like it’s okay to do this!
- They speak more easily. Some clients have told me that they had a throat constriction and that, in the course of this work, it loosens up.
- They may even breathe more easily! When you’re unsure of yourself and your welcome, it can be like a trauma in your body. You may have tightened up, and you may be unconsciously holding your breath much of the time or breathing shallowly. This work tends to help people to feel an openness in their chests, and to begin to breathe more deeply.
- You feel settled, centered, calmer.
- You start saying, “I would like….”, “I prefer….”, “I’m really feeling a longing for….”
And you can act on your wants and yearnings! Some clients say this gives their lives an organization that it’s never had before, that it’s like going from floating around waiting for things to happen to know what they want and feeling that, at least much of the time, they can make it happen. - Your shame diminishes, and as this happens, you get in touch with healthy anger. Anger helps you to set boundaries, to know when you’re not getting what you need, and to advocate for yourself.
The transformation in therapy with folks with the connection survival style is profound.
This kind of work goes way beyond teaching you strategies or relationship skills.
Clients who go through this work, and stay with it, say that they feel like they’ve finally come home. They say they feel like they know and like who they are.
They sometimes have difficulty putting into words how profound the changes are. But they do say that they can feel the shift in their bodies, in their emotions. Their loved ones say they too notice a deep difference.
You can experience profound shifts if you’re struggling with this style.
This style, and three others, are explained in depth in Laurence Heller’s book, “Healing Developmental Trauma.”
Laurence has offered a training called “NARM”, a method that combines Somatic Experiencing and relational work. But there are lots of people who know how to work with this.
You’ll want to look for someone gentle and who can help you to compassionately notice your present moment experience and who can help you to gently begin to get a sense of welcome, room for you to be, room for you to want things, room for you to know yourself.