What did that voice just say to you?

When we do inner work, in therapy and elsewhere, we attend to our relational tendencies in order to heal.

These relationship tendencies are usually a result of the attachment styles we adopted as little ones. 

Usually we could deal with the way we were handled by our caregivers. 

Some of us tend to be avoidant, some are anxious. 

Some are both, and a few lucky ones experience secure attachments. 

(More on these attachment styles in just a bit…)

However, while it’s important to look at the way we interact with other people, not many therapeutic environments emphasize the importance of our inner relational patterns. 

We all have a whole lot of “inner talk” going on, usually with an impatient tone, and that actually represents a well of healing waiting for our attention.

If you notice your own inner talk, it’s usually a representation of the way you were spoken to when you were younger. 

It’s part of your attachment style, but it lives inside your head now and it needs tending. 

It pays off to pay attention to your inner relational tendencies.

Learning how to attend to each part of your experience as if it’s an external relationship is invaluable.

Even more invaluable is learning to make space for all the parts in your body and treat them with compassion, even the “annoying” ones you feel might be keeping you stuck. 

This somatically oriented “parts work” is something I do with my clients. 

It’s powerful when they notice they can have a few different ways of responding to one issue: “I’m really angry about X but I shouldn’t be angry because it’s a waste of time”.

We can recognize these as two different reactions as separate parts, welcome them both, notice that we’re actually capable of having both at the same time, and then attend to each once separately by noticing how they are being experienced in the body.