You Didn't quite have me at hello

“Hello” is a good first step but, by itself, it doesn’t get us very far into a mutually restorative relationship. We are conditioned to fear the intimacy that would make our encounters so interesting. It is dangerous after all. We have all learned that. For some, it is more deeply written in their souls than others. One could say that caution about intimacy is the first important thing we learn. It is the beginning of forming us as the character in our story. 

Even if we are born into a home with attentive and caring parents, siblings et al., we are invisible to some degree. They cannot see the essential us. They do not experience the world through our brain, heart, and body and so they do not make the appropriate space for the pure us to expand and express itself in the little bit of the world we inhabit. At first, we do not realize this because we are not consciously aware that we are a separate individual. But slowly, we come to know, deep in our core brain, that we must adapt to their view in order to be good, to have our needs met, to belong, to be loved, and to be safe. 

I am not referring to trauma. We all have that as well as our early invisibility to one degree or another. Some that is direct and terrible, some that is passed down to us and much that is subtle, insidious, and hard to recognize. But whether we are simply unseen or we are also deeply scarred by trauma, we take a shape that is not an accurate expression of ourselves. We do so in our attempt to connect, survive, and thrive in the world. This is the beginning of our story. It gets better.

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