We have all experienced the pain of not being seen. Evidently, many of us are walking around with a younger version of development for exactly this reason. That place in us is constantly calling to be seen in its vulnerability and fear, so that it may develop self-agency.
The development path freezes when needs are either inaccurately interpreted or missed completely. When we’re young we have few resources to develop on our own. We grow through our relationship with the world and reliance is specifically heavy on our caretakers.
Given this, a child may be impacted with an immense amount of fear around a certain experience and need to be held in that. One way the parent can respond to this is fully seeing the child in their fear and caring for them until it’s gone. When they do this, parents help children wire the resource to self-regulate in the future.
The second way that a parent can respond to the situation is with partiality. Through this, they see what’s happening in the child but may not be fully present with them through the process. And lastly, the parent can miss the child’s need to be held completely.
The latter two responses are not so impactful in a few instances but over time, when a child repeatedly is not met fully in their needs. Instead of wiring safety, we then wire a danger zone. The root cause of the disconnection, usually not stemming from the parents' lack of care and love, but the experiences in their attachment process.
We are born into a fast-paced world with fields of undigested wounding. The ways our parents took care of us were informed by their parents, their parent’s parents, and so on. A relational framework passed down the line.
Much of the incoherence in this relational framework is an evolute of an initial incident. Like a pebble dropped on a still lake, the ripple makes its way through the generations, showing up in similar relationship dynamics. So, our attachment process is largely informed by our parents’ attachment process to their caretakers.
For the first several years of life, secure attachment is a high priority. In the first six months, a baby cannot differentiate themselves from the rest of the world. Within the first year, they realize their individuality but are still vulnerable.
As the years pass, the baby turns into an independence-desiring toddler. Curiosity takes over and the child starts to explore the world more, without the parents' direction. Although it’s important that they can exercise this independence, it’s equally important to have a home base to come back to.
Secure attachment continues to be wired as they experience fear and can return to the parents for support to regulate it. With the right care, children turn into young adults who more and more can regulate themselves and have agency in how they choose to live. This inevitably promotes strength in the kid to embody their unique qualities and express them freely in the world.
Now I know this is the ideal situation and probably quite romantic compared to the circumstances many of us grew up in. Most of us can be grateful that we even had parent(s) because some don’t. However, my point in illustrating the ideal situation is to see how much the attachment relation informs our lives. Further, it also points to how normal it has become to not experience secure attachment.
When our overwhelming emotion was not able to be shared with our caretakers there was no other choice than to contract to our experience. We ended up alone in that place with beliefs like “it’s not good to be scared”, “there’s no space for my creativity”, “I shouldn’t get things wrong”, “when I need something it’s too much “, etc. All the after-effects of not being seen in the first place.
Yet, there’s an intelligence to our ability to decrease the noise of life. To withdraw inward or expand out of the body. This is a complex process that somehow we can do from one moment to the next, to protect ourselves. We can manage our experience by turning down the level at which we feel it. Think about that. A baby can “dim the lights” if the world is too much.
Hence, the importance of this mechanism and the reason it’s still active in many of the ways we experience the world. One moment can trigger us back into a place where we needed to hold ourselves without any resources. The defense mechanisms come online again. Then, we’re all of a sudden not a 36-year-old with a great career and stable life, but a 4-year-old that’s lost, scared, and confused.
Contraction is not commonly a positive experience in our adult life. Incredibly, this was the way we saved ourselves in the past but we often feel less able to handle our life. Rather, we feel young, vulnerable, alone, and separate.
Not only this, but our contraction often has less to do with the current situation and more with the past. We are seeing through yesterday’s picture rather than today, as it is. This is not a bad thing, though. However many self-development and spiritual enlightenment initiatives have told you otherwise. Your karma is not your opponent. It’s an opportunity.
When we regress there is a moment where something unseen can be seen and therefore expanded. The unconscious is constantly resurfacing so that we can take care of unprocessed energy. The essence of our path is that we clarify things that aren’t currently understood, including the shadows we were born into and gained through our attachment process.
This is a radical way to look at the challenges in our life. To not push them away or try to improve them, but to welcome them with open eyes. To see what insight and expansion are concealed within them.
We all have experienced the joy and wonder of being thoroughly seen by someone. The energy we receive in those moments is exactly what we asked for (or maybe didn’t dare ask for) as children. It’s the energy needed to transform a regressive pattern into a mature and creative response.
We also all have experienced the letdown of not being seen. We need to see that child. We need to bring awareness to the parts that were missed or not met fully as we grew up. It’s not enough to blame our caretakers. It’s our responsibility to repair the relational framework, even if it didn’t start with us. More important for our individual path, digesting the energy will ignite us in bringing our creativity and authenticity to the world. Thus, the attachment wounds are a gift through which can actualize what we’re truly here to do.