The Reconnected Heart

I once met with a lovely, gentle lady who worked in the health industry. She was newly married and had no children. At one stage, I was talking to her about the need to match up proximity with people and safety levels. She became teary and began to disengage a little from our conversation, and I had to stop my explanation when I was halfway through a sentence. (I began silently reprimanding myself for talking so much in therapy. I hate it when I do that.) Was she being reminded of a previous trauma, I wondered?

‘Jess, are you okay? What is going on?’ I asked.

‘Sorry,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Didn’t know what?’ I asked.

‘That I was allowed,’ she said.

She wasn’t being reminded of a trauma at all. She wasn’t reliving; she was relieved. She was even astounded. She never knew that she was even allowed to have a say in who she would like to have close. Even to this day, many years after this conversation, a lump forms in my throat and a tingle begins in my nostrils when I write about this beautiful person. How sad it is for a young woman not to know that she has choices.

For every traumatised child, there are moments in that person’s adult years when new insights are born. Like a bubble in a New Zealand mud pool, they just seem to rise up and appear in our minds—not intellectually, or more aptly not ‘merely’ intellectually, but in a more primitive way, a way that resonates for us and orientates us towards or away from something. We reframe the experience we had and see it in a new light, and the sense of agency, the power that comes with choice, galvanises our motivation to change things and do relationships differently.

You can choose whom to be close to and whom not to be close to. If you forget that you have a choice, you will fail to fashion your social environment in a way that will help you to recover.

In many respects, a challenge of this sort of social engineering is a tacit acknowledgement that our psychological functioning is to a large extent contingent on others. As we have already discussed, who we are, our happiness and our sense of being loved is to a large extent determined by the nature of the relationships that are around us. If they are loving and safe, we will, over the long term, be well. If they are not, we are going to be constantly challenged by the tangle of anxiety, conflict and misunderstandings that unsafe relationships are likely to bring. If we are to be well, we will have to cultivate better relationships.