How Do We Become Ourselves in Relationship?
Credit: Robert Hund | Pexels
The baby in the café
I don’t know why I was so taken by what I’d witnessed. It’s not like I was unfamiliar with early attachment dynamics, or why babies have a meltdown if a caregiver vanishes from sight. But there was something about this baby’s response that stayed with me.
In under a minute, I’d gone from being the centre of attention to a monster in the eyes of the brown-eyed bundle of curiosity next to me. I may have been minus make-up and in oversized glasses, but I didn’t look that scary.
So, what happened?
Little BBB, let’s call them, didn’t know that their chief protector had only got up to order another coffee. They hadn’t walked far. Nor was their voice out of earshot. Not to me, anyway. Yet to BBB, their person may well have been a goner, and I was a monstrously unsatisfying stand-in.
As little BBB noticed something was up, they stared straight through me, as if checking I wasn’t hiding their person behind my chair. They winced at me and shook their head as if to say, where are they?
Then in 5,4,3,2,1, with remarkable force they braced from head to toe. Rigid, they twisted and stretched, willing themselves free from highchair straps to go and find their person.
Their tiny fingers grasped at the air as their beautiful, bronzed face crumpled. Then came the cry. No. A piercing scream Nothing I did distracted them from the fact that their person was MIA.
I watched BBB try - and fail - to soothe themselves. Hands dismissed me in protest as I tried to distract them. Their little eyes scrunched tightly shut, then opened again to cartoon-like tears that rolled down rice-caked cheeks.
And then they heard the voice, and an even louder scream came. This was really disturbing to behold.
Literally running out of the loos, the chief protector raced back and began unbuckling their straps – a reaction was so fast I doubt they’d had time to pee.
However, as their person pulled them out, BBB did not want a cuddle. They butted their head against said protector's shoulder, pulling back and forth, refusing any attempt to be placated.
As their stress level dropped, and tears stopped, they finally settled and burped a big burp. Tired, they curled into their person and sucked very, very hard on their dummy until they fell asleep a few minutes later.
A Stressed Little Person
At almost eight months, BBB was only beginning to discover themselves as separate from the world around them - a world organised around their caregivers.
In about four minutes, it was as if the centre of BBB's universe had disappeared. From a flinch as they noticed, where they’d go? they went full throttle through the stress cycle:
Fright (they’ve gone, oh-oh - am I alone?)
Fight (the pulling back and forth)
Flight (trying to get free and find them)
Freeze (staring at me, the rigid torso, and their locked body when being picked up)
Their stress cycle completed with co-regulation as they settled sucking their dummy, and fell sleep.
We become ourselves through relationship
Just like BBB - long before words, in a time of mere gurgles - we are already becoming ourselves, through our relationships.
We let this new world know, I’m here! from the moment we enter it by clearly signalling, I need you to do something for me … or something with me.
The people who meet our cries for attention offer far more than meeting a need: they are meeting us.
It’s within these moments of meeting that our sense of Self begins to emerge - a sense of being known. Of impacting another person and discovering that they impact us, too. Of mutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988).
We learn this as an embodied experiencing. We reach, and someone responds. We respond to their response, and they respond to ours. We begin discovering not only that there exists a You and a Me, but who We are together - what Us means.
This is why our attachment patterns and relationships matter. It isn't merely how we learn to relate to others. It's how we first learn to relate to ourselves.
We adapt to stay connected
Of course, these encounters repeat in different ways with different people. We discover that one person delights in something another finds difficult. That some ways of expressing ourselves bring people closer, while others create a distance. We don’t need this explaining: we experience it.
This is where the human capacity to adapt comes into play. We may amp up the parts of ourselves that help us stay connected and tune down those that don't. Sometimes those quieter parts become so quiet that we struggle to access them at all.
As a species, we survived by evolving, adapting, flexing, and connecting. We need each other, so we find creative ways of staying connected to the people who matter most - namely, the ones we depend on to survive.
Toning down or completely cutting off parts of who we are is smart. Which generally, works well enough, for long enough.
Until long enough becomes too long. Until well enough isn't good enough anymore.
It’s like an internal alarm goes off, and we wake up to our Self with an uncanny sense that somewhere along the way, we've been selling ourselves out. We’d been living for others. Others whose voices were louder than ours.
But those parts of us we shushed? They haven't necessarily gone anywhere. They got used to what happened when they tried to be heard.
We become what we come to expect
This is where working with our relational patterns goes beyond attachment styles.
Drawing together decades of attachment research, relational analyst David Wallin (2007) stresses how these early experiences become organised within us. We develop expectations about ourselves and others, ways of understanding feelings, ways of approaching closeness and distance, and ways of protecting ourselves when relationship becomes difficult.
Some of these we can explain beautifully. Others we simply come to know, such as:
I'm better sorting things myself.
People leave.
Don't make a fuss.
If someone's upset, I gotta fix that.
I don't want to be a burden.
I need to know if I share something, you'll still be there.
These can feel less like beliefs we’ve internalised and more like facts about who we are and how the world works. Yet, these didn’t appear out of nowhere: they are formed through countless everyday encounters where I meet You. I meet World.
We are born as a being-in-the-world, living with others from the moment we arrive (Heidegger, 1927/1962). We’re born Into a world in a particular culture, time, place, and setting. Into families and histories already underway, including the emotional inheritance that those before us pass on.
While what we encounter is always subject to our own lived experience and relationships, some belongs simply to the givens of being human. Existential psychotherapy names some of these unavoidable conditions of being alive: our mortality, freedom, isolation, and need to make meaning (Yalom, 1980).
Plus, none of us gets to choose the world we land in. None of us can avoid needing other people, being changed by them, losing them, disappointing them, or being disappointed ourselves.
If there has never been a version of us that existed outside relationship, asking who am I? can never be entirely separated from asking, who have I been with you?
Or: Who did I need to become here? Who am I when I'm loved? Who am I when somebody’s disappointed in me?
Plus, the big one that often leads us to therapy: Who am I becoming now?
References
Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. Pantheon Books.
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Blackwell. (Original work published 1927).
Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1/2), 66–104.
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.
Did something here land for you?
If anything you’ve read brought up a feeling, explored a pattern, or made you question something in your life, you’re very welcome to get in touch. We can talk about whatever came up and see if working together might feel right.