16/07/2025
Whenever I am trying to understand 📚 why people act the way they do, I often bring it right back to what we would have done in caveman times. Turns out very little has changed since then in terms of our subconscious motivations and fears. So when clients express guilt that by rejecting their parents’ behaviours or values, they are essentially rejecting them completely, I explain that that is precisely what they are meant to be doing in terms of identity development. Trouble is that given the way our parents treat us is our first window 🪟 to the world 🌍 of how we predict others will perceive us, they have a disproportionately powerful impact on our identity formation. We are wired to align with their models of self and their values, because at an unconscious level we equate sameness as guaranteeing inclusion in the tribe and therefore survival 💕🧑🧑🧒🧒. And prior to adolescence, we really do need them to keep us alive. But when we hit adolescence, our surge🚀 of hormones means we are wired to seek out a potential mate. To ensure the survival of the species, that mate needs to be from a tribe outside of our family one, and so we are really invested in how do we need to appear, act, identify in order to be deemed worthy of inclusion to an outside tribe. For adolescents, this a painful and contentious time: we need to understand our individuality but at a subliminal level we fear 😧 rejection from the family if we demonstrate our difference. So difference feels like a rebellion, a risk rather than what it is: a necessary stage of separation from our family of origin to find our own tribe. Finding others that share our interests and enhance our existence doesn’t need to mean rejection of our family tribe, it can co exist along side it, with the family being the source of nurture 🥙and love ❤️ and the chosen family/tribe being the platform for our own development and understanding of self. Of course that’s the ideal, but when parents have their own unmet needs that they protection onto the children to fulfil, you’ve got a whole hornets 🐝 nest of detangling to do.
