Object constancy refers to the ability of a person to use the function or representation of a caregiving other for self-soothing and comfort, even when the other person is not actually there. It’s the ability to feel a sense of security and to hold in mind a positive image of the other person even when that person is not physically present or is temporarily occupied or unattuned, as well as to trust that they still exist and that their soothing function still exists. 

Children usually develop some object constancy by around age 3. But some struggle with this even as adults. Some adults may even develop object constancy issues in their attachment relationships in adulthood, even if as children they felt secure. This is sometimes triggered by their fantasies about the other person, which can turn dark as soon as the other’s physical presence is not available, and they don’t have the reassurance of concretely seeing the other’s affection or warmth. Separateness can feel threatening, and a person may imagine being abandoned, or not existing in the mind of the other, when the other is not available, or they may project their anger at being left onto the attachment figure, and then imagine them withdrawing or acting cold in return. 

Whereas children may not have the ability to imagine another’s intentions or feelings towards them when they are not present, adults can elaborate the potential meanings of the absence in their imaginations- and interpret the lack of the other’s availability as personal, attacking, or intentional- whether based on projection, on past experiences, or on their image of the other person’s feelings towards them. This leads to not only a feeling of being left to one’s own devices in terms of self-soothing or emotion regulation, but also to fantasies of the other having malicious intent towards them. So there is a lack of an internal other to soothe the person, and a sense of threat at the same time. As Bion said, the absence of the other is not felt as just an “absence” or as something missing, but rather, that empty space becomes filled with a negative “presence”; with a feeling of persecution about the frustration and pain we feel. 

Some people have trouble also with evocative memory; bringing up a memory of a person  that is powerful or vivid enough to evoke (at least a trace of) the emotional experience the person had when the other was physically present. Obsessing can be one way of trying to conjure up the experience, although it doesn’t really help. Being unable to not just remember the details of something that we experienced, but also to remember what it felt like (for example, a calming or comforting feeling when we were together with the attachment figure), can handicap our ability to tolerate the moments when the experience is not currently available. Pulling up a good feeling can be very hard under the sway of frustration and emotional pressures,  especially when there is stress on the ego, or a person is emotionally overloaded. On the other hand, when a person is able to conjure up for themselves a good feeling based on a memory, they are able to re-experience positive moments even when they aren’t happening right now. 

Sometimes transitional objects can be helpful; these are concrete representations or objects that help us remember the feelings associated with another person or with a positive experience. Looking at a picture, reading a note, hearing a recording of someone’s voice: any of these things can at times help bridge the lack of a physically available other or a “feel good” experience in the moment with our object constancy difficulty.

When we feel able to hold on to another person’s presence or soothing function when not together with them, or if we’ve been able to internalize that function as our own, then there’s a part of us that’s able to say to us, “You’re going to be okay,” or “They’ll be back soon”, or “I’m here for you” in moments of distress. We can regulate our affect on our own, and even though it may not feel quite as good as getting that regulation from another person, it can feel good enough to get us through a hard moment- without feeling like we’re going to be annihilated, die from frustration, or experience the wait for the other to come back as torturous.  

When there is a lack of object constancy, the feeling that we can’t wait another minute until we reunite with the other; that we might lose ourselves completely without them; or that we cannot manage our own emotions without access to the other’s soothing function- these are fantasies. These feelings may also be a memory- from perhaps a preverbal time in infancy when our survival depended on the other’s presence completely, and when the wait for the other to feed us, soothe us, or take care of us may have felt like eternity. We had no way to comfort ourselves, no way to actively try to remember the other; no way to understand what was happening to us, or that the other would come back soon. 

Learning how to take something inside of ourselves and to hold onto it, as well as how to use it fully when it’s available, is a skill that some of us have to work on; it doesn’t come naturally for everyone. We have learn to let ourselves be fed relationally, and to feel satisfied, as well as to take time to digest what we’ve been given, and to make it our own, and to trust that what we take in from outside ourselves will nourish us rather than poison or deplete us. Some of us are afraid to take in, and afraid to let ourselves accept the separateness of the other, and the spaces in between our caregivers and us. We don’t want to accept the reality or not being able to get whatever we want in whatever form we want it. But the reality is the reality, and learning to let ourselves take in what’s available instead of waiting for what isn’t, helps to make the unbearable into something bearable.

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As humans, we all need some level of predictability, and perception of control, in our lives. 

Even though none of us really have control over the way life plays out for us, there are choices we can make, and experiences others can give us, that maximize our chances of certain outcomes, or of feelings of security. 

When our world is ordered enough that we perceive things around us to be stable and consistent, and that cause and effect relationships we’ve come to expect are reliable overall, we feel secure- and don’t have to spend too much time thinking about patterns or associations that we’ve learned to take for granted. This allows us mental space for other things. Imagine if every interaction, or stimulus and response, in our lives needed to be approached as if experiencing it for the first time, as a totally new experience? We wouldn’t really be able to function under such conditions. 

Trauma disrupts our expectations of how things are supposed to go. It can make us question everything we believed we knew about the world, as well as everything that felt safe in the past.  We may have come to feel that we have to be vigilant about approaching any situation we enter with caution. Our fundamental sense of the world being a safe and predictable place no longer exists, and we may have lost trust in ourselves, our relationships, or places and things in our lives.

At the same time as trauma can shatter our sense of predictability, when our expectations are jarringly and consistently not met (meaning when we don’t have predictability in our lives), we may find that traumatic as well. It goes both ways. 

Some children and adults will provoke certain reactions in others, sometimes by pushing their buttons (or by pushing and pushing the person until they can’t help but react) just to feel a sense of predictability and to feel that they can elicit an expectable response (even if negative) that is under their control to some degree. 

As caregivers or attachment figures, it’s important for us to be regulated enough in our own emotions and reactions to be able to interact with our children in ways that are responsive to what they are bringing to us. The social biofeedback theory of affect regulation shows us how the feedback a parent gives a child in response to the child’s behaviors, emotions, or communications should be able to be distinguished from reactions the parent is having to their own emotions or distress. If a parent acts angry or frightened when a child is upset, the child doesn’t feel mirrored regarding their own experience, but rather can be confused about whether what they’re experiencing was generated inside of them or was created by the parent’s own feelings which speak more about the parent than about the child. 

Saying yes to others (and especially our children) when they make a direct request, at least much of the time, can help others feel they have enough effectiveness over their environment to be able to handle an occasional “no”, or violation of expectations, without their sense of stability becoming disrupted. Helping our children to feel some sense of control over being able to make things happen for themselves out in the world, and getting their needs met when they signal others regarding them, helps them feel comfortable to take risks and to go after what they want in life with a sense of agency and initiative. At the same time, over-giving to our children or to others that is not in response to their signals or cues, when it happens too much of the time, can also stop a person from knowing their own desires as separate from what others project onto them. Teaching our children to show us what they want by responsiveness when they do (as much of the time as is safe or possible) leads to them developing direct communication abilities, rather that getting lost in what others want, or expecting others to offer things all the time, or to read their minds. 

We all feel good when it feels like we can make things happen for ourselves and have some perception of control over outcomes at least a good amount of the time. Being able to communicate with others and to get responses that are reciprocal and affirming is regulating and helps a person learn to live comfortably in the spaces between the environment and the self. 

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I used to have pretty bad health anxiety. It wasn’t there all the time, but when it flared up, it was debilitating. For example, over the years, I’ve had a few biopsies. Those cancer scares, and the waiting for results, were always terrifying for me. Getting sick on Rosh Hashanah of 2003, being in the ICU, going blind, and wondering if I’d ever feel better again- that was alsone of the scariest, most serious experiences of my life.

Sometimes health anxiety does come from traumatic experiences in our past (like that Rosh Hashana when I had gotten Stevens Johnson’s Syndrome from an antibiotic, long before most doctors knew what that was). Where something rare happened to us or went wrong, and we felt shaken to our core and completely caught off guard. It made us feel like our sense of security was gone. Usually, we tell ourselves that rare things won’t happen to us. But when something unexpected, unusual, or rare does happen, it shakes up our foundation. It makes us feel like anything can happen, and that we’re not fully safe.

Sometimes the hardest part of health anxiety is uncertainty. When we don’t know why something is happening, or what’s going on in our own bodies, it can make us very scared and uncomfortable. Uncertainty is common in both anxiety and OCD- which is why so many people scroll the internet looking for explanations of what might be wrong when something alarming or confusing in the body crops up. We are really looking for reassurance, but often, we end up just scaring ourselves instead.

We catastrophize. We imagine the worst. But somehow, anything feels better than not knowing. Filling in the blanks, even with something scary, seems to reassure us that we’re in control, that we can make a plan, that we’re prepared for whatever happens. Our minds get hijacked, and we start imagining all kinds of scenarios. The trouble with imagination is that when you imagine something happening, your body goes through the experience as if it’s real. You can live through a scary experience a million times over, purely in your own mind, even though it never actually happened- and is very unlikely to.

For those of us with overthinking minds and active imaginations, and especially for those of us with trauma, or a deep fear of getting sick, losing control, being debilitated, being in pain, or not being there for our children- that fear can feel enormous.

Luckily, a lot of my health anxiety has gone away. I don’t experience it often anymore, thanks to the treatment I’ve gotten for it. But every now and then, something from the past that I haven’t felt in a long time can pop back up.

Over the last 6 weeks, I’ve had a bad cold that hasn’t seemed to go away, no matter what I’ve tried. It’s been lingering on and on, seeming to get a little better, then flaring up again. At a certain point, when it no longer made sense to me why it was still there, and not knowing what would help, I started to feel scared. What’s wrong? Why isn’t this cold and cough going away? Things have felt out of control with my body. (Luckily, I started a new medication regimen, and I’m hoping I’m on the mend.) But feeling out of control, uncertain, and not knowing why my cold was lingering put me right back in that space of health anxiety, just for a few minutes, every now and then. It wasn’t fun. And I don’t miss those days when the fear would actually take me over. These days I can pull out of it more easily because I know how to cope with the anxiety differently.

But here’s the thing about the health anxiety- it can make your imagination take over, your heart start racing, and make you feel you can’t get to a doctor fast enough to find out what’s wrong, or get another test done. If you have this kind of anxiety, you may not trust your body to work well for you. You may feel a sense of fragility, like time is limited, or like you’re not in control.

The truth is, none of us are in control. We never are. All we can do is cope as best we can with whatever happens to us. Worrying, catastrophizing, and imagining the worst doesn’t prevent anything, and it doesn’t help anything- although deep down, some part of us often thinks it does. Some part of us believes that the more we worry, the more control we have. That the more we imagine the worst-case scenario, the more prepared we’ll be for whatever goes wrong. This is a trick our mind convinces us of. We don’t have to buy into it.

So if you’re worrying about a health issue, convinced something is wrong with your body, and you’ve already been to the doctor- it’s very unlikely that anything serious is going on. If you find yourself back on the internet, searching for answers you’ve already been given, maybe stop. And go see a therapist instead. Life is way better when anxiety is under control!

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Not everyone comes to therapy wanting the same thing. And not everyone should.

Some people want a place to exhale. Somewhere they can talk about their week, process how they’re feeling, and have someone really listen, not to fix anything, just to hear them. (When people offer solutions or advice or try to make us feel better by “fixing” our feelings, sometimes that feels dismissive…or like they can’t handle our feelings or are telling us we should try to make them go away. That often doesn’t feel helpful.) There’s no agenda, no homework, no pressure to change. Just the experience of having someone’s full, undivided, nonjudgmental attention. And for some people, that alone is healing. A non-directive, empathy-based therapist creates this kind of setting. Perhaps those of us who had practical minded parents who related to our emotions with solutions or overreactions long the most for this place to just be heard and to be.

Others would find that model frustrating. They feel they could call a friend for a listening ear or just to have someone say back to them what they’ve heard them say. What they want is a therapist who will teach them something like concrete skills, specific strategies, a clear path from point A to point B. These clients are motivated, practical, solution-oriented. They want to track their progress, do the work between sessions, and see results, not explore their childhood or vent about their week. They want to change their behavior, and they want someone to show them exactly how. Therapists with CBT training or a clear system for getting specific results tend to be most helpful for this group. These are often clients who like structure and prefer to be practical about their feelings, asking “what should I do about them?” instead of wishing to explore them or to be heard. (Sometimes this can come from an avoidant attachment style, and sometimes it’s just a personality preference).

Then there’s a third group. They know something is wrong — anxiety, depression, a pattern they can’t break — and they want to feel better. But they don’t come in with a specific technique in mind or a particular outcome mapped out. They just know they want something to shift. They like self-growth and are open to trying different things as long as it might help. These are often the clients who surprise themselves in therapy. They come in for one thing and discover something else entirely. The relationship with the therapist starts to feel different from other relationships in their life. There’s room to say things that are usually too awkward to say. Things that felt shameful start to feel okay. The anxiety they came in with begins to go away.

This third experience is closest to the kind of therapy I think I practice (and prefer), my own version of a psychoanalytic type of therapy I suppose…where surprises from the unconscious come up, the therapy relationship takes center stage, and speaking freely doesn’t just reveal things about ourselves but also is its own type of exposure therapy for facing our feared thoughts, feelings, and the things we find hard to say out loud. And where we get a different relational experience than the ones that have led to the challenges we live with today.

I think of the therapy room as a transitional space — separate from the rest of one’s life, with its own rules; rules that create a structured and containing (and predictable) experience, but that are also often meant to be broken at least every once in a while! A place where you can say things and feel things that other people in your life wouldn’t easily tolerate, and where you can have feelings you usually push aside, face fears you usually avoid, and make connections you couldn’t quite make on your own. Where the relationship itself becomes part of the work.

Because insight alone isn’t usually enough. Knowing why you do something, like where it comes from, or who you learned it from, is only a first step. But insight has to resonate, has to click for us somehow, to be transformational. It has to be paired with vulnerability, with facing the thing we’re coming to understand with all of its attendant emotions and sensations, rather than thinking about it from a safe distance. That’s when patterns that have been conditioned for years actually start to change.

A lot of people come into therapy wondering, on some level, whether the therapist actually cares. They think we disconnect the moment the session ends. Clients ask if I’m just doing a job, or just want to get paid. And I guess in a sense it’s a fair question, because there is something artificial about the setup- two people in a room, one of them paid to be there. But underneath that setup, we’re really just two humans struggling through something together, trying to get something helpful to happen. Yes therapists care, at least the ones I know. And the best therapy happens when both people are willing to be real.

Whatever kind of therapy you’re looking for — there’s something out there that can help. The most important thing is giving it some real thought. What has worked before, even a little? What hasn’t? And what do you actually need right now…

The post Which Therapy is Best for You? appeared first on Goldstein Therapy.

Those of us with active imaginations tend to be excellent at coming up with hypothetical scenarios and running possibilities through our minds. We constantly play out mental scenarios, asking ourselves: “What if this happens? What if that happens?” 

•  What if I mess up this report?
•  What if I don’t do well on my test?
•  What if it rains tomorrow when I’m supposed to go out?

What if, what if, what if…

And because our imaginations are so vivid, we don’t just think these scenarios, we actually feel them as they come alive in our imaginations. Sometimes, this is actually helpful. It allows us to mentally rehearse for different situations or prepare a backup plan just in case something goes wrong.

But there’s a dark side to this superpower: it can lead to severe anxiety.

Many of us don’t stop at just one “what if.” We go down the rabbit hole, imagining a cascade of consequences following one another, until suddenly a worry or a possibility becomes a catastrophe!

• “What if it rains tomorrow, and I forget my umbrella, and then I get soaked, and then I catch a cold…”
• “What if I fail my test, and my teacher and parents get upset, and then I mess up my GPA, and then I don’t get into a good graduate school because of that, and then I’ll never make any money because I couldn’t get my degree…etc. etc.”

We run these scenarios all the way to the worst possible endpoint. But in real life, things rarely turn out that way. And so we end up worrying for no reason, paralyzing ourselves, or avoiding healthy situations out of fear of what *might* happen but almost never does!.

This trap shows up in different ways for everyone:

•  Social Anxiety: Imagining hypothetical scenarios of people judging or rejecting us in social situations.
•  OCD: Imagining worst-case scenarios tied to doubts. “What if I forgot to lock the door? What if I left the stove on?”
• Hoarding: What if I lose weight end up needing that dress that hasn’t fit me in 10 years? 

But here’s the good news: Your imagination isn’t always the enemy! That exact same ability to imagine hypotheticals is what allows us to dream and explore possibilities.

•  What if I could become a teacher?*
• What if I could write a book?*
•  What if I could get a better job? 

This kind of dreaming is healthy and adaptive. It inspires us to take action and move forward, rather than shrinking back in avoidance.

Hypotheticals are harmful when they lead to anxiety, and it’s important to recognize when it’s time to stop engaging with them. But they are incredibly powerful when they lead to hope, creativity, and thinking outside the box.

And so the next time your mind starts spinning, remember this:

•  Focus on positive outcomes and the endless possibilities of what could go *right*.
•  Focus on your resilience:  Remind yourself of ways you can cope and adapt, even if your fears do come true.
•  Catch yourself before you go down the rabbit hole of imagining a sequence of things going wrong.

Your imagination is yours, so use it well!

About the Author: Mirel Goldstein is an award-winning, Columbia University trained therapist with decades of experience as a psychotherapist. She has offices in Clifton, NJ and Queens, NY and works virtually as well. To schedule an appointment for therapy, contact her at 973-348-9384 or mirel@goldsteintherapy.com

The post The “What If” Trap: How to Use Your Imagination Without Spiraling appeared first on Goldstein Therapy.

Growing up, and life in general, involves a lot of trade-offs. Many of the developmental steps we take come with a sense of loss, a feeling of giving something up. New doors open, new capacities develop, but we also leave things behind. These are necessary losses, as Judith Viorst called them.

Yet some people are not willing to give something up to get something in exchange. They feel that what they need is so pressing and urgent that the trade-off doesn’t seem worth it. I’ve seen this in a number of clients who want attention very badly — who seem to feel it’s worth sacrificing their mental health, doing something reckless or dramatic, or holding on to their suffering in order to get others to pay attention to them. Sometimes these same people may also carry a fear of growing up and taking on adult responsibilities. Yet part of what they lose out on in such cases are the good feelings that come with a sense of mastery: the satisfaction of working hard at something, taking on new responsibilities, developing new capacities, and growing into them.

And yet we all need attention. When those needs are frustrated, it can feel like the only way to get them met is to get people to notice us through negative behaviors or dramatic displays. For some, this feels worth it. Others recognize that what they’re giving up in exchange for the attention, or the ways in which they’re self-destructing to get it, is hurting them — and the life force inside them is strong enough that they’re not willing to go down that road. They want to fight the urge to do destructive things just for attention.

Families that only give attention when a child is sick, or that punish a child for separating, can unconsciously send the message that the only way to get what you need is to be ill, to struggle, or to stay small and needy. Even when those same parents complain about the child’s neediness, they were the ones who reinforced it in the first place. Something similar happens with people who avoid work because they don’t want responsibility — don’t want a boss, don’t want to answer to anyone or have to push through difficulty. In avoiding all that, they also lose out on the deep satisfaction that comes from working hard, earning money, and discovering what they’re capable of.

When we keep ourselves small — when we avoid going out into the world and doing things that require effort, frustration, and patience — we give up a feeling of efficacy and mastery. For some people, that feeling doesn’t seem worth pursuing. Maybe they’ve given up. Maybe they were taught learned helplessness, absorbing the lesson that whatever they do, they’ll fail or be criticized anyway. So why try? Better to take the easier satisfactions of staying needy, taking it easy, just chilling out.

We all have parts of us that want to regress — to go back to being young, carefree, nurtured, free from responsibility. We want to let go, we want to be loved. But as we grow older, we learn how to integrate those needs with reality. When we can do that, it eases anxiety, because we know we’re meeting life on its actual terms. Otherwise, there’s a kind of low-grade paranoia — a feeling that something bad could happen at any moment, because on some level we know we’re not playing by the rules of how things are supposed to work. This creates an undercurrent of anxiety, even when we can’t quite name why it’s there.

I can’t make the case for people who are stuck that getting unstuck is worth it — not in any way they’ll simply accept. Growing up is hard. It’s hard for all of us. But when our needs were met well enough in childhood, we learn that growing up isn’t traumatic. It just involves some ordinary disappointments — and those are well worth the price of what we gain. I hope someday those who are stuck in a regression can rethink their position.

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If this resonates with you, you may feel that your internal world can only be made real to others if you act it out, physically manifesting your pain rather than simply speaking it.

In therapy, I watch my clients make a slow, often painful progression:

• Moving from the belief that only actions can manage or communicate their feelings, to the realization that words are enough.

• Understanding that language exchanged between two people creates a shared experience that is meaningful and soothing, rather than empty or flat.

Along this journey, there is often a “middle ground” between action and speech. Clients may use emotionally evocative language as a bridge to ensure they impact the listener. For instance, a client might say they want to die, even if they aren’t suicidal. In this context, invoking death is an attempt to convey the magnitude of their pain in a way that goes beyond mere description.

With time, the presence of the therapist and the rhythm of the sessions create a symbolic womb—a space where new experiences are born and words become animated.

While words help us share our lives, they also define our boundaries; they highlight the separateness of two distinct minds. Paradoxically, it is this very separateness that makes communication necessary. As clients begin to feel that their words truly reach and impact the therapist, the need for dramatic action or “shocking” language decreases. Eventually, an ordinary back-and-forth becomes sufficient to fill the void with the relational nourishment they’ve been seeking.

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We all need to be held in mind by others, especially by our caregivers early in life, at a time before we have words- or the capacity to think about ourselves on our own. Being held in someone else’s mind makes us feel seen and understood, thought about, relevant, and represented. Being held in someone else’s body is essential for the infant on the most basic level, yet being held in mind is also what helps us feel that we’re real—as a person who can be thought about. 

Sometimes caregivers are too preoccupied to hold a child in mind. Sometimes a parent understands only the language of physicality and tends to the infant on a practical, concrete level, without a mindful awareness of who the infant is, how he or she must feel, what the infant needs. This form of neglect is not obvious at first glance, because the child’s physical needs are being met, but its effects often emerge later, when the child does not feel real, important, or represented in the imagination of the other—at times when the other is not physically present. A difficulty with object constancy may arise, and separations may feel annihilating rather than bearable.

As therapists, we often attend to the physical aspects of the space we provide—the office, the ambience, the setting, the position of the couch or chair. But we don’t always think about how our clients need us to hold them in mind from session to session. Remembering who they are and what they’ve said after a separation, letting them know they’ve been thought about even when they were not present—these are not small things. Hearing the therapist’s voice, seeing that look of recognition, being reminded of something meaningful from the previous session—these are ways of holding continuity. We show the client that we have not forgotten them, that we are paying attention, that they exist for us outside the frame of the hour as much as within it. In a quiet way, this builds a sense of psychic permanence: You are still here in my mind, even when you’re  not in the room.

But in order to hold another in mind, the other must be separate from us. There has to be a distinct person to think about; otherwise, it becomes enmeshment rather than holding. Being merged with someone is different from allowing them to exist as a separate presence and letting our own mind reflect on who they are, what they’ve shared, what they might need. We recognize the other because they are an other. That small but essential distance preserves our capacity to think, to see, and to hold without suffocating—without collapsing into them or pulling them into us.

We all know how good it feels to be thought of—unless, in our primary relationships, we have been held in mind in ways that felt unsafe or misattuned. In those cases, the experience of being represented in another’s mind as something steady and benevolent may need to develop slowly, as a kind of emotional achievement. Most of all, when we remember what others have told us, think about them when we’re apart, imagine what they might be feeling or needing—these are quiet but profound gifts. To hold someone in mind is, in a very real sense, to help them feel that they exist.

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Guest Post By Michal Goldman

Relationships are built through many small moments of connection, and they are also shaped by many small moments of disconnection. These moments of disconnection are often subtle. Someone says something and does not feel fully understood. A comment gets overlooked. An emotional bid is met with distraction. These experiences are known as ruptures, and they are a normal part of being in a relationship with another person.

A rupture happens when there is a break in emotional connection. Although ruptures can sometimes be big, most ruptures are small enough that neither person pays too much attention. They can show up as a feeling of distance, a flicker of disappointment, or a sense of being unseen in response to something that happened between the two people. Rupture will happen just by virtue of the fact that a relationship is made up of two imperfect human beings.  What happens next is what is important for the security of the relationship.

Repair is the process of addressing that moment of disconnection and restoring closeness. This might involve clarifying what was meant, acknowledging an impact, offering an apology, or simply slowing down to reattune to the other person. Over time, these cycles of rupture and repair shape how safe and trusting a relationship feels.

One way to picture this is through the image of a string. Imagine two people holding opposite ends of a string that represents their emotional connection. As small ruptures occur, tiny tears form in the string. When those tears are ignored, the string becomes increasingly frayed and the people holding it feel more distant from one another. When a rupture is repaired, it is like tying a knot in the string. The knot shortens the string slightly and brings the two people closer together. With each repair, the connection becomes stronger and more secure.

This process begins early in life. When a baby cries, there is a rupture marked by distress and discomfort. When a caregiver responds by soothing, feeding, or holding the baby, a repair occurs. Over many repetitions, the baby learns that distress leads to connection and that their needs matter. This does not require perfect responsiveness. It requires enough moments of repair over time to create a sense of safety and trust. These early experiences shape how people come to understand relationships throughout their lives.

Rupture and repair continue to play a central role in all relationships as adults. Imagine the example of a couple.  One partner shared that they had a difficult day at work, and the other responded briefly while looking at their phone. The partner who shared may feel dismissed or alone, even if that was not the intention. If there is no acknowledgment about what happened, that feeling often lingers. A repair might happen when the distracted partner says they realized they were not fully present and they want to hear more, or when the first partner says they felt a bit unseen earlier and needed reassurance (and the other partner responds). These moments of repair communicate care and responsiveness, and they build trust over time.

To start building more repair into relationships, it can be helpful to gently name small moments that sting rather than minimizing them or letting them pile up. Speaking from one’s own experience and inviting reconnection creates space for repair and strengthens emotional closeness.

Rupture and repair also occur in the therapeutic relationship. At times, a client may feel misunderstood or feel that something important was missed. When a client brings this into the room and the therapist responds with openness and curiosity, a repair takes place. This experience can be deeply meaningful, especially for people who are used to their feelings being dismissed or ignored. Over time, experiencing a secure, responsive relationship in therapy can help people feel more confident and secure in their relationships outside the therapy room.

All relationships move through moments of connection and disconnection. Security and closeness are built through the repeated experience of finding one another again after those moments of distance. When people learn that relationships can stretch, repair, and come back together, connection begins to feel sturdier and more reliable. This is how trust grows, one small repair at a time.

Michal Goldman, LCSW, is a couples therapist in NY specializing in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and discernment counseling.  Learn more about her work at michalgoldmanlcsw.org.

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Many of us now understand the self not as a single, unified identity, but as a system of parts or sub-selves that can be in conflict or in harmony. The idea that a person has only one unified self is no longer universally accepted (even if most of the time our sense of self can feel undivided). In Internal Family Systems (IFS), for example, we think in terms of a system of selves, where different parts have different roles: some protect, some carry pain, for example. 

Our overall sense of self is formed through our past experiences. Some of these experiences involve what we learn about ourselves from accurate mirroring by others, where they reflect back to us who we are in a way that feels true. When others respond to our cues and spontaneous gestures with accurate feedback, this helps us feel seen and connected to our true self, the person we experience ourselves to be from the inside out, the part of us that feels real, alive, genuine.

Other parts of us develop through internalization, imitation, identification. We adapt to the people around us, absorb aspects of their personalities, feelings, and behaviors, and make parts of their emotional world our own.

Then there is of course also Winnicott’s false self, in contrast to the true self, where what we show the outside world is not coming from our inner truth, but is an accommodation to caregivers or others who did not make room for our spontaneous, alive expressions. This self is a persona of sorts. 

And then there are introjections. 

These are parts of us we absorbed from others (perhaps to align ourselves with their point of view, or as a repository for the own unwanted parts) that feel foreign, unwanted, or disturbing inside, and that don’t feel like “us” deep down. An example would be when a person who was criticized repeatedly by their parents now carries a harsh, critical voice inside. This voice often feels like someone else’s, even though it lives within oneself.

But today I want to make sure to mention the alien self, based on distorted mirroring. 

Fonagy and Target in the mentalization literature describe the alien self as developing when someone reflects back to us not our real emotional signals, but something that does not fit who we are.

For example, when a child tries to separate or become autonomous, a parent may experience this as aggression or rejection. The child then receives the message:

“You are bad.”

“You are hurting me.”

“You are aggressive.”

Over time, the child may start to believe this. Yet on the inside, it does not feel true.

So the person grows up with a painful dissonance:

On the inside: “I feel independent, alive, and well-intentioned.”

Internally also: “I am mean. I hurt people.”

This creates deep confusion and shame.

The alien self forces a person into a painful choice: either sacrifice their inner truth, or sacrifice the feedback they received from important caregivers.

Because this dissonance is so hard to tolerate, the psyche may try to rid itself of the alien self using projective identification, in which we symbolically evacuate our unwanted identity into another person and then behaviorally provoke them into enacting it.  This temporarily relieves the inner conflict, because once again the alien self feels alien, as if it has been gotten rid of, or no longer belongs to us, yet at a high relational cost. This recreates the original injury and disrupts intimacy.

How do we heal if what feel like parts of us inside are not aligned with who we really are, or do not really belong to “us”?

The goal is not to erase parts of ourselves, but to differentiate what is truly ours from what was imposed on us, especially when those impositions involved distortions between our true intentions and the other’s perceptions or reactions.

We can have compassion for introjected parts, because after all on some level they have become a part of us, but it is perhaps a bigger dilemma to cope with the alien self– because it’s not based on something true.  It is very hard to have compassion for something that never felt real. Healing means learning to trust our inner experiences again, rather than living inside someone else’s distorted mirror.

We are allowed to define ourselves from the inside out, and sometimes this means finding a new mirror to look into for feedback. 

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