Relational & Attachment Trauma Recovery
A friend calls at the end of a hard day, and you know exactly what to say to her.
You’re patient in a way you’d never manage with yourself.
Every word of the kindness you hand her is true.
Then you hang up.
The voice that turns toward you has none of that in it.
Why is the grace so easy to give… and so impossible to keep?
You aren’t in crisis, exactly.
What follows you is the residue of relationships that injured you, still setting the terms years after those people left.
By every standard anyone else is using, you’re managing beautifully.
Coping is not the same as thriving.
You value self-determination, and yet in close relationships something else takes over before you get a vote.
Someone’s tone shifts, and the dread arrives ahead of any evidence.
This person is already leaving.
Or the opposite happens, and you go quiet and far away before anyone gets close enough to matter.
Every line of that program was written for a reason.
Reading the room a half second faster was how you kept things from tipping over.
You learned that half second in a family that ran on someone’s mood, in a religious community with rigid rules, with a partner who rearranged the truth on you.
The self-criticism had a job too, reaching you first, before anyone crueler could.
Those reasons expired a long time ago, and the program kept running anyway.
This work takes longer than a technique does.
Some of what we look at is tender.
Psychodynamic work is what I trained for at the doctoral level, and it’s the one certification I hold.
We go underneath the behavior to the moment it first made sense, then we name what that response was protecting you from.
Named that way, a pattern begins to loosen on its own.
Be prepared for some “aha” moments.
We move at your pace.
What carries forward is being met without judgment, often enough that you begin meeting yourself the same way.
You start recognizing what you feel without putting yourself on trial for feeling it.
Now you can say no.
The guilt doesn’t trail you for the rest of the week.
When you put distance between yourself and someone exploitive, it comes from taking care of your own security rather than from anger.
A friend calls at the end of a hard day, and you still know exactly what to say to her.
You hang up.
And the voice that turns toward you sounds like the same person.
Once you stop working against yourself, it’s amazing what you can change.
Ground that looked impassable turns out to have stepping stones, and we find them one at a time.
Call me today at: (832) 308-0467.
A text or a voicemail reaches me just as well.
We’ll set up a free 15-minute phone consultation, or you can write to me first at lisa.vanvleet@yahoo.com.
Tell me what keeps repeating, and together we’ll find where it began.
If you've read this far, some part of you is already leaning toward the deeper work.
The skills brought you this far. The deeper work is how the old gravity loosens its grip, how three in the morning gets quieter, how the color comes back up.
This is the work I'd be glad to do beside you.
