What It Means to Feel Seen in Relationships
We all need and want is to be seen, but if you had a complex relationship with your mother you might not have a clear idea of what feeling seen in relationship feels and looks like. In this blog I'll share why misattunements are not a sign for feeling unseen, but can actully be an opportunity for strenghtening any relationship you have, and what signs you can look for to know what it means to feel seen in relationships.
Before I get into it i want to let you know that I'm holding a workshop on Saturday, October 5th, 10.00-13:30 in Biel on Feeling Seen in Relationships for women who want to heal teh mother wound and feel seen, heard and understood in their personal or professional relationships
The yearning to be seen in relationships is an existential one. Everyone needs to feel seen even at times when we think or feel that we’d rather not be seen by anybody. But what it means to feel seen in relationships can be personal and not such a trivial question.
If you sit with it for a moment and try to explain it to yourself, you’ll notice that a lot of abstraction comes up.
How can we break it down in a way that guides us to feeling seen, heard and understood, a way that also helps us know when we’re not?
I’ve been revisiting this question since I’m once again offering my workshop Feeling Seen in Relationships—a Hakomi-based workshop for women who want to heal the mother wound and feel seen, heard and understood in personal or professional relationships.
Here's just a general definition to start with:
Feeling seen validates our feelings, it gives meaning to our dreams and wishes, it reinforces our gifts and it alleviates our pain.
Misattunemnet and expectations in relationships
I’ll start with telling you right away what’s the only thing that can serve as a sign for feeling seen, heard or understood because there’s a lot to unpack about what seems to be simple and straightforward:
Feeling seen, heard and understood in relationships is possible when we have an inner sense of feeling safe.
When we feel safe in a relationship, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a personal or a professional relationship, we can freely share our point of view and needs with the other, expecting those to be met, respected and fulfilled to a relaxing degree.
A relaxing degree means that others can’t always fully meet us. We need just enough (say 20-30% according to research) of attunement in connections in order to feel seen.
It’s inevitable to experience misattunements in relationships. In fact, when we misattune AND feel safe in a relationship, we’re able to create a repair which often leads to a strengthening of the relationship.
When the dynamic of our relationships is such that it enables that level of safety and the possibility for repair, we are in the right place to feel seen, heard and understood.
This is not the case for many women who’ve had complex relationships with their mother that didn’t provide them with the level of safety needed in order to intuitively understand what feeling seen, heard and understood really means.
The relationship with a mother provides a blueprint for relationships in life. That’s why it’s important to flesh out the patterns and habits, the survival strategies and perceptions we’ve developed in order to heal the mother wound and shift towards relationships that can give us the experience of feeling seen, heard and understood.
Why a repair strengthens relationships
A repair happens when we’re able to face a misattunement in a relationship and open the space to re-establishing the right attunement together.
Repair restores the resonance between people. The gift of a messy attunement is to be in it together.
This recently happened between me and my line manager where I work part-time as an educator for young children.
I found myself getting increasingly stressed over a period of some weeks. I became hyper-vigilant, afraid of making mistakes, and I was walking on egg shells around her.
It took me time to articulate it into words, but I noticed at some point that I was afraid of disappointing her. This only put more pressure on me, which made me more forgetful and, obviously, more prone to making mistakes. My negativity bias was acute.
As the pressure grew, I came to a point one day of almost leaving work in the middle of the day. I felt like a failure, and emotionally I was very raw. I’d get into tears over literally nothing.
On that day, when on my break, I went out for a walk and contemplated the thought of just leaving. As tears welled up in my eyes and I felt so exhausted from the accumulated stress of needing to perform, I noticed that what I wanted most was to express my feelings.
Leaving would have been my default response in the past. 'I’d be better off without this person,’ would be my thinking.
I used to feel very vulnerable and shaky in relationships. Always expecting a pushback against my needs and an overwhelming wave of shame.
Other common responses to feeling unseen, unheard or misunderstood can be: pleasing, feeling abandoned, caving in and shutting down, reducing your needs to ‘not so important’, increased fear of rejection, fawning, shame or guilt.
But I’ve done my homework, as the saying goes, and I was able to shift from shame and running away to seeking repair as a first step.
Had I had gone home, I would have missed the gift.
Even though it’s a new working place, even though the local culture I live in is not one for encouraging the sharing of feelings, and even though I was afraid of creating more tension by being so open and honest, I went back to my workplace and shared my feelings with my manager.
Repair allows us to understand each other better, to know where each person is coming from, to experience being vulnerable as a positive experience, which all leads to a greater depth in the relationship and a new shared meaning for the relationship.
This is what I want for you, loves. To feel safe in relationships, to have clarity of what that looks like for you, to be able to repair misattunements in relationships so they offer you what they’re meant to—an enhancement of our sense of satisfaction, meaning and purpose in life.
If this resonates with you, and you too want to have better relationships in life, do join me on October 5th in Bile, 10:00-13:30.
So what it means to feel seen, heard and understood is a combination of:
An intuitive and emotional insight of what You need to have this experience in each and every relationships
The space for a repair of misattunements
But underling all these is the only and single component of having an internal sense of safety.
These are the foundations of my workshop Feeling Seen in Relationships.
I bring nearly two decades of experience in working with women on healing the mother wound. Now I put together a workshop that focuses on relationships because:
The mother wound is a relational wound so it has a significant impact on relationships
All women I’ve worked with, even in cases where the initial focus was on developing their career life and creative endeavours, brought to our session relational conflicts and dissatisfaction
When working on healing attachment traumas in a group setting there’s a beautiful, additional healing level that’s not possible in a 1:1 setting.
What participants of the previous workshop say:
“It was my first workshop of this kind and it was a valuable experience. Your calm and gentle presence was wonderful and the exercises we did were very powerful. I felt uplifted and lighter after the workshop and will continue to work on some of the things that came up for me.”
“It was a brilliant workshop. Two different times what came up in my body was unexpected and perhaps off-topic but handled in a way that led to deep processing and integration. Shelly’s identification of what was happening was razor-sharp and with minimum, precise intervention she was able to bring my process to its momentary completion.”
Not living in Switzerland?
I'll talk about this more soon but we've already started with pre-registration to our healing the mother wound summit in November.
Register for FREE or purchase your discounted ticket now by clicking on the image below:
Not sure yet? No problem!
Here are a couple of ways to learn about healing the mother wound:
Sign up to my Museletter for regular, useful content on healing the mother wound
Take my video training on breaking free from mother wound limiting beliefs
Shelly's helping women whose relationship with their mother left a negative mark and want to become un-limited in their personal or professional life
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