The Place We Find Ourselves

Triangulation occurs when a parent requires a child to function as an emotional adult by meeting the parent’s adult needs and wants. Were you required to give, give, give to your parent, or was your parent continually giving, giving, giving emotionally to you? In a healthy parent-child relationship, there is plenty of connection—but the parent never imposes their emotional needs on the child. Triangulation results in two deadly dynamics. First, your goodness is consumed by one parent. Second, as a result of being consumed by one parent, you are setup to be envied by the other parent. When triangulation is present in a family, it is common (though not inevitable) for the triangulated relationship to become sexualized. By sexualized, I mean that there is erotic energy between Mom and the chosen son or Dad and the chosen daughter.

Sexuality is an emotionally charged topic. Period. But when you are talking about sexuality for people with a history of trauma, you are stepping into terrain where angels fear to tread. However, if God intends for you to experience overflowing sexual pleasure and lavish sexual freedom, then exploring your sexual story is more than worth it. Human beings are aroused by particular things in the present because of our experiences of being aroused in the past. Your past story can help you understand why you are turned on by the things that turn you on. Your sexual preferences and sexual fantasies are not random. There is a connection between your painful experiences growing up and your present sexual struggles. Sexual harm in the past becomes reenacted in the present. This is because you have neurons... and that's how neurons operate.

I am joined today by therapist and friend Reid Zeller who shares a story about egging cars when he was 16. Behind every story is a backstory. The backstory includes the nature of the environment we grew up in. When religious or spiritual expectations are placed on the shoulders of a child, pressure builds within that child. And when that pressure inevitably leads to a bursting, what results is always a mixture of dignity and depravity. Both. If the podcast has been helpful to you, please consider supporting it financially. 

When you were a child, you were deeply dependent on your primary caretakers. This means that the development of your brain was contingent upon the level of care and kindness in your family environment. Today I identify the six things you needed from your parents, and give examples of each. The “Big Six” things you needed from your parents include (1) attunement, (2) responsiveness, (3) engagement, (4) ability to regulate your affect, (5) ability to handle your big emotions and (6) willingness to repair harm. To download a free document that explains the Big Six, click here.

If you have difficulty regulating your emotion, there is a reason for that! No one comes out of the womb with the ability to regulate their affect. The way you develop the neurobiological structures to regulate your own emotions is by having your affect interactively regulated by another. This is the main gift that a primary caregiver gives to a child. Another name for this gift is “secure attachment.” The essence of secure attachment in adulthood is that you have the ability to both self-regulate and reach for help (that is, receive regulation from another). If the podcast has been helpful to you, please consider supporting it financially by clicking here.

This episode is for people who experience emotional pain but feel like “nothing that bad happened to me growing up. I had a pretty good childhood.” As it says in Jeremiah 6, it is very common to dress our wounds as though they are not serious. One way we tend to minimize our wounds is by comparing our story to someone else who “had it worse.” Another way we minimize our wounds is by spiritualizing away the harmful experiences we endured with sentences like, “God used that terrible experience to shape my character.” What is keeping you from having compassion for the harm you experienced as a boy or a girl? If the podcast has been helpful to you, please consider supporting it financially here.

My invitation to you today is simple: to take your story seriously. Engaging your story is the single most important thing you can do to experience healing. When I say "your story," I'm talking more about the individual scenes than the overarching narrative of your life. Your stories—particularly your stories of heartache or harm—have shaped your brain more than anything else. Which means that your past stories are shaping your present life more than you may realize. To support the podcast financially, click here. 

In “As Long As You Need,” author J.S. Park writes that “Grief is not about letting go, but about letting in.” Letting in sorrow, letting in anger, and especially letting in other people who can be WITH us in our pain. This episode is about all kinds of grief—not merely the grief of losing a loved one. One of Joon Park’s main points is that we often experience loneliness in the midst of our sorrow and pain. He says, “It is possible to be in a room full of people, but feel more lonely than if the room had been empty. It is to be unseen. Unseen by those close to you is in some ways worse than having no one see you.” 

I am joined today by author Jay Stringer to talk about sexual stuckness/difficulties/pain. Healthy sexuality is deeply tied to the degree to which we have made sense of our story in our family of origin. Sadly, so few of us have ever been asked to connect the dots between our past life story and the sexual difficulties we face in the present. Today, Jay and I try to connect some of those dots. If you want to understand your sexual story in more depth, please sign up for The Sexual Attachment Conference on May 4th. We want to help you understand and transform some of the unique sexual difficulties you may be experiencing either individually or as a couple.