E.14 - What If Your Patterns Aren't Evidence You Were Failed?
The self-help world has a subtle implication: if you had just had a more attuned caregiver, you wouldn't have the patterns you have today. You wouldn't struggle with connection. You wouldn't have these adaptations.
But what if that's not true? What if a different environment wouldn't have produced a person without adaptations—it just would have produced a person with different ones?
In this episode, Lacey K. Kelly explores the unintended consequences of the "attuned caregiver" fantasy. We look at how this belief turns adult therapy into a courtroom where parents are put on trial, how it creates a generation of parents terrified of getting it wrong, and why misattunement isn't a failure—it's a non-negotiable reality of being human.
Listen to hear:
- Why we mistake our adaptations for evidence that something went wrong
- The strain the current attachment model is putting on parent-child relationships
- Why "gentle parenting" is sometimes producing extreme anxiety
- How to hold the complexity of your childhood without pathologizing it
- The difference between recognizing cause-and-effect and assigning blame
Links:
Guided reflection on Insight Timer
About this podcast:
Most of what you've been told about self-improvement is built on a false premise: that you are broken, and that the right amount of work will fix you. This podcast is about what happens when you stop believing that.
Lacey K. Kelly is a therapist and author of three books—The Process of Unbecoming, Already Human, and God Is A Dirty Word—and every episode is an argument for the idea that you were never the problem to begin with.