EQI.org Home | Authors Dan Siegel
Creating a Cohesive Life
Story:
Dan Siegel
Why do we parent as we do? When researchers asked this
question, they hypothesized as many of us
would that it
is the childhood experience of parents that predicts how
they
behave with their own children. This sounds plausible,
but it
turns out not to be quite right.
When I first heard about what the researchers actually
found, it changed my life and my understanding of the
life of the mind. The best predictor of a childs
security of attachment is not what happened to his
parents as children, but rather
how his parents made sense of those childhood
experiences.
And it turns out that by simply asking certain kinds of
autobiographical questions, we can discover how people
have made sense of their past how their minds have
shaped their memories of the past to explain who they are
in the present. The way we feel about the past, our
understanding of why people behaved as they did, the
impact of those events on our development into
adulthood these are all the stuff of our life
stories. The answers people give to these fundamental
questions also reveal how thisinternal narrative
the story they tell themselves may be limiting them
in the present and may also be causing them to pass down
to their children the same painful legacy that marred
their own early days. If, for example, your parent had
a rough childhood and was unable to make sense of what
happened, he or she would be likely to pass on that
harshness to you and you, in turn, would be at risk
for passing it along to your children. Yet parents who
had a tough time in childhood but did make sense of those
experiences were found to have children who were securely
attached to them. They had stopped handing down the
family legacy of nonsecure attachment.
I was excited by these ideas, but I also had questions:
What does making sense really mean? How can
we accomplish it, and how does it occur in the brain? The
key to making sense is what the researchers came to call
a life narrativethe way we put our
story into words to convey it to another person. How an
adult told his or her story turned out to be highly
revealing. For example, people who were securely attached
tended to acknowledge both positive and negative aspects
of their family experiences, and they were able to show
how these experiences related to their later development.
They could give a coherent account of their past and how
they came to be who they are as adults.
In contrast, people who had challenging childhood
experiences often had a life narrative that was
incoherent in the various ways Ill describe in the
following pages. The exceptions were people like Rebecca.
Based on the facts of their early childhood, they would
be expected to have an avoidant, ambivalent, or
disorganized attachment as children and an incoherent
life narrative as adults. But if they had a relationship
with a person who was genuinely attuned to them a
relative, a neighbor, a teacher, a counselor
something about that connection helped them build an
inner experience of wholeness or gave them the space to
reflect on their lives in ways that helped them make
sense of their journey. They had what the researchers
called an earned secure life narrative. Such
a secure narrative has a certain profile; we can describe
its features. Even more important, like Rebecca we can
change our lives by developing a coherent
narrative even if we did not start out with one. This is
such a crucial point that Ill repeat it: When it
comes to how our children will be attached to us, having
difficult experiences early in life is less important
than whether weve found a way to make sense of how
those experiences have affected us. Making sense is a
source of strength and resilience. In my twenty- five
years as a therapist, Ive also come to believe that
making sense is essential to our well- being and
happiness.
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