Relationships are learned behaviours.
We often expect ourselves just to know what to do and get it right, but really, they’re skills that we learn.
What is normal, how to communicate, how to express your emotions to someone, whether to express your emotions at all, what kind of intimacy or affection to display are all things that we learn from our environment.
We learn these from our early caregivers, our family growing up, what we witness in the media, our wider culture and our past relationships.
Even those of you who did everything you could not to turn into your parents will still have learned about relationships from them! And you will have some patterns or traits that have carried through, because that’s just the way it works.
Our early relationships and even our past relationships have such a strong effect on us that they literally effect the way our brains are wired.
And then those impact the rest of our relationships going forward.
This wiring impacts how we show up in our relationships, how we communicate, react, deal with emotions and even our predisposition to conditions like anxiety and depression.
These past relationships and the ways our brains become wired, help shape what has become known in therapy as attachment style.
On today’s episode, you’re going to hear: