Conditional & Unconditional Love: Learning to Tell the Difference


If you grew up in a family where you felt unsafe, unwelcome or invisible, you may have adopted an attitude of shame and self-hatred.  If the people around you are constantly pointing out your mistakes, and giving you the message that you have no value until you do something for them, you’ll learn over time to get ahead of all this criticism and disregard.

For children, being loved and accepted is necessary for survival. This is how survivors of dysfunctional families learn that if their not proving their worth by doing something extraordinary, or making the people around them happy, they have no value at all.

As adult, you may continue to operate under the same rules, wearing yourself out trying to prove you are worthy of love by being extraordinary. And when you eventually get too exhausted or fed up to continue- you may end up collapsing into depression, helplessness and/or addiction. This is the “shame spiral” made famous by John Bradshaw (and Stuart Smalley.) 



Whether you spend more time in "overfunctioning" or collapse, many c-ptsd survivors tend to neglect their own needs. As children they felt left on their own, which is an overwhelming and threatening situation for a child. So as adults they ward off feelings of abandonment or “not being enough” with a never-ending stream of negative self-talk. 



Healing from complex trauma involves overcoming this chronic regime of self-neglect and self-aggression and learning how to receive unconditional love and care, both from your own inner grown up, in therapy, and from trusted loved ones. This starts with::


     - Paying more attention to your own felt experience, and beginning to believe the messages you receive from your body about your needs and limits.


     - Noticing when you are dismissing your own needs and feelings. Asking yourself, "What would a loving parent say or do right now to protect or comfort the distress I"m feeling?


    - Practicing speaking up for yourself- setting needing boundaries and making it clear to the people who want to be close or trusted by you when you feel hurt or devalued.

Shared Experiences of ND People

"Neurodivergence" and "neurodiversity" are relatively new concepts. "Neurodivergent" was coined by Australian sociologist Judy Singer in the late 1990s.

It refers to people who's brains process experience in a significantly different way from "neurotypical" people. It is most often used to refer to people with autistic, ADHD, and dyslexic neurotypes. It could reasonably be expanded to include people with Bipolar and OCD experiences, Highly-Sensitive People and Myers-Briggs N-Types. Studies have shown they are more likely to be diagnosed as neurodivergent, but we are still learning about the correlation.

In my work as a therapist (as well as my personal experience as a neurodivergent person), I've noticed that many people with autistic, adhd, dyslexic, and bipolar neurotypes have shared experiences. Here's a list of some of those shared experiences I've observed:

Sensory and Emotional Sensitivity

Many neurodivergent people have both high emotional and high sensory sensitivity. This first commonly shared trait leads to many other shared experiences.

Vulnerability to Mental Health Issues

Neurodivergent people's emotional and sensory sensitivity may make them more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive patterns and complex trauma.

"Low Spoons"

Some neurodivergent people have significantly different energy resources from neurotypical people. They may be capable of marathons of focus and productivity, or enormous bursts of creative energy or they may have regular experiences of exhaustion and longer term burnout. Learning how to take care of your particular energy system is often an important part of learning how to thrive as a neurodivergent person.

Less Filter Leading to Overwhlem

Do you remember (from your favorite comic book or movie) when Spiderman first got his new sensory powers? He could hear everything going on for miles around and was completely overwhelmed. This is a pretty good analogy for what being neurodivergent can feel like sometimes. If you're in a group of people you're picking up on subtleties everyone around you seems to be missing, it can feel exhausting, like you're being flooded with more information than you can process.

Way Ahead and Way Behind

Many neurodivergent people feel way ahead in some ways at school but in other places they are slower to understand or pick something up which noone else seems to have trouble with.  Because of this they sometimes get feedback from teachers that they seem smart and need to try harder..

Rejection Sensitivity and Relational Trauma

Many neurodivergent people experience something called "rejection sensitivity." It starts with a sense that there's something different about you which people sense and which they don't like. These differences can sometimes lead to neurodivergent people becoming the target of scapegoating, bullying and abuse. 

More than One Kind of Different

A significant number of neurodivergent people have more than one form of neurodivergence. A single person might be autistic and ocd, adhd and bipolar, adhd and autistic, etc.

The Double Empathy Problem

Neurotypical people can seem shockingly insensitive, inconsiderate or immoral to  neurodivergent people. At the same time neurodivergent people can seem abrupt, cold or clueless to neurotypical people. The term double empathy problem is helpful because it describes a communication problem based on difference, not just a deficiency in neurodivergent people.

If this list of shared experiences is striking a chord with you, you might consider if understanding yourself as "neurodivergent" might be helpful in explaining your life experiences.

On my resource page (see bottom of page) I've included links for self-tests for autism and adhd. These tests are not definitive, but they can be part of your process of examining your own experience to determine if neurodivergence might help you understand yourself.

Please remember if you are coming to the realization that you might be neurodivergent, you're not alone.. Many people, including myself, didn't understand how our neurotype had effected our life experience until our forties, fifties, sixties or beyond. If you think having a supportive witness could be helpful in this self-exploration, please get in touch.

Sometimes hidden under seemingly endless periods of depression, burnout, or grief, an inner transformation may be unfolding

Over the years many people have reached out to me when they are struggling to integrate a profound spiritual experience they'd had. This is one form of “transformational crisis."

An inner crisis can also be brought on by a profound loss (like the death of someone important, the end of an relationship, or the end of a deeply meaningful role (like being a parent to children living at home) which may have endowed your life with a sense of energy and purpose. 



These kind of ground shifting losses can alter our whole relationship with life, as well as our experience of self. The fall out of our old ways of being can even leave us feeling shattered. From this vulnerable place, We're left to try and figure out how to piece together our sense of ourselves, our world and our reason for being. 

This can be a slow process of grieving and rebuilding. It might take years, and in the meantime it can feel like all the wind has left our sails, and worry that second wind may never arrive. 



These profound passages between lives in the midst of life have been referred to by many names throughout history. In Christian circles, it was "the Dark night of the soul." In Jungian psychology, James Hollis called it "the middle passage." In Tibetan Buddhism, they talk about bardo or charnel ground experiences. In Shamanism, it could be understood as a journey through the underworld. 
You might notice the shared images of descent, darkness, and painful, disruptive transformation.

Human beings are more like butterflies then we usually understand. There are times in the midst of our lives when we have no choice but to dissolve and reform ourselves. 

Just like butterflies, this choiceless process of transformation requires us to withdraw inwards, and create a container that's reliable and safe enough to protect the process that's unfolding.

Because the process we're experiencing unfolds organically, we have no choice but to let go of our need for control. The process we're undergoing won't unfold on our schedule. It has its own timing, which we'll need to learn to respect.

My job as a counselor is to help you pay attention to the natural process that's unfolding. On the outside, you may have been feeling a profound desire to withdraw and spend more time in solitude. You may have lost interest in old passions. You may have less energy or interest to give to relationships.


Because there's so little understanding or honoring of spiritual experience in our society, sometimes these profound and important passages are seen in a very reductive way as depression or burnout. Depression and Burnout may indeed be part of the experience of transformational crises, but if we reduce them to that, we may be missing the bigger picture.
 

If you can learn to trust and respect the process that's unfolding within you, it can change from feeling like endless stuckness or depression, to the realization that on an inner level a great deal has been unfolding. 
While on the outside you might have appeared profoundly stuck or lifeless, inside new ways of understanding yourself and your world have been slowly forming into a whole new sense of self and world.

If we ignore or devalue what's unfolding inside us, these organic strivings towards healing and wholeness can take much longer to unfold, or stagnate completely.

 But if we are able to learn to trust our organic self, eventually the time comes when, like a butterfly, we're ready to emerge. Our long period of withdrawal ends and we're ready to share our new aliveness with the world and other people.


I hope this description gives you some inspiration to trust the process that's unfolding in you. If you'd like a companion to help you witness, understand and support the transformation your going through, I'm here to help.