By Sara Stanizai.
In my previous post, we explored how childhood dynamics shape our adult relationships, identifying common roles such as the Hero Child, Scapegoat Child, and Lost Child. Understanding these roles is the first step toward healing our relationships, but the real work lies in transforming these ingrained patterns into healthier relational dynamics.
Maybe you resonated with one or more of these roles. But now what?
What do you do when you feel stuck in these relationship patterns from your family?
According to Relational Life Therapy, understanding and using the basic concepts of the Adaptive Child, Wounded Child, and Wise Adult can help guide your journey toward healthier relationships.
By Sara Stanizai
It might be a therapy cliche, but our family roles profoundly shape who we become as adults.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this (and sharing with my clients) especially recently. I’m making my way through a certification and training with my therapy hero, Terry Real, an LCSW and the founder of Relational Life Therapy (RLT).
In our trainings, he sheds light on the specific roles children often adopt within their families of origin. These roles—such as the Hero Child, the Scapegoat Child, and the Lost version of each of these—can have lasting effects on our behaviors and relationships as we navigate adulthood.
This especially resonates as I run the Eldest Daughters group and do more research on the impact of birth order on our mental health. It’s never as cut and dry as eldest/middle/youngest/only.
Understanding these roles can help us identify patterns in our romantic relationships, friendships, and professional lives, providing a pathway to healing and personal growth that we may not find in traditional therapies.
Which one are you?
Like many pop psychology terms, people really throw around the idea of “going no contact.” It can be tempting to cutting ties with someone in your most heated moment — and it’s true, it can ultimately be beneficial to move on with your life.
But if you value community care, and wanting to do right by the people in your life, it can be confusing to figure out when and if it’s the right decision, and how to ethically do it.
What does going no contact actually mean and how can it help or harm you? How do you know if it’s the right decision for you? Have you truly done all you can - and should you?
The phrase “trauma-informed” is being thrown around all over the internet, but what does it actually mean?
Being trauma-informed goes beyond simply acknowledging the existence of trauma and its effects on mental health. Trauma-informed therapy is an actual approach to care that revolves around specific core principles. What a skilled therapist does with those principles, and how they implement them in the therapy room, will vary.
How we generate trust, safety, choice, collaboration and empowerment for our clients depends on what you have experienced in the past and what you might need now. (It’s those. Those are the principles.) This involves a deliberate and thoughtful approach to therapy that influences every choice we make as a therapist, both in session and when setting up our practice.
If you’re seeking therapy or if you’re a therapist yourself, it’s crucial to understand this concept so that you know how therapy works — and if it’s working for you.
Most of my clients have been to therapy before. Many have tried therapy several times over their life, but they never felt it was that helpful or they found it difficult to find a therapist who was a good fit. There are plenty of reasons why this might be the case, and this post aims to explore one of the main offenders: a very common type of therapy practiced is CBT, and using CBT alone may not be a great choice for neurodivergent brains.
What is self-trust?
It’s more than self-compassion, or self-esteem. It’s not thinking you’re great all the time, or ignoring your faults. It’s also not beating yourself up for mistakes, or “not living your highest potential.”
When you start to internalize acceptance of yourself, it changes the way you operate in the world. These are five habits that change when you begin to trust yourself:
Impostor Syndrome or Impostor Phenomenon s a term coined by Pauline Clance in 1978, based on her research studies of high-achieving women in university settings. It is characterized by people of all genders who are successful by reasonable external measures but have not internalized this success. Instead, they report that their success was gained either by accident, an oversight by others, or that they are generally a fraud, waiting to be found out.
While it was originally researched among college women, newer research suggests that it is experienced across the board. Which makes sense - people of all genders experience specific societal expectations, and struggle with self-image.
One of our specialties is working with high-functioning anxiety, perfectionism, and impostor syndrome, particularly in bicultural, first-generation, and immigrant Americans. There is a great deal of impostor syndrome in people who are acculturating to mainstream American culture. It’s exacerbated by the tendency that these folks are often acculturating at a rate faster than their families of origin, so people often don’t have the same “back-up” and reinforcement from their families. In this way, they may feel like they are unintentionally “leaving their families behind.”
One of the side effects of balancing your family's values and expectations with your own, is that people often feel like a failure by one set of standards (their family's), despite being successful by another set of measures (mainstream culture). And their own values are caught somewhere in the middle.
When your primary support system (your family) doesn’t know how to validate your success, you can start to believe it doesn’t count. Many bicultural people feel that their families don’t understand their work, their lifestyle, or some aspect of their identity. Compliments can feel stale or superficial. Or you might just stop sharing good news altogether because the response is disappointing.
There are other effects of impostor syndrome as well. It can cause people to hold themselves back from their goals, it can cause social and relational isolation, and can exacerbate existing symptoms of anxiety or depression. There is that self-fulfilling prophecy of not believing you are worthy of advancement, so people stop offering you opportunities, thus reinforcing your feelings of inadequacy.
If you can’t afford groceries because of your therapy bills, you’re seeing the wrong therapist.
I don’t care how much you like them, how chunky their jewelry is, or how hip their eyeglass frames are. If therapy is taking away too much from other parts of your life, you’re going to hate the process.
But therapy should be a little bit uncomfortable for you as the client.
An exchange of resources - time, money, energy - helps you both be accountable to the process. But what’s a fair price for that work?
A good therapist should be able to answer that question.
Many people can be socially awkward from time to time. It’s normal to experience periods of self-doubt. It’s natural (and healthy!) to second guess ourselves sometimes, too.
The important thing about impostor syndrome (rather than just regular anxiety or self-esteem issues) is that despite fears of being inadequate, you are wholly qualified to be doing what you’re doing.
Yeah, ok. You keep hearing about "the importance of setting boundaries" and you kind of have an idea of what people mean by that. (It's just saying "no" a lot more frequently....right?)
How do you set limits without hurting people's feelings? Especially when you don't even intend to be hurtful, but people take it the wrong way? Sometimes it feels easier to just give in and hope the other person notices that they're asking too much.
Convenient to Long Beach and Seal Beach at:
4510 E Pacific Coast Hwy, #540, Long Beach, CA 90804
contact@prospecttherapy.com | (562) 704-4736
