I was sitting in a park on a warm Sunday, watching people stroll past, when this thought landed: most of us are still operating from a guidebook someone handed us a long time ago - and it is badly out of date.

Relationships and patterns of relating are, by far, the most common thing people bring into my practice - whichever form that takes for them. A few patterns come up again and again:

  • Someone who cannot take a compliment, even though it is exactly what they are craving underneath
  • Someone who avoids the partner they actually want, and settles instead for what feels “safe”
  • Someone who keeps ending up with emotionally unavailable partners, without quite understanding why

These patterns rarely announce themselves. We are good at hiding them, often from ourselves most of all - because there is usually a good reason we built the defence in the first place.

The real work starts with identifying where a pattern came from, and then - the harder part - accepting that changing it is now our responsibility, even if we did not create it. It is always easier to find something or someone to blame. And there is often truth in that. But blame alone does not move anything.

An Out-of-Date Guidebook

Most of us were handed a guidebook early on - by parents, teachers, whoever raised us - full of instructions about how to behave and what to expect from life and from others. Some of it still serves us. A lot of it does not. Just like an old map stops matching a city that has since been rebuilt, an old guidebook can quietly lead us somewhere we do not actually want to go.

What most of our guidebooks left out was permission to put ourselves first, to actually love ourselves without qualification. Not many of us grew up hearing, plainly and often: you are enough, exactly as you are. So as adults, we tend not to expect much more than we were shown.

The good news is that this can be learned - slowly, the way anything new is learned, through practice and a fair amount of getting it wrong before it settles. It helps enormously to do this alongside someone who has done their own version of this work, and can walk the path with you rather than just point at the map.

If any of this resonates, it might be worth asking yourself what is still written in your guidebook - and whether it is time for a new edition.

Agatha x