Organizing principles: Getting to know how you are ‘organized’

A quick look at what they are and how they might operate:

In therapy, our attention will likely be drawn to your ‘organizing principles’: the core beliefs and unspoken assumptions you’ve extracted and compiled from attachment relationships throughout life (but mostly in early years). These adopted templates operate below the level of consciousness and lead you to ‘organize’ yourself in relation to others, to either have or avoid certain relational experiences. They are formed from deep psychological (and neurobiological) responses to experiences of safety and danger in relationships.

It is tremendously helpful to become more aware of how this network of interpersonal experiences in your life has shaped you and what relational behaviours it has led to.

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You’ve been mistreated and misunderstood? Of course, you’d want to protect yourself now.

You’ve been told how great and special and perfect you are? You would maybe then feel deeply invested in upholding that and not disappointing others (and at what cost?).

The world has told you that you’re ‘less-than’ and ‘other’? You might continually adjust yourself to be seen as one who belongs and has worth. You may also respond by leaning in to that identity and always being/feeling the ‘outcast’.

You’ve been shamed for being ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘too much’? You’ll likely have learned how to hide different parts of yourself at great personal cost.

It wasn’t safe to place your trust in others who didn’t have your best interests at heart? You may be well-practiced in relying solely on yourself, perhaps to some detriment.

You had to continually act as a caregiver, rescuer and protector, i.e. had to be the adult in the room – as a child? You may now enact that same pattern in adult relationships.

Example of an illuminated organizing principle: “I learned in my family to not expect any attention to my needs, that my needs were ugly and inconvenient - and now I make them as invisible as possible to avoid shame, disappointment and hurt. Because of that pattern, I am never getting needs met, and I harbour anger towards others because of it. I just bury my feelings even further and disappear into disconnection and a sense of impossibility.”

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You may very well be living out these lifelong templates and relational schemata without being aware of what the pattern is, where it comes from and how it has you in its grip.

Once you understand how some of your ways of being in relationship with others is constructed–the foundations of the relational self–you can much better understand from where many of your day-to-day and moment-to-moment emotional responses originate. When you understand that better, a personal shift may be felt through greater self-acceptance, self-empathy and compassion, less confusion, a reduction in shame and more willingness to take important emotional risks.

All of this, in turn, can be integrated into your relationships, creating more intimate connections, less entangled emotional dynamics, a separation between past and present, more clarity on how past patterns show up today. With this deepening self- and self-with-other knowledge, you may find yourself being able to expand in directions you hadn’t imagined possible. 

It takes time to begin to shift your organizing principles, but it all starts with talking about your historical experience in the world of others that you’ve developed in.