When negative, traumatic, or bad things happen, have you ever wondered why you blame yourself or are the one who takes responsibility for the thing that happened? If you have a disagreement or conflict with someone, are you quick to think it’s your fault? If so, have you wondered why this is the case? This kind of negative self-attribution can leave you feeling weighed down, discouraged, hopeless, and depressed. If this is your experience, the way out is to connect to yourself. Connecting to your needs, feelings, thoughts, and other aspects of yourself is the way to overcome and chase away deep-seated negativity and badness. Just as the more parts of you that have been neglected and mis attuned to leads to feelings of badness, the more parts that are seen, validated, and received leads to feelings of lightness, energy, and hope. You likely internalized this sense of responsibility and badness through many experiences where someone in your life was unable to receive and respond to you in ways you were intended to be. Growing up provided you with countless times when you needed to be understood, validated, empathized with, guided, comforted, confronted, helped, encouraged, and cautioned. We all need these relational experiences to grow and develop. Taking on feelings of badness occurs when our need for these things is frustrated or met with something other than what they were intended to receive.

You know the feeling of ordering pickup or going through the drive through thinking you ordered one thing and getting home to find they forgot an item? You intended and planned to get one thing and discover something was left out. That is how it is for our nervous systems when we go to someone with a part of us hoping to get one relational response and get something else. It jolts us. The degree of receiving something other what our psyches needed is the degree to which we take on badness. More mis-attunement, more badness. More spot on and good enough responses, the more goodness and feeling protected relationally.

Therapy and other safe relationships offer a place where parts that have become bad have a second chance to become good. New relational experiences go a long way towards increasing positivity, energy, and hope about ourselves, others, and life.