Something happened in one of my groups this week that reminded me of a psychological concept I learned years ago and hadn’t thought about in quite this way for a long time.
We were talking about the experience of going into situations where we know it might be difficult to stay connected to ourselves. Maybe we’re about to spend time with a family member who reliably activates old patterns in us, or enter a conversation in which we know we are likely to become defensive, angry, frightened, or desperate to be understood. We may have done a great deal of work beforehand. We may know exactly how we want to behave and what we do and don’t want to get pulled into. But knowing who we want to be in the abstract and remaining that person once we are actually inside the situation are two very different things.
Several people talked about how much it helped simply to know that the Family and Friends group was there every Tuesday. They knew they could come back the following week and talk about what had happened. They knew that other people understood what they were trying to do because those people were trying to do it too. In some cases, they found themselves recalling people or words from the group while they were actually in the middle of the difficult situation. The knowledge that they belonged to this community, and that they would return to it, seemed to make them feel stronger and less alone even though no one from the group was physically with them.
I found this enormously moving. It was also a wonderful example of something psychology has understood for a long time: we internalize our relationships.
In psychodynamic theory, there is a somewhat unfortunate term for this: the “internal object.” An object, in this context, is not a thing. It refers to another person as we experience them in relationship, and an internal object is the representation of that relationship that we gradually carry within ourselves. The idea comes out of object relations theory, which is concerned, among other things, with how our earliest relationships become part of our inner psychological world.
We can see this process in childhood fairly easily. A young child needs an actual parent or caregiver to soothe them when they are overwhelmed. Over time, through repeated experiences of being comforted, the child gradually develops some capacity to soothe themselves. The relationship that once existed entirely outside the child has, in a sense, been brought inside. Something similar can happen throughout our lives. When we are repeatedly met by someone who is steady when we are frightened, compassionate when we are ashamed, or able to see us clearly when we have lost perspective, eventually we may find that we can access some of that steadiness or compassion even when the person is not there.
This is one of the reasons relationships can be so profoundly healing. Sometimes another person can hold something for us before we are able to hold it for ourselves. A therapist may believe our perception before we have learned to trust it. A friend may remind us that we have choices at a moment when we feel trapped. A spiritual teacher may help us distinguish between fear and guidance. A recovery community may keep returning us to principles that disappear from view when we are activated. With enough repetition, what we have experienced in those relationships can begin to become part of our own internal landscape.
I think that is some of what I was hearing in the group this week. The group was no longer something that existed only on Tuesday nights. People were beginning to carry it into the rest of their lives.
That matters because, of course, we have already internalized a great deal before we ever consciously choose what we want to carry. We carry families, religions, cultures, schools, relationships, political systems, and all kinds of other experiences inside us. A critical parent can become an internal critic. A frightened family system can leave us constantly scanning for danger. A religious environment organized around punishment can make fear feel indistinguishable from conscience. An economic culture built around endless growth and consumption, with few guarantees of security or care, can teach us to measure our worth by how much we earn, own, produce, or achieve—and to experience ourselves as somehow deficient when we are not among those who have the most.A relationship in which love depended upon keeping someone else happy can leave us feeling guilty whenever we set a boundary.
Long after we have intellectually rejected those messages, they can continue speaking from inside us. This is part of what makes the work of recovering our own guidance so difficult. We are not beginning with a quiet interior in which our own deepest knowing is perfectly audible. Most of us are beginning with an interior populated by voices we have absorbed over a lifetime.
And because those voices are now inside us, they do not necessarily announce where they came from. We can mistake inherited fear for intuition, shame for conscience, conditioning for obligation, or another person’s needs for our own. We may believe we are listening to ourselves when we are actually listening to something that was installed in us years ago.
This is one reason I think healing communities matter so much. They do more than provide companionship. At their best, they give us a different relational experience to internalize. We spend time with people who are practicing another way of being: telling the truth without punishment, disagreeing without dehumanizing, setting boundaries without cruelty, allowing uncertainty without rushing to control it, and returning again and again to the question of what is actually ours to do.
Eventually, those relationships begin to accompany us.
We walk into the difficult conversation and remember, perhaps without consciously trying to remember, how it feels to be with people who do not require us to abandon ourselves. We become a little more able to tolerate someone else’s anger because we know there is another place where our experience will be understood. We become less desperate to force an outcome because we have practiced, with others, the possibility that we can survive uncertainty. We may even find ourselves responding to our own mistakes with some of the compassion that other people have consistently extended to us.
There is something deeply spiritual about this process for me as well. I believe sacred guidance is available to us, but I also believe that our ability to recognize it can become obscured by fear, trauma, conditioning, shame, and the many voices we have absorbed about who we are supposed to be. Sometimes we need relationships that help us clear enough of that noise to begin recognizing a different kind of guidance—one that does not coerce, threaten, flatter, or shame us, but calls us more deeply into truth, love, freedom, and responsibility.
At first, we may need another person or a community to help us find our way back there. We may need the meeting, the friend, the therapist, the teacher, the spiritual practice, or the recovery group. There is nothing lesser about that. Human beings are relational creatures. We become ourselves, in part, through one another.
But if those relationships are healthy, something gradually changes. We do not simply become better at reaching outward for reassurance. We develop a stronger place within ourselves from which to stand. What was once available only in the presence of others becomes increasingly available when we are alone.
That is what struck me so powerfully as I listened to people speak this week. They had gone into difficult situations by themselves, but in another sense, they had not gone by themselves at all. They carried with them the experience of being known, understood, supported, and accompanied by people engaged in the same work.
Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful things we can do for one another. We can become, for a time, part of the structure that helps another person remain connected to themselves. We can hold a steadier vision of them while they are learning to hold it on their own. And eventually, something of what we have given one another becomes part of what each of us carries into the world.
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Amen, sister. Thanks for being someone I carry with me. 🩷😊🙏🏼