The most effective container

In my view and experience having a relational home offers the most effective container for any dysregulation. As Bonnie Badenoch put it, we draw on our inner community in order to self regulate (soothe ourself). On the outside, it looks like we’re self regulating, but we are in fact always co-regulating, whether another person is there with us physically or not. If we’ve been relatively securely attached to our care givers and others, this gives us a fantastic solid start in life which we later draw on again and again and again. The ACE study, among many others, demonstrates the price we pay when we haven’t had this solid beginning.

So, the hard science is in, we are relational creatures who are interdependent, therefore we need each other, going it alone all the time is not good for us, but it’s like many of us haven’t got the memo. People are continually shamed for not changing, not ‘growing up’, or ‘moving on’. But without the safety and warmth that a relational home can provide, we’ll stay in whatever protective defenses we’ve developed because it just won’t be safe enough to allow ourselves to be vulnerable and make any changes that we need to make.

Being able to contain our emotions, and grow a bigger container, so we increase our window of tolerance is crucial. We’re not going to release anger for ever more, because like all emotions, we need anger in certain circumstances, but we can release the anger that has become stuck when we are triggered about certain experiences we’ve had. Wishing that we didn’t have certain emotions is futile, learning how to live with them and use them for our benefit is absolutely essential for our mental and physical health.

As practitioners we can practise all the interventions and exercises we want, but if we don’t provide a relational home to ‘hold’ any dysregulation, either in ourselves or the client, they’re next to useless. At worst we’ll project and blame the client, calling them resistant and all sorts of things, instead of taking a good hard long look at what we need to change.