The Emotional Blueprint

Long before we're able to understand our family, our relationships or ourselves, we're already learning about the emotional world around us. We notice what happens when we're frightened, angry or upset. We learn whether somebody responds when we need them, how disagreement is handled and whether certain feelings seem more acceptable than others. None of this requires anyone to sit us down and explain the rules. Much of it is simply absorbed through experience.

I use the term Emotional Blueprint at Wolf Path to describe the assumptions, expectations and ways of protecting ourselves that can begin developing through those early experiences. I don't mean that childhood writes an unchangeable script that determines the rest of our lives. It is more that we learn certain ways of relating to ourselves and other people, often before we're old enough to realise that we're learning anything at all.

Some of those lessons may stay with us for a very long time.

Learning how to belong

Children adapt to the emotional environments they grow up in, and those adaptations can take many forms. One boy might discover that being useful earns approval, while another learns that keeping quiet is the easiest way to avoid conflict. Humour can become a reliable way of diffusing tension. Achievement might receive considerably more attention than vulnerability. A child might become particularly good at noticing everybody else's mood because knowing what emotional atmosphere he is walking into feels important.

None of this necessarily means that something terrible happened. Families are complicated, parents are human, children differ enormously in temperament, and two siblings can grow up in the same house while experiencing it very differently.

For me, the useful question isn't about finding somebody to blame. I'm more interested in what a person may have learnt about himself, other people and relationships while he was growing up, and whether some of those early assumptions are still influencing the way he lives now.

There are established psychological ideas that occupy similar territory. Attachment theory, for example, uses the concept of internal working models to describe expectations about ourselves, other people and relationships that are associated with early relational experience. The Emotional Blueprint is my way of bringing some of this wider psychological territory into language that I find useful within Wolf Path.

When old rules follow us into adult life

An emotional rule can remain influential long after the situation in which it developed has disappeared.

A man can be independent, capable and successful while still finding certain experiences surprisingly difficult. He may want closeness but find himself withdrawing when somebody gets too near. He might take responsibility for everybody else's feelings while becoming uncomfortable whenever his own needs enter the conversation. Conflict can feel threatening even when the person in front of him poses no threat. He may repeatedly become the fixer in relationships, or spend enormous amounts of energy making sure nobody sees him struggling.

Any one of these things can have many explanations, and I wouldn't automatically trace them back to childhood. What becomes interesting is when we begin noticing something familiar appearing across different parts of life. The people and circumstances change, yet a particular reaction or difficulty keeps finding its way back into the picture. At that point, something previously dismissed as“that's just the way I am” may deserve a little more curiosity.

When the rule once made sense

This is an important part of how I think about the Emotional Blueprint. I don't begin by treating these patterns as defects that need to be corrected.

If you learnt to keep your feelings to yourself, there may once have been a perfectly understandable reason for doing so. If relying on yourself feels considerably safer than depending on somebody else, that too may have a history. Someone who constantly monitors the mood of the people around him may have discovered early in life that paying attention to the emotional atmosphere was useful.

We develop ways of managing ourselves and our relationships for reasons, even when those reasons are no longer obvious to us. A way of coping can also be genuinely useful for many years. The difficulty comes when something that once protected or helped us begins creating problems in a life that now looks very different.

That gives us a more interesting question than simply asking how to get rid of the pattern. We can begin wondering why it developed, what it has done for us and whether it still deserves the influence it has today.

Why midlife can bring this into view

By midlife, we've accumulated decades of experience. That gives us enough history to begin recognising repetition in a way that may have been much harder when we were younger. A relationship can be entirely different from the one before it and still produce a strangely familiar tension. We can change jobs and eventually encounter frustrations that resemble those we thought we'd left behind. People and circumstances move on, yet some reactions seem remarkably persistent.

This doesn't mean everything can be traced neatly back to childhood. Human development is far too complicated for that, and memory is not a perfect recording of what happened to us.

Nor do I think therapy needs to become an investigation into childhood simply because childhood exists.

We look backwards when looking backwards helps us understand the present. The question is whether recognising where some of our emotional expectations may have developed tells us anything useful about the man living with them today.

Understanding isn't the same as excusing

Understanding why we behave in a particular way doesn't remove responsibility for what we do.

In some respects, it makes responsibility more possible.

If I don't recognise a recurring pattern as mine, each new occurrence can appear to have been caused entirely by the particular situation or the other person involved. Once I begin seeing that I've arrived somewhere remarkably similar before, I have something else to consider. The situation may still matter enormously, but so might the way I respond to it.

That's why I place such importance on understanding before rushing towards change. Insight doesn't magically resolve a pattern, but it can help us recognise what we're actually dealing with. From there, choice becomes a little more possible.

Exploring your Emotional Blueprint

Working with the Emotional Blueprint doesn't involve searching for a single childhood event that supposedly explains the person you became.

We're more likely to become curious about the emotional environment you grew up in and the things you learnt within it. We might think about how anger was handled, whether people spoke openly about feelings, what happened when somebody needed help, how affection was expressed, what was expected of you, or the role you tended to occupy within the family.

Then we bring our attention back to the present.

We look at the relationships you have now, the way you handle conflict, what happens when you need somebody, how readily you express anger or vulnerability, and the situations that seem to provoke reactions you don't entirely understand. Sometimes the connection with earlier experience may seem fairly clear. At other times there may be no useful connection at all, and there is little value in trying to manufacture one.

The Emotional Blueprint isn't intended to reduce the man you are today to the boy you once were. It's a way of remaining open to the possibility that some of the rules you live by are older than you realise, and that you may never have consciously chosen them in the first place.

Once an old rule becomes visible, we can begin considering whether it still has a useful place in your life.

Understanding where it came from doesn't mean you have to keep living by it.