Tend to the soil; don't blame the plant.

Family Dynamics & Boundaries • April 28, 2019

Attachment patterns are the characteristic ways you learned to relate to others based on how safe or unsafe your early relationships with caregivers felt. They are not fixed labels of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ attachment, nor are they flaws—they are survival strategies your nervous system developed to keep you connected or protected as a child. For you, as a driven, ambitious woman carrying relational wounds, these patterns often show up as difficulty trusting, struggling to ask for support, or pushing yourself too hard to earn love and safety. Naming these patterns matters because it frees you from blaming yourself and opens the path to healing how you connect with others and, most importantly, with yourself.

• You might be feeling overwhelmed, restless, or emotionally numb because your nervous system is stuck in a state of dysregulation, shaped by early experiences that felt unsafe or unpredictable—not because you’re weak or overreacting.
• Your attachment patterns—how you learned to connect with others—are adaptive survival strategies formed in childhood, showing up now as difficulty trusting, asking for support, or pushing yourself relentlessly to earn love.
• Healing begins when you stop blaming yourself and instead tend to the soil—the early conditions of your nervous system and relational environment—by cultivating safety, patience, and tender care within yourself and your relationships.

“A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.”
– Liberty Hyde Bailey

SUMMARY

One of the most transformative reframes in healing work is this: before blaming yourself for your struggles, look at the soil you were planted in. Your nervous system, attachment patterns, and emotional responses are not character flaws — they are the logical result of the environment you grew up in. Tending to the soil means addressing the conditions that shaped you, not just the symptoms they produced.

Nervous System Dysregulation

Nervous system dysregulation refers to a chronic state in which the autonomic nervous system struggles to return to a calm, settled baseline after stress. Often rooted in early childhood relational trauma or an environment of chronic unpredictability, it manifests as anxiety, emotional reactivity, hypervigilance, or emotional numbness — and is the soil in which many psychological symptoms grow.

Related reading: What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?, Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections, Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

My husband is a patient gardener.

He has a habit of saving, tending to, and bringing back to life little scraps of plants and struggling flora in and around our home in a way that I just can’t be bothered to.

The wax-enclosed Trader Joe’s amaryllis bulb someone gifted us around Christmas? He’ll take the wax off, water the bulb, and place it in its own pot in our garden until next season (whereas I would have composted it once the blossoms were gone).

The failing kale plants in the raised bed? He’ll go to the store and buy bat guano and who knows what else to make a concoction to nourish the soil to make the kale more hearty. (Whereas I would just consider it a loss and add a few bunches to the grocery list that week.)

The random houseguest gift orchid that lost all its blossoms sitting in our too sunny living room? He’ll move it to the bathroom, take it out of its pot. And water and drain it in our sink until it’s healthy again (whereas I… well, you get the picture). For more on this topic, see the American Psychological Association.

1. I admire this quality of my husband.
2. How does a dysfunctional family system affect your childhood?
3. In such environments, what do you think happens to the child?
4. But sometimes, the family may point a finger at the child and shame and blame them for how they have developed, coped, and adapted.
5. So what’s the outcome?
6. Transplanting oneself to a healthier, better soil environment can look many, many different ways.
7. Hopefully, we will all encounter patient, tender gardeners along our path who will help us heal, grow and thrive.
8. Wrapping up.

What does it mean to tend the soil instead of blaming the plant in your own life?

Even though and maybe especially because I don’t possess it myself (let’s face it: my thumb is brown, not green).

This is a habit of his – taking care of the environment of struggling plants so that they thrive again. And, with most things I observe, it makes me think about parallels with therapy and with psychological development principles. Particularly how antithetical this way of patient tending can be in dysfunctional family systems when one member is struggling.

I work with clients who come from dysfunctional families and complex relational trauma backgrounds. They – the proverbial plant in the garden – are often viewed as the problem of the family system versus a natural product of the context of the family system.

Families usually give them the message over and over that they’re not okay. And it’s not often (or ever) considered that the proverbial soil itself might be the problem.

And, more often than not, both the struggling plant and the soil it’s rooted in receive little to no patient tending to help bring it back to life as it were.

To learn more about this parallel and how it may apply to you if you came from a dysfunctional family and a complex relational trauma background, keep reading.

How does growing up in a dysfunctional family system shape who you become?

All children need certain elements to grow and thrive physically and psychologically.

This includes (but isn’t limited to):

• a sense of safety and stability in their external environment (especially with their caregivers)
• adequate food, clothing, and medical care
• a deep regard and appreciation for their personhood
• and, more abstractly, love, time, attention, and consistent care from their guardians.

In such an environment, the conditions are in place to help a child grow and develop and to venture out into the world and face the challenges and complexities that childhood, adolescence, and life inherently holds.

To use the gardening metaphor, in this kind of environment, the soil is rich and healthy for whatever plants may take root in it.

But in dysfunctional, chaotic, neglectful, or abusive family systems, these conditions may be partially or sorely lacking.

Instead of safety, there may be financial insecurity, sexual abuse, addiction, mood or personality disorders.

Instead of a deep regard for the personhood of the child, there may be gaslighting, derision, shaming, projection, and molding of the child into what the parent wishes them to be instead of who the child authentically is.

Or instead of love, there may be control masked as love.

Instead of time and attention, there may be none or it may be outsourced (to the TV, to the nanny, etc).

And instead of consistency, there may be erraticness. A sense of Jekyll and Hyde in their parents’ moods or personalities. A constant feeling of walking on eggshells.

What happens to a child who grows in unhealthy family soil?

If a garden bed was laced with acid, shielded from the sun, and denied water, would the plant in it grow and thrive and blossom as well as it might optimally?

No. Of course not.

But still, it might survive.

A child, much like a tender little budding plant even in such an inadequate garden bed, will likely find a way to persist.

In that way, children, to my mind, are the ultimate survivalists and greatest adaptors.

Children will do whatever it takes to survive the powerless chapter of childhood.

Sometimes this may mean contorting themselves in ways that are pleasing to their parents.

Sometimes this may mean cutting off and splitting away certain parts of themselves that are “displeasing” to their caretakers.

Or sometimes this may mean seeking comfort and care from whatever sources or substances they can.

And sometimes this may mean wearing personality masks, adapting behaviors, and moving themselves into and out of environments to try to manage their feelings and comfort themselves somehow.

The child adapts to the environment he or she is in and grows in response to variables he or she is exposed to.

Like a bent, warped branch that does not grow straight and strong but instead arches severely to the side, turning its leaves toward the one patch of sunlight in the untended garden, so too will a child not necessarily grow as “straight and strong” as they might have if the conditions had been more optimal.

What happens when the family blames the child for the very adaptations they caused?

“You’re getting too overweight. You need to exercise daily like your mom and I do.”

“You’re too angry! Why can’t you be nice like your sister?”

“Why don’t you spend time with friends instead of alone in your room with books?”

“Oh, why are you so sensitive? It was just a joke!”

Perhaps the child was overweight because they were trying to hide and protect themselves from a painful home life. Showing themselves “love” with food because “nourishment” lacked in their house.

Perhaps the child was angry because they grew up with an alcoholic, narcissistic father. And their “bad mood” was an appropriate response to knowing their needs as a child were not being met.

Perhaps the child spent time with books and disappeared into stories because real life relationships felt too painful. Too confusing, too overwhelming. And unsafe based on what they had been shown and modeled at home or at school.

Perhaps the child was a highly sensitive, empathic and deep little soul. Who, even at a very young age, knew that “jokes” that made fun of or bullied others weren’t kind and appropriate. The child’s sensitivity was a gift but in their family it also may have been a liability.

This child, this adolescent, coping with their environment as best they can, often becomes the identified patient, the scapegoat, the black sheep of the family when blamed and shamed in this way by others in the family.

They’re seen as the problem but in reality they are only a product of the system.

The “soil” has yielded this particular proverbial plants growth of lackthereof.

It’s not the plant’s fault. It’s a product of the environment. It is a result of the soil.

So how do we tend to the soil?

In an ideal world, hopefully the family system – the soil – goes to family counseling or undertakes a journey to address the elements that may be dysfunctional, chaotic, or unhealthy among them.

But, sadly, I don’t think this happens nearly as often as it should.

What is the long-term outcome of growing up in soil that blamed you for not thriving?

Well, again, children become adolescents, coping with their reality as best they can.

And someday, adolescents become young adults who will hopefully have more agency, power, and resources to leave, alter, address or heal from the environment they grew up in.

Their task as adults – should they have grown up in less than ideal soil environments – becomes seeking out and transplanting themselves to better proverbial soil environments.

This can look like a literal leaving of home. Not only of their parent’s house but the town or city they grew up in.

This can also look like a leaving of the church or religious system they were raised in.

This can look like seeking out and cultivating healthier, more functional relationships.

Or this can look like learning about boundaries and asserting them appropriately.

This can look like creating the external safety and stability their childhood lacked.

This can look like treating themselves with deep regard. And only allowing others into their life who do the same.

This can look like going to therapy.

This can look like working on their foundational self-care, grieving the losses and pain of their childhood, and becoming their own good-enough inner parent.

What does it look like to transplant yourself into healthier emotional soil as an adult?

And hopefully, no one does this alone.

Hopefully, each of us who were raised in unhealthy, dysfunctional or chaotic environments will encounter real-life or pen and paper mentors and guides who can help us better grow.

Hopefully, we will all encounter patient, tender gardeners along our path who will help us heal, grow and thrive.

And hopefully, along the way, we learn how to be our own patient gardeners to ourselves, tending to ourselves with curiosity and deep regard when we are struggling or in need.

And, in turn, doing this for others in our life when and if they need it, too. Our partners, our children, our best friends…

Before you close this tab.

When we do this, when we learn to be our own patient gardeners and surround ourselves with people who can likewise embody this archetype and treat us lovingly and helpfully, we help undo the pain of our complex trauma past and move forward in creating a more whole, enlivened life for ourselves.

So tell me in the comments below:

What’s one or more ways you could embody the patient gardener archetype for yourself? Who are the patient gardeners in your own life who have shown up for you and helped tend to you when you were/are struggling? What might you need in terms of a healthier “soil” environment for yourself now?”

Leave me a message in the comments below. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Both/And: Love and Harm Can Come From the Same People

One of the hardest things about healing from a difficult childhood is the pressure — internal and external — to pick a side. Either your parents did their best or they failed you. Either your childhood was “that bad” or you’re being dramatic. In my practice, the women who make the most progress are the ones who stop trying to resolve this tension and learn to hold it instead.

Camille is a startup CEO who grew up in a home that looked enviable from the outside — good schools, family vacations, a mother who volunteered at every event. It took Camille years to name what was missing: emotional attunement. Her achievements were celebrated; her feelings were dismissed. “You have nothing to be upset about” was the family refrain. By the time she reached my office, she’d internalized that message so deeply that she felt guilty for being in therapy at all.

Both/And means Camille can love her parents and still be honest about the ways their limitations shaped her. She can acknowledge that they did their best with what they had and simultaneously acknowledge that their best wasn’t enough in some critical ways. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the full truth of most family stories, and particularly the stories of driven women who learned early that performance was the price of belonging.

The Systemic Lens: How Culture Teaches Children to Earn Love

The message that love must be earned — through performance, compliance, achievement, or self-erasure — doesn’t originate in individual families. It’s transmitted through culture at every level. Schools reward compliance. Workplaces reward output. Social media rewards the curated life. By the time a driven woman arrives in therapy, she’s been marinating in conditional acceptance for decades, and her family of origin was simply the first classroom.

This matters because without the systemic lens, childhood healing can become another form of self-blame. If the problem is just “my family,” then the solution is just “my therapy” — and the structural forces that perpetuated the pattern remain invisible and intact. When a driven woman understands that her parents were themselves products of systems that didn’t teach emotional intelligence, didn’t provide mental health support, and actively punished vulnerability, she can begin to locate the injury more accurately.

In my work with clients, I’ve found that the systemic lens doesn’t diminish personal responsibility — it contextualizes it. Your parents are accountable for their behavior. And your parents were also shaped by forces larger than themselves. Both things are true. Understanding the systemic layer doesn’t excuse harm. It helps you stop carrying the shame of harm you didn’t cause.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer