Solano Psychotherapy Associates

Psychological problems, such as depression, anxiety, relationship difficulties, or shyness, are not signs of weaknesses.  Even though genetic factors may be somewhat involved in the development of many psychological difficulties, the primary source of these problems evolve from personal experience,  especially early in life.  There has been voluminous research which demonstrates that people’s personalities are shaped by mental maps they develop during early life.  These internal maps, also called attachment patterns, are formed as infants learn who they are in interaction with the world and who the world is in interaction with them.   They can be modified with new experiences in interaction with the world, however, they can be very persistent.  When an infant encounters, on a relative consistent basis, caregivers (including older siblings), who are frightening, depriving, overly reactive, under-reactive, needy, or inconsistent, that infant will develop an adaptive internal map.  This map, over time, may not work as well in interactions with people who are different from those to whom the infant had originally adapted.   As a result, symptoms such as those listed above may result.  Let’s take an oversimplified example:   Suppose an infant has a primary caregiver who is oblivious to most of her feelings, under responding to her joy, her fear, her anger, and her shame (feeling emotionally hurt).   This infant will adapt by avoiding her own internal feelings and going on as if she isn’t feeling them (although, as research also shows, her heart rate will go up higher than another infant whois visibly demonstrating distress in a similar situation).  This pattern often carries into adulthood, resulting in such symptoms as fear of intimacy, justification and rationalization of feelings, difficulty expressing or asserting one’s feelings, and emotional isolation.  

 Everyone has problematic feelings and some relationship difficulties.   The psychological problems that come into treatment are the result of a confluence of congenital and experiential factors. That is, your physical make-up at birth in interaction with your experiences (the earlier or the more acute, the more influential) combine to shape who you are as a person. Hence, I believe that it is not accurate or helpful to consider any psychological difficulty to be a personal weakness, even if the sufferer of this difficulty feels weak.