A quick note: Parents who frequently have to relocate often ask me how moving a lot affects kids. Because I’ve worked with so many children and adults whose childhood families have had to frequently relocate, I wanted to depict the effects of these moves on a young adult, and in particular, to show how these effects get played out in the therapy between us. Based on working with these clients, I created Rhiannon, a compilation of these clients and a little of my own imagination.
Rhiannon
When I first started working with Rhiannon, she was seventeen and was proud of having moved a lot as a kid. As if she were bragging, she told me that by the time she was twelve, she’d moved seven times and had lived in three foreign countries. She said moving had made her stronger.
Now, she’d just moved a month ago. She’d been staying in touch with her old friends through social media, but after having a fight with one of them—which prompted her to throw her phone from the window while driving—she thought maybe it was time to see a therapist.
“I’m done with social media,” she told me that first meeting. “I’m also done trying to make friends. Or keeping them.”
This would be the most revealing, personal thing she’d tell me that first month.
She’d done therapy before, and I suspected she knew what was entailed, but for that first month, she mostly talked about building drones in such excruciating detail that I felt like a lost student in an advanced mechanics class.
Oddly, she seemed eager to meet with me. She’d arrive early and talk in an upbeat way, often smiling even when describing her frustrations with soldering wires and something having to do with microcontrollers.
After a month of this, I asked her why she was coming to therapy. She didn’t seem to want to talk about anything very personal, I said.
She got quiet. For a minute, she stared out the window, then turned to regard me as if trying to decide something.
“I guess I don’t know you,” she said.
“Yes, exactly,” I nodded, agreeing with her. “I think that’s it.”
I reflected on how her family had just moved again, that she’d lost a bunch of friends, and now here I was, another new person in her life. I told her, “It makes sense that you’re being careful about letting us get to know each other because maybe this relationship will end like all the others.”
She chewed on her upper lip, her eyes squinted just a little. It felt like the first time she was actually really looking at me.
After that, our sessions began to change. Rhiannon started to open up, and a few months later, she confided that the repeated moves had caused her not to trust others.
“And in telling me this, you’re trusting me a little,” I said.
After a moment, she nodded.
Frequent moves and trust
I’m writing about Rhiannon because her experiences capture how trust is so crucial for kids. Not just with relationships, but in a more general way, too.
We often think of trust as being an idea, but for kids, I think it starts as a gut-deep feeling of security that what they perceive to be true actually is true. It’s this sense that they can rely on something as being understood, predictable, and known. It’s reality testing at its most basic form.
For Rhiannon, her frequent moves meant having to learn a new world—and sometimes a new language—and a new way of doing things. But before she could settle into this new world, she’d get uprooted and moved again.
With their limited knowledge, little kids often misperceive why things happen, and they struggle to predict what will happen. They are simply too small and too naïve, and they know it. Just like they know that grownups hold the key to all of this. Being small means feeling helpless much of the time, and naturally, kids look to caregivers and other helpers. This is where trust begins.
For Rhiannon, her caregivers were the source of her world’s turmoil. Because she couldn’t predict what would happen next—and because she so frequently experienced losing people—she couldn’t feel safe forming relationships. To do so was too painful and filled her with a fear of loss.
The dangers of getting close
One day, six months into therapy, Rhiannon told me about how her dad would disappear for weeks at a time for work, and how her mom withdrew into herself frequently, disappearing in her own way. It felt like a breakthrough session, Rhiannon trusting me with something really painful.
The next week at the start of our session, my waiting room was empty, and Rhiannon never showed up. The following week she was fifteen minutes late, and spent the session describing how she hated rubberneckers who slowed down at car crashes to see all the gore.
The next week, she cancelled last minute. It all made sense: she had let me get too close when she told me about her parents, and now she was making sure she kept some distance.
Surviving ruptures
There’s been a lot of research about how kids form a trusting attachment to caregivers. There are two sides to the trust issue, and both need to exist: building trust and the inevitable—and hopefully infrequent—breaking of it.
Yes, it’s crucial that we show up for our kids, but there’s always going to be moments of rupture. As parents, we lose our cool and we yell. Or we discipline in a way that’s not fair or doesn’t make sense. Or, in a moment of adventurousness and expansive thinking, we buy a new type of BBQ sauce.
These ruptures happen and challenge our kid’s faith in us. But the ruptures are also important, not only because they are part of life and inevitable, but because when we repair a rupture, the act of repairing further develops trust. It’s like a broken bone which is said to heal up stronger at the break site than the original bone itself.
What then does a repair look like? It’s not simply an apology of our wrongdoing but something more. It’s an acknowledgment of how the child was made to feel. It’s a reconnection, and the path to repair is done through the emotions.
When we let our child know that we understand her feelings, this is a reconnecting at the deepest level. It’s a healing up that strengthens the relationship. It also builds a child’s basic trust that their relationships can weather some blows and come out even stronger. (For more, check out the post, “Ruptures and Repair: the 4 Steps You Need to Know.”)
Repairing with Rhiannon
Rhiannon did return the following week, a little sheepish for her absence, and wary that I’d be mad at her. Instead, I told her what I imagined might be going on inside her.
“You told me some real stuff about your parents,” I started. “And then you told me how much you hated rubberneckers. It’s almost like I was a rubbernecker who takes morbid pleasure in seeing someone else’s pain.”
She shrugged, then smiled, and said, “Yeah, a little like that.”
There was a rupture between us, but it was one that Rhiannon had created, and I suspected it was her way of testing me to see if I would use this rupture to end our relationship.
I repeated something I’d said at our first session after learning about her history of repeated moves as a child.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m not retiring for a long while and I’m not moving. I’m staying right here.” Then I added, “And I’m not going to kick you out because you get scared after sharing some intense feelings.”
Her face crumpled a little, and she worked at not crying. Then she shook her head, and her eyes watered up. We were on our way.
Related Posts
How Feeling Small Surprisingly Affects a Child’s Behavior
Young children feel very small, and this feeling radically affects everything they do. Understanding exactly how kids feel small can help parents deal with tough behaviors.
How to Find a Therapist and Get the Most From Therapy
An insider’s guide to finding, evaluating, and working with a therapist.
Ruptures and Repair: the 4 Steps You Need to Know
All parents make mistakes, and repairing things afterwards with our kid is not just incredibly important, it can feel incredibly good, too. Here’s how…
