Healing for the Rose: Believing You’re Worth the Calm

Casey described it as waiting for the punishment.

Not the ordinary kind, not the explicit kind, not anything that came from outside. The punishment she was waiting for was internal, and it arrived reliably enough that she had stopped being surprised by it and started being surprised when it was late. Things would go well for a sustained period, good weeks and warmth and the sense that the relationship was solid, and she would feel, during these periods, a kind of pleasant unease. A gathering tension. The specific anxiety of someone who knows from long experience that good things do not hold, and who is waiting, without knowing quite what they are waiting for, for the thing that will end the good thing.

Sometimes she waited and the punishment did not come from outside. So she produced it herself. Created conflict where there was none. Found the flaw that made the relationship untenable. Left before anything could make her go. And then spent the next weeks grieving what she had just destroyed.

She knew this was happening. She had known it for years. What she had not yet been able to do was feel, in her body and not only in her mind, that she might be worth the calm. That the calm might be safe. That the punishment was not coming, and that its absence was not a trick.

What healing requires from the Rose

The core task in healing the Rose pattern is not learning to stay in good relationships, though that is the desired outcome. The core task is learning to tolerate stability without treating it as a threat.

This sounds simple. It is one of the hardest things I have seen people do. The Rose’s nervous system was trained in conditions where warmth preceded harm, where the quiet before the storm was as dangerous as the storm, where the people who were supposed to love them were also, sometimes, the people who hurt them. That training is not undone by knowing that the current relationship is different. It is undone, if it is undone at all, by experiencing the difference enough times, at the body level, that the body’s predictions begin to change.

This is slow work. It does not happen in insight, though insight is part of it. It happens in moments of staying, of noticing the impulse to push and choosing something different, of allowing the good thing to continue one more day and discovering that the punishment still did not arrive. Each of those moments is a small piece of new evidence going into a nervous system that has been running a different prediction for decades. The prediction does not update immediately. It updates incrementally, in the way that all deeply embedded patterns update: through repetition, through evidence, through the gradual accumulation of experience that does not match what the system expected.

The work of naming it before acting on it

One of the most practically useful skills the Rose can develop is the ability to name the impulse before it becomes behavior. This does not require stopping the impulse. It requires developing enough observational distance from it to recognize it as an impulse rather than as accurate information.

The impulse might sound like this, in words, if the Rose could hear it: I want to leave right now. I want to start a fight. I want to find the thing that is wrong here, because I can feel something wrong and I need to know what it is. Things have been too good and I do not trust that.

When the Rose can hear this, can name it as the alarm rather than as reality, something becomes possible that was not possible before: bringing it into the relationship as information rather than enacting it as behavior. The specific and significant difference between I want to push away right now and I’m starting a push period that could end us is that the first is shareable and the second is enacted before the sharing can happen. The first allows the partner to be a participant in the moment. The second puts the partner in the position of receiving consequences without understanding the cause.

Learning to say I want to push right now and I’m not going to is not comfortable, even when the relationship is safe enough to hold it. It requires tolerating the alarm without discharging it through behavior, which is exactly the thing the alarm was designed to prevent. But it is the single most powerful move available to the Rose who is ready to begin doing this differently.

Grieving what was supposed to be there

There is a specific grief that is part of the Rose’s healing, and it deserves to be named because it tends to arrive and be confused with depression or with the processing of specific past events rather than understood as what it actually is.

The Rose grieves the safety that was supposed to be there and wasn’t. The childhood in which the people who were supposed to be safe were also, sometimes, not safe, which produced the impossible bind that the disorganized attachment pattern is built around. The love that was real and frightening at the same time. The specific loss of the thing that should have been the ground, the reliable base, the certain safety of being in the arms of the people who were supposed to love you, and was instead something more complicated and more painful than that.

That grief is not the same as blaming the parents, though it can arrive alongside anger and sometimes in a form that is hard to distinguish from anger. It is the genuine acknowledgment of a loss that was real, that was not the Rose’s fault, and that has been shaping their life ever since without necessarily being named as loss. Naming it as loss, grieving it as loss, allowing it to be what it is rather than what the Rose has often been told it is, which is damage, which is defect, which is just the way they are, is part of what makes the healing possible.

The specific lie to unlearn

Casey had been told, by her father and later by a husband who had learned something similar somewhere in his own history, that she was broken. Not in those words, or not always in those words, but in the cumulative message of years of contact with people who met her need with contempt or unpredictability, who loved her in ways that cost her something, who made her feel that her particular self was too much, or not enough, or simply not quite the thing that love was for.

She had believed this for so long that she had stopped recognizing it as a belief. It felt like a fact. Like accurate self-knowledge. Like the thing you arrive at when you look at the evidence honestly and without sentiment.

The specific lie to unlearn is not you are lovable, stated as a reassurance, because reassurance does not reach the place the belief lives. The specific lie to unlearn is the interpretation of the evidence. The evidence was real: the people who were supposed to love her did not always do so safely. The interpretation that evidence supported, in the child’s mind and in the adult Casey’s continued application of it, was that something was wrong with her. The reinterpretation that healing makes possible is not that the evidence was false. It is that the evidence says something about the people who loved her badly, not about whether she deserves to be loved well.

That reinterpretation does not arrive all at once. It does not arrive as a single moment of clarity. It arrives in pieces, over time, in the therapy room and in the relationships that are safe enough to provide different evidence, and in the gradually accumulating experience of being someone who stayed, who did not push, who allowed the good thing to continue one more day and did not get punished for it.

Casey said, near the end of our time together, something I have thought about since. She said: I think for most of my life I believed I was only lovable in crisis. That the version of me people would stay for was the version that was bleeding. She paused. I’m trying to find out if there is a version people stay for that doesn’t require that. I told her there was. I told her the evidence was starting to come in. She said she knew. She said she was starting to believe it. Slowly. Imperfectly. More than she had before. That, in the Rose’s healing as in most things about this work, is enough.

Daniel

Daniel Wethington is a Licensed Professional Counselor and the founder of Arise Counseling Services in York, Pennsylvania, where he specializes in attachment trauma, anxiety, and gaming and technology addiction. He is the author of four books, including Shaped in Silence and Breaking Free, which explore how early attachment experiences shape adult relationships and compulsive behaviors, which you can find here. Dan works with individuals and couples across Pennsylvania, both in person and through telehealth. If something in this article resonated with you, you can schedule an appointment or learn more at http://arise-pa.com.