70. The Past Can Be Met Differently – PBSP Series 1.2
What if you could give yourself something in the present that your childhood never gave you? There’s an old adage, it is never too late to have a happy childhood. Is that really true?
Let’s start with a fundamental truth. We can’t change what happened. That’s important to say at the beginning, because sometimes therapy gets talked about as though we can somehow go back and give ourselves the childhood we should have had. We can’t. The parents we had were the parents we had. The things that were said, or not said, cannot be unsaid.
But we can change what happens inside us when we encounter the past.
This is one of the things I find so intriguing about Pesso Boyden. PBSP doesn’t ask us to rewrite history. Instead, it asks a different question: What did you need then that you did not receive? And what would it be like to experience something of that now? And then to imagine life if you had had that experience, right at the moment you most needed it?
Imagine a child who grows up with a parent who is cold, critical or emotionally unavailable. The child may reach a very understandable conclusion: There is something wrong with me. I’m not lovable enough. I’m not important.
Fast forward forty years and that person may be perfectly capable of telling you that their parent’s behaviour was about the parent. They may understand it beautifully. They may even have forgiven them.
And yet somewhere inside, the old conclusion remains.
This is where the concept of the Ideal Figure becomes so important in PBSP.
An Ideal Figure isn’t a fantasy version of the real parent. We aren’t pretending that Mum secretly wanted to be loving or that Dad would have behaved differently if only he’d understood himself better. Instead, we ask: If you had been given what you needed, what would that have been?
Perhaps the person needed an Ideal Mother who was delighted by their existence, and whose face lit up when they came into the room. And an Ideal Father who was interested in them, who protected them. Someone who could set appropriate limits. Someone who could support them without making them responsible for the adult’s feelings.
The Ideal Figure(s) can then embody that missing experience.
And something rather extraordinary can happen when the experience is made physical and present. There is another person standing there. You hear their voice, and they are looking at you, they connect via eye contact. Not only that, but there is proximity. Sometimes there is touch, if that is what the person wants and it is appropriate. The client is not simply thinking about being wanted. They are experiencing something of what being wanted might have felt like.
I remember the first time I really understood the power of this, after years of being a therapist. I thought, Oh. This is different.
We aren’t arguing with the old experience. We aren’t telling the person to think more positively. We’re creating a new experience alongside it.
The old history remains true.
But it no longer has to be the whole truth about who you are.
And that leads us to another question. We have talked about what was missing, but how do we know what the person actually needed?
That’s where PBSP’s five developmental needs become incredibly useful.
In the next talk, we’ll explore Place, Protection, Nurture, Support and Limits, and why our adult behaviour can sometimes be an ingenious attempt to get something we didn’t receive early enough.
BESSEL VAN DER KOLK RECOMMENDS PESSO BOYDEN
Click here to see a 3 minute video of Bessel van der Kolk saying the work of Al Pesso is the “only thing that really works” https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/1-Bvk-Best-One-reduced-size-not-tc.mp4
TRAINING AS A PESSO BODY THERAPIST
For therapists – our next training starts in June 2027. It is 6 months for Foundation Skills, or 2 years for the Complete Training
https://pessoboydentraininguk.com/pesso-boyden-training-course/
JOIN A PESSO BOYDEN EXPERIENTIAL WORKSHOP
If you are a member of the public who would like to experience a Pesso Boyden session, look here https://pessoboydenuk.org/workshops/
Juliet Grayson
September 2026
BESSEL VAN DER KOLK RECOMMENDS PESSO BOYDEN
Click here to see a 3 minute video of Bessel van der Kolk saying the work of Al Pesso is the “only thing that really works” https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/1-Bvk-Best-One-reduced-size-not-tc.mp4
TRAINING AS A PESSO BODY THERAPIST
For therapists – our next training starts in June 2027. It is 6 months for Foundation Skills, or 2 years for the Complete Training
https://pessoboydentraininguk.com/pesso-boyden-training-course/
JOIN A PESSO BOYDEN EXPERIENTIAL WORKSHOP
If you are a member of the public who would like to experience a Pesso Boyden session, look here https://pessoboydenuk.org/workshops/
Click here to give feedback, which Juliet loves to receive: https://bit.ly/julietmuses
See the list of Pesso Events that Juliet is leading: https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/pesso-events/
If you are a therapist, counsellor or health worker, and interested in thinking more about conflict, and you are a therapist, you might want to attend the Couples in Conflict module of the Certificate in Working with Couples.
www.therapyandcounselling.co.uk
If you’re a therapist and watching this you might be interested in my six modular workshops on how to work with couples. Go to www.therapyandcounselling.co.uk and look either at the calendar or look at the course for therapists: Certificate in Working with Couples.
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You’ll find more Juliet’s Musings on https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/juliets-thoughts-for-the-day/.