72. Taking Your Life Back – PBSP Series 1.4

What if the thing you call your personality is partly a collection of survival strategies you learnt as a child?

Perhaps you’re the person who always keeps the peace. Perhaps you’re fiercely independent. Perhaps you need everything organised and under control. Perhaps you’re the one everybody relies on. Perhaps you are extraordinarily good at sensing what other people need, while being rather less good at noticing what you need yourself.

We tend to think of these things as who we are.

That’s just me.

But what if some of them began as ways of staying safe, staying connected or getting our needs met when we were children?

This doesn’t mean our personalities are somehow fake. Nor does it mean that every adult characteristic is caused by childhood experience. But difficult experiences can leave us with patterns that once made perfect sense and are no longer particularly helpful.

Somebody shouted, so we learnt to freeze.

Somebody left, so we decided never to need anyone again.

Somebody was unpredictable, so we learnt to scan the room before we even noticed we were doing it.

Somebody needed us, so we became the responsible one.

The child adapted because the child had to.

But what protected us as children can become a rather exhausting way to live as adults.

I sometimes meet people who are incredibly good at managing themselves. They know their triggers. They know how to calm themselves down. They have learnt the breathing exercises and the mindfulness techniques. And all of those things can be useful.

But I think there is a difference between managing yourself and feeling genuinely free.

One of the things I particularly value about PBSP is the way it puts the person back in the driving seat.

In a structure, (that is the name for a client session, because it is a very structured process), the person is actively involved in discovering what they need and what feels right. They can ask an Ideal Figure to move closer or further away. They can change what is happening. They can say yes or no. They can decide when something feels complete.

That may sound like a small thing.

It isn’t.

For somebody whose early experience involved helplessness, having choices can be profoundly significant.

I think of someone who grew up having to take care of a parent emotionally. Perhaps they learnt to monitor that parent’s mood, soothe them, keep the peace and make sure everything was all right.

The child became the adult.

In a PBSP structure, we might create an Ideal Figure who takes that responsibility back. The Ideal Figure might say, If I had been your ideal father, you would have been the child and I would have been the adult. It would have been my job to take care of you. You would never have needed to take care of me.

And sometimes the relief is enormous.

Not because the past has disappeared. It hasn’t.

But because the person can finally step out of a role that never belonged to them.

That, for me, is what I mean by taking your life back.

Not becoming invulnerable. Not becoming somebody who never gets frightened, never needs anybody and never gets triggered.

It is something much more ordinary and much more profound.

It is being able to notice an old pattern and have a choice about whether you follow it.

It is being able to say, That was then. This is now.

And perhaps, after all the years of adapting, pleasing, protecting, controlling, hiding or holding everything together, being able to ask the most important question of all:

What do I want now?

That is one of the reasons I love Pesso Boyden. It doesn’t assume that we are broken and need fixing. It assumes there is something healthy underneath all those adaptations.

Sometimes therapy is about clearing enough of the old wreckage for that healthy part of us to have a little more room.

And perhaps that is what healing really means: not becoming somebody else, but becoming increasingly free to be ourselves.

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

October 2026

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.

Juliet enjoys hearing comments about how these talks impact people – both positive and negative. If you have time, please let her know your thoughts
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScMcMLPGU2WY1sUZJKF7l_BBEi0h5EkRD5lCOn3xpLvvdKnBw/viewform

To sign up for more of these – and info about CPD workshops – https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/sign-up-for-info/

If you are a therapist, to join an email support group for therapists in the UK where you can ask questions, find out about CPD, and get referrals, go to https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/counsellor-network-groups-uk/

You’ll find more Juliet’s Musings on https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/juliets-thoughts-for-the-day/.