Elaine Carney Gibson on analyzing Relationships
In this episode, we have a conversation with Elaine Carney Gibson, a seasoned psychotherapist with fifty years of experience. Gibson opens up about her upbringing and how her past experiences have shaped her career as a psychotherapist. Additionally, she provides a glimpse into her patient analysis process. Gibson also delves into the intricate nature of familial relationships, a topic she further explores in her most recent book, "Your Family Revealed: A Guide to Decoding the Patterns, Stories, and Belief Systems in Your Family."
More on Elaine Carney Gibson
Website: www.elainecarneygibson.com
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Quotes:
“I do see psychology as soul work. The word psychology comes from the Greek word psyche… And that's really what I believe is my goal: to help people know more about themselves and move forward in their life, honoring their true selves.” - Elaine Carney Gibson
“It’s each person's responsibility to do their own growth and their own healing… their partner is not magically going to fix this, and their partner is also an individual who has their own wants and needs.” - Elaine Carney Gibson
"You'll think of something that happened 20 years ago. You hadn't thought about it in years and you realize it did impact you. And perhaps something in you shifted at that point and you want to just know more about it to understand yourself better." - Elaine Carney Gibson
Show Notes:
Elaine Carney Gibson: I grew up in a small town in central Indiana with a mother and a brother and a sister. I was the oldest.
Elaine Carney Gibson: I went on to study education and was particularly interested in early childhood development
Elaine Carney Gibson: The family systems theory kind of views human suffering as a result of relational patterns as much or more than pathology or deficits.
Elaine Carney Gibson: And that's really what I believe is my goal is to help people, you know, know more about themselves and move forward in their life, honoring their true selves.
Elaine Carney Gibson: I love the imagery and I love the labyrinth. I always have.
Elaine Carney Gibson: What do I want to bring with me that's useful? What do I want to think about in terms of changing? The only way I'm going to know that is by taking a look at it. I don't want to get stuck back there.
Elaine Carney Gibson: If you have siblings and you know that you all have this experience together, each person may have given it a different meaning.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Sometimes we change the story. We make a new narrative. Other times, the story stays the same. We change the meaning we give to it.
Elaine Carney Gibson: There can be the family where they're so rigid and autocratic that one person or several people make all the rules. They don't listen to anyone else. No one else has a voice.
Elaine Carney Gibson: When I see an individual and or a couple or a family, I want to take a history.
Elaine Carney Gibson: A healthy boundary is when you know your thoughts and feelings, you can identify those as separate from someone else, you allow yourself to have them, and hopefully and more and more so with women, you know, giving yourself permission to have voice around that.
Elaine Carney Gibson: It's sometimes in our nature. I mean, we've learned that we maybe learn that as our role to be a pleaser.
Elaine Carney Gibson: We always have to make sacrifices for people we care about, but we choose not to be sacrificial. There's a difference from making a sacrifice and being sacrificial.
Elaine Carney Gibson: How can I honor my relationship with this person and be there in the way I want to be? And take care of myself.
Elaine Carney Gibson: I think communication is paramount in relationships.
Elaine Carney Gibson: I think that it is each person's kind of responsibility to do their own growth and their own healing
Elaine Carney Gibson: I love the idea of there being extended family and being connected and doing things together.
Elaine Carney Gibson: From Alfred Adler's point of view that oftentimes the oldest child is the one that, you know, feels like they need to go out in the world and, and carry on or prove something.
Elaine Carney Gibson: There are times where a middle child can get lost because there's so much attention given to an older child or the younger one comes along and gets the attention.
Elaine Carney Gibson: The younger child, depending on how much younger it seems in my experience as to whether they kind of become the mascot of the family and are treated in that special way, or sometimes they're depending again on the size of the family and maybe the distance between the children may get left out.
Elaine Carney Gibson: It can be difficult work, but we hope rewarding.
Elaine Carney Gibson: We're entitled to privacy, that we have our own thoughts. We have our own feelings.
Elaine Carney Gibson: I'm not going to be one of those parents that goes through their desk and looks all around the room because they weren't doing anything that would indicate to me I needed to do that.
Elaine Carney Gibson: When one of the aunts died, he found out then that she was actually his birth mother.
Elaine Carney Gibson: The moment of absolute certainty never arrives.
Elaine Carney Gibson: A man handed that to me and gave me a motorcycle ride across campus. I was 19, and when we got off the bike, I said thank you. And he handed me the poem, and I carried it with me for years.