About Bev

All my life I have been a student of human relationships.  Among other things, I am a wife, a mother to two adult sons, a daughter, a caregiver to aging parents, a daughter-in-law, a sister-in-law, and companion to multiple fur-babies. I have been a student, a volunteer, a work colleague to many, a team member, and I worked my way up to being a leader of multiple non-profit organizations where I had valued, sustained relationships with thousands of volunteers over a 25 year period. Many have told me I inspired them because of my fairness, my ability to empathize, and my ability to see others’ points of view.  But always, always, through all of this, my relationships had the greatest influence on my life.  My personal philosophy is that “who I am” is a direct result of being “in relationship.”

You see, I grew up in very dysfunctional family, and I experienced, long before I studied “Attachment Theory”, that how we attach to others is vital to our very survival.  As early as 2 or 3 years old, I already knew how I felt about myself was very different when I was with my father compared to my mother. I instinctively knew I had to behave, think – just BE – someone different in my relationship with each parent.  My father’s alcoholism, combined with my mother’s understandable self-absorption because she struggled constantly with his drinking, left them both emotionally unavailable to me as I was growing up.  I watched them fight incessantly, which created an unstable environment that threatened my safety, my very survival. I developed coping mechanisms that got me through those days, but I learned too late in life that they only worked in that environment.

Funny thing.  Later in their lives I learned both my parents as well as their parents experienced chronic stress growing up, too.  They all developed their own coping mechanisms, which worked for a season, but then they didn’t.  Remember when we all said we weren’t going to be like our mother or our father? Well, it turns out we often adopt their coping mechanisms anyway because we don’t know any different.  I brought all those coping mechanisms with me into my adult relationships – and that didn’t go so well.