24/05/2026
Have you ever felt under resourced, unsupported, like you're carrying too much on your own?
When we're infants, we need emotional attunement from caregivers who can regulate themselves, soothing, feeding, holding, understanding.
When we're children, we need emotional attunement, understanding, guidance, boundaries to keep us safe (even if we don't like it) and encouragement to try things for ourselves.
When we're teenagers, we need understanding, emotional attunement, healthy modelling and opportunities to process strong emotions, opportunities to take risks, more adults around who can model different healthy ways of being in the world, rites of passage that help encourage stepping outside of those comfort zones, knowing we have safety and support to turn to if we need it.
When we're adults, we need emotional attunement and understanding, people around us who understand the same challenges we face. We need support and care when we're ill, injured, disabled, going through big life transitions so we can still feel part of the community. We need to feel we can contribute.
If we become parents, we also need support from many other adults to enable us to provide the support our children need.
When, as adults, the path is not clear and the responsibilities and burdens of adulthood feel heavy. We need guidance and wisdom from older adults, our elders, who've lived it before. We need stories from past generations. We need to be able to come together to sit with our tensions and challenges of the community and stay with the tension to create a healthy solution.
In the UK, our societal system does not support these needs to be met for the most part. Grind culture, lack of social support, the pursuit of more stuff, disconnection from human connection through screens and AI, everything to be squeezed in and done as efficiently and conveniently as possible, "get more for less"...
And so we must intentionally create spaces to be with one another, with our challenges and experiences, with the resources and gifts we have to offer, and the vulnerability to ask for what we need.
