I was thinking recently, on my way home from a weekend of training, about the TA concept of Life Script, which was not what we were discussing at training, weird how my mind wanders sometimes!
And from Life Script my mind went to knitting and all the little jumpers, hats, trousers and toys that I knitted, mostly for my first born, when my children were small. I know! That’s a bit of a stretch for a connection!
I started thinking about the unhelpful repetitive patterns of relating to others (Life Script in a nutshell) that we may have learnt in childhood, and that we often continue to engage in out of our awareness, and how when we go to therapy we become aware of these patterns, unravel them and then start to change our behaviour. That’s when knitting came to mind! Maybe it was the word ‘pattern’?!
Then I got a picture in my head of a child wearing a hand knitted jumper, rather like the one my first born-in the photo below-wore some 30 years ago.
As a toddler the jumper starts out as a good fit, a bit like the way we learn to relate to others as children, we work out ways to stay safe and how to ‘fit’ safely in our families, if it works, we keep doing it however dysfunctional it might actually be in reality. 
But what if that jumper (or early behaviour) is not taken off, and then we grow up into a teenager, young adult, middle aged adult and we’re still wearing that toddler jumper? It’s no longer fit for purpose, its too tight, its restricting our movements, its looking very old and frankly, as an adult, why would I still want to be wearing a worn out Postman Pat toddler jumper? But so often we do just that.
When we go to therapy, with the jumper in tatters, loose ends hanging off, it’s like that jumper is slowly unpicked, the wool unravelled, maybe wound up into neat little balls. It takes time, its not an overnight exercise, and then the wool, once its all gathered up, can be handed back to start knitting a new jumper, one that fits, using the same wool, adding in some new, to make a jumper that is fit for an adult.
Who knew that therapy is really a knitting masterclass?!
(A similar version of this post appeared on my Facebook Page on 13.02.2020)
If You’d like to get in contact with me to discuss maybe starting to reknit your own outgrown ‘jumpers’, please follow the link to my Contact Page
