Connecting to your authentic self (developmental trauma 101)
Is it your personality or is just a cluster of survival strategies?
This email is for you if:
You struggle to stay connected to yourself.
You struggle to know who you are or tend to feel empty inside if you really pay attention. You might then try to fill that emptiness unconsciously with consumerism, substance abuse, dissociation, unhealthy relationship patterns or other coping skills even if healthy.
You’re either enmeshed with or overly independent from others and can’t seem to figure out how to do relationships in a healthy, balanced way.
You struggle to identify, stay connected to and advocate for your needs to be met in life and relationships.
You struggle to connect with yourself and others in a safe, healthy way.
Trust is a struggle.
What’s in this email:
The core dilemmas created if you were raised in an emotionally unhealthy family system and how they affect you in adulthood.
The balance needed between staying attached and connected to others vs separation and individuation from others.
The distress cycle of misattunement from parents that leads to core survival strategies which then become what we think is our personality.
The key differentiators between healthy and unhealthy families and what to do about it if you grew up in an unhealthier family system.
How to heal this and find agency to change patterns as an adult.
How these issues are showing up in our Western culture.
Why grief work is at the core of reclaiming our deepest, most authentic selves.
As children we learn to adapt to our environment. When people says kids are resilient, what’s more accurate is that children are adaptable but it’s going to cost them.
Children’s brains are wired for connection. We are born with a brain that has lots of extra neurons that has to be shaped by the environment in order for us to function properly in the world. Children learn through interactions with their caregivers and those interactions prune neurons and shape their brains toward whatever is called for in that environment. I like to say we’re like little potatoes in our parents’ soup. We will take on the flavors of that soup.
My undergraduate degree is in anthropology and we can’t separate cultural or evolutionary anthropology from the psyche. We’ve evolved to be born more immature than many other mammals. When we evolved to be bipedal (walking on two legs), the female pelvis had to become smaller in order to do so. A smaller pelvis means the baby’s head needs to be smaller in order to make it through the birth canal during labor. Therefore, we aren’t born almost walking like horses or cows or with big brains because the baby has to come out earlier.
As a result, we are much more dependent on our caregivers for a longer amount of time after birth than many other mammals. We are therefore highly reliant on our caregivers for our survival and for our brain development.
Important tenant #1: This means a child will be evolutionarily successful if they can get their parents to take care of them. They have to do whatever it takes to get their needs met by their parents.
This is why babies are cute and smell good: bonding hormones connect babies to their parents and make it more likely that their parent will care for them.