_______ I’m breathing slowly and deeply from my belly.
_______ My heart is beating calmly.
_______ I feel peaceful and relaxed in my body.
_______ I am able to make eye contact with those around me.
MIND:
_______ I can think clearly and plan for the future.
_______ I am open to and curious about others and the world around me.
_______ I am in a flow with my interests or passions and able to access my unique creativity.
When our nervous system is activated, we often act like a trapped animal. Because we feel threatened, we’ll do anything to preserve our survival without concern for others. Recognizing this tendency and accepting it as innate human behavior can help us release the shame we may feel about our actions or words when we’re in a stress response. By becoming aware of the signs of nervous system dysregulation so that we can identify when we’re dysregulated, we can begin to understand why we may do or say things in our relationships that create or exacerbate interpersonal stress.
When we learn to recognize when we’re reacting in a stressed state, we can make a conscious choice to act or respond differently. We can decide to take a step away or a timeout, excusing ourselves from a situation or not interacting until we feel both calm and are both able and willing to be open to connect socially again. Ming, the parent of a toddler, recently commented in our private membership portal that she noticed how much calmer she felt when navigating her dysregulated child’s temper tantrum after she paused to take a few seconds to ground herself first. Whereas she used to “feel like a bad mom” for focusing on herself before she did her child, she was relieved to hear that her instinct was backed by science.
Like Ming, we can all begin to use some of the mind-body practices we’ll continue to discuss throughout this book to bring our body back to safety. These practices will be particularly useful if we can’t remove ourselves from an interaction or are otherwise unable to leave a stressful environment.
Nearly all of us have trauma bond patterns we repeat within our relationships, whether with our friends, family, colleagues, or romantic partners. We re-create the same dynamics with others because we’re neurobiologically driven to do so: our nervous system and subconscious mind are wired to reenact within our relationships today the ways in which we learned to feel safe, valued, or loved as children. Until we regulate our nervous system, we’ll continue to create or reinforce our trauma bonds with others, no matter how much insight or awareness we have. Thankfully, we can all regulate our nervous system, a process that we’ll continue to talk more about in the following chapters.
4
Witnessing Your Conditioned Selves
Mona couldn’t stop staring at her phone. Why isn’t he texting me back? she wondered. It’s been two hours! I must have done something wrong. Maybe he’s with another woman. And the thought behind all the others: I’m just not good enough for him.
Mona had been dating Juan for more than two years, and even the security of what was a relatively long-term relationship didn’t prevent her from panicking every time he didn’t respond quickly (or quickly enough, in her opinion) to her texts or calls or seemed distant, distracted, or disinterested in any way. When he stayed late at work, she suspected that he was having an affair. When he wanted to spend time alone or out with friends, she assumed that he must be unhappy with her. If he was quiet, grumpy, or low energy, she figured that he had finally grown tired of their relationship. Mona was always, it seemed, looking for evidence to indicate whether her relationship was going to work out.
When two hours dragged into three, Mona started to panic. It’s finally happening, she thought. He’s breaking up with me! She sent another text: “What’s going on? Is everything OK?” The more time passed, the more nervous she became. She had a ton of projects to finish that day—she worked from home as a graphic designer—but she couldn’t concentrate. She’d already skipped her afternoon online yoga class, even though she’d paid for it, and rescheduled several work calls because she was too anxious to do anything other than stare at her phone. She wasn’t even listening to her favorite playlist, which she usually found comforting, since she was too concerned about missing the ding of a possible text.
When another hour had passed since her last message, Mona texted Juan again: “Can you please text me back? Or just call me? I’m getting worried.” Her anxiety was now all-consuming. Should she drive to his work and look for his car? She decided to try calling his phone . . . straight to voice mail! He’s blocked me! she thought. She started crying as she dug around in her purse for her car keys. Even though Juan usually left the office by that time, she would drive over anyway, and if she saw his car outside, she’d walk in and confront him about what was going on.
As Mona was getting ready to pull out of the driveway, her cell phone rang. It was Juan; he’d forgotten his phone charger that morning, and his battery had died shortly after her first text. He’d just plugged in his phone and seen all her other messages. “Is everything OK?” he asked.
Mona wanted to squeal with relief, “He’s not leaving me!” At the same time, she wanted to scream in anger, “Why didn’t you charge your phone at work? You could have asked a colleague to borrow a charger! Is it because you didn’t want to text me back?” But she didn’t scream anything and broke down crying instead as Juan tried to make sense of how he’d upset his girlfriend yet again.
FROM CORE WOUNDS TO CONDITIONED SELVES
Mona wasn’t inherently an insecure or paranoid person. Instead, she suffered from what so many of us do: a core abandonment wound. We develop this wound if we were physically left by a parent-figure who died, was incarcerated, gave us up for adoption, or simply stopped coming home one day, separating from the other parent or suffering a health crises or accident. We also develop this wound if we were consistently left without the emotional support while going through emotionally overwhelming experiences as children.
In Mona’s case, though both her parents cared for her deeply and were physically present in her life, they had married at a young age when they didn’t yet know how to emotionally support themselves or each other, let alone attune to their developing daughter. They fought constantly, and when Mona was three, her father abruptly moved out after one particularly explosive argument, eventually filing for divorce. Several years later, he married another woman and started a new family. Although she saw him and her half siblings regularly, she never felt part of their family or as though she was even her father’s daughter anymore.
Though Mona doesn’t explicitly remember much about her parents fighting or the details of the night when her father left, her body and brain do. That’s because all the experiences we have in childhood, even when we’re too young to consciously recall them, are recorded as our implicit memories, those that exist inside us as instinctual thoughts and feelings. Because our hippocampus, an area of our brain responsible for conscious recollection, doesn’t fully develop until age three, most of us can’t directly recall what happened to us before then even though our developing nervous system stores those experiences. Before our brain has language abilities, the overwhelming events we experience are imprinted on implicit or preverbal regions of our mind, according to the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Simply put, even if we can’t actively call to mind the experiences that impacted us as children, the impact on our conditioning is still there, driving our thoughts, feelings, and reactions today.
To complicate things, if we faced chronically stressful environments outside and inside our childhood home, our body produced more cortisol, which further impacted the functioning of our hippocampus, helping to explain the life-long difficulties recalling the past that many of us have noticed, including myself.
When we experience trauma at a young age, we lack the emotional maturity to contextually understand the subjective nuance of our individual circumstances. This causes us to have immature and self-centered (or egocentric) thoughts as we try to make sense of what is happening or has happened to us. We often think, I’m what causes Mom to always come home in a bad mood; Dad drinks because I’m bad; or If I were more lovable, Mom wouldn’t be depressed. Whatever thoughts we had as children, if we thought them often enough, they eventually became part of our neural patterning and deep-rooted beliefs.
When a parent leaves the family, as Mona’s father did, especially when the child is young, the child can’t understand that the conflict or separation has nothing to do with them. Instead, they may feel as though Dad or Mom left because of them, that they weren’t worthy or lovable enough or were too intrinsically flawed for their parent to want to stay. This causes deep-rooted shame that the child internalizes and carries with them into adulthood.
Because my mom was constantly dissociated, distracted, and lost in her own world, she wasn’t able to emotionally connect to or attune to me. Without the developmental maturity to know the real cause of her distance, I assumed that it was because of me and my overwhelming emotional world. Feeling shameful about myself for causing our disconnection—or so I believed—I stopped sharing my feelings with everyone, believing it was the safest way to maintain my relationships.
Either form of abandonment, physical or emotional, results in adults who still believe that they’re not worthy or good enough to be loved and supported within a relationship. Because Dad or Mom left us, we subconsciously assume that others will leave us, too, as soon as they find out that we’re as flawed, unworthy, or broken as we’ve come to believe we are. Though we’re particularly prone to feeling this way in our romantic relationships, where we are the most vulnerable both physically and emotionally, we can have similar worries about being left out within our friendships or find ourselves feeling like an imposter in our professional relationships.
Believing we’re unworthy, some of us become “chasers” as adults, constantly pursuing or pushing others to try to verify, validate, or prove that they still love us and want to be with us. As a chaser, we may seek out new romantic interests or even casual sexual encounters in the hope of feeling good enough. We may find ourselves constantly stressed about our job security when our boss or colleagues don’t praise our latest project. If we’re in a committed romantic relationship, we may struggle to give our loved one the space they need and interpret moments of distance or disinterest as confirmation of our overall unworthiness. Whenever we perceive the slightest possibility that we’re being abandoned by another person, we easily become reactive as Mona did, texting, calling, or pursuing our loved one, sometimes in unreasonable or irrational ways. We may break down emotionally, becoming inconsolable, all-consumed by overwhelming feelings, or shut down and nonfunctional. Because, as children we subconsciously believe that who we are caused Mom or Dad to leave, we modify how we are in the world. As a result, we never truly allow ourselves to be who we are or our full and authentic Self, continuing instead to embody only the parts of us that were accepted as children.
While some of us weren’t abandoned in childhood, we were wounded in other ways when we were shamed, criticized, ignored, or otherwise overwhelmed by our parent-figures. Every time we heard “Stop being so dramatic” or were teased when we cried, we felt hurt by those we needed the most at that time. Every time our boundaries were ignored or disrespected when we were told what we should or shouldn’t think, feel, or believe, our emotional intuition was invalidated. Every time a part of our external self-expression like our appearance or performance was highly praised, valued, or acknowledged more than our deeper interests or pleasures, our authentic Self was diminished. Every time we were seen as an extension of our parents, pressured to bring pride to the family, or told to pursue an interest, career, or path others had been unable to follow, our natural inclinations and talents were dismissed.
Regardless of what our individual childhood wounds were, those early hurts caused us to modify ourselves in order to feel safe and remain connected within our earliest relationships and environments. Those adaptations became our childhood coping strategies or ways of fitting in. Of course, these coping strategies don’t go away when we grow up; our past conditioning is stored in our nervous system where it continues to drive our instinctive reactions as adults. Because of our learned habits, most of us continue to play the same roles in our adult relationships, even though the conditioned parts of us are immature, reactive, and based in trauma.
These adaptations are what I call our conditioned selves, the consistent roles we’ve learned to play in our relationships based on the ways we learned to feel safest and most loved in childhood. Rooted in years of research and related ideologies, the concept of conditioned selves stem from an evidence-based method of therapy known as Internal Family Systems (IFS). Developed in the 1980s by the psychologist Dr. Richard Schwartz, IFS maintains that our minds are made up of different “parts,” which developed in response to our earliest unmet needs and that continue to live as mental constructs inside us, directing how we act and react with others.
Our conditioned selves are the neurobiologically wired parts of our subconscious minds. Because the thoughts, feelings, and reactions we had as children were patterned into our nervous system, where they continue to exist today, our conditioned selves are a physically and emotionally embodied part of us. Unless we take the time to become aware of or witness the ways in which they drive us to think, feel, and behave with others, they will keep us locked in the same reactive neurophysiological patterns and habitual ruts.
In this chapter, we’ll meet our conditioned selves. To help you start exploring, below are seven archetypes and the common thoughts, feelings, and habits that accompany each. Most people I’ve met or have worked with relate to one or several of these seven conditioned selves witnessing their presence in most if not all their relationships. You may likely recognize yourself in at least one of the seven descriptions you’ll read below.
Before we can more deeply explore our conditioning, though, we need to meet our inner child—more specifically, our hurt inner child. Our hurt inner child is the little being inside us all who was abandoned, shamed, criticized, ignored, overwhelmed, or hurt when our needs weren’t consistently met by our parent-figures. When we reconnect with our hurt inner child, we’re better able to see our core wounds and the childhood coping strategies we developed as a result. Understanding and witnessing this painful and reactive part of us gives us the opportunity to cultivate compassion for ourselves and others as we continue to repeat the same dysfunctional habits, despite wanting or needing change. Reconnecting with our hurt inner child will help us identify which conditioned selves we most commonly embody in our adult relationships, giving us the opportunity to begin to break away from playing these trauma-based roles.
THE (HURT) INNER CHILD INSIDE US ALL
We all have an inner child; it’s the part of us that’s born free, whole, and connected to our inner essence, or authentic Self. Our inner child loves to play, freely speak their mind, and is expressive, spontaneous, creative, trusting, and innocent. Imagine what you might be like if you felt truly free to be fully you. That would be your true Self before you were exposed to all of the life experiences that changed your natural way of being—that is, before all the imprinting, teaching, scolding, chiding, shaming, criticizing, rule making, and other forms of conditioning that we were all subjected to, whether it was functional or dysfunctional.
Our inner child usually doesn’t stay free, whole, and joyful for long. As children, we all experienced moments or situations that caused us to feel insecure, scared, or hurt. If those moments or situations occurred often enough or were overwhelming enough, we eventually learned to suppress our natural instincts and our playful, expressive, spontaneous side to keep ourselves safe. The more consistently we suppressed our natural instincts, the more wounded our inner child became.
Though emotions were a normal part of our childhood and life experiences, few of us were modeled healthy emotional expression by our parent-figures. If we grew up in a household where certain emotions weren’t tolerated—we were told to stop crying or were ignored whenever we were sad—we may have learned that only certain feelings are okay to express. If we regularly witnessed emotional explosions or overwhelming outbursts, we may have come to believe that those were appropriate ways to express ourselves when we’re upset. Or if our parent-figures suppressed or hid their own feelings, emotionally dissociating or disconnecting themselves from us, we may have developed similar habits.
