To learn how to navigate our emotional world, we first need to feel safe and secure enough to express what we’re really thinking and feeling to those around us. Our ability to do this as adults is highly influenced by how we regularly felt in our earliest relationships. The concept of attachment theory, which was first developed by the psychoanalyst John Bowlby in 1952, explains that the safety and security of our relationship with our parent-figures influences what kind of relationship we look for and create with others for the rest of our lives.2 If our attachment to our parent-figures was predominantly safe and secure as young children and our physical and emotional needs were consistently met, we are more likely to prioritize and meet our own needs as adults. Those with secure attachments are more likely to trust themselves and others and have emotional resilience, or are able to tolerate and quickly rebound from uncomfortable emotions. This emotional self-trust is built over time through our consistent, reliable, and predictable actions. In a relationship, trust is the feeling that you can count on someone to behave in a certain way.
Many of us didn’t grow up with safe and secure attachments because our parent-figures were impacted by their own earliest relational environments in which many of their needs were not met. As a result, our physical and /or emotional needs weren’t consistently identified or tended to in early childhood. Today, we may be unable to identify or tend to our needs as adults because no one helped us learn how to do so as children. We may not trust ourselves or others, often reacting impulsively because we lack the emotional resilience to deal with uncomfortable emotions, whether specific ones like stress, sadness, or anger, or all of our unpleasant feelings in general. We may continue to abandon or betray ourselves, overcommitting our time, energy, or emotional resources in an attempt to get another to care for us, or we may close ourselves off from the support of others entirely.
Whether our earliest attachments were secure or insecure, our habitual patterns of relating were wired into our subconscious mind, where they remain. It’s these patterns that automatically and instinctively continue to pull us toward similar relationship dynamics well into adulthood.
YOU ARE DRIVEN BY YOUR UNMET CHILDHOOD NEEDS
Before we can identify our attachment patterns, it’s important to first understand what unmet childhood needs are. Unmet childhood needs can be physical or emotional; the former is generally easier to understand.
Physiologically, our body functions the same way. Our lungs oxygenate our blood with the air around us, our cells helps us function by converting nutrients in our food, and our muscles move us around and help us lift and carry heavy things. These structural similarities are universal to all humans, and as a result, we share the same basic physical needs: water, oxygen, nutrients, a balance of rest/restorative sleep and movement.
If your physical needs weren’t met in childhood, you may not have had enough food to eat, appropriate clothing to wear, enough space for physical movement, or quiet to rest. Or you may have not felt physically safe in your environment for a number of other reasons, including financial insecurity and racial discrimination. Unmet physical needs in childhood can include more subtle inadequacies, like not being physically touched or soothed because you were often left alone or were raised by others who were uncomfortable themselves with physical contact, or not getting enough sleep because your childhood home was too loud or chaotic. Many of us continue to struggle with unmet physical needs as adults because we don’t have access to the stable financial resources necessary to consistently care for our body or are unable to feel safe and secure in our own skin. Regardless of the cause, when our physical needs aren’t consistently met, our body activates a nervous system response that shifts us into survival mode, pushing our emotional needs to the back burner.
What’s even more common than unmet physical needs is unmet emotional needs. Nearly everyone I know, even those who had well-intentioned parent-figures, grew up with unmet emotional needs. This is to be expected, given the number of hours and jobs many of them had to work in order to provide for us financially. How can anyone who is working overtime, and not sleeping, eating, or tolerating their own stress well, emotionally care for another? They can’t.
Despite these societal inequities and realities, we all have core emotional needs that need to be tended to. The deepest need we all have in all our relationships—whether as children or now as adults—is to feel safe and secure enough to be ourselves without losing the connection to and support of others. Feeling safe and secure enough to honestly express our perspectives and experiences helps us create emotional intimacy. When we’re able to be emotionally vulnerable and honest regardless of what we’re feeling, we allow more of ourselves to be witnessed and known. Look at the questions below and spend some time exploring how emotionally safe and secure you feel in your different relationships:
Do I feel safely and securely connected to you physically and emotionally?
Do I feel that I am/our relationship is important to you?
Do I feel I am loved and cared for by you, even in moments of physical or emotional distance?
When we feel emotionally safe and secure, we are able to trust that another person sees, accepts, and appreciates who we are, can give us the space to change or evolve, and has our best interests at heart. If we have this safety and security in our earliest attachments, we develop the ability to trust our physical connection with our body and its ability to cope with stress and other upsetting emotions. When we feel this safely and securely connected to our emotional world, we’re able to authentically share ourselves with those around us and trust our relationships knowing we can reconnect or repair after moments of conflict or disconnection.
For a parent-figure to help a child feel safe, valued (or seen, heard, and appreciated), and loved on a consistent basis, they themselves have to be able to feel these ways consistently, too. But most of our parent-figures did not feel those ways because they weren’t able to regulate their emotions due to their own childhood trauma (and consequential nervous system dysregulation, which we’ll explore below). As a result, most of us didn’t grow up feeling the emotional safety or security we needed to be able to authentically express ourselves, causing us to feel deeply unworthy and emotionally alone.
If our parent-figures weren’t able to feel emotionally safe and secure themselves, they weren’t able to create the environment we needed to explore and express our authentic Self. As a result, we ended up feeling emotionally abandoned or overwhelmed by them, left alone to figure out how to navigate our own stressful or upsetting emotions and experiences. The feelings associated with childhood emotional neglect (CEN) or abandonment actually activate the same pathways in our brain as physical pain does, sending our mind and body into a continuous stress response that causes trauma.
A lack of emotional safety and security in childhood can look like being regularly ignored, criticized, or yelled at for expressing different emotions, instilling deep-rooted beliefs that you’re “too much” and continued difficulty expressing yourself. Or it can look like being discouraged or prevented from pursuing a passion or interest that now causes you to feel unsure about what you like as an adult.
While there are many more than are listed, below are some other indicators that you may have had unmet emotional needs in childhood.
Your parent-figures didn’t or couldn’t see you as a separate or unique individual, often treating you as an extension of themselves who needed to follow in their footsteps or adopt their beliefs, emotions, appearance, and even careers. In adulthood, you may never feel truly safe or secure to be who you are, or you may not be sure what you believe, how you feel, or what you’re interested in.
Your parent-figures didn’t or couldn’t pay attention to you on a consistent basis because they were distracted by their work, relationship issues, financial demands, or unresolved trauma. In adulthood, you may self-isolate or be hyperindependent, walling yourself off from any type of connection to or support from others.
Your parent-figures often took things personally and quickly became defensive or emotionally reactive, externalizing or blaming others, including you, for various issues or conflicts. In adulthood, you may often worry about “being in trouble,” look to others to make you feel better, and often find yourself placating or pleasing others to avoid conflict.
Your parent-figures had two personas: one they displayed at home, where they were critical, shaming, or shut down, and another they displayed in public, where they were warm, affectionate, and seemingly loving toward you. In adulthood, you may often feel on edge, unsure of, or confused by the intentions or actions of those around you.
Your parent-figures often highlighted or bragged about your accomplishments to others yet mostly ignored you unless you were achieving something or receiving accolades for your performance. In adulthood, in the absence of external validation, you may feel unworthy, unlovable, or empty.
Your parent-figures regularly dismissed, invalidated, or ignored your perspective or feelings. In adulthood, you may find yourself stuck in polarized thinking (“right” or “wrong,” “good” or “bad”), often struggling to see or validate another’s perspective especially when upset or in conflict.
Your parent-figures regularly centered their own needs or emotions, often highlighting or overemphasizing the role they played in raising you, regularly repeating or reminding you of all the things they had done or sacrifices they had made for you. In adulthood, you may feel chronically indebted to others or selfish for having any needs at all.
MY UNMET EMOTIONAL NEEDS
Although I didn’t realize it until I began my own inner work, my childhood environment hadn’t allowed me to feel consistently safe, valued, and loved for just being myself. When I was very young—as well as throughout my childhood, teenage, and adult years—my mom remained emotionally distant, her attention consumed by the chronic pain she felt in her physical body. Constantly distracted and locked in survival mode, she was unable to express little emotion outside of worry about my well-being or validation around my latest accomplishment. As I was later told, she treated me and my two other siblings as if she were a “medic,” feeding and caring for us without attuning to or emotionally connecting with us. My dad was an active physical presence in my life, playing with me and entertaining my restless nature, but he too remained emotionally distant, hardly ever sharing feelings outside of his daily stress or annoyances with others. My sister, who is fifteen years older than me, similarly took an active role in raising and spending time with me, especially when my mom was physically unable. But she, too, was emotionally closed off, having developed the habit in her own relationship with both of our parents.
All children have an active inner world, both mentally and emotionally—and as a young child, I was no different. But whenever I tried to share experiences with my mom, she often expressed worry, trying to quickly solve or dismiss whatever issue was causing us both to experience uncomfortable feelings. Other times, she’d try to control my behavior to relieve her own hurt, anger, sadness, or disappointment by saying things like “Oh, please don’t say or do [insert undesired expression/action], or I’ll get sad” or “Oh, won’t you [insert desired request] for me so I don’t have to worry?”
Fearful of losing my connection to my family, I regularly chose to honor their needs or desires over my own. Learning these codependent dynamics and feeling no separation between my emotions or perspective and others’ feelings or perspectives, I learned to take responsibility for their emotional experiences. Caught in an internalized cycle of self-blame, I developed the habit of explaining away others’ behaviors, as I later went on to do with Sofia and in many of my other relationships.
My home largely lacked emotional boundaries, adding more stress to an already overwhelmed environment. Anytime I shared intimate information with one family member, it was quickly relayed to all the others without my permission, request, or notice, in the belief that it was supportive to do so. Those violations of trust caused me to become even more self-protective, further limiting the personal details I shared. Over time, I learned that it was easier to ignore and stifle my feelings altogether. Eventually, I convinced myself that I didn’t have any feelings at all because it felt safer than acknowledging those that I wasn’t comfortable expressing.
This absence of boundaries in my family helped create my belief that relationships weren’t emotionally safe. Because I felt distant from the people I was supposed to be closest with—my family—I feared that something was wrong with me, a fear that my mom exacerbated by continuously commenting on my “secretive” nature. I didn’t feel comfortable sharing personal details of my life with my mom, though, because she wasn’t able to create the emotional safety, security, or connection that I needed to authentically express myself to her. As a result, she ended up knowing little about my life, not because I was private by nature, as she told me, but because I never felt safe enough to share with her what was really going on with me.
As I got older, I instinctually began to look for and maintain the same emotional distance in my adult relationships that I had experienced as a child. Largely disconnected from my own wants and needs, I focused more on how I showed up for others, avoiding issues and conflicts, constantly fearful of disconnection or abandonment. Sometimes, I even felt ashamed of myself for having a desire or feeling that might disappoint or upset another person. I carried all these dysfunctional habits into my adulthood, continuing to rely on the same subconscious coping strategies I had adopted and used as a child to protect myself from my overwhelming and undersupported emotions.
THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL IMPACT OF YOUR CHILDHOOD
Though other early childhood relationships, including those we have with our siblings, grandparents, caregivers, friends, and teachers, can create trauma bonds, nothing has a greater impact on our current relationships than our earliest attachments with our parent-figures. Why? The answer to this question is key to understanding and unlocking the work we can do to change our relationships today—effectively and sustainably.
Our attachments to our parent-figures didn’t just condition our behavior; our earliest relationships also physically programmed our nervous system, determining how we think, feel, and act. That’s because our nervous system drives our thoughts, feelings, and reactions, in addition to influencing our other physiological functions.
Our nervous system is “profoundly social,” according to UCLA neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Siegel, who helped pioneer the field of interpersonal neurobiology, an emerging area of science that explores the fascinating interaction that exists between our brain and our relationships. As Siegel has shown us, our brain needs other people to function.3 Since the dawn of humankind, we’ve depended on the safety that families and groups provide. And when we’re unable to feel safely connected with others, the resulting feelings of aloneness can negatively impact both our well-being and our physical safety.4
Today, our body and brain are still programmed to need other people. We instinctively seek out relationships, both romantic and platonic, whether we consciously think we want them or not. Though modern Western culture may promote a more rugged individualism offering an idea of the “solo self,” no one is or can be an island unto themselves; having relationships throughout life is necessary for us not only to survive but to thrive. We all exist in a relationship with someone and something at all times, including with the environment around us and the earth on which we live (more on this in chapter 10).
Not only does our brain need relationships to physically survive and function, our relationships with others impact how our nervous system operates. As Siegel explained, “human connections create neuronal connections,” meaning that our relationships with others determine how our neurons, or brain cells, connect or communicate with one another.5 These neural connections or communications, when repeated by our brain over and over again, become the basis of our inner world, driving our daily thoughts, feelings, and reactions.
While any relationship can create new neural connections, it’s our earliest attachments with our parent-figures that built our brain’s basic architecture. Human infants are born with a largely underdeveloped nervous system—which is why we’re so dependent on our parent-figures for the first few years of life compared to the days, weeks, or months that other mammals need before they can survive on their own. During our early years, our nervous system grows and develops rapidly, firing and forming a million new neural connections every second.6 Although these neural pathways undergo pruning later in childhood, we create most of our neural infrastructure as infants and young children.
It’s the people with whom we first connect—that is, our parent-figures—who cause our nervous system to fire and wire in certain ways. It’s what they do (or don’t do) when they interact with us and how we respond (child development experts call this the “serve and return”) that becomes patterned in our brain. These patterns drive our brain’s operating system, activating and controlling our automatic or instinctual thoughts, feelings, and reactions for life—or until we harness our brain’s neuroplasticity, or its power to change.
YOUR CONDITIONED STRESS RESPONSES
Our nervous system plays a foundational role in our existence. It connects with and controls our biological organs and physiological functions. It drives our automatic thoughts, feelings, and habitual behaviors. And it determines our level of physical, mental, and emotional safety, not only with ourselves but also with others by activating a stress response when we encounter a threat, causing us to move toward or away from connection.
You likely already know something about the body’s “fight-or-flight” response that’s controlled by our nervous system. Fight-or-flight occurs when our nervous system initiates physiological reactions like dilated pupils and an increased heart rate and breathing rate in response to a threat, giving us energy to face danger head-on (fight) or run away from it (flight). Our nervous system can also activate a “freeze” or “shutdown” response, which slows or shuts down our body’s physiological functions, usually when a threat is overwhelming or consistent. And, although it’s not as well known, we’ve even evolved to adapt a “fawn” response to stress, with our nervous system remaining on high alert as we continuously scan our environment to identify, eliminate, or deescalate possible threats as they become apparent to us.
These nervous system responses happen automatically, most times outside our awareness. They are normal, natural, and even healthy; we need them to confront a threat (fight), run away from one (flight), play dead or conserve our physical resources (freeze or shutdown), or maintain bonds in certain communal crises (fawn). If our nervous system never activated stress responses, we wouldn’t learn how to regulate our emotions or develop the resilience we need to deal with stress and return quickly to a state of calm and physiological and emotional wellness.
The problem for many of us though is that our nervous system doesn’t return to a state of relaxed calm. Instead, our body gets stuck in a stress response, though not necessarily because we face stress all day long. Though many of us have stressful, busy lives, if our nervous system is regulated, we can toggle back and forth between a stress response and calm, everyday function. But many of us can’t toggle back and forth because our body didn’t develop the ability to do so when we were children.
If we grew up in a consistently stressful environment or with parent-figures who couldn’t regularly meet our physical or emotional needs, our nervous system may have continued to signal that there was a fire around us long after the embers had cooled. Since our brain was still developing, those stress responses got programmed into our nervous system’s standard operating mode.
Today, our nervous system is likely still wired as it was in childhood, possibly even stuck in a stress response even when there’s no active threat around us. These conditioned stress responses are familiar and comfortable to our brain, as an old baby blanket is to a grown child, both biologically and emotionally. Biologically, our nervous system may struggle to physiologically downshift from a stress response, even though living in a constant state of stress isn’t optimal for our body. Emotionally, we may find ourselves feeling uncomfortable, agitated, uneasy, or bored when we’re not experiencing a familiar stress cycle. For some of us, if all we ever knew as children was stress, chaos, or abandonment, we may never be able to experience feelings of peace and connection unless we make the conscious choice to rewire our neurobiology.
Conditioned stress responses keep us stuck in our trauma bonds with others on a physiological level, even when we’re adults. When our nervous system gets wired for stress in certain ways as children, it drives us to feel instinctually attracted to certain people only to become trapped in reactivity cycles with them (we’ll talk more about these later). Our dysregulated nervous system causes us to see or re-create situations with others that fire our predictable stress states, giving us a physiological feeling of safety and control when, in reality, neither exists. Whether we gain a sense of false safety when we’re picking fights (fight), distracting ourselves (flight), walling ourselves off (freeze or shutdown), or putting others’ needs before our own (fawn), we are driven to repeat these habits, even if they’re not helpful within our relationships or aren’t aligned with our conscious intentions or desires. In other words, we can’t help it: our brain is wired for stress when we’re alone or around other people. In chapter 3, we’ll talk more about how to identify when we’re in a stress response and what we can do to shift out of it.
CHANGING YOUR BRAIN TO CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIPS
While our relational habits are wired into our brains, we can change them. Though there are still things we don’t know about the human body, science has more recently discovered that our brain is incredibly malleable. It can change over time, no matter how old we are or how much stress or trauma we experienced.
The term neuroplasticity refers to our brain’s ability to form new neural connections throughout our lifetime. Whenever we form new neural connections, we give our nervous system the opportunity to create new instinctual or automatic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; in short, we can change our brain’s standard operating mode. Each new experience we have and every new person we meet has the potential to create new neural connections. But newness in itself isn’t the answer; if we approach new experiences and new people with the same conditioned thoughts, feelings, and habits we’ve had since childhood, our nervous system will fire the same neural connections it always has, producing the same relational patterns and dynamics. If we truly want to change our relationships, we have to change our subconscious, which means shifting how we instinctively think, feel, and act, regardless of whether it’s with new people or those we already know.
