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.
Changing our instinctual habits isn’t easy; it will feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable at first. But it is possible. The first step is to learn to become conscious of or to witness the conditioned habits that live in our subconscious mind, creating and maintaining our trauma bonds with others. After we begin to witness our trauma bond patterns, we can begin to do the work to develop more adaptive and resilient ways of dealing with stress and relating to others that will better serve ourselves and relationships.
As I hope you’re starting to see, you are not a passive bystander in any of your relationships. Asking others to change who they are or what they do to make us feel better doesn’t often actually solve our relationship issues. By harnessing the new advances in science that we’ll explore here together, it is you who has the power to change your relationships, no matter what someone else does or doesn’t do. You can finally stop waiting or relying on anyone else. You can and will the change. And that change can begin now.
To change how we interact with others (and by association how they interact with us), we will need to extend our awareness beyond our brain to include our whole, embodied Self. Our embodied Self is the interconnection between our body, mind, and soul that we’ll explore in detail in the next chapter.
Your Emotional Safety and Security Checklist
Take some time to consider your relationships with your parent-figures or earliest caregivers. In reviewing the following statements, check the ones that best describe your most consistent childhood experiences.
_______ I was offered comfort and support by emotionally present adults when I was upset.
_______ I was modeled boundaries and saw adults who respectfully communicated their limits without using abusive discipline or fear-inducing threats.
_______ I was given space to explore developmentally appropriate behaviors and was not parentified by adults, or made to counsel their emotions, put in care of younger siblings, or used as a pawn to manipulate or control others.
_______ I was modeled ways to safely express my feelings by adults who didn’t control the emotional climate of the home with their own feelings and who regularly asked me how I felt and validated my shared emotional experiences.
_______ I was modeled how to directly express my emotional needs by adults who asked for support without using emotional manipulation techniques like giving others the silent treatment, raging, guilting, shaming, or blaming.
