As a child I loved superhero movies and stories. The idea of someone possessing special powers that made their life easier to navigate and gave them the ability to do superhuman things was more than just intriguing, it spoke to something I felt I lacked: the ability to be resilient in the face of life’s blows.
However, what I loved even more than superhero stories were the tales of seemingly normal people who developed extraordinary abilities through discipline and hard work. Superman may have been born with the ability to fly, but more incredible was someone like Iron Man, who built a super-powerful suit, or the Karate Kid, who through great mentorship acquired the ability to stand up to his tormentors. Put another way, I loved the idea that superpowers could be learned.
As someone who grew up being heavily knocked by life, and feeling deeply shaped by those impacts, for many years I searched for ways to heal my traumas and help make my life easier and more functional. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a byproduct of my healing journey was that my emotional black sack became a lot emptier, making me less easily triggered (although I’m human, and it still happens!) And I also developed greater emotional resilience.
Today, I notice that many of the things I once found hard, I no longer do, and when life throws its challenges at me, I’m more easily able to navigate through them. And I don’t mean in an emotionally detached or shut-down way, but by staying emotionally open and present and moving through the feelings with as little resistance as possible.
The point about resilience isn’t that it necessarily means we experience fewer knocks in life, but that we’re better able to handle them when they do happen. We develop the flexibility to be tough when we need to be tough, and equally to be gentle when we need to be gentle. Life’s knocks move through us rather than getting stuck and held in our nervous system.
Ultimately, it’s this emotional resilience that determines whether our homeostatic balance shifts and we develop destructive, long-term coping strategies to attempt to manage this shift. And I’ve come to realize that just as there are critical ingredients for feeding our physical body – such as food, oxygen, and sleep – there are critical ingredients for the healthy development of our emotional body. It’s these ingredients that help fuel us to develop our emotional resilience.
As we discussed in Chapter 2, there are three core ingredients to emotional resilience which, as children, we’re entirely dependent on our parents or other caregivers to provide for us, but as we grow older, in healthy development, we can learn to meet for ourselves. The reality is that when our three core emotional needs are not met, we don’t learn how to be with our own emotions in a healthy way. When we’re unable to process our emotions, we end up with trauma.
So, let’s look in detail at these three core emotional needs that a child must receive to develop in a healthy way and go on to reach its potential. They are the need for boundaries, the need for safety, and the need to feel love. And please note that these are needs not wants. These are not preferences in life to support our healthy functioning, they’re essential for our basic development. They’re as important to our emotional body as food and sleep are to our physical body.
A boundary is a real or imagined line that indicates the limit or extent of something. A boundary separates self and other, inside and outside, and one nation from another. Healthy boundaries are critical to the functioning of almost every system on planet Earth.
One simple example is the immune system of our physical body, where it’s the job of our T cells to determine what’s a native cell and what’s a foreign invader. If the foreign cell is in any way a threat, our natural killer (NK) cells (which are from the same family as T cells) will respond quickly to protect us. Indeed, part of the way vaccinations work is in teaching our immune system how to better mount a protective response to a disease that crosses our boundary.
Just like our physical body, our emotional body also needs boundaries. It needs us to be able to say yes or no to people, experiences, or events. On the most fundamental level, as children these are boundaries to protect us from people or experiences that might harm us. However, early in our development as a child, we need to learn to take on this function for ourselves, as our own wishes and desires become clearer to us, and only we can know what they are.
In our development, we go through a few cycles where this is a psychological priority, the first of which is commonly referred to as ‘the terrible twos.’ This is when children are developing and practicing their ‘no,’ and it can often be at the expense of getting what they really want, because the experience of having their ‘no’ in the moment is developmentally more important.
Although it’s a source of deep frustration to parents everywhere, children don’t do what we say, they do what we do, as we’re their model for how to move through the world. So, as parents it’s almost impossible to teach children boundaries in any way other than modelling them for them.
And clear and predictable boundaries are a crucial ingredient for our feeling safe as a child. Furthermore, a parent who’s willing to establish and hold a boundary, particularly when it’s inconvenient to them, is ultimately sending the message, I love you enough to hold this boundary.
Of course, part of the great adventure of parenting is that the moments we need to be the most skillful and empathic are often those when we feel the least resourceful and the most like screaming ourselves. Indeed, children almost have a sixth sense for sniffing out vulnerability in their parents and exploiting it. So, what I’m about to say is in no way intended as blame; it’s just a statement of how things are. Parents, please be gentle with yourself as you read this – and I’ll do the same!
Children need strong, predictable, and consistent boundaries, held in a loving and sensitive way. Healthy boundaries teach us how to say yes and no to others, but also how to do the same for ourselves. If you’ve ever struggled with self-discipline – which in essence, is the ability to say yes or no to yourself – then the chances are you have an inner boundary issue.
As much as healthy boundaries need to be predictable and consistent, they also need to be responsive. When a boundary is constantly rigid and not sensitive to what it’s holding, it feels cold and cruel. When a boundary is held firmly but with a little give and take, and acts in a way that feels loving and sensitive, we feel truly supported.
For example, we may create a boundary with a child that says they need to go to bed at a certain time, and we hold this boundary predictably and firmly. But let’s say they’ve invited a friend for a sleepover and are having a riot together, their hearts bursting with joy. Shutting down the fun in a cold and insensitive way by holding the bedtime boundary is likely to unleash a world of rage. Equally, letting a child play until they can’t stand straight will cause everyone pain the following day.
So, the boundary needs to be sensitive, proportionate, and lovingly implemented, which doesn’t preclude an appropriately escalating enforcement if it isn’t heeded. Ultimately, the boundary giver needs to be attuned to the child’s emotional response, and to adapt and adjust the boundaries in a way that feels supportive and not crushing.
Boundaries are also like a muscle, and they grow by being exercised and challenged beyond their current comfort zone. This means that children need to have something to push against or challenge (such as being told ‘no’), because it helps them to grow their own sense of strength and to develop their will. Once again, this challenge needs to be appropriate, considered, and responsive to how it lands with the child.
On the flip side, a child being told they can do something (which they want to do), that they have what it takes and should go for it, is also important because it gives them the strength not to just grow and expand in their life, but also to meet the challenges they’ll inevitably face. In essence, there’s a power to both no and yes being used in the right way.
Of course, if we put too much strain on a muscle, we’ll injure ourselves, and the same is true of children. But growing courage and emotional strength does require appropriate challenge and the shaping of our sense of inner strength and capacity, which is why I believe the current trend of overly protecting children’s comfort is doing more harm than good.
Ultimately, when we learn how to establish and maintain healthy boundaries, we’re able to protect ourselves from potentially harmful situations, and when we do find ourselves in them, we’ll find it easier to extract ourselves. And when it’s time to commit to our own healing, we’ll have the self-discipline to say no to the distractions that arise and yes to the new habits and behaviors that will most support us.
The human body’s nervous system has two branches. The first is our sympathetic nervous system, which is designed to stimulate and activate our body for action. The second is our parasympathetic nervous system, whose job it is to rest, digest, and regenerate. When one system is activated, the other is deactivated. Both branches are necessary for survival, and a healthy balance between the two is at the heart of a healthy life, because too much of either has associated problems.
When we perceive danger in our inner or outer environment, our sympathetic nervous system is activated so we can fight or flight in response to it (we’ll look at this further in the next chapter.) However, when this sense of danger is constant or consistently overwhelming, this healthy survival mechanism, or ‘stress response,’ becomes maladaptive, and our nervous system can become stuck in a prolonged state of over-activation.
Our inner sense of safety as children has both a physical and an emotional component. We need to feel safe in the actual physical environment we’re in, but that alone isn’t enough. We can know that we’re not in physical danger yet feel emotionally unsafe. For example, if we’re around someone who constantly makes us feel judged or criticized, or we have a parent who’s emotionally unpredictable, our nervous system will become activated to protect us.
Sometimes the threat in the environment is real, and other times it’s a perceived threat, but the impact on our nervous system is the same. Indeed, our brain doesn’t distinguish between something that’s real and something that’s vividly imagined. Furthermore, as small children, we consider much of the world a threat, and rightly so: Everything from the family cat to the fireplace is a danger until we learn how to be safe around it.
What helps to soothe us in the face of these constant dangers is the comfort and holding from our primary caregivers. In the case of healthy development, when we feel scared, or the world feels overwhelming, we’ll return to our caregivers so they can reassure and comfort us. The comfort of our caregivers isn’t only in the physical protection of their embrace, there’s also a regulation that happens between our nervous system and theirs.1–4
However, if the caregiver we return to is themself not in a calm and soothing state, rather than merging with the comfort we need we actually merge with more stress.5–8 Furthermore, if they dismiss or chastise us for seeking that comfort and holding, we’ll learn that the world isn’t a safe place and that we’re wrong for seeking safety, and as a result, we may ‘shut down’ emotionally.9
If our emotional need for safety isn’t met when we’re young, we’ll find that as we get older, our nervous system’s resilience is diminished because it isn’t sufficiently conditioned to deal with life’s blows.
Just as plants need sunlight to give them life, human beings need love. There’s a huge body of research which demonstrates that when children are not given enough love, it impacts their development in almost every way.10–13
And it’s not just any kind of love that we need as children. It’s a specific kind – the love that ultimately helps us develop emotional resilience is unconditional love. When we’re raised to believe that our self-worth and value are linked to what we do and how we act, we end up on a dangerous treadmill of constantly chasing love, as opposed to relaxing into the knowing that it’s there as a foundation at the heart of who we are.
As children, to truly feel loved, we need to feel that we’re adored and loved in the deepest sense of the word. There are different ways of demonstrating and expressing love, but as always, the actions of caregivers are more powerful than their words.
One of the most powerful demonstrations of love is attention and interest. When a child knows that their caregiver is genuinely interested in them, that they want to and enjoy spending time with them, they will feel loved. And children are emotionally attuned – they can feel when a parent is going through the motions but not truly giving them their interest and attention.
Furthermore, words and actions alone are not enough. As children we also need to feel love, which means responsive and affectionate human touch that respects our boundaries when we express them. If we’re not touched and held as a child, and in age-appropriate ways as we mature, all the words and actions in the world may not be enough for us to truly feel that we’re loved.14–19
Feeling a sense of physical and emotional love is also not enough. As a child we need to feel special. We need to feel that we shine above everything else in our caregiver’s world – that we’re the apple of their eye. Now, one might argue that some parts of modern society have taken this principle a little too far, but ultimately, it’s a human need to feel that we matter in this way. Love isn’t just about being one of many, it’s about being witnessed and loved in our uniqueness and beauty.
When one core emotional need isn’t met, it will often impact the others. Indeed, there’s a direct connection in the sense that we need boundaries to feel safe, and we need to feel safe to relax enough to feel love. Equally, a sense of love may be what gives us the confidence to hold a boundary or allows us to feel safe.
Furthermore, for many of us, our life is the result of the interplay between these different needs, and they’re not being suitably met. In my own life, my sense that the world was unpredictable and dangerous, due to my sister’s behavior, the lack of physical holding, and the lack of support in cultivating my strength due to the absence of my father, left me very vulnerable to being bullied at school.
I was normalized to violence and abuse, but I didn’t have the strength necessary to stand up for myself. And my emotional neediness meant that on some level, I craved the attention that being bullied brought. In a perverse way, at least I was being seen and I felt special.
Now, of course, there are degrees with these emotional needs, and as we touched on in the last chapter, many of the struggles will be covert traumas. We don’t need to be physically beaten to feel a lack of safety, and we don’t need to be given abusive boundaries for our sense of strength to be diminished.
To help increase your understanding of where you’re currently at, let’s explore which core emotional needs you did or didn’t have met as a child. Answer the following questions using the worksheet in your free companion course at www.alexhoward.com/trauma.
What did you discover about yourself from completing this exercise? Did you get the boundaries, safety, and love that all children need? If not, that’s OK. A key trajectory of our work together is for you to learn to meet these needs for yourself and increase your emotional resilience.
I recognize that you may have found the exercise difficult. For many of us, realizing that as children our fundamental needs were not met can be both shocking and deeply upsetting, as our heart longs for what we needed and deserved. If that’s true for you, please be gentle with yourself.
We’ll talk more about the key relationships in our life in the final part of the book, but I’d like to point toward something specific now. When we feel a particular deficiency in an emotional need, we can unconsciously search for someone to meet that need in an intimate relationship.
For example, let’s say we have poor boundaries and people walk all over us. As a result, we may find ourselves in a relationship with someone who’s too strong and pushes through others’ boundaries. On one level, there’s a sense of relief for us in being with someone ‘strong’ who can protect us from other people, and even though they may disrespect and push through our own boundaries, there’s also a strange familiarity in being related to in this way.
Ultimately, for our inner life and intimate relationships to work, we must learn to meet these needs inside ourselves. That’s not to say that our intimate relationships can’t help in supporting these needs, but they can’t be the primary way that we meet them. Not having our core emotional needs met in childhood doesn’t give us the best start in life, but we can learn to meet them for ourselves now, with practice and the right guidance.
Bringing this all back to the ECHO way of thinking, the context within which the events of trauma happen is vitally important. How those around us, and we ourselves, respond to an event has a huge impact. Let’s take the cases of two children who experience something as tragic as losing their mother.
In the first case, the family members are so consumed by their own sense of loss and grief that they pay little attention to the needs of the child. Indeed, seeing them upset may be too painful to witness and so they shout at them for crying. As a result, the child feels unsafe in their feelings and lacks a sense of adoration and care from those around them. They start acting out to get attention, and there are no boundaries that say, we love you enough to say no.
In the second case, the child isn’t only given the physical and emotional holding they need, but they’re also actively encouraged to have and to experience their emotions. When they feel sad, they’re held in their tears, and the constant message is that they’re loved and held. When they’re caught acting out to get attention, they’re given firm boundaries to adjust their behavior, but from a place of kindness and care.
Child one will likely go through life with a jacked-up nervous system through constantly running from how they feel, and all kinds of other negative outcomes resulting from their attempts to compensate for and avoid their pain.
Child two, as much as they’ll deeply miss their mother, is held in the processing of their emotions and given the holding in their environment to limit the damage to many other areas of their life. Their pain isn’t necessarily less at the time, but its impacts in their life are vastly different to child one’s.
I hope that by having read this chapter and completed the exercise you can now make more sense of how your childhood has shaped and challenged aspects of your adult life. More importantly, knowledge is power, and now that we’re getting deeper into understanding what’s shaped you, we can also go deeper into how to support healing.
And, as you’re likely now realizing, the true damage of not getting our needs met in childhood isn’t what happens in childhood, it’s how it shapes us for the rest of our life. Ultimately, how we learn to relate to ourselves in our adult life is set up by these core emotional needs.
Our primary caregivers might not be around every day, but what we learn from them is. And until you deliberately change it, the chances are you’re continuing to respond to yourself emotionally in the way that you were responded to. And that’s exactly what we need to change. That’s how we unlock your future from the limitations of your past.
Now it’s time to get into the third of the four stages of trauma. In the next chapter we’ll explore how our traumas affect the homeostatic balance of our nervous system, and the enormous impact this can have in our life.