Making Sense of How You’re Wired
“Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
“This is going to sound strange,” Nora began as her eyes widened, “but there’s something about me saying ‘thank you’ to my husband that feels scary.”
Nora, a client of mine in her early thirties, had been telling me about how her husband, Cliff, had accompanied her to a doctor’s appointment the previous day. It was an anxiety-filled moment for her; she was getting the results of a mammography for a lump in her breast she’d found recently. In an uncharacteristic show of support, her husband had offered to go with her to the appointment. He sat beside her as they listened to the doctor give the test results. To their shared relief, she received a clean bill of health.
As they left the appointment, Nora felt the tension that had filled her body for the last few days begin to dissolve and make way for an upwelling of gratitude. She was grateful for her health and especially for her husband’s care and concern, given all the marital strife that had been the stuff of her life for so long. They’d been working so hard to shift out of the negative patterns they’d been caught up in, and things between them finally seemed to be improving.
Nora wanted to thank Cliff to let him know just how much it meant to her that he’d been there for her when she really needed him. She recalled how I’d recently encouraged her to let her husband know how much she appreciated the efforts he was making to better their relationship and respond to her needs. Nora felt a “thank you” roll around the tip of her tongue, readying itself to be expressed, but her lips wouldn’t separate. She couldn’t get the words out. As she later described the feeling to me, she said it was as though a force field had enveloped her, freezing her body with fear and preventing any appreciation from being communicated openly.
Nora’s eyes filled with tears as she recounted what had happened. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, looking at me bewildered and shaking her head. “Why couldn’t I just say thank you?”
It was a good question. Why would uttering a simple “thank you” to her husband feel dangerous to Nora? I knew that the answer wasn’t something we could reliably get to by merely thinking about it. To get to the heart of the matter, we needed to consult the wisdom of Nora’s body.
“Well, it may not make sense on a rational level,” I explained, “but clearly something about expressing gratitude to Cliff really scares you. That’s what we need to pay attention to. Your body seems to know more about what’s going on than your head.”
“Let’s try something,” I suggested. “Close your eyes, and picture that moment with Cliff. Imagine trying to thank him and just notice what happens inside of you. What do you feel?” Nora closed her eyes and recalled that moment. Within seconds she was in touch with something; her eyes opened quickly and widened with fear. “What’s coming up for you?” I asked.
“My chest feels tight, and my heart is racing. It’s that same panicky feeling I get sometimes.”
“What’s so scary?” I wondered aloud empathically and then pointed her toward the answer. “Ask the fear, not your head.”
“It feels like something bad is going to happen,” Nora replied. “I don’t know … like I’m going to be rejected.”
What’s Actually Going On
What’s going on with Nora? What’s making her feel so afraid? She’s been longing for her husband to be more present and engaged, and to put her and their relationship first. You’d think the gratitude she’s feeling would just flow right out of her. Instead, when the opportunity presents itself, why does expressing her feelings frighten Nora? Why is she afraid to be emotionally open and to connect more deeply with her husband?
For that matter, how is it that so many of us become this way—afraid of being emotionally open in our relationships?
This is certainly not how we start out in life. Our ability to express ourselves openly and connect with others is apparent from the time we’re born, and it expands by leaps and bounds during the first few years of life. Over the last few years, I’ve had a front row seat to this developmental phenomenon while spending time with my adorable nephew Ethan. Apart from being totally enamored with him (which, I confess, I am), I’m repeatedly struck by how readily and vividly he experiences and communicates his emotions. He smiles and laughs with delight when he’s happy, cries when he’s sad, and gets angry when frustrated in some way. His face lights up with love and affection when he sees his parents, and he reaches out for contact and reassurance when he’s afraid. It’s amazing to witness the simplicity and clarity of his feelings and his natural capacity to communicate and connect emotionally.
This emotionally expressive child wonder provides such a stark contrast to Nora and to so many adults whom I encounter both professionally and personally. Of course, the manner in which we express our feelings becomes more sophisticated as we grow and mature. With the right kind of help, we learn how to manage our feelings and communicate our experience verbally. But if we’re born emotionally uninhibited, what happens to us? How do we become so afraid of sharing our feelings with others? How do we lose this ability to be in touch with our feelings and connect emotionally?
The answer can be found by looking at our earliest relationships.
Wired to Connect
Attachment theory, one of the most empirically supported perspectives on human development and relationships, explains how our early emotional experiences with our parents shape who we are, how we see the world, and how we behave in relationships. Initially proposed by renowned British psychiatrist John Bowlby, it is based on the assertion that as human beings our need to be in a close relationship with someone is fundamental to our existence.1 It starts from the time we’re born and continues throughout our lives. Our primary instinct, wired in by millions of years of evolution, is to seek contact, comfort, and connection.
At no point in our lives is this more apparent than when we are just born. As infants, we come into the world completely helpless, entirely reliant on our parents to take care of us, to bathe, clothe, and feed us, to soothe our fear and distress, and to protect us from harm. In addition, our social and emotional development is dependent on our parents being attuned, responsive, and engaged with us. Unlike other mammals, it takes years of nurturing support before we humans are able to make a go of life on our own.
Our caregivers are of utmost importance to us. They provide our lifeline. It’s no wonder then that we are biologically programmed to develop and build a connection with them. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t survive. Literally.
It follows that maintaining a secure attachment with our caregivers is a high-stakes matter, and the drive to do so overrides all of our other primary needs. In short, we do whatever it takes to stay connected to them in order to prevent the possibility of loss or abandonment, which is the equivalent of death to an infant or child. Our infant “M.O.,” so to speak, is all about maintaining a secure connection with our primary caregivers at all costs.
One way we experience that connection is through actual physical closeness. For instance, when our parents hold us or take our hand, or when we reach out and make physical contact. This is particularly true when we are infants, and physical contact is a primary source of connection. However, the main way we experience a connection with our caregivers and how it gets wired in is through emotion. We sense and experience connection and disconnection through our feelings and the emotional responses they engender as well as through the feelings of others.
As babies, we don’t have words to express what’s going on with us. Instead everything is communicated through feelings, and feelings are expressed nonverbally—through the “language” of the face, the eyes, and the body, and through touch, sounds, vocal tones, and rhythms. We let others know about our experience by expressing our feelings physically, and in return we learn about others by sensing and reading their feelings.
In the best of circumstances, our caregivers are emotionally available and respond to our communications in an attuned way, delighting in our joy, soothing our fears, and lovingly meeting our needs for closeness and care. When we express ourselves and experience a sense of engagement and understanding from our caregivers, we feel seen, heard, and validated. When we are emotionally in sync, we feel close, connected, and on secure ground. We feel safe. In this way, attachment and emotion are inextricably linked—connections are formed and maintained through emotional experiences.
Now, I’m not suggesting that our parents had to be perfect all the time and meet our every emotional expression with one hundred percent empathic attunement. That’s just not humanly possible. Of course, there were moments when they were distracted, anxious, or irritated, or when their initial response was less than ideal. But if our caregivers are able to recognize what happened, reengage, and repair the disconnection, then together we get back on track and continue onward with our relationship and ourselves intact.
In fact, studies have shown that when our caregivers are able to navigate emotional ruptures with us, it actually strengthens our connection to them and makes us feel more secure in the world. We come to learn that our relationship can weather disruptions. The road may get rocky at times, but our bond will endure. This lesson is of utmost importance. Knowing that we’ll find our way even if things go awry helps build our sense of internal security. After all, if you’re assured that the relationship will go back to normal after the storm has passed, there’s good reason not to worry too much about it.
Countless repetitions of optimal back-and-forth emotional exchanges with our parents, in which feelings are expressed, registered, and responded to, not only help us feel connected and secure in our connection but also provide the experiences through which we learn how to understand and make good use of our emotions. In fact, our emotional development directly reflects our parents’ capacity to help us cope with and manage our feelings, especially when those feelings are intense or overwhelming, which is often the case in infancy and childhood.
When our parents help us regulate our emotions—that is to calm the intensity, stay present, and work through the experience—we eventually develop the ability to deal with our feelings ourselves in a healthy way. We develop an internal capacity to regulate and make good use of our emotions. The broader the range of feelings we learn to manage when we’re children, the larger and more flexible our emotional range will become as we grow and develop. Having that flexibility is a very good thing: As studies in emotional intelligence show, knowing how to manage and make good use of our feelings paves the way for success in life and in our future relationships.2
Unfortunately, many of us grow up with parents who are uncomfortable with some or all emotions—both their own and those of others.
That’s when things go awry.
As babies we’re extremely sensitive to the emotional cues we receive from our caregivers: what we see in their faces, their eyes, what we sense in their bodies. When our parents are uncomfortable with certain feelings and react negatively to them, even subtly, we pick up on this. For instance, when our anger offends them and they admonish us, or when our fear irritates them and they get impatient or annoyed. Another example is when our need for closeness overwhelms them and they withdraw. When we sense any sort of discomfort on the part of our caregivers, we get scared. Our caregivers’ discomfort signals a threat of abandonment to our exquisitely perceptive nervous system. Thus, we keenly sense and learn from our earliest experiences which feelings and behaviors are acceptable to our parents and which ones aren’t. We recognize which feelings make our parents uncomfortable and which ones bring them pleasure. And, more importantly, we become experts at which feelings draw and keep our parents close and which ones upset them or cause them to pull away.
Motivated by our innate drive to stay connected and the distress we experience when we’re emotionally disconnected, we adjust our emotional repertoire accordingly. We either suppress the feelings that threaten connection, or we heighten those that keep our caregivers engaged. In short, we do whatever it takes to keep Mommy and/or Daddy close.
Isolated or occasional negative responses from our caregivers don’t tend to have long-lasting effects, especially if the parents repair the disruption with attunement and connection and reengage in a more helpful way. But repeated patterns of unfavorable responses can cause children to exclude or distort the feelings that seem likely to cause a negative reaction from their caregivers and maybe even exaggerate those that seem to assure a sense of connection.
Suppressing or heightening certain feelings as children is quite adaptive since those responses help us stay connected to our parents and thus maximize the caretaking and connection we get. But these survival strategies come at a high cost: They compromise our inborn ability to feel, communicate, and share our core feelings. Over time, our development is thwarted, and our emotional and interpersonal capacity is diminished. We end up cut off from a fuller experience of ourselves and of our relationships.
Nora’s Early Emotional Experience
Beneath Nora’s fear of expressing gratitude toward her husband was a well of feelings. Love, vulnerability, sadness, and longing for closeness and connection to name just a few. These were feelings she had long ago learned to suppress and conceal; they were too dangerous to have when she was growing up. Early on in our work together, as I helped Nora turn down the dial on her anxiety and make room for the feelings inside her, a picture of her early life emerged that began to shed light on the origins of her current struggle.
Nora was born into an unsettling and unstable environment. Her mother, barely twenty, and her father, thirty-five, were not married and had a rocky relationship. While Nora’s father was seldom around, when he was his attention was consumed by Nora’s mother. Nora longed for her father’s attention. To be seen, cared for, and loved by him. But he was frequently distracted and seemed to have little patience. Occasionally pleasant toward one another, her parents spent most of their limited time together arguing. Nora was also shocked to learn later that her father had a family with another woman in town and spent most of his time with them.
After many failed attempts at trying to make their relationship work, Nora’s parents decided to go their separate ways when she was six. The memory of their painful goodbye haunted Nora as she grew into adulthood, the moment vividly etched in her memory and never too far from her awareness. She could still see herself and her mother boarding the train, which would take them to her grandmother’s house, while her father remained outside on the station platform. Feeling heartbroken and abandoned, Nora stared at her father through the window of the train as it pulled away, his sullen face growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared in the distance. She sat motionless in her seat, filled with unbearable sadness. Inside her, a growing sense that there must be something wrong with her, that she must be unlovable and unworthy began to take root. After all, Nora’s six-year-old mind reasoned, why else would he let her go? Nora never saw her father again.
Nora’s mother, the one constant in her early life, was anxious and unpredictable. In many ways, she was still a girl herself, preoccupied with her own concerns and developmentally unready for the job of parenting.
Because she was a fearful person, Nora’s mother could be overprotective, gravely warning Nora of the dangers of the world and giving her explicit instructions on how she should protect herself from harm. But rather than feel safe and protected, her mother’s cautionary tales only exacerbated in Nora a looming sense of danger that something bad would happen.
While she could be loving at times, her mother was usually distracted and oblivious to Nora’s emotional needs and attempts to gain her attention. When she did notice, she often seemed irritated and would react in a dismissive way, sometimes criticizing Nora for being silly or unreasonable. On one particular occasion, Nora recalled leaning over to kiss her mother’s arm after her mother had bumped it against something and seemed to have hurt herself. Her mother, unable to control her distress and receive her daughter’s affection, lashed out. “Don’t touch me!” she blurted out as she pulled away, leaving Nora feeling confused, hurt, and ashamed.
Perhaps trying to make up for when she’d been neglectful or reacted badly, Nora’s mother would also occasionally swoop in out of nowhere with a dramatic show of affection. While you might think this change in behavior would be a welcome occurrence for Nora, more often than not, it felt excessive and smothering—more about her mother’s needs and less about her own. It didn’t give Nora the kind of sensitive and attuned love and care that she needed.
Never quite sure what to expect and fearful of possibly being shamed or rejected, Nora learned to avoid explicitly communicating her needs for closeness and care and to inhibit any show of affection. However, her innate need for connection was too strong to contain and found its way out in the form of behavioral ticks and inexplicable ailments. Not realizing her daughter’s behavior had an emotional basis, her mother would take her to the doctor, trying to get it to stop or get some medicine to make the symptoms go away. It was the one thing that would reliably get Nora’s mother to engage with her.
As a child, Nora learned what would bring her mother close and what would drive her away. In a fundamental way, Nora learned to dismiss her own emotional needs and stuff down any feelings that might make her mother uncomfortable, engender her disdain, or set her off. Nora did what she needed to do to keep her mother happy and to feel a sense of connection with her. Underneath it all, she was suffering, longing to be cared for, comforted, and embraced in a whole and unconditional way. Her natural affection had nowhere to go. It was a valid way for a child to cope with an untenable situation, and it helped Nora get through her early years with her family as best as she could.
Over time this pattern of pleasing others and neglecting her own feelings became her standard way of responding and, therefore, left Nora disconnected from her emotional experience as well as from those she was closest to, including her husband. The pattern that had helped her maintain a connection with her mother as a child had now become a liability.
As I helped Nora become more emotionally mindful of what was going on inside of her, she began to see how hard it was for her to be vulnerable with her husband, to let her more loving feelings show, and how, in a way, she’d become imprisoned by her fear of being rejected or dismissed. Underneath it all, she longed to be cared for and embraced in a whole and unconditional way, and, as she put it, “be the person that I really am.”
Outdated Wiring
You might be wondering why Nora’s fear would persist. After all, she’s a grown woman now and doesn’t have to worry about her mother’s reactions. Besides, even if her husband were to react badly to her showing her softer side (not likely, actually), she should be able and free to express how she feels regardless, shouldn’t she? There’s some truth to this line of thought. Nora is an adult, and she should feel safe and free to be her own person. The problem is that her brain is running on old programming and will continue to operate in this way until she’s able to recognize what’s going on with her and start to get some distance from her wired-in, preconditioned nervous system’s responses.
To make sense of these physiological dynamics in all of us, it helps to have a bit of an understanding about how the brain develops and works.
The human brain is a “social organ.” It thrives when it has stimulating, interactive experiences with other human brains. In fact, our infant brain, which is relatively unformed when we’re born, requires this emotional engagement with others in order for it to develop and mature. While genes determine the specific neuronal makeup of each brain, our experiences determine which neurons get activated. Without interpersonal brain-to-brain experiences, many of the neurons in our immature brains would wither and die. Connecting and relating with others in our environment gets our brain cells firing and wiring together to form the vast and person-specific neural circuitry of our brain—the programming, so to speak, that oversees how we operate.
The first few years of life form a critical period during which the brain is growing at a remarkable rate. The right hemisphere, the side of the brain that specializes in the nonverbal, expression, reception, and regulation of emotion, is the first to develop.
Our early life is spent in the world of the right brain: feelings, images, bodily sensations. The left hemisphere, which specializes in language and logical thinking, starts to develop a bit later. Evidence of its development is seen when babies become more verbal. The upshot of this sequence is that, for a fair amount of time, our right brain is running the show. There’s a whole lot of brain development happening during the time when our experiences are all about feelings—sensing, perceiving, experiencing, and expressing emotion. Furthermore, since most of our experiences are with our caregivers, our emotion-based interactions with them have a disproportionate impact on the very architecture of our brains.
Let’s take a closer look at what exactly happens.
As infants, our needs are fairly basic. Life is all about survival. We come into the world exquisitely attuned to whether or not we’re safe. In fact, the part of our brain that assesses the threat of danger and activates our “fight-flight-freeze” response, the amygdala, is up and running before we’re even born. From the get-go, we can tell how secure our little world feels and are prepared to respond if the need arises. If we don’t feel connected to our caregivers, if we sense that they are not emotionally available and responsive, we become anxious and distressed. Our amygdala sounds the alarm that our safety and well-being are in jeopardy, activates our nervous systems, and mobilizes us to take action. Through trial and error, responding emotionally in different ways, we figure out how we need to behave in order to keep our parents engaged as well as to gain a sense of security and feel safe. These emotional lessons of what works to maintain connection—and what doesn’t—get wired into our neural circuitry.
When our parents respond to our emotions in an attuned, accepting, and encouraging way, we come to associate our feelings and their expression with a positive sense of connection, and we feel safe to share them. For instance, when a mother meets her child’s sadness with empathy and concern, the child feels seen and cared for. Children learn that it is helpful to express their emotional pain, that it will bring them the comforting they need, that they will feel better, and that they can trust that someone will lovingly be there for them. My three-year-old nephew Ethan is fortunate in that he has very attuned, emotionally available caregivers; the result is that he is able to express himself so freely. In attachment terms, he would be seen as being “securely attached” to his caregivers.
If, on the other hand, the response to his emotional expressions were given in a way that raised his levels of anxiety, they would become linked in his memory with a sense of danger. For example, when a father gets frustrated or is irritated by his children’s fear and vulnerability and responds with impatience or dismissiveness, they learn that showing these feelings as well as the need for reassurance and care are dangerous. Instead of feeling seen and understood, children who are responded to in less than optimal ways come to feel that certain aspects of their emotional selves are bad and harmful and need to go away.
This is what happened with Nora. Her mother responded negatively to her need for affection and closeness and, in turn, Nora learned to suppress it out of fear of rejection.
For better or worse, the more a particular interaction is repeated during childhood, the stronger these associations and the related neural pathways become. As the saying goes, “neurons that fire together, wire together.”3 Eventually, depending on our experiences, either safety or fear becomes embedded in our brain’s circuitry as an automatic response to our feelings. These potent lessons about emotion and connection—about how relationships work and what we can anticipate—form instructional blueprints, or what Bowlby referred to as “internal working models,” that get stored outside of our awareness in our long-term memory.4 The effects of this hardwiring are powerful and long lasting.
Memory
There are two types of long-term memory, “explicit” and “implicit,” and they differ in a very important way. Information stored in explicit memory requires conscious effort on our part to be recalled. When you’re trying to remember what time you agreed to meet a friend for dinner or where you celebrated a particular birthday, you’re making use of explicit memory. In contrast, information stored in implicit memory requires no conscious effort on our parts to recall. Implicit memories are what afford us the ability to do things like ride a bike, button a shirt, or type on a keyboard without having to think about it.
Our early lessons about emotion and relationships get organized into mental models—schemas, templates, or maps—that are stored in the implicit memory, the only form of memory available to us when we’re infants. They contain a set of beliefs and expectations about our own and other’s people’s behavior, our self-worth, whether or not we’re lovable, and whether we can depend on others to be there for us (see sidebar). These internal working models persist into and throughout our adult life, coloring and shaping our perceptions of our partners and ourselves and guiding our responses without us even knowing it. In short, they develop into the unconscious programming for how we do relationships and are especially dominant when strong emotions get aroused.
INTERNAL WORKING MODELS
• Implicitly stored schemas or templates of how relationships work
• Are based on our early attachment experiences with our caregivers
• Contain a set of beliefs about who we are and what other people are like
• Tell us what to expect and what to do when we relate with a partner
• Unconsciously color our perceptions and guide our behaviors
It just so happens that the storehouse for these memories includes the part of our brain that assesses whether or not we’re in danger—our amygdala. What we might call a “threat detector,” the amygdala appraises our level of safety based on previous experiences.5 It scans our current situation and then runs a search through lessons stored in our neural files, our implicit memories, to see if there’s any cause for alarm. If it finds a match, even one that’s remote, it prompts us to respond as we have learned to do in the past. All of this takes place behind the scenes, outside the realm of our conscious awareness.
While this process has evolutionary value—better to be safe than sorry, even if we might be wrong, right?—it also can be a problem. When implicit memories are activated, they don’t come with a time stamp. We don’t realize that the surge in our nervous system is based on lessons from our distant past and might not be entirely relevant to the situation in front of us. Instead, we interpret what we’re feeling as a result of whatever is happening in the here and now and respond in the way we’re programmed to respond. We keep reacting as though we’re in danger, whereas, in reality, most of the times we’re not.
This is precisely what’s happening for Nora. She fears that she’s going to be rejected if she expresses her gratitude, but she isn’t.
Nora’s Wiring
Although Nora’s memory of her childhood gives us a pretty good idea of why she’s afraid to be emotionally open and vulnerable with her husband, the groundwork for her fear was set in place in events that occurred even earlier than the ones she remembers.
To illustrate how this process unfolds, let’s imagine what life might have been like for Nora when she was a baby. Given what we know about Nora’s mother, it’s reasonable to assume that the stress of having and caring for a tiny baby, mostly by herself, pushed her mother to her emotional limits. In addition, Nora’s mother brought to this experience her own attachment history—her own implicit memory bank of how her mother responded to her when she was an infant, which, in turn, affected how she responded to her own daughter. When Nora cried or fussed, as babies inevitably do, her mother may have felt overwhelmed or inadequate, reacted with discomfort, or pulled away. Maybe she got frustrated or angry with her. Perhaps she felt ashamed about her own inadequacy and, as a result, was shaming.
From baby Nora’s point of view, these responses implied the threat of abandonment (which would lead to death) and were terrifying. In response, her brain’s threat system lit up right alongside the parts of her brain that were activated by her initial feelings and behaviors (e.g., sadness, crying, reaching out), and these experiences became linked. Her brain encoded these associations between certain emotions and her mother’s fear-inducing responses into a neural network, which eventually got wired into her brain’s circuity.
In a very basic way, on a nonverbal level, Nora learned that expressing certain feelings was treacherous. If I’m vulnerable, Mommy gets anxious. If I’m upset, Mommy gets angry.
What was she to do to cope with such a challenging situation? Sensing these negative reactions and geared to do whatever she needed to do to survive, Nora adjusted her behavior accordingly to keep her mother connected, to keep her present, to minimize any discord, and to prevent being scolded. She did what she needed to do to stay connected and as safe as she could. In short, in order to survive she stopped herself from having certain feelings.
Seen through the lens of her early attachment experiences, Nora’s current struggle makes more sense. Her fear is triggered by implicit memories of early experiences in which having and showing her feelings was a scary prospect. Even though present-day circumstances are different, Nora’s brain still anticipates the same responses she experienced as a child. Her brain is wired in such a way that now, whenever she starts to feel certain feelings, her nervous system responds as though she’s in danger. As a result, Nora often feels anxious and afraid regardless of whether or not it’s warranted. That’s why she couldn’t bring herself to say “thank you” to her husband. It was just too scary to allow herself to be vulnerable in that way with him.
This is exactly what’s going on for those of us who are afraid to express our feelings and needs to others. The fear we have around being emotionally open and connected is an old fear based in the past, not in the present. Even though the fear itself is very much experienced in the here and now, our response is really the result of early programming. We’re still responding as though there’s a reason to be afraid and, in most instances, there isn’t.
While Nora was well aware of her fear in the present moment, she had no idea that her nervous system was being triggered by the past, and that’s true for many of us. We don’t realize that the reaction we’re having today was wired in a long time ago. To begin to separate out the influence of the past on our nervous system from the reality of the experiences of our present, it helps us to get a picture of what our early attachment experiences were like.
While many of the foundational experiences that shaped the wiring of your brain occurred further back then you can remember, chances are, the ways in which your parents reacted to and dealt with your feelings early on had a similar flavor to how they continued to respond to you throughout your childhood. Those later memories are likely more accessible to you. So, let’s take a moment to get a sense of the early emotional environment in which you spent your formative years and how your feelings were responded to by your parents as you were growing up. This was one of the first things that Nora and I did in our work together.
Take some time to consider these questions (separately for each parent):
• How did your parent(s) respond to your feelings?
• Were they generally open, attentive, and responsive to your feelings?
• Did they get uncomfortable or anxious when you expressed your feelings or certain feelings in particular (e.g., anger, sadness, fear, joy, and the like)?
• Did they get distracted or seem to ignore certain feelings?
• Were some feelings okay and others not? If so, which feelings were welcomed, and which weren’t?
• Did they get irritated, frustrated, or maybe even angry at times when you expressed your feelings?
• Were they shaming or admonishing toward your feelings in any way?
• Did they seem to take your feelings personally? Did you end up feeling as though you had to take care of them?
• How did they respond when you were afraid or feeling vulnerable? Did they comfort you? Did they protect you?
• How did they respond when you were angry and asserted yourself?
• How did they respond when you were affectionate and loving?
• Did they apologize and make amends when they hurt your feelings or reacted in an unhelpful way?
• Were their responses consistent or erratic?
• Could you rely on them to be there for you emotionally when you needed them?
• Did you feel loved? Seen? Valued?
• Overall, did it feel safe for you to share your feelings with them?
My Early Wiring
As you look over your answers to these questions, take some time to think about the implications of the messages that were either explicitly or implicitly conveyed by each of your parents’ behaviors. Are there messages that you unknowingly took to heart? Are they cemented into the beliefs that you have now? Do you see any similarities between your current behavior and what went on in your family? Let me give you an example from my own life of what I mean to convey through these questions.
I must have been around eight years old when I got caught up in some kind of heated, verbal struggle with my father. I don’t remember what had happened, but I recall that he was yelling at me. Needless to say, my father didn’t deal well with anger. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for him to explode at times in fits of rage. When that would happen, I was horrified.
Anyway, I’m not sure what I had done on this particular occasion that had gotten him so worked up, but I must have felt that he was being unfair in some way. I could feel the energy building up inside of me, and, as he turned his back on me to walk away, I blurted out, “I hate you!” Not an uncommon thing for a kid to say when feeling angry at his parents. What followed was, for me, the worst part. My father didn’t say anything. Not then, and not for several days. He gave me the silent treatment. He ignored all of my attempts to get his attention or to try to reconnect with him. He acted as if I didn’t exist. I felt alone, sad, guilty, and scared. As you can imagine, for a child of eight, it was an excruciating experience. It also wasn’t the only time I got the silent treatment.
Obviously, my father wasn’t a good role model for helping me to deal with anger constructively. Had he been, he might have asked me what was upsetting me so and would have helped me with my feelings. At the very least, he might have apologized for losing it and worked toward clearing things up between us. Instead, he responded in a way that was anxiety-provoking, guilt-inducing, painful, and the source of an indelible impression on me and my nervous system. In addition, the message here, conveyed through his behavior, was clear: Anger is bad and dangerous to a relationship; it brings disdain, loss of approval, and abandonment. That got wired in. It’s no wonder that I grew to feel anxious about anger, worried that I might have upset someone or about what would happen if I felt angry and spoke up or asserted myself with someone important to me. These fears followed me into my adult. relationships where any sign of conflict with a partner, friend, or authority figure ignited the internal sense of dread in me that I might be rejected, that our relationship was in jeopardy.
Anytime I felt angry an old sense of danger would reverberate in my system, and I’d start to question myself, inevitably rationalizing away whatever was bothering me, and, in so doing, avoiding the discomfort that came with the prospect of honoring my anger and asserting myself. Unable to feel or trust my true feelings, I kept repeating the same old patterns that got me nowhere.
It’s not that my father didn’t love me. I know now that he loved me very much.
However, he had a really hard time managing his emotions—the result of his own troubled early experiences in his family of origin. Surely something deep in his implicit memory had gotten triggered in that moment between us and had gotten the best of him, causing him to withdraw and shut down. A response that he wasn’t able to control and had a difficult time finding his way out of. Without any insight into what was affecting him, he was actually doing the best he could at that time. Fortunately he’s grown and changed a lot since then.
Fortunately so have I!
The case with your parents is probably the same—they did the best they could, given their own attachment experiences, the resultant issues, and how their brains were wired accordingly. What’s important to keep in mind here is that taking stock of your early experience is not about placing blame. We’re not trying to find someone to point a finger at. Rather, we’re trying to gain insights into how we’ve been shaped by our early experiences so that we can better understand our present-day reactions and behavior patterns. In doing so, we can more readily identify and separate out what’s old and archaic and can begin to make some room for something new.
Often, when people start to take stock of the effects of their upbringing, they begin to feel sad, angry, frustrated, or pained. It’s natural that you may feel so as well. Honoring whatever feelings you have is also not about blaming your caregivers. It’s about acknowledging and appreciating the truth of your early experience and how it has affected you. It’s also part of the process of no longer being constrained by old messages, by old wiring. Give those feelings a lot of room so that they can be felt and processed through. It’s an important step on the road to resolution and freedom.
As I worked with Nora in our session together to understand and manage her fear, she was able to trace it back to when it began. She saw herself as a little girl, alone in her room, missing her father, wondering why he had left, and wondering if her mother would ever be there for her in the way she hoped her to be. She saw more clearly how the fear she was feeling with her husband came from that old place. It wasn’t safe for her as a child to be vulnerable, to allow others to be important to her, to have needs for closeness. She had to put those desires away. She understood now why the prospect of opening up, leaning forward, and showing her gratitude to her husband filled her with dread. She felt that letting him know she needs him, values him, and depends on him, put her at risk. At least, that’s what her nervous system conveyed to her.
As the fear inside her started to settle, as she connected with her early experiences, she began to feel something inside her opening up. It was as though she could feel herself more solidly in the room with me, more as the adult she now was and less as the little girl. More her core self. “That’s not who I am,” she said. “I want to be able to express myself. I want to be close.”
Later that day, at dinner with her husband, she thought about our work together. She wanted to try being the person she sensed she could be. She wanted to take a risk and express her gratitude, to let her husband know how she feels. As she leaned into the present moment, the old fear started to stir a bit, but this time Nora knew where it was coming from. She looked over at her husband, her heart beating a little faster, took a breath and said, “Um, I meant to say this before, but … I just wanted to thank you for going with me to my doctor’s appointment. It meant a lot to me.”
Her husband smiled, reached out, put his hand on hers, and said, “Anytime.”
While there was more work for us to do together to help Nora more readily recognize and break free from the fears that had been governing her life, she’d taken an important step toward being able to identify and express her true feelings and connect with her husband in a more genuine and productive way. She was on her way toward having the kind of relationship she had always truly desired.
You’re already on your way as well. By thinking about the early environment in which you were raised, you’re beginning to shine the light of awareness and understanding on your own experiences.
Let’s move on to Chapter Two and take a closer look at what’s happening inside of you so that you, too, can start to disentangle yourself from outdated fears and free yourself to experience new possibilities.
• Our need to be in a close, secure relationship is innate and fundamental to our existence.
• Our brain is shaped by the early emotional exchanges and interactions we have with our caregivers.
• As infants, we’re exquisitely attuned to emotional cues and whether or not we’re safely connected to our caregivers.
• When our caregivers respond negatively to our emotions, those negative responses become linked in our memory with a sense of danger.
• As infants, we adjust our emotional repertoire by either suppressing the feelings that threaten our connection with our caregivers or by heightening those feelings that keep them engaged.
• Early lessons about emotion and connection are stored outside the realm of our awareness in implicit memory as working or mental models of how to function in relationships.
• Our brain continues to be malleable and open to growth, i.e., is plastic and can change over the course of our lives.
• New experiences in which we identify, manage, and constructively express our core feelings change the way our brains are wired.