Developmental trauma series

In the first few years of life, you were exposed to many novel experiences.
An attentive and attuned parent/caregiver is essential in helping you navigate these experiences.

One of the key areas your primary caregivers helped you develop is a differentiation between threat and excitement.

It’s the line between knowing something is exciting, but enjoyable or something causes arousal because a real threat is present.

When our environment growing up is chaotic and lacks consistent feedback between safety versus threat our emotions and felt sense can become confused or even numbed. Limiting our ability to differentiate between experiences.

In other words, how your parents/caregivers responded to people and environmental cues, plus how they guided you in experiencing these, will have a major impact on how you perceive and respond in the world. It’s encoded in your nervous system.

The system feels unsafe in adult life, and because of this, it cannot accurately recognise safety when it’s available.

That’s why you often may feel anxious when something is good and that’s also one of the reasons joy and other positive experiences can feel overwhelming or/and threatening.

My intention in writing this is not to blame parents/caregivers. It’s to help you understand your own experience in an objective way.

Education and knowledge is a very important aspect of your healing journey.
As an adult, with this new knowledge, you can start to take the necessary steps toward healing these disruptions that occurred in your foundational years.

This type of “repair” can only happen somatically (through the body), because of the early stages of development.

I hope this information has helped you complete another part of your “healing puzzle.”