This is like a puppy needing shelter from a cold rain, but to a human child. The rain is shame wrapped up in our worth. Are we lovable? Can we keep up? How do we manage that at that age of say, three or four or we haven't even discussed what happens earlier? So who out there remembers what it felt like to get an answer wrong after you raised your hand in class?
Who remembers the pain of not? Keeping up with an older kid or an older sibling, and why is that so important to a small child? We really have to think about that. Why is it getting ahead or being part of so important? It's appropriately kind of childish. It's their work. They're actually saying, put me into the big stuff, like I can handle this.
That's what a little kid is saying. So quick disclaimer about this video. We're gonna be talking about some hard to hear situations that children experience in their childhood trauma that will be affecting their emotional security in through adulthood. So a bit of a trigger warning there. The other piece I want to let you know about is the work that I do is past focus that we explore through our present triggers.
If I talk about, say, an attachment insecurity issue in childhood. It might feel like I'm dismissing your present relationship problems with somebody that might be difficult, but both past and present things are true, but we're really exploring our childhood past in this work, which getting insight on or getting help around can make your present situation better.
Whenever I say something called real or imagined throughout this video, I'm meaning the issue can potentially just be in our head, like a trigger or projection. Or can also be a present big problem with someone in our present life, but it's not one or the other. And I find that trying to fix something like our attachment issues without the conversation around our childhood trauma creates a dead end in our recovery.
But often, and I get this, that people just wanna know about how do I fix my present stuff, which I get too. I'm just focusing the channel on how our childhood trauma affects that stuff. So let's dive into this. Does anyone remember playing a board game when you were a kid called Shoots and Ladders? On your turn in the board game, you spin this wheel and you get a number from one to six, and you move to a spot on the board that's numbered one to a hundred.
If you land on a ladder, which is pretty cool, you jump ahead from like, say spot 17 to 33, and hopefully you eventually land on the final spot of 100 and you win the game, or maybe your first one there when you land on the shoots though. Which is a slide in the game and you end up way behind the others and picture little kids playing this.
Say you were at Spot 33 and you hit a shoot, and now you're back at Spot two, and now your friends are up on Spot 67 and somebody else in the group is close to winning the game at a hundred. For little kids, the game gets pretty emotional because someone is always doing better than they are, and kids being little humans, they assume that their playmates are doing better because they are better, like they're a better kid than you are.
Does anyone remember that feeling about your friends and childhood that they were just. Better or somehow they had what you didn't have. A 4-year-old doesn't understand that spinning a wheel is about chance shoots and ladders is not a skill-based game. It's just kind of winners and looters by chance, which doesn't sound very fun, but it's just a board game.
And important note is, is that when we're little. We developmentally feel the need to win because it's tied to forming a healthy sense of self. It's a healthy sense of ego. So being first is really important to a three or a 4-year-old winning shoots and ladders, or say having a parent react well to our drawings when we're little is about developing a sense that we exist in the world and that we're good and that we're doing good things.
We're also battling this inherent human emotion of shame. That just comes with being born at the same time as trying to figure out if we're lovable or not. So this stuff is really important. This is like a puppy needing shelter from a cold rain, but to a human child. The rain is shame wrapped up in our worth.
Are we lovable? Can we keep up? How do we manage that? At that age of say, three or four, or we haven't even discussed what happens earlier. So who out there remembers what it felt like to get an answer wrong after you raised your hand in class? Who remembers the pain of not keeping up with an older kid or an older sibling?
And why is that so important to a small child? We really have to think about that. Why is it. Getting ahead or being part of So important. It's appropriately kind of childish. It's their work. They're actually saying, put me into the big stuff, like I can handle this. That's what a little kid is saying. How did it feel though, to be the first one out in dodgeball or kickball when you were playing a game with other kids, say in third or fourth grade?
Games are learning and socialization, yet they're vulnerable experiences for children, and I'm not saying they all cause trauma, although like fourth. Grade dodgeball or team picking, like when you were lined up to be picked on a team certainly felt barbaric and kind of Lord of the Flies, like Lord of the Flies is a movie about kids getting stuck on a desert island fighting for dominance.
If you already are upset, don't Google it. Don't YouTube it. Forget I said anything about it. Don't worry about it. It's pretty awful. Growing up, I would see more secure kids. Who to me, had more secure home lives be able to dive into those games or life more comfortably. Like related to that trauma is also about a child not being helped or prepared to manage the chutes and ladders in our lives.
Helping them manage the reign about becoming a person that they're trying to do play is a way we're becoming somebody. The stakes are so much higher for kids who aren't safe, say a child is. Being physically hit at home by a parent about their natural upset to losing a game with their siblings. That happened to many of us growing up or being ignored when we're upset as a small child, which is often just as damaging.
And I'm not saying a parent has to respond to every discomfort that their child is experiencing, but that is very different to a child not having a safe, emotional home base at home. Or at all with a parent again, while they're trying to become a person. Getting to the point of this video picture that child subconsciously getting stuck in the chutes and ladders in their lives with those high stakes that carry on through their adulthood, like not feeling secure and terrified of the shoots because the shoots are gonna feel like evidence about something about you.
Like when we played, when we were four. Where they're vigilant about the shoots and they actually don't believe the ladders are gonna help them or get them closer to the winning. But in reality, the ladders are very helpful in life. But we can't take in the ladders because we're so preoccupied with the shoots, if that makes sense.
And I'm not saying we're childish. Or that we're a complete mess or victimy, or that we are choosing not to handle what other people seem to handle. Take this in. That is all just noise and BS from the outside world, especially when that outside world doesn't get childhood trauma. I am saying though, that those who grow up in physical and emotional and sexual abuse, they have to fight a lot harder to hide the insecurity and.
That is more about the shoots and they don't trust the ladders and maybe their peers don't have to fight so hard to do that. Like what it felt like to me in my experience. Imagine a group of four year olds playing this game and one of them was already told at home that morning that they're selfish or that they don't have any common sense, or that they're treated with like intense contempt, or one of those children didn't sleep very well because their parents had a violent fight the night before.
All without any repair or reconnection or soothing. Or maybe they didn't know if one of their parents was actually safe when they were playing this game. How might that child feel when one kid on their team on the that's playing a game spins a six, just a few steps away from winning at a hundred. And the child who's really struggling spins a one and they're in last place, and on the next move they land on a shoot, which takes them from 34 to 17.
Do you think that they're gonna feel like they have a chance to winning against the kids who seem more confident? Would you conclude that they're a better kid? If you were that kid all the while there, again, they're trying to become a person in the world and the other kids are kind of doing the same, but might they feel like everything is unfair.
So juxtapose against that scene, imagine having lived your first 18 years of life by having a healthy parent who can help you manage and soothe your emotions. Ranging from not winning a game at say, three or four to managing, say your first breakup with somebody at age 17 or managing a nasty boss at your first grocery store who's kind of inappropriate with you as a teen, or manage your body changing, or even if they're getting you away from an unsafe other parent and they're able to talk to you about it.
Insecurity isn't a choice. It's often our history that we're trying to deal with or we need to deal with. The traumatic events can be at home or out and about in the world. Life is actually pretty traumatic, but it's about not having kids stay in their trauma responses and where they have to live from a very unsure and insecure place is really what counts related to our childhood.
Here are some common quick examples about emotional insecurity in our adulthood. Let's say you go on a job interview and you're extremely anxious and you freeze due to a childhood trauma response, and you end up not getting the job because you weren't your best. That's gonna be negative feedback, which is what I'm gonna be talking about later.
Another example is a common one, is you want real intimacy, but you can't stop asking the person you're dating if they're mad at you, which kind of can get old and sour the relationship that's abandonment stuff and insecurity stuff. Another example is you're trying to parent your kids from a better place.
But you really get triggered when other parents don't seem to struggle like the way that you do. That's about feeling not good enough and comparing ourselves to others. Let's see, and another one is you wanna speak up or set a boundary and give your opinion to someone, but you don't trust yourself and you end up missing your chance to speak or you default to the opinions of someone else.
And I know this feels exhausted. Some other quick lifelong patterns is a pattern feeling that. People do things to you on purpose instead of them being human, like forgetting to hold a door open for you. A pattern of noticing differences. That last one, real or imagined? Remember what I said in the beginning?
A pattern of noticing differences instead of similarities in people comparing ourselves instead of relating. Is another sign, a pattern of feeling like you're forgotten about in the world. Notice how all of those examples are about wanting something greater in our life and putting energy into that, but it feels like you're landing on a lot of shoots and you're not getting ahead where you want to be as a person.
And to be honest, we just want what everyone else wants where it's very normal. But those examples, they are also about us not trusting our ability to handle things in life. To go after what we want. But the thing is, and probably the most important thing in this video, when we land on a shoot as a child, a trauma survivor, we interpret it as a confirmation about something defective within us.
So much so that everything will look and feel like a shoot in our life. And again, related to all that, I'm not saying that people aren't jerks because that's an issue in society. I'm not saying there aren't. Big differences, especially in this late stage capitalistic thing that we're in, or a patriarchal system.
That's a big issue about fairness and equality and equity. The adult winning shoots and ladders is the person in our present life who maybe they bought a house early with help from parents, or they can afford their health insurance, or maybe they can simply afford their rent. These are very real things.
So again, I'm not trying to minimize your experience. I'm also not saying that society isn't set up in terms of winners and losers. That is also a very big issue, and it feels like a lot like shoots and ladders, and incidentally, that game is a game of chance, but real life, there are real things about socioeconomic poverty.
It's not always about sort of chance, is what I'm saying. What I am saying is. This might be all we have to control right now is our emotional security issues or our work that our present insecurity issues can maybe be fueled by our emotional insecurity from our family of origin. Stuff like it's very hard to feel confident in a job interview if you've been told you're an F up.
Your whole life is kind of like what I'm getting at. That's the focus of the channel. Here are some more examples, what I'm calling graceful exits. What would be the difference between someone who is emotionally secure and someone who is struggling with emotional insecurity? And these are coming from my own life.
So thinking of this, and I know this sounds weirdly specific, but I know people might struggle with emotional security based on how. Things, do they stay in conversations or feel trapped in conversations because they don't want to look like they're being rude or insensitive? If they exit the conversation, might they stay in relationships longer than they need to because they don't want to seem like they're being mean or abandoning the other person, or they might be worried about.
Being alone and they can't tolerate being alone, so they stay longer. Do they feel the need to burn something down in order to have permission for themself to leave? Something like, do you need to burn a job down or a relationship down, or You're dead to me, kind of stuff. Or leave a friendship instead of just sort of saying, no thanks, this is not for me.
Do they need to build a case about how someone or a job is a bad person? To justify their leaving? Do they stay in a job because they don't wanna abandon others in the job? Those who don't struggle with those things can make decisions for themselves on their own wellbeing without feeling that cold, rain, intense shame about the consequences of their choices on others like leaving a job.
So being forthright and self preserving at the same time is hard for those who have childhood trauma. We also have really poor modeling to go on. So it's sort of like you might burn a lot of bridges because that's how your parents rolled. So let's explore some ideas on rebuilding security that we didn't get to choose.
We're not choosing to struggle with this stuff, like it's not a moral problem. So here are four different security categories in our adult lives and these, these are how I see them. This is my opinion. Others might have different takes on this. So I'm gonna get into these four emotional security issues.
One is. Self-worth compared to others, which is important, which is our ability to maintain our worth in context of others. The next is receiving feedback. What is said and what we hear might be very different things. The third one is romantic attachment is our ability to stay connected to self. And others.
And lastly is something I'm calling emotional confidence. How much time do you lose to fear and anxiety and upset and sensitivity? So in each category I'm gonna talk about what the insecurity issues specifically look like in our adult lives. Next I'm gonna talk about how the insecurity issues come from potentially our childhood.
And lastly, I'm gonna be talking about potential healing, some specific interventions that you might like or you might not like. So keep thinking about these in context of shoots and ladders for each one. Also, there's no way for me to cover or hit, or. Playing the complexity of human insecurity in one video or emotional security.
So I'm gonna do my best to go as deep into this topic as I can, but I'm just little old me on a planet with 8 billion of you, so I'm not gonna be able to cover everything, is what I'm trying to say. So here, let's dive into the first one, which is self-worth compared to others. What does. Self-worth insecurity look like.
It's really about feeling inadequate about our abilities or our goodness as a person. Again, think shoots and ladders what we have compared to others, like in their career or in relationships, or simply just seeing someone go after something or being able to see somebody like a peer handle. Something that we feel like we could never handle or we can never kind of manage because we don't feel worthy or we don't have the confidence to be able in that.
So think hyper vigilance. And confirming things about ourselves. Incidentally, I don't see this as jealousy, the self-worth thing, in my mind, jealousy is a lot of, why do you get to have that where this is kind of the insecurity that is more about, I'll never have that. The first one is feels more personal, like a conspiracy against us.
I'll never have that because I don't deserve it or I can't catch a break. In my mind, jealousy is rooted in kind of in an unfairness thing, and we can sometimes definitely feel that, but not necessarily always. Here are some examples and situations that trigger feelings of self-worth, because also these things can feel like just big things we worry at baseline and that we worry about.
Think of these things that come up in our inner child or our subconscious mind goes, see, I told you. Here are some examples. Reading into text messages and the speed to which someone responds to us. We take that as evidence about our worth. It's pretty human, but again, how intense is that for you? Might that confirm something about you or you're looking to con have it confirm something about you?
Another is getting really triggered around in groups and outgroups, like not being invited to lunch by a group of coworkers or having a friend who spends time with other. Friends and you feel like it confirms something about you seeing someone get like the house, the car, the kids, and get all that and education and everything they wanted in life.
When you might be a very late bloomer. Like myself, I was a late bloomer seeing someone on social media. So a lot of S words have experiences or a lifestyle that makes you feel really less than Ps. That stuff is really not real, but it can very much affect our sense of self-worth. Another is a pattern of wondering if people are mad at you.
It's kind of obvious stuff, but anxiety about something you said when you were trying to be like, say more authentic and intense shame about being real, or why did I say those things? Why do I even try? These can be real or imagined mistakes and the comparison is feeling like others have the right. To authenticity or others have the right to be mad at you and you don't.
One I forgot to mention is feeling insecure when we're not in a relationship as not being in one might confirm something to our subconscious or our inner child, which I see as the same kind of a thing in inner childhood, subconscious. How are the worth issues maybe related to our childhood? Some examples from our childhood about our self-worth and security.
So being a child of neglect. Where inclusion with engaged parents just didn't happen. And subconsciously neglected children know where they stand, meaning that they might believe a parent loves them because the parent tells them, but the child takes in that the parent really never spends time with them.
And it's like a message that the child might not be fully conscious to, but they're taking it in. Another is being a scapegoated child where having worth was impossible since you were listed as the family problem at all times. Another is experiencing being left. Behind at school due to neglect or at home, either around like not keeping up academically or struggling with a disability, uh, struggling with trouble, socializing, struggling with bullies.
School is usually one's first. Huge struggle with self-worth when we're not safe at home. In a big one. Another example is, uh, growing up in poverty or chaos where normative dreams, such as having a house or a happy marriage or having consistency with with a parent never materialized. It's a domish feeling about not making it.
That was based really in reality, considering our childhood kids can often feel like hyper aware of that and that other kids might have a cleaner or saner home and we can internalize that. Another example is not being protected by a parent who had the power to protect us. This is what I call the safer parent, and I recently did a whole video on the safer parent idea or issue.
You can think about it as like a casual betrayal that sends a message to a child about. Their self-worth. And you know, you can check out the link to that video in the description of this one. I'll put it in there. So another example is being raised in interpersonal abuse with a narcissistic or mentally off parent who used your lovability and your worth or your value as a weapon.
And this is intense emotional abuse. Another example is being forgotten about. Because of, say, your gender or your needs or that you were sensitive or that a sibling was more valuable than you were to your parents in some awful way. So here are some potential healing ideas and specific interventions about self-worth.
So notice that the issues here involve things like lovability. Value and worth. These interventions are conceptually broad and they're not tips, or they're not hacks. They're really healing concepts. Healing this stuff is gonna be process oriented as well as deeply emotional and grief oriented and cerebral interventions or like tips, you know, like quick therapies, quick ideas.
Those things just stay cerebral. The first intervention about self-worth is what I call holding childhood trauma perpetrators accountable. This is the concept of shifting shame and blame about our poor self-worth onto that neglectful or narcissistic or abusive or unprotective parent. This is done in like the therapy room or when you're journaling or self.
Work without the abusive parent being in in front of you. It's not meant to try to get the parent to own their stuff, what they were like, unless they're open to that and want to hear about it and they want to grow and change. You really gotta be careful with that. Um, we have to get real about our insecurity, about in our worth.
That started very young. And if you didn't receive consistent protection, care and love is what that means. Shifting into a stronger self-worth starts with the story about what happened to us and actually what could have been is like a thought exercise. Could your relationships and career have been less problemed in your life?
Had you not experienced ongoing severe neglect or verbal abuse about being named as. Stupid by one of your parents, like that kind of stuff. Grieving. What happened is in the other part of this intervention about what you had to believe about yourself without getting any help as a little kid, it's not just about finding buried anger about the abusive parent.
It's by grief work. I'm suggesting to find a therapist who gets the grief of losing connection and safety in childhood, and groups that focus on childhood trauma also have a group. Component to them, although it might not be specifically talked about as grief work, but when we're looking at our childhood and feeling it and processing it, that's gonna bring grief is what I'm trying to say.
We all have to grieve the lies that we were kind of fed before we can discard them and rebuild our self-worth. Just doing it like affirmations usually doesn't work or sink in without. Our childhood trauma being considered within that affirmation. So like you can look at the mirror every day and say, I'm worth, I'm a worthwhile, lovable person, but it's more powerful to say, I'm a worthwhile, lovable person and my father was completely wrong about me.
You see the difference in those two things. The other is to rebuild a new narrative about your worth. Notice that that comes after processing. Your childhood trauma, where and where your messages of worth come from and what you lost in that. So the second category is feedback. How we react to feedback, how it triggers us is one of our biggest clues into emotional insecurity.
Really pay attention to what I'm about to say. Feedback is hard for anyone. I think it's really human to be vulnerable, but the issue again with the childhood trauma stuff is how vulnerable, how sensitive are we? Can we become less vulnerable in managing feedback? Another thing is that when I say feedback, I'm not talking about just like a BS work performance review, because those things are inhumane and ineffective and I hate them.
Um, I'm more talking about receiving information about yourself. In many different forms. Here are some daily examples of feedback that we can react to as child to trauma survivors. Say you're a parent and your toddler doesn't like the spaghetti that you made, and they say it's awful and that you're awful because they wanted chicken nuggies.
What is that like for you as a child to trauma survivor and a parent on a bad? Another example is your dentist office says that you didn't fill out the form completely and the person on the phone sounds like a little irritated with you. Another is you haven't heard back from your friend about plans and they are really kind of hit and miss about communication.
So you don't really know where you stand with them. Um, another is that second date you had was rescheduled and things aren't clear where that is going, and you really liked. Them, or maybe you're really highly immature or abusive parent tells you that you've always been a problem and you're delusional about what happened to you.
If you approach them about the abuse, so say the abuse from say, their co-parent or something, or stepparent, a big one is also. Who is it that you're getting feedback from? Getting feedback from, say someone in authority. Like authority figures can be really activating, especially like with a therapist or something like that.
Let's look at three different types of feedback that are typically complicated and how vulnerable might we get from these. The first is positive feedback. We tend to not. People when they compliment us or we just trust their motives 'cause the positivity and we might feel like they've totally misread us and we're shocked and even feeling manipulated.
Those are all very common things for childhood to trauma survivors around positive feedback, negative feedback, which is really, I think what we're all kind of anticipating as child to trauma survivors. Mostly negative feedback is like you did this wrong kind of stuff. Like we tend to go into a really big.
Or kind of medium-ish trauma response around feedback. Like we might go into fawn mode or fight mode and we might really ruminate negative feedback and this is where we really take things personally in real or imagined situations. Then there's neutral feedback. Oddly, in perhaps the worst kind of feedback can really drive us crazy 'cause we're usually looking for the negative.
Feedback due to our hyper vigilance and our shame neutral feedback feels like the person is hiding their real feelings from us. Like we can feel like someone is withholding and we can feel like, just tell me you don't like the shirt, and they actually don't have opinions about your shirt. And again, all of these can make childhood trauma survivors feel.
That feedback is extremely personal and it really takes us back to our early interpersonal trauma and emotional abuse from growing up, which is really not a good thing at all because we can miss in the present that people want to give us a compliment and connect to us and we can miss that or even shoot people down in that.
And we might shoot somebody down when they give us a compliment and they don't really want to compliments it again 'cause maybe their own stuff comes up around it. We can also reconfirm something about ourselves if we allow someone to get into our head, like with negative feedback. And it's really freeing in life to just take things at face value with neutral feedback.
And incidentally, even for healthy and secure folks, again, feedback is hard, but again, how hard is it for them? How hard does it have to be for us? Think of which type of feedback is more activating for you and why. And an interesting side note about. Emotional security around feedback is we can also get really triggered when we're giving feedback to somebody because that's really rooted in our worth or our shame if we're doing it right, if we're, a lot of us feel like if we, if we give someone a compliment, are we being manipulative?
And we'll really get into our head about it. That's also a sign of emotional insecurity. We can also kind of be blunt too, or too flowery or give up our power when we're giving feedback. So here are how the feedback issues can come from childhood, and I think of these as directly stated or indirectly implied.
Abusive family messages. If we had a parent who expressed their love, but their behavior didn't back that up, you know, I love you kind of stuff, but they aren't around or they're unpredictable or they struggle with addiction, we can really distrust positive feedback because it felt like a lie. Growing up in the math of the.
Parents' behavior doesn't add up, but we feel shame about how we are feeling. It's like, you love me, but you don't show up. It's kind of a mess. Another example is if we had a parent who constantly made comments, aggressive or passive comments about how we looked, how we did at school, how we didn't brush our hair, right?
This can range from everything from verbal abuse to sarcasm about our ability to tie our shoes. In short, the constant negative feedback here was being put on the spot and attacked and affects all three categories of feedback, like being addressed as a little kid meant to be in trouble. And we can take things really personally because it was personal growing up.
Again, I know I keep saying that, but I wanna drive that point home weird. One is having a parent who's silently judged. Or was kind of miserable, like they wouldn't outwardly say you're bad or you're not good at basketball or, or being messy with serial, but they would definitely roll their eyes and then say it's fine.
Like they lived in somewhat of an f my life kind of energy kind of experience about being a parent that really messes with believing people about positive feedback and neutral feedback and negative feedback, and definitely worrying about what the person really thinks about us. Really. Another example is if we grow up with a highly mentally off.
Or mentally ill parents, someone struggling with really poor mental health, who is both aggressive and twisted about reality. Children do not know what mental illness is, so if someone is raised by someone struggling with an untreated personality disorder or thought disorder, or struggles with a mood disorder, the feedback can be highly attacking and confusing.
To kind of being disorganized and feedback later really becomes a mess in their adulthood. It's like it's positive, negative, and neutral, wrapped up in one chaotic mess, and the parents' problems with us usually becomes our identity without really having any choice in that. Also, a big piece about feedback issues is the difference between what was said.
What you hear, it's actually a wonderful thing to work with our inner child around that. Have you ever been devastated by a work email and then you go back to read it later and it's really not that big of a thing? It's a good example of the inner child looking to confirm the chutes and ladders from our child to trauma lens.
So some potential healing specific interventions about the feedback issue in terms of security, the most important piece. To healing and growing outta the feedback issues is having a healthy person in our life, like a therapist in your life to bounce things off of. Having a sounding board. A partner can do that for you, but it's actually not good if they are like the therapist in your life.
'cause that might get old for them, uh, for the partner to always be talking their loved ones upset down all the time, or having to confirm things for them, I mean. We do that naturally in relationships. But again, the issue is like how much for a sounding board back in the day I was extremely lucky to go be able to go to a therapist with my triggers who could give me feedback literally about how my trauma might be amping up what I was feeling in a safe way, while also validating what I was experiencing in the present.
The help I got about the real or imagined stuff was invaluable for my security and my emotional security and recovery. Just like in childhood, we need a lot of help about what is happening in our conflict and in our relationships, and having that sounding board person is like really having a healthy need, finally being met, but.
Eventually the goal is to not actually depend on a sounding board so much and to eventually get to a place where there isn't so much doubt or confusion about how we respond to feedback. Incidentally, there's a free resource online and usually shows up in Reddit forums of the I-T-A-M-I, the A Hole, um, forums that you see on Reddit.
And they're pretty great 'cause it stands. For am I the a-hole in a, in a situation that people are kind of struggling with and they present a situation, guys, what do you think about this? This just happened with my boss. And then people give their opinion. Um, and that is really cool. But just, just know that a form like that is kind of transactional.
It's not human like we would have with a, with a partner or a therapist or someone like that, but it is helpful. That's what I mean about seeking. Is it me or is it the other person kind of here a bump in the road as if. You get help around feedback triggers, but the help doesn't stay with you and the insecurity kind of creeps back in childhood Trauma work with a trained and effective person is often needed.
It's like how affirmations don't really last because our trauma belief system. Probably need some deeper help. Interpersonal group work is also what I suggest around the feedback. With a good solid group therapist, the goal is about feedback can gradually be done in safety. That takes a lot of strength building in the therapy world, like with individual and group therapists.
I think most ruptures happen when feedback happens way too early at the wrong time. And interpersonal groups are about encouraging authenticity. When I was practicing and I was running groups. The model of therapy that we would do is that we wouldn't really get into hard feedback exercises for at least a year into the work of weekly meetings.
And that feedback was really thinking about how a person's inner child in their inner adult are really connected with each other and there's some problems there. So we can actually heal our feedback issues and safe environ. Where we learn to not take our vulnerability so seriously. But working with childhood trauma is like working with raw nerves, to be honest.
So many people who don't have an experience of therapy or a group assume it's all gonna be negative feedback. It's kind of a funny assumption that people, like when I used to say, would you want to join a group? And they're like, why would I want to be attacked? Uh, people fear or assume therapy is about being told we're wrong or we suck at things, and the assumption tells a story about.
How we were raised. Our first group is actually our family. So there's something there. Receiving positive feedback from a therapist or group is usually the hardest thing, but because it also brings up a lot of grief about how, what kind of feedback we got when we were kids. So there's that. So the third category is romantic attachment and our ability to stay connected to ourselves.
And others and oh boy, like where do we, where do we start with this one? In a poll that I took on my YouTube channel in preparation for this video, romantic attachment issues were the number one issue that people identified and wanted to gain something out of this video. And it makes sense that attachment issues are so prevalent given that childhood trauma always involves such a loss of connection.
Loss of connection with a parent. Loss of connection with family or community and loss of connection with self. Here are some examples about how romantic intimacy triggers emotional insecurity, and yes, they're gonna probably line up with your attachment style in some way, but it's not really the focus, the feeling that your partner is cheating and you're accusing them of that real or imagined.
Another example is feeling like the person will eventually leave. The person you're romantically attached with will eventually leave. Or that there's a time limit to it. Like subconsciously you feel like it's gonna end at some point, even when you don't want to. A feeling at any day. Now it will be over and they will find someone better and think of like this as waiting for the other shoe to drop around.
The attachment, which is a version of hypervigilance. Another is hiding one's emotions from a partner in fear of burdening them. Or having them be angry with you or disgusted and feeling caught between wanting help when it doesn't feel safe to kind of ask for that help when we have to really take some risk here to get out of that kind of stuff.
Another is not bringing things up, like nothing is really a problem until it blows up, or breaks or explodes, or the reverse of that where everything is being brought up by you, where everything is a problem. To kind of create a familiar dynamic from childhood and be able to actually create distance with problems.
Another is not dating someone at your level for perhaps the belief that you can't be at a healthier person's level. If you can nail that and fix it, your life will change. Another is starting a relationship, falling in love, and then quickly finding fault with them that you just can't be with someone who does that one thing.
Kind of usually something small and not super, kind of like consequential, like something like sometimes they don't brush their teeth. I don't mean that you're dating someone and you kind of gradually find out that they don't want children when you do. That's different from what I'm kind of talking about.
This one is really about how wounded inner child can actually start to pick their partner apart, gradually, kind of subconsciously build a case against them because you feel like that the romance and the newness of it is dissipating and it's moving into a more mundane. Thing, which could be a trigger to your own parents' relationships growing up, it might feel boring or it might feel scary or, or whatever.
If you don't resonate with that, you might have been on the receiving end of someone doing that to you at some point. How the romantic attachment issues can come from childhood. One example is being parentified or being an emotional support for a parent where the worth is wrapped up in doing for them or helping and security is actually for somebody else.
Another example is narcissistic abuse, where we're bound to a caretaker that isn't safe and highly damaging, and security is wrapped up in getting things right with them, but that game changes every day. Another is witnessing parents live in a miserable marriage for kids. There is no security if. Our parents really aren't secure.
Another is witnessing a parent model, poor romantic relationships or choices where security has to be attained through other people. Another is receiving incredibly off messages about sex or partnerships or ourselves because we are receiving those messages from a parent who has really poor mental health and our security becomes really confusing and it feels like we have to shoot in the dark a lot in romantic relationships.
Another is being raised by caretakers who behave like they barely tolerate their children. Like we don't deserve security. Here are some potential healing and specific interventions about romantic attachment. The first is inner child work, and I think childhood trauma survivors are usually caught seeking attunement from others romantically due to having never received it during childhood because of the abuse.
And we can really live in a deficit of care and connection, but it's also a big ask of our romantic. Partners to supply that for us, that makes us relating to them only from a childhood trauma place like Save Me, tolerate Me. We're not really being our best self in those situations or that situation.
Inner Child Work is the work of becoming connected to self instead of. Running to or running from connection with others. Here are some benefits and ideas to inner child Work Integration is being aligned with our inner child enough to make separation and conflict in our lives manageable. Think we'll be okay no matter what as a loving truth between you and your inner child.
And I don't mean you become a hermit, I mean you're able to self-soothe. Instead of needing that so much from others or actually running from it. And I kind of needed to learn how to self-soothe from a good therapist to teach me how to do that. If your dating life feels dependent on having someone in your life and being alone is a trigger, it might be good and time to work on your relationship with yourself like I had to do, even if I had the most amazing girlfriend in my life back in the day.
Still would've had that disconnection with myself. So it's important. Inner child work is very helpful in terms of managing attachment triggers that do come up such as conflict, disconnection, and doubt. Inner child work is about developing a healthy inner adult who can help the inner child, not project.
Onto others so much or feel like everything is a shoot. The final category is how we deal with insecurity through emotional confidence. Emotional confidence related to security has a lot to do with how we deal with our feelings and our relationship to our feelings and our ability to communicate and express our feelings.
Here's a hypothetical with these, let's say a 7-year-old just went through their parents divorcing and now abruptly, they have a moody stepparent in their daily life. There's a very common presentation for childhood trauma, how we deal with our feelings, let's say that child gets no help at all with that big change in their life.
It's never talked about or addressed, and they develop a coping strategy of disassociation or fawning or fantasy. Children will find ways to cope when they aren't offered healthy coping and our relationship to feelings. Let's say that child has no one in their life to say, yes, this is really hard, and that stepparent is scary, and I wouldn't feel safe either.
Our feelings are more in line with. The perception of what's going on around us, and we have more confidence to just kind of call it like it is. Many childhood trauma survivors don't feel they have the ability to do that, or they're confused or they don't have the right to do that. So many of us as little kids didn't know if we were right to not like a perpetrator.
And it's confusing when other adults actually like a perpetrator in our life. If the scary stepparent isn't a problem for the parent, how could it be a confirmed problem for the child? So to that child, it's a lot like you are wrong about them. So be nice even if that isn't explicably said by the parent.
So we can find ourselves as adults going, who am I to say that anyone is a monster? What do I know? It's dangerous to not know. Who is safe and who is not. And that's a symptom of how the adults reacted to monsters, you know, in, in the family life. And regarding our ability to communicate in our present lives or our confidence in that, not just in this hypothetical, but related is what would happen to you as a kid if you did talk about the things that you were feeling growing.
Say like a scary stepparent. We get really unsure about saying to a parent, I don't like my stepparent for fear of their reaction. Along with our doubts, communicating what we are feeling becomes extremely insecure for good reasons. It makes sense when you, when you look back at it, we are conditioned to it causing more abuse and potentially more problems.
In addition, another scenario is growing up in a family of screamers or adults who like overpower. So communication or our confidence there, our feelings are super complex because we don't want to be abusive like that perpetrator, but that's maybe the only communication style we might have to go off of.
So we don't say anything at all. A sign of emotional insecurity is when our inner child believes that telling the truth means to be extremely hurtful or being like a screamer or something like that. So what's the opposite of all this? Imagine if as a child, your family valued working on things from fairness to justice, like with siblings or whatever.
Or as a child that elephants in the room could be brought up in safety and addressed. Or as a child, all your feelings could be tolerated in a good enough way and voiced as your feelings and inform us. Like we're taught like, yeah, your feelings are important. 'cause they inform us as a human being.
Imagine if we had parents that told us that, or simply you saw the adults in your life model healthy conflict and communication and maintained like respect for each other in that conflict. Imagine if you saw people being both caring and direct at the same time. That's a lot of environmental, emotional security that some people actually get.
It's rare, but that happens. What would it mean for you if we got that as a thought exercise? Usually, like myself, we leave our childhood home. Without any emotional confidence. I don't know about you, but I really had to wing it through adulthood until problems started to kind of come up and I had to address them.
Here are some examples of not being emotionally confident from childhood that stay with us through adulthood. Notice how these are relational. And that we lack confidence because we often only see threats. We only see the shoots in these scenarios. One is feeling unsure if our feelings are valid or if we're allowed to have them.
There's a lot of apologizing for having basic feelings, not trusting what you perceive, having not a lot of confidence that you're, you're all right and you're not responsible. Or that you can actually have opinions, God forbid. Another example is feeling intense shame or rage when someone doesn't validate what you're feeling right or wrong about a situation, not feeling confident about being believed, coming back to real or imagined stuff.
Another is feeling caught between having feelings yet convinced you're gonna be shot down or attacked for them or in trouble for them. Again, real or imagine, I know that that's annoying, but not confident in that you have the right to your feelings or existing that you are actually gonna have someone respond well to you.
Another is expecting people to read our mind, like read what is going on for you without you having to tell them. It's usually projecting of wanting to be noticed or parented along, probably with not feeling confidence about how to talk about it. Or believing the person should be omnipotent like a parent.
That is a subconscious belief. That's not really like a conscious kind of belief. It's inner children really feel, one, they don't feel confident in saying things, but we can look at people close to us, like as a little bit like, why don't they know? Can't they read my face? How do they not know? That kind of stuff.
In another words, vacillating between going like really big in a fight response and blowing up and then going to a fond place when the other person responds. That's like a really hard inner child cycle, and that requires its own video. It feels like. Refusing to lose and feeling like you need to go big upfront.
And then when you do go big upfront, that kind of backfires. You really can get submissive after being really upset. And the submissive is about how the person responds. Notice how interpersonal emotional confidence, and it's often rooted in a one up, one down power structure. Like they're not gonna get it.
They're not gonna listen. I'm probably wrong. Not today, Satan. I'm gonna go for it and really tell them off. And then feeling quickly. Sorry for bringing that up. And I've already given some, you know, childhood scenarios, where it comes from. But here are some other scenarios being overpowered in communication by aggressive or mentally off parent not being believed when we're in distress.
Not witnessing a parent be able to communicate feelings appropriately when they are in distress or in conflict. Another is having a parent who was submissive or codependent, had a poor sense of self or self-esteem, or was kind of emotionally limited. Another is being scapegoated or neglected or experiencing changes, quick changes in caretakers without consistent attachment.
Here are some potential healing ideas around emotional confidence is building emotional confidence can be helped in two specific things in my mind. One is being willing. To take an emotionally mature risk emotionally with others from a new place, such as bringing something up in a continued practice of taking such risk instead of feeling caught and powerless and I better not go there.
And side note is make sure you choose wisely about who you practice taking risks with. Probably not gonna go well with really difficult or or highly abusive people, so obviously, so another is working with your inner child and helping them with the fear. Around the risk taking, in addition to working around the issues such as overly apologizing or getting really upset when you're not feeling validated.
The risk taking leads to becoming more emotionally mature and confident about how you communicate. And again, this is why group work is always one of my main suggestions is trauma is super relational and I think that the healing needs to be relational as well. Being in a group and communicating is a risk.
I've never met someone who was psyched to like, join a group, to be honest. Um, neither was I, but being in a group and learning how to communicate and realizing that you're not gonna die from taking a risk around safe people is like, you can't get much better than that in terms of. Growth. Again, I haven't met a survivor yet who didn't feel super shaky about their emotional confidence in terms of knowing how much to be upset about something or how to talk about it without being really submissive or cerebral or going over the top about it, which I see a lot of that online these days is going big with the wrong people, I think a lot too, but inner child work helps with all that, but one needs to really learn how to do that in safety as well.
So we made it. Here are some final thoughts and thank you for hanging, uh, hanging in there with me on this video Is. So to plug these four categories into what I was like before I started my childhood trauma work, this is what it was like for me in terms of self-worth compared to others. I really was in this place of like, I'll never be able to function like other people do, and I can't do what other people can do.
Like hold down a really kind of like a professional job or say things the right way or whatever, you know, that was that category. Self-worth was, I felt very much less than compared to others. And in terms of feedback is when people would give me feedback. I would spend a lot of time getting angry and ruminating, like, why did they say it?
That to me, they have no idea what's going on. For me was a big narrative that I would have. And sometimes childhood trauma survivors always feel like they're being kicked when they're down, when they receive some kind of feedback, real or imagined. Third category of attachment was always like, they're eventually going to leave me, so what's the point?
That was basically my personal version of insecurity. That was my inner subconscious narrative or conscious actually. And lastly, for emotional confidence, I would have this, like, why does the way I say things always go wrong? Or Why does the way I say things not land the way I think It's going to where I really kind of was in a little bit of a bubble and my communication and confidence communicate was really off.
So I would try to go into things really independently and then. People wouldn't want that for me, and then it would kind of really get messy. Like people didn't want the over apologizing or idealizing someone the way that I used to or something like that. People don't want that really in general, I think, unless you're difficult and abusive.
But in addition, I'm someone who remembers my childhood very well, and even as a little kid, I just remember being very unsure about the potential shoots, even as early as. Kindergarten. So why I use that analogy from that game is that healthy kids are vulnerable to things too, because we're all battling baseline human shame and development and becoming a person biologically, it's like a, it's like a biological task, but like me not winning or keeping up with others would confirm.
The message that I was receiving at home, such as, you're not good enough, you're not lovable enough to be protected or spend time with, you're not gonna make it if you keep being vulnerable like the way that you are. So my main message is kids who are growing through childhood trauma at home. Are more vulnerable to not winning such a game.
But also the child starts to think even early on that everything is gonna feel and be a shoot, and they have to watch out for that. It becomes an exhausting way to live in life. Kids who are safer growing up, they can grow into adults who can navigate and tolerate the shoots. Better. I'm not saying they're better people, I'm just saying they've had a more secure beginning to them.
So we have some work to do about really understanding our emotional security issues and we also definitely have to become more self-compassionate to start to work on these interventions. And I'll recap them here. One is understanding our history better. Another is holding abusive parents or neglectful parents accountable in finding healthy anger and have reclaiming our power there, taking the blame and shame off of us, and just really looking at the development piece and the interpersonal trauma.
Another is taking healthy risk. Another is looking at therapy interventions if they're available to you. Strong suggestion about an interpersonal group. Another is understanding, having a grief process. That usually probably comes with that last one, last suggestion about interpersonal group and establishing someone in your life that can be a healthy person to bounce things off of for feedback issues.
It's really not good to just kind of be in your head alone with them. In other is re-parenting the inner child and establishing an inner secure connection with ourselves instead of seeking out that connection solely with others. And phew. You made it. You made it through this video. That was a lot. That was a lot of information.
Thanks for hanging out with me. And related to all this is I'm offering a lecture and a course on emotional security, specifically around inner inner child work. You just followed the link up here and sign up for the live lecture, which includes slides. Worksheets as well as the video lecture to replay whenever you want to.
It's a live event and then it becomes a course afterward. And also FYI, all my courses and lectures are available in my membership, so you can either go, just sign up for the lecture alone or consider joining the monthly community and you'll get the same lecture there, same link right up here. Lastly, lastly, lastly, inner child work.
It's confusing around emotional security, but whenever you hear a strong internal, I can't. Things like, I can't ask for help. I can't leave this relationship and hurt them or be alone. I can't tell that secret. I can't admit to that thing. I do whatever. I can't bring that up with them. I can't. Is really your inner child not feeling secure and needing help?
And it's usually said from a place of pain, not, not like, I can't jump to the moon right now. Like from a, from a literal sense, this is usually an emotional pain based. Thing that is really rooted in how we weren't secure as kids, and it's kind of a clue. Thank you so much. May you be filled with loving kindness.
May you be well, may you be peaceful and at ease, and may you be joyous and I will see you next time. Thanks for hanging out with me.
