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Hi and welcome back to our book club where we are diving into the book Are You Mad At Me?, all about fawning and our survival strategies from childhood. This week we’re going to be reading a chapter that addresses grief, anger, and emotional loneliness. These are feelings that will be very familiar to those of us who grew up in environments with developmental ruptures and attachment failures.

Maybe we had emotionally immature caregivers or other forms of early developmental trauma. If you’re familiar with my work, you’ve likely heard me talk about the big three of the emotions, and that is anger, sadness, and fear. These are normal expected emotions that all humans will feel, and there are many emotions that kind of branch off from there.

Of course, hurt and grief and rage and annoyance, frustration, disappointment. There are many ways we might experience emotions within that spectrum, but those emotions are also very present when we have experienced these attachment ruptures in our lives. And there’s a difference between feeling those feelings in the present and feeling those feelings as a child and being all alone in them.

And so this chapter is going to be curious about how we as adults can start to feel things like grief, like anger, to identify our feelings of loneliness that can often create feelings of being very afraid because it’s terrifying for a child to feel that they are disconnected, and how those things impacted us as a child versus how we can be with them as an adult. You know by now if you listen to some of the other books, like Unlocking the Emotional Brain, that many of our parts, our schemas, our patterns, what we might think of as core beliefs, are actually emotional learnings. So many of these things that say, if I want other people to love me, that I need to be good, that I need to be meeting all their needs all the time, I can’t be myself.

These are unconscious learnings stored in our brain, and they are rife with emotion. So when we are a child and we have this experience of when I’m my playful, silly, messy, emotional self, it upsets my parents, or they seem to fall away from me, or they seem more stressed, or they fight more. We might feel in that moment very scared because we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe.