Advancing AwarenessTo Get More Love In Your Life
The Psychology, Technology, Neuroscience and Spirituality of
Reducing Unhappiness by Becoming Progressively Loving
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Emotional Problems that Start in Infancy
The world of psychology has long known that emotional problems during infancy lead to the deepest of human suffering in adulthood, because the bad feelings in adulthood are often chronic and persistent. The treatment problem has been that these disturbances occur before we are talking and remembering in words, so these memories have been virtually impossible to address in traditional talk therapy. Thanks to the field of Somatic Therapy and its integration with EMDR we now have tools to identify, release and repair these emotional problems which occur pre-verbally.
Problems occur in infancy when our drive to attach to our parents, and thus survive, are not responded to effectively by our mother or father. This can occur when mother is depressed, fearful, anxious, or simply not responsive enough. When this occurs repeatedly, it can become traumatizing to baby, as baby is often left to cry, alone. If baby cries long enough, baby is put in the position of feeling like "I'M DYING, I'M NOT GOING TO SURVIVE." This kind of trauma seems to create a nervous system which is always highly active and in survival mode. It feels like danger is always lurking. The poly vagal system in conjunction with the sympathetic nervous system are chronically activated, making the adult feel regularly fearful, like they have done something wrong or depressed.
These are symptoms that provide a strong indication that something was significantly disturbing during your infancy and the problem remains unresolved:
1) You seem to always have lots of feelings and body sensations and you cannot shift to being emotionally neutral, that is, without such feelings and sensations.
2) You struggle to deeply connect with people, because as they get physically and/or emotionally close, you feel an underlying discomfort.
3) You struggle with trusting people and there was no major trauma in later life that you remember or can recognize as causing this.
4) You were raised by a very cold, fearful or angry mother.
5) You have a snap shot image in your memory of you as a baby and a very bad feeling about the picture.
6) You regularly dissociate, feeling like you are not fully present or actually outside your
own body, when things get stressful.
The incredibly exciting news is that some therapists now know how to help you repair these problems using specific therapeutic steps and methods. Treatment starts with an emotional resetting process which connects emotional memories from babyhood, which are stored in the right hemisphere with adult verbal capacities in the left hemisphere. Baby memories are stored as imagery, body sensations and emotions. These unconscious memories must be opened up to be accessed by our adult vocabulary.
Then, there is a releasing and repair process, which is done by evoking baby memory and tracking and giving meaning to the emotions and body information which arises. Typical body information which comes up (and are often felt in our bodies as adults) are discomforts in the stomach, tightness in the chest, shoulders or jaw, and tears. This information goes through a review and release process, until the
body is cleared from being reactivated as an adult. A visual imagery reformatting process is then used to repair the unmet needs of baby.
The treatment outcome usually includes reduced nervous system activation so that you can be emotionally neutral most of the time, experiencing feelings when they should really be present in response to important life events. Most importantly, YOU CAN LEARN TO TRUST AND LOVE MORE DEEPLY.
This repairative work usually requires a knowledgeable therapist who is skilled at "Attachment Repair."
Only when this foundational work is done can other later traumatic experiences be fully cleared using traditional EMDR processing.
