Emotional Neglect: Healing From The Hidden Trauma Of What Didn't Happen

hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here today on this channel we're talking about the concept of emotional neglect and this is a topic that I personally feel very passionately about bringing into the conversations that we have around attachment healing around trauma healing around essentially any form of early Developmental wounding and the reason why I think it's so important to highlight this topic is because it's one that very frequently gets missed so I think it's very common for people to start watching videos or reading content or in

any way exposing themselves to information about trauma or attachment Styles or whatever it is and go yeah I see myself in the symptoms of these things but there's nothing I can point to in my childhood that was overtly traumatic there's nothing that happened to me that I can really look at and go yeah that's the reason why I have all of these challenges very often and when we talk about these topics we're looking quite directly at what did happen in our childhoods but we also have to pay attention to what didn't happen when we were

young in order to make sense of how our cognition and our emotional World developed as adults so when we look at things like depression and anxiety PTSD cptsd addiction insecure attachment emotional regulation problems essentially all of these really big topics that get covered in psychology we can see links to emotional neglect to all of them which is not to say that all of these things are always caused by emotional neglect but that at least a subset of all of these issues can and has reliably through research been linked to emotional neglect so emotional neglect can

be at the core of all of the above however realizing that you've been emotionally neglected is a very challenging thing to do so what we're going to go over in this video is what actually happens when when we experience early emotional neglect how that shapes or fails to shape our emotional World in a way that can lead to a lot of challenges later in life so essentially the core of what we're looking at here is how emotional neglect leads to a disconnect between our subjective world so our inner world of thoughts and feelings and the

outer more objective world so the world of people places and things in a nutshell what didn't happen if we experienced early emotional neglect is we were not taught to make proper sense of the relationship between our inner world and the outer world so whereas trauma disrupts our systems of meaning making emotional neglect can interfere with our ability to form systems of meaning and to form coherent understandings of how the world works and what information it's important for us to be paying attention to and emotionally investing ourselves in I remember seeing this joke on Twitter one

time where someone was explaining what it's like as someone someone with cptsd to listen to someone with PTSD speaking and it went something along the lines of person with PTSD I just can't stop thinking about what my life was like before the trauma me a person with cptsd wait there was a before for you and obviously this is a joke but what it highlights here is that while single instance trauma disrupts our ability to understand the world coherently complex trauma which can be the result of earlier emotional neglect interrupts our ability to form a coherent

worldview in the first place so I remember really starting to draw my attention to the idea of emotional neglect when I was at a workshop where there was a speaker talking about how she had experienced Trauma from early emotional neglect and something she said that I never forgot was she spoke about a member of her immediate family dying when she was a child and she said nobody made that experience matter and those words really stuck with me the idea of making an experience matter felt so forward to me but also made total sense when we

are children a lot of how we learn about emotional regulation is through social referencing so something happens that maybe shocks or scares us maybe we're watching a scary movie and we look around and we kind of check is everybody else freaked out or are my caregivers looking calm and then we learn how how to with increasing complexity categorize our own inner experiences based on how the people around us are responding to the same stimuli so if I feel really scared and then I look around and notice everyone else is just chatting and eating popcorn I'm

going to learn something along the lines of when something scary happens but it's on the TV I'm probably safe now this is a very simple example but when we have social referencing in our environment that does not properly map on to our inner states this gets very confusing so let's say you have a member of your immediate family die but you exist inside of a family Dynamic that's quite avoidant so even though the members of your family might be feeling intense grief and loss they might not be displaying those things and so then when you're

looking around and trying to kind of socially reference what's going on I feel this deep sense of grief and loss but everyone else looks kind of calm or is making jokes or isn't really paying attention to what happened what we might internalize is this feeling of grief or intense loss that I feel is the wrong thing to feel because it doesn't match what I'm seeing from my environment so in a healthy caregiving environment it is the role of the parent or caregiver to see the child's inner world and to help them associate their inner emotions

to what's happening in their environment you feel grief you feel sadness you feel loss those are normal responses to someone you love passing away it's a very simple example that's very clear to most of us but this can also happen on a very subtle level all of the time maybe a child had a difficult interaction at school but when they tell their parent about it they don't seem to have any significant reaction so the child figures okay maybe my feelings were hurt when this person said something to me about how I look or how I

act but I must just be too sensitive or it must be wrong for me to have this response of upset and then what happens is we start to develop shame bound emotions so I do have an entire video just on this that I'll link in the description of this video but essentially what happens when our emotions become shame bound is we start to believe that there are things we can feel that are wrong and that we ought not to feel and this can lead to a whole host of emotional disregulation issues when we believe that

the emotions we are feeling are not connected in a way that makes sense to our external environment so we're going to get into some of the things you might struggle with as an adult if you experienced emotional neglect in childhood but before we do that I just want to quickly go over once again why emotions are so important to focus on and develop vocabulary around as children because there's often this kind of narrative out out there that if you just toughen up and ignore your emotions you're going to have an easier life and that absolutely

could not be further from the truth emotions are incredibly important pieces of information about what is happening in our environment and how our body is responding to what is happening so what matters to us in life and what we ought to be paying attention to if we ignore this we are robbing ourselves of the ability to make good decisions to stay Al igned with what matters to us in life and we are also likely to be missing very significant pieces of information that are necessary for processing the world in a logical and coherent way another

tweet I saw one time that I really liked was comparing emotional sensitivity to intuitive eating so in the philosophy of intuitive eating it's all about paying attention to your body's cues and giving your body whatever food it wants whenever it wants it and the argument against intuitive eating is often well if I did that I would just eat pizza all the time but the argument this tweet was making was that that is actually not intuitive eating because your body is very rarely craving super unhealthy Foods if you're actually attuned to your body and you're listening

not just to its cravings for sugar and things like that but also paying attention to what foods make your energy low what foods are harder to digest which foods are easiest on your system you're actually probably going to be eating pretty healthily at the end of the day because you're not just paying attention to the super strong overt cues that your mind is giving you about what it wants to eat you're actually really Associated to your entire system and you're looking at how everything you put in your body impacts the way that you feel and

the same is true for emotional Attunement so when I hear people say things like if I were to pay more attention to my emotions I would just be a rational and I would never get out of bed in the morning I would become this lazy slob whatever it is that they fear placing additional attention on their emotions would lead to to be attuned to our emotional systems does not mean only listening to the part of ourselves that's telling us to stay in bed all day and be a slob it means also listening to the emotions

that tell us hey I want to feel good and proud of myself so it's time for me to enact some discipline or to do some hard work to get myself to where I want to go those types of signals are also signals that our emotional systems give us when we are accurately attuned to them our bodies do not want us to wither away in bed our bodies want us to get up and live but we have to be properly attuned to our bodies and to our emotions in order to get the whole picture in our

minds so what we're going to look at now is some of the ways we might struggle as adults if we had early experiences of emotional neglect and then after that we're going to look at what we can start doing to to reverse this process and to become more attuned to and sensitive towards our emotional experience so the number one thing that I think can be really challenging for people who had early emotional neglect is making decisions on both a large scale and a small scale our emotions are there to draw our attention to what matters

most to us in life if we have learned to dissociate from our emotions and tell ourselves it's not important to pay attention to them what we are going to find is that it's really difficult for us to feel as though our lives have a deep sense of meaning because maybe we'll end up following all of these formulas that are set out by other people or by Society for what leads to a good life without ever really checking in on does this fit for me do I feel aligned with these things is this what I want

out of my life and then we might end up feeling really depressed when we achieve all of these milestones and can't understand why we aren't happy or this could go in another Direction which can be that we are so disconnected from what makes us feel a certain way that we can get extremely neurotic about even the tiniest of decisions in our lives so we can spend hours obsessing over what am I going to eat for dinner tonight or which shirt should I wear to this event because we don't really understand the big things that give

our lives meaning what the guiding principles of our lives and our well-being are we can get super fixated on the little tiny hits of dopamine that we might be able to glean out of our day-to-day life but at the end of the day both of these scenarios leave us feeling pretty empty inside which is probably a big reason why early emotional neglect tends to be associated with depression and anxiety in adulthood when we don't know what matters in life when we don't have our emotions as guiding principles telling us I care about this I'm interested

in this this is an area where I feel as though my inner world can make a positive impact on my outer world we don't really know how to make good decisions because again we aren't attuned to the part of our s that is giving us constant information about that second thing that we frequently see with emotional neglect toxic shame so if you've been following this channel for a while you have probably seen some videos I've put out on toxic shame and how it ties into emotional disregulation but if not I'm going to link them in

the description of this video because toxic shame is inherently this belief that something about me is fundamentally broken flawed or wrong and that if anyone got close enough to me they would see that and the reason why toxic shame often develops as a product of emotional neglect is because children experience shame when they put out bids for connection and have them rejected or when there is some sort of rupture that goes unrepaired with their caregiver shame is the emotion that comes online to tell us what is likely to get us rejected from our environment and

so if simply being ourselves and displaying our emotions to our caregivers leads to Chronic rejection we are going to feel chronic shame which is going to bleed into the belief there is something just fundamentally wrong with me in that belief the belief that the very core of who I am is shameful and needs to be hidden from others leads to a whole host of other challenges some of which you can check out in the videos I've linked below some of which we're going to talk about in the remainder of this one the next thing that

might happen as a product of emotional neglect is developing a phobia of inner experiences so this is a term that I came across for the first time in a book that I believe I have behind me in this book right here coping with trauma related dissociation and I found that this term really clicked some things into place for me the idea of having a phobia of inner experiences is essentially the idea that there are certain emotional states we have absolutely no idea how to self-regulate around so our body naturally tries to redirect us from them

anytime we get close to them however once again all emotions are really important as pieces of information so if we have a phobia around the experience of anger we're going to be missing out on really important pieces of information about where we need to set boundaries maybe when I was a child if I experienced anger I got left alone and that experience of anger was overwhelming I had no idea how to downregulate from it my system learned to lock away conscious feelings of anger when they came up in my mind so now maybe I automatically

go into a freeze response anytime I start to experience anger in my body if I don't know how to process sadness maybe anytime my system begins to feel that emotion of sadness because it starts as a sensation in the body my mind immediately finds something to distract me with and all of a sudden I don't know why I just can't pay attention to what I was doing or what I was thinking about and I need to be online looking at something or researching something that is changing my emotional state I've flipped into a flight response

and this can go for any emotion that we failed to learn to regulate as children it can become a kind of psychological no-o area in our minds that we often need a lot of trauma informed help to access and we're going to talk more about what that looks like in the latter part of this video the next thing we might see as a product of early emotional neglect is this sense of what I call existential loneliness so this idea not just that there's nobody in my life right now who sees and understands me which is

kind of how we perceive of loneliness in general existential loneliness is this kind of feeling that it's impossible for us to be seen and known period because we didn't have that early mirroring when we needed it most and when we were developing our sense of self so our sense of self may have developed largely in isolation and we might not have any idea that it's possible for other people to see and know us deeply and that might be a very strong felt sense that we have and to complicate this if we do not know ourselves

completely because there are psychological no-go areas that we've developed defensively through that phobia of inner experience now it's going to feel very true to us that we can't properly be seen or known because we do not properly see and know ourselves in our entirety and other people can only meet us as deeply as we have met ourselves and I think that for myself one of the most profound shifts that has happened for me as I've been on this journey of attachment work is going from a sense of existential loneliness to the Deep profound belief in

my body that I can be known by developing intimacy first with myself and uncovering all of those no-go areas in my psyche it became possible for me to communicate myself to other people in a way that I once thought was absolutely impossible it wasn't a conscious belief I had it was just a feeling in my body that feeling of deep existential aloneness and this feeling can be changed and it's one of the core reasons why I'm so passionate about all of this because the more literacy we gain around ourselves and our own emotions the more

we learn how to connect with other people and those connections are the things that make our lives feel meaningful and worth living so this stuff is so important it's so important to become aware of and to not dis Miss inside of ourselves but before we go through that process another problem we might encounter if we've experienced early emotional neglect is chronic unconscious self-abandonment so if you've been around this channel for a while you've probably heard me talk about self-abandonment so essentially abandoning what we want for ourselves in an authentic way in favor of staying in

connection with another person and there are small instances where this isn't a big deal right you want to get sushi your friend wants to get Indian you for Indian tonight but when we are doing this chronically and unconsciously it tends to be very alienating and the reason why we will do this unconsciously and chronically if we've had early neglect is often because we have no idea that we can bring our authentic selves into connection we may have internalized if we have that toxic shame belief the only way to be in connection with others is to

figure out what they want and present myself as though I want that to or or to act as though I am this absolutely perfect and ideal human being so that they can find no fault with me and it might not even occur to us that there is such a thing as authentic connection where we can be fully us and another person can see the whole of us so both what we're good at but also what we're struggling with and what we don't understand inside of ourselves and another person can stay on the page with us

for all of that and that we can also hold space for other people in that same way but again I really think that for a lot of people who experienced early emotional neglect and internalize that belief that sharing any of my feelings or inner world is going to lead to rejection self-abandonment is not even something we consciously think of it's just something we automatically do it's what we unconsciously believe is the price we have to pay to get any form of connection even if it's entirely superficial and so this is another one of those really

deep Insidious beliefs that can shift over time with direct and targeted work on developing emotional literacy on working on those toxic shame beliefs and on learning to communicate our inner worlds without an overwhelm of Shame getting in the way sixth thing that's very common with people who've experienced emotional neglect is that criticism hits incredibly hard and you might feel highly highly defensive to even the smallest hints from other people that you're not doing something perfectly to integrate feedback back without having our defenses online we need to know that we are being seen as whole people

by the people who are giving us that feedback but if once again we have never really learned to share ourselves with people nobody is going to be able to see us as whole people because we haven't been able to show them the full breadth of ourselves so again if we have that belief I need to behave perfectly in order to stay in connection someone giving us any form of negative feedback is probably going to be processed by our system as you don't want to be in connection with with me at all and everything about me

is wrong when in reality someone might really like 99% of us and just have one thing that they want to chat with us about because it's getting in the way of them being able to connect with us properly and the reason you might feel so defensive when this happens is because you're used to the cost of mistake being really high if your only route to connection when you were young was behaving perfectly so your body might go on high alert and start looking for any way you can find to prove that person that they are

wrong about the criticism that they're giving you because you equate criticism with them writing you off entirely so of course you're going to push back against it and try to make it not true instead of sitting with it and integrating it which is something we can only really do well if we have a relatively secure attachment system so I remember there was part of a support group that I was in for a while and part of the process within this group after we'd spent some time building trust together was to give each other feedback both

on what what our first impressions of each other had been for better and for worse as well as where people thought we could be doing better so where people perceived our areas for growth to be and I remember sitting there waiting for this circle to come around to me absolutely terrified and just thinking this is my worst nightmare but then when it actually happened it was very interesting because I'd gotten to know the people in this group pretty well they'd seen me in vulnerable States and I'd seen them in vulnerable States and so when they

were giving me feedback I had this sense of this is coming from a place of care these people are actually seeing me very clearly and they're bringing into my awareness opportunities for growth that I could take but they're not using those critiques to write me off as a person they're using them to help me amarate my own experience and that was the first time I think I really got in my body what it was like to receive criticism that was actually very well intentioned and that's not to say that I'd never received well-intentioned criticism before

in my life just that this was the first time my body really deeply logged it as what was happening because there was a high degree of interpersonal trust and the idea that these people saw me as a whole person built into the whole dynamic and this is ideally the place we want to get to as we work through that early emotional neglect and we learn to share ourselves more completely with others criticism is going to start looking less scary to us because we know that people also see our strengths and our vulnerabilities and so they're

not rejecting us on the whole when they give us feedback in a lot of cases they're actually trying to help but once again this is the opposite of how we're going to process this if we are dealing with significant emotional neglect that we have not yet started to work on and the last thing we're going to look at here is something you're likely to struggle with if you had early emotional neglect is that you have trouble with the relationship between your subjective inner world in the objective outer world and understanding both how you impact the

world around you and how your environment impacts you so there is a field of psychology called object relations that kind of harks back to Freud and I just want to be clear that that isn't specifically what I'm referencing here though there might be some overlap in what I'm saying what I'm talking about here is that there's just an inadequate amount of feedback between our inner worlds and our outer worlds because we haven't been taught how to manage the connection between those two things so if I'm feeling something strong in my body but I don't see

a very obvious and overt reason in my external environment why I might be feeling that instead of getting really attuned to my environment and trying to figure out where might this be coming from what subtle things might be kind of adding up in the background of my life that are culminating in this emotional experience that I'm having and I'm going to really examine the links between what's going on in my outer world and what's going on in my my inner world that's what we're able to do when we're attuned to both things when we're not

attuned to those things if we don't see a super overt reason in our outer World why we're maybe upset we're just going to go I'm crazy there is no cause for my being upset I'm just being my irrational self again so that experience gets covered up by shame and the information that whatever feeling we were having is trying to give us goes underground and we don't process it or the opposite could be true we could feel a super strong emotion and just pick something in our external world to blame it on and to go well

I'm feeling this so X Y or Z must be happening someone must be behaving maliciously towards me or whatever it is because again we don't have the inner and outer Attunement skills to pick up on more subtle Dynamics in our environment and how subtleties impact our emotional in our inner World in order to do that well we have to have pretty good emot literacy and we also have to have a pretty good understanding of what events impact Us in what ways so in my attachment healing Journey there were multiple points where I would be talking

to someone who is more securely attached than me and I would hear them complain about something and I would go I would never think to complain about that thing to me that thing is just a part of everyday life you just ignore your feelings about it and you get on with things but then I would experience chronic emotional disregulation intermittent depression etc etc etc and I had to start realizing that these things other people are making into a big deal might actually be these people processing the emotions that they're feeling at the volume that they're

feeling them at the time that they're feeling them and that is what healthy emotional expression looks like it means being sensitized to and understanding which things impact us emotionally and in turn how we can take care of ourselves and interact with our lives in a way that maximizes our emotional health and well-being and when we have a very significant disconnect in this area it can lead to things like delusions or forms of schizophrenic thought patterns and we're not going to go into that today just because that is not my area of specialty and I would

not be able to do it justice but in the kind of moderate range we get things like for example liance which is something we talk a lot about on this channel so I have this memory of years ago catching up with a friend of mine who had been dumped about a year prior by this girl he'd been dating who he really liked and I remember him talking about her as though their breakup had happened like a week ago and he was saying yeah I just still have these really strong feelings for her and I remember

thinking well how could you possibly have feelings for this person you have not had any contact with in a year because the person she is now could be totally different than the person she was a year ago and that person is someone you don't have a connection with but he didn't seem to realize that his inner world was holding on to the past and it's almost like it wasn't updating fast enough it wasn't taking the feedback from the outer World which is that this person was no longer in his life and adjusting his inner World

accordingly and this is on a large or small scale what often happens to us when we have significant impairments in our emotional processing we aren't doing enough checking between our inner and outer world so when we have healthy secure attachment systems what we're frequently doing is sharing our inner world with other people and getting feedback on it and then that feedback that we get from other people we then use to update our inner world of feelings and thoughts and perceptions and this happens continuously in a never-ending way for the entirety of our lives but when

we have learned that our emotional world and our outer World shouldn't or don't or can't interact in a meaningful way we can experience really big disconnects between how we're feeling or we're thinking and making sense of the world and the way that the world actually is so when it comes to Healing from emotional neglect what we're trying to do is get to a place where we are doing more Reality Checking on a more frequent basis so where our inner and outer world are interacting with each other more frequently and in a less distorted way so

now we're going to move into what it looks like to start to heal from emotional neglect and what it takes to start targeting these problems at their core for healing from emotional neglect can be an Insidious task because the very thing that we need to heal from it which is mentorship from our environment is the very thing that emotional neglect tends to tell us is useless or impossible for us but healing from emotional neglect is the process of making our own feelings including our own pain matter because we need those feelings to navigate the world

in a way that makes sense and we are probably going to need a lot of help getting to the place where we understand what value to give which emotions so the first step in this process is often increasing our emotional literacy and this is something that can be done to a large extent through things like reading or watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts and just developing more language for what it is that we are feeling and for which types of feelings tend to be connected to which things in our environment another thing we want

to do in this process is get better at self Attunement so I do have a video about this I will link in the description of this one but when we are self attuning essentially what we're doing is we're learning to draw connections between what we're feeling and what's happening in the world outside of ourselves it's kind of like keeping a food diary so when I was learning about intuitive eating I used to write down about 20 minutes after I ate anything how I was feeling physically in my body to to start drawing my awareness to

eventual patterns around which foods impacted my energy levels in which ways and this is something that I also recommend if you're trying to get more emotionally attuned pick points throughout the day to sit down and routinely write out what's going on for you at that point in the day as well as how you're feeling and I go over this process in much more detail in that video on self atunement so I recommend checking it out if this is an area that is new to you but the important thing here is that we are learning to

draw our awareness to what it is that we're feeling and when and why so we're learning to see our inner world as connected to our external environment in a way that might feel somewhat unfamiliar to us the next thing we're going to work on is practicing to increase our tolerance level to all emotions so it's highly likely if you experienced early emotional neglect that there are one or several feelings that you do have either those shame binds or those inner phobias of so for myself I used to have an inner phobia around anger and if

I got too angry one of two things would happen I would have a chronic pain flare up that would totally shut down my system for a couple of days or I would experience an overwhelming urge to get drunk and it wasn't until I began working with a therapist who was able to be present with me as I was somatically experiencing anger and stay on the page with me and help me learn skills for both expressing and downregulating that anger that those instinctive body responses of pain or addiction started to naturally disappear so therapists particularly ones

who have a sematic element to the work that they do can work as really great SPH holders for us as we go into those experiences and learn to tolerate staying present with them so staying with them without dissociating or without having that flight response that takes us out of the experience and the more that we learn to tolerate those feelings that are most afraid of the more we're able to integrate them into our awareness which helps us make better decisions across the board and we might need to look for different environments to hold different types

of emotions so when I was learning to work with anger I worked with my therapist but I also did a lot of work with a community called radical honesty that places a really big focus on accessing and cleanly expressing anger when I was learning skills for tolerating intimacy I leaned heavily on the community of authentic relating which teaches staying present with expressions of interpersonal intimacy when I was working on staying present with feelings of sexuality I lean on the Tantra Community which helps us learn to tolerate Sexual Energy in the body and when I was

learning to tolerate feelings of pain and sadness I leaned heavily on Buddhism where they would do teachings on staying present with grief so what we often need to do at this point in the process is find environments where we canot just cognitively think about which emotion we need to integrate but where we can actually get in touch with them in the moment and somatically experience them with the help of those who are trained in containing these types of emotions so this is about going out into the world and finding the containing environments that we needed

when we were young but did not get and once again that emotional neglect patterning might be telling us there's nothing out there that's going to help me there's no one out there who's going to be able to give me the feedback I need and if I try or put myself in any of these environments and show these emotions I'm going to get rejected and so that belief might be something that we need to work through first in order to even develop the nerve to go out and put ourselves in these situations where we can have

firsthand sematic experiences of those emotions that we have been repressing so again this process doesn't happen overnight but hopefully we can lay out a bit of a groundwork of what it can look like overall so this is already bled into the third thing we really want to place our focus on in the healing process from emotional neglect which is finding mentors emotional neglect is in large part an interpersonal wound which means that the healing from it has to happen in large part interpersonally so we need to go out into the world and deliberately search for

people who are embodying the qualities that we know we are emotionally deprived in and finding ways to seek out mentors who can help us grow in those areas I remember having a conversation with a mentor of mine at one point where she said you're used to thinking of the environment around you as an emotionally impoverished place so you have stopped searching for ways in which the opposite could be true and if you're really serious about healing from emotional neglect you have to believe that there are ways in which your environment can and will be able

to nourish your inner world and you have to go out searching for them and that piece of advice was one that hit home really hard and that changed my life in very big ways we have often cut ourselves off from even the option of thinking about the outer world as a place that could provide us with accurate mirroring with co-regulation with meaningful feedback on our inner world and with really enriching experiences that will change our inner world for the better if we are not used to interacting with it in a wholehearted way and this all

Builds on itself because the more we get to know ourselves and what our needs are the more we're able to go out and find mentors who very specifically can help us fulfill those needs so those mentors might be coaches they might be therapists they might be community members they might be friends but the idea is that we just need to start believing those people are out there there are competent and compassionate adults out there who have significant nourishing things they could provide to our lives and vice versa this might feel completely counterintuitive and because it's

so counterintuitive to the way that you think it's often what holds the key to changing your worldview because at the end of all of this we want to arrive at a place where we believe that our environments are places where we could get nourishment from and that we could give nourishment back to which leads us to the final step which is living in a state of constant give and take with our environment and this is what it looks like to have a secure connection to the world we are allowing ourselves to go into new situations

and to meet people from a place of wholeness and openness so we're both receptive to what our environments have to offer us and we are also not withholding our own feelings and our own perceptions and our own inner worlds so there's a natural give and take that we now have between our subjective world and the objective world around us so this requires self atunement and once again getting to really deeply know ourselves and understand ourselves so that we get clear on things like how to stay in authentic connection with people in a way that is

boundaried and that protects our inner world but also how to not erect those boundaries so high that we never have the chance for genuine connection with other people this also requires learning Attunement to other people so learning to stay on the page with people and get really curious about their inner worlds and their experiences and coming to understand how our inner world and other people in our worlds are different but can very significantly enrich each others a kind of formal practice that's helped me a lot with this is the practice of circling so this is

kind of an interpersonal meditation process that gets practiced in groups so if you're curious about it you can go online and try to find an online circling group or there might be groups that meet in the place that you live but essentially this is all about engaging in practices that allow you to stay in authentic connection with other people which opens up that continuous feedback cycle between you and your environment so that you're understanding how the world is impacting you and how you can impact the world and the more we do that and the more

we get attuned to the relationship between subject and object and how it is never not happening even if we deny it the more we make sense of ourselves and the more we find our place in the world the more Our Lives become meaningfully directed and the less chaos and confusion we feel internally so there are so many benefits to all of this but it all starts with recognizing that something like emotional neglect if we have experienced it can lead to very massive disturbances in the way that we are processing the world and our inner world

as adults it's not a small thing to have not received proper emotional guidance and context for how to make sense of our inner world so this has been a lot of information and I'm going to leave it at that for today but as always anything that's coming up for you guys as you go through this video please leave in the comments section below I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really [Music] soon