Our backlog of toxic emotions can start at any point in time. Did your toxic emotions start in infancy?
Toxic emotions are ones that have not been resolved and are still causing problems for you today.
If these emotions have their roots in infancy, you probably have no memory of what caused them. If you are like me, you don’t remember your early years.
So, how can you release these early emotions? Read on to learn how.
What science tells us
In Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology (2015), author Donna Jackson Nakazawa describes how parental stress can be passed from parent to child. One way is through “empathetic stress.” The parent’s stress affects the child even raising their cortisol levels.
Infants are attuned to the emotional state of their care givers and as a result “an infant may silently absorb her parents’ negative emotions into her own tiny body.” Scientists have also found that “children may even inherit the effect of a mother’s stress from events that occurred before conception through their DNA.”
Children exposed to parental stress are more likely to develop health issues in childhood, such as headaches, stomach aches, pain, and fatigue.
What my clients have discovered
Many of my clients find that emotional issues start in very early childhood before they have any cognitive memories. Most of my clients are unable to connect this emotional memory with an event from their lives, but I am aware of a few exceptions.
The first is from my life. I had an emotion I called free-floating fear. I would be doing something completely normal, like picking out a broccoli at the grocery store and all of a sudden, I would feel fear. This emotion made no sense to me.
When I was developing the poetry of emotion process, this fear seemed like a good emotion to release. After I released the fear, I was able to connect my fear to my mother’s fear. When I was born, my parents were living far from either family. My mother had a lot of fears about being a new mother without family support. She passed this fear along to me. I am happy to say that she became a more confident parent over time.
Another one comes from a client. Linda (not her real name) was an intelligent and professional young woman, yet she struggled with self-worth issues and she never felt like she belonged.
She told me this family story of her birth. Her parents were told that they were having a boy. When she was born, her parents were disappointed but quickly adjusted. This brief moment of disappointment was stored in Linda’s body. Linda is now working at a job she loves and is happily married.
What this means to you
Sometimes you just don’t know where your emotional memories started. You may have been very young or you may have inherited them from your parents.
Cognitive methods can be effective, but at some point, you may discover issues, such as fear or low self-esteem, that do not seem to have a cause. These problem emotions started before you were able to create cognitive memories.
You need a non-cognitive method to address these very early emotional memories. The poetry of emotion process can help.
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(Image: TC Photography)
