If you were stuck in a room with an alarm going off, your brain would eventually tune it out in order to survive. This is what I imagine happens when we grow up in a home environment that doesn’t meet our needs; our nervous system acts as the alarm telling us we’re out of alignment, but because we don’t have the option to leave, we stop listening to the alarm instead. 

In this work, I call those alarms emotional allergies. Our nervous system, the threat detector that it is, will alert us to a familiar threat or something that isn't safe. If you grew up feeling judged often, you may now have an allergy to judgment. If you grew up with inconsistency, you may now be highly sensitive to unavailability and inconsistency. If you grew up emotionally engulfed, you may be allergic to relational overwhelm. 

Every time you override an alarm that’s trying to protect you, you chip away at self trust, which is the foundation of a secure attachment. Our job as we start to pay attention to our emotional allergy alarms isn’t to silence them or intellectualize them. Our job is to tune into them and to get curious with ways that we can protect ourselves and get ourselves back to a baseline of safety. 

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