What’s more important than safety? Our mind is conditioned to believe, “Nothing is more important than safety.” If you have experienced trauma, safety feels especially paramount. But when safety is the goal, we miss out on wholistic wellness. Every human being has needs. We need nutrition to stay alive and we are also social creatures with emotional needs. From the moment we are born and throughout our lifespan, our emotional needs change. Our needs don’t change randomly; they change developmentally. Just like there is a cycle of physical growth, there is a cycle of emotional development.

In the absence of trauma, familiarity helps us develop healthy patterns for negotiating the world. However, familiarity keeps survivors stuck in dysfunctional cycles. It causes us to choose the demons we know over the goddesses we find strange. Ultimately, we maintain tradition because of familiarity, not practicality. The more times any event or experience happens, our brain will likely code it as “normal.” The brain codes “normal” according to the reality of the environment, not according to right and wrong. Generally, when a victim cannot stop abuse, the brain will habituate to the abuse to survive, making it “normal.” Adult who experienced severe adverse childhood experiences have a long history of normalizing pain, both internal and external. Attempts at new behavior compete with decades of the familiar.

As we develop trust with ourselves, we learn to create boundaries and value the boundaries of others. We allow for disappointment in relationships and use healthy communication to resolve conflict. When all goes well during childhood development, we use relationships to express joy, not create it. On the other hand, we enter the school of hard knocks when, as adults, we unconsciously rely on relationships to fill in the gaps of our childhood emotional needs. Rather than experiencing people authentically, we try to predict who can fulfill particular roles for us, and relationships end before they begin. This episode teaches you how to build optimal satisfaction relationships.

Generational wounds are the interference of ancestral experiences in our lives. When harm is unacknowledged unaddressed or unhealed, response to it keeps showing up in the next generation, even if the harm is no longer present. The response will show up until an offspring heals it, even if it takes 1000 years. Any maltreatment can leave generational wounds. Any group of people who have been systematically oppressed leave generational wounds in the family tree. Any individual who has experienced trauma can pass down generational wounds. We can pass down emotional wounds just as we can pass down disease.