When we are living in emotional childhood we are not owning our attachment wiring, we are not stepping into awareness of how our primal panic affects our reactions, or we don’t acknowledge how our selective feedback, selective memory and selective interpretation may be influencing how we are currently perceiving our partners words/actions. So what does this mean?

This means we have to learn how to develop Emotional Adulthood. We have to develop skills and strategies for when our primal panic is activated.

What is emotional adulthood?

Emotional adulthood is when we take responsibility for our thoughts, our feelings, or actions and we practice being aware of our attachment system triggers and our response to it.

It's when we take responsibility for developing our new belief systems. It takes back our power. Learning how to love ourselves, be there for ourselves and not make someone else’s actions or reactions to us mean anything about us as a person or our worth.

Emotional adulthood is when we are able to learn to hit the pause button, set away with communication: I need a minute, I can feel my body and brain want to react a certain way but I want to choose how I show up so I am going to walk away for a minute.

Emotional adulthood is learning to think, act and feel on purpose and allow others to do the same. We no longer take ownership of how someone else feels. We no longer think we can earn love through actions. We no longer lose ourselves inside of a relationship because we need to “prove” that we are all in by being overly committed to someone else and loosing our commitment to ourselves.

Emotional Adulthood is learning to develop a relationship with yourself that looks like learning to feel all of our emotions. It is learned to allow them, even when it is the last thing we want to do, trust me sitting through anxiety is one of the hardest emotions for me to sit with, I have learned that this may be my life’s work, to learn to sit with my emotion of anxiety, but I am going to continue to work on it and I hope you do to.

It’s learning to develop new core beliefs that serve you in developing healthy relationships.

Developing Core Beliefs takes practicing new neutral thoughts on purpose. So if you have the belief you are not loveable. Even practicing to some people I am loveable, will slowly allow you to change it to I am loveable. If you have the core belief, They will always leave and you change it to “Some people will stay” it will slowly allow you to change it to “the person for me will stay”. I will never find someone who can love me. Practice “ There are some people who could love me”, to “there are an infinite number of people who could love me”

Remember practicing self love and self compassion when your primal panic is triggered: looks like, you showing up for yourself, you acknowledging your brain patterns, feeling your emotions, and then choosing how you will respond or react. It does not look like judging yourself, comparing yourself to securely attached people, or calling yourself negative names like “too much, too needy, or crazy” .

When we are walking around with these yucky core beliefs that don’t feel good, we do not show up confidently, we do not show up with feelings that will emulate that we love, trust and care about ourselves and as a result we do not attract those that will love, trust and care about us. So if you want to feel confident, if you want to feel secure, if you want to learn that you will choose a better partner for yourself, one that you DO ACTUALLY deserve, then it starts with practicing new thoughts, new thoughts consistently practiced become new thought beliefs, new thought beliefs eventually become core beliefs. This takes LOVE and PATIENCE and CONSISTENCY.