Thriving Your Love

In this podcast, Tricia and I explore how anger can sometimes be a protest—a cry from someone who doesn't feel loved, valued, or respected by the person closest to them. At its core, anger can be a cry for attention: a longing to be treated as someone special and to hold a meaningful place in the life of a loved one. Anger can also arise as an attempt to protect those we care about deeply. We may feel angry when we see a loved one heading toward harm, making choices that could bring pain, or missing out on opportunities to grow. In these moments, anger reflects our desire for them to be safe, successful, and fulfilled. Yet, when anger shows up—whether in ourselves or in others—it's often difficult to recognize the love beneath it. Instead, we may see only hostility or hurtful intent. In this episode, we challenge those negative views and invite our listeners to look deeper, to uncover the positive intentions hidden within anger. Finally, we encourage you to channel anger in more constructive ways: to clarify the loving motivations that fuel it and to express the care and concern that lie beneath.

Welcome to the first episode in our series exploring the many facets of anger. Today, we want to emphasize that anger itself is not bad. It's a natural, healthy emotion designed to enhance our chances of survival. In fact, without anger, we probably wouldn't have made it this far as a species — it helps us protect ourselves and assert boundaries when we're threatened.

Anger's core purpose is to keep us safe and prevent others from harming us. However, when anger becomes excessive or uncontrollable, it can turn destructive.

Many of us carry childhood traumas that shape our perception of others. These past wounds can lead us to interpret people's words or actions as threats, even when none exist. We might make negative assumptions about their intentions and feel a strong urge to defend ourselves against imagined dangers.

At times, we may feel small or powerless, believing we need to yell or lash out to be heard and respected. But instead of resolving conflicts, this often causes pain for others and triggers their anger in return.

When this happens, we can unintentionally create a cycle of negativity that keeps us from building the closeness we desire with the people we care about most.

The concept of the "inner child" typically refers to the part of ourselves that felt unloved and unimportant during childhood. This inner child embodies trauma, pain, and a desire for love and appreciation.

As children, we yearned to feel loved and connected to our caregivers. We sought their approval and often tried hard to please them to earn their love. When we didn't feel important or loved by them, we carried that sense of neglect into adulthood, where we continue seeking love and acceptance.

Even as adults, we continue to pursue love and significance, seeking the nurturing and validation that we lacked as children from our loved ones. This desire to feel loved and treated as we wished to be treated in childhood can complicate our roles as parents. Without realizing it, we may want our children to fulfill our unmet emotional needs. We hope they will obey us and succeed in validating our importance to them. Consequently, when they engage in behaviors we disapprove of, we may interpret these actions as a sign of a lack of love for us.

In this podcast, we aim to raise awareness among parents about the importance of giving rather than receiving. We need to examine our relationship with our children to ensure we aren't expecting them to please us to feel loved. Additionally, we should refrain from punishing them as a means of expressing our feelings of unworthiness or lack of importance.

We discuss the significance of compassion for our well-being and the value of maintaining good relationships with others. Being unkind to ourselves contributes to unhappiness and reduces our productivity. Blaming ourselves or forcing ourselves to meet expectations drains the energy we need for the things we genuinely want to do.

Additionally, we examine how childhood experiences influence our self-care in adulthood. If we were treated harshly by our caregivers, we may struggle with self-kindness as adults, which can also affect how we interact with our loved ones.

In this podcast, we explore how childhood influences our sense of worth. Not feeling loved and connected to our caregivers during childhood makes us think we must perform to be accepted. This causes many people to work hard to achieve their goal of being loved and accepted. Unfortunately, this never happens, and they continue pursuing this goal their entire lives.

If you had a traumatic childhood, you dream about having a different experience in your adulthood. You would like to find love and feel safe in the hands of your significant other. However, your trauma may often stand in the way of finding happiness. You may have difficulty trusting your partner, and you may have developed coping skills that might hurt your partner.

This podcast discusses the tendency to project the image of the people who hurt us in our childhood onto our partners. This can lead to attacking them as if they were our enemies, which can cause them to become defensive and confirm our fears that we cannot trust them.

The good news is that traumas are not set in stone. Our brains are plastic, and we can learn to trust our loved ones and heal our inner child. We have helped many couples overcome their childhood trauma and have better relationships. We invite you to join us in this quest to understand how the wounds you carry from your childhood affect your present relationships and how you can overcome them to find happiness and connection.

We all dream about having a great relationship with a loved one. We think the ideal relationship is one where there isn't any disagreement, or at least disagreements are rare. In this podcast, we show how even the best relationships have disagreements. The hallmark of a good relationship isn't the absence of disagreements but the ability to repair. When we disagree and feel disconnected from our partner, our ability to repair will make all the difference. Reaching out to our partners and taking responsibility for hurting them helps us reconnect.

In this episode, we discuss people's tendency to think that their worth depends on external circumstances. We explain that our worth does not depend on our condition, money, beauty, or accolades.

The concept of authority is frequently confused with harshness and power. The “authoritative” person places themselves in a position of superiority and shows others who is the boss. This causes people to feel humiliated and disrespected. The result is that people either resist defiantly or comply for fear of consequences.

We receive these messages about authority from our caretakers in our childhood. Many of us were treated from a top-down position by them. We felt hurt, but we learned from them and did the same as they did to us. We pass down to the next generation what was passed down to us. We don't remember how we felt hurt and humiliated by this kind of treatment, and we lose the ability to be empathic to our children and subordinates.

In this video, Tricia and I introduce a different type of authority. One that is born from a deep sense of respect and belief in the good of the other person. We focus mainly on parenting and how we can change the narrative of power and force to kindness and respect.

In this edition of the Thriving Your Love Podcast, Shalini Dayal, MFT, and Natasha Kharbanda, LCSW, speak about their work and how they have shared their knowledge of EFT and John Gottman with therapists in India and other countries.