Annaka Harris

I was already interested in consciousness and the brain.

And it just... You know, this kind of rattled other intuitions for me in terms of how our childhoods shape who we become.

Because I had been convinced... My father was...

I was just going to say again, but I think, I mean, so he, he was not diagnosed.

I think he was, I think he had borderline personality disorder and was emotionally abusive.

And I thought that all of the ways I experienced the world and all of my anxiety and my sensitivities, um,

I thought almost all of that, if not all of that, was because of these experiences I had growing up and trauma that I experienced as a child.

And obviously those things play a part.

But what I realized after going through postpartum and then the thing that was extremely informative to me was having my own children.

because they were basically living my dream childhood.

They had none of the things that I thought were the cause of the psychological suffering that I experienced.

There was none of that.

And they have a lot of the same, they struggle with a lot of the same anxiety and panic attacks.

And what I realized was

how much we're kind of born into the world with these things that we struggle with and with our strengths and with all of that.

And of course, then if you have an abusive childhood, if you're someone who tends to be anxious and sensitive and empathic, and then you're born into an abusive situation, that's obviously a terrible combination.

But I never acknowledged or realized how strong just the genetics and the wiring is.

played.

I think they're part of the same process.

And I think,