Joe Hudson

Society in a lot of ways does celebrate childhood adaptations, right?

A lot of times drive, right, is seen and celebrated as motivation, as an individual who's seeking to achieve and then who does achieve.

And I make a case that I am of the belief that

A lot of times the continuous action or seeking comes from a childhood where love was conditional, where we learned that we had to go and do and acquire certain things or present ourselves in certain ways to maintain the connection and the belonging that we needed.

I think society also in some ways celebrates other behaviors as well, right?

The behaviors of being

shut down and easygoing to some extent for some of us, right, are celebrated as opposed to on the other side, sometimes moments where we're being passionate and explosive, right, those two also can be celebrated.

So I think that there's a lot of aspects of society where certain parts or identities or habits are seen and looked at, you know, in a more positive light when really they're grounded and

again, in our best attempt to maintain secure connections because in childhood, we need to be connected to the world around us.

It's the only way that we can care or be cared for.

So by being attuned to what's happening around us, including society's messaging and those of us that kind of continue on that path do, I think it's celebrated in some ways.

Yeah.

So in childhood, again, when we are completely dependent, not only for our physical needs, but for our emotional needs, we're incredibly adaptive.

We will change ourselves because we can't change the environment around us.

And even locating emotional needs in childhood is a newer shift, even in the clinical psychology world.

And that really came when we understood the development of our nervous system, the fact that a child cannot calm oneself down on its own.

We need a safe adult who

to calm and to soothe or to down-regulate when a child is crying or upset or in a state of need.

So then depending on the consistency or the inconsistency, so even just putting my childhood into this conversation, it wasn't necessarily a matter that I did have two parents who were physically present.

What impacted me was the lack of emotional attunement.