Ashok Gupta explains how childhood without reliable safety creates persistent anxiety in adults. He calls these "overprotective responses" that once helped but now need updating. The program retrains your unconscious to recognize you're an adult who can handle what comes.
When you've been brought up in an environment and a childhood where you didn't feel safe or didn't feel regularly safe or a background sense of safety, then what happens is, as an adult, you will notice, or many patients notice, that there's this background feeling of existential dread that what happens if something bad happens now? Because in our childhood, a lack of safety is defined by inability to predict what's going to happen in some situation. Okay, how is someone going to react to me? What happens if I say the wrong thing? So we start living walking on eggshells. And that creates that lack of safety and that tension in the nervous system which then reflects itself in the balloon. Your balloon is just easier to inflate than most people's balloons or over inflate. Yeah. And so as you go through the program, I want you to know that, yes, you may feel this sense of dread. You may feel this sense of, God, how am I going to deal with life now that I have this condition? That feeling of dread, anxiety, background fear is perfectly normal. It is not a reflection of your life or your situation. It is an overprotective response. Yeah. Is this. Is this making sense to you? It's an overprotective response because when your brain tells you that there's a lack of safety and there's a danger in your environment, guess what? It is telling you to then take precautions like you needed to when you were younger. But now it needs updating. Your whole unconscious, and this is what we're doing in the program, needs updating with new information that you are no longer a child, you are an adult, and you can handle life and the situations around you. You don't need to be given this sense of background dread.
