Ashok Gupta explains how traumatic experiences—often in childhood but also in adolescence or adulthood—create internal "parts" (e.g., an approval-seeker or achiever) that remain at the developmental age when they formed and influence present behavior and emotions. He frames separation/abandonment fear as an evolutionary core fear that underlies layers like fear of failure and rejection, describes how parts develop and can be strengthened by later events, and advises that while the program helps retrain these parts (not necessarily by revisiting all past trauma), people with significant trauma should also work with trauma specialists. Practical exercises (notably in session 11) focus on giving wounded parts the love/approval they sought to reduce unhealthy patterns and move toward healthier moderation.
Chapters
We understood more about how they start in terms of the core fear of separation or abandonment from the tribe. Yeah, it's an evolutionary, programmed protection mechanism which makes complete sense. And that fear of failure and fear of rejection are layers above that core separation or abandonment. They become proxies for separation or abandonment. And then these parts recognize how dangerous that is and begin strategies to overcome that particular fear and maintain safety, our physical safety and our emotional safety. The emotional safety is a proxy for the physical safety. And that's all well and good at the time that those strategies were created. And these parts of this get developed often in childhood or teenage years. They can even come afterwards as well. And they stay at the same developmental age as when they were created. And sometimes they're not created in one big bang like that. They're created over a period of time. Sometimes they are created at a specific point, and then future experiences simply build and strengthen the motivation of that particular part. And yes, it is often childhood trauma. Teenage trauma can be relationship trauma even later in life that can contribute to these parts being created. And so, as an example in an adult, let's say someone goes through a difficult breakup and it's traumatic for whatever reason, then that can create a part which could be, for example, the approval seeker. It's the core part that's the core wounded part that seeks love and approval from people around. Now, if that adult experience was traumatic, the likelihood is the reason or the strength of its gentle. The strength of that traumatic experience was based upon some of the core experiences the child may have experienced. They build upon each other. And in this program, we know that many people do have trauma. They have experienced trauma in their past. And specifically, this program is not necessarily designed to handle the trauma. If you have had trauma or experienced trauma, that's something that we advise that you work with a trauma specialist and some of our coaches can work with people with trauma, but also that you focus on the core program first. Get yourself healthier and happier, and then move on to that next stage, if that's important to you. But it certainly isn't a prerequisite that you need to deal with all of your trauma in order to be able to heal, because there are periods in your life when you had that past trauma, but you didn't have this condition. All trauma does, in my view, is it makes the brain more susceptible to. To learning events or conditioning events in the brain. And those learning conditioning events can be emotional or they can be physiological. So having these traumas in the past, they simply are predisposing factors to making it have a higher chance that one of these conditions may develop. And these parts that have been created often are as a result of the underlying trauma. And the great news is that actually a lot of the trauma. Yeah, I'm just going to enable the transcriptions. There we go. So you should be able to see the transcriptions. Now. A great deal of that past trauma can be dealt with in the present through retraining the parts that were created from that trauma. Does that make sense? So, two aspects. There's many aspects of trauma, but one aspect is there can be repressed emotion or there can be parts that have perspectives on those particular experiences which keep creating more and more emotion that gets repressed or pushed down that then subtly bubbles up and impacts on our anxiety and depression levels. And then secondly, those. So there's that repressed emotion or that stuck emotion. And then on top of that, there are then these parts that are still very active in the present moment, such as the approval seeker, such as the achiever, who are actively impacting on our present day behaviors in our present day emotional states. And the good news is we don't necessarily have to pull up and bring up all our past experiences to be able to heal it. Partly we can work with our parts in the present moment, which is what we're doing in session 11, and give them the love and approval that they wanted back then and now are working really hard to get in the present moment as children and as other adults. And if we give them the love and attention that they craved before and help them realize they're loved unconditionally, then they can gradually let go of this protective behavior or this excessive behavior. And don't worry. People come to me and say, ashok, I don't want to stop being an achiever. I want to do things in life. Yes, don't worry. As if it was going to be that kind of miracle. We are moderating and going from unhealthy patterns to healthy patterns. So we're going from unhealthy achievement to. To healthy achievement, unhealthy approval seeking to more appropriate approval seeking. So there's a middle ground. And that's what these exercises gradually help us to retrain these parts of us.
