Fleet MaullThe Entrepreneur’s Zen Master

Alex Howard discusses Trauma + Personal Development at The Ultimate Life Mastery Summit #motivation

9 Sept 2023 · 1 min

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Alex Howard (speaking at The Ultimate Life Mastery Summit) discusses how patterns of avoiding emotional closeness in adult relationships often originate as childhood survival strategies. He describes these protective 'walls' built in childhood to manage trauma that later become prisons limiting intimacy; he also notes a common therapeutic impulse to remove those defenses without fully understanding their origin or function.

Chapters

Maybe what we struggle with is when we feel too close to someone emotionally in a relationship, we leave. And we've got a sort of pattern through our life of struggling to stay in an intimate, loving relationship. So these are classic things that someone would go, right, I want to change that. The interesting thing, though, is that often these things are defenses or survival strategies that we developed as a way to manage those early childhood traumatic experiences. So it's sort of like the walls that we built as a child to keep us safe becomes the prison that traps us as an adult. And then we come to therapy, or we come to sort of self development, trying to smash down those walls without always having the sense of. Of respect and, and understanding of why those wills got.