Dan Roberts says that the most common schema he sees in his Internal Family Systems practice is Emotional Deprivation.

This schema develops when parents or caregivers provided for physical needs but not emotional support.

They put food in our mouths, clothes on our backs, and a roof over our heads. But we didn’t get hugs or “I love you”s. We didn’t feel cherished or valued.

Our hygiene was tended to, but not our hearts.

I know now that I didn’t get these things because my mother didn’t get these things. You can’t give what you didn’t get.

Even though I know the reason, there is still the result.

Roberts says we walk around with what feels like a big hole in our chest that can never be filled.

My addition:

We don’t say, “I feel like I have a big hole in my heart due to my early life experiences.”

Instead, we say, “I feel like I have a big hole in my heart. I am defective.”

We are wrong, but we don’t know it.

We just feel the  hole.

The good news is that our brains our plastic—for our whole lives.  If we learn to do the tango at age 80, our brains will develop new neural architecture to hold all the tango-related information.

Our schemas, no matter how long we have held them, can be changed.

To quote Roberts,

 “…whatever painful stuff you went through, and however much you might struggle with the legacy of that now, neuroplasticity allows you to change, grow, and develop new, more helpful neural pathways and networks.

 

“Whatever you went through as a child, it’s never too much and never too late to heal.”

Chewing the Cud of Good

Thankful for a plastic brain.