Dear RJG:

You are very welcome. Regarding the early life emotional shut down I suggested- no human can shut down and feel nothing at all, become a sort of a machine, a robot. We are emotional by  nature, born that way and always will be emotional. When we resist a particular emotion, we get anxious, distressed, because emotions are meant to be felt and as we feel the emotion, we kind of.. listen to the message in it. For example, we feel fear, the message is: pay attention, or run-away, or freeze/ play dead. We feel anger, the message is: someone is hurting me, run away or fight, and so on.

The early life emotional shut down is about a child feeling fear but she can’t run away, or feeling anger, but she can’t fight, so she is stuck, nowhere to run, no way to fight, the fear and anger are strong.. can’t survive like that, so she shuts down, turns down the volume of the fear and anger.

And so, a child survives childhood and on in the context of life with her parents, but when she interacts with other adults, her fear and anger are not there to give her the messages required. She feels anxious, depressed, distressed, sometimes scared and angry, but the emotions are in a mix up, and the woman is unclear, lost, not knowing how to interpret what is going on, or misinterprets.

anita