The Inner Life of Your Child: How Early Emotions Shape a Lifetime

Send us Fan MailWe explore how our emotional lives are shaped from birth through the story of Cordelia, examining how feelings become emotions and how unconscious patterns develop. Understanding these early formations is the key to rewriting our emotional scripts and experiencing more meaningful happiness.• Nine innate affects (interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, distress-anguish, shame-humiliation, fear-terror, surprise-startle, anger-rage, disgust, dissmell) form the basis of all emotions• Newborns experience feelings as pure, immediate sensations without memory or expectation• Laidelescence represents a critical developmental stage in adults when we can question and rewrite emotional scripts• Emotional patterns become automated in childhood before we have the cognitive capacity to understand them• Every person experiences the same basic affects, but our emotional lives become uniquely individual through memory and meaning-making• Recognizing automatic emotional patterns is the first step toward taking conscious control• The early relationship between caregiver and infant lays the foundation for future emotional responses• Complex emotions require body signals, mental meaning-making, and consciousness to form a personal storyConsider what emotional patterns in your life feel automatic, as if running without your conscious input. Reflect on how your early experiences might have shaped your current emotional responses.Support the showFor more information about Scott and his practice, articles, videos, and more: https://linktr.ee/scottconkright