Love is a powerful force, and its presence or lack thereof can dramatically alter an individual’s state of well-being. Psychology studies and other scientific research have shown that those raised with sufficient love have stronger immune systems, lead healthier emotional lives, and generally experience more happiness.

Furthermore, when a child grows us with the good fortune of a loving environment, they are less likely to grow into adults with patterns of chronic anger. This scenario of being nurtured with consistent love is wonderful and ideal, and if everyone were so blessed, our world would have far less unhappy and angry people. But sadly, as you may have already concluded, the majority of people aren’t this fortunate.

Most of us have a less than perfect infancy, and the internalization of our mother’s love is a partial one. As a result we grow up with a psychology and emotional self that has some mixture of strength and woundedness.

Being Cut Off From Love

There are all kinds of ways and degrees in which the ideal love and nurturing environment created by our mother eventually falls apart. At one end of the scale is innocent distraction and at the other is horrific abuse. However since our focus in this article isn’t to examine the full spectrum of situations possible, but rather to understand the basic phenomenon of being cut off, we’re going to simplify and look at a  relatively innocent and benign possibility.

In this case, after we are born our mother is perfect and present for us pretty much all the time. But at some stage other concerns in her life start to pull her away from us. At first glance this is not a big deal, but actually if she disappears from the scene too soon and for too long, in fact it can turn into a very big deal.

One day suddenly our mother will have a headache, and she will be distracted from showering us with love as she had always done before. If this persists for too long, our infant self will start to feel vulnerable, confused, and insecure. We will lay there in a helpless state, crying for our mother’s attention, and when she doesn’t show up, or worse, when she scolds us and tells us to STOP!!, our whole being retracts into a fearful darkness.

When a child grows us with the good fortune of a loving environment, they are less likely to grow into adults with patterns of chronic anger.

Don’t forget, we are so tender and vulnerable, and we depend on our mother for our life itself. Our very life source has suddenly disappeared, causing us to feel deeply perplexed, lost, and hurt. Since we still lack an ego structure, we have no ability to reason and no way to understand these moments, so our emotions and psychology experiences them as deeply painful and traumatic.

Think how you would feel, a grown adult, if you suddenly found yourself in some unknown dark and cold forest in the middle of the night, and there was no logic for how you got there. Think of how afraid you would be, and then multiply that by a hundred. That gives an idea of how scary it is for an infant to feel suddenly alone when we aren’t yet prepared for that.

Continued in Origins of Anger IV…