Out of fear

The two authors of this book are Krishnanda and Amana. Both of them are well-known tutors in the field of psychotherapy, leading workshops around the world. Their trilogy of "Love and Trust" has been translated into many languages and distributed all over the world, which has helped many people suffering from emotional distress.

About this book

This book teaches you how to find the root of emotional problems in life, get rid of negative emotions, and thus better control your life. In life, we are often troubled by negative emotions, some of which are caused by external factors and some are caused by internal factors. This internal cause is what the author of this book calls "emotional children". In the book, the author analyzes the causes and manifestations of "emotional children" with easy-to-understand language and years of practical experience in psychotherapy, and guides us to get rid of the negative effects brought by "emotional children".

Core content

According to Freud's classic iceberg theory, the consciousness we can perceive is only the tip of the iceberg, and there is still a huge space hidden under the water, that is, our subconscious. The "emotional child" mentioned by the author of this book is a part of our subconscious.

The two authors of this book believe that the deepest feeling of an "emotional child" is fear. In life, many of our negative emotions, such as anger, sadness, jealousy and inferiority, actually come from fear. The book "Out of Fear" is actually to understand how the subconscious fear affects our lives by analyzing the operating mechanism of the inner "emotional child".

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Hello, welcome to listen to a book every day. I read it for you today out of fear. The Chinese version of this book is about 6.5438+0.8 million words. I will talk to you about the essence of this book in about 22 minutes. Let's look at how to find the root of emotional problems in life, get rid of the troubles of negative emotions, and thus better control our lives.

In recent years, emotional problems have been widely concerned by the society. People have some common sense about emotions. For example, emotion is an inevitable problem in our daily life. Whether we can manage our emotions well is very important for a person's career and life. But for emotional management, people often fall into a misunderstanding, thinking that once they have bad emotions, it is good to vent them. For example, someone will advise you to go out for two laps and spit with your friends. No big deal. Often before long, this kind of emotion will pop up again, and life is like a vicious circle.

The reason is actually very simple, venting can only deal with temporary superficial problems, just like going to the emergency room at the first time every time you have a stomachache. The emergency doctor prescribed you painkillers, and you feel much better after taking them. But next time, your stomachache will still attack. The emergency doctor can't help you find the source of your stomachache. If you want to know why you have a stomachache, you have to go to the internal medicine department for a detailed examination to see what disease you have, so that you can prescribe the right medicine.

So are psychological problems. We must go back to our hearts to find the crux of the problem, which is also discussed in Out of Fear.

In life, everyone has negative emotions, sometimes caused by external factors and sometimes by internal factors. For example, if one day you are walking in the street and someone suddenly comes up and punches you, you feel very angry or even angry. This is a typical normal emotional problem caused by external factors. However, if you take the subway and the people next to you look at you, you will feel that the other person doesn't respect you and get furious. This excessive emotional reaction is caused by internal factors. And this internal cause is the "emotional child" we are going to discuss today.

What is an emotional child? This concept can be understood as two parts: one is children and the other is emotion. We can first imagine what children usually look like in life. When eating, they don't eat anything that is not delicious, knowing that it is good for their health. When shopping, when they see something they like, the children immediately ask their parents to buy it, and they can't wait for a moment. If they are not satisfied, they will cry. Childishness, impulsiveness, willfulness, impatience, lack of self-control and so on are the most obvious characteristics of children.

Emotional refers to sensitivity beyond reasonable limits. A person with a particularly sensitive mood is prone to obvious mood swings because of trivial matters, which is what we often call moodiness. When these two characteristics are put together, we can imagine how much children's emotions affect our lives.

You may find that in life, some people suddenly become unreasonable and particularly childish when they encounter setbacks or feel anxious. Psychoanalyst Freud called this behavior regression. In other words, at some point, we will give up the mature way of dealing with problems we have learned and return to the state of children. Freud believed that regression is an immature psychological defense mechanism.

The book Out of Fear is actually about people's retrogressive behavior in life. The author focuses on the causes and manifestations of emotional children in the book, and guides us to face the negative impact of regression on our lives with easy-to-understand language and years of practical experience in psychotherapy.

This book has two authors, Krishnanda and Amana, who are well-known tutors in the field of psychotherapy. In the trilogy of love and trust, Out of Fear is the last one. The book has been translated into many languages and published all over the world, which has helped many people suffering from emotional distress. What's more interesting is that these two people are a couple, so the book quotes many of their personal experiences and how they cured their emotional children through these experiences, which provides us with vivid first-hand materials.

Then, I will summarize the key points in the book for you from three aspects. First, let's look at the performance of emotional children; Then, let's analyze how emotional children are produced; Finally, let's sum up how to treat emotional children in life.

first part

Ok, let's take a look at the performance of emotional children first. In life, our behaviors are not all influenced by emotional children, and some are normal emotional reactions. For example, if someone suddenly punched you, it's normal for you to feel angry because you were violated. But if an acquaintance passes by you and ignores you, you will fly into a rage. It is likely that an emotional child has been touched.

In the book, the author lists many manifestations of emotional children, such as rebound behavior, control, expectation, willfulness, compromise, addiction behavior, fantasy and so on. These external manifestations sound a bit abstract, but we can actually classify them into three categories, namely: automation, overreaction and habituation.

First of all, emotional children's reaction is automatic, that is, as the author said, there is almost no conscious thinking between the trigger event and the rebound behavior. In life, in the face of unexpected events, the first reaction of ordinary people is that I should think clearly about what is going on first and then act after I understand it. The emotional child's reaction is that I must do it at once and can't wait a minute. Therefore, their behavior is often very impulsive and shows a strong desire for control.

For example, after a couple finished eating, the wife asked her husband to help wash the dishes. My husband sat in front of the TV and dawdled, saying that he would wash it after watching this TV series. A normal wife may say to her husband, "Don't forget." And a wife who is controlled by an emotional child may immediately say angrily, "Look at you, you don't care about anything at ordinary times, and I do everything at home alone." The more I think about it, the more angry I get. I may not give my husband a good face for several days.

In addition to impulsiveness, another manifestation of emotional children's automatic response is addiction. Because emotional children have no self-control, they want their needs to be met immediately, so they are easy to become addicted. For example, when they are in a bad mood, many people cannot help eating junk food. Although they have just eaten, they are not hungry at all, and they are very aware of the harm these foods do to their health, but they just can't control it. This is an emotional child guiding our actions.

The second characteristic of emotional children is overreaction. To go too far is to go beyond the normal and reasonable limits, that is, ordinary people would not think so under the same circumstances. Such as high expectations. Everyone has expectations for life, and it is normal for us to hope that life will get better every day. However, it is unreasonable if we ask others to meet our expectations unconditionally. For example, most singles choose to get married in order to seek long-term companionship and care. However, some people often expect the other half to be on call in marriage. If the other party doesn't call back in time, it just doesn't love me. If you have this idea, it is probably controlled by emotional children. Because only they will feel that others must pay attention to themselves unconditionally and should meet their expectations immediately.

The third characteristic of emotional children's behavior is habituation. In other words, if you have an emotional state that appears repeatedly in your life for a long time, it is likely that emotional children are affecting you.

For example, there is a phenomenon in psychology called learned helplessness, which was discovered by American psychologist seligman in 1967. In animal experiments, he put a dog in a cage. The experimenter first made a strange noise, and then immediately electrocuted the dog. The dog couldn't get out of the cage, so it had to be electrocuted. Later, the experimenter opened the cage, and the dog had a chance to escape from the cage between making a sound and electric shock, but they didn't. Instead, I lay on the ground and began to moan, waiting to be electrocuted.

Emotional children often show this learned helplessness, such as compromise. Children usually feel that their strength is very small and they must rely on others to survive. However, with the growth of age, ordinary people will gradually learn to take control back into their own hands. However, if people are in an emotional child state, they will habitually give the initiative to others and even allow others to hurt themselves.

In this book, the author tells the story of a student. This student is the boss of a company, but no one in the whole company listens to her. Later, the author found that similar situations often occur in this student's life. Her relatives, friends and even neighbors don't respect her and violate her boundaries. This is a habitual behavior pattern caused by emotional children, because she dare not claim her rights and face the guilt of rejecting others, so she chose to compromise.

Well, what I told you above let us know that the behavior of emotional children often shows three characteristics: automation, overreaction and habituation. However, why does an adult show these immature behaviors? Next, let's look at how emotional children are produced.

the second part

The author believes that there are three main reasons for emotional children. First, the original demand has not been met. Second, the influence of family background. Third, it is a personal special past experience. Let's talk separately.

The first reason for emotional children is that the original needs are not met. These primitive needs include taking care of the body, being respected as a unique individual, feeling safe and so on. As we know, the main feature of black holes in astronomy is that they have strong attraction and will devour other substances. Psychologist Amas put forward the "black hole theory". He believes that if some of our original needs are not met when we are young, we will form a black hole in our hearts, just like you have an underfed stomach and keep shouting "I'm so hungry".

These black holes will have a negative impact on our lives in two ways. On the one hand, we will project unmet needs to others. For example, if you were a child, your parents often told you that you must study hard to be looked up to, then when you grow up, you will feel that you are valuable only if you are recognized and praised by others. Such people usually show control, compromise or addiction. On the other hand, these black holes will also make us lose trust in others and always worry about being hurt by others. Under the influence of these two aspects, we can easily fall into a contradiction. While longing for intimacy, we are afraid of getting too close to others.

The second reason why children are emotional is that they come from families. They are our nurturers, mainly our parents. The influence of parents on children is mainly reflected in two aspects, one is infection assimilation, and the other is the harm caused by parents to children in the process of parenting.

Krishnananda said that infection assimilation refers to a phenomenon that children inherit the negative feelings and thinking patterns of their parents. Simply put, children will unconsciously repeat their parents' lifestyles and behavior patterns. The fear and shame of emotional children may come from the infection and assimilation of their parents. For example, parents are particularly afraid of strange environments and never trust strangers, so they often tell their children that the outside world is very dangerous and don't trust others easily. Then it will be difficult for children to establish relationships with others when they grow up. For another example, if parents are very strict with their children and often find fault with them, then when they grow up, these children will be particularly harsh on themselves and often dissatisfied with themselves.

Another influence of being born in a family is the harm in the process of raising, such as being abandoned and being swallowed up. If a person is often ignored by his parents when he is a child, then he will have a deep anger and resentment in his heart. When he grows up, once someone makes him feel as if he is going to be abandoned, he will unconsciously make some irrational actions, which is called psychological overcompensation.

On the contrary, if the children's parents are particularly strong and like to monitor their every move, then such children will often show reluctance to make commitments when they grow up. Then, there will be problems in intimate relationships.

In the book, the author cited a case in which a couple came to him for psychological consultation, and the wife hoped that her husband would promise to accompany her for life. However, the husband can't do it because he is afraid of losing his freedom. The two men argued about it for a long time. What these two people show in their marriage is typical dependence and anti-dependence, and these two States are the different results caused by two kinds of injuries: abandonment and engulfment.

The third reason for emotional children is the special experience of personal growth. There is an old saying in China that once bitten, twice shy. If you have been bitten by a snake before, you will be afraid even if you see a rope that looks like a snake. This is because memories of fear are stored in our brains. Neuroscience research has found that childhood memories will remain in our nervous system. Joseph Ledoux of the Psychiatric Science Center of new york University pointed out that the amygdala in the human brain can not only process memories, but also record things that we don't realize at all.

Many people think that only a particularly serious trauma will have a psychological impact on people. However, the author believes that even those seemingly small events are enough to cause trauma and shock to children with internal emotions.

The famous writer San Mao is a typical example. When she was in middle school, she was particularly good at Chinese, but she was particularly poor at math. So, she thought of a way to memorize all the math problems, and her math test scores improved a lot at once. But her math teacher doesn't believe that her grades can be improved so much at once. She thought she was cheating, so she gave Sanmao a senior three paper that she had never talked about. As a result, she got zero. The teacher thought she won, so she drew two circles around Sanmao's eyes and took her to the playground for a walk, which attracted countless teachers and students to watch.

This incident dealt a great blow to San Mao. She dropped out of school and became very afraid of school. Since then, Sanmao has entered the isolated literary world and started her lonely wandering life. Later, Sanmao's family thought that her suicide had a lot to do with the shadow left by this incident. It can be seen that some special experiences in a person's growth process will remain in the memory of emotional children, which will affect his personality and lead to a series of automatic and habitual overreactions in his life.

The above tells you three main reasons for emotional children. Next, let's talk about how to deal with the influence of emotional children and regain the initiative in life.

the third part

In this book, the author gives us four steps, namely, recognition, diving, acceptance and taking risks. Identification refers to judging whether you are influenced by an emotional child. If the answer is yes, what is the behavior pattern of this emotional child? Deep dive refers to looking for past injury experiences in memory and finding out what trauma led to the emergence of emotional children. Acceptance is learning to get along with negative emotions. Finally, adventure is that we must bravely walk out of the endless cycle of behavior patterns and stop being led by emotional children.

First of all, let's talk about identification. The first point we mentioned is that emotional children have three characteristics: automation, overreaction and habituation. When an emotion appears, we can usually compare these three criteria to distinguish whether it is influenced by emotional children. However, it should be noted that emotional children affect our lives through the subconscious, so this influence is not easy to find. The most obvious manifestation is that we often blame others for our misfortunes. For example, if a woman often meets a man who is not good to her, she will be abused or even punched and kicked.

Most people will think that it is because of this person's bad luck that he always meets love rat. However, if we look back on her growth process, we may find that it was actually that she didn't get enough love from her parents when she was a child, so as long as someone is kind to her, she can ignore all her shortcomings. Therefore, the tragedy will repeat itself again and again.

The first step to break this vicious circle is to see emotional children and admit that it is their own reasons that cause recurring problems in life.

Once the emotional child is identified, it is necessary to go deep into what trauma led to the emergence of emotional children, which is the second step to deal with emotional children. It is called deep diving because understanding a person's subconscious is not as easy as we think. People's emotions and behavior patterns are very complex, and one kind of emotion often covers up another.

For example, children don't listen to their parents, walk badly, and jump or fall. The first reaction of many parents is not to comfort their children, but to yell at them: "Let you walk well, why can't you obey?" On the surface, parents' emotions are anger, but in fact, what is hidden behind them is the fear of children being injured.

So learn to dig deep through the superficial phenomenon layer by layer to see what injuries you have experienced in the past. In the book, the author provides us with a simple way to pay attention to the situations that touch you in life. Because the behavior of emotional children is habitual and will appear repeatedly in life. Whenever you have negative emotions, learn to ask yourself, is there anything in the past that made you feel the same way? When did you first feel this way? Through such conscious exploration, we can find the root of emotional children, thus reducing its control over us.

The third step in dealing with emotional children is to accept, that is, to learn to get along with negative emotions.

Growing up, you must often hear people say that negative emotions are bad and how harmful they are to our health. So we must try to avoid negative emotions. Therefore, once an uncomfortable emotion appears, we will try to drive it away. However, the more you drive away, the stronger this feeling will be.

There is a famous experiment in psychology called "Don't think about pink elephants". Testers only need to do one thing, that is, they can't imagine a pink elephant in the room. It turns out that few people can do it. This shows that getting rid of an idea only deepens your impression of it. What we really need to learn is to accept negative emotions and learn to get along with them.

Acceptance does not mean compromise. The essential difference between the two is that compromise means forbearing and not talking, and acceptance means no longer talking through emotional children. When we express ourselves through emotional children, we often show extreme emotions such as anger, despair and depression, and always want to satisfy ourselves by changing others.

If we can accept our true feelings, including those bad feelings, then it is easy for us to give up our intention to change others. As we said before, many times, we are sad, not because the other person is particularly bad, but because we have many unreasonable expectations of others and hope that they will change completely according to our wishes. If we can give up this idea and accept the fact that everyone is not perfect, many contradictions will be solved.

The last step in coping with emotional child control is to take risks. Just seeing and accepting the emotional child inside is not enough to get us out of his control. We need to take further action, that is, consciously and actively refuse what emotional children ask us to do.

For example, in life, we can often see a sentence between two people inadvertently awkward. For example, if you casually say to a friend, "You have gained weight recently", the other person may try to make you feel uncomfortable with some ugly words because of discomfort. If you know what an emotional child is, you will find that two emotional children are actually talking. At this time, if one of them can realize that he is controlled by an emotional child and chooses not to follow the child's instructions, he will take the initiative to reconcile. But this kind of behavior is seen by emotional children, because reconciliation means weakness, and weakness is shameful and very dangerous.

For emotional children, it is equally dangerous to refuse others and express their true thoughts to others. However, we must learn to clearly express our boundaries to others. When someone violates this boundary, we must resolutely stand up and refuse, so as to avoid repeated injuries. At the same time, learn to express your true thoughts to others, especially in intimate relationships. Sometimes, we obviously want each other to care more about ourselves, but we often show anger and anger at each other. Only when we are willing to share our true thoughts with each other in a peaceful way will emotional children lose control of us.

abstract

Well, speaking of which, the main content of Out of Fear is finished. Let's briefly review it again.

First, we talked about how to identify emotional children. Simply put, emotional children's behavior has three characteristics: automation, overreaction and habituation.

Secondly, we talk about the unsatisfied primitive needs, family of origin's influence and personal past experience as the three main reasons for children's emotionality.

Finally, we talked about how to deal with the influence of emotional children on us and regain the initiative in life. In this regard, the author puts forward four steps, namely: recognition, deep diving, acceptance and adventure.

Inner child is a very classic concept in psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud's classic iceberg theory, the consciousness we can perceive is only the tip of the iceberg, and there is still a huge space hidden under the water, that is, our subconscious. The emotional child mentioned by the author of this book is a part of our subconscious.

The two authors of this book believe that the deepest feeling of an emotional child is fear. In life, many of our negative emotions, such as anger, sadness, jealousy and inferiority, actually come from fear. The book "Out of Fear" is actually to understand how subconscious fears affect our lives by analyzing the operating mechanism of children's inner emotions.

Knowing this may be very helpful to our lives. On the one hand, it helps us to manage our emotions in daily life and find problems from ourselves when things happen, instead of blaming all negative emotions on the outside world. On the other hand, it also reminds us that when we get along with family and friends, we should know more about the shaping of their character by the growing environment. When educating children, we should also pay special attention to the fact that their interaction with them is shaping his inner child, and the behavior pattern of this inner child will also affect the child's life.

Author: Xiao Qiao

Brain map: Moses

Interpretation: Jack Sugar