What it’s like to be an internalizer

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Welcome back to our book club and read-along of adult children of emotionally immature parents. This week we're going to be diving into chapter six that goes further into that concept of internalizer and I'm really excited to dive into this chapter a little more because I bet a lot of you listening can relate to this chapter. I know that I certainly can and especially if you found me through my work talking about intellectualizers and how often they can get missed in therapy, you probably will really relate to this chapter.

So this chapter really explores what it's like to grow up in an emotionally immature home and to turn inward. So we know that our protective survival strategies are our brain, nervous system, and body working together subconsciously, biologically, to determine what is going to keep us safe when there is a threat. And remember in this situation we're not talking just about physical safety but about a felt sense of safety which means maintaining connection with our parents and caregivers and those around us.

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It's so important to remember that these are all protective strategies to keep us safe. It's hard to conceptualize as an adult because of course we want to say well I was safe but I always want to is our biological imperative to stay safe, to stay alive because we rely on them to keep us alive. So staying connected and feeling like we belong with them is our biological imperative.

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So that is what our brain and nervous system are doing when they create these protective strategies and so it's not something that we get to consciously choose. We don't get to decide if we're going to be an externalizer or an internalizer. It's very similar to fight, flight, fawn, or freeze.

When we're in an emergency situation, like we're in a dark alley and someone walks in behind us, we don't pause and think cognitively and intellectually. Should I fight this person? Should I run away? Should I try to make everything okay by being nice and sweet? Should I freeze? We're not deciding any of that consciously. It's decided in milliseconds subconsciously by our brain.

So just remember that these strategies are similar in that regard and so if you are listening and you're thinking I don't really relate to the internalizer. I partially do but sometimes I'm an externalizer. Just know that all of this is your brain and nervous system wiring.

It doesn't mean anything about you and what we're curious about is how they show up here in the present because that is where we have an opportunity to make a change because what happens for many of us who grew up in homes with adult emotionally immature caregivers is we become that person for ourselves. We become, we internalize that emotionally immature parent and then we treat ourselves the same way. We abandon our needs.

We abandon our boundaries because we are criticizing ourselves all of the time because we don't feel like we can handle the emotions so we need to shut them down because we feel like we're not good enough and so we take care of everyone else's needs to make us feel like we are good enough. We do that as adults because those are the neural pathways that are laid down as children but that's what we're wanting to change and so that's what we're being curious about when we observe this. Not to criticize ourselves for noticing these behaviors but to say well I can really understand how these developed and I feel sad and I feel angry and I can be with the part of me that was afraid but I don't have to do those things anymore.

Little bits at a time I can start to change my neural pathways. So Gibson defines internalizers as those of us who learn to turn our distress inward. So instead of acting out, you may remember from the last chapter, we withdraw, we overthink, we intellectualize, we manage, we go internal and try to manage everything all at the time.

So we will appear very mature, very capable, very thoughtful. We're often told that we're literal little adults as children but what we don't see is that maturity is actually a part of the survival strategy. If we have emotionally immature parents and that feels dangerous to us then we will develop this sort of faux sense of maturity beyond our needs to try to manage, beyond our age is what I meant to say, to try to manage an environment that feels unmanageable and that feels unsafe.

So when we grow up in these families where our emotional needs are not met, we don't just give up on that connection, we double down on trying to earn it, right? So we will become whatever our parent needs, we will become the most helpful person with no needs, we're very low maintenance, we're responsible, we're self-regulating because this is what is safe. This is how we're trying to get our needs met and stay in connection and then we don't just do this with our parents, we do this with our teachers, we do this with our peers and our friends. This is how we learn to navigate the world.

We learn subconsciously and then eventually consciously that connection is very, very fragile, very, very fraught, that we're always at risk of kind of being voted off the island and thus we must earn it. We must do something to keep it. We must perform lovability.

So again in NARM and in parts work, we recognize this the same way that these are protective parts of us, these are adaptive survival strategies. When we develop these, it's because we're actually very, very perceptive. Some part of us senses what other people need and so we learn to become hyper-vigilantly over-attuned.

You've heard me say that word before, of sensing every single little shift in a room. And so as an adult, you might say to your partner, what's wrong? And they might say, nothing's wrong. And you might say, well, your tone of voice changed a little bit and now it seems like you're upset.

And they're like, no, everything's totally fine. I don't think my tone of voice changed. But you were responding to some tiny little shift because you're so over-attuned and now your nervous system is saying something must be unsafe.

You need to make it okay. Something must be unsafe. You need to make it okay.

So our atlas in our brain is made up of all of these roads that say, here's how you minimize your needs. Here's how you minimize your emotions. Here's how you be as lovable as possible.

And those are the pathways that are available to our brain, that our brain goes down most frequently. The other pathways of having needs, having boundaries, communicating, feeling emotions, being authentic, going after what we want, feeling that anything is possible. Those roadways either are very, very underdeveloped.

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They're like little back rocky roads, or they're not developed at all. So it feels terrifying to us. Remember, if we try to go somewhere where the neural pathway doesn't exist, or the road is encoded as unsafe, our brain says, that's way too dangerous.

I can't let you do that. And it will want to get us back to these other pathways. And it'll often do that by making us feel overwhelmed.

We'll criticize ourselves to shut ourselves down. We'll turn our back on our needs. We'll tell ourselves we're not good enough, whatever we have to do to get us back to those safe pathways.

That is how our brain is wired when we grow up in homes with a... So you could imagine that if you're an internalizer, the name of your atlas, all the maps and neural pathways in your brain would be entitled something like, if I want love, I need to be good. If I want love, I need to not have emotions. Connection is dangerous, and this is how I stay safe.

And it's just an atlas full of these survival pathways. And it's incredibly heartbreaking to do this work, because oftentimes when we are children, we don't have the capacity to feel these emotions, to understand what's really happening. And we're often not supported in our homes to feel the emotions.

And so we don't know that what's happening could make us feel angry, or sad, or afraid. Instead, it's just sort of this like, it's normal. This is what's normal.

This is what my family does. So this must be what love is like. So when you are coming to terms with this as an adult, and this is why I always say to take this work so slowly, is that oftentimes all of those emotions that you didn't get to feel as a child, the anger, the fear, the sadness, and grief, will come up now.