Emotional Ecology: Introduction to the Traumas of Unmet Core Needs
By Elizabeth E. Heilman, PhD
This article introduces my Emotional Ecology theory of human flourishing and trauma. While a lot is written about trauma, I observe that several kinds of confusion tend to occur when trauma is described. First, there are different types and origins of trauma, and these are often mixed up and conflated. I also note that there are paradigmatically different types of trauma that originate in different chronic or acute unmet core emotional needs. A profound danger is traumatic but so is being unloved or betrayed or shamed. The four core emotional needs include a need for safety, a need for esteem, a need for justice, and a need for love and belonging in relationships. These were originally named as core needs by Abraham Maslow 1 except for justice. He mentioned the need for self-actualization as including self-development and learning, spirituality and transcendence, wisdom, creativity, beauty, justice, play, virtue, autonomy, individuality, and more. I observe that an unmet need for justice can cause harm in a way that is comparable to the other "core needs" while an unmet need for creativity or beauty etc. will not. When any of these needs are acutely or chronically unmet a person’s emotional ecology will be distorted and they will not be flourishing. The second confusion is trauma is a dynamic and not static experience. Our emotional experiences occur in particular environments and so the experience of trauma is inevitably affected not just by past events but also by how toxic or healthy and healing our current environments are. We can have an emotional “color” but so do our environments. The environments we live in will be relatively emotionally healthy or toxic for getting our ongoing core emotional needs met and can be favorable and unfavorable in complex ways for healing as well. Our personal emotional ecologies are influenced by the emotional qualities of the environments we are in like our home, our family, our friendships, work or school, and also by the wider political, cultural, and natural environments in which we live.
The concept of trauma has traditionally been understood as an emotional shock that results from particular events and but ideas about what inspires trauma have been significantly expanding. PSTD in the DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria 2 is traditionally narrow and is a formal psychiatric diagnosis that refers to impairment triggered by exposure to a traumatic event including “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence”. The effects of trauma are included in the PSTD definition. However, trauma does not emerge only from an unmet acute or chronic safety need like death, injury, or assault. The theory of trauma within emotional ecology is broader than PTSD and considers trauma to stem from the four core human emotional needs being acutely or chronically unmet. This wider approach encapsulates nearly all of the usages of the term “trauma” that now dominate both popular culture and the psychology literature.
Core Basic Emotional Needs and Their Distortions
The Four Core Needs and Hyper-Hypo Trauma Responses
When a need is unmet in either an acute or chronic way, people experience trauma and their emotional ecology will be unbalanced. This means that their brain will change and their feelings and behaviors become distorted in a way that may keep them alive in the short term but negatively impacts their flourishing in the long term. This can include harm to the flourishing of others, and the health of the environments like family, work, and the natural world in which they are living. A trauma response is an evolutionary adaptation that affects brain chemistry. Further, as Lisa Firestone explains, “trauma memories are often implicit, because “trauma floods our brain with cortisol, the stress hormone, which shuts down the [frontal cortext] part of our brain that encodes memories and makes them explicit. Our implicit memories can be like invisible forces in our lives, impacting us in powerful ways.”3 The distortion of emotional well-being will take on the form of either a hyperactive overperformance or a hypoactive underperformance. Our modern society includes many people who are emotionally unwell and are “hyper expressing” or “hypo expressing” often without understanding why in one or more of these areas outlined below. In our global context, unbalance and un-wellness can sometimes create very materially “successful” and powerful people and institutions. There is a difference however between conventional success and flourishing within a healthy ecology.
Relational Needs and Trauma
One of the earliest and most primal human needs is for the love and connection of healthy relationships. Human beings are primates. We evolved being raised in hunter-gatherer communities of many adults and many other children in which a baby or a toddler would always be picked up and held and soothed. As anthropologist Barry Hewlett and psychologist Michael Lamb write in their book Hunter-gatherer Childhoods, “hunting and gathering groups are characterized by frequent and extended breastfeeding and extraordinarily high levels of parent-child physical contact and proximity.” 4 Modern children raised as babies, toddlers, and children with what is called “attachment parenting” are most likely to have had their relational needs met. Of course, being able to provide this relational need also requires that parents' emotional ecologies are happy and balanced and flourishing. Even with well-intended parents, many modern children grow into adulthood with unmet relational needs. Unmet relational needs in early childhood can establish a biochemical and neurologically habituated brain orientation towards the compensatory meeting of relational needs. These are primarily of two kinds, a hypo or a hyper reaction to inadequately met needs for love and belonging. In early childhood, children may express two dominant types of distorted relationship “attachment” and these are known as anxious attachment and avoidant attachment, a theory originally developed by Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby. 5 For example, avoidant attachment is characterized by “a strong compulsive self-reliance, a relational disconnection, and emotional overregulation” and anxious attachment reflects an “excessively strong tendency to proximity-seek and a reduced tolerance for separation from the attachment figure, leading to emotional dysregulation.” 6
The avoidantly attached child deals with the uncertain provision of love by becoming an acute watcher of parents and caretakers in their world. Such children train themselves to notice subtle differences in facial expression so they can anticipate potentially negative or angry reactions almost as soon as these reactions emerge. 7 Such children then craft their response to be as protective as possible. These calculations are the beginning of a Machiavellian personality type. 8 These children can experience profound difficulties as adults with truly trusting spontaneous emotional experiences. This child grows up fundamentally as an emotional loner. Such a child, however, may be charming, friendly, and affectionate if the performance of those behaviors has proven to be effective for them. The happiness chemicals in our brains and the receptors for them develop within emotional environments. When an anxiously attached child successfully manipulates a situation so that their needs are met the dominant chemical experience would be the dopamine release of task completion rather than the oxytocin experience of love. There are of course dangers to a brain with a habit for dopamine and few receptors for oxytocin. We know for example that psychopaths and bullies release a higher amount of dopamine in their brains9 and that sociopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians feel less compassion (an oxytocin-related feeling) than a person with a healthy emotional ecology. 10
The anxiously attached child lowers their expectations and can even lose the ability to make distinctions for the negative facial expressions of a parent such as anger and contempt 11 and yet the child may also have increased sensitivity to facial signs of parental sadness or distress. 12Essentially, the anxiously attached child preserves their ability to feel love and to give love by lowering their ability to notice poor treatment and increasing compassion. Such children commonly grow up to be very empathic people with poor boundaries who feel others' pain more than their own. It is hypothesized that such children may develop extra receptors in their brains for feeling oxytocin which is the core chemical experience of bonded parental and romantic love. This means the child can survive on less expressed love and feels even a meager offering of love more deeply than a child whose relational needs are met. Such children are commonly trauma-bonded and are so fixated on a need for love that its absence or a threat to its withdrawal is perceived with high anxiety. 13A trauma bond is a bond that is created in an emotional dynamic of met needs followed by unmet needs, abuse, or neglect. The feeling of love and bonding that occurs in a context of constant uncertainty is more powerful and literally addictive than healthy love which is persistently present. Insecure attachment and distorted patterns of oxytocin place children at risk of love or sex addiction 14and abuse in their adult relationships as well as substance abuse disorders. 15 Attachment also changes epigenetic gene expression as developmental experiences create a gene-environment interaction and “the manner in which environment is experienced will act as a filter in the expression of genotype into phenotype.” 16Children who grow up without the biochemical experience of a brain bathed steadily in the oxytocin of healthy love face an increased risk for addiction to the compensatory chemicals of alcohol and opioids. Anxiously attached children who experienced relational trauma are also at increased risk of relationship exploitation in work and school settings if they develop into empaths with poor boundaries or people pleasers.
Safety Trauma
People need to feel physically safe; it is a core human need. Physical safety is a basic human need and people also need to feel that their future safety is likely. Trauma that is related to physical safety occurs when a safety threat is so extreme or so chronic that the associative mind overrides the logical mind to keep the body safe and alive. Anxiety results. The logical mind may decide that a situation is safe but there is bodily resistance to activities that the associative mind finds threatening. As Jun-Hyeong Cho, who researches associative fear memory, explains, “the capability of our brains to form a fear memory associated with a situation that predicts danger is highly adaptive since it enables us to learn from our past traumatic experiences and avoid those dangerous situations in the future.” This process is dysregulated, however during traumatic experience where “overgeneralized and exaggerated fear responses cause symptoms including nightmares or unwanted memories of the trauma, avoidance of situations that trigger memories of the trauma, heightened reactions, anxiety, and depressed mood.” 17
A safety trauma can result in a specific bodily fear like being afraid of driving after a car accident or a fear of using a ladder after a fall. A safety trauma can also result in more general avoidance and inattention to things like looking for work, paying bills or doing taxes, or being proactive in attending to material needs. Sadly, something like a trauma about not having enough money can result in avoidance around money responsibilities that actually further endangers a person since they may avoid financial issues due to the triggering of implicit traumatic memory. Both hoarding 18 and OCD 19about material life can be rooted in safety trauma. Hoarding seems to occur in an environment where both healthy relationships and safety and security needs are unmet.
Esteem Trauma
People also need to feel valued, worthy, and competent. This need is called esteem. Esteem is not just how others see us, it is also our belief in our competence and it is the third core human need. When this need is not met people feel shame. Traumatic shame is common in modern societies and many people are driven to pursue success, not because of the intrinsic satisfaction of the actions they're engaging in but because they're hoping for social approval. In other words, as Brené Brown 20explains, being socially viewed as worthy can be much more motivating as a way to avoid the feeling of shame than actually developing competence for a person with esteem trauma. A person who feels shame can react in a hyper need-fulfillment state and this creates dysfunctional ways of being such as success addiction with imposter’s syndrome, domination of perceived competitors, narcissism, aggression, opportunism, cheating, and bullying. Esteem trauma is not an inevitable further result of an unmet attachment need from relational trauma. A child may grow up feeling emotionally insecure in relationships and yet receive messages that they're competent and worthy in their actions and performances. In other words, a child may fundamentally feel unlovable and yet also feel that they are competent and good at things. Because esteem and lovability are closely tied together, however, children with unmet relational love and belonging needs may be at particular risk of becoming success addicts if a parental message is that their actions are valuable but not their fundamental self.
It's also possible for a child whose core relational needs for love and belonging have been met at home to suffer unmet esteem needs when they go to school or enter the workplace. This truism helps to underscore the importance of the theory of emotional ecology because all of us live in multiple environments that give us powerful emotionally resonating experiences. Children also receive messages from more than one important adult in their life both within and across environments including diverse family members, peers, and teachers. Also, the presence and absence of these needs exist along a continuum and they may also change during a lifetime. The need for love and belonging with a childhood family changes in adulthood to more centrally include esteem and belonging in adult work. The pathological expression or healthy healing of a traumatically unmet need will be significantly affected by the ongoing emotional ecology of family, school, workplaces, peer groups, communities, and the wider culture in which we live. A family might be healthy while a school or workplace is toxic or the opposite may be the case. A family may be toxic while a school or a workplace may provide a healthy ecology for a person to grow and develop.
Justice Trauma
People also need to feel like their world makes sense and is just and morally safe. The human propensity for judging ethics and fairness is an innate trait. Victims of crimes that result in safety trauma and are fully assured of future safety may still suffer from traumatic injustice if people who facilitated the crime are never held accountable. Traumatic anger can be especially common in contexts of unpunished betrayal or exploitation. Pathological traumatic anger is implicated in nearly every social pathology from war to bullying to child abuse yet a need for justice and related anger about injustice is also the spark of reform for nearly every positive social movement. Anger, therefore, has an odd dual role of being connected to both shameful and righteous feelings, and to being suppressed or expressed in different contexts. Responding well to a judgment of injustice and a feeling of anger is complex because it requires multiple distinctive capacities. Anger is more than one experience; it typically includes the simultaneous experience of threat, despair, hope, and moral judgment.
The most central characteristic of the need for justice (and related anger) is that it anger at injustice is both a moral judgment and an emotional response. Anger is a response to the distance between what is and what should be.
1. It includes a moral judgment, which is a categorically good human impulse.
This impulse can be misapplied, however. The quality of the moral judgment can vary greatly, and thus can have accurate or inaccurate aspects.
2. It includes unpleasant feelings which can be rooted just in the moment or in past experiences as well and this requires attention.
3. It includes a will towards action which can be inappropriately acted upon or ignored if the moral judgment and feeling states are not clarified and addressed.
4. It often includes a traumatic overreaction rooted in acute or accumulated chronic experiences of unfairness.
Justice is a human need. While injustice will always exist, it is important for humans to feel that their family, workplace, community, culture, and government are more just than unjust and the experience of significant injustice can be debilitating. 21Both apathy and the aggression of traumatic anger are distorted responses to the core human need for justice.
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