Hello and welcome back to our Read Along of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma, where I use my expertise as a therapist who specializes in complex and developmental trauma to break down popular self-help books and to create a community where we can explore and ask questions together. I have had so many new faces joining me on Substack in the last few weeks, but I decided to make this post a free post so that you could get a little feel for what we do over here in our book club read-alongs. You don't need to own the book, or even to be on the same chapter that we are on. If you are reading along, because I'm going to provide a little summary and then share some of my thoughts about it as well. Listen above or read the transcript below! This week we'll be exploring chapter five of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This chapter is on reinforcing agency, which is a huge concept in the NARM model. To understand agency, we need to understand what we're talking about when we talk about our sense of self or our observer, or our curious experiencer, as I call it. And to do that, we need to understand the concept of structuralization. To put it simply, structuralization is a process through our development, starting as children, where we take our life experiences and we internalize them to build maps or models of the world around us, including how we see ourselves. And this sort of internal map helps shape us: what we think about ourselves, how we feel about ourselves, what we allow ourselves to do. And we're always sort of filing that information away, determining if we can clear through developmental gates. And when I say gates, I kind of imagine it like a hurdle. Can I have my own needs? Can I be my own person? Can I do those things and still be loved? We're exploring each of those things starting from infancy throughout our life, and based on the feedback we get from our early environments, including our caregivers, schoolmates, teachers, anyone who's around us, that's how we build our internal sense of self and our internal map of the world. You could almost imagine a little kid building something with Legos, and every Lego brick that they pick up represents an experience or an interaction they have with the world around them. Positive experiences where they feel loved, seen, attuned to, or supported help them build a strong, stable structure, a strong, stable foundation. Negative experiences where they might feel unseen, neglected, unsafe, or even mis-attuned to, meaning you're supported and you're loved, but there's a miss. So maybe you were a highly sensitive child, but you grew up in a family of engineers who weren't extremely connected to their emotions. While they may have loved and supported you and made sure that you had a stable home, you may have felt missed because you felt things strongly and you were always feeling emotions. Being this attuned to in that way leads to a shaky, unstable structure. And so as we grow up into teenagers and adults, that internal structure that we've built influences our entire world- how safe we feel having agency, how safe we feel being ourselves, responding to challenges in our life, connecting with other people, building relationships. If we have a strong structure, then we likely have a strong sense of us as ourselves, and we can handle stressful things and know that we are still okay. So we're not in survival mode. We don't have those predictive patterns in our brain saying that a tiger is trying to eat us all of the time. But if we had a history of misfortune or a lack of safety or any other sort of environmental ruptures and failures, then we don't have that foundation. And so when things happen, or when we think about the potential for hard things to happen, we might get that feeling that things are unsafe because we don't have that stable structure. Another way to think about structuralization is through that lens of the different p