Basics

I was very helpless and entirely dependent on my parents. More than anything, I feared being abandoned.

I believed that I was the center of the universe, that I caused everything which happened.

Despite their best intentions, my parents sometimes "abandoned" me.

These abandonment experiences were intensely traumatic, painful, horrible to me at that time.

Developmentally, congnitively, I couldn't understand what was happening; e.g., that my mother was busy or tired so that, even though I was hungry, she couldn't feed me right away.

From my perspective, I was torturing, terrorizing myself.

As a result, I came to _feel_ deeply that there was something inherently wrong with me.

That is: from my perspective, I was causing myself the worst imaginable trauma, and therefore, I felt I was deeply, inherently bad and wrong.

Because my mind was so young and undeveloped, this wasn't something I could understand in a cognitive sense, this was something I embodied as a felt sense of my reality.

Another way to say this: my experiences were experiences of feelings, not thoughts. They were emotional experiences, not cognitive experiences. My mind wasn't yet capable of cognition.

Because of this, my evolving memories of those experiences were "emotional memories".

Also, I internalized ways (coping strategies) to try and mitigate or avoid these experiences.

Here's the paradigm:

"I know there's something very wrong with me, but at least I can try to do things so that I won't get abandoned and feel so incredibly awful."