Your Inner Mammal: How to Meet Your Real Emotional Needs and Become Stronger-for Self and Others

By Ron Neff, Ph.D

Your Inner Mammal takes on anxiety, anger and depression -- the major emotional maladies that afflict us in the cold, impersonal and threatening modern world. To do that, Dr. Neff builds on the concept of “your inner child.” That concept has served us well in mental health for many years. If you are still a child – and a lucky one -- someone else may meet your emotional needs. But not if you are an adult. Your lover doesn’t want to love you as a needy child. They want – and need – a competent adult. In short, the inner child concept tells you to attend to your own emotional needs. Your Inner Mammal tells you a lot more. It tells you what those needs are. And it provides chapter after chapter of tools to meet those needs – including chapters entitled, ” The Importance of Being Calm,” “Your Angry Mammal,” “Your Inner Playmate,” “ Your Inner Dancer, ” “Getting In Touch,” and “You Are Part of Nature – Embrace It. ”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Apr 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483465371

Ron Neff, Ph.D

Ron Neff (Ph.D University of Iowa) is a semi-retired professor and psychotherapist. In recent years he has published several self-help books: Goodbye, My Love: How To Mend A Broken Heart (2016), Loving Well: Keys to Lasting and Rewarding Relationships (2016), Your Inner Mammal: How To Meet Your Real Emotional Needs And Become Stronger - For Self And Others (2017), and Surviving Divorce & Winning in Family Court (2021). He has often been told he should write novels, probably love stories, since he has studied and worked with issues of the heart most of his life. Hence, The Color of the Moon (2017), Daisies in Hell (2019), One Heart Over the Line (2019), Heroes, Hellions and Hot Rods (2019), and now Sometimes They Came Back (2022). At other times, his novels have been more in the “action adventure” or “science fiction” genres, including Enough With Those Humans: Was It Time for a Higher Intelligence? (2020), The Trouble With Eve: Forbidden Fruit in a Big Sky Paradise (2020), Sidewinders & Sassy Skirts: Blame It on Texas (2020), Up to Alaska: The Rush Of 2032 (2021), and Post-Earth: Searching the Stars for New Life (2021).

Book preview

Neff

Your Inner

MAMMAL

HOW TO MEET YOUR REAL EMOTIONAL NEEDS AND BECOME STRONGER - FOR SELF AND OTHERS

RON NEFF, PH.D

Copyright © 2017 Ron Neff, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Interior Image Credit: Harold Ramsom Stevenson (1924-1985)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-6538-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-6537-1 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 02/27/2017

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Introduction

Overview

My Vantage Point

So Why Your Inner Mammal?

From the Trenches

The Toolshed: A Preview

Physical As Well As Mental Health

Good For Whom?

Why Bother?

A World Gone Cold

A Chapter By Chapter Preview

Chapter 2

The Most Fundamental Emotional Need

So How Do We Reassure An Adult?

The Problem

Not A Representative Sample

What The World Needs Now

Reality

The Panorama of Anxiety Disorders

What Is Anxiety?

Are You Secure?

Routines

Routines And Getting To Sleep

Good Sleep Is Also Its Own Antidote to Anxiety

Exhaustion and (temporary) Paranoia

Chapter 3

The Importance of Being Calm

Part of The Problem

What Is A Therapist To Do?

Calm Rocks

Are You In A Rush?

Life Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Are You A Downer?

What Do You Say to Yourself?

Being That Good Parent to Yourself

The Philosophy of Pessimism

Are You Of More Than One Heart?

How Do You Calm Down A Child?

The Good Parent

Your Own Worst Enemy?

Chapter 4

Your Angry Mammal

Where Anger Comes From

B. F. Skinner’s Angry Rat

What We Do With Anger

Anger And Cardiovascular Health

Anger and Depression: When Anger Goes In

Getting the Anger Out: But How?

Anger Release Exercises

Large Muscle Activity

A Good Cry

Muscle Relaxation Exercises

Music

Letting Go of Resentments

Pamper Yourself

Take a Soothing Bubble Bath

Get Plenty of Sleep

Take Yourself Out On a Picnic

Go Out Dancing

So What Do You Need?

The Front End

Chapter 5

Your Inner Playmate

Knock Knock, Can Your Inner Child Come Out and Play?

Come On In, The Water’s Fine

Pretending

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Getting A Leg Up

Take It From The Coach

Learning From Babies

Taking Time To Just Do Nothing - But Watch, Think And Be

Color My World

Tell Me A Story

And Make It A Positive Story

The Stick People Art Gallery

Your Inner Caretaker

Chapter 6

Your Inner Dancer

But Why Do All Children Dance?

Rock Me, Baby

Applications

Dance, Dance

The Music Is Fundamental

Dance With A Kid On Your Shoulders

Music Is to Dancing As Language Is To Culture

Dance Therapy

Chapter 7

Getting In Touch

The Problem

So Why Are We Out of Touch?

A Cultural Distinction

Another Part of the Problem

Solutions

Have Pets

Dogs

Cats

Miniature Rabbits

Chinchillas

Horses

Petting Is Pet Care

Your Brain As A Social Organ

The Soft Touch of Emotion

Hugs

Get A Massage

Massaging Yourself

Your Clothes

Your Bed and Bedclothes

Indulge In A Leisurely Bath

Chapter 8

Your Inner Mammal Is Social

The Problem

Just Leave Me Alone?

How Much Do We Need Social Involvement?

There Are Ironies Here

Happiness: How Do You Get It?

We Are Social Beings

The Looking Glass Self

Those Who Really Count Start Early

The Structure of the Problem

And What of Our Emotional Needs?

Why The Social Sciences Began

Friends First

How Do You Make Friends?

Similarity

Familiarity

Ask a Favor, Make a Friend

Share

Make Family A Priority

Make Up A Family

Chapter 9

The Conscious and Self-Aware Mammal

A Smudge of Rouge on The Nose

Specifically Human Solutions

In Your Own Words

Taking Charge

Of Practice

Self-Esteem

Performance

Mental Health

Enhancing Your Self-Esteem

Earning It

Be Good To Yourself

Choosing The Right Friends

We’re In This Thing Together

What Is Your Field of Interest?

Looking Ahead

Chapter 10

You Are Part of Nature: Embrace It

Nature Deficit Disorder

Want To Increase Your Brain Power?

Nature and Stress Relief

And Your Physical Health?

Nature Is Your Mother

Where Do We Start?

Water Fun

Swimming

Boating

Just Taking It In

Gardening

Stress Relief

Brain Health and Reduced Alzheimer’s Risk

Reduced Risk of Anxiety and Depression

Heart Health and Reduced Risk of Stroke

Birding

Rockhounding

Fishing

Hunting

And If You Can’t Be Out In Nature?

House Plants

Natural Artwork

Aquariums and Terrariums

Sounds of Nature in Recordings

Chapter 11

Your Traumatized (Or Severely Neglected) Mammal

Preface

It’s Not You

Causes of Emotional Trauma

Combat Related PTSD

Trauma: A Matter of Degree

Verbal Abuse

An Alcoholic And/Or Drug Abusive Parent

The Battered Child

The Poor Me Parent

Were You A Victim of Other Childhood Trauma?

How Do You Know If You Were A Victim Of Childhood Trauma?

How Do You Know If You Were A Victim Of Childhood Neglect?

Healing

Calming Yourself

Getting Un-Stuck: Overcoming The Anxiety And Avoidance Trap

Vigorous Large Muscle Exercise

Letting Go Of Anger

Forgiving

Support Groups

Information Sources

Start Your Own Support Group

Be Patient With Yourself

A Limitation And A Referral

For The Usual Suspects

At Pipeliners Bar And Grill

Washington, IA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I must thank Connie Sowa of Hilton Head, S.C. for graciously granting permission to reprint an image of a delightful painting by Harold Ransom Stevenson (1924-1985). That painting, entitled After School, artfully conveys what it means to enjoy a childhood where one’s emotional needs are well met – and conveys that feeling (of emotional security) more effectively than any thousand words ever could.

Secondly, I wish to thank all the public libraries – local, national and college or university affiliated – of America. For as long as I can remember, I have reaped the benefits of finding nearly any piece of information one could imagine – through the generous, capable and tireless efforts of public library staff. I commend – and recommend – these soldiers of information to any and all as a tremendous though rarely recognized resource. Let’s hear it for them – and let’s pledge ourselves to support them with the funding and other institutional assistance they need!

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

You don’t have to listen to my pain. You don’t have to show me any compassion, but go ahead and try to have a happy fulfilling life as an adult without dealing with me. . . Everything I need from you and you don’t give me, you will try to get from your partner in a love relationship and get mad when it isn’t forthcoming … I can fling you into depression. . .

In dealing with children you will be so inept, you won’t know what that child needs, you won’t know what to do because you never cared to know what I need from you. . . If I don’t nurture the child I once was, if I don’t assume the role of a good, adult parent to my internal child-self, I will instead become the child and I will expect other people to be parents to me. - Nathaniel Branden Inner Child 1930-2014

It doesn’t matter how old you are, there is a little child within who needs love and acceptance. If you’re a woman, no matter how self-reliant you are, you have a little girl who’s very tender and needs help. If you’re a man, no matter how macho you are, you still have a little boy inside who craves warmth and affection. - Louise Hays www.healyourlife.com 2016

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince. 1943

Overview

You don’t really have a child inside you. Not unless you are pregnant. But you do have a lower brain, which operates below the level of your conscious awareness – and regulates your emotions. The inner child is a metaphor for something very real. It stands for your emotional needs.

If you’re still a child -- and a lucky one -- someone else, a nurturing parent or parent-figure, may meet your emotional needs. But not if you’re an adult. As adults, we wouldn’t let someone else have the power necessary to meet these basic needs. Not even if someone was willing to assume that role. And no one will in any case. Your lover doesn’t want to love you as a needy child. They want - and need - a secure adult.

If you were well-parented as a child, you have at least some vague idea of how to meet your own emotional needs. You just need to realize that it is a priority – and act like that parent or parents to yourself now.

If you were not well-parented, things are much different. First, you have a backlog of unmet emotional needs. Your inner child has no doubt shown you this in some way – and likely in many and disturbing ways. You are troubled. Second, without that experience of being well-parented, you are ill-prepared to soothe that aching inner-child (to meet your emotional needs). You had no teacher.

If in addition to having unmet childhood needs, you were actively abused as a child -- whether by a parent or anyone else – your inner child will be even more disturbed.

My Vantage Point

I’m a therapist. I specialize in anxiety problems – from generalized anxiety disorder to panic attacks, from separation anxiety and abandonment issues to obsessive-compulsive disorder, from social phobia to hypochondria, from agoraphobia to stage fright, from anorexia nervosa to bulimia, from grief to broken hearts. If it causes anxiety, I work with it.

I train clients to achieve a sense of calmness and well-being - how to feel secure.

With different clients, I start at different places. The things an eating disorder client needs to do first are different than what you need to do first if your anxiety stems from an ending – a broken heart.

But once the client is stable -- feeling secure because of what we have accomplished together – I go on to teach them skills they can use on their own. And keep using.

This book will not cure panic attacks. It will not cure obsessive-compulsive disorder. Nor will it mend a broken heart. (See Neff, Goodbye, My Love: How To Mend A Broken Heart, if that is your need at this point.) These and each of the other specific anxiety problems enumerated above have their own special features and each requires its own treatment. No one book can tell you how to overcome the acute stages of every problem from grieving the loss of a loved one to fear of flying. What this book can do is teach you how to stay calm - after you have passed a specific crisis. How to be a person who is usually calm and secure - because your basic emotional needs are being met.

So Why Your Inner Mammal?

I love pets. I grew up on a farm. And more recently I spent time on a ranch out West – trying to calm down a number of allegedly crazy horses owned by a lady who was sure they would throw me off just as they had the last two-hoofer who tried to ride them. After a while, I began to realize that I was using the same techniques to soothe those hot-blooded Arabian horses -- and my pet rabbit – as I do in calming down my clients. And, surprisingly, with marked success. What I finally realized was this: Every one of these calming skills is based on early - pre-birth and post-birth - mother/child experiences common to all mammals. Hence the title of this volume.

From the Trenches

Over the years I’ve been making lists of various things an adult can do to feel secure - and make others feel secure. I was making these lists and using these techniques long before I began to see the inner-mammal needs behind them. Many of these techniques I have gleaned from the anxiety literature. Others I have devised on my own - as applications that occurred to me while I pored over basic research findings on the workings of the human endocrine system, especially when it’s in the alarm stage (See Hans Selye, The Stress Of Life and Chapter 3 of the present volume.)

Still other calming techniques I’ve simply stumbled upon, through trial and error, in years of trying to help people feel secure. In brief, the concept of your inner mammal had a slow birth. And, initially, it was the growing lists of calming techniques that eventually gave rise to the inner-mammal concept - rather than the concept inspiring the techniques. But, once born, the concept of your inner mammal has proven to be an active one - inspiring the identification of additional calming techniques. By now the lists have grown quite long. So many calming techniques I’ve had to sort them into categories. And each of these skills has proven itself in the trenches - on the front lines of fighting anxiety.

Many authors, including those quoted at the beginning of this chapter, have made constructive use of the concept of the inner child. This concept was first introduced by Dr. Lucia Capacchione in 1976 and later elaborated in her book, Recovery of Your Inner Child (1991). I like this concept. It provides valuable insights. But I am proposing to add the concept of your inner mammal. Why? Because this concept goes further. It takes the next steps. The inner-child metaphor tells you to attend to your emotional needs. Your inner mammal goes on to tell you a lot more. It tells you what those needs are. And it points to a wide range of specific techniques to meet those needs. In short, learning about your inner mammal tells you how to be a good parent to yourself.

There are many dimensions to your inner mammal. We will examine each of these dimensions in the chapters to follow. But let me anticipate just one: what your inner mammal hears. Applications on this dimension involve non-intrusive, back-groundish, steady and repetitive sounds: burbling waters (from brooks to fish tanks), wind-like sounds (from fans to the ongoing rustle of leaves and branches), humming sounds (from the steady murmur of my air conditioner to the rhythmic beat of tires and engine as you ride in a auto at sustained speed), buffeting, wave-like sounds (from seaside noises to a flag flopping in the breeze), the plodding of a clock, metronome, or any other low-pitched, pulse-like sounds. All of these are soothing. Why? I would simply note this: they all resemble sounds one’s lower brain recalls from the womb.

Other dimensions of what is good for your inner mammal have nothing to do with experiences in the womb. They arise instead from the fact that all mammals require a substantial period of nursing, warming, protection and other care after they are born. Baby mammals are not immediately ready to fend for themselves. Incidentally, in this respect humans are the most mammalian of all; we require a longer period of parental care than any other species! Among other things, this extended early life dependency makes us the most social of all animals.

Most mammals are distinctly social but, from the beginning, we humans need each other more than any other creatures. (Today this particular truth has become tellingly ironic. Especially in America, where we like to think, I DON’T NEED ANYONE. Little wonder that our rates of mental health problems have skyrocketed.)

The Toolshed: A Preview

The pre- and post-birth nurturing experiences of mammals occur on several dimensions. Beyond sound, there are touch, sight, taste, smell, motion, time, sleep, temperature and, yes, social (bonding) experiences. Each dimension opens up a whole category of corresponding therapeutic applications. I don’t think I’ve exhausted the possibilities in any of these categories. Each of them appears to have an infinite number of applications. If you’re like my clients, you will soon find yourself devising new applications on each dimension.

Of course, I hardly expect you to work out all - or even most - of your own applications. That could take years! And it isn’t necessary; I’ve already put the years in for you. The chapters to follow will detail many ways to meet your most basic emotional needs.

These techniques range from monitoring the tone of your voice, to keeping several large pillows on your bed – quite apart from whether or not you sleep with a lover – so no matter where you turn in your sleep, you can grasp onto one of them (one of the many ways to make sure you get plenty of tactile nurturance.) Details on these techniques – and why they work – will be spelled out in later chapters,

The more of these skills you learn and make use of, the more secure you will feel. Nor is this a mere feeling: the better you meet your emotional needs, the healthier you will be - not just emotionally but physically, too.

Physical As Well As Mental Health

Yes, even your physical health depends, as we will see, on meeting your emotional needs. For four decades holistic medicine has provided evidence that physical health does not exist in a vacuum. The happy person, the person who enjoys social support, the optimistic person, the person who cares for pets - all of these have been found to enjoy better physical health. Part of the reason for this traces to stress. Because of modern sanitation practices and antibiotics, most deaths in our society are not due to infectious diseases, but to stress-related illnesses including heart disease, stroke, cancers, bleeding ulcers and other gastrointestinal problems. Over 40% of all deaths in the U.S. are due to heart disease alone! For this reason, more research has been addressed to heart disease than any other illness. And from that mountain of research the importance of stress as a killer - and emotional well-being as a healer - have been documented over and over.

But stress is not the only thing that can kill us. What about those infectious diseases? These, too, occur at higher rates among those who are not emotionally secure. This puzzled researchers until recently. But now we know why: Your immune system doesn’t work right unless certain emotional needs are met (Paul Pearsall, A Healing Intimacy).

We will return to the physical health benefits of a contented inner mammal, both as a bulwark against stress and a boon to your immune system, throughout this volume.

Good For Whom?

Does taking care of your inner