What Feels Like Love to Childen: The Three Loves
 There are many things that are loving to offer a child, such as food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc. But there are only three things that feel like love to a child: connection, validation and safety.
The Three Loves reinforce a child's Five Primal Energies and Three Core Drives. They also help children learn how to properly digest their life experiences.
What Prevents Children From Properly Digesting Their Life Experiences: The Four Forms of Disconnection
 Life is constructed so that virtually none of us experiences connection, validation and safety (the Three Loves) all of the time as children. All of us experience Disconnection at times when we need nurturance, validation or safety. Disconnection comes in four flavors:
- Violation: intrusiveness or harmfulness
- Abandonment: neglect, absence
- Indulgence: spoiling, not being held accountable
- Stealing the Attention: where an adult reacts to us by becoming even more upset than we are in moments as children when we need nurturance
The only difference from one child to the next is the amount of Disconnection we experience, especially during particularly difficult (or joyful) life experiences.
The Four Disconnections cause children to dim or repress their Five Primal Energies and Three Core Drives. They also cause children to learn the wrong things from their life experiences because the Four Forms of Disconnection prevent children from learning how to properly digest their life experiences.
Your Brilliant Childhood Mechanism for Coping with an Insufficiency of the Three Loves: Your Survival Plan
 To cope with whatever amount of Disconnection Experiences you has as a child, you developed a set of strategies for trying to regain Connection and for surviving despite Disconnection. This set of strategies is called a Survival Plan.
A Survival Plan includes five ingredients that work hand-in-hand to empower us to cope as children with difficult life experiences:
- Happy Ending Fantasy
- Rules
- Pandora’s Box
- Mask
- Anesthesias
Survival Plan Ingredient #1: Your Happy Ending Fantasy
 Manufacturing hope through a Happy Ending Fantasy that says your life will get better if you can figure out what to do differently in order to get more of the Connection, Acceptance and/or Safety your childhood development requires.
Survival Plan Ingredient #2: Your Rules
 Rules are the things you discover you need to do in order to have the best possible chance of making your Happy Ending Fantasy come true. Rules include what you need to cover up or change in yourself and the ways you need to make things easier for the adults around you. Rules are what we replace aspects of our authenticity and integrity with. They are the templates we later use to try to create relationships.
The part of you that became the holder and enforcer of your Rules is your Inner Critic: the part of you that pushes you to do more than you can do, that criticizes you when you don't follow its rules and that lashes out at others when they don't fulfill your Happy Ending Fantasy when you do follow the rules.
Survival Plan Ingredient #3: Your Pandora's Box
 This is the place in you where you hide gifts and talents of yours that you believe are too much for others, aspects of yourself that you have judged awful or unacceptable, and a growing backlog of Undigested Life Experiences (traumas, etc.).
Survival Plan Ingredient #4: Your Mask
 The is your mechanism for getting others to see you as the person you think they need you to be, and to hide from others the aspects of yourself you learned were unacceptable and hid in your Pandora’s Box.
Survival Plan Ingredient #5: Your Anesthesias
 You need a way to numb the pain you feel because no amount of trying to figure out and follow the Rules makes your Happy Ending Fantasy come true. You need a way to numb the pain you feel because you gave up aspects of who you are (portions of your authenticity), and you sacrified portions of your integrity, for the sake of survival. You need a way to numb the pain of carrying a backlog of Undigested Life experiences. An anesthesia is anything you use to numb your pain.
A Survival Plan is Incompatible With Integrity!
Survival trumps integrity. As a result, the extent to which your Survival Plan ruled your life as a child determines the extent to which you grew up to be out of integrity with yourself, in your relationships with others, and with collective highest good.
What Happened to Your Survival Plan When You Become an Adult?
Like any habit, in order to be effective your Survival Plan needed to become automated and unconcious when you were a child. Over time, it simply came to feel like part of who you are. This is why all of us bring our Survival Plan into our adult lives. This, in turn, is why a significant part of Adult Development is about outgrowing our Survival Plan and replacing its skill sets with the Seven WisePassions of 3D Living™.
By the time you became an adult, your Survival Plan had morphed into a Redemption Plan. To learn about your Redemption Plan, click on the button below...
Complete details about how to take charge of your development are in
The New IQ and The New IQ Integrity Makeover Workbook by Dr. David Gruder,
both of which will be released this coming January, 2008!
Want to know more? Click on the book cover draft further up the left frame.
Want a free sneek peek? Click on the "Free eCourses" button further up the left frame.
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