To help us understand how our anger patterns develop we’re going to take a brief tour of developmental psychology. This is the first in a series of posts, and the posts are all linked, each one connecting to the following one etc.

Developmental psychology has profound knowledge of mind, personality, and emotions, and of particular interest to us, it has some insightful things to say about anger. We obviously can’t do an in-depth study on this website, even in a series of articles, but there are some highlights we can look at to help us better understand anger.
I am not a psychologist and so I make no claim to having anything unique to say in this field. The ideas presented in this chapter are quite elementary, and you will find them in most books on developmental psychology. They are offered here in a simple format in order to help us with our journey.

When we were born, in the first moments after we emerged from our mother as a separate individual, we were wide open, vulnerable, and our mind was very much impressionable. Our ego structure was yet to be formed, so we were very much open to being shaped by the world.

This isn’t to say we were a blank slate, as there was some kind of history to our being, either from our parents, from our karmic propensity, or from another source, however you choose to look at it. However at that point, our history was operating on a sort of background level, and our personality was more or less formless. When we were first born and in the early stages thereafter, we were very much an open and receptive being.

If we were fortunate, we had a mother who was relatively sane and able to provide a nurturing environment where she showered us with unconditional love. The whole maternal process awakened deep love in our mother, and she was very much connected with her own nature of basic goodness. (Of course both the mother and the father are present in this story, and indeed some infants will be raised solely by a father. But biologically it is the mother who is more connected to this early nurturing role, and the father is more prominent later as the child begins to explore the world. Our discussion here is focused on the early stages of infancy, so we will mostly refer to the mother in this chapter.)

In his book Perfect Love Imperfect Relationships, well known psychologist and author John Welwood talks about this early experience of unconditional love:

When held in the loving arms of their mother, babies relax into the blissful current of warmth that is love as it flows freely through them from the absolute source of all. The mother’s caring is the outer condition that lets the child experience the love and joy that is the essence of its own being.

Thus, in our mother’s loving care, our own nature of love and basic goodness was free to emerge and start to blossom. If we had this good fortune, our early development likely went fairly well.

In these early stages of our infancy, our essence of goodness was still being nurtured and formed. As an infant, at first we experience this goodness as being external to us, and to us, our mother was like the sun, the source of all. This process continues for some time, up until a certain stage we internalize our mother’s love and recognize it as our very own.

Opinions amongst psychologists vary, but it’s generally agreed that it takes from two to three years of being in a stable, loving environment for the child to finally decide they are safe and secure, and that their basic nature is made of love. Of course infants don’t conceptualize this with thoughts, but there is a deep inner knowing that all is well in the world. At this point there is a deep imprint of love in the infants being, and that imprint stays with them for life.

Continued in Psychology of Anger II…

By Craig Mollins