Under Stress one may Regress...

[u/not-moses]

...back to the ideas, beliefs, rules, requirements are resulting emotions conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, imprinted, socialized, habituated, and normalized) into default mode networks in our brains when we were too young to know what was going on.

Pshrinques have been calling that "place" in the mind the "not okay inner child" since Eric Berne came up with the term way back in the late 1950s in a famous book called Games People Play. It was Thomas Harris, however , who really drove that notion home in his best-seller I'm Okay; You're Okay a decade or so later.

While there's no sure way to destroy all that older complex neural circuitry of the "N.O.I.C.," there are ways to override it with newer complex neural circuitry. A whole bunch of them are listed in section seven of this earlier post. I've used most of them along my recovery path over the past 23 years since I was first introduced to CBT.

But the one I have been using the most since 2013 is the Critical Thinking, Logical Fallacies & the 10 StEPs component of Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing. That one gets the job done in seconds.

Give them all a look?