Sadness will not determine your life. What will determine your life are your attempts not to feel the sadness. What will determine your life are your attempts to compensate for the sadness by not feeling it, by developing coping mechanisms that keep you from allowing you to experience yourself the way you really are. That’s what will determine your life. If you don’t want your life to be determined by what happened, allow yourself to feel exactly what’s there. Developmental trauma happens when there isn’t space for us to feel what we feel. The fact is, there was never space in your life for you to feel what you felt. There was nobody there to hold you; your mother wasn’t there to hold you. She was too busy trying to soothe her …