Chapter 3 - Born Into Grief | Eden's Flaming Sword
In the previous chapter, I introduced the three seeds—belonging, control, and identity. But why does the loss of these seeds threaten us so deeply?
There must have been a foundational moment when all three seeds were lost, leaving a permanent mark within us.
There was. It happens to everyone. It was the day you were born.
Imagine being born. Hard to do, I know. But try.
You are in the womb, not yet a separate individual. It’s safe in there. It’s familiar, warm, and comfortable. You don’t breathe by yourself. You don’t eat for yourself. You don’t regulate your own temperature. Your mother’s body does all of it for you. You are tethered to another human being so completely that you don’t even know you exist. You have never been alone. You don’t even know what it means to be alone. That is oneness.
Then suddenly, you are thrust into the outside world. It’s bright, it’s cold. You’re wet, naked, and exposed. The cord is cut, and in an instant, the body that kept you alive is gone. You are now a separate thing. And your tiny, undeveloped nervous system has just been handed a job it is not ready for. KEEP YOURSELF ALIVE.
And so you try. By letting out your first cry.
This was your first nervous system regulation, a natural human function. But it was also the event that shook your nervous system to the core, encoding deeply within it a permanent mark. A deep trauma.
And what is that trauma?
Separation equals danger. This was your very first encoding of threat.
Now, before we go further, I want to draw a distinction that matters.
Trauma is the shocking event that happens to you. GRIEF is the outcome of that event. Trauma is the rupture. Grief is the residue. It’s the lingering, unmet desire in your nervous system to return to the safety you once had. So when I say you were born into grief, I don’t mean you came into this world sad. I mean your nervous system inherited an unresolved longing, right from the first breath.
I know this part may sound a little strange, because now we’re stepping into religion, but hear me out. This may be what the Bible was pointing toward. This is what “born into sin” could really mean. Original sin, not the mainstream version where Adam’s disobedience somehow made every infant guilty. That never made sense. How could innocent children inherit guilt?
It may be far simpler than that. We are born into separation. That is what we inherit—the biological imprint that separation equals danger. The moment you became an individual, you lost oneness. You were expelled from the garden. This is the original encoding.
And we can see our response to that separation immediately in the first cry.
That first cry is doing two things.
The first part of the cry is the gasp for control.
In the womb, the oldest, most primitive part of your nervous system; the part wired purely for survival; had the easiest job in the world, because survival was automatic. Your mother’s body handled everything. The system was perfect. Then you were born, and in a single moment, every one of those responsibilities was transferred, completely and irreversibly, onto a body that was not ready...
You have to breathe on your own now. Regulate your own temperature. Signal when you need food. That’s... a lot.. Sounds minor to us now, but to an infant, it’s a total shift in responsibility! No wonder we freaked out. No wonder we’re still freaking out.
And because a baby cannot actually be responsible for itself yet, what does it do? It screams.
That first cry isn’t just a gasp for air. It’s a command. It’s the only tool a newborn has to force the environment to provide safety. You are screaming to regain control over a physical state you cannot manage. And your nervous system records it with a deep, primal encoding that reads: I cannot handle this. If I lose control, I will die. It sounds dramatic, I know. But to the nervous system, it’s very real.
That is the seed of control. And it never leaves you. Every time life feels like it’s spinning out, every time you can’t make something work, every time your predictions fail, your nervous system isn’t responding to that moment. It’s responding to the first moment your body experienced separation and became responsible for yourself. The TERROR.. That’s why losing control doesn’t just feel frustrating. It feels like the walls are closing. It feels like dying.
Now let’s go to the second part of the cry. This is a cry for connection.
In the womb, the part of your brain built for bonding had never known a single second of separation. You were literally part of your mother. There was no gap between you and another human being. Her heartbeat was your home. Then, in an instant, the cord was cut. And for the first time in your existence, you were alone, in the most fundamental sense possible, physically severed from the only bond you had ever known.
Your first cry is your nervous system demanding that bond back in real time.
Notice what happens the second a screaming newborn is placed back onto the caregiver. The nervous system registers the skin contact, the heartbeat, the familiar tone of voice, and instantly, the crying stops.
An infant cannot calm itself down. It requires another nervous system to soothe its own. That’s a biological process called co-regulation, and through it, the infant temporarily restores what was lost.
But that loss buried an alarm so deep in the nervous system that every later threat to connection can feel like a threat to your life. You feel rejection, abandonment, and the terror of wondering whether you can survive on your own.
That is the seed of belonging. And it never leaves you either.
Every time someone pulls away, every cold silence, every rejection, every relationship that ends, your nervous system is responding to the first time the bond was cut. That’s why rejection hurts the way it does. To the part of your brain built for connection, being severed from another person registers the same way as a threat to your life.
These two seeds, control and belonging, are primal. Meaning, they live in the oldest parts of your brain. They fired the moment you were born, and over time, they grow and harden. They stop being reactions and start becoming foundations. Two pillars holding up everything you are. One driven by the terror of helplessness. The other driven by the terror of rejection.
But two pillars don’t hold anything up on their own. They need something on top to lock them together. And that is where the third seed comes in.
An infant isn’t capable of building a self yet. But the seed was planted the moment of exposure. As you grow, as your brain develops, a newer, more sophisticated part of your mind, capable of language, thought, and story, looks down at those two screaming pillars and says: I’ll fix this. I’ll build something so strong that I never have to feel helpless or alone again.
And so it builds you an identity.
I am smart. I am tough. I am good. I am successful. I am the one who holds the world on my shoulders.
It takes your roles, your beliefs, your achievements, your relationships, and hardens them into a structure. A self. And it drops that identity like a keystone right on top of those two pillars, locking control and belonging into a rigid architecture that becomes you. Or at least, what you think is you…
And for a while, it works. The structure holds. You feel safe.
But here is the trap.
Your mind forgets that it built the identity. It stops seeing identity as a tool it constructed and starts believing it is the self.
Your identity becomes the unquestionable, non-negotiable core of who you are. You think I am this. And the moment you believe that, the stakes become existential.. Because if that identity cracks, if the role you worked so hard for disappears, if the story you told yourself about who you are turns out not to be true, the pillars of control and belonging have nothing locking them together anymore.
The whole structure falls. You fall.
You are falling back into the original wound. The raw grief of your first separation and your nervous system will do anything to stop that from happening.
So that’s why the Ego stepped in and said this.
I’ll build an identity that can never be threatened.
I’ll control everything so I’m never helpless again.
I’ll make myself so valuable that I’ll never be abandoned.
Sounds like a world that is exhausting to live in.
Well, let’s see what kind of world this creates.