Moro Reflex in adults
Tom’s mother Sarah has lived with her Moro reflex for 40 years. At school, she learned to compensate by burying her impulses and withdrawing. She has never felt comfortable in her skin. Life is a constant struggle. She’s never really known what she wanted to do for a career – she wishes she could be more decisive. Other people just seem to get on with the tasks they set themselves. Sarah can’t seem to focus and follow a clear path towards a goal – every task leads to a dozen other tasks, everything is an emotional hurdle, and she is rapidly overwhelmed. She feels a huge sense of failure and berates herself furiously, and so continues her cycle of low self-esteem and under-achievement. Her anxiety has got worse as she’s got older. She never gets a good night’s sleep – she just can’t turn off her thoughts. What’s more, she has aged – she has bags under her eyes and poor skin tone from constantly overdosing on the powerful chemical that is adrenaline.
Throughout our lives we strive to compensate for any reflexes still present, but this takes a tremendous amount of energy. Under stress we can’t keep up the façade. As we get older, we have less and less energy to continue these automatic compensations, and the reflexes themselves begin to reappear. Instead of life getting easier as we get older and wiser, it seems to become more difficult, with increasing effort required to do familiar tasks and an increasing feeling of disconnection with the people around us.
