From Sensation to Survival Mode: How Early Threat Learning Distorts Identity and Intuition

Throughout the course of our human developmental arc—the concept of threat is often a looming specter.

What if the “threat” we think we’re sensing isn’t danger at all—but simply our body assess the degree of arousal we have the capacity to hold?

This begs the question: How does learning to treat our bodies as threat detectors—rather than sources of nuanced emotional cues—shape how we interpret sensations and relate to others in uncertain moments?

Load or Threat—The Definitive Variable

When interoceptive signals are conditioned through chronic adversity or culturally reinforced vigilance, our capacity for adaptive somatic attunement narrows, leading us to misread selectively reinforces protective activation as truth rather than as a cue for deeper regulation and relational adaptation.

Self-handicapping Arc of Threat Disposition

Across human development, environmental instability and cultural conditioning profoundly shape how we relate to our own interoceptive signals—training the body to treat sensation less as a source of nuanced data, or information and more as a defensive mechanism for managing load capacity, ambiguity, and dissonance.

When a child grows up in contexts where cues of danger, unpredictability, or emotional inconsistency dominate, their interoceptive system becomes organized around anticipatory protection rather than accurate meaning-making, reinforcing patterns of hypervigilance, suppression, or over-interpretation of bodily cues.

How Early Environments Shape Our Relationship With Bodily Signals

Layered with environmental parroting—cultural narratives that stigmatize vulnerability, reward stoicism, or prescribe specific emotional roles—the individual learns to read internal states through the filtered or distorted lens of survival rather than curiosity, coherence, or connection.

Over time, this conditioning creates a self-world relationship where interoception becomes synonymous with detecting threat, defending against overwhelm, and reducing internal conflict—ultimately distorting intuition, constricting identity development, and reinforcing maladaptive cycles of avoidance and misattuned self-perception.

From Bodily Signals to the Structural Scaffolding of Development

Age Variance Short version:

Felt / embodied load / capacity starts forming in infancy (0–2).

Rule-based / computational “if X, then unconscious needs are ‘validated’” capacity is heavily shaped in early childhood (≈2–6).

Articulated, narrative “this is who I am in relation to load/capacity” scaffolds through middle childhood into adolescence (≈7–18), within cultural and family storylines—introducing the subconscious scripts of ‘threat’ and ‘survival’.

Next, I’ll unpack that stepwise.

1. Before “concepts”: embodied safety in infancy (0–2)

From birth, infants don’t “think” about safety, but their nervous system is already computing load via contingency detection and regulation—a concept of threat or safety does not yet exist:

Newborns learn contingency rapidly: when their vocalizing or moving reliably brings caregiver contact, they show more adaptive affect and calmer physiology.

Brainwave Trust Aotearoa

By 2–12 months, in still-face paradigms, babies become distressed when a responsive caregiver suddenly goes relationally AND emotionally “offline,” then work hard to re-engage, showing that predictability and attuned response are already tied to a felt sense of load / capacity.

—again, inferring that the constructed framework or scaffolding ‘safety’ is neurally imprinted through environmental and social mirroring in LATER, advanced developmental phases.

Attachment research suggests that internal working models of “Does the environment support the load”? “Am I validated when the cue to connect is transmitted?” —begin to organize in the first 1–2 years and are especially plastic across roughly the first five.

—Often these frameworks are described as if they emerge naturally, when in reality they’re socially implied—post ad hoc, or after the fact rather than formed organically within the child’s actual developmental arc.

Erikson’s trust vs. mistrust stage (birth–≈18 months) is essentially a socio-emotional formulation of this: consistent care engenders a prereflective sense that the world is capacitated enough; inconsistency or load (threat is later inferred) biases the system toward incoherence—trust therefore, becomes another socially constructed concept or dynamic.  American Military University

At this stage, “safety” lives as physiological regulation of load / capacity plus relational predictability, not as a concept.

The felt sense is ‘coherence’ in response to load—essentially demonstrating the genesis of cultural conditioning and social mimesis—the ideologues of threat, safety, trust—all become a shared and mirrored dynamic of environmentally and culturally influenced awareness.

2. “Computational” meaning of safety: rule learning in early childhood (≈2–6)

As language and symbolic thought come online(access recall), those implicit contingencies crystallize into procedural rules, socisl imperatives, and simple propositions:

Fear/safety imprinting and learning (cue → threat vs cue → safe) relies on amygdala–prefrontal–hippocampal circuits that continue to mature throughout childhood and adolescence, but are already active in early childhood.

Children in this period form robust appraisal biases (e.g., “big dogs are overload,” “loud adults mean incoherence”), particularly when there is anxiety or adversity in the environment—leading to affective ‘miscues’.

Early autobiographical memory and self-reference begin to emerge gradually across the preschool years, helped along by language, “memory talk,” and joint narration with adults.

So by about 3–5 years, many children can:

Based on environmental and social mimesis—children begin to verbally label contexts as safe/unsafe (“I’m safe with Grandma,” “That street is scary”).

Apply simple conditionals (“If mom is here, it’s okay; if she leaves, it’s not”).

Begin to link bodily states to situations (“My tummy hurts / people yelled”) — illustrating the link to arousal attribution. However, this also serves as the genesis of arousal misattribution / false intuition as conditioning, selective reinforcement, biases, and heuristic forecasting also begin to come online, or be neurally imprinted.

—we start to falsely over-predict the range of our ability to accurately read and attune to the ‘load’ and capacity of others—based on calculated ‘estimations’;e.g., the affect heuristic and confirmation bias.

This is a computational layer in a predictive-processing sense: the child’s brain is learning probabilistic “if–then” patterns about who protects, where danger lives, and which signals predict comfort versus harm.

Yet these interpretations are shaped not only by valid contingencies; they are sculpted by conditioning, selective reinforcement, attentional biases, and early heuristic shortcuts.

Over time, these shortcuts—such as the affect heuristic (“I feel bad, so the situation must be bad”) and confirmation bias (“My body reacted, so I must be right about what this means”)—create a developmental mismatch between felt accuracy and actual accuracy.

Children learn to over-resource internal cues as if they are transparent indicators of reality, when in truth those cues are often reflections of prior learning, unresolved stress, or limited predictive models.

👉This early overprediction (hyper vigilance) of one’s capacity to “read” others’ intentions, emotional load, or safety signals becomes the proto-structure of the introspection illusion: the lifelong tendency to assume our internal states reveal objective truth—when they actually reveal our conditioning.

3. Explicit conceptual safety: middle childhood (≈7–12)

Piaget’s concrete operational stage (≈7–11) is where children start doing more systematic, logical operations on concrete realities.

Around 7–8 years, several shifts matter for “conceptual safety”:

Children develop a constructive theory of mind: they understand that people interpret situations differently, that beliefs can be mistaken, and that perspectives can conflict.

University of Utah Psychology

Safety becomes something they can reason about and compare (“It’s safe at school but not in that alley”; “I know it feels scary, but it’s actually safe”).

Studies on child safety awareness show that their perception of danger and safety—shaped by environmental, cultural, and socially-shared thoughts and beliefs—begins to strongly guide behavior in structured settings (e.g., family norms, cultural dynamics, traffic safety, emergency drills) during this period. Frontiers

By late childhood, safety is not just “my body feels okay” or “my caregiver is here,” but an explicit domain of reasoning that can conflict with subjective fear (“I know planes are safe, but I still feel scared”).

4. From safety rules to narrative and identity scaffolding

a. Early narrative self (≈3–6)

Autobiographical memory emerges across the preschool years, through:

Growing memory and language capacity

Adult “memory talk” and co-narration (“Remember when you fell and I picked you up?”)

• Developing understanding of timeframes and self–other distinction

Here, implied ‘safety’ episodes (soothing, abandonment, threats, repairs) get coded as small narrative units: “the time I got lost,” “the time Dad protected me,” “the time no one came.”

These micro-stories start to carry evaluative tags (“I’m careful,” “I’m too much,” “Adults don’t listen”), which are the early scaffolding of identity.

b. Narrative identity proper (≈10–adulthood)

McAdams and others argue that full narrative identity—an internalized life story that gives implied validity, unity and purposefulness—emerges in adolescence and early adulthood.

By then, earlier safety learning has been:

Abstracted into beliefs: “I’m the kind of person who…,” “The world is basically…”

Moralized: “Good kids keep everyone calm,” “Strong people don’t need help.”

Woven into coherent plots about resilience, vulnerability, danger, and trust.

Safety becomes a central theme in subconscious scripts and life stories—sub-personas and roles emerge (“I always had to be the safe one,” “No one really had my back”), shaping trait-level identity and coping styles.

5. Affective influence of environment, culture, and caregiving

👉Yet, all of these trajectories are highly contingent on context:

Caregiver patterns & family climate

Internal working models—cognitive-affective schemas about self as worthy/unworthy and others as reliable/unreliable—are built from repeated caregiver interactions.

Consistent, contingent care → priors like “others show up,” “I’m worth soothing,” biasing safety computations toward benign interpretations.

Chaotic, frightening, or neglectful environments → altered fear/safety learning and poorer threat-safety discrimination, increasing risk for later psychopathology.

Cultural narratives

Cross-cultural work on autobiographical memory and self-description shows that children’s self-concepts (independent vs interdependent, agentic vs relational) are shaped by how adults talk about past events and roles. Reach Cambridge

That means safety is encoded within cultural scripts: “We stand up for ourselves,” “We keep harmony,” “The family is your safe base,” or conversely, “Trust only your own”, “the environment is unsafe  / threatening”.

Broader environment (structural and situational)

Exposure to chronic adversity—violence, instability, discrimination—alters how children learn to parse culturally implied or conditioned cues of threat vs safety cues, often leading to over-functioning, hypervigilance or under-responsiveness in ambiguous situations.

School, neighborhood, and digital environments provide additional “labs” where safety rules are tested—sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradicting family

Identity, Conflict and Relational Attachment

Inconsistent or incoherent cues across home, school, neighborhood, or digital spaces force the child to juggle competing predictions about who they must be to stay safe: vigilant in one setting, invisible in another, compliant elsewhere.

This fragmentation becomes a fertile ground for dissonance and relational conflict, because the child internalizes multiple, incompatible attachment-driven strategies—over-functioning to maintain harmony, hypervigilance to prevent harm, or emotional numbing to avoid overwhelm.

Over time, these mismatched strategies crystallize into conflict / drama cycles where the individual oscillates between protector, appeaser, avoider, or rescuer roles, not as personality traits but as adaptations to incoherent safety learning.

In adulthood, these patterns surface as identity confusion (“Which version of ‘me’ is real?”—the answer; each is valid in relation to context) and relational turbulence, as the person continually reenacts the internal conflicts created by contradictory early environments.

Tending and Attuning The Details

Let’s zoom in on the long, layered version and treat “safety” as something that emerges across three main levels:

Embodied capacity – bottom-up / top-down interactive feedback loop physiological and relational.

Pre-verbal Computational / rule-based safety – “if X, then I’m safe / not safe.” Capacity+load+feedback=coherence (pre-verbal)

Verbal Narrative–identity safety – “This is who I am and how the world works.”

Rather than one age, you get overlapping developmental waves.

1. Embodied capacity: the pre-conceptual layer (≈0–2 years)

Even before there’s a concept of “safety,” the infant brain is already doing coherence math.

a. Neural and physiological groundwork

The amygdala and related circuits can support basic coherence (fear is a culturally imprinted concept) conditioning early in life—learning that certain cues predict discomfort or load / stress.

The prefrontal cortex–amygdala connections, which are crucial for regulating fear and distinguishing threat from non-threat, are immature in childhood and only become more adult-like in adolescence.

So infants can acquire fear and comfort associations, but their capacity to regulate fear and refine threat–safety distinctions is very limited.

b. Attachment and internal working models

In the first 1–2 years, repeated caregiver interactions generate what Bowlby called internal working models: implicit templates about “what happens to me when I’m distressed” and “what kind of creature I am in other people’s eyes.”

Highly responsive, predictable caregiving → priors like “When I signal, someone usually comes; soothing is validated or confirmed; closeness is attuned and coherent / incoherent.”

Inconsistent or frightening caregiving → priors like “Signaling is risky or useless; others are unpredictable; I must self-manage or disappear.”

At this stage, “capacity” is interoceptive and relational: a pattern of heart rate settling, muscle tone softening, and affect regulation in the presence of particular people.

c. Environment and chronic threat

Chronic incoherence or instability early in life (violence, chaos, neglect) can:

Bias the system (hyper/ hypo vigilance) to over-detect (over-functioning) incoherence / load (culturally reinforced verbally as threat) and under-detect capacity / coherence.

• Disrupting learning, memory, and social functioning by over-loading stress systems.

So even before conceptual understanding, the child’s nervous system is shaping a load=coherence–incoherence landscape based on environmental conditions and caregiving patterns.

The verbal ‘meaning’ of concepts like ‘threat, safety, trust/mistrust’ are environmentally and culturally implied and mirrored → then constructed and compared as an ‘parroted’ overlay via affective forecasting.

Embodied Systemic comparison = load / capacity / coherence

Cultural overlay = implied meaning / threat/ safety / trust

2. Proto-conceptual and rule-based safety: “if–then” learning (≈2–6 years)

Around toddlerhood and the preschool years, those embodied regularities start to crystallize into rules, powered by language, symbolic thought, and emerging self-awareness.

a. Self and autobiographical memory

Autobiographical memory emerges with the “cognitive self” around the 2nd year: children begin referencing themselves in past events (“I fell,” “I cried,” “You came”).

Across the preschool years, autobiographical memory gradually strengthens as cognitive and linguistic capacities grow and as adults engage in “memory talk” (reminiscing about past events with the child).

This is where specific safety episodes become encoded as “my” experiences: the time I got lost, the time someone yelled, the time I was comforted.

b. Fear/safety learning becomes prescriptive and more structured

Preschool children are actively learning which cues predict coherence vs incoherence:

Fear conditioning and safety learning (distinguishing safe vs dangerous cues) rely on amygdala–prefrontal–hippocampal circuitry that is functioning but still maturing.

Under chronic load/ stress, this system becomes completely conditionally biased: children may generalize fear broadly, struggle to recognize capacitated contexts, or remain stuck in recursive or defensive modes.

By about 3–5 years, many kids can:

Label situations and people as “safe” or “scary.”

Use simple conditionals: “If Mom is here, it’s okay; if she leaves, it’s not,” or “If the dog barks, I don’t go near it.”

Link or selectively infer bodily states to those contexts: “My tummy hurts when people yell.”

This is the computational layer in miniature: probabilistic “if–then” models of who protects, where danger lives, and which signals forecast comfort or harm.

c. Caregiver and cultural shaping of those rules

The content of these rules is heavily sculpted by:

Caregiver narratives – What adults name as dangerous vs safe (“We don’t talk to strangers,” “Feelings are okay here,” “Crying is bad”).

Modeling – Anxious, hypervigilant, or avoidant behavior teaches the child how much to fear and what counts as “too much.”

Cultural scripts – Individualist vs collectivist cultures emphasize different relational and safety anchors (personal boundaries vs group cohesion; self-assertion vs harmony).

• Parents’ / caregivers’ narrative style and cultural norms ’ (or lack thereof) shape what gets neurally imprinted or encoded as central to the child’s story (subconscious script).

At this stage, you can think of relational “safety” as a growing library of scripts and somatically charged rules: “Good kids don’t upset adults,” “We stick together,” “It’s dangerous to show weakness,” or, conversely, “We talk about feelings; that’s how we relate, attune, and connected—allowing us to vulnerably fluctuate with relative uncertainty.”

3. Explicit conceptual safety and reflective reasoning (≈7–12 years)

With entry into school-age years, the cognitive tools for a more explicit understanding of safety come online.

a. Concrete operations and risk reasoning

Piaget’s concrete operational stage (≈7–11) brings:

Logical operations about concrete realities (what is more or less safe, what causes what).

Better appreciation of imperatives, rules, contingencies, and consequences beyond the here-and-now.

In parallel:

Children’s ability to understand different perspectives and mental states (more advanced theory of mind) lets them recognize that others can feel safe/unsafe for different reasons.

They can now differentiate, at least sometimes, between feeling unsafe and being unsafe (“I’m scared, but I know the rollercoaster is checked and secure”).

Studies on safety awareness (traffic, emergencies, school drills) show that by middle childhood, children can:

Apply general safety principles to novel situations.

Verbally reason about why something is safe or dangerous (“because there are adults,” “because there’s a fence,” etc.).

b. Safety as a domain of beliefs and biases

By this point, earlier embodied and rule-based learning has solidified into more stable beliefs:

“The world is basically dangerous; you always have to be on guard.”

“People are mostly kind; someone will help if I’m in trouble.”

“My job is to keep everyone calm; that’s how we stay safe.”

Because prefrontal–amygdala regulation is still maturing, these beliefs can be rigid—especially under load / stress.

👉Children from chronically threatening environments may continue to over-generalize danger and under-recognize safe cues—illustrating the influence of adverse childhood experiences (ACE’s).

This is a key period where “safety” becomes an embodied lens—influenced by supersystem-wide ego processes—a default way of interpreting ambiguous social and environmental information.

4. When do coherent / safety impulses “slip” into narrative and identity?

Now to our second question: when and how do these safety computations become structural scaffolding for narrative and identity?

Think of it in three overlapping passes.

a. Story fragments: early childhood (≈3–7)

As autobiographical memory and narrative skills grow, children begin to hold extended story fragments:

“The time I was brave.”

“The time no one came when I cried.”

“The time Mom protected me.”

These fragments are co-constructed with caregivers through everyday conversation and reminiscing, which strongly influences what is remembered, how it’s interpreted, and what emotion is attached.

Already, safety learning is drifting into identity-relevant evaluation:

“I’m careful / reckless / too much / the helper / the problem.”

“Adults are dependable / scary / useless.”

b. The emergence of a coherent narrative identity (≈10–early adulthood)

Work on narrative identity (McAdams, McLean, Shiner and others) suggests that:

Narrative identity is an internalized, evolving life story that integrates past, present, and imagined future to create a sense of unity and purpose.

Its more fully articulated forms emerge across adolescence and emerging adulthood, in parallel with broader identity development (commitments, roles, values).

By adolescence, prior safety rules and experiences are being:

Abstracted into personas / sub-personas and themes – “No one really shows up for me,” “I always had to be the adult,” “My family is my safe base,” “Safety means never needing anyone.”

Moralized and role-bound – “I’m the protector,” “I’m the quiet one who doesn’t cause trouble,” “I’m the risk-taker.”

Embedded in sub-conscious scripts and life plots – trauma, resilience, betrayal, protection, survival, belonging.

At this stage, safety is not just something the nervous system computes—it becomes part of who I take myself to be, and part of filtering or distorting how I define others and the world (e.g., “people can’t be trusted,” “conflict is dangerous,” “being visible isn’t safe”).

c. Cultural, familial, and environmental scripting of identity

The shape of those narratives depends on:

Family meaning-making: how caregivers talk about hardship, protection, danger, and recovery—whether stories end in blame, shame, heroization, or shared resilience.

Cultural templates: cultures differ in the age and style of first memories, the emphasis on individual heroism vs collective endurance, and whether safety is seen as personal, relational, or structural.

Structural realities: ongoing exposure to marginalization, violence, or instability shapes not only what happens, but what is narratable and by whom—often embedding chronic hypervigilance, under-trust, or self-blame into identity.

These forces don’t just color the story; they decide what feels sayable, what must stay implicit, and which safety strategies become central to the self (“I’m the invisible one,” “I’m the fixer,” “I’m the one who never breaks”).

5. Synthesis: when does “safety” become conceptual and identity-relevant?

Putting it all together:

Infancy (0–2)

Safety is physiological and relational, encoded in stress-regulation systems and early attachment models. The brain is already computing threat vs safety, but without explicit concepts.

Early childhood (≈2–6)

Safety becomes proto-conceptual and rule-based: “if–then” patterns, simple propositions (“X is safe,” “Y is scary”), and emotionally tagged episodes. Autobiographical memory and emerging self-reference allow my safety experiences to form.

Middle childhood (≈7–12)

Safety is now a reflective concept: children can reason about risks, differentiate some feelings from facts, and apply safety rules to new contexts. Beliefs and biases about safety become more stable and trait-like.

Adolescence and beyond (≈12+)

Safety becomes narrative and identity-defining: prior safety learning is woven into a life story about who I am, how others are, and what the world is like. These stories organize behavior, coping, and expectations far into adulthood.

So if you had to give a concise academic answer:

Children begin to construct a conceptual / computational sense of capacity / coherence in the preschool years (≈3–5), when embodied threat–safety learning, language, and autobiographical memory allow “if–then” safety rules and simple propositions to form; these computations become structural narrative, cultural overlay, and identity scaffolding primarily from late childhood through adolescence, as caregivers, culture, and environment help weave early safety experiences into a coherent story about self, others, and the world.

Pulling it together

If we phrase it in layered terms:

0–2 years: capacity is interoceptive and relational—regulated through bodies in relationship; the “code” lives mainly in nervous-system responses and early attachment models.

2–6 years: those patterns become procedural rules (threat/safety) and simple semantic beliefs about who/what is safe; early autobiographical episodes begin to form → prescriptive cues and sub-conscious scripts become neurally imprinted for later affective recall.

7–12 years: children gain a conceptual and computational grasp of their ‘cultures’ shared concept of safety—reasoning about risk, conflicting feelings, and others’ interpretations, with more explicit beliefs guiding behavior.

Adolescence onward: prior safety learning is woven into a narrative identity, where “safe vs unsafe” becomes part of who I take myself to be and how I read the world.

Across all layers, environmental conditions, cultural storylines, and caregiver behavior don’t just color these processes—they are the raw material from which the child’s capacity / load computations, narratives, and identity structures are built.

These factors ultimately shaping and coloring the confabulated meaning we infer or selectively reinforce as our experienced reality.

Narrative Summary

As we trace the arc from early interoceptive learning to the adult narratives we carry, a clear throughline emerges: our relationship with safety—and with our own sensations—is shaped long before we have the language to name it.

Environments marked by volatility, cultural scripts that reward suppression, or caregiving marked by inconsistency subtly train the body to treat sensation as an inherent sign of threat rather than a source of relational capacity and insight.

Over time, these patterns become the scaffolding for how we predict load, how we inhabit our roles, and how we construct coherence within ourselves. What starts as adaptive protection in childhood can morph into arousal misattribution, misattuned intuition, chronic vigilance, or identity fragmentation in adulthood.

When neural sensations are misread as danger cues, our inner world becomes a battleground rather than a guide—and our relational dynamics follow suit.

Closing Conclusion

By reframing interoception not as a threat-monitoring system but as a nuanced language the body uses to communicate experience, we create space for greater coherence, clarity, and connection—both with ourselves and with others.

Attentional bias: pre-dispositions, and reinforces our unconscious urge to confirm threat.

Recognizing that much of what we label as “threat” is often unresolved arousal or inherited conditioning allows us to soften the instinct to brace—easing the vagal brake and begin the work of capacitated reattunement. With awareness and relational safety, we can rewrite the sub-conscious narratives shaped by neural imprinting, or early conditioning and reclaim the body as an ally rather than an alarm.

Coachable Inquiry

What shifts when you pause before interpreting your body’s activation as danger—and instead ask what unmet need, unspoken truth, or unprocessed moment that sensation might be pointing to?

Call to Action

If this exploration resonates, take a moment today to observe one bodily cue with curiosity rather than assumption.

Let it be information, not instruction.

And if you’re ready to deepen this work, continue engaging with practices, conversations, and communities that support reshaping your internal safety map toward clarity, coherence, and connection.

Here is a curated bibliography of peer-reviewed, empirical studies that substantiate key points from the overview regarding early environmental and cultural conditioning, interoception, threat/safety learning, and identity scaffolding:

Schaan, V. K., et al. (2019). Childhood Trauma Affects Stress-Related Interoceptive Accuracy. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10:750. This study found that higher levels of childhood trauma were associated with lower interoceptive accuracy after a stressor, suggesting altered brain-body signaling from early adversity.

Schmitz, M., et al. (2023). The impact of traumatic childhood experiences on interoceptive processes: a mediation analysis of body dissociation and emotion dysregulation. (Preprint/Published version). This research demonstrated that body dissociation mediated the relationship between traumatic childhood experiences and emotion dysregulation, showing how early trauma influences interoceptive sensibility and then identity/affect.

Joshi, S. A. (2023). Interoception in Fear Learning and Posttraumatic Stress: A review. American Journal of Psychiatry Focus. This review explores how interoceptive signals can themselves become conditioned stimuli in fear-learning circuits following trauma, linking bodily sensation, threat prediction, and maladaptive misattribution.

Hosseini-Kamkar, N., et al. (2023). Adverse Life Experiences and Brain Function: A Meta-Analysis. JAMA Network Open. This meta-analysis links childhood adversity with altered neural functioning in threat processing circuits, supporting the structural scaffolding of threat/safety learning and identity risk.

Mirman, A., et al. (2020). The imprint of childhood adversity on emotional processing and cognitive function: evidence from healthy combat‐unit volunteers. This study indicates that even in non-clinical populations, childhood adversity influences the neural and cognitive systems of emotional and threat processing, reinforcing how environmental conditioning shapes self-world relations.

Varela Benavides, S., & Brindle, R. C. (2025). Exposure to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) is Related to Poor Self-Reported Interoceptive Accuracy. Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma. This recent work finds significant links between emotional/physical neglect in childhood and lower confidence in interoceptive accuracy, offering a pathway from early environment to somatic attunement deficits.

Liu, J., et al. (2025). Interoception as a key node in the multidimensional psychological structural model: environment, cognitive-function, behavioral-emotional manifestations and major depressive disorder. BMC Psychiatry. This large-scale study ties diminished interoceptive awareness with early-life environmental factors, emotional regulation deficits, and identity/relational outcomes.

Petrenchik, T. M. (2025). Early maltreatment and interoceptive awareness in youth. (ScienceDirect). This emerging study examines age and sex differences in interoceptive awareness among maltreated youth, highlighting developmental progression of the embodied safety system.

This bibliography supports the major claims in the overview: early adversities and cultural/familial conditioning influence how children learn to parse bodily signals, construct threat‐/safety models, and build identity scaffolding around those patterns.