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May 2025
1h 4m

are you emotionally feral?

Mollie Adler
About this episode

What happens when no one teaches you how to feel safe with other people? When no one shows you how to speak your needs, regulate your emotions, or come back together after a rupture? This episode introduces a phrase you may have never heard before, but once you hear it, it won’t leave you: emotional feralness.


If you grew up with emotionally immature parents, absent caregivers, or constant disconnection, your body may have learned to adapt in ways that protected you back then but isolate you now. You may find closeness uncomfortable. You may shut down when things get real. You may scan for danger in relationships that are trying to love you. You’re not broken. You’ve just never been shown another way. We’ll explore the emotional orphan archetype, why so many of us were raised without repair, how emotional neglect gets passed from one generation to the next, and what it takes to interrupt that pattern without becoming emotionally cut off from the world around us.


What You’ll Learn:


  • What emotional feralness actually is (and how to recognize it in yourself)
  • The long-term effects of childhood emotional neglect and emotionally immature parenting
  • Why so many of us avoid conflict and mistake self-protection for empowerment
  • How to practice meaningful repair in relationships when rupture is inevitable
  • How emotional rewilding can help you reconnect with the parts of yourself that had to shut down to survive
  • What it means to parent forward without a map (and how to avoid passing on what you never received) 
  • Why empathy without boundaries keeps you stuck in cycles of hurt
  • How to recognize emotional feralness in others without absorbing their chaos
  • How to move from orphan to initiate (without pretending the pain didn’t happen)

This isn’t therapy-speak or spiritual bypass. This is raw, practical, and grounded work for people who want to understand the shape of their inner world and to reshape it with intention.


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