Malka Ceh, psychoanalyst

16/10/2025

How Early (In)stability Shapes Your Adult Intimacy 🌱❤️

In every relationship, there is a quiet observation of what each person brings to the table. Sometimes it is affection and charm, sometimes money and security, sometimes shared fun and vision. 🔥✨💰 Humans have always negotiated connection through exchange, though the form of the exchange shifts with time and culture.

One of the clearest modern examples is the so-called sugar relationship: an arrangement in which companionship or intimacy is exchanged for access to resources such as financial support, stability, or opportunity, most often held by the older and more established partner. Behind the social commentary, it reflects a much older human pattern, the exchange of resources and care within mating strategies. 🧬❤️

Meskó and colleagues (2025) explore these dynamics and explain that openness to such relationships is shaped by biology and context. Early-life adversity can nudge you toward faster, short-term strategies because in unstable environments, immediacy is adaptive. 🧩

We can look at these patterns through the lens of life strategy, the way you allocate energy across your lifespan between growth, reproduction, and maintenance. In stable early environments, a slow strategy develops: you plan ahead, delay gratification, and invest in long-term stability. 💭 In unpredictable or resource-scarce environments, a fast strategy emerges: you focus on immediate rewards, act quickly, and seize opportunities as they come. ⚡

A childhood marked by inconsistency, conflict, or scarcity teaches the nervous system that the future is uncertain. 🌀🌩️ It adjusts accordingly, favoring immediacy over patience, attraction over trust, chemistry over compatibility. These are adaptive responses to instability. When the world feels unpredictable, it is safer to grasp what is available now than to wait for what may never come. 🐚 In adulthood, this early calibration can translate into what we call a short-term mating orientation: a preference for intensity, novelty, or relationships that are exciting but transient. It may show up as a pull toward partners who bring thrill or advantage rather than stability. It means your emotional system was trained to optimize survival in conditions that once demanded speed and self-reliance.

Understanding this helps you see your dating preferences clearly. They are expressions of survival strategies that evolved to keep you safe and resourceful in uncertain worlds. But the world has changed, and so can your strategy. 🍂🌿 The change begins with noticing when your instincts are optimized for survival rather than growth. Once you recognize the impulse that confuses urgency with attraction, or excitement with safety, you can start choosing differently. You can start moving from instinct to intention, from protection to connection, from the logic of survival to the art of partnership. 💫

The study: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14747049251339453

Life history theory suggests that individuals vary in their sexual, reproductive, parental, familial, and social behavior in response to the physical and social...

02/10/2025

🌿 In memory of Dr. Jane Goodall (1934–2025) 🌿

Her work at Gombe showed that male and female primates develop differently emotionally and socially. These biological patterns shape how women build their competence, craft their paths, and pursue growth in the modern environment. Dr. Goodall’s legacy is not just scientific but also very practical: she demonstrated that emotions are strategies built into biology, and it is up to us to refine them into tools for the future we choose.

🤍 A tribute to her life and insights, and what they mean for women’s emotional development.

➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tribute-what-jane-goodalls-discoveries-teach-women-emotional-ceh-8l0zf/

14/08/2025

🔔 The Science of Using Color to Steer Your Mood: Color–Emotion Links Backed by a Century of Research 📚🎨

For more than a century, we have examined the mental effects of color. 💡 Early theorists like Goethe described yellow as gladdening, red as dignified, and blue as both exciting and calming. These ideas found their way into design, marketing, and even medical practice long before science could confirm or refute them. Jonauskaite and Mohr (2025) offer a brilliant, comprehensive review of 128 years of research (132 studies, over 42,000 participants from 64 countries) mapping systematic links between colors and emotions. They find consistent patterns across cultures, shaped by lightness, saturation, and hue:

Light colors = positive emotions
Dark colors = negative emotions
Red = empowering, high-arousal emotions (both positive and negative)
Yellow and orange = positive, high-arousal emotions
Blue, green, green–blue, white = positive, low-arousal emotions
Pink = positive emotions
Purple = empowering emotions
Grey = negative, low-arousal emotions
Black = negative, high-arousal emotions

Most of these are many-to-many correspondences; one color can evoke multiple emotional tones, and one emotion can be linked to several colors. 🔄🧠 While the review focused on associations, not direct causal effects, we can easily extract implications for using colors as tools for influencing mental states:

👗 Clothing: Choose a deep red scarf before a high-stakes meeting, a pale blue shirt for a reflective day, or yellow sneakers to lift an afternoon slump.
🏠 Interiors: Paint a home office in a muted green to support calm focus, use warm orange accents to stimulate energy and conversation.
☕ Objects in view: A cobalt mug for steady concentration, a small vase of fresh yellow tulips on your desk when you need brightness.
💻 Digital environments: Customize device backgrounds, app themes, or presentation slides to the emotional tone you want to sustain: a muted blue desktop for analytical work, a soft green notes app for planning, or a bold orange slide background to energize a presentation.
💡 Lighting: Using adjustable LED or smart bulbs to shift hue and saturation through the day: cool daylight tones for morning alertness, warmer amber tones for evening calm. Colored lampshades or filters can fine-tune your room’s emotional climate.
🗂️ Workspace zoning: Divide a workspace into color-coded zones: a deep green reading chair for focused intake, a bright yellow brainstorming corner, and a soft grey meeting area to temper high energy.
🔄 Transitional cues: Introduce certain colors at key transition points: a blue water bottle for your mid-morning reset, a soft pink shawl for winding down, or a bold red journal for decisive planning.
🧘 Ritual objects: Choose colors for items tied to consistent habits: meditation cushions, exercise mats, or the covers of daily-use notebooks. Over time, the color becomes part of the practice’s emotional signal.
🌳 Nature interaction. Seek out environments where the dominant palette supports your emotional goals: evergreen forests for calm, flower fields for optimism, open water for contemplative focus.
🛟 Recovery tools: Keep a “visual first-aid kit” of fabrics, images, or postcards in colors you know help regulate you. Even a brief gaze can interrupt an escalating emotional state.

In essence, color is not just a matter of taste or style. It is part of the sensory environment shaping your affective baseline. By making intentional choices, you can subtly nudge your mind toward the emotional tone you want to inhabit. 🎭🌈

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-024-02615-z

13/08/2025

The Mind-Body Dialogue: How Does This Make You Feel, Really? 🧠💬

How do you identify an emotional feeling? Is it the jolt in your gut, the racing heart, or the conscious thought in your head? ⚡🤔 The truth is, it's a dynamic two-way conversation. ⛖ Every emotion is a unique blend of signals flowing from your body to your brain and back again, all while your mind is processing the information in real time. A creative chaos. ✨ Michalska & Díaz (2025) are putting it under the lens. They explain that a critical aspect of your emotional life is the alignment between your subjective feelings and your body's physiological responses. When these two systems are not in sync, the divergence, the mismatch, offers an opportunity. 💡

The divergence, where what you feel is out of sync with what your body is doing, can be a factor in both internalizing problems (IPs), like anxiety and depression, and externalizing problems (EPs), like aggression and defiance.

For Internalizers: You may experience what we call "hyper-awareness". You might report a high level of distress, but your body's autonomic response is not as intense. This cognitive hyper-awareness can magnify minor stressors, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and anxious even when the physical signs of a "fight-or-flight" response are absent.

For Externalizers: The pattern here is "hypo-arousal". This is where there's a disconnect, where you feel intense anger, but your body shows a reduced physiological stress reaction. This can lead to acting out in anger and aggression because you've missed the bodily cues—like a racing heart or tense muscles—that would typically signal danger and deter such a response.

Understanding the relationship between your subjective feelings and your body's signals is a crucial tool for your emotional development. By learning to identify when your mind and body are misaligned, you can develop targeted, proactive strategies. If you frequently feel anxious without strong physical signs, it's a cue to explore if you're magnifying minor stressors. Use grounding techniques like deep breathing and mindfulness to manage your cognitive response before anxiety feels overwhelming. If you find yourself acting out in frustration without feeling physical distress, it's a cue to practice mindfulness and reconnect with your body's emotional signals. 🧘‍♀️🍃🌿

These proactive approaches manage emotions and lead to a deeper state of emotional regulation and self-awareness. 🤍🤍

A central tenet in emotion research is that emotional reactivity involves convergent changes across subjective, behavioral, autonomic, and more recently neural,...

08/08/2025

Can You Invent an Emotion? Discover a New One? 🌱🧠✨

Emotions are like colors. 🎨 There are the primary ones; red, blue, yellow. Just as there are core emotions like anger, fear, and joy. But between them lies a full spectrum of mixed shades. And just like with colors, your emotional vocabulary expands and shifts over time. 🔄🌈 New terms appear, fade, and sometimes change their meaning entirely. Nostalgia was once considered a fatal medical condition. Loneliness only entered common use in the 19th century. And terms like hygge or ikigai have risen and fallen like fashion trends. 🍵🕯️📚

In this context, historian Katie Barclay (2025) introduces the idea of neo-emotions: 💡 Words created to name emotional experiences that didn’t previously have a label. Some are coined in therapy. Others arise in internet culture. 🌐💬 One Reddit user asked ChatGPT to invent an emotion. The result was velvetmist: a soft, floating sense of serenity. 🌫️🪶 They followed the instructions for evoking it and cried, and then even their partner did the same.

Naming emotions isn’t only about describing what already exists. It can also create new experiences. 🪄 Emotion always has a reflective, cognitive layer. 🧩🧠 How you name and frame a feeling shapes how it unfolds in your body and mind. 🌀 When your work, relationships, or daily habits change, your emotional vocabulary may need to change too. You might feel something you don’t yet have a word for. Or the word you choose might change how you feel. 💭 That’s what neo-emotions are about: in the space between what you feel and what you can say. 🤯😉

Neo-emotions are invented terms that express emotional experiences that are novel or that have not previously been labeled. This article considers the utility o...

22/07/2025

🧬 Your emotions may not be dysfunctional. They may simply be mismatched to the environment you're in. 🔑
Traits evolve when they increase the chances of survival (or more precisely, reproduction) in a given environment. A well-known example is lactase persistence, the ability to digest milk into adulthood. In populations where dairy farming became common, this genetic trait became advantageous. It allowed individuals to extract nutrition from a new food source, improving their reproductive success. As a result, the trait spread. 🍼 In populations without dairy culture, the same trait offered no advantage. It did not spread. The outcome depended on the cultural and ecological environment. We call that gene‐culture coevolution. 🤓📚
The same principle applies to emotional traits. Emotions, such as fear, attachment, or anger, evolved because they supported gene-survival in ancestral conditions. But the fine-tuning of these traits depends on the cultural context in which it appears. In their new article, Kasser and colleagues (2025) argue that we are often focused too narrowly on natural selection when explaining human evolution. 💡 They propose a broader framework that includes other evolutionary processes and emphasizes how culture can buffer or redirect natural selection. 👣 This insight has implications for how we think about emotions. 👀
Some emotional tendencies may not have been strongly selected for. They may have been carried along by other traits, or buffered by cultural practices that reduced their costs. For instance, strong emotional dependence might be tolerated, even adaptive, in extended kin networks, but feels burdensome in highly individualistic cultures. ⚖️ A heightened vigilance system might have helped in unstable, dangerous environments, but now manifests as chronic anxiety. 🧘🏼 In other words, your emotional makeup is not universally adaptive. ☝️🧠 It may not serve you well in a particular culture, at a historical moment, or within your current environment. But that same patterns of feelings could be highly functional in another context: another region, another social class, another family, another job, another group of friends, or with another partner. Culture not only plays a role in which emotional traits persist, fade, or adapt, but also determines the efficiency of your emotions.
Your emotions are a product of biological and cultural history, and that heritage does not guarantee a perfect fit with your present environment. However, your emotional tendencies are not set in stone. 🪨😉 With self-awareness, reflection, and intentional effort, you can adapt and reshape your emotional responses to better align with your personal goals and aspirations. 🎨🖌️💫

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/evan.70007

Gene-culture coevolution (GCC)—an ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences is often used to explain the evolution of key human traits. Despite the framework's broad conceptual appeal how...