Max Littman, LCSW
August 8, 2025
Wonder, curiosity, and discovery are some of the most fundamental and interconnected aspects of being human. From the moment we’re born, we’re wired to explore, learn, and adapt. The drive toward novelty—the thrill of encountering something new, meaningful, and pleasurable—is deeply intertwined with our capacity for joy, connection, and growth. Yet, for many of us, the drive toward discovery can also feel fraught with fear, shame, or numbness. In other words, our drive toward curiosity can be concealed by burdens and the protectors who shield us from being in contact with them.
This article weaves together insights from IFS, neuroscience, developmental psychology, the Personality and Developmental Pathways (PDP) model, spirituality, epigenetics, and the concept of porosity of mind to explore how our innate drive toward discovery functions in the human psyche. It examines how trauma and protection suppress this drive—and practical ways we can use to help restore it.
Throughout this article, you’ll see the words curiosity, joy, wonder, exploration, discovery, exuberance, and novelty used somewhat interchangeably. While each has its own nuance, they are deeply interconnected expressions of the same life force: the innate drive toward aliveness, meaning, and connection that emerges when our systems feel safe enough to reach beyond what is known.
The Neuroscience of Wonder, Curiosity, and Discovery: Joy, Novelty, and Safety
Discovery lights up our brain’s reward systems. When we encounter novelty, the release of dopamine—the chemical messenger associated with motivation and pleasure—sparks curiosity and propels us toward exploration. In infants, this can manifest as reaching for a brightly colored toy, crawling toward an unfamiliar sound, or giggling at a game of peek-a-boo.
But discovery isn’t just about pleasure. It’s inextricably linked to safety. Neuroscientifically, this is reflected in the dance between the amygdala (which scans for danger) and the prefrontal cortex (which assesses safety and makes decisions). When safety is perceived, the nervous system shifts into ventral vagal mode—a state associated with openness, connection, and play. This state is the biological foundation for healthy exploration.
In contrast, when the nervous system detects a threat, the sympathetic (fight/flight) or dorsal vagal (shutdown) systems take over. For those of us with histories of trauma and adversity, these defensive states can dominate, leaving parts of us wary of—or completely exiled from—the joy of discovery.
Developmental Perspectives: Wonder, Curiosity and Discovery as Birthrights
In infancy and early childhood, discovery is a primary means of attachment and development. Think of a baby’s first smile eliciting a parent’s coo, or a toddler’s delighted laugh as they figure out how to stack blocks. These moments of often shared discovery not only builds neural pathways but also reinforces a child’s belief that the world is a safe and responsive place.
One of the earliest developmental expressions of discovery is the reach movement—when a baby extends their arm toward something that captures their attention. This simple gesture reflects a profound truth: the body’s instinct to move toward what feels meaningful, new, or engaging. Reaching isn’t just motor development; it’s an embodied form of curiosity, a sign that the nervous system feels safe enough to explore. When met with attunement, these early movements reinforce not only connection but also a foundational belief: it’s okay to want, to explore, and to engage with the world.
However, if caregivers are inconsistent, unavailable, or abusive, the child’s exploratory impulses can be thwarted. Instead of reaching out for connection or novelty, they may learn to avoid, suppress, or numb their natural curiosity. Protectors form to manage this disconnection, shielding the child from further pain but inadvertently blocking their access to the joy of discovery. These parts can even be preverbal and nonverbal.
Trauma, Burdens, and the Exile of Discovery
Trauma and adversity buries the drive for discovery beneath layers of protection and burdened beliefs. An exile may hold the grief of unmet curiosity—the times a child’s bids for connection were ignored or punished. Managers might adopt rigid control strategies to avoid risk, while firefighters may pursue frenetic novelty in ways that bypass genuine connection (think: impulsive purchases, excessive screen time, or risky behaviors).
When these parts dominate, discovery becomes a source of threat rather than joy. A client might say, “I can’t try anything new because I’ll fail,” or “Every time I’ve been interested in something or someone, I’ve always gotten hurt.” These beliefs keep us stuck in survival mode, disconnected from our natural capacity for curiosity, exploration, and discovery.
Wholeness, Motivation, and the Origins of Personality
From the moment we begin to develop in the womb, we exist in a state of implicit wholeness. According to Daniel J. Siegel and his co-authors in Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, this intrauterine experience is one of complete being—undisturbed, fluid, and undivided. There’s no need to strive, no fear of rejection, no disconnection from Self. But this changes dramatically once we enter the world. With birth comes the necessity of survival. We must now “work to live.” Our nervous systems begin to interpret discomfort as threat, and the process of personality formation begins.
Siegel and the PDP group describe how three core aversive emotional experiences—anger, sadness, and fear—signal early disruptions to this original wholeness. In response, our systems orient around three core developmental needs: agency, bonding, and certainty. These needs shape the fundamental motivational vectors that drive personality development. Personality, in this frame, is not a static set of traits or a fixed identity, but a dynamic pattern of protective adaptations (protectors in IFS) that help us survive and function in the wake of perceived separation from our original wholeness.
Within this model, we can differentiate between aversive and appetitive motivations. Aversive motivations emerge from perceived threat or disruption: the drive to avoid harm, prevent rejection, or control uncertainty. These often shape the development of protectors—parts that manage risk, seek approval, or avoid vulnerability. Appetitive motivations, by contrast, stem from an innate draw toward integration, connection, and vitality. They reflect our organismic pull toward wholeness—toward joy, creativity, intimacy, and discovery. In IFS, we can understand this pull as Self energy.
In the language of IFS, we can also understand these appetitive impulses as belonging to our exiles: the parts of us that remember what it felt like to reach, explore, or play before being met with pain. When the aversive systems take over unchecked, protectors suppress these appetitive impulses in the name of safety. But when Self energy is present, we can begin to rebalance. Discovery becomes possible again—not because the world is entirely safe, but because there’s enough internal safety to allow for it.
Understanding this interplay between original wholeness, motivational drives, and personality development offers a rich foundation for IFS work. It helps us see that the drive for discovery is not just a function of preference or temperament. It’s a birthright—one we are all, in some way, trying to find our way back to.
Porosity of Mind and the Vulnerability of Discovery
As Robert Falconer explores in The Others Within Us, all our minds are porous. Porosity of mind suggests we absorb the energies, emotions, beliefs, and unspoken experiences of others and the world around us—often without conscious awareness—making us exquisitely attuned but also highly vulnerable in environments that lack safety or coherence.
My belief is that some minds are more porous than others. In early childhood, and particularly in those with highly sensitive systems, the mind can act like an especially absorbent sponge for external energies, beliefs, and unresolved psychological material—not just from caregivers, but from the collective field. Porosity of mind can make discovery, curiosity, and exploration feel more vulnerable and risky. For example, when a child’s system absorbs the unspoken anxieties, cultural burdens, or spiritual legacies of those around them, their natural curiosity may feel like a liability. Even if no one explicitly says, “Don’t be curious,” the child with a more porous internal system may feel the fear, shame, or vigilance in the room and take it in as their own.
This level of absorption isn’t a weakness. It’s sensitivity. But in systems shaped by trauma, colonization, religious dogma, or multigenerational oppression, more porous individuals’ protectors often exile discovery and exploration early in life because they had too much input of stimulus in a world that didn’t feel safe enough to explore.
Epigenetics and the Inheritance of Inhibition
Scientific advances in epigenetics show that emotional trauma and chronic stress can affect not just our biology, but our offspring’s gene expression as well. What this means is that some of us may enter the world with a nervous system already carrying the residue of fear, suppression, or vigilance. Even in a relatively stable present-day environment, our systems might react to novelty or uncertainty as if it were inherently dangerous.
This can show up as a subtle but powerful brake on discovery. A child may have had loving caregivers and still feel a deep, inexplicable inhibition when it comes to trying new things, being visible, or expressing joy. Understanding the science of epigenetics helps validate that these barriers are not imagined or self-inflicted—they are inherited forms of protection.
Legacy Burdens and the Quiet Exile of Curiosity
In IFS, we speak of legacy burdens—beliefs, emotions, or survival strategies passed down from families, cultures, or communities that no longer serve us. These burdens often go unnamed but shape inner experience in profound ways. We may carry the belief that “good boys don’t ask questions,” or that “curiosity is dangerous,” not because anyone told us so, but because it was true for generations before us.
These legacy burdens can quietly exile the instinct to explore. They are often held by protectors who mistake curiosity for rebellion or by exiles who remember being shamed for wanting too much. Inviting the parts plagued with these burdens to unblend and experience Self can create space for the rediscovery of curiosity.
Spirituality and the Sacred Nature of Discovery
The experience of discovery often carries a spiritual quality. When we reconnect with our innate curiosity, it can feel less like learning something new and more like remembering something sacred. Even those of us who do not identify as spiritual often speak of feeling “more alive,” “more like myself,” or “closer to something bigger.”
Self energy—when present—doesn’t just encourage exploration. It sanctifies it. It affirms that the drive to discover is not indulgent or frivolous, but a birthright expression of aliveness. It often does so through still, quiet, patient, and calm yet powerful means. In this way, healing becomes a sacred act of returning. Of remembering. Of reinhabiting a world where wonder is allowed again.
When the World Isn’t Safe from the Start: In Utero Trauma and the Inhibition of Discovery
While the drive toward discovery is innate, it is not always accessible—even in infancy. For some, the inhibition of discovery begins before birth. Emerging research in neurobiology, epigenetics, and trauma studies reveals that the intrauterine environment can shape a baby’s nervous system, stress response, and internal sense of safety. In other words, the womb is not just a physiological container; it’s an energetic and emotional field that leaves an imprint.
In utero trauma can take many forms. From a physiological standpoint, a developing fetus may absorb heightened stress hormones from the pregnant parent’s system, especially in the presence of anxiety, grief, intimate partner violence, or systemic oppression. This biological transmission can wire the fetus’s stress response toward hypervigilance, even before the first breath. Biologically, this means that the baby’s body may begin to organize around survival long before birth.
From an epigenetic standpoint, the fetus may also inherit patterns shaped by trauma that occurred generations earlier—altering how their genes express stress sensitivity, emotional regulation, or immune function. These inherited vulnerabilities do not guarantee pathology, but they can predispose the system toward protective reactivity, making discovery feel risky even in a relatively safe postnatal environment.
Porosity of mind adds another layer. Certain individuals have minds that are more permeable to energetic, psychological, and even spiritual influence. A highly porous fetus may absorb not just stress chemicals, but the emotional climate, unresolved grief, ancestral burdens, or unspoken fears of the pregnant parent or lineage. These absorbed impressions may not carry explicit memory, but they live on in the system as implicit knowing—often interpreted later as dread, inhibition, or shame without clear origin.
Spiritually, some people describe a sense of being unwelcome, unwanted, or unsafe before they even arrived. Whether this is symbolic, energetic, or intuitive, these impressions can shape the earliest layers of identity. In such cases, the exile of discovery isn’t simply developmental—it’s existential. The act of reaching outward may register as dangerous to the very core.
Understanding in utero trauma through these multidimensional lenses can create enormous relief. It shifts the narrative from “something’s wrong with me” to “my system adapted early, wisely, and protectively.” From this place, the therapeutic task becomes not pushing discovery, but cultivating the safety, attunement, and spaciousness that might allow it to reemerge.
A Personal Note on Wonder and Privilege
For much of my early life, wonder came easily. I was born into a family that was ready for me—planned for, welcomed, and embraced. My parents delighted in my curiosity. They encouraged exploration, met my questions with interest, and celebrated even the smallest of discoveries. I grew up in a home where safety was a given: food was always available, love was dependable, and danger was distant. The extended family around us not only supported my parents, but also affirmed my right to exist, to want, and to reach. I lived in a neighborhood where I could ride my bike without fear, where the adults knew each other’s names, and where my nervous system could rest in the background conditions of stability.
I also grew up white-bodied, cisgender, and male. These identities—though unchosen—functioned like invisible air cushions, softening my entry into the world. No one told me not to be exuberant. No one scolded me for taking up space. My joy was interpreted as confidence. My curiosity, as potential. My liveliness, as leadership.
It wasn’t until I stepped outside that bubble—beyond the family, community, and social structures that had scaffolded my early life—that I came face to face with the complexity of systems far less affirming. I began to encounter people whose parts had adapted to threat, deprivation, oppression, and exclusion. People whose exuberance had been punished. Whose curiosity had been shamed. Whose reaching had been met not with delight, but with dismissal, silence, or danger. And I noticed something: my natural orientation toward joy and openness sometimes made others bristle—not because of who I was, but because of what I represented. A freedom they hadn’t been afforded. An innocence that, to parts of them, felt naive or even unsafe.
This reckoning continues to be painful, humbling, and necessary. It forces me to confront how privilege shapes not only my outer circumstances, but my inner experience of what is allowed. It also deepens my respect for the protectors in systems that move more cautiously, more quietly, more defensively through the world—not because they lack wonder, but because they’ve had to work much harder to keep it safe. When working with clients, it allows me to express my authentic exuberance and delight while staying attuned to the impact this can have on systems that had to exile exploration in order to survive.
Practical Implications
The rediscovery of curiosity and wonder doesn’t require elaborate interventions. It often begins with subtle, embodied signals of safety—moments when our attunement, playfulness, or openness helps a client’s system loosen its grip on vigilance. Below are a few practical ways to support this process in therapy:
- Model Curiosity Without Demand
Your own gentle interest can make space for your client’s curiosity to return. Let your questions be exploratory rather than interrogative. Wonder aloud. Let parts feel that they don’t have to know anything or perform insight to be welcome. - Invite Playfulness and Lightness
A playful tone, a gentle laugh, or a metaphor can disarm protectors and signal that exploration is safe. Clients often discover more when we’re not trying too hard to find something. - Normalize the Hesitation to Explore
Discovery can feel risky for parts who’ve known shame, punishment, or invisibility. Reflect this gently:
“It makes sense that trying something new might feel scary if it’s brought pain before.”
This honors the wisdom of protectors without bypassing the possibility of reengagement. - Celebrate Small Moments of Reaching
Whether a client speaks a long-held truth, sets a boundary, or considers trying something unfamiliar, mark the moment. Not as performance, but as a quiet return to vitality. - Listen for Motivational Quality
Gently explore whether a behavior is aversively or appetitively motivated. For example:
“Is this part trying to prevent something painful—or move toward something meaningful?”
This helps clients attune to the internal source of their impulse, rather than simply the outcome. - Share Your Own Discovery (When Appropriate)
When offered with care and minimalism, brief disclosures about your own learning or curiosity can model safety and normalize not knowing. Even something like, “I’m not sure where this is going, but I’m really interested,” invites collaboration.
More broadly, you might ask yourself: Are there any parts of me who shut down my own laughter, delight, playfulness, and curiosity in session with clients? With any particular client? What are their concerns about what might happen?
As therapists, we don’t restore discovery for our clients—we create a field where it can return on its own. That field is built not just through insight, but through trust, attunement, and presence.
Reconnection
Our capacity for discovery is always there, even when it’s buried beneath burdens and the activity of our protectors. And there are boundless possibilities for discovery. The universe is full of mystery. Not all of it is a threat. As IFS therapists, we have the privilege of helping our clients reconnect with this birthright, safely peeling back the layers of fear and shame to reveal the joy, wonder, and aliveness that come with exploring the world—and themselves.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide private practice mentorship, consultation, and therapist/practitioner part intensives.
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References
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