These thought patterns cause kids to believe:
The abuse and neglect they suffer is their fault. Therefore, they deserve the neglect or mistreatment;
And I have the power to change the parent or significant figure who is neglecting and/or mistreating me. When efforts to be a good boy or girl fail to result in better treatment, the child feels like a failure and unlovable.
Most people never get beyond these original thought patterns and behaviors. In our adult relationships, many people (especially women) try to be good, hoping to finally earn the love for which they are starving. Of course, this “good girl” pattern doesn’t work and creates a greater feeling of disconnection and emptiness.
In order to heal this injury, you must experience what it feels like to be lovable, that is to feel another person loving you to the bottom of your soul.
The only way to be loved at this level is to be vulnerable and radically expose your soul. When you are finally loved at this level, you finally feel you are lovable. This isn’t an intellectual exercise. You have to feel the feeling.
Most people never reach the place of self-love because they are too afraid to practice emotional nudity. Precisely because these people believe they are unlovable, they take great pains to not reveal themselves at the deepest core level. Doing so would only bring loathing, right?
Wrong!
Profound healing arises when you have the courage to radically expose your deepest core AND these revelations are received with total acceptance and love.
Radical healing is sparked when you feel loved and held, warts and all. This “Corrective Emotional Experience” provides the unconditional love that is never received as a child. It is this holding, acceptance and love of the part of oneself that has been kept hidden that fertilizes the seeds of self-love.
The next step in the Energetic System Upgrade is learning how to stay in your naked and loving heart when you are hurt and angry.
Intimate relationships are a trigger.
In a nutshell, the unconscious mind constantly links present-day slights with the wounds suffered as a kid. This is what I call the Emotional Lake Effect. Think about an actual lake-effect blizzard that gathers moisture and energy as it moves across large expanses of warmer lake water and dumps mounds of snow on the lake’s leeward shores. Well, the unconscious mind does the same thing. As the mind dips into the reservoir of the unconscious, it dredges up memories of similar hurts suffered way back when. The next thing you know, you’re blowing an emotional gasket because you are reliving all the pain of previous similar offenses. This explains why fireworks go off inside when the current event doesn’t seem to warrant such an explosive reaction.
To complicate matters, these associations are happening on an unconscious level, meaning your “feeling memories” are disembodied from the actual events. As a result, it’s easy to mistakenly assume that the mountain of emotions you’re experiencing is the result of whatever another person just said or did. The next thing you know, you’re aiming our broadsides at your partners and friends, family members and colleagues, dumping old emotional baggage onto them without realizing it. This heats the relationship environment to a sizzle and drives those closest to you farther away.
The remainder of the workshop will focus on how to communicate when you are triggered so that you can guide those closest to you to help heal your Old Scars, rather than falling into the trap of camouflaging your pain with anger, which creates the chemical imbalances that cause those closest to you to run away.