As a kid, I loved to take things apart and see if I could successfully reassemble them again. My analytical brain told me that if I understood how a thing came together, I could deconstruct it and rebuild it the way I wanted to, maybe even make it better. As an adult, I use this same model for self healing; examine what happened, how if affected me (or perhaps still does), construct a healthy new way to deal with it. Sounds simple enough, right? Yet as anyone reading this knows all too well, self healing is anything but simple. It's painful, cringeworthy, uncomfortable, and ugly, but the only way out is through.
Now, the loving joke about me amongst my circle of friends is that I own self-help books about how to implement self-help books, and they aren't wrong! I've spent countless hours reading, researching, attending seminars with great minds like Deepak Chopra and Jack Canfield, experienced their guided meditations and learned many of the tools they teach for success, and as helpful and informative as all of that was, something still felt off to me. Eventually, I was led back to this silly little thing I did as a kid; take it apart, look at it carefully, put it back together better, and that is what I want to share with you here. This brief exercise is something you can do today to begin unlocking pain and understanding yourself on a deeper level. Ultimately, we cannot fix something if we don't know how it broke to begin with.
Start by writing a list of everything that hurt you in your childhood. This is just for you, so no edits are needed, just let the feelings and thoughts flow from you. Once you feel as though you have written all of it down, go back to the beginning and read your items line by line. Ask yourself how each specific thing made you feel at that time, then write that down. As you do this illuminating exercise, the correlations between events and feelings should start to become clear, and you will hopefully begin to see how the programming and patterns from childhood have caused you to react or respond to events in your life now. For instance, if you grew up in a household where abuse took place and you spoke up and asked for help but didn't receive it; maybe this manifests in your life today as not trusting others and feeling as though your truth and your voice do not matter. Now dig into that a little deeper; does this unhealed wound cause you to feel as though you need to be loud and domineering in order to be heard? Maybe you were raised in a family that didn't have much money and comments were made about things would be so much easier "with less mouths to feed" or "if we were just rich". How did that narrative manifest for you? Do you feel as though you only bring value to a situation if you also bring monetary gains?
The unfortunate wounds we have from childhood are very real and they creep into our daily lives if we allow them to. As the saying goes "What we resist persists, what we look at disappears". These things can no longer hurt us when we shine the light on them and begin to understand how they are controlling our lives without us even knowing. Take it apart, look at it, put it back together better. You deserve to be free of trauma and attract the very best life you can live.
Follow us on Facebook & Instagram @BreakYourInertia
