Stop Running and Face Yourself!
Man, I heard a truly interesting story today.
I was talking to someone who’s a therapist, and he told me about a client he had in the past, who, after three years of working with him, where he stripped layer after layer, he got to his core wound that he had been running from since childhood, and now he was totally exposed, he didn’t want to confront it, so simply put, he just stopped coming.
What in Earth do you mean Ike?
I’ve mentioned it before in other blogs, but each of us are dealing with some type of childhood trauma derived from some sort of perceived abandonment, abuse or neglect. I say “perceived” because it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, but if the child perceives it as true, then for all intents and purposes, it happened.
After this trauma, we adopt all sorts of coping mechanisms to numb ourselves from feeling the wound. Yet, though we’re “numb,” the wound still controls us in many ways and triggers thoughts connected to the wound which in turn triggers all sort of dysfunctional behaviours that are as many as the people are on this Earth.
On top of this trauma, are additional layers of emotions that we just stuff in our bodies and never deal with.
Enter therapy. The PROPER type of therapy is supposed to peel off these emotional layers by feeling them through until we get to the core issue that’s running our lives.
Back to what I had originally mentioned, the client finally got in touch with the core issue, and it freaked him out so much he ran the other direction. I thought that was a shame, because though the therapist out of respect for the privacy of the client was very vague, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out from the little he shared that the client’s life was a mess.
By him running, he missed out on a huge opportunity to heal, become more whole, have more peace in his life, and put an end to the patterns he engaged in that made his life a mess in the first place. He’s on the cusp of reclaiming a part of himself that was lost in childhood. Healing is affording him that opportunity, and now he’s about to blow it.
This fascinated me, and so I mulled it over most of the day. As I was pondering this, it dawned on me that for most of my life, I had been running from my own feeling of greatness. Ever since childhood, in order to please my parents, I played “small” by doing anything possible to squelch my own feeling of greatness from within me. I kept my body stiff to stifle any feeling of my natural life force (that’s why I always seem so stiff), and every time I was on the cusp of something big, I’d sabotage myself. I also was always up in my head thinking too damn much in order to distract myself from being in the present to who I really was.
This is why I struggled with having success for most of my adult life. I tried to be something that was acceptable to my parents instead of being who I was created to be.
Thank God I’m in therapy because I get to work this out.
What deep emotions have you devoted your entire life to avoid feeling? Trust me, if and when you start to deal with that, it’ll transform your entire life.
This is The Viable Alternative.
Hope this helps,
Ike Love
