Beyond Broken

Wendy’s Blog

What Is Being Revealed to Heal?

Week nine of our respective isolations and aloneness is bringing with it a phenomenon I am observing in many of us.

This iceberg is a classic metaphor. The part seen above the water line is what we are conscious of knowing, experiencing and remembering, and the mass below water represents material that lives in our unconscious.  What is beginning to happen is that as the waters of life have been quieted by our slowing down and staying still, we can see what is below more clearly and more unconscious material is making itself known.  It is fascinating to watch this in myself and in those with whom I work. Here is how things were revealed in some dreams.

I dream I am in the hospital with the virus and I feel its desperate grip on me.  I can feel the moment of choice — will I fight to live or will I succumb?   It is a desperate moment and I am all alone.  I choose life and wake up realizing that I have often made a different choice — one of living with depression and contemplating suicide.  I are now affirming life!

In another dream I am in a terrible car accident, a 600-car pile up.  The devastation is unimaginable, yet I am taken by ambulance to the hospital and told by the medical staff that it is a miracle that I survived.  On waking I realize that I have survived the tremendous car wreck which was my family breaking apart when I was young.  I am walking away,  into my life — a true miracle.

In a third dream I am able to bring someone back to life who is a mother figure to me.  She has stopped breathing and no medical intervention helps. I lay my head on her chest and a magical healing power of love starts her breathing.  In real life I was not able to bring my mother back — it is the most impotent, grief-filled experience of my life.  In my dream I get to complete this story with a new ending where I have the power to heal and life is restored.

Through these dreams, much is being worked out in the hearts of the dreamers.  I sit in awe of how hard our unconscious material is working to surface and heal, uniquely during this time.

Trauma that has not been given enough attention is also surfacing. Painful past experiences with friends and loved ones are coming back to life to be fully experienced and healed.  The protective strategies we used instead are being questioned and loosening.  In one example, a woman lost her best friend to suicide.  She was young and helpless as she saw her friend degenerate into depression and madness.  Soon afterward she got her first professional job.  She has since had terrible work anxiety.  At work she is always afraid that something horrible is going to happen, she will make some unforgivable mistake and get fired.   As we slowly, with lots of time and love, revisit the moments leading up to her friends’ death and the shock of her death itself and fully experience all the feelings, we can finally feel that it is over.  The trauma can now retreat into the past and not be just about to happen, re-lived in her feelings about her workplace.  We hope this will lessen her work anxiety.

Finally another person I work with has found a dissociated part of herself who emerged out of extreme trauma with the belief “I can withstand anything and look fine and heal the rest of the world.”  This part of her has been very successful but has been completely cut off from her real needs.  She is beginning to come into her needs, preferences — truly herself.  It is astounding how she has found this while having the time to be at home, to really come to grips with what happened to her and step into the real person — the beautiful person she fully is.

For myself I notice for the first time an anxiety before bedtime.  I often find a small symptom that seems to flair up at night, a foot throb, an ear ache, or some other unexplained symptom.  In the past week a voice has surfaced to accompany the symptom.  In a desperate tone it says. “this will hurt and you will be alone and not be able to sleep all night.”  I am curious about this and wonder if it’s origins come from a time when I was six.  I am driving home in a car with my parents and feel like I have to throw up.  I ask my parents to pull over and I try retching at the side of the road but nothing comes up.  This may happen a few more times before we reach home until my parents are exasperated.  They put me to bed (alone) with a pot and tell to be sure to use it if I need to throw up.  The next morning I am still in distress and am taken to the doctor who admits me to the hospital.  I have acute appendicitis.  As I am meditating this morning and listening to the voice in it’s full desperation say, “I will be alone all night.”  I whisper back, “not now, I am with you , I am right here and will stay right here.” 

It is obvious to me that this time has been given to us to investigate more closely our relationship with ourselves.  Ann Lamott once said (and I paraphrase), “my mind is like a bad neighborhood I would not like to go into after dark.”  When we are isolated we have ourselves.  It may turn out, if we listen carefully and uncover that which has been unconscious and hidden, that there is constantly new territory for us to discover.  We may find out we are one of the most interesting people we know.

Little Drops of Rain – The Grace of Grief

Walking on the beach yesterday — a beach that is officially closed except for exercise — I started to let in the fact that our summer is essentially cancelled.  Each event was cancelled one at a time and there was a feeling of loss, or sometimes relief. But now there is the empty beach and the empty summer stretched out in front of me for miles.  My mind went to all kinds of conclusions.  First, that I should not feel sad because I have so much to be grateful for, second that we could stay a shorter time here and then go home and third that I was just feeling blah and would get over it.

I came back home and listened to a Tara Brach podcast I have been following Called Sheltering in Love.  She has been a teacher of the practice of RAIN meditation, a profound process of Recognizing a feeling, Allowing it, Intimately feeling it in the body, and then Nurturing it.  As I fought my feelings that arose when I felt the loss of our summer I had hoped for, we usually resist our feelings.  We do this by minimizing them to try and make them small or exaggerating them so they feel too big to handle or by trying to fix them. So naming them and allowing them is so different.  And then giving them space in our bodies and our own comfort — it is revolutionary.

Today, Tara varied a bit from RAIN.  She says she uses this mantra: “Come right up to the edge and then soften.”  She is referring to coming right up to the edge of a difficult feeling and then softening instead of stiffening and deflecting as we usually do.  She leads us in a ten minute guided meditation and I use the difficult feeling of grief.  As I move to the very edge or edginess of grief, I feel much more grounded in my body.  I remembered this: grief is grounding.  I had discovered this before. The heaviness of grief lends us weight and gives us the feeling of substance.

Towards the end of the meditation we are invited to bring in a nurturing presence of our own or a nurturing person or spiritual entity.  I remember grace, and a special moment from the past.  Over ten years ago a close friend was visiting me from Israel.  She speaks Hebrew as her native language and is very proficient in English but she is pausing to translate each thought from one language to the other.  I am no help to the communication. I speak no Hebrew.  We are outdoors in the woods one day and she tells me she thinks I am very graceful…

At that moment I am sure that something has been lost in translation.  I have never thought of myself as graceful. I was never good at any sport, always too tall, too fat, too uncoordinated.  Being too tall, I took to stooping over and have poor posture.  I cannot think of a graceful thing about myself.  So I ask my friend to explain.  And she says, ” the way you hold your grief is so graceful.”  I am a person who experienced a good amount of loss and grief, all before I was 16 years old.  For years I tried to get rid of it or heal it.  Once, on a mountaintop, I created a ritual with a small fire and burned all my losses written on little pieces of paper and watched them curl in the fire and go up in smoke.  There, I thought now this is all behind me.  But it wasn’t, and the loss and grief would come over me in unexpected moments.  When I watched a young girl shopping with her mother, or when I cooked and entertained, something my mother loved doing.  It was hard losing her when I had just turned 15.

I became impatient with myself.  I would rail against my mother (imagining she could still hear me) with an unquenchable question : “How could you leave me?”  I would summon her to give me a sign, any sign.  One day she did answer me.  She said that her death had nothing to do with me.  It was her own life’s trajectory.  It settled the question but did not bring me much comfort.  Her words were matter of fact, like a reading of spiritual law — not warm or particularly loving.

I finally realized that transforming the grief, getting over it, or whatever, was not my actual task.  My task was to learn a way to live, and love, with the grief, and let it inform me, ground me, even console me. I learned this gradually, and it seems that my friend noticed.

Today I find the pairing of grief and grace again.  As I allow in the nurturing presence of grace my whole body feels animated, as if grief now has a substance and an aliveness.  It is a profound experience— allowing our feelings.  Lingering with the experience I realize that going through the grief did not produce joy as I may know it but something new all together.  Perhaps this feeling is true joy.  I invite the people I work with to feel their feelings all the time.  I am glad I did it for myself.

 

What Is Calling YOU?

It now seems a bit ironic that my last post, at the end of January, was about finding our true pace in what can be such a frantic world.  What I suggested as a task worthy of some thought and consideration has now been imposed on us as we are forced to slow down.  Moving fast through the world with a doingness consciousness can become an addiction.  Most of us have addictive behaviors, but are not addicts.  In fact our addictive behaviors have often served us well to help us cope with and avoid very difficult feeling states or painful situations.  As the world has come to an unprecedented screeching halt, this can be the deepest and most meaningful of times — if we chose to take on the challenge.

We can inherit our addictions, and the one I inherited from my mother looks a lot like OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder).  My mother, whose name was Bernice, was nicknamed Baboo Bee (after the kitchen cleanser popular in the 50’s).  She scrubbed and cleaned everything continuously, including me.  This was particularly frustrating for her and wounding for me because I never stayed clean!  I was a constant project for her and I felt like I was a constant disappointment.  I had a cousin who always seemed to stay ‘put together’.  But not me.  One minute after brushing my hair it would recoil and fly out in a million directions.  ‘Stay on all day’ lipstick stayed on me for about two minutes, and still does.

In the past week I have been holding space for a lot of people who feel fearful and ungrounded.  In between my sessions I have been going out to the garden and somewhat maniacally digging up weeds.  My OCD has resurfaced with a surprising momentum and force.  Not consciously, but somewhere below the surface I am sure I believe that if the garden is weed free, then I am safe.  That I have done my bit to help the situation our world is in.  That each weed represents a deadly germ and as I dig this one weed, getting the full root ball underneath it, I am making the world a better place.

It has helped me feel more grounded, being outdoors, my hands in the soil.  But of course I know this strategy is just my way, just as it was my mother’s way, of dealing with stress and disorder inside and around me.  It is an illusion of control, and although it is fruitless, it also helps in a small way.  So here is one meaningful thing we can notice as we slow down.  Watch for little addictions that are getting stirred up.  Poke a little deeper for the real roots or deeper feelings underneath. This can help us get closer to ourselves — our true nature.   Now I can look at my behavior with some humor and lots of awareness and compassion. I can begin to turn my attention to ordering my real inner garden, my inner home.

And as I contemplate this I turn to Tara Brach and her new book, Radical Compassion.  On page 130 I find the heading; YOUR STAR IS CALLING YOU.  And although her book was published in December, before the world as we have known it ended, she seems to be talking to each one of us now.

She says, “Awakening from the trance of wanting is a spiritual path.”  And clearly many of our wants are stymied right now.  For some of us, what we truly need, like money, employment, food and shelter, is being challenged.  As one-by-one more and more things are getting cancelled, I notice an interesting phenomenon — some things that cancel are really disappointing and other things that cancel give me a sense of relief.  This makes me wonder how much of my life I actually want to be living?   In the trance of ‘wanting’, have I lost my way?

Next in her book is a beautiful meditation what contains the question; “What is my deepest longing?” This quiet time in our lives allows us to step back from everything and ask these kinds of basic questions.  And some of us may be in too much fear to settle into them.  At the beginning of my sessions I have been inviting us to remember the most beautiful, serene and safe place we have ever been.  As we go back to this place in our minds eye, I illicit all the senses, how the air felt, the view or sights, the smells.  As we linger there a little longer (30 seconds) we both immediately calm down and our fear or threat feelings reduce.

So, what is my deepest longing? What captivates me?  As I make my way into and through the meditation she gives us prompts. Is it the longing to love fully or be loved, to know the truth, to be peaceful, helpful, to free of fear and suffering?

  • The longing to be helpful fits. I feel this deep in the center of my being.
  • I  also have an especially strong longing and need to know the truth.

Those answers came to me. What is calling you?

Tara Brach promises that when you know your deepest longing it gives you a felt sense of innocence, energy and flow.  I experienced this in my body.  She also promises a potential inner shift that can give us fresh resolution, openness and ease.  For me it makes my life take on new meaning.  It gives me a new sense of my true priorities.

When and if life gets back to some new ‘normal’ I will be making different choices about how I spend my time.  They will need to be in alignment with my deepest desires.

I hope that I will not need things to be cancelled to know they were not right for me in the first place.

Traveling at the speed of… me?

Dear Lord Prayer

Actually my boat is relatively small, even though I was told as a child that I should not be afraid of anything because my mother was afraid of everything.  I felt like an adult from the day I was born.  I honestly believed that some of us are born full grown.  We are the special ones, we know to keep our napkins in our laps, to use big words and how to shadow all the grown ups in our lives to be really helpful.  ‘Mother’s little helper’ was the grandest of praise!  Me along side my mother baking eight kinds of Christmas cookies—all to perfection—until my mother’s ‘back’ gave out and sent her to bed, never to recover. Instead, she would  die eighteen months later.  I never made the connection between her death and her perfectionism until  now.  How driven she was to always ‘look’ so good to the outside world, many times at my expense.  My father and I got used to staying clear of her right before a dinner party when she was entertaining.  A tantrum would ensue with slamming doors and fits of hysteria at one or the other of us. Her little helper was watching, and learning.

Stretching to be as perfect as possible glorified the OCD in our household and I adopted the idea that love equals perfection.  This left me too exhausted to actually be very present to my life or the people around me.

When a feeling of emptiness ensued, I was sure the cure was more perfection and more activity.  When I went to college I chose a major that would please my new step mother.  When my husband and I started a business together, I became the salesperson, never really asking myself, “Do I want to be a salesperson?”  Instead, I flew into the job head first and was renowned for being able to squeeze in the most customer presentations in one day or week.  When or if I had time to even eat on these days was uncertain, but I would make ‘my numbers’ and I thought this would bring me more love from my husband, and approval from the world.

Each of us, especially  those who experience trauma at a young age, find developmental coping strategies.  I have noticed these three tendencies.  These are uncomfortable yet familiar and all push us out of our window of tolerance.

Dan Siegel coined this term “Window of Tolerance”.  The concept suggests that we have an optimal arousal level when we are within the window of tolerance that allows for the ups and downs of emotions experienced by human beings. We may experience hurt, anxiety, pain, and anger that brings us close to the edges of the window of tolerance but generally we are able to utilize strategies to keep us within this window. Similarly we may feel exhausted, sad, or shut down, but we generally are able to shift out of this.

Below is a diagram demonstrating the ebb and flow of an optimally regulated nervous system.

“When we experience adversity through trauma and unmet attachment needs this can drastically disrupt our nervous system. Our senses are heightened and our experiences and reactions are typically intensified and strategies are less readily accessible to us.  Adverse experiences also shrink our window of tolerance meaning we have less capacity to ebb and flow and a greater tendency to become overwhelmed more quickly. Learning how to track and shift our affect can be a powerful tool for promoting regulation and integration throughout the brains, body, and mind”. (From Dan Siegel)

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There is the hyper, over-the-top strategy of dis-regulation which creates over-achievers like me.  These people push themselves beyond their limits so habitually that it feels normal.  There is a constant mantra like a drum beat that says, “you are not enough, you are not ok”.  These people feel that they must do more and more to somehow compensate for this terrible flaw in themselves.  All of these strategies carry deeply held, often unconscious beliefs like, ‘I will miss out on something so important if I don’t go into overdrive’, and, the worst, ‘you will leave me’.  As children we may have felt  we were not really wanted or our parents expected too much of us.  This became my ‘normal’, to always be ahead of  where I actually am.

The second tendency is a habitual hypo, under-energized response.  These people can struggle with depression and lack of interest or follow through in their lives.  They may have a similar mantra going on in their heads of not enough-ness but they have developed a different strategy.  They wanted to stay out of trouble, perhaps from a very critical parent by trying to stay below the radar, to literally disappear.  This would require shutting down their natural energy, holding their breath and making as little movement as possible.  They have decided, “if I stay really still and small, I will be safe.”

The third tendency swings from high to low.  These people burn the candle, so to speak, on both ends.  They go into a frenzy of activity one moment and then a full collapse in another moment.   They vacillate between full on and full off.

Each of these three different strategies needs different things to begin to reclaim their true windows of tolerance.  It is possible and it takes conscious work to override a lifetime of an energetic pattern.  For the hyper person who is always above and beyond their window of tolerance, they need to begin to feel their enough-ness in a regulated state.  They need to slow down, risk the terror that something bad will happen and notice all is well when they are comfortable and operating inside their window of tolerance, their true limitations and energy.  For the hypo person they need to move more and risk getting bigger in their lives.  And also notice that it is safe to do this.  Obviously the third type person needs to do both.

What does it mean to be ‘in’ your window of tolerance?  What does it feel like?  We have all had days where life felt relatively effortless and everything just seemed to flow.  This is what being in your own window of tolerance feels like.  It feels so good and natural.  Like the picture below, you are light on your feet and surrounded by all the colors and joy of life.  Or it can also feel like you are fully feeling your pain and loss and it is moving through you as if by magic as you allow it and stay close to yourself and your own needs.  When you stay connected to your actual energy system and honor it, your window of tolerance naturally expands.  So we cannot push or pull it open or closed but by staying within our own comfort zones we naturally grow and expand.  How perfect is that!

This requires us to face squarely our own limitations and the obstacles that life presents to us.  It no longer is dangerous to be big or small.  We can come into reality and it is safe.

Jon Kabat-Zinn gives us a glimpse of this feeling and encourages us to live more from a place of wholeness at the end of his body scan meditation: “…Feeling complete and whole as we are in touch with our essential completeness a realm in which our limitations are not confining a realm of oneness ,silence, stillness and peace.  Open to things just as they are in each moment and seeing that this attitude and stillness itself is healing and allowing the world to be as it is beyond our personal fears and concern beyond the tendencies of the mind to want things to be a certain way and seeing ourselves complete right now as we are.  Experiencing the fullness of our ability to love and care and experiencing being totally awake right now…”

Truly we all are rather small when it comes to meeting the suffering and adversity that life presents to us.  We can reach out to God for help and/or be Godlike and compassionate to our selves.

Are You A Good Person Who Was In A Bad Situation?

Lifelong feelings of shame and deficiency are typically found to accompany the distress states caused by early trauma.  Children cannot experience themselves as being a good person in a bad situation.  Failure of the holding environment (family) is experienced as failure of the self.  Later thoughts like, ‘there is something wrong with me’, or, ‘I am not worthy or bad’, are built upon early sensations in the body of ‘I feel bad’.  Simply understanding that your shame reflects the environmental failure you experienced rather than who you really are can help shift lifelong patterns of low self esteem, shame and a sense of worthlessness and help you see yourself in a new, more compassionate way.  Paraphrased from Healing Developmental Trauma with Laurence Heller, PHD

 

Have you experienced extreme highs when something good happens to you and extreme lows or deflation when facing something bad or a disappointment?  Do you feel like you are bouncing up and down, dependent on outside forces?  If things are going really well and you are making your goals, do you still have a nagging feeling that you are not enough?  Do you sense an emptiness that does not respond to how much you fill your life or even how happy you seem to be?  Even as your confidence grows, and your accomplishments pile up, do you notice you are afraid that failure could be lurking right around the next corner? Or do you feel that, no matter how successful you are, you are just fooling everyone—playing a charade of a confident, accomplished person; that you’re a fake?

If you can relate to any of these questions, then there may be something helpful for you here.

We are usually not conscious of breathing since it is an involuntary activity of the body. But when we slow down and breathe deliberately there is so much to observe about the breath. Each breath feels differently. One is shallow, one may be deep. There is a world of sensations that accompany each breath.  They usually live in the background of our lives. Our thoughts that speak to us, as words inside, also take on this “involuntary quality”, particularly our less conscious background thoughts. They just become like the air we breathe, and we do not hear them or pay any attention to the power they wield over our lives. Most of the time we are too busy to hear all this back-ground noise.  If we do learn to listen to these thoughts in the background what we will learn is this: there is an inner tyrant inside each of us. It began so early in our lives we may not have even been talking yet.  This is the one who drives us to be perfect and thus avoids the painful recriminations we suffered as children.  It is often not our own voice, but the critical or harsh voice or environment of our family or parents.  This is called introjection: the unconscious adoption of the ideas or attitudes of others.  We all introject the worst admonitions from our families so as to try and protect ourselves from having to endure them again.  “If I say it to myself, then I will never get caught doing [whatever] and have to endure this punishment again.”

The process of unearthing these strong demands and background thoughts does not make them go away, even though we begin to see how irrational, unrealistic and self-defeating they are.  Some part of us knows that you cannot ALWAYS be kind and please everyone, but that rational part does not win out, does not silence the voice of the tyrant.  Beyond the messages that demand perfection are also accompanying beliefs that are mostly unconscious but exert a strong influence on our thinking and actions. But as we follow this process below the surface, we will begin to have more control over this inner struggle and begin to find more inner connections to what is the real good inside of us that is not dictated by outside forces or our inner critic.

The more conscious we become of these buried parts of us, the better we know ourselves.  When the hidden parts become known they have much less power to influence our lives.

The Inner Critic

Since inner critical words are introjected (literally put in us by others), they are actually alien and don’t actually belong to us.  These early messages contradict our present sane beliefs about who we really are.  We can easily see the falseness of them at the intellectual level and replace them with more sane and accurate assessments, but our young belief system keeps us stuck in them. The part of us that knows better, our adult logical self, joined in the developmental process rather late.  The more primitive inner-child part of us already believes firmly in the messages that came from our parents, no matter how offensive or life-effacing they are such as:

    • Don’t show yourself to anyone.
    • Don’t think a man or a women will want you.
    • Don’t let anyone know what you are thinking.
    • Don’t let anyone get too close.
    • Don’t let anyone go too far away.
    • Don’t be enthusiastic about anything.
    • Don’t be quiet.
    • Don’t think you are important.
    • Don’t underestimate yourself.
    • Don’t be arrogant or proud.
    • Don’t be just pretty.
    • Don’t be just smart.
    • Don’t be assertive.
    • You are inadequate, ineffective, weak, failing, doomed – don’t be.

When these “dont’s” are internalized they can become rigid, self-defeating mind sets. These critical voices are so ingrained and insidious because they come from our family.  Our instinct is to trust our families, so it is frightening to contradict or challenge those early injunctive voices of authority.  Our discernment is not yet formed so these messages go unchallenged. (Paraphrased from Shadow Dance—Liberating the Power and Creativity of the Dark Side, by David Richo.)

Observation Skills

Here are some practical ways to get down into the material of our background thoughts.  Those inner voices that control our our inner life.

Observe Yourself.  You will probably be surprised at how many negative judgments you produce during a day.

Study how you react when something unpleasant happens. If you experience a break-up of a relationship, or get fired, or have a nasty falling out with a friend, what thoughts do you have about this?  If you feel bitter and resentful— “I just knew it. This is the way it always turns out. To hell with it!”—you can be sure there is belief at work.  An equally good indication is if you feel self-pity: “This always happens to me. I’m so tired of being disappointed!”  Study this in yourself. Try to get to the root of the negative feeling and define the belief as clearly as possible.

Look at your behavior patterns.  If, for example, you believe that relationships will never work out, you won’t try to give them your best.  You may avoid relationships altogether or be so guarded that they never have a chance to get very deep and eventually die away.  At the other extreme, you may get into a relationship and very soon begin to make yourself disagreeable and pick fights, resulting in the other person leaving you.  What do these behaviors indicate regarding your beliefs about intimate relationships or about yourself?  Are you passive and indifferent?  Impatient and rushed?  Study your day-to-day behavior to see what you can learn about your thoughts and beliefs.

Analyze your fantasies.  Most people cherish one or more fantasies, which they use repetitively to amuse, calm or console themselves.  What are yours?  Do you play scenes in your mind of winning someone’s undying love after undergoing much suffering?  Do you cherish a fantasy of yourself doing something heroic that will gain people’s respect once and for all?  Do you repeatedly play a scene of getting even with someone for hurting or betraying you?  These little stories are based on strong underlying beliefs and assumptions about how the world works. Explore these fantasies and work on putting into words the underlying beliefs that drive them.

Look at your family stories.  Most families have a standard set of seemingly fond stories that they reminisce about and share with new acquaintances: “Yes, Ruth was an ugly little baby, but we were sure glad to get her.”  “Our Jimmy has always been the wild one; he just drove his father and me crazy when he was little.”  “Andy and Liz could never get along—they were like oil and water.”  On one level these may be endearing anecdotes that serve to bond the family.  But they can also be potent indicators of underlying negative currents in the family and in your own personal history that may have been invisible to you when you were a child. What are your family’s favorite stories and statements about itself? How does this relate to you own beliefs about yourself?

Study the times when you feel a deep sense of shame.  It is natural to feel remorseful at times about your flaws and shortcomings.  It’s not unusual to get momentarily annoyed with yourself after doing something that was not conscious or appropriate.  However, if you find yourself going to a place of deep, paralyzing shame about something you’ve said or done, this almost always points toward a belief formed in very young childhood. This feeling of intrinsic badness becomes frozen as a belief that can keep influencing us as adults years later.

After reading carefully some of the examples and concepts above, spend some time listening inside yourself.  See if you catch any words you speak that you have not heard before, because they slip so far into the background of who you are and what it is like to be you.  What are some of the negative, critical, judgmental, and positive, supportive comments that you tell yourself? Spend some time on this and come up with some specific words.

What are images and visuals that accompany the words?  What is the fantasy that frequently plays in your head?

There is no amount of outer accomplishment or outer recognition that touches the critical inner voices.  As we begin to hear these voices out loud and let them be really known to us, we befriend a long, lost part of ourselves.  As we welcome these parts home and hear them clearly, it is like welcoming back an old friend after a long separation.

Shifting Identification and ownership

As we hear more clearly and consciously what we are speaking to ourselves, every minute of every day, we can begin to make choices.  Is this voice really mine or maybe it belongs to one or both of my parents?  We can imagine the tone of this voice and all it’s admonition  as a mass of energy — like the red energetic mass in the photo above.  As we locate and feel this actually energy in our bodies we can gather it up and literally return it where it belongs.  One client did this and both her parents (now deceased) said they were sorry (in her minds eye) something she had never heard  while they were alive.  It was a moment of healing.

We can also find an older and wiser part of ourselves and begin to challenge the validity of these voices.  We can emulate the kind voices of the ones who loved us the best as children.  We can literally say to ourselves, “Oh sweetheart, it is not really true that you are lazy, fat, stupid or [fill in the blank]”.

I sometimes say this out loud for emphasis—if no one is near.

A miracle begins to happen slowly. Our inside voice becomes kind and quiet. We begin to be good friends with ourselves.  We consciously shift our identification from the one who believes these voices and speaks them constantly and unconsciously, to the one who can hold with tenderness and understanding this misguided historic part of ourselves. Then real change begins to happen.

In this shift of identification, we can begin to shift our whole lives. We make the leap from experiencing the effect of our inner lives to being the cause.  Our inner perpetrator finally gets returned to where it belongs and also gets the attention and care it has been screaming for all our lives. Nothing we have done in our outside world has been able to hear this plea.