Top 2 Insights About Childhood Trauma You Need To Know.
And how you can fully heal from the past.
You know those days where everything seems shitty, everyone annoys you, and you secretly feel like running to the top of a mountain and screaming until you lose your voice?
I was having one of those days.
I had been going through months of intense healing from past trauma: deep, repressed wounds that included childhood sexual abuse, among other things.
But I was honestly exhausted. I was tired of sitting in the pain that was surfacing in layers, every single day. On some days it felt like I had healed everything, finally reaching the bottom of my subconscious pit.
I would feel lighter and even a sense of peace and joy. I could giggle at the butterflies and watch the birds soar overhead as I hiked in the mountains.
And then I would crash. Another layer of pain would surface, sometimes crushing my chest with so much pressure.
People often think that healing looks like this:
But in all honesty, if this were what healing looked like, we’d all be doing it, instead of intensely repressing our traumas and pain.
More often than not, this is what real healing looks like:
At times you feel buried and can’t breathe, holding on to the slightest hope that tomorrow will be better.
So as the weeks went by, my mind decided to take over and redirect my attention elsewhere. The psyche is always looking for ways to escape pain. So I started working non-stop, burying my face in my computer screen.
I had a new website to launch, a new business that was blossoming, clients to coach, videos to shoot. And I had the dream of a healing center in Portugal to start materializing. There was just so much to do.
But as I buried myself in my work, my heart and soul were very aware of what the mind was doing and they decided to step in. So one day, as I was busy producing one of my weekly videos, my computer crashed.
Yep, the computer that produces my videos, has video sessions with coaching clients, and helps me create all the content for my upcoming website.
My work computer died on me. Just like that.
The first thought that came up was “Holy shit, this can’t possibly be happening”, followed by a slight whimpering: “I just can’t catch a break.”
Not knowing whether I should cry or laugh hysterically, I just sat there for a little while, looking at my now defunct computer. Then I felt deep gratitude for that piece of equipment that has worked so hard for me in these past years.
I smiled. I knew why my computer died on that specific day.
Life was helping me heal, as it does for all of us.
We are so loved, guided, and cherished. And as we awaken, as we begin to question our lives and surrender to the power of the Universe, we notice just how guided we are. Sometimes to the point where you feel like your free will doesn’t exist anymore.
My computer died on that day because I was resisting the surfacing of more pain. My mind had decided that enough was enough. But you see, it’s not the mind or ego that should make those decisions for you.
Your heart will tell you when it’s time: you’ll just feel it deep in your chest.
I recognized this truth and decided to finally hear what life was asking of me. So I sat down in meditation, pretty reluctantly at first. My mind was now busy thinking about how on earth I would continue working without a computer.
But I took a deep breath, put on my earphones, and listened to a deep meditation track. Slowly, my body began to relax and a familiar sensation took over.
I could feel that one of my Spirit guides wanted to talk to me.
I started to feel her energy and then saw her in my mind’s eye. Tall, beautiful, older lady. She’s never given me a name so I call her “Ma” because of her strong motherly energy.
She sat next to me and smiled:
“Can you learn to see yourself as we see you?”
I sat with that question for a few seconds and just as I was about to telepathically ask “how do you see me?” I felt a wave of love wash over me.
Unconditional love. That love that we sometimes think only Spirit can give, when in truth, we have the same capacity to love like this too.
Because we are Spirit, God, the Universe, whatever you want to call it.
As the wave of love washed over me, all the emotions, images, and memories that I had actively been resisting came up.
I understood so much about myself and my past. And I came to understand how some things can be our salvation in one phase of our lives, only to become our poison in another.
Here are some of the insights I received during that meditation.
Insight 1:
Psychological dissociation is a survival mechanism, especially for highly sensitive children.
I saw myself as a young child, standing alone and sad. I was 4 years old and felt overwhelmed by an emotion that I didn’t intellectually understand yet: shame.
I was being molested by a family member and my little mind was so confused and hurt.
For children who are highly sensitive or “empaths”, these intense emotional states are very traumatic, especially if they occur before the ego has started to develop (around the age of 5 or 6).
These children tend to be very emotionally intelligent and can sense energy on a very deep level. Yet, their minds simply are not mature enough to explain or understand what it is they’re feeling.
As hard as it may be to imagine, I strongly believe that it’s not the physical acts of abuse (sexual or otherwise) that often cause the lasting trauma but rather, the deep and overwhelming emotional charge that comes with these acts.
When a highly sensitive child feels such painful emotions like shame, without being able to mentally understand them, their immature psyche begins to think:
“I must be doing something wrong”
or
“There’s something wrong with me.”
At that moment, the psyche “splits” or dissociates into the Real Self and the “Perfect Self” or alter ego. From then on, the alter ego (some call it the inner critic) takes over , leaving the real self as a “servant” or passenger in the car that it now drives.
These children then grow up and often become driven, self-critical, self-loathing adults. Their self-esteem is low and they don’t love or respect themselves. Their alter ego is constantly repeating the core thought that led to the dissociation in the first place:
“There’s something wrong with me.”
This was how I lived my life for over 30 years.
But here’s the thing:
At the moment of trauma, this split of consciousness is absolutely necessary.
It’s protective. Without this “escape”, the child’s psyche would likely not survive.
I could feel this to be true as memories from my childhood flashed in my mind. The alter ego or inner critic that I had always thought of as a pest in my life (I called it the “little devil on my shoulder” in my first book) was actually a savior.
Suddenly, I felt deep gratitude and acceptance of a part of me that for years, I had thought was my biggest “problem”.
As I felt love and gratitude, I also felt the alter ego integrate back into my energy system. My consciousness united. I felt whole — truly, deeply whole — for the first time in my entire life.
Insight 2:
The alter ego’s distorted image leads to codependency.
When the alter ego takes over, it keeps its power by relying on one key emotion: fear.
At this point, as the traumatized child grows and their egos develop, the original wounding thought “there’s something wrong with me” begins to get layered by other fear-based thoughts.
Fear of abandonment, of being rejected, of not being good enough, of betrayal, of loss. These are some of the fears that begin to take hold, influencing everything the now teenager or adult does.
And these intense fears lead to another painful trait that becomes toxic within relationships: codependency.
Codependency simple means “a need to be needed”. I remember this feeling so very well because it was present in all of my relationships. The little voice in my head was constantly saying I wasn’t good enough and that people always left me.
So I developed this habit of making myself useful to others.
My psyche reasoned that as long as I was useful, people wouldn’t leave, betray, or mistreat me. And that’s how I ended up losing myself within relationships.
I became the “savior” in my relationships: constantly rescuing and holding my partners up, sometimes until I no longer even knew who I was anymore.
To me, love meant being needed. I treated love as if it were a commodity.
There are a lot of self-help courses and videos on copendency but in my opinion, the majority of them just scratch the surface of what is needed to truly heal this toxic personality trait.
You can’t heal codependency until you sit with the original core thought that gave birth to the consciousness split in the first place:
“There’s something wrong with me.”
And that leads me back to my Spirit guide’s initial question:
“Can you learn to see yourself as we see you?”
I cried and then smiled. “Yes, I can. I will.”
There was never anything wrong with that gentle, joyful, sensitive, beautiful child that endured so much. There was never anything wrong with me.
I am, and always have been, loved. I am Love.
You are too. No matter what happened to you that caused a split in your psyche, never forget this:
You are so loved, so cherished, so guided.
Spirit wants to help you heal, even if they have to break your laptop to make you listen.
That’s love, isn’t it?
As much as your alter ego helped you survive some serious shit in your childhood, it’s not necessary anymore. In fact, if you keep it, it’ll poison your life and relationships.
Love it, bring it close to you, and then…integrate it. Let the Real You take the lead now.
After that beautiful and powerful meditation, I felt so much better. So am I fully healed now? Who knows. I’ve stopped wanting to “get there”, wherever “there” is. I just keep living this life, one day at a time, some days better than others. One foot in front of the other.
And no matter what happens to me, I now know and feel how lovable I truly am. I really am a remarkable creature of God.
And so are you.
Now, off I go to buy a new laptop. There’s just so much I still want to do in life. But I promised Spirit not to get so carried away that I lose sight of how I feel.
Thanks Spirit, for the loving nudge. ;)
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