Whenever I’ve had uncomfortable or painful feelings, I’ve tried to find the
way out from them. In my teenage years, my way out was to suppress my feelings
and in my 20s the way out was being independent at university and traveling the
world. However, these were coping mechanisms that helped me feel less burdened
by myself. When I got into my 30s and settled down to raise a family, I couldn’t
suppress, deny or run away from my uncomfortable feelings anymore. They
surfaced more strongly and needed to be dealt with. Actually, it wasn’t until I
started seeing therapists, reading self-help books and attending 12 step programs
for co-dependency that I even learned to identify what my blockages were. Before
that, I only knew that I wasn’t feeling comfortable in my own skin and I wasn’t the
peaceful and joyful person I had read about others having achieved. Therefore, the
journey to heal finally became an inward journey. That was my real way out. If
you really want to be free, it comes through facing your shadows. That’s your
way out.
A key to this process is first being able to know what’s disturbing you. The
indicator of that is usually frustrations that have reoccurred time and time again
throughout your life. You’ve probably heard that others are a reflection of us. We
are attracted to people that will bring out that which hasn’t been healed in us.
Throughout most of my life, abandonment was an issue for me. This was
something I addressed in more detail in my 2 previous articles. I didn’t really
know the impact of having to face that abandonment until I married a man who
was emotionally unavailable for me. We tried various ways to mend this, but no
amount of counseling, expressing my feelings in “I” statements, or attempting to
have date nights, could make him nurture that pain for me.
Once I identified that I felt abandoned, I was able to then take the next step. I wrote
out all the circumstances in my life I could remember that created that feeling. There is
something powerful about writing things down as opposed to just typing or
mentally reflecting on them. Over the years, I have heard about the power of
writing as a healing tool. It releases emotions stored in our subconscious brain and
frees up the neuron channels operating in our conscious reality. Then when we
share it with a trusted person who can listen in a space of trust and acceptance, we
can feel a shift happen. I also spent time in meditation to really feel the
abandonment and bring love and acceptance to it. This isn’t a short-term process,
sorry to say, but each time I was present with this abandonment energy and gave it
space, it dissipated another layer. I came to see emotions as energy trapped in our
bodies, and this energy then creates stories with a lot of momentum played out in
our mind. Taking the time to distance ourselves from the story and observe the
energy of the emotion, gives us the way out of the pain and discomfort.
Judgementalism is another attribute I was plagued with in my life. I thought
that if I acted a certain way and followed good values, I wouldn’t be judged. But I
was certainly judging myself, as well as others. When I was raising a family, I
tried to do things “right” so I wouldn’t be criticized. We had good healthy meals.
The house was clean. The kids got to their activities. I was good at my
educational jobs, and I played the role of the patient wife and loving mother.
However, at times, things would still fall apart and dramas would happen. What
was I doing wrong? After repeated cycles of this, I started to see that me judging
how good or bad things were around me was a huge burden. It is actually a
mechanism for us masking low sense esteem. When we are judgmental of others
and maintain a relationship with this attitude, we are using others to make
ourselves feel better. As I became more whole and accepting of myself,
judgmentalism’s grip on me lessened.
The biggest struggle of all for me has been with self-loathing. This was in
conjunction with traumas around abandonment I had as a young child. A big
experience in molding this self-loathing was when I was entering my teenage
years. My mother let one of her boyfriends come into our home to live for a
couple years. He was younger than my mother, into drinking and drugs and would
blow up at times and hit her. Then came the inappropriate sexual touches and the
exposing himself to me. After he came into my room in the middle of the night
and did something in my room, which I later found out was masturbation, I
remember feeling frozen in fear and hiding under my covers. I somehow managed
to tell my mother about it the next day. Fortunately, she had had enough and got
him out of the house. I internalized 2 years of such an unstable home life into
disgust toward myself. Most of my life, I thought the level of loathing I had was
unique to me, but when I started helping other women heal, I learned that it wasn’t
so uncommon. The hate other women held would play out in hurting themselves
through skin picking or cutting, hair pulling, eating issues, intense hate toward a
specific part of their body or allowing themselves to be objectified by their partners
for sexual gratification. This is all heavy-duty trauma that needs release. Various
kinds of affirmations and visualizations also support in lessening this grip of pain
held in our psyche.
If you haven’t been feeling comfortable with how things have been for you,
it is crucial to look at what’s disturbing your peace and sense of freedom. There
comes a time when the old ways of coping don’t work anymore. If you are ready
to do things differently to find your way out, I’ll be glad to help!
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