It’s important to prepare yourself for the road ahead. The change process that's ahead. Growth and change start with gaining knowledge. After all, we can't fix something if we don't know what it is, how it works, all the parts involved, what's currently not working, and what optional functioning looks like.
Let's start building your knowledge base and framework to explore your present experiences, review past experiences, discover patterns and unmet emotional needs, and begin to see the healing path forward. In other words, get to know: how the self works, who you are, and how you got to be that way. Then, you’ll truly be in the driver’s seat of your life and able to make choices about who you are, how you’ll interact with others, and how you want them to treat you.
Bad relationships? Keep dating/marrying/befriending the same wrong-type-of person over and over? It won't change unless we get to the core of what's causing it. Communication skills, dating techniques, and self-esteem exercises treat the symptoms, the effects – not the cause.
Consider this: if I take a painkiller and knock out the pain (symptom) I feel, it will just come back when the meds wear off. I haven't addressed the cause of the issue. Similarly, if I need emotional comfort and reassurance and use food for that, no diet will help in the long term. It fails to touch on the core cause leading to overeating.
Here’s the core: see yourself as two, not one. We have an Adult Self and a Child Self – an Inner Child. Imagine your Child Self as a 7-year-old version of you. When was the last time you looked at a picture of yourself at that age? Try it and see what feelings and memories come to mind.
Knowing your Life Patterns will help you see and track the experiences that child part had growing up:
• how it formed its sense of self;
• what unmet emotional needs it has;
• how it impacted your relationships; and
• how it continues to feel those feelings and have those needs right here and now.
It's been with us all this time and never left. The relationship struggles we experience are part of the Inner Child trying to meet its needs. For example, if a 7-year-old us were never good enough, they would still doubt it was good. It will push us into relationships in which we feel inadequate. It will push us into sabotaging relationships so that we experience not feeling good enough – which is familiar. It will push us to misinterpret everything occurring in life as proof I'm no good.
For things around us to change, we have to change. The cause of our struggles inside us has to change. The Inner Child has to get his needs met. So, for example, instead of demanding validation from our partner, we stop. We instead begin to turn inside and realize it's our Child Self begging us to give him the validation he’s been craving for decades, that parents didn't provide and never will. And we talk to that part of ourselves, get to know it, hear and feel it, and give to it, forming a relationship with it.
It's up to us. If we don't help her feel she’s good enough, loved, valid, and accepted...who will? Let’s get to work.
#lifepatterns #innerchild #innerchildhealing #innerchildwork #emotionaltriggers #emotionalvalidation
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