The nightmares you won’t face.
What are you running from? You might tell me there’s nothing, but I’m going to guess that there is. You might not even be aware of it, but somewhere deep in the dark corners of your mind, I’m confident that there is a thought, a fear, or a feeling that you struggle to experience. So instead of working through it, you shy away from it.
And it silently controls your life.
We all have some kind of trauma in our past. People think that it has to be something terrible, or life threateningly bad to ‘qualify’ as a trauma, but that’s not how it works.
For me, the definition of trauma is “any experience that creates a negative emotional state that you can’t process, and that generates a maladaptive response cycle in the future”. Do you have something like this – I’m sure you do.
Because we’ve lived too long with the idea that we just have to “get over it”.
But no one tells us how. People just bury their feelings deep inside, and move forward, unaware of the ways that their mind will find to avoid revisiting the wound that has not healed over.
Sometimes it can show up as anxiety, or depression, or an obsessive compulsion. Often, these traumas occur so early in our pre-verbal lives that we struggle to even remember the events that triggered the traumas, yet we live with the emotional scars long into our adult years.
Until we find a way to access, process and release the pain that occurred so many years ago.
And that’s so much harder than it sounds, because the pain is usually buried so deep that you can’t even see it, and when you get near it, the feelings of fear and loathing can overwhelm you into running anywhere but towards that which hurts you.
In my work as a coach, I often take people into those dark corners, uncovering the feelings that scare them to their core. I never cease to be amazed at how resistant the human mind can be in its attempts to avoid the darkness, or the lightness of being they find when they have accessed, processed and released the pain that has held them for so long.
It’s never easy, but it is so worth it.
Because once you see how your defensive emotional routines have littered your past with destruction, you have the opportunity to change who you are going forwards.
Small differences in the way that you react, the decisions that you make and the chances that you take pay out in incredible new emotions of joy, peace, happiness, fulfillment and purpose. The pain of living afraid is transformed into the excitement of living in a world of passionate possibility.
It all starts with a desire to change, and a decision to grow.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings