Feelings like anxiety, frustration, impatience or feeling the need to rescue other people, even pleasing others – getting into that “please others trap” when you put everybody’s problems before your own, and you’re the last on your list of priorities, can all be learned beliefs from early childhood.
And you know how you find that out? You look at your family of origin. We all love our parents by now, but maybe some people still really don’t love your parents and you’re wondering why? Because they’re generally good people. I mean, unless you’ve got some really crazy, seriously wounded parents.
But most of us have normal parents who did the best they could with the knowledge they had for us kids. So we have that push-pull with our parents and then we become parents and we realise they weren’t really so stupid after all.
Most people have a kind of normal dysfunctional childhood. Look back at your childhood. Were you one of those kids who had to parent your parents? Were you the parent in your family? Were you the rescuer in your family? Were you the one that was trying to fix all of the family dynamics? Was your mother out working all the time? Was your father out working all the time?
When I was growing up in the States, it was called being a
latchkey kid, if you were the child who came home to an empty house with no parental supervision.
Were you left to your own defences? I knew a person whose parents ran a pub. And at seven years old he was no longer allowed to be in the pub. So when he came home from school, he was just stuck in the back room. His parents were there in the front running the pub but they were busy working. So he would just watch TV all afternoon. When he was given his dinner, they left him to it so he grew up never eating vegetables because there was no adult to say ‘eat your vegetables!’
That’s one little thing but if you’re the one parenting your parents, and they’re dumping all their emotional issues on you as a young child, what kind of beliefs do you think you would have perceived from that?
What kind of picture are you building up about your parents? “Is what overwhelm feels like? I have to take care of my mother or my father because they can’t survive on their own. I have to be a responsible person. I have to work hard all the time to survive. I have to take care of my siblings, I have no one to protect me, the world isn’t safe….” So where is your childhood?
One of the foetal memories that we clear in my 12 week online class called From Fear Into Love is, “I know what it feels like to be a kid” because so many kids don’t get to have a childhood because too much responsibility was dumped on them when they were a kid.
If one of your parents was sick or an alcoholic, or depressed, it creates different dynamics. Did you witness your parents constantly fighting with each other or were they always stressed about money? Did one parent abuse the other? Were you hit as a kid? Was there not enough food on the table?
Or maybe you came from a really wealthy family and you were travelling all over, except that your your parents had a certain way that you needed to behave, so there was a public mask and a private mask… Was the public face congruent with the actual private face? Did your parents expect you to fulfill their dreams?
You see, I’m getting you to look back to your early childhood years, because now when we’re getting triggered about whatever it is, that uncomfortable feeling that you get when someone is saying or not saying something or doing or not doing something, that’s really not what is the problem.
The issue and why you’re getting triggered is because of how it makes you feel; not seen, not heard, betrayed, guilty, ashamed…. you pick!
But go back to the first time you felt that way. You might only track back to your early 20’s, so then go through that scene. Remember what happened and how you felt. It might bring up another similar kind of feeling, maybe something a little deeper. So ask yourself when was the first time I felt that way, and then you take it back even further and further.
Get down to your family origins so that you can discover what kind of limiting beliefs you modelled from your parents and took on as your own with no rationale because you were too little. You didn’t have the bigger picture to understand all of your parents behaviour and choices.
And then you kept repeating those limiting beliefs, the behaviour, the negative thought patterns, because that’s all we knew, we had nothing to compare it to. So what story have you been telling yourself your whole life that maybe isn’t serving you anymore?
This is the type of deep work that we do in From Fear Into Love and my students shift radically. It helps you understand why you tick the way you do; why you behave the way you do; why you are defensive, angry, shameful, guilty, a victim, or why you’re sad all the time.
Look back to your family of origin, not the one that you’re in now, married with kids, but look at who your parents were, and what was their story? Because understanding your parents origins and upbringing and woundings can really help you understand not just them, but yourself.
We have entirely different generations of people here. My parents grew up in the Depression, in the states. You can imagine what kind of hardships they had and what kind of limiting beliefs they were taking on for themselves that, of course, they passed down to my sister and me because that’s what they knew.
So then we got to model their stuff. But we don’t need to keep all of this stuff that isn’t helping us. We have a choice to change. We want to know who we are, so that we can change and get rid of all the stuff that we’re carrying around that isn’t really ours!
It’s fun to realise our truth. Yes, it can be emotionally painful to revisit the past but it’s such a gift to understand yourself.
To heal and clear is the best gift you can have in the world.
And when you do that, and all of your energy is flowing properly, it’s amazing to see all the opportunities that come to you that you can’t even imagine from the point of perspective that you currently have now.
So isn’t it time to change? Isn’t it time to find out truly who you are in your soul? In your heart of hearts, in your brain? Check out your parents to help you investigate you.
