The Dangers of Running on Autopilot
Even though I have been on my healing journey for years and have come a long way, I can still fall into old patterns of resistance, old habits that reflect who I was, not who I am now. Even after all this time, I sometimes need gentle reminders that I have taken up these old habits. Sometimes that gentle reminder comes from someone else, sometimes it comes from my compassionate adult self. The thing that helps me stay compassionate and not immediately turn to shaming and judging myself is my awareness of automatic patterns and habits, also known as running on “autopilot,” and I hope that by sharing this information with you, it can help you move forward with compassion for yourself, once you understand that it isn’t always your fault when you resist change and revert to old habits. Because until we become aware of our automatic patterns and habits, change is very difficult, sometimes impossible.
Most of our day to day behaviors and actions are done on an automatic...
Healing is a Lifelong Journey
Healing after years of child abuse and rape takes a long time. I am still a work in progress and each time I find another layer, I welcome it because it is the only way I can work through it to let it go.
Part of my healing journey now is to challenge myself as a human being. After years spent managing internal pain and uncertainty, in survival mode I am on a mission to become the best version of myself. Not perfect, but experience all that life has to offer.
This past weekend, I attended a retreat in Sedona with like minded people. I have been blessed to find a group of entrepreneurs that are both looking to build a successful business and do it with integrity and in alignment with their highest and best good. I have been a part of this group for almost a year now. Just like I recommend to my clients that they find a group or join one of the groups that I provide, I also need a group of peers for encouragement and support and, most importantly, to celebrate our strengths and...
How to Stop Resisting Healthy Change
Why do we resist healthy change? Why does resistance rear its stubborn head every time we decide to do something good for ourselves? It makes no sense!
Or does it?
The purpose of resistance is to protect you. It is a biological occurrence, it happens without your say once you have experienced trauma because it is your brain’s job to keep you safe. That’s one of its many skills. And the brains attempt to keep you safe involves minimizing change, because change comes with mystery, risk, and uncertainty. After a traumatic event, the brain comes up with a way to survive it. It comes up with an answer to why it happened. It comes up with a way to deal with the pain, which is usually by burying it when one is too young to deal with the complexity of it. The brain then makes you hyper aware of future situations that are similar to the previous one, to do anything to prevent it from happening again. And once that trauma, especially recurring trauma, has occurred, your...
Trauma Makes Us Believe Change Is Impossible. It Isn't.
The biggest reason why we don't change and why we find ourselves stuck is because we simply don't know how to change. For so many years, I thought there was something wrong with me and that everyone else was moving along in their lives, reaching their goals and sorting out their challenges, and that I was the one who was missing something to be able to do that. This was the logic of my trauma brain, my overwhelmed, fight/flight exhausted mind and body thinking and collapsing into thinking there is no hope and certainly not for me.
I got tired of reading books about how broken I was, the terrible impact of child abuse and trauma. The broken relationships, the addiction, lack of self worth, the mental health challenges, the sick bodies that we are left with after our coping strategies fail because our body simply cannot continue with decades worth of toxic stress lodged into our nervous systems, our hearts, and beliefs. I was learning about all the negative impacts but still...
How Survivors Can Safely Feel and Accept Negative Emotions
All survivors of child abuse and trauma are afraid to feel, accept, trust, and appreciate their uncomfortable or negative emotions. And there is a reason.
We fear and avoid these emotions because we never had a positive role model to teach us how to express sadness, grief, overwhelm, anger, pain, and anxiety in a healthy way. Instead, we got hurt when the adults in our life felt these challenging emotions. So we have no reason to believe that there is a safe to feel them.
However, developing the ability to feel, accept, trust, and appreciate all your emotions (the good, the bad, and the ugly) is a vital step on the healing journey. It’s impossible to heal if you skip over feeling the bad ones. You can't selectively numb feelings. When you numb the bad, you are numbing your ability to feel the good too.
So where do you start?
Feeling begins with awareness. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But it's not for survivors. The human brain is programmed to avoid pain at all costs....
Living Out of Your Truth
The trauma from child abuse disconnects us from the truth we feel in our hearts. The healing journey is about finding your way back to your truth. Being able to feel again is how you do that. It's one of the incredible blessings of the healing journey.
We spend a lot of time learning how to safely feel and release our negative emotions like fear, shame, pain, and loneliness. But there comes a time when we need to learn how to feel positive emotions, too. Why? Because these emotions are our truth.
What is your truth? It’s the same as mine:
- Love
- Kindness
- Peace
- Joy
- Compassion
- Goodness
- Patience
- Gratitude
Slowly work your way down this list and practice “feeling” each of these truths. Allow them to saturate your heart, soul, body, and spirit until they become a part of you.
Actually, these truths have always been a part of you. The trauma of child abuse simply disconnected you from them. When I began to feel these...