What I’ve become aware of is that when we have an experience (usually in childhood- pre 7 and usually involving an adult) that we shut down from, and by that, I mean shying away from what we really want to say or do (suppressing emotion) in the moment to maintain human connection, we develop a part of us to protect us in that moment. That part carries the responsibility of giving up on our authentic drive to express ourselves.
So, from then on, we find ourselves, within certain situations, and with certain “types” of people sitting back waiting on others to act, so we can re-act. We can stand on the back foot just anticipating, waiting on the next encounter to confirm our experience of stepping away from our essence. We create a level of hypervigilance to support the suppression of self and start to believe that if I step into my truth, I will lose my attachments to others and won’t be loved. So, we learn early in life, to be our true self is to threaten our relationships, we then run the risk of believing we are unable to respond.
By respond I mean having the ability to quickly assess all available information, our emotional connection, and make generalised guesses based on previous experience before beginning to move forward, all of this is completed within a few seconds. However, if we feel unable to respond we search within our own skin to find ourselves response able, this is where things can become a little unclear for us (leading to confusion) the part carrying the responsibility for giving up on authenticity goes “Hey, I’m responsible for holding this emotion down, I don’t want any more responsibility”.
We then try to push the blame/shame/response-ability onto others. And almost all the time we don’t even realise we are doing it. We disempower ourselves through decisions made in childhood that if we simply revisit and make sense of, while connecting the mind, body, and self we can completely change our path in life, VERY QUICKLY.
Think about it, we change our mind about stuff all the time, in our early to mid-20’s our brain has developed where we can analyse and strategise. We didn’t have that ability as a child so going back to childhood experiences with the wisdom and understanding we have now can have a tremendous impact on our ability to grow.
So you see once we embrace the power of flexibility and variety and allow ourselves to be vulnerable with courage and curiosity, we can start to hold our emotions without suppressing them, we can hold our truth and show the world who we are without fear of rejection or abandonment, we can step into the role of an adult and take responsibility for our behaviours and contributions.
This in turn gives us freedom, freedom to be yourself with authentic essence and gusto.
My advice to you, for what it’s worth: be you, be only you and love every second.