It breaks my heart when I hear a client say, “I’m broken” or “I think there’s something wrong with me”. It happens far too often.

I remember feeling the same way. The first big wave of deeper emotional work I did was back in my late 20s. Some of the patterns in my relationships became so obviously painful, I just couldn’t muscle through and pretend everything was okay anymore.

I remember saying just what I hear from my clients. “I think I’m broken. I’m too wounded.” I felt like I was dirty. (Thank you, shame). My inner critic grabbed onto the work I was doing with healers and teachers and used it against me when I didn’t change as fast as I thought I should.

It took awhile for a core truth to sink in with me, even though it was spoken to me many times. I say it to you now. See how it feels to read this —

There is nothing wrong with you. There never was.

You suffer, and that suffering needs to be met skillfully. But, the suffering is not a sign that you are broken, it’s a sign that you’ve forgotten who and what you are. You can remember that, and hold the suffering parts of you tenderly. Learning to do that is healing.

When things happen to us as children that give us the message that we don’t matter, or that we’re unworthy, we believe it. We’re children! We don’t have the capacity to rationalize someone else’s behavior and know that they didn’t have the skills to treat us, a child, with gentleness.

You may have witnessed a parent under stress, dealing with a divorce from or death of the other parent, and in their grief they shut down and couldn’t connect with and support you the way you really needed.

You may have a parent who was addicted to substances. Who could not control their emotions and was violent. Who was physically and/or sexually abusive. All of these occurrences are far too common.

As a child, you can’t quite conceive that there’s nothing you could have done to stop the behavior. You take in the messages as beliefs about yourself, that there must be something wrong with you, or they wouldn’t have treated you that way, or you should have stopped them or gotten away somehow.

That belief shows up in different ways as adults. It may cause you to find relationships that feel familiar, repeating the kind of treatment you received as a child in subtle, or not so subtle ways. It can look like not knowing how to receive love. It can even show up as dis-ease in the body — research is bearing this truth out. People who have experienced certain kinds of traumatic events in childhood are at higher risk for many different types of illnesses.

Things can start to change when you can meet your suffering in a different way. You can begin to have a relationship with your feelings and beliefs, instead of just believing they’re true, and that they are who you are. The memory of what happened, whether that looks like fear, or anger, or a frozen feeling of depression, begins to be something you can even feel curious about, and actually tend to, the way you needed to be tended to as a child. You can build on that.

There’s a moment when someone breaks out of the trance, from “this is happening to me”, to “this is a feeling that I can tend to” that is magical. So tender. Painful, yes, the pain doesn’t just disappear. But, I’ve seen over and over, when that step is possible, there’s more space for the pain. You go from “my whole world is pain, and I’m overwhelmed” to “there is pain in my world, and I can start to hold the pain, and know that it is not the whole world”.

Then, you can actually have the understanding that having an experience of pain is not the same as being broken. There’s an intrinsic you that is whole and free. That is what can tend to your hurt self.

And, you don’t have to do this work alone. Whether it’s me, or another trusted counselor or healer, you deserve support. We all do. Any idea different than that is simply a belief you were taught sometime long ago. It’s time to learn something new. You can learn something new.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 4th, 2021 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Grief, Life on Life's Terms, Living with Health Challenges, Spiritual Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.