Our personal familial indoctrination and dynamics will be quite different from person to person, family to family. Some will grow up in very nurturing, affirming and uncomplicated households. Many others were raised in unhealthy, traumatic environments by people who may have had emotional, mental, physical or even spiritual challenges. Both home environments offer versions of love – – whether healthy or toxic – – that provided the life giving breast milk willingly accepted by the innocents who were not able to differentiate or judge what they are being served or taught. Yet, all children are programmed from birth to cling and love the humans who assume the role as life givers, protectors and parental figures in their upbringing. It is wired in their DNA for survival until one day the innocents gain some clarity and discernment, through observation or experience, that everything is not always quite right.
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This brief introduction sets the stage for discussing parental boundary enmeshment some of which is unhealthy for the development of children. It is very traumatic for any person to wake up one day and realize that your care giver(s) were imperfect in what they taught and how they treated you. In no way should this necessarily negate the love one has for them or gratitude but we are still faced with an important decision about what one chooses to remember, accept and embrace in the future.
Check out my definition of “enmeshment” in words matter.
One of the most difficult steps to personal healing is to take a hard look at your childhood. As adults, many of our first personal traumas happened when we were young. Some experiences may have been directed at US personally or indirectly creating a trauma bond triggering a fight to flight response in our brain’s amygdala. In order to process our actions and label the experiences, we assigned meanings to these traumas which ultimately influenced our development and the potential for “enmeshment” in relationships.
My childhood was fraught with many such events that made me fearful and accelerated my maturation process. I was “adultified” beginning at five years old because of the responsibilities placed upon me emotionally when I was even too young to understand or reject the role. This involved me caring and worrying about adult issues and a sibling at the expense of my own capabilities. Maybe my nerdy, sometimes withdrawn personality would have been quite different if I had been allowed to just be a child. Craving authentic love from care givers with mental and emotional disorders left me with a deep void and feeling of unworthiness, guilt for not being able to protect them and sadness.
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Perhaps this post will resonate for some of you to take a step back in time to explore those events of the past. Your reason for doing so is not to blame people who were hurt or damaged themselves but to understand how you processed those old events/wounds and to see if they still impact you today. The most important step you will ever take is to strip away, layer by layer, the stories of your life, grabbing the inner child to show how she got some things wrong about herself, the people in her life and the actions that scarred her soul. I made peace with my inner child during these experiences with my adult self guiding me to trUthfully face every fear and regret one by one. Trust me … YOU will gain so much more respect for the small you who demonstrated such courage and strength of character during those sometimes difficult moments.
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Your inner child is calling YOU home.
So today I challenge you to embark upon a journey of self discovery to not blame anyone but simply understand YOU – – not a relationship partner, parent, sibling or friend etc. You might just find out some things about yourself or your family that requires healing. This realization will often prompt one to forgive, CHANGE and reprogram your perceptions of past traumatic events. Isn’t this really why we are all here anyway – – to learn and evolve as humans divinely created and guided? It’s time to come on back home to the past but this time in the spirit of self/SELF reconciliation (mind, body and spirit).
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for speaking trUth and being an outstanding teacher.
3ACTunveiled 