Permission to Heal
In therapy this week we talked a lot about sadness (as you can see we are diving straight in here 🙃).
We talked about how, despite all of the beauty in my life, I can often feel an underlying sadness, a heaviness, that I can't always pinpoint or explain.
When she asked me how long I had felt this, I told her I couldn't ever remember not feeling it. It felt like it had been there my entire life.
She had me place my hand where I felt the heaviness and she asked me if there was any memories associated with this feeling. I paused, stopped talking, closed my eyes and just sat with the feeling and eventually a memory came forth (which doesn't always happen).
I was alone on a playground - I must have been around 4 years old - and I remember wandering around by myself, unsure of where to go or who to play with. Someone had bullied me (something I experienced often at this school) and I felt sad, lonely, misunderstood and out of place.
When I located that memory, the tears started to pour out of me because I realized this was the feeling I currently carry around with me so much of the time; this core wound of feeling deeply misunderstood, sad and in some ways very lonely.
Is this my truth? No, not at all. But as a 4 year old, this was a devastating moment and because I didn't receive the care that I needed at the time, it embedded in my nervous system and became a truth, a filter in which I saw myself and my life.
That's how trauma works. Whether it's a real threat or a perceived one (our brain doesn't always know the difference), our nervous system experiences a disruption and if we don't appropriately process and release this, it holds it there in place like a photograph stuck in time.
But oh how beautiful healing and evolution can be, no? How we can be the loving presence we needed in those moments? How we can say the words that could be the balm for the ache in our soul? How we can acknowledge the pain but also release it?
And that is just what we did in the session. I asked my 4 year old self what she needed and then I gave that to her. I imagined myself sitting down and hugging her little body and telling her the words that she desperately needed to hear - that she was safe, that she was loved, that she was special.
When I opened my eyes, my face was completely covered in tears but the heaviness in my chest had lifted and I could feel that something had shifted.
And that is my question for you : what pain (emotional and physical), beliefs and burdens are you carrying around with you that you believe are just "the way it is"? That this is just "who you are"?
Where have you consciously or unconsciously denied yourself permission to heal and blocked your own blessings? The blessings that open us up to new and sometimes completely unimaginable ways of being and living our lives?
I'd love to hear what this opens up for you and if you need some extra support, I created a video to help you give yourself some of that permission here.
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