The Magnum Opus on Healing Childhood Trauma for Achieving Psychological Freedom
How to Free Yourself from Negative Subconscious Beliefs from events in the past.
My first memory of being alive has a terrifying and violent outcome. And was savagely delivered from the one I wanted love from the most.
Have you noticed the same problems reoccurring in your life?
Did you know this comes from the beliefs you hold?
But did you know where these beliefs come from?
Your bright and exciting future is to be found in the release of childhood traumas and the negative beliefs they formed.
Your inherent programming
You are operating on a program. This program is made up of a set of beliefs. These beliefs were acquired in the first few years of your life.
The experiences you had with your parents were the biggest influence on the establishment of these beliefs. Or, more importantly, your interpretation of these experiences.
While there are healthy beliefs that contribute to your well-being. Some beliefs are destructive.
This operating program can be likened to a computer’s software. The unhealthy beliefs act like a virus within the software. They need to be identified and removed.
As an adult, stimuli come in from the outside world. Your software processes the stimuli. And a behavior is spat out.
Beliefs continue to drive a similar type of behavior for similar types of stimuli.
For example, if your dad was a dominant male. Throughout your life, all stimuli from dominant males will produce a similar response based on the beliefs you picked up from your interpretation of your interactions with him when you were a child.
This process happens unconsciously in a split second. You appear to have little if any control over your responses.
Before you can remove something you need to be aware of it. Thus your starting point is to identify your beliefs.
Your beliefs are buried deep within yourself like a sunken treasure at the bottom of the sea.
“Give me the f*cking car keys now!” my dad screams at my mum late one night.
I was 3 years old and woken up by yelling and screaming.
I run down the hallway into the lounge room from my bedroom. Without any thought, I confidently stood between my mum and dad.
My one thought was to protect my mum from this vicious attack.
My dad was a giant of a man, standing at 6ft 4. Big broad shoulders, a massive beer gut, and tree trunk-like legs.
I came up to his knees that night.
“No! It’s my car, and you’re drunk” my mum tearfully screamed back.
My dad reached down and grabbed a handful of my hair at the top of my little head with one of his giant-like hands. In the flash of an eye, he lifted me off the ground. Then threw me across the lounge room like a rag doll. I crashed head first into the wooden dining room table.
I interpreted this incident and took on the following beliefs. That dominant men are to be feared, and women are helpless victims that required my assistance.
These beliefs have translated in the following 2 ways:
- Throughout my career, I have had many ugly clashes with authoritarian male managers at work.
- I have been in several relationships with women that have had a lot of problems, and I tried to help them. I unconsciously viewed these women as victims and me as the mighty savior.
This one incident has gone on to shape the next 44 years of my life in a twistedly good way.
The good thing is there is a way out.
Takeaways
Identify beliefs. Tony Robbins starts by asking you whose love did you crave most when you were a child.
Not receive, but crave.
This is a great point to start identifying your beliefs. As this need acts as the dominant force in your life as you grow up, and you continue to seek it throughout your adult life.
Question what beliefs you have formed around this need.
For example, I formed the belief that I need to act quietly like a mouse around dominant males to get their love and approval.
Reactions. Another signpost that will help identify what your current beliefs and core wound are is your reaction when around other people.
Personal baggage aside, all of us are pretty much the same. Two arms and two legs. Which begins the question, why do you feel and act differently around various people?
Take note of how you feel around people. There will be certain types of people who you either feel superior or inferior.
Around dominant males, I felt inferior. Around women who played the victim, I felt superior. Can you see where I may have got this from?
What needs to happen
When you are observant over time, you notice carrying out the same behaviors and having similar experiences throughout your life.
You repeatedly apply your willpower to change your behavior, but the negative behaviors and unfulfilling experiences continue.
The reason this happens is you seek out those experiences that generate a similar feeling to those feelings you experienced as a child.
Another layer to this is that your perception distorts your experiences to allow feelings to arise.
A therapist once shared with me an incident where a middle-aged man in a large firm was asked by his personal secretary to immediately go see the CEO.
His nervous system was triggered. He panicked and became anxious. He went into the fetal position under his desk in his office.
He told his therapist that this reaction was common whenever the CEO asked to see him. But he didn’t know why.
He later made it to his boss’s office. His boss praised him for the great work he had been doing.
The therapist said that when he was young and his dad was angry, he would seek him out and beat him black and blue. So he would hide from his violent father curled up in the cupboard under the stairs in the family home.
See the pattern?
Your psychological and emotional bond to your parents is a suffocating force.
In ancient cultures, some ceremonies are performed where the child is taken or “kidnapped” from their parents.
A ceremony such as remaining in the jungle alone for 5 days before returning to the community. Or killing an animal with no weapon needs to take place before you can return to the village.
This ceremony serves as a coming of age for the teenager. The octopus tentacles that once had hold of the child have now been severed when the teenager returns. He is now an adult.
Teenager now lives away from their parents and is treated as an adult by all in the community.
Takeaways
Divorce your parents. David Dieda tells men to live like their father is dead.
While we don’t live out in the wild anymore, you can transition through to adulthood and your perceived stranglehold of your parents.
Meredith Little, along with her late husband Steve Forster, set up The School of Lost Borders. Based on anthropology research, they have established rites of passage ceremonies that assist modern-day people with transitioning from childhood to adulthood.
The ceremony is called a vision fast. You go through the stages of severance, threshold, and incorporation. You will spend one night out alone in nature in the middle of nowhere (there are safety measures put in place to create a space container.)
Boys return as men. Girls return as women.
Parent yourself.
Coming back to Tony Robbin’s questions.
What you craved from your parent then will be a driving force in your life now.
Provide this unmet need to yourself now.
If not, you will unconsciously seek it in other relationships. For example, you will look to extract that need from your intimate partner. Meaning you look to unconsciously manipulate and control your partner’s behavior to get your need met.
As a child, I thought my parents didn’t listen to what I wanted. This translated to me complaining to partners in my intimate relationships that I was never “heard”.
If not addressed, these problems get passed down within families (and cultures.)
After a conversation with my mum, she told me that she had been moving through her life and that people didn’t listen to her. A big lightbulb moment for me.
Accept yourself. You feel you aren’t enough in relation to another person.
People will act in a way that they are subservient to another or that they are better than another person. Either way, they feel insecure and not enough.
When you accept who you are, as you are. Warts and all. Then there is no projection or comparison out into the world and attempting to control others.
“The higher our self-esteem, the stronger the drive to express ourselves, reflecting the sense of richness within. The lower our self-esteem, the most urgent they need to “prove” ourselves or to forget ourselves by living mechanically and unconsciously.”
Following your passions and fostering healthy relationships go a long way towards increasing your self-esteem.
Do the things that make you happy. These activities will allow you to relax in that environment and your natural talents will shine. There may be some aspect of that activity that you love. For example, a friend liked writing, but when he drilled down what he loved was the storytelling aspect of writing.
Doing what you love other times, you will find like-minded souls. These interests will go on to forester important relationships in your life. You will see yourself on equal footing with them.
If you don’t know what you like to do. Then think about or ask your parents what you did do for fun when you were a kid.
As an alternative to activities, look at your way of being. That is how you present yourself to society.
What’s your essence and be that way in the world.
I like observing people and thinking about how they impact me in what they do. I have this straight-up honesty about me.
Without judgment, I share those thoughts will people. Sometimes it’s welcomed, and sometimes not. But over time, taking small risks has allowed beautiful experiences and friendships to form through my sharings.
Implementation
The above suggestions are easy to talk about but can be challenging to do.
To assist with implementation, follow this 3-pronged approach.
#1. Emotional Therapy
These belief-forming experiences from your childhood were emotionally charged events.
Similarly, look to those therapies that have a similar effect but have a positive direction.
Primal Therapy. At a young age, you were unable to process emotions associated with major experiences. As such, you have repressed these powerful emotions.
If not processed, these repressed emotions look for expression throughout your life. These unconscious emotions express themselves in a neurotic and unhealthy manner currently.
You need to act on these repressed emotions consciously to be free of their negative effects.
Primal therapy uses everyday annoyances as a launching point to regress you back through to those traumatic childhood experiences. When the therapist has regressed you back to these events, they facilitate you to experience those repressed emotions.
Sometimes you talk about the incidents, and other times the therapist may get you to punch a pillow or scream out loud.
It can be a very intense form of therapy.
Through this powerful therapy, I worked through my issues around money.
When my parent divorced, they used money as a vehicle for their power struggle.
I went through life for several decades never being able to save money. Through primal therapy, I saw that I had unconsciously had the belief that money was a source of problems.
As much as I wanted more money, it always seemed to slip through my fingers. After going back into reexperiencing my repressed feeling. I released my emotions, and my bank balance has since gone from empty to bulging.
Eye moment desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Is a form of psychotherapy. Similar to primal therapy, it looks to resolve unprocessed emotions from traumatic events.
A traumatic event is brought up consciously along with bilateral stimulation (such as instructed eye movements, hand tapping, or audio stimuli.)
The therapy accesses the traumatic memory and new feelings and points of view on the incident come to light. As such new associations are made between the traumatic memory and more adaptive memories.
These new associations release repressed emotions and create cognitive insights.
I found the insights flowed from being so relaxed. Your defenses are down through the process the therapist takes you through with the bilateral stimuli.
I experienced memories and emotions popping up by themselves with no effort.
I had a memory pop up about the day when my mum left my dad. I felt confused, and in a daze on the day this happened. I had no idea why this was happening. Where I was being taken.
This created a belief that change was a negative thing. As such, I moved through the world for decades fiercely controlling my environment so nothing would change. As a result, I missed many beautiful experiences as I didn’t see them or let them in.
“What we do not know, controls us.”
— Under Saturn’s Shadow by James Hollis
#2. Group Therapy
Sitting in a group with others will be a facilitator. Sitting in a group with others allows you to see how you impact others. This reflects back to you the issues you are having.
Plus, the group members provide you with support and encouragement.
These types of groups will have a specific problem they look to address. Such as alcohol, as seen by alcoholics Anonymous.
Other helpful groups include:
Another group therapy, of sorts, without the 12 steps, is circling.
Circling is one of the most beautiful experiences you can allow yourself to experience. There is a group of 6 people (which can vary), and 1 person gets circled. The person being circled speaks about what is happening to them at the time. The other people in the circle give feedback. Feedback is given in terms of observation. Participants become curious by asking questions about what is shared.
The only rules are there is to be no judgment and no advice given. The reason being is that this causes the person being circled to close down.
Nondirectional inquiry allows the person to delve deep within themselves and go to places they have never been.
Word of warning. To move up to the next rung on the ladder you will be required to leave the bottom rung.
These groups can play a part in your healing. But don’t use them as a crutch.
There will come a time when it’s time to move on.
As part of a men’s group, I had a massive breakthrough about how I relate to women. In the next session, I saw how people had been repeating the same stuff for months now. Immediately a saying from Jim Rohn came to mind.
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”
After this, I stopped going and haven’t looked back since.
#3. Self Empowerment Tools
Another aspect of removing the virus is your personal tool belt.
These methods allow you to be self-empowered.
Accountability partner. This is a person that helps you stay committed. When you look to roll back into an outdated behavior, you reach out to the person for assistance.
Do the opposite. If what you have been doing for years isn’t working, do the opposite. Your programming will continually throw you into the same experience over the years.
George Costanza humorously does this on Sinfield. As a result, he dates beautiful blonde women and gets his dream job with the New York Yankees.
I am introspective, and in the past, this led to thinking about myself a lot and a reclusive lifestyle. When I started to do the opposite, I looked more to understanding others which shifts the focus from myself. This also translated to a more active lifestyle. My career took off, and I started following my passions.
Final thoughts
It’s been over 40 years since that fateful night in the family lounge room.
Your path to freedom is through resolving the past in the present moment.
Identify those beliefs that were formed from childhood experiences and how they hold you back. You are then in a position to use various methods to heal and replace those beliefs.
By living on the edge of consciousness you are now open to various opportunities that present themselves to you every day.
