I realised after therapy today that I hadn’t had a spare moment to myself the last two weeks. No quiet time to reflect. So today after dinner I went for a walk then came home and journaled some. My therapist said I should take a few weeks off and see how I get along. She’s taught me some very useful tools to work on the areas I wanted to improve and change. The past few weeks have been a journey of discovery, very insightful and interesting. I keep going through the talks we have had just to remind myself of the issues we discussed. She has helped me really look at myself not with a self-critical eye as I would have before, but one with compassion and love for myself.
It has been hard.
One of the most difficult things to do is to attempt to change the belief systems that you have grown up with your whole life. But I have made a promise to myself that I will live the life that I dream of without fear. For example, it is so difficult to make myself believe that it is ok to make mistakes and that it is ok to fail. Failure is not shameful, it is what we make of it and how we pick ourselves up that defines us.
If i have one aim in in this life, it is to have it full and varied. And that means living in the moment — leaving the past behind and not worrying about the future. Every minute that I spend rehashing what happened yesterday, or fretting about what tomorrow brings, I am squandering the chance to live for today.
So just for my reference, today’s session focused on potency, permission, protection and finding a new parent. And in this one sentence alone, lies a ton of work to be done. This is adapted from John Bradshaw’s work on reclaiming one’s inner child.
Our wounded inner child is the one that prevents us from doing whatever we want. When I think twice about doing something because I fear someone will be displeased, that is not me talking, that is my 8 year old self talking. When I become afraid to speak up or stand up for myself in the presence of someone with authority, that is my 8 year old self thinking. This is where all the irrational fears come in.
So the ‘good’ coping mechanism, — rather than regression or repression, which I have been doing — is to empower and protect the inner child in me. To love that part of me and to reassure it unconditionally so that it can feel safe and my adult self can connect and control it, rather than letting it be controlled by external influences ie reclaiming my inner child.
This of course leads to the ultimate question of “Who am I?” But I haven’t figured that out yet. I’m slowly getting there but I don’t have all the answers.
Reading all this back, it sounds like a big pile of pyschobabble and baloney but it definitely helps to know that these ‘afflictions’ are common, because we all come from dysfunctional backgrounds, to some extent. We are all flawed in some way. It is not wrong, and there is no blame. It just is.
