Is Kindness A Threat To The Painful Reenactment Of Your Childhood Story?

steemityourway (69)in #life • 5 years ago

“Most of us have an inner parent that doesn’t take care of the inner child’s needs properly. They are more focused on the needs of the ego, such as pleasing other people in order to feel needed, or achieving success and getting recognition from others. This makes the inner parent happy for a short period of time, but it doesn’t last. There is always a feeling of not being fulfilled, no matter how much you achieve, because the inner child’s needs are not being met.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Parent Yourself Again: Love Yourself the Way You Have Always Wanted to Be Loved

Many of our unconscious roadmaps that guide us through life are rooted in our childhood story. If we never bring them to our conscious awareness to assess of their validity or their lack thereof, they ought to perhaps intensify. On the surface, we may think that the life we are living is a result of our own judgment, choices and actions. Yet if we dig a little deeper, we ought to find that we’re merely playing on repeat our embedded childhood mechanisms.

At a time where we were deeply fragile and reliant little beings on the ones taking care of us (or supposed to) , the child in us was faced with no choice but to try its best to make sense of his own inner world. Yet the way by which we shape our internal reality has a lot to do with the environment inside which we float in.

As children, we don’t have the capacity to understand the why behind what happens to us.** We take all the weight of what happens in our chaotic household on our own tiny shoulders**. We don’t have the freedom to choose the events that happen to us. The only freedom that we have is to choose our response to these things. We don’t have the luxury that adults have to escape from what hurts us.

Consequently, to the best of our ability, we create these narratives in our minds of how the external world works. If left unchecked, in adulthood, these narratives that stem from our personal upbringing become deeply ingrained patterns that orient our behaviors and our lives, mostly unconsciously.

As a result of this, we are drawn the most to people who activate our childhood playlists. And what do you do with playlists? You repeat them, over and over again. Our adult life then just becomes a playground for the wounded child in us to respond again to all the hurt he’s endured.

Instead of un-doing the damage – we welcome it with open arms. How could you turn down familiarity? How could you say no to someone who brings to life every wounded inch of your being? The truth is that if you don’t consciously choose to heal this part of your life story – you will likely relive some of the very painful things that have happened to younger You.

By unconsciously wanting to preserve our unhealthy and damaging childhood schemas at all cost, we turn down all possibility of creating perhaps a healthier and more loving future for our adult selves. For some, kindness may be a threat because cruelty is all they’ve ever known. Others may have internalized the belief that everyone will always abandon them in life.

Consequently, they may put themselves in situations or fall in love with people who will end up making their worst dreaded fear come to life. When you aren’t aware of the trap that you make yourself fall into time and again, you don’t give to yourself the chance of choosing differently.

If you were made to believe as a child that you were inadequate and a waste of living space – it is only normal that as an adult, you seek more of that familiar, while terribly painful feeling. Your broken inner child clings to everything that reminds him of the smell of his childhood.

He’ll go to extreme lengths just so he can confirm to himself that he was right for thinking so. That the world is indeed a terrible place. That people will abandon him no matter what. That he is inadequate and defective. That people will always abuse and betray him. Yet it does not have to be this way forever.

The only thing that stands in your way isn’t what has happened to you. It is your pulling away from choosing a different ending. It is your not saying Yes to the healing journey.