How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self

I was not willing to admit it to myself for a long time. I would have fought you tooth and nail if you suggested that my childhood was less than perfect. This didn’t come just from an idealization of my past; it also came from a culturally ingrained protection of the family unit. Admitting publicly that everything was not all rosy would have been d

As with most of us, many of the habits I learned in childhood, I repeated and carried with me throughout my life. Many of us never stop to think: Is this really me? How many of us find ourselves celebrating holidays the same way we did in childhood without even imagining doing it a different way? How many aspects of your life have you actually chos

It is painful not to be heard. It is upsetting to be ignored. It is confusing to learn that we must hide our true Selves in order to be loved. Being acknowledged is one of the deepest human needs. If your childhood thoughts or ideas are not “heard,” your mind feels dismissed. If your childhood Self-expression is not “seen,” your soul feels diminish

We all carry unresolved trauma. As we’ve seen, it’s not necessarily the severity of the event itself but our response to it that determines the imprint it makes. Resilience is learned through conditioning; if we didn’t see it modeled by our parent-figures when we were young, we may have never learned it. When we do the work of resolving trauma, we

Even though consciousness makes us human, most of us are so immersed in our inner world, so unconscious, even asleep, that we aren’t aware that there’s a script continually running through our minds. We believe that script is the true “us,” the Self. But that chatter is just our thoughts. We practice thoughts all day long. You might have stopped at

It is painful not to be heard. It is upsetting to be ignored. It is confusing to learn that we must hide our true Selves in order to be loved. Being acknowledged is one of the deepest human needs. If your childhood thoughts or ideas are not “heard,” your mind feels dismissed. If your childhood Self-expression is not “seen,” your soul feels diminish

Every time we make a choice that is outside of our default programming, our subconscious mind will attempt to pull us back to the familiar by creating mental resistance. Mental resistance can manifest as both mental and physical discomfort. It can take the form of cyclical thoughts, such as I can just do this later or I don’t need to do this at all

The second type of boundary is a resource boundary. When we are too free with our resources, we are always “on call,” much as Susan was with her friends. Those with too few resource boundaries in place are endlessly giving and generous to a fault, which makes for unequal, draining exchanges with friends, partners, and family members. When we give a

I looked around me—really looked, as if for the first time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every single one of my clients who came to me for psychological treatment also had underlying physical symptoms. Long out of school, I started to ask new questions: Why did so many of my clients suffer from digestive issues, ranging from irritable bowel

we cannot choose the circumstances of our childhoods, let alone the circumstances of our great-grandparents’ childhoods—but many factors are within our control. We can provide ourselves with the nurturing we may not have received as children. We can learn to give ourselves secure bonds and the ability to create a sense of safety.