There are few people in our experience who have as powerful presence in our lives as family. So foundational, so basic to who we are. Most often people, like our parents, serve to show us something incredibly important about ourselves. Most often, though, we often view our parents with a mixture of love, frustration, joy, and hurt…and we pull away when we see the negative aspects in them, and us, coming. Parents, though, can show you right where your own fractures are. You just need to know how to see them. Most often, when things go bad, we focus only on the wounds that we feel, as some form of victimization in some way or another. We didn’t get enough of something, or got too much of something else. Lying behind our shadowed experiences with family lies a rich bed of truth, and only when you are brave enough to suspend your own personal misgivings about them, can you reach into this truth about yourself.
Hurt or feeling a victim is itself a snake swallowing it’s tail; it continues until you choose to step out of this feeling, this self-chosen definition of who you think you are. This is not easy since feelings associated with childhood go so far back. It’s a hard habit to break. But it’s possible to step out of the vortex of your own pain or hurt in order to know these deeper truths. There is little else that heals as quickly your own issues which are often called the mother and father wound.
Many years ago, in 2009, I was assisted by a brilliant intuitive in what was a guided imagery exercise deep into my early feelings when I was a child. That experience was one of awareness about my own investment in a feeling as an infant that led me to seeing the root of the problem I had instead of just seeing or feeling the symptoms, the surface, of that old wound within myself.
So often, we hold our own emotions at a distance so that we never really examine them or understand them all that well. What I was guided to do was to reach into my memory of feeling during my first year of life. This was so early a memory I did not experience any identifiable memories, but instead the memory of a feeling.
With a father dying from cancer, my mother was suddenly facing being alone with 4 children to care for. I was just over a year old at the time. Just a baby, really. I didn’t get what I knew that I needed. It formed the core of a wound that followed me every day of my life. As a baby, all I knew was that I wasn’t getting what my inner compass told me that I needed. It was out of this mismatch that my wound emerged. Was it because I wasn’t loveable?
The guided imagery, which expertly took me deep within myself, allowed me a level of comprehension that I had l lacked up until the session began. I had always assumed that the core of my feelings were just too buried in memory and they weren’t accessible. No matter how early these things occur, we all have the information within us. Instead of conscious memory, my guide took me deep into feeling, a path whose comprehension is as fresh as can be.
This experience showed me that behind the tangle of upset lay deeper feelings I hadn’t fully examined. The first stage in the healing was in simply understanding how I felt. No more arm’s length. There was more there that I had hurriedly hidden away within myself that kept a fuller understanding at bay. It was brilliant because as soon as I did this, I was then able to see things as they were, or more so where my Mother and I were concerned. I saw my Mother in a way I had never seen her before. This enabled me to forgive not just her, but myself for having clung to this old feeling for so long. I felt foolish for making her responsible for my own misgivings. I was not aware nor in harmony with the flow of events. I suffered as a result….for years.
The result of this work was that it cleared an old karma of mine and also of my Mother’s. She felt guilt because she knew I had been at odds with her, and I had felt anger towards her for something I didn’t get. This was a self-reinforcing problem until I snipped the loop of the snake. The change was instantaneous.
This changed our relationship for the better. I saw her differently and felt differently, too. It was a liberating experience. I was able to see beyond my own mess and her load was lightened from then on. It was one of the biggest reliefs I had felt in my life. It’s hard to realize how these feelings weigh us down and shutters our awareness.
Healing these wounds are critically important to substantive spiritual growth and gets at fundamental issues about ourselves that are less about the victim and more about seeing things as they are. When you can do this, feelings can be changed forever. Until you do this work, you are in truth only running from yourself. It’s about you, and less about them. It’s more about your reaction, and less about what they did. Divine forgiveness sweeps through your entire being and completely erases the trauma or hurt that you had stored there. A new chapter can then be written in your life that changes everything based on the healing of the hurt for all time. It never returns when healed in this way.
While there might be other issues floating in the ether, these become easier to heal and let go. You can reach a point of bold curiosity and desire to do more of this work. To do it, you often must forget what you think you know.
You can’t forgive with your head and expect healing to come.This must come from all parts of you. It is what healing these things that makes healing so huge for you. Everything else is just trimming weeds. The process I went through was unconditional and took me to the core, to the hidden root of the problem.
My daughter and I clowning for the camera recently
Years later I was able to see how during a divorce, my children were being polarized into anger over how her mother was acting. Yes, she had been emotionally abusive. The mother of my children began to engage in inappropriate behavior by indulging in what is called in psychiatric circles as mobbing behavior. Mobbing happens when someone decides they hate another person and tries to turn other people against the targeted person through a campaign of criticism and denigration. Healthy people will know better than to let their own upset get the better of them, especially in a divorce where children are involved. But in cases of mental instability or abusive tendencies, a parent can engage in a campaign of seeking to alienate the target just to get back at them, to try to destroy what they hold most dear; their children and the relationship they have with them.
In the case of one of my children, she found that what her mother was saying was untrue due in part to because she chose to retain her own sense of self and willingness to be objective. Because she was willing to spend time with me, she was able to very quickly see how what her mother was saying just didn’t hold up. This is where this type of campaign can backfire on the parent who is engaging in the denigration of the other parent, resulting in a child who sees through the deception with a broken sense of trust, with resentment that often follows.
Yes, she could have wound up hating her Mom. Had I been like her Mother, I could have taken this and run with it. I knew though that the future of my child’s coping skills hinged on her having a good relationship with her mother and myself. I urged her to forgive, and the amazing thing is, she did. She forgave and she forgot.
This is how this work goes. To be free, you have to release all negative feeling in order to be able to move on with greater happiness. It’s the holding on that causes us to suffer and keeps us not fully healed. It transforms how you see the person who hurt you and it’s instantaneous.
The difference between my one child who took the bait his Mother was feeding him and my daughter who was more willing to find out the other side of the story is like night and day. It’s hard as a parent to know how you are setting up a child for failure in their life when you succeed in getting a child to believe falsehoods about the other parent that serve to make a normal relationship impossible for the child. This child now has the classic symptoms of parental alienation which include depression, anxiety, anger management issues, and difficulty holding down jobs or completing long-scale tasks like graduating from high school, or completing a college program. Children of alienation are unable to form lasting relationships and tend to move around a lot, from relationships every few years, as well as changing jobs every few years. It is always the problem of the school, the boss, or significant other.
While you should never stay in a bad situation with toxic people, the people so abused do not have healthy coping skills, which is the legacy that this type of abuse nails to the hearts and minds of children like this. I can tell you just how tragic it is to have not just a spouse engage in this denigration against you, but to have a once-loving child swept up in this terrible outcome. So you can see how important it was for me to make sure that my child could have the benefit of the love and support she so badly needs in order to grow up more whole and healthy as an adult.
When I began the session with my intuitive, I had no idea where we’d wind up. Neither did she; she was being led in large part by her own gift, and this is how her work often is. It also is what makes her so incredibly successful in her intuitive work with people. It helped to transform my relationship with my own Mother, and has led to a happier and more joyful life. This rising tide will lift all boats.
I encourage you to do this work because it’s so basic and foundational, and can have the power to change so much within you that has been a problem or stumbling block for years. With help like this, difficult problems can be changed in an instant when you are ready and have excellent guidance from a gifted person like I had.
Family is so important to us and for us. Being able to transform the nature of something difficult into something positive is a truly beautiful thing. It touches on your and their lives as well as your siblings, if you have them.
For anyone who would like to explore this work more in-depth, I am happy to share her contact information. Just drop me a line or request it to find out more.
P.
Waking The Infinite 