Two years ago in late autumn, in Christchurch, New Zealand, I had just stopped working in a job I hated. I was only there for three months but after only a week my energy was drained, my vitality depleted, and I felt depressed. I wondered to myself, why I kept choosing work and life paths that didn’t reflect what I truly needed? Why didn’t I know what my true passions were, what I wanted in my heart?
Five years prior to this, I had attended a training course called “The Energy Awareness Training,” run by Lynda and Stephen Kane, which I desperately needed at the time. I learned how to make choices based on my body’s innate knowledge of my needs, untainted by the self-saboteurs within that kept forcing me to make decisions to do things I didn’t truly want! I knew with a blinding certainty that if I was to truly break free of the saboteurs that existed forcing me into choices that did not reflect my heart’s desires, I had to start getting to grips with why I made those choices in the first place. And so began the long, deep journey into the past I was pretending hadn’t happened. When we are born into a family we all have challenges to face. All families have their stuff. In my experience, the more traumatic the challenge, the more the necessity to pretend for survival. That is, unless our parents are conscious enough to acknowledge what is happening and face it. This is rarely the case though. Children in traumatic situations make the best of it by pretending it isn’t happening until it’s safe to face the truth.
Vision coaching with Lynda Kane brought into the light of day the many inner children of my past who I had squashed from my conscious awareness because they told a story my family had been unwilling to hear. But they then acted as strong actors behind the scenes of my adult life until I had the courage to turn back to them and ask them each in turn (via self-acceptance) what they had to say. The truth of their words has been the most liberating experience of my life. And the truth of their words, although taking a modicum of courage to hear, has been the key to my freedom.
The story created about me within my family to shield the ugly truth left me a helpless, emotionally crippled stranger to myself, a non-person. The theme in my family was for us girls to be spaced out, and out of touch with our feelings. For if we were grounded and clear my dad would have had to face his issues and my mum would have been in touch with her feelings about him and perhaps been faced with the decision to leave. That was a no no, so I disappeared, pretending I didn’t feel his rage, tuning out of my inner knowing because it threatened his perception of being calm and rational. I squashed my need for friends so not to rouse his jealousy and I certainly did not talk about how I felt him to be. I stuffed down my feelings and my life ground to a halt. I have read numerous times recently that our feelings are guides to our passions and perceptions of others and also to our decision-making. I used to be terrible at decision-making because my feelings about my childhood used to be too hard to feel so I left my body, feelings, and decision-making ability!
I was numb to my past but left without any ability to feel my way through life. I’m naturally an intuitive person, a gutsy girl so this left me very out of touch with who I truly am. I was allowed boyfriends but was drawn to those who reflected my dad’s issues, like a moth to a flame. Because I wasn’t allowed to live my life as I truly wanted to I became jealous of others who seemed happy to me or were free to go out and join the life “party.” I pushed away my true wants and feelings, pretending I didn’t need people other than my dad (and later my boyfriends). I did such a good job of pretending that I actually began believing these false choices were what I wanted. Each choice I made that denied my true needs masked my joie de vivre until I became depressed. But I pretended I wasn’t depressed to continue the family story that all was fine and dandy. I knew deep down that to acknowledge my depression meant rousing the sleeping ghosts of my past and greeting the cold, frozen inner children. It also meant facing the reality of my past, what had really happened rather than the familiar fiction. This would entail courage, pain, change, and eventually liberation.
