When we are in pain, the last thing we want is to feel like we’re stuck in that pain.
In fact, the truth is that one of the WORST things that we can feel as a human being is TRAPPED in a situation that doesn’t feel good.
That feeling that we are trapped in pain, that we have no agency, that we can’t make it go away is something that all humans deeply fear and resist - because again it’s always going to feel better when we at least have a sense that we know WHY we’re in pain, and when we feel like we have some power to make the pain go away.
As we have talked about a LOT in these posts and on my youtube, when we start to get onto this self love path and we begin looking deeply into our patterns of thought and behavior - many of us are going to recognize that we have a deep instinct to go into a state of self blame/shame/guilt when we’re suffering.
Many of us are going to come to see that we have a kind of constant fear that something is going to go wrong, that the other shoe is going to drop or that there is something wrong already that we can’t quite seem to pinpoint or explain - and in trying to remedy this we again are in a perpetual state of questioning ourselves, believing that we are doing something wrong, that we’re failing, that we’re not good enough, that we need to change this or that about our personalities, our professions, our physical appearance or the way we show up in the world.
Many of us may recognize in ourselves a perpetual pattern of looking to the world around us and seeing potential disaster everywhere. We fear climate change. We fear government and corruption. We feel like we could lose our job at any moment. We feel like our friends, families, partners, coworkers, bosses and even strangers are in a perpetual state of possibly being upset with us - and all of this feels like a very real threat that could ruin our lives in the blink of an eye.
When we start to really become aware of ourselves, many of us are going to come to see that we are living in a state of hypervigilance and pretty much constant fear and anxiety - and that this fear and anxiety feels very REAL and TRUE all the time - even if we can take a step back and objectively see that we have been fearing a lot of things for a long time that have never come to pass, and that we have always been able to figure out how to get through hard things.
We’re going to notice that no matter how capable we may NOW be as an adult - there is a part of us that continually feels like they are deeply vulnerable, alone and in a state of threat - and this part is deeply concerned for our safety at all times.
Leading to that perpetual underlying feeling of not being ok and leading to a state where we are continually nit-picking ourselves, our behavior, the behavior of others and the world around us trying to find the ‘source’ of what’s bothering us and attempting to fix that through fixing ourselves.
Many of us don’t recognize this as shame, blame and guilt. Rather it just seems logical to us that our personalities are wrong and are the reason no one likes us and that we aren’t safe. It seems logical to us that our bodies are unattractive and this is why we can’t be loved the way we want to be. It seems fully reasonable to us that we are lacking something and thus of COURSE we are on the brink of being fired, broken up with, abandoned, rejected or left to be alone forever.
It seems totally reasonable to us that if we were more attractive, smarter, more capable, richer, had accomplished more, were less lazy, didn’t have our coping mechanisms and so on that life would be better. It seems reasonable to us that if we just stopped all of our ‘bad habits’ and could get ourselves to do the ‘right things’ that everything in life would go the way we want it to go.
It seems like objective truth that the world around us is falling apart, or that the ‘other shoe’ is going to drop at any moment.
This is because we aren’t used to slowing down, getting clear on what we are ACTUALLY thinking and feeling, what’s truly going on for us and what we actually need to feel better.
The Awareness Is The Hardest Part
Many of us are going to start to come to see that we’re not even consciously aware that we’re in a state of pain and suffering - rather all we feel is the sense that we are broken, flawed, doing life wrong or that a big catastrophe is happening/going to happen.
When we really start to get into this self love work, we are going to be surprised to discover just how much we go into a state of trying to fix ourselves/projecting disaster onto the world around us when we are in a state of stress, pain, fear, doubt, not knowing what to do to move forward and when we are hurting on some level.
Because the instinct to blame ourselves is SO deep and so pervasive, we don’t even witness it.
This is why unravelling shame is SO hard - it takes a LOT of self awareness and often a lot of PRACTICE to be able to come into a state where we are seeing our shame, blame, guilt and catastrophizing for what it is - a childhood coping mechanism - not an objective view of real reality.
Remember - in our childhoods when we were in pain, we didn’t have the capacity to actually figure out WHY we were in pain.
We didn’t have the ability to regulate or process our own emotions.
We didn’t have the capacity to understand our own needs or how to get them met.
We didn’t have the ability to say or see that what our caregivers were doing may not have felt good for us.
We couldn’t reasonably understand that our caregivers could have been abusing us, neglecting us or harming us.
Even if we COULD identify our caregivers as hurting us, we weren’t then able to stop the abuse unless our caregivers were able to truly hear us, validate us and change their behavior - which for most of us was not a reality. We couldn’t get ourselves out, we couldn’t change the situation, we couldn’t remedy the actual circumstances - all we could do was try to change OURSELVES in an attempt to make the pain stop.
The only power we had from our perspective as children, was to try to figure out what was wrong with us, what was lacking in us, what we were doing that was causing our caregivers to behave how they were or what we figured we HAD to do/be/become so that they would see us, understand us, love us and help us in the ways we needed.
We could not reasonably understand that our caregivers were separate people from us, and that they may have been doing things for reasons that had nothing to do with us.
We could not rationalize that they may be flawed or inherently unable to meet our needs.
All we knew was that there HAD to be a way to get them to see us, to love us, to understand us and to provide us with the love, attention, security, provision and opportunities that we NEEDED, or a way to get them to STOP harming us in whatever way they were harming us.
This is where shame, blame and guilt were born.
We turned the pain we were experiencing in on ourselves, because this was the only way we could rationalize that we had any POWER to make it stop. Without this shaming, blaming and guilting, we would have felt that we would be endlessly TRAPPED in the pain we were in - because again we couldn’t see any other way of making the circumstances change.
These would have been the roots of our attempts at body modification, trying to become perfect in our careers, feeling like we needed to be smarter, stronger, tougher or somehow better.
These would have been the roots of our codependent behaviors where we lived for the approval of others while sacrificing ourselves in whatever way we felt we needed to in order to be loved.
These are the roots of our beliefs that we are too loud, not loud enough, that our personalities need to change, that we need to become something better than what we are or that we have to dim ourselves.
THIS is where this came from - the hope that if we managed to change ourselves in some way, that we would then be LOVED and CARED FOR in the ways we weren’t being loved and cared for.
This is where our scapegoat thoughts came from - blaming our bodies, our personalities, our jobs, our lack of partner or whatever it is that is our ‘go to’ when we feel like we’re failing in life - that thing we TRULY believe that if we just fixed this ONE THING about ourselves everything would be perfect - that hope that if we ‘got that thing right’ that everything would be perfect is the SOURCE of this.
It’s our childhood self’s belief that THIS was the cause of us not getting our needs met - and thus even now in our adulthoods when we are hurting, suffering, overwhelmed, feeling like we aren’t getting our needs met or otherwise in a state where we don’t feel good - we automatically revert to THIS shame and blame in an attempt to help ourselves feel better.
On top of this, we would have started to develop ways of coping with the pain we were in. Ways of numbing ourselves, ways of checking out, ways of stimulating ourselves and ways of escaping in an attempt to help ourselves feel better. These would become the roots of our ‘bad habits’ of not taking care of ourselves, numbing out with food, drug or drink, risky sexual behavior, over-working, excessive dieting/trying to fix our bodies, daydreaming, perpetually sabotaging ourselves and our ‘progress’ in life and everything else we think that if we could just ‘stop doing’ our lives would be perfect. Many of us still believe that our ‘bad behaviors’ are CAUSING us the pain we are experiencing in life - when in reality these behaviors are the ones we’re using to COVER UP the pain we’re experiencing. These coping mechanisms are how we are DEALING with the pain we don’t even see and don’t know how to fix - it’s not the CAUSE of our pain.
Even though most of us can take a step back and say that objectively, if we were to stop doing whatever behavior we’re currently doing there would be LESS harm done in our lives - we can see that there IS negative consequence attached to the ways we are coping - at the end of the day, if we were to STOP using our coping mechanisms we would not end up in a place of pure bliss and happiness - rather we would find that we actually plummet into a deep state of feeling all the pain our coping mechanisms are currently covering up. We would be in a state where our needs are being met even LESS - because right now the ways we are coping are the best we know to do to get our needs met.
Lastly, many of us don’t recognize that what we went through growing up is the source of all of this, because to us what we went through was just ‘normal.’
Many of us have never been given the chance to really question what we went through growing up.
We’ve never taken the time to deeply reflect on the ways we were let down, the ways we were harmed, the ways we didn’t get our needs met. We have never been able to take a step back and objectively look at our pasts through the lens of a HEALTHY upbringing and been able to compare and contrast.
We’ve never had the experience of being seen, heard, validated or understood in our pain - and thus we don’t know how to identify our pain nor how to validate it.
We truly believe we are failing, that we aren’t good enough, that we aren’t trying hard enough, that we need to get rid of the ‘bad habits’ and that we need to fix ourselves - and that is pretty much the end of our awareness train.
We are trying to fix ourselves from this place of not even knowing why we’re hurting, what we actually want, what we believe ‘fixing ourselves’ is going to get us, nor do we have any awareness of what will ACTUALLY meet our needs and make us feel better.
So we try, over and over and over again to do what all the spirituality and self help people tell us to do - only to find that we can’t actually change and that no matter how much we improve ourselves or try to control the world around us - we never feel better.
Enter: Validation
You see, at the end of the day, we aren’t going to be able to change any of our behaviors, we aren’t going to be able to figure out if the self improvement we’re doing is actually GENUINE to us or if it’s based on the flawed premise that we if do it and change ourselves enough we will finally be safe and loved, we aren’t going to be able to figure out WHY we shame, blame and guilt the parts of ourselves that we do, we aren’t going to be able to figure out what is actually hurting and what we actually NEED, we aren’t going to be able to figure out what our coping mechanisms are doing for us and we aren’t going to be able to develop new, healthier ways of meeting our needs and blossoming into who we REALLY ARE - until we slow down and acknowledge the pain we’ve been through.
We aren’t going to be able to CHANGE if we don’t know what hurts, what’s driving us, what’s true to us, what’s just conditioning and what we actually NEED in order to feel better.
Until we take the time to unravel all of this we are going to be lost in cycles of self improvement, coping, numbing, shaming, blaming and catastrophizing forever.
Now, again, the purpose of this article isn’t to give you a full road-map on how to do this healing work from start to finish - this is a long road. This is why I have so many youtube videos, why I have a Mystery School and why I do one on one coaching - all tools that you can find on my website here. Because the reality is, figuring all of this out, healing, shifting and becoming aware takes a LOT of time, effort and care.
That being said, we can START with one simple tool:
Learning to validate yourself.
What do I mean by this?
The first step towards becoming AWARE of how what we have just outlined above may be affecting us, and then learning to get our needs met in new ways, is to START with catching ourselves when we are in that state of shame, blame and guilt and learning to slow down and ask ourselves one very important question:
How am I FEELING right now?
Asking ourselves what we are actually FEELING is a HUGE key.
We want to start to unpack what is truly going on for us, so that we can eventually move into a state of actually getting our needs met and becoming aware of what it is we need to heal.
So when we are in shame, blame and guilt, we want to start to pattern-interrupt the cycle of going into self fixing or numbing by simply connecting to our actual feelings so we can become AWARE of what it is that’s going on for us.
To do this, we can ask ourselves the following:
- If I were to fix this thing in myself, what do I think I would GET?
- What would change in my life if I were to fix this thing in myself?
- If I were to get rid of this bad thing about me, what do I imagine would change about my experience?
- What do I fear will happen if I never change this thing about myself?
- What do I feel like I NEED right now that I’m not getting?
- What triggered me into feeling that I needed to change myself? What hurt about that?
- Where did I first learn that what I feel is wrong about me is wrong and what was happening?
- Where am I feeling like my needs aren’t being met?
- Where am I feeling like someone is crossing my boundary?
- Am I feeling anger, sadness, grief, loss or fear on some level that I am turning in on myself?
- Am I afraid that someone is upset with me? What do I think is going to happen if they are upset with me?
- Am I feeling misunderstood, left out, neglected or unloved?
- Am I feeling unsafe because of something or someone?
- Do I need comfort?
- Do I need support?
- Do I need affection?
- What’s REALLY going on with me?
These are the questions we want to start to ask ourselves.
Then before we try to fix, change or alter anything - we want to learn how to simply VALIDATE ourselves in whatever we discover.
To tell ourselves that we see ourselves, that we understand, and that we have a good reason for feeling how we feel, even if we don’t fully understand it.
That’s it.
Just checking in, getting curious and then being compassionate with ourselves.
Not telling ourselves we should feel differently, we should understand more than we do in this moment or that we should be different.
Just witnessing and validating.
Give it a try, just for a week and see what happens.
What happens when you stop trying to fix yourself, and simply move into a state of self validation?
These are the SEEDS of transformation. The first steps we need to take.
I hope this article has encouraged you to slow down, and start with this very important first step.
<3
Are you sick of the self help roller coaster that leaves you constantly striving and never arriving?
Are you ready for a true spiritual path that connects you to yourself and reality so you can feel good about your life?
Then come check out the Mystery School
