Isn’t it amazing how things that happen in our childhood greatly impact our adult lives? Like we just keep living with a deep wound in our hearts.
I learned the hard way that I was living my life with a deep wound in my heart.
My mother was very strict with a temper when I was little, starting when I was around five years old. She has a way of making me shut up regardless of what I had to say. My opinion didn’t really matter for a long time.
It was a time when some parents thought that beating their children was a way to “put them in place” and teach them a lesson. All this taught me, though, was nobody wants to listen to you — we don’t need your opinion.
As I got older, her temper cooled down… but my weight changed and so did my father; his painful remarks — *redacted* was his way of “inspiring me” to do better with my life, but it had the opposite effect on me. It was slowly killing my self-esteem.
There was a trigger that made me rethink what I was doing with my life. I had to stop for a moment to look at the past. This can be very difficult to do, but sometimes we need to face those painful events in order to understand the nature of our poor decisions and behaviour.
It helped me realize that, unconsciously, I had become comfortable in not being heard. My space, my notes heard my opinion more than people did.
I was looking for approval in my words. And you know what? It got me nothing but disappointment and headache because somehow I said the wrong thing always.
Inside, I was still that little girl looking for her mother’s approval.
When you are a child, you are considered a victim, but when you are a grown-up, it is your duty to heal from what was done to you. You just can’t go through life feeling sorry for yourself and complaining about the hand you were dealt. This just keeps you stuck in a sad, joyless life and jeopardizes your relationships.
In my case, I had to give that little girl the assurance she so needed in order to stop feeling unheard.
The only approval that I needed was my own! When I realized that, I started learning to believe myself — regardless of my accomplishments — and I also developed compassion toward my mother because I recognized that she was raised the same way she raised me.
So, what makes us slaves to anger, resentment, and abandonment issues? I think it’s the way we keep telling the story in our heads, and this is something that we can transform.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting we sweep things under the rug and pretend as nothing happened. We cannot change the past, and certainly, we cannot turn a blind eye to it, but we can modify the way we retell the story to ourselves, and this can be a step toward inner healing.
Your wounds will hurt a lot less when you broaden your perspective, try to understand the people who hurt you and change the meaning of what you’ve been through.
