Be Unencumbered

Let’s start with something more normal, here is an example of a scenario that demonstrates the opposite of unencumbered and work on how to release it…

It’s Sunday morning here, a beautiful sunny (but cold) Winter’s day in the Southern Hemisphere.

Having been at home for ten days straight with sick kids, who are now recovering from a nasty flu virus (and as any parent knows the only thing worse than sick kids are kids on the mend but not back to full strength), I headed out to the pool for a swim this morning before my partner left for work.

As the sun was coming up, it was four degrees and the (outdoor) pool looked very atmospheric with steam coming off the top. I chuckled as I noticed two ladies doing aqua jogging were both wearing big matching woolly hats as they chatted and waded.

Swimming up and down I found my bliss, and returned home feeling refreshed and ready for the day.

My six-year-old was laid on the couch and immediately started asking if she could watch TV. In our house, device time is limited to late afternoon/early evening on a weekend. But with having been sick the kids have watched a lot of TV this last week. “Later” I said and tried to distract her by focusing on what she might want for breakfast.

This was an ineffective strategy, my daughter – who her teacher had just described as “a ray of radiant sunshine” in her end of term report – looked like an incoming storm that quickly whipped up into a tornado.

Soon that tornado was hurling abuse and objects in my direction. And as Dr Gabor Maté reminds us “it is not our children’s behaviour but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates the greatest difficulties.” Indeed.

My response wasn’t pretty, what was already in play was somewhere in the region of a category two (extremely dangerous) hurricane, my inner child was more than a match for that storm, she was whipping up that scale and turning this thing into a category three or four.

Here’s the thing, being on the journey to me – the reclamation of my soul –means recognizing all the junk in my trunk so to speak.

This junk identified itself very clearly as I heard myself scream “I had to put up with being yelled at and hit my whole childhood, I will not put up with the same aggression as a parent, it’s not going to happen.”

Simultaneously I’m recognizing that in reaction to my trauma, I’m now traumatising my daughter, so immediately remorse set in. The thing I could find instant gratitude for however is that I recognise it, I’m not unconsciously repeating a pattern, I’m aware of it – I am aware of something that is weighing me down.

As I often say, there was nothing particularly remarkable about my childhood, as a child of the seventies in western Scotland, it was a normal thing to be yelled at, to be smacked if I did something bad and to be punished in the same way in the school system. It was normal so I don’t think of it as abuse and I don’t blame my parents for the way they acted as they were doing what they thought was best.

What I do remember from my childhood was suppressing my anger, I used to often stomp up to my room (after being told what to do or told off) and I’d be saying under my breath all the things I really wanted to say to my parents. Then I’d look around for things to throw but, after quickly determining that anything broken would cause me even more pain, I’d often just punch the concrete wall.

And even though I don’t remember feeling traumatized (though I probably did when this pattern began as infant me started to fiddle with the buttons on the washing machine and get my knuckles rapped), there is absolutely no doubt trauma occurred.

Do you know how I know? The force of my reaction to my daughter is how I know, I could literally feel the force of the sound and shock waves moving through me and hurtling towards her. The trauma I can feel from that reaction is still reverberating in my body, so how do I get rid of it?

It’s got nothing to do with the other person, my daughter has already forgiven me and moved on, she knows violence towards me triggers me and she knows why, she also knows that I want and encourage her to express (rather than suppress) her feelings, but it’s not okay to express them violently.

Getting rid of an activated emotion that has years of momentum probably requires a multipronged approach. As I said in Change Unhealthy Reactions there is a moment, it is fleeting but it’s pivotal, it’s my choice point. If I can catch myself in the act, I can change my response. Equally there has to be compassion for myself.

I understand why my patience was worn thin; it’s been a stressful week. I’m not proud of my reaction, but it’s not going to serve me to beat myself up either – that is like further beating the inner child who wanted to be heard in that moment.

There are lots of approaches to inner child work, and its’ become so clichéd over the years. It made me laugh when social scientist Brené Brown was talking about her own journey in being vulnerable and brave, and telling her counselor that she was there to do the work but “can we skip all that childhood stuff”.

There is no skipping it; it’s been hardwired in there. In the docu-series Transcendence Josh Axe talks about how most people aren’t aware certain emotions cause disease in specific organs. For example, emotions of fear affect the reproductive organs, the kidneys and adrenals. Think about a child getting really scared and they wet themselves. Why? Fear directly affects the bladder and the kidneys.

As I could feel those emotions ripping through my system this morning, I am left in no doubt there decades of junk still in the trunk to clear out. Inner child work is essential in order to give my inner child her time to speak her truth, to be heard, understood and held. Then it’s time to speak my now truth, as an adult that does not need to tolerate violence of any kind towards me, nor to project it back to others in defence. I deserve kindness and so do you.

What is also interesting is the amount of blockages in my system that relates to old stuff that is not even mine any more. My chiropractor/applied kinesiologist/nutritionalist/emotional therapist (she is even more holistic than all of that), in pursuit of the cause of my shoulder pain, uncovered that my lymph system wasn’t functioning well due to a blockage in my ileocecal value in the digestive system.

The emotions that were creating this blockage were feelings of powerlessness: lacking strength, resigned to fate, no longer caring, expecting to fail, feeling alone, misunderstood and distant. These are not emotions currently activated within me, in fact I’d say based on the location (where my mum had a tumour) they are not even my emotions as I have never resigned myself to fate in anything other than a positive way, but I recognise the feelings from the year mum slipped away from us.

All I can tell you is that, after releasing these emotions with some Bach remedies and physical work on that area around my colon, my shoulder now feels freer than it has in a long time.

It’s also like the example I mentioned in Value Your Uniqueness of becoming aware of all the judgmental thoughts in my head and recognizing them as belonging to my mum when I was a child.

One of my enduring memories was the mortification I used to feel taking public transport with mum who used to loudly disapprove of various people’s behaviour without actually addressing them directly. What I used to do was think of all the reasons why they may, in fact, be behaving like that. That is my true voice, the one who sees a broader picture and understands that what I perceive may not be the truth. In fairness, it wasn’t even my mum’s voice as she matured; it was a moment in time that has gotten stuck in a loop in my head.

​Releasing these thoughts and emotions and finding kinder thoughts is really the route to becoming unencumbered. It’s an active process that requires awareness and persistence.

Imagine the feeling of being free of all fear, anger, anxiety, grief and worries? That is the sovereignty of your soul. Imagine a world of people who are in the pursuit of that? I believe that is where we are headed, and it starts with the likes of you and I setting a goal to be unencumbered and live our best life.

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