The journey of healing is a beautiful journey. Black Elk, a Lakota chief, once said “The longest and hardest journey of your life will be the 18 inches from your head to your heart.” To begin that healing journey, we must first identify where the pain and the wounds originated.
This journey first starts with a beautiful child being born. I call this the Golden Child. We have no wounds, no pain, no negative messaging, no insecurities. We are perfect, benevolent, and pure. We are unaltered potential and unconditional love as that child. Do you feel like you are in touch with that golden part of yourself? Or have you lost it?
The reason we often lose that golden part of ourselves is because the first thing we experience in this life is pain. Often, this pain begins in childhood. How we initially build our self-esteem is through our parents. Now, this isn’t about blaming everything on our parents or making any parent “bad;” this is often about the unintentional impact of their actions or perhaps the lack of action. It could be from emotional or verbal abuse. Physical or sexual abuse. Abandonment or neglect. Bullying or death. It could be witnessing parents arguing or divorcing, or it could be as simple as a parent making work more important. As children, we often can’t grasp these larger concepts, so we take things personally.
Because of this pain, we begin to develop what I call a “shadow message.” These shadow messages sound like, “I’m not good enough,” “I’m unworthy,” or “I’m not important.” When we feel this pain, we often aren’t taught what to do with it, or we’re told not to feel it. We’re told “Big boys/girls don’t cry,” “I’ll give you something to cry about,” “Suck it up,” etc. Because of these messages, we begin to hide or stuff down our pain and fear develops. We then start to push people away or hold them at arm’s length. Because if we let people in, they may add more to our pain, or we fear that they will see our pain and won’t accept or love us. This is where we begin to create masks or façades.
Through our pain and fear, anger is created. How was anger shown in your home? Yelling? Arguing? Violence? The silent treatment? Or did we just sweep it under the rug and never talk about it? How we learn to express anger is a learned behavior from our environment. Either we lash out, or we stuff down our anger. We begin to express and feel anger more deeply in adolescence. However, when we begin to express this anger, we often hurt the people we love. Because we do this, we become angry with and lash out at ourselves. Internalized anger becomes depression, which can lead to the desire to numb ourselves so we don’t have to feel the pain, fear, and anger.
This desire often leads us to start using drugs or alcohol. Or we may turn to shopping or impulsive buying, withholding from or overeating food, jumping from relationship to relationship, acting out sexually with people or pornography. This is when shame comes into our lives. My belief is that shame begets more shame. When we feel shame, it causes us to act out, which in turn creates more shame. Imagine shame as a poison slowly eating us from the inside out. We become hollow and empty. We begin to hide from ourselves and others.
Finally, we have what I call the Rational Adult. There is the outward façade we show the world and the inner reality that we hide. This hidden side is the part of us who has trust issues, who overthinks, who has catastrophic thinking, or who struggles with vulnerability and intimacy. This is the part of us we do not want the world to see. Because of our pain, fear, anger, and shame, we struggle to find purpose and meaning.
This is where the healing journey begins. First, we must learn to trust both ourselves and a professional. Then, we need to stop the negative behavior that creates more shame in our lives. To do so, we must work through the anger and fear and get in touch with our pain. Where did our pain come from? Where was it caused? Where has it shown up in other areas of our life? With therapeutic help and support, we can begin to heal our pain and wounds. Once we begin to heal ourselves, we can then get in touch with that golden part of ourselves that many of us have lost.
That golden self is who we are in our heart of hearts. Through our pain, we can grow and heal. By moving past our fear, we can gain wisdom. Our anger allows us to realize and create healthy boundaries. The shame begins to dissipate. And the Rational Adult is once more able to be used for strategic thinking and problem solving. In doing this, we begin to heal our whole self and find a deeper meaning and purpose in our lives.
Walk in Beauty,
