Your relationship with your past
I’m excited to share this with you. I’m reading the book Dream. Clarify and Create What You Want by Marcia Wieder. In her book, Marcia writes about our relationship to our past in a way that is new and really resonates with me.
“Your life was designed to protect a child.”
You were born as your essential self, your essence was clear to you as a young child. Then early in your life you developed strategies to protect yourself from being wounded.
“The internal protector took care of the wounded child.”
You developed an internal protector who helped to protect you from these wounds. This wounding shows up in all sorts of different ways. This is how you developed your coping strategies.
As a child, you developed a “walls up” coping mechanism in order to protect yourself. Brené Brown wrote about this in her latest book Dare to Lead, our childhood is about putting up walls, and then we spend our entire adulthood trying to tear down those same walls.
But here is the great insight that I hadn’t heard put this way:
“Your identity and worldview was turned into a story by a child.”
As a child we told ourselves stories (that were not necessarily true) in order to create our identity and to make sense of the world.
Our brain as a child is who determined how we assessed ourselves and everything in it.
And children tend to assume it is their fault, a child’s brain doesn’t know that other people are responsible for their own behavior.
How are you still allowing your identity and beliefs to be ruled by your child self?
For me, it’s the stories I told myself about not being good enough because I felt ignored and overlooked, not worthy to have needs and to have a voice. Even as I’m writing it, my child’s brain is telling me it was true.
But is it?
As an adult, I have the capacity to feel compassion for my parents and their human-ness. They did the best they could. But my child’s brain took responsibility for their shortcomings. I made it mean something about me.
I’m practicing new ways of thinking based on the understanding that my identity and beliefs have been determined by me when I was a child.
Now as an adult I have the choice to either play this out the rest of my life, or to construct a new story, a story told with my adult mind that has the maturity and intellect to tell it another way.
How can you tell a different story?
What has your child mind told you about the past? Is it really true? How does it affect you now as an adult?
Letting your past go by telling a new story is an important first step to taking responsibility for your life. And to create the best life you can for yourself.
Do you want help getting clear about your past so you can move on to your future? I can show you how.
