Self-Sabotage - Are We Prisoners of the Past?
Many people who suffer from low self-esteem would giveanything to escape their painful feelings of inferiority. Almost anything, that is. People are reluctant, even obstinate, when it comes togiving up their illusions of an idyllic childhood. And yet, if we are to break free from our mental prisons,we must become willing to honor the truth of our personalhistory. This is the key to removing our invisiblepsychological and emotional chains. Lack of Self-Worth Does Not Develop in a Vacuum There is just no getting around the fact that our corebeliefs about the world and ourselves and our place in thisworld are pretty firmly established by the time we are threeor four years old. Lack of parental approval in early childhood exacts a heavytoll. Low self-esteem, the root of all self-sabotagingbehavior, hangs heavy around our necks for life "I Left All That Behind a Long Time Ago" People are quick to grasp at a simple "Out of sight, out ofmind" escape. Sadly, this is a fantasy. While you can,indeed, leave home and leave your family life behind, theirinfluence does not leave you. Negative parental messages carry enormous weight. It isthrough these concepts that everything else later on, (i.e.,for the rest of our lives) is filtered. Clearly then, if these basic messages are more negative thanpositive, it is not surprising that we would wind up with abadly mangled sense of self-worth. A life of self-sabotage and perpetual dissatisfaction iswhat results, because we simply do not believe, at aSUBCONSCIOUS level, that we are worth anything better. Traditional Morality Would Have Us Turn Away People recoil at the idea of finding fault with theirparents. We have many religious, social and culturalinjunctions to honor, obey, respect, forgive, and worshipour elders. These commandments prevent us from looking upon ourcaretakers in a less than adoring way without incurring atremendous sense of guilt, betrayal and ingratitude. So weremain unaware. What people fail to appreciate is that it is only byshattering our ignorance and examining our formative yearsthat we can come to understand what makes us tick. Thisawareness will, in turn, allow us to process any distress sothat we may finally release it. Not ignore it, notcamouflage it, but finally release it. This is all done in a spirit of healing, not one ofself-pity, and certainly not one of denunciation. As aresult of discovering and embracing our emotions rather thansquelching them, we can finally come alive. Not only do we gain a new sense of vitality, but we gain anew source of wisdom. And our awareness allows us to cutnegative patterns off at their source. You see, we cannotlet go of something if we don't allow ourselves toacknowledge what we are hanging on to. Rational Justifications Do NOT Penetrate the SubconsciousMind Many well-intentioned people and spiritual mentors willagree that while injurious things may have been said anddone, we should be mature or evolved enough to understandthat our caretakers were doing the best they could. After all, they didn't mean to hurt us with their harshnessor neglect. Why don't we just rise above it and move on? Surely we are noble and generous-hearted enough to forgivethem, yes? Well, no, actually. And for two very important reasons. First, this is an attempt to reason things out consciously. It is a fruitless activity, because it does nothing to reachand alter the core beliefs and distress that are stuffeddown BEYOND conscious access. And second, the person whose body and/or emotions wereassailed was NOT an adult capable of reasoning things out sorationally. The early distress lives on unabated. We Cannot Live With the Results We may be able to carry on, but we cannot really live andflourish while those negative core beliefs remain frozen intime. The tragedy for so many of us is that they remainlodged firmly in place today, without our consent andwithout our conscious awareness. Down With the Taboo Against Knowing Who We Are Rather than continue to justify our ignorance, we must dareto bring the unconscious to conscious light. There arecompelling reasons for doing so. ? To heal a mutilated sense of self-worth.
? To process our present moments through fresh eyes.
? To avoid becoming subtly mean, cruel or sarcastic.
? To prevent ourselves from unwittingly passing on our damage. And finally, and perhaps most compelling of all, iftraditional morality continues to deny us knowledge ofourselves and our history, our bodies will end up speakingfor us. And this it will do by erupting into disease. Witness the alarming number of people who suffer fromdepression today. Our psychological and emotional disturbances must eventuallysurface as some type of physical or mental malady. Or as Iheard somewhere along the way, "If your mouth won't say itstraight, your body will say it crooked." And according to the title of Dr. Alice Miller's most recentbook on the victimization of children, The Body Never Lies. Time spent digesting any of Dr. Miller's books is time wellspent, indeed. The greatest healing contribution any of us can make toworld is to heal our own wounds, not hide from them or denythem or justify them. After all, we do want to live and notjust survive, don't we? Rosella Aranda is the author of Sabotage Thyself No More,an excellent guide to raising your sense of personal worthand getting rid of self-defeating behaviors. Free Mini-Course at http://www.SabotageThyselfNoMore.com/
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