Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes.
In order to be free, we must release the hurt, fear and shame.
Give your shadows and darkness a voice. It’s the only way to truly be free.
Can you remember a time when you were free of self-doubt and fear? Free of built-up emotions that are suddenly just pouring out of you, and you can’t seem to stop the flow?
Would you like to be rid of that voice that says you’re never enough, you can’t do it, or attacks you because you feel you’ve made a mistake and now you need to make amends before everyone finds out and shames you? (“What if I’m punished/get in trouble?”)
Do you struggle to be kind and compassionate to yourself? Do you even feel you deserve this kind of compassion, or is that only for others?
As women, we want to be happy, confident, resourceful and content within ourselves and when around others. But being at peace is not always easy. Sometimes – or maybe most of the time – our inner lives can be painful and no matter how hard we try, we seem to be stuck with the same old struggles and memories which keep us in a loop of shame, rage, depression and hurt.
Emotional peace and wellbeing would be easy if we didn’t have to cope with our past traumas, the rejection we’ve experienced, loss, physical, verbal and mental abuse from those we love and sometimes even complete strangers who don’t even know us but somehow find our weak spot.
Sometimes there are things we let happen because we’re in a state of flight or freeze and we just didn’t know what to do in that moment, and so our shame spiral continues ever downward. But perhaps it was also a fight response and so now we have guilt about how we handled a situation.
Many times, when dealing with our fears and traumas we have to face or admit to the parts that we played – and that can really hurt. Energetically, how did we ‘agree’ to be a part of this when it feels so horrible? Maybe the voice in your head says, “why didn’t I do better?” or “I don’t even want to be that person anymore, but I just can’t stop, and I can’t change”.
If you find yourself filled with anxiety. If you feel emotionally and mentally exhausted. If you are crying daily or at the drop of a hat, and you’re struggling to remember the last time you actually felt peaceful and happy within yourself: you are not alone.
There is a way to feel ‘normal’ again.
As humans, we can only sustain so much emotional burden and struggle. We aren’t meant to live with it, long-term. But so many of us are doing exactly that and the bad news is that our emotions don’t simply disappear. They stay stuck and embedded within your body.
Repressed feelings can cause depression, illness, disease, physical pain as well as anger and fits of rage.
It’s actually been proven that 86% of illness and disease have an emotional root cause.
If you are now in a state of constant pain, be it physical, mental or emotional, it’s likely you are at capacity emotionally and your body is sending you the warning signals that it’s time to stop ignoring what is haunting you, it’s time you let go of your shadows and demons.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed or like you’re out of control – it’s not because you’re broken. It’s because you’re human and you’ve been taught to bury your feelings and emotions. But please know, this is not healthy and it’s not how we are supposed to live.
Emotions and feelings are how we interact with the wider world and the Universe.
When I say the word ‘trauma’, how do you react?
If you’re like most women, you pull away.
You associate it with intense pain, with tragedy. You don’t think of it as something ordinary people experience. And you certainly don’t think it’s happened to you.
That’s because ’trauma’ is one of the most misunderstood terms out there and I’m on a mission to change how women talk about it.
Traumatic experiences shape our deepest and most limiting beliefs about ourselves.
Most of the beliefs we have about ourselves right at this moment can be traced back to childhood. Why? Because this is the time where events and situations can have the most impact on us. It has been noted that, as children, we operate through our nervous system so if our surroundings weren’t calm, nurturing and safe then we have grown up with a nervous and anxious expectation about the world and the people in it.
That is hard to shake by simply using the power of your mind.
Before we can even articulate it, we’re forming beliefs that shape how we live our lives, influencing the people we attract and the love we accept.
This the Law of Attraction at its most fundamental level.
Sometimes our traumatic experiences are easy to recognise – what you might call ‘Capital T’ trauma:
But often, the experiences that shape us don’t show up like that. They’re a mosaic of tiny moments and feelings that you can’t identify at the time.
We call these ‘little t’ traumas:
Anything that causes you to feel ‘shock’, especially as a child, is considered a form of trauma. Because it’s in that moment that a part of you ‘crystalises in time’ and you can stay stuck in this moment, causing an energetic loop of repeated behaviour and experiences.
Whatever it was that you have endured and experienced it all has something in common, and that is: It stays with you, even when you don’t know it’s there.
As we grow up, we carry the pain and energy of our past with us and it has so much influence over who we are, how we react to people and situations, who we date, who we let into our lives, our health and body image, as well as the choices we make in our daily lives.
Your past is so incredibly powerful and has more influence over your present life than you might realise.
Even as we age, and hypothetically move further and further away from these traumatic experiences, they can still hold incredible power over us.
Our brains cannot tell the difference between a daydream, an emotion caused by a past event or something happening in the present. That’s why recalling a traumatic experience can cause everything from panic and anxiety, to anger or rage to sadness and fear.
When we’re exposed to, or have held onto, this kind of pain for too long, it bends the body and mind to its will. It rewires our neural pathways and it infects our energy. It can even make us physically sick.
As long as our pain stays unresolved, we can always be triggered by our past.
This is why conventional talk therapies can very often fail us.
When we are asked to talk our way through our trauma, we confront and feel the pain of it over and over again. It still hurts and so we recoil from it. And yet we do this until we become numb to it. Convincing ourselves that we’re now free of it.
Without a physical releasing of emotional pain, there is no room for anything else to flourish. That’s why you can try all the affirmations and the coping strategies you like, with no success.
Think of it like trying to cultivate crops in a desert.
You can sow the most beautiful seeds, but if the earth is burnt and barren, they won’t take.
I know this, because I’ve done it too.
I’ve swallowed my emotions because it felt safer than actually facing them.
I’ve given away my power to other people because I didn’t know how to fight for myself. My past, and in particular my childhood, taught me that to fight back meant even more pain and punishment. I spent so much of my life in fear and I equated that to being a failure and no one would ever be able to understand that or want to help me.
I believed being alone and doing it alone was all that life had for me…
But it turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong. I found a way to break the cycle. And you can too.
It certainly wasn’t a linear process, however.
As I approached my early thirties, more and more ‘stuff’ was coming to the surface. I felt bombarded, mentally and emotionally, by so many events and people from my past which were exacerbated further by the stress of my day to day living. Memories and feelings were coming out of the shadows asking to be looked at and let go of.
I ended up having a breakdown. Discs were slipping in my back, I was covered in patches of eczema, my panic attacks were so severe that I couldn’t breath and I couldn’t go to work.
I started to believe that I was weak and that I should be able to do better – but my body and my mind had other ideas.
This is an evidence-based technique – scientifically proven – to help rewire how you feel about situations. This is important because, believe it or not, it is your emotions that are keeping you stuck. (This is what PTSD is – an overflowing and explosive release of emotions from the amygdala in the brain that the body and mind just can’t cope with).
EFT counselling heals the emotional and physical pain caused by trauma, through a technique known as ‘tapping’. It’s like acupuncture, but without the needles.
We stimulate meridian points on the body. Each point has a connection to our organs as well as the amygdala, the part of our brain that controls emotions, memories and our fight, flight, freeze, appease, fawn response. In other words, this is the place where our entire history is stored.
When we ‘tap’ on these points around the body, we’re able to access our past experiences and release the emotional memory and pain that they cause us.
Sceptical? I was too. But here’s why it works.
For most of us, our traumas are buried deep. And this means we can’t just talk our way through it. No amount of ‘managing triggers’ or talking about it will get close.
When you’re at the point of breakdown, surface-level healing won’t work.
