I have worked with numerous children and teens who have had what might be considered happy childhoods with all the benefits of loving parents, food on the table, a good education, holidays, friends and on the face of it, everything they need for a good start in life........yet
There is something missing
- perhaps they don't find they can trust anyone
- they don't feel they have a voice
- they don't feel important - they believe their brother or sister is loved more than them
- they feel everyone is out to get them
They are anxious, they have low self-esteem, they get angry, they can't explain what is the problem and we ask "why?" but they don't know why. This is for a very good reason. The core belief they imprinted was made when they were under 6yrs old, probably around the age of 2 or 3yrs when they didn't even consciously record what happened. Sometimes they do remember an incident but perhaps just remember what happened without the meaning they gave it at the time.
Let me share with you one of my childhood memories that imprinted at many levels.
I was being collected from a play date by my mum, I was about 4yrs old and my brother and I were playing at my mum's friend's house with her children. My mum reached towards me with my duffle coat asking me to put it on. "I'm not cold" I said. I don't feel the cold as she does and simply didn't want it on. I'd been running about I expect so I was probably quite hot.
"Don't be silly, just put it on" she told me, now wrenching my arm round and trying to force it on me. It hurt.
"Ow, you're hurting me" I wailed.
"Why are you so difficult?" she complained, continuing to try and force my arm into the stiff duffle coat.
Now on the face of it, this may seem harmless enough but her tone was angry and annoyed with me. I didn't feel I was doing anything wrong, I simply didn't need a coat. I'm guessing she was embarrassed in front of her friend and I expect my brother was smirking because he did that when I was being told off.
In those minutes I imprinted a belief that I was
- unloved
- difficult
- my needs were not important
- I didn't have a voice
- I was wrong
I think some of these had been imprinted earlier in my life because they seem very familiar when I think back on the relationship with my mother.
The thing is that I only discovered these beliefs through therapy and was able to work on them because none of them are facts, they are simply what meaning I put to them. I can now look back on incidents like these and realise that my mother had low self-esteem and this was all about her wanting to look like a good mum in front of her friend. It was not about me at all BUT small children will think these events are all about them.
Then what happens is that they are subconsciously on the lookout for this sort of thing happening again, and because of this, it does happen again.............time and time again.
Often incidents happen at school where again a person of influence in the small child's world may blame them for something they didn't do or dismiss their work in a way that really hurt at the time.
When we find these events we can revisit them together and from a safe space, supported by tapping and the opportunity to revisit the event as an older version of themselves, they can create a new learning such as "teacher was just making what she thought was the correct decision based on what she saw" or "mum was just stressed at the time" or "my brother didn't mean to break my favourite toy".
I find EFT Tapping so good for clearing those subconscious blocks that talking therapies don't reach. We can go round and round in circles, trying to figure out why we can't seem to move on. By tapping on specific points on our body and tuning in to where that resistance is and where it has come from (often way back in our childhood) we can clear it and feel free and in flow. The problems we encounter in our life, occur because we hold beliefs about ourselves, about others and about 'life' in general, that are preventing us from achieving what we want. Those beliefs were formed before we were six years old and we can't even remember what happened. This is because it was what we call a UDIN. It was: unexpected dramatic isolating and we had no strategy to cope with it As a result we went into 'freeze' locking the memory in our subconscious because we could neither fight or flight in that moment. We made a belief or decision at that time about ourselves. It may be that 'I am unlovable' or 'I am stupid' or 'I'm not important' or something similar. We then spend our lives attracting evidence of this belief because it is trapped and we can't access it consciously.
Perhaps this is reminding you of something that happened in your own childhood or maybe you are remembering something from your child's childhood.
Limiting beliefs come from somewhere. We can even be born with them. I sometimes work with mums on their child's traumatic birth or their own. Sometimes they can be ancestral, often a mother's imprinted during pregnancy and birth or even a grandparent's. This is fascinating work and I do train this if it sounds interesting to you.
Getting rid of limiting beliefs and replacing the script with one that empowers is my passion and calling.
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