A path to healing
Sometimes small sparks can ignite an unprecedented fire. A simple "no" that we hear can give us access to the feeling of rejection. Someone's absence can make us feel abandoned. Criticism can lead us to the place where we doubt our own worth...
There are many negative self-beliefs that we build up throughout our lives as we face traumatic experiences. "I'm worthless", "I'm not good enough", "It's my fault", "I'm not worthy of being loved", "I don't deserve it", "I'm inadequate", "I'm a bad person", "I'm invisible", "I don't belong", "I'm weak"... just to name a few.
And these little sparks can unexpectedly open a portal to the world of our deepest pains. Pains that stem from our past traumas and painful experiences.
Suddenly, we find ourselves back in the past, reliving deep pain, re-enacting familiar scenes with different characters.
Are we looking for people with similar profiles, who tend to re-enact the dynamics we've already experienced? Or is it our gaze, contaminated by our internal triggers, that reads situations in a similar way, filtering experiences through familiar lenses that feed those pains and negative self-beliefs that want to survive in our subconscious?
And why do they want to survive? Why do we unconsciously feed them?
What we believe about ourselves is our known territory, our constructed identity. We cling to it because it's what we know and have learned about ourselves. Without it, an unknown and often distressing void opens up. But this is undoubtedly where we need to look if we want to let go of these old destructive patterns and beliefs.
Just as in the Egyptian/Greek myth of the phoenix, a bird that is reborn from its own ashes, we gradually burn away what doesn't serve us and make room for the new to be born.
Fire here is the symbol of this combustion that transforms. That's why, when these small sparks cause this immense fire, they are directing us to where we still need to look: to our unresolved traumas, to our complexes, as Carl G. Jung said. And this direct access to these painful cores gives us the opportunity to heal them.
By looking at these pains, these beliefs and sustaining this place, which is often painful and dark, we can gradually heal and deconstruct them in order to rebuild ourselves.
And this deconstruction is simply a stripping away of the masks, layers and walls that we have built around ourselves to protect ourselves, to protect our soul, which is the core of our true self, and without which we could not survive.
And as these layers, as well as our protection, have become the identity with which we identify, it's as if, by shedding them, we're shedding who we are. An illusion that I want to deconstruct here, because you are actually the soul behind all these layers.
And as we find ourselves in safe and loving contexts, be it with a partner, friend or psychotherapist, who offers us another look at ourselves, we can gradually say goodbye to these masks and break down the walls that have served us up until now. To build a new way of looking at ourselves.
This is a profound process, which requires the courage to sustain the unknown, to look at the pain, to feel the vulnerabilities and to face our deepest fears.
And it's challenging, since our built-up defenses are so efficient that they end up defending us even from the good things that happen to us and can heal us, because everything ends up becoming threatening, and they will fight at all costs to protect us from being hurt again.
But we are capable of doing so, and this will allow us to rediscover the freedom to be who we are, the strength to be vulnerable and the power to let go of all the negative images we have built up about ourselves, to see who we really are, with all our shadows and lights, because one without the other cannot exist.
Namaste!
*Photos from www.freepik.com
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