For much of my life,
There were patterns I desperately wanted to change.
I knew when I was living in fear.
Knew when I was slipping into victimhood or martyrdom.
I knew when I was over enduring.
Even knew when I was abandoning myself to take care of everyone else.
The frustrating part wasn't that I couldn't see these patterns,
I could.
The frustrating part was that I couldn't seem to stop them.
I could understand why I behaved the way I did.
I could trace things back to my childhood.
I could read the books.
I could do the cognitive work.
I could even promise myself that next time I would choose differently.
And then life would happen.
A relationship,
A conversation,
A disappointment,
A trigger.
And there I was again.
Back in the same familiar pattern.
It wasn't until much later in my healing journey that I understood something.
Sometimes awareness isn't enough to give us choice.
Because underneath the behavior may be something much older that is still unfinished.
When we're children,
Our nervous system is constantly trying to keep us safe.
When something frightful or painful or humiliating or overwhelming happens,
The whole system responds.
And we might want to fight or run away,
Cry,
Scream,
Say no,
Or reach for someone.
Children do this naturally,
Right?
They cry,
They yell,
They stomp their feet,
They run out of the room,
Or they reach for comfort.
And as children grow,
Of course,
They also begin to talk about what happened,
Understand it,
And make meaning from it.
Because processing matters.
Understanding matters.
But there's something even more basic that has to be allowed.
The body has to have its response.
So what happens when it can't?
What happens when expressing anger isn't safe?
When there's nowhere to run.
When crying isn't welcome.
When the person you need comfort from is the person you're afraid of.
When telling the truth could make things worse.
Or when what happened isn't even acknowledged.
The nervous system still has one job.
Protect you.
Sometimes we fight.
Sometimes we try to escape.
Sometimes we freeze.
Sometimes we learn to keep the people around us happy enough that maybe we'll be safe.
Sometimes we disconnect from what we're feeling all together.
And none of this means there is something wrong with the child.
These are adaptations.
They helped us survive what we couldn't change.
But what happens to the emotional response that was interrupted?
The fear that couldn't be felt.
The anger that couldn't move,
Or the grief that couldn't be expressed.
The humiliation that had nowhere to go.
Because that original response wasn't simply happening in our thoughts,
It was happening throughout the body.
Fear changes the breath.
Anger mobilizes us.
Grief brings tears.
The body prepares to move,
To protect,
To reach,
Cry,
Protest,
Or seek comfort.
And if that response isn't safe.
It may have to stop.
So years later,
We can understand exactly what happened,
Right?
We can understand our childhood.
We can recognize our patterns.
We may even understand why the adults around us behaved the way they did.
And that understanding can be incredibly valuable.
But understanding something isn't necessarily the same as completing something.
Because the response that was interrupted simply wasn't a thought.
It was an emotional and physiological response that began within the system and didn't have the opportunity to finish.
And in my own healing,
I've come to understand this as trapped energy.
An incomplete emotional response,
An energy block,
Right?
Something began to move.
And that movement was interrupted.
And one of the deepest things I've learned through my own healing is that feelings want to be felt.
And this is why I also struggle when I hear people described as broken.
I don't believe we're broken.
We're interrupted.
All right,
Something began.
And our nervous system protected us by stopping,
Suppressing or redirecting wasn't safe for us to experience at the time.
That's not brokenness.
That's survival.
And what was interrupted can remain unfinished until there is enough safety and enough capacity for that movement to continue,
Right?
To be felt,
To move.
And sometimes to complete.
But until then,
We still have to live our lives,
Right?
So the system adapts around what remains unfinished.
So imagine a child who discovers that keeping everyone happy helps maintain safety.
That may begin as an adaptation.
Then it becomes a pattern.
They anticipate everyone's needs.
They monitor everyone's emotions.
They keep the peace.
They stop asking what they need.
And after years of repetition,
They may no longer think,
This is something I learned to do.
They think,
I'm just a caretaker.
Maybe needing someone once felt dangerous.
So independence became protection.
And eventually.
.
.
I don't need anyone.
That's just who I am.
Or maybe becoming or being visible brought criticism or humiliation.
So disappearing became safer.
And then eventually I'm just shy.
The adaptation becomes the pattern.
And the pattern can become a pattern.
The identity.
And the identity becomes so familiar that we may not realize how much of our behavior is still being shaped by something unfinished underneath it.
And this is one of the most profound realizations of my own healing.
I knew I was being a victim.
I knew when I was martyring myself.
And I always wanted to change those things,
Right?
But I couldn't simply decide my way out of them.
There was unfinished anger underneath them.
Anger from childhood that I had turned inward because expressing what I actually felt wasn't safe for me at the time.
And when I eventually completed that emotional response,
Something shifted.
Much of the victimhood and martyrdom loosened.
Right,
I didn't sit down and decide,
Okay,
I'm not going to be a martyr anymore.
Something underneath the pattern had changed.
And suddenly the pattern didn't have the same grip on me.
And that happened in different ways throughout my healing,
Right?
The fear loosened,
Humiliation loosened,
And patterns changed.
Parts of my identity also began to change.
And something else happened.
As one thing loosened,
I could see other patterns more clearly.
Things that had once happened automatically became noticeable.
And when I could notice them without as much pressure underneath them.
I had more room to respond differently.
More awareness and more space.
More choice.
And this wasn't one magical breakthrough.
My healing unfolded over a couple of years.
But eventually I completed one of the deepest wounds I had encountered.
What I've come to think of in my own healing as an organizing wound.
I had to meet that wound four different times.
It wasn't all at once,
Right?
My system seemed to allow me to meet what I could and then integrate and eventually return when I had more capacity.
And when that emotional response finally completed,
I understood something I hadn't been able to see before.
That wound had been pushing against everything.
My nervous system,
My behaviors,
My relationships,
My patterns,
My identity.
And my choices.
Not controlling every part of my life or not causing every problem I'd ever had experienced,
But exerting pressure.
Organizing me around survival.
And when that pressure was no longer there in the same way,
I began discovering how much choice I hadn't known I'd lost.
And one of the clearest moments happened when I was flying to Bali earlier this year.
Flying had always activated huge fear in my body.
And in the past,
I could tell myself that I was safe,
Right?
I would do all the things,
I could try to calm myself,
I could use all the right words,
But my body didn't necessarily believe me.
But this time I began calming my nervous system.
And something was different.
For the first time ever,
My body believed me.
I wasn't trying to convince myself I was safe.
I knew it.
And my nervous system seemed to know it too.
And that moment taught me something I'll never forget.
Healing hadn't simply made me calmer.
It had changed what was available to me.
I had more choice.
And none of this happened because I went hunting for the wounds.
My healing unfolded over a couple of years through meditation.
Energy healing and learning to regulate my nervous system.
Spending time in nature and learning to stay with myself.
And as my capacity grew.
Life continued to bring triggers.
I didn't consciously decide one day that I was going to start following them.
It happened naturally as I became more able to stay.
So when something arose,
Instead of automatically numbing it or bypassing it or ignoring it,
Or abandoning myself.
I stay.
I became curious.
What am I feeling?
What's happening in my body.
What is this touching?
And I allowed what was there to be there.
I accepted the feeling as it was.
I didn't demand that it go away.
And when something deeper began to reveal itself,
I followed where it took me.
Not forcing and not digging,
Not trying to manufacture healing.
Staying.
My relationship with what I call higher source also became incredibly important during this process.
When I couldn't understand what was happening,
I would ask,
Please show me what I need to see.
Please show me what I'm not seeing.
And then I listen.
Often the answer came while I was walking in nature.
Sometimes within a day.
And during some of my deepest healing,
The answers almost came immediately.
So whether you call that God or universe,
Universe,
Source,
Spirit,
Your higher self or inner knowing,
Or something else entirely.
For me,
It was about trusting something deeper than my thinking mind.
Trusting my own inner authority.
Trusting that I didn't have to figure everything out.
I needed to stay available to what was ready to be seen.
And energy healing was also an important part of this for me.
Because in my own experience and in the way I've been trained,
Energy healing can accelerate the healing process.
And that doesn't mean skipping the work.
It doesn't mean finding one energy block and suddenly everything is healed.
My healing took a couple of years.
But energy healing gave me another way of being present with myself.
I could notice the subtle movement,
The sensations,
Right?
Energy moving through my body and my field.
It brought my attention away from constantly trying to think my way through healing and back into my experience.
And as my capacity grew.
Life kept doing what life does.
It brought me triggers.
The difference was that I had become more able to remain with myself when they arrived.
And sometimes following those triggers eventually brought me to an emotional response that had been waiting a very long time to finish.
So if you find yourself repeating a pattern you understand but still can't seem to change,
Maybe the question isn't,
What's wrong with me?
And maybe it isn't even,
Why do I keep doing this?
Perhaps it's another question.
What might this pattern have once been protecting?
And when life activates something within you.
What is this moment asking me to stay with?
You don't have to force an answer and you don't have to go digging through your childhood looking for wounds.
And you don't even have to overwhelm yourself trying to feel everything at once.
Build the capacity to stay.
Allow what you're feeling.
Accept what is there,
Become curious,
And let your system show you what it's ready to show you.
Because sometimes what we've spent years calling our personality is partly the shape we took around something we couldn't safely feel.
We weren't broken.
We adapted around something interrupted.
And healing doesn't erase who we are.
It can loosen what we had to become in order to survive.
It can relieve some of the pressure that has been organizing us so that something else becomes available.
More space.
More freedom.
And perhaps one of the greatest gifts healing has given me.
Choice.
Thank you so much for being here with me today.
I'll see you next time.
