Childhood Trauma And Free Will

Healing childhood trauma is one of the most empowering things any human can do. Childhood trauma leaves behind an emotional, cognitive, and psychological residue that can make perceiving the world in a healthy way as well as ourselves almost impossible.

In this episode, Lisa dives into the question of free will. As trauma survivors, this is an important question to ask ourselves as we consider how the brain and mind are wired to perceive the world based on personal biases. She hopes to help other trauma survivors follow in her footsteps and learn to question the beliefs they hold that shape their view of the world, others, and the self.

Transcript

Welcome to the breakdown to breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Best-selling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the breakdown to breakthrough podcast.

So today we're going to be talking about trauma and free will.

So when we're talking about trauma,

We're talking about something that has occurred in our life that has now inhibited our ability to act more consciously.

And that's what trauma is.

Trauma is or can be an event that happens to us at a point in our life where it's just overwhelming and we cannot process what has actually taken place.

There is this effect of us being stuck in the past and it is a very difficult thing to move past because oftentimes trauma leaves behind these invisible wounds.

What do I mean by that?

Well,

When we are children specifically and things are happening around us that we are powerless to control,

We are overwhelmed by our dependence upon the people that we love.

And organically we come here to attach to those that we love.

And in the best case scenario,

Those that we love will envelop us.

They will love us.

They will draw us in.

They will validate our emotions.

And in that way,

Our brain then develop this concept of self or personalities in conjunction with our brain develop this ability to wire for a sense of self.

So now I have self perception.

The fact that I have consciousness,

The fact that I am aware of how I feel implies a higher brain function.

The problem with trauma is that my level of consciousness can be hijacked outside of,

Let's say,

Awareness.

Trauma then interferes with free will.

I myself,

As someone who struggled with childhood trauma,

The result of emotional neglect and psychological abuse,

Sorry mom,

Sorry dad,

It is what it is.

Although those sound like very harsh statements,

They were true.

Being gaslit was a part of our story.

And many of us grew up with parents who were stuck in their own trauma,

In their own drama.

Many of us have grown up with parents who are desensitized.

They are stuck in their own trauma and they too have very little,

Let's say,

Conscious awareness around their own wounds.

And so if we were to approach this idea of free will from levels of consciousness,

Meaning that let's say that we incarnate and we experience spiritual amnesia,

Which I think we all do,

And we forget from which we came.

And as a result of forgetting,

I am born into a physical apparatus that is subject to the five physical senses.

And my physical brain now is interfacing with this stimuli.

My brain comes pre-built to want to strive towards survival.

My brain comes pre-built to live in fear or to have a reaction to things like abandonment,

Things like yelling,

Things like screaming,

Things like abuse,

Or things that harm me physically.

My brain will send me a chemical reaction or my brain will react to a harmful situation with stress hormones.

I didn't create that design.

You didn't create that design.

The essence that you are that's been plucked down into this physical body is subject to these designs.

And that's an important distinction to remember.

And so here you are,

Let's say for argument's sake,

This spiritual being that has spiritual amnesia and now the state of consciousness that you're in as a child is very limited.

You're in a theta brainwave state.

At the level of this brainwave state,

You are now being conditioned and brainwashed according to external experiences.

Now if you have negative external experiences,

Then below the veil of consciousness,

Your brain will wire accordingly.

Your reticular activating system,

The bunch of neurofibers in your brain that essentially are gatekeepers are now going to filter out information that goes against your belief system.

How did this happen in my life?

Because I think drawing analogies and sharing personal stories helps other people apply it to their life.

As a little girl,

I felt like an alien.

By the time I was seven,

I was convinced that I was a Martian,

That I was dropped off by some ship because nothing made sense.

My world was very cold.

It was very rigid.

I felt very unloved.

My mother was very aggressive and very hostile towards me.

And life just was very complicated.

I was forced to disown my own reality.

In essence,

I was betrayed by my reality.

My father,

For instance,

When I,

At seven years old,

Said to him,

Dad,

I don't think mommy loves me,

He taught me to betray my reality by saying,

Don't ever say that again.

There was no curiosity.

There was no empathy.

There was no desire for understanding why this little seven-year-old daughter of his would say such a thing about her mother.

And so that taught me that I needed to shut down,

That it was bad to speak up for myself.

Now at a neurological level,

I ended up in terms of,

Think about neuroscience,

My reticular activating system,

The gatekeeper of my brain that allows information to flow into my consciousness or not,

Was primed to associate fear with speaking up.

So part of my belief system was it's bad to speak up.

Part of my belief system was it's good to suppress.

Part of my belief system was wear a mask,

Smile,

Pretend,

Make other people happy,

All at the expense of yourself if it means that you will avoid making other people unhappy,

Which was my attempt at an unconscious level to avoid the pain of abandonment.

In essence,

In all of my coping strategies,

The reality was I was in pain.

That even though I was codependent and even though I was suppressing and even though I was emotionally dependent on other people,

Even though I made other people my God,

Even though on some level I'm thinking that this is the way I get to avoid pain,

The reality was I wasn't avoiding anything.

I was absolutely in pain.

And by the time I was in my early 30s,

My body was failing pretty rapidly.

And so when it comes to understanding trauma and free will,

What free will did I really have if below the veil of consciousness I was hijacked to believe that I was unworthy and that my ideas were wrong and that me asking for help meant that I was weak?

Did I really have free will when below the veil of consciousness the trauma or the consequences of trauma were really running my life at a neurological level?

Because when we understand trauma,

We have to understand that the brain is designed to filter in and filter out information that we have at some point in our lives learned to believe is true.

Unfortunately,

What that does is that creates a cognitive bias.

So if I believe that I'm unworthy of love,

Then when people try to tell me that I'm worthy of love,

I will reject it.

And I have had this experience many times in my life where I manifested a wonderful friend and I screwed it up,

Where I was in a relationship with a young boy that I thought possibly really liked me and I screwed it up.

What did I gravitate towards?

I gravitated towards chaos.

I gravitated towards needing to prove myself.

Although it looks on the surface like those of us who marry our mothers and marry our fathers,

It looks like we're making these choices rationally.

But I believe that there's an argument to be had that questions the nature of free will when we are traumatized,

Before we have a spiritual awakening,

Before we have this separation in consciousness where we recognize,

Wait a minute,

I am not my programming.

That was a huge moment for me when I realized,

Wait a minute,

Who's doing the thinking?

Then it was like,

Holy Hannah,

Who's doing the observing?

Then it was like,

Who's asking these questions?

And it really was this incredibly powerful moment where nothing would ever be the same again because I was developing the ability to observe my thoughts from a higher state of consciousness.

Now,

When this happens to you,

Nothing will ever be the same.

Now,

Some of us who go through this,

We stay on the path and we continue to grow and we continue to explore.

Some of us have a false spiritual awakening.

Again,

This is something that I experienced.

After my divorce,

I assumed that because I understood that my parents were adult children of alcoholics and unrecovered and that their unconsciousness and their faulty parenting skills,

Their condescending comments,

Their gaslighting,

All of it,

The way that they spoke to us,

The putting us down and all of it,

The refusal to be nurturing and thinking that,

Well,

They're making us tough.

All it really did was make us weak.

Love makes you strong.

Acceptance makes you strong.

Appreciation makes you strong.

And anything less than that actually makes you weak.

I did not understand that although I was codependent and my marriage thus was codependent,

I didn't yet make the connection to this idea that that was aside from my marriage.

In other words,

I came into my relationship wounded.

The relationship itself mirrored the relationship that I had with my mother in a freaky way because my ex,

Like my mother,

Was someone who withheld love.

He was somebody who was highly passive aggressive.

He was highly condescending.

He was one way in front of people and a different way behind closed doors.

There was a lack of empathy.

There was a lack of a desire to communicate and to meet in the middle.

And so there was a desire to dominate and control and to stonewall,

Which really became the demise of our relationship.

And ultimately it forced me to realize,

Because my body was failing,

That I was living in a state of complete duress outside of balance,

Outside of harmony.

And I really was not living in alignment with the types of spiritual laws or the type of psychological truths that allow someone to manifest a life that's purposeful and worth living.

If anything,

I was going in the opposite direction.

It was sort of like I was a tree and rather than growing up towards the sun,

I was growing down as a root system and there was nothing above the level of soil.

There was no reaching towards the sun.

There was no grabbing of the rain.

There was no appreciation of being this incredible tree above the veil or above soil.

I lived below the soil,

Which really is a metaphor for living in the past.

As I began to awaken,

I started to understand that whatever situation I had found myself in,

It was not conducive to my mental health.

It was not conducive to my physical health.

And then I began to realize that it wasn't me.

It was just my programming.

And in that state of awareness and that state of consciousness,

I sort of freaked out because I realized that I had been living a life on autopilot,

That it was very much the default settings of my brain that had arrested me.

In the spiritual sense,

I was living a life of spiritual amnesia.

I had no idea that I was connected to everything or that everything was connected to me.

This idea of unity consciousness,

No flipping clue as to what the heck that meant because my lower self or my ego self,

My false mask,

The person that I thought that I was,

That I wasn't,

That others programmed me to believe,

That trauma prevented me from escaping,

Had taught me to believe that I was not worthy to receive.

As I had this incredible moment where I was driving down the highway and I looked at this magnificent tree and it hit me that whoever and whatever created that tree created me.

And I had this incredible sense of oneness.

This incredible peace came over me.

And then I started to think about all the people in my life that I loved who had battled me to the point internally and emotionally that reinforced the opposite notion that I was unworthy,

That I was crazy,

That I was a negative thinker,

There was something wrong with me.

And I thought,

Wow,

It's time for me to start cutting these people out of my life and me to believe something different.

And that really was the beginning of this spiritual journey.

But certainly this experience of having a false awakening in which I didn't realize that what was wrong was me,

That it wasn't just my marriage that was codependent.

I was codependent and I needed to get deep into the psychological healing that I needed to do in order for me to align my spiritual self and my cognitive mind with the true laws that govern time and space so that I could live a life of purpose and truly align with love and truly align with freedom and experience this idea of magic in life that,

Wait a minute,

I am in control and I can manifest and I can choose different ideas.

But first you have to awaken from this trauma experience.

If you were raised by a narcissistic parent,

Then you have to understand how that has affected you at the neurological level,

At the psychological level,

And at the spiritual level.

If all human beings incarnate and forget who they are,

Then that's bad enough.

But when you have a narcissistic mother or a narcissistic father or you are engaged in a situation where you are surrounded by people who are of the level one consciousness,

The matrix consciousness,

And they're all acting out their trauma,

And if their way of dealing with life is through dominance and control and your way of dealing with life is through agreeableness and not having conflicts and you're the peacemaker,

Well then you're both going to get stuck in that level of consciousness and you're never going to be able to escape it until you awaken.

And so I think it's important that those of us who have had trauma in our background,

We take a moment to understand that trauma arrests us at the psychological level,

At the neurological level,

At the spiritual level.

It prevents our growth because until I'm able to have a birthing of consciousness in which I'm able to question my thought process and question what I believe,

Then my false self believes in the narrative that's running.

So now it also believes that I can't go up against a narcissist or I should always keep my mouth shut or I shouldn't feel my feelings.

So these become the rules by which I'm governing my life at the subconscious level.

And so what is it hijacking?

It's hijacking my free will.

And so it's super important that if you come from trauma,

If this type of work that I offer and the similar work of other people who are offering this type of work,

If it resonates with you,

I really encourage you to look for the consciousness piece because trauma will arrest you.

You already come to planet earth with spiritual amnesia and you forget who you really are.

And that's the purpose.

And I could do another session about the purpose of spiritual amnesia because I think it is important because if we incarnate on planet earth knowing that we are one with everything and everything is us,

Then we are just actors and we really aren't having a true transformation of going from believing ourselves less than to believing ourselves to be a higher self.

There really is no transformation.

We're just acting at that point.

But when we literally come to planet earth and we don't remember and our consciousness is awakened and so many of you write me and tell me that your video or your book or your program or something I saw on social media woke me up.

That is the greatest type of email or feedback I could ever get because that is the entire of a teacher,

Of someone who is in this line of work.

Our goal is to get the message out that you're asleep and get the message out that there is a dreamer having a dream and it's not your fault because what has been programmed to you at the subconscious level now is playing on the screen of your mind and you believe it and the rules by which you have been governing your life are subconscious.

That's why I always say it's not you,

It's your programming.

However,

The great news is that you can awaken.

You can come out of this dream state.

There are many,

Many,

Many,

Many,

Many,

Many layers of transformation that we have to go through.

I think about the transformational journey as going from the spiritual amnesia,

This shadow world and having to walk through all of these doors have been created in the subconscious mind,

Some of which are more frightening than others,

But the goal really is to be able to know then that is the work.

And so that is trauma recovery.

I do have subconscious programming that is affecting my ability to live more consciously and advocate for myself.

And there are true valid reasons for why.

They are neurological,

They are psychological,

And they run by default.

However,

When we say to ourselves,

Wait a minute,

I can live in this reality and I have been living in that reality and trauma has hijacked my ability to think of my feelings,

Emotions,

And perceptions of self and perception of others objectively.

We're trying to get you to become the non-resistant objective observer of everything that is.

Now when you reach the level of consciousness,

That's when you develop freedom because it's in that state of consciousness,

You discover true free will.

Am I going to beat the drum of that or am I going to ebb in the direction of something different?

One of the exercises that I encourage people to use is what I call Shutty Shutty.

Now when I began to realize that trauma had hijacked my consciousness and free will,

I understood why I was going back at my ex so much,

Especially after I was finally able to get out of the house.

We sold the house,

I was in a new home.

The harassing phone calls kept coming.

And when I realized that it was this unjust fairness piece,

Like I didn't like that things were unjust,

I didn't like that things were so unfair,

I didn't like that he was only telling part of the story,

And I felt like I needed to push back.

And in the pushing back,

I failed to recognize that I can't control something that happens outside of me.

And so part of my consciousness journey forward was Shutty Shutty.

The one day that he called me,

Probably between 20 and 30 times,

I had a flip phone at the time,

I was working at a wellness center,

I heard my phone going off in the locker,

And I went to the locker and I flipped open my phone and I saw many,

Many negative texts from him.

Even though I could feel this,

How dare he?

Oh yeah,

I'm going to set him straight.

I don't have to be afraid of him.

How dare he try to intimidate me?

What I did was I just decided to shut the phone.

It was Shutty Shutty.

And so it was me taking my attention away from what was,

From the paradigm I was living,

From my false self's reality,

From the tango between my false codependent self and his self.

And rather than go into that dance again,

I chose a different direction.

So that marked the beginning of me exercising my free will.

And also through with the divorce attorney,

Through with an order of protection,

Finding a house,

These action steps that I took were absolutely ebbing me in the direction of invoking free will.

Now,

I really hope that this session has been helpful for anyone out there who ever asked themselves like,

Why can't I change?

Why aren't I making different choices?

Try to understand that trauma will arrest your free will.

And when you hear yourself saying,

I should do this,

Try to also remember that there are psychological default settings within your subconscious mind that might be hijacking your ability to advocate for yourself.

But the more conscious that you can become,

The more aware you can become,

The more you can separate your consciousness,

Right?

Have a divide of consciousness where you recognize,

Wait a minute,

There is an observer within me.

And maybe I am acting out old belief systems.

And then you question yourself,

What would happen in my life if I adopted a new belief system?

What if I accepted what was,

And I started to reframe my reality or my perception of self if I only offered myself a compassionate inner narrative?

What if despite what was going on over here,

I decided to focus on what was going on over here?

I highly recommend that if this resonates with you,

Please know that spiritually bypassing is not the answer.

There is no quick fix.

And there are far too many people out there telling you what needs to get done,

But not telling you how to get it done.

Without us recognizing,

Those of us who are interested in spiritual healing,

Without us recognizing the psychological component,

We're going to spiritually bypass,

Which affects the reticular activating system,

Which basically is the gatekeeper between the subconscious and the conscious mind.

It has been downloaded with parameters that have been based on childhood experiences that are often based in trauma,

Which means that if I don't think that I'm worthy,

Then my brain is going to filter out information that suggests that I am.

So I won't go out for that job and I won't take the extra course so that I can make more money at my job.

So I won't go to that dance class,

Even though every ounce of my being wants me to take that dance,

I won't do it.

I won't speak up.

So we want to be careful,

Those of us who know that we have trauma in our background,

There's no way to fast track a true healing and recovery journey.

But I can tell you that if you do this work,

You do it diligently,

You take your time to heal,

To break it down and to understand yourself from all angles,

The journey that you are on is so worth it.

You eventually come to a place where you understand that you are always tethered to a unified consciousness.

As you begin to learn how to let go of your resistance to some of the things that are happening in your experience,

Especially to those things that you cannot control.

When you begin to make peace with what you can't control,

Then you experience so much more lightness in your body and you're not so dense anymore and trauma no longer hijacks your free will.

That is when you develop the free will and the consciousness to move about in this 3D reality from a higher state of consciousness with intention.

I so hope that this has been helpful.

Namaste everybody.

Until next time.

Bye for now.

Reviews

So much good information here that resonates with me. I’ll be listening to it a few more times. Thanks, Lisa

Yes. Helpful. 🌈🫶

Lisa, thank you so much for this 🙏you are a genius and after listening to this, I feel like my eyes are open a bit more. The “false spiritual awakening” really resonated; I’ve been meditating for years now with a bit of progress here and there, but still feeling a sense of “stuckness” that I was having trouble understanding and processing. I realize now that I was still living reactively to my trauma. I’m still on the path of healing, but self love and self acceptance and changing the internal dialogue doesn’t feel so scary now. I just love you so much 🙏❤️✨🪷thank you for all you do for us

I related so much to this & very powerful. Thank you.

💜

Lisa, I can’t thank you enough! This talk was not only validating but educational and definitely awakening✨✨✨ thank you so much 💖