Welcome to Breakdown to Breakthrough,
The podcast that empowers you to transform your life by awakening to your true authentic self.
I'm Lisa A.
Romano,
Your host.
As an award-winning author and certified life coach,
I've dedicated my life to helping others understand the incredible power of an organized mind.
I believe that true empowerment begins with awakening to our false self.
My mission is to support you on your journey toward mental and emotional regeneration through conscious and deliberate awakening.
In this podcast,
I'll share insights,
Tools,
And transformative stories that illuminate the path to healing and self-discovery.
Namaste,
Everybody.
So today I want to talk about your higher self and trauma and why it's so difficult to access the higher self when you have trauma.
So what is trauma?
So trauma can be defined as an event that overwhelmed you at a point in your life that you were unable to process emotionally.
You were unable to make sense of it psychologically.
And so there was this traumatic event and you stayed at a peak height,
Like a really high height where you felt overwhelmed.
You felt that this was too much.
You could not process what just happened in front of you.
I often refer back to when I was a little girl,
My dog died.
My dad put her in a black garbage bag and threw her into a dumpster,
Actually a garbage truck.
That traumatized me.
And there was no one there in that experience to say,
Lisa,
The dog passed away,
Whatever,
Like some type of explanation that would allow me to make sense of the fact that this was my beloved pet.
Now she's in a black garbage bag and you're just tossing her into the back of a garbage truck.
That was traumatic for me.
And I was overwhelmed at the time.
And my parents weren't very good at understanding what children needed.
I needed someone to validate the horror,
The shock,
The grief,
And the loss.
There was no one outside of me to become what I call the witness to my experiences.
So psychologically,
What choice did I have but to shunt these experiences?
On top of that,
I was brainwashed and conditioned not only by my parents,
Who were adult children of alcoholics,
Never did any recovery work,
To believe that feelings were irrelevant,
They were unnecessary,
They were a bunch of psycho mumbo jumbo,
That if you had emotions and you shared them,
You were weak.
If you dared to cry,
You became a burden.
And that really disrupted what was happening in the home.
That would cause conflict within mom.
She would become overwhelmed.
She would rage.
Of course,
There were no witnesses to her raging.
She would sing around the house these crazy songs that implied that we were driving her crazy.
And of course,
Like I said,
This was just in front of me,
My brother and my sister,
There were no witnesses.
And she would then shunt those experiences the minute my dad walked in the house,
Which taught me that it's not okay to feel these feelings.
It's really bad.
It's so bad that you have to hide them.
It's so bad that you only do it in front of little powerless people or express your emotions around little powerless people.
You never express yourself in front of this big person.
It also taught me to fear men.
It taught me to fear what other people thought about me.
Aside from that,
I also came from a very religious background.
We were raised Catholic.
And part of the indoctrination was that I was born a sinner.
So everything that I was feeling meant that I was no good.
I was unworthy.
There was something wrong with me.
Somehow I was born broken.
And so when you think about the multifaceted,
Multidimensional being that just me,
That I as a little girl was,
Which is the same for you,
It's the same for anyone,
We are multidimensional beings.
And when we're talking about the higher self,
We're talking about the ability to connect to our divinity,
The ability to connect to the organized mind,
The part of our mind that allows us to make sense out of our emotions.
Now,
You can't connect to that higher self,
That objective,
Divine,
All compassionate,
All loving,
All forgiving,
All understanding aspect of you with all of this muck and mire that is stored at the subconscious level.
You just can't because the human mind is more subconscious than it is conscious,
Which means that although everybody that we see is walking and talking below the veil of consciousness,
It is really the ego that is doing the running of the ship.
It is the ego story.
It's you thinking that you're this gender,
That you have this eye color,
You have this job skill,
You have this career,
You have this family,
You have this mom,
You have this dad,
You have this family history,
That becomes your ego identity.
And you will not know that you are not these ego markers or these ego identities.
And so that's why we can get stuck in our trauma.
When trauma happens,
We become arrested at the psychological,
The emotional,
The cognitive,
The neurological,
And even the spiritual level.
We become arrested.
And we perceive the world through that lens.
So whatever trauma happened to me and whatever my inner child believed,
Whatever my neurological processes became,
Where we associate pain with expressing our emotions,
We associate pleasure with shutting down.
We associate pleasure with disconnecting from the authentic self.
So there are psychological consequences that affect each and every one of us despite where we come from.
So when we take a step back and we view ourselves as these multi-dimensional beings,
When we look at all of the very layers,
So many different layers of indoctrination,
What did you learn about yourself through your family of origin?
What did they teach you to believe?
What did you learn about yourself through the faith that you grew up in?
Now,
Any faith that teaches duality,
In my opinion,
That's where suffering comes from.
If you have been taught that God,
Source,
Holy Spirit is outside of you,
That's duality.
And what we're trying to achieve is unity.
We're trying to achieve oneness consciousness.
We're trying to stop pushing away the parts of ourselves that aren't the prettiest,
The parts of ourselves that we would consider represent our shadow self or our false self.
And everybody has a false self.
You're not a bad person.
That just makes you human.
But the higher above the veil you fly,
The more conscious you become,
The more cognitive you become,
The more critical you become,
The more objective you become,
The more forgiving you become up and out of the shadows,
Then you're able to observe yourself from a higher state of consciousness.
That's when you can merge the inner child with your authentic self.
So it's difficult,
If not impossible,
To connect to the higher self when there is trauma and when you don't understand the consequences of trauma.
When you look at it from one dimension only,
My father said X,
Y,
And Z,
Did X,
Y,
And Z.
My mother did this to me,
Whatever.
My spouse,
My narcissistic husband,
My narcissistic wife,
Parental alienation.
When we just see the trauma and the traumatic event and the consequences through a singular lens versus a multidimensional or a mystical or spiritual or objective lens,
Then we get stuck.
Because then we think that the enemy is outside of us.
And we don't realize that a lot of our suffering is coming from the way we view things.
It's our perception,
It's our stuckness,
It's our ego identity,
It's identifying with the story.
You need to develop that awareness,
Like what's wrong is really patterns and programs that have been downloaded at the subconscious level that have had a multitude of consequences.
They include spiritual consequences,
Because if you don't think you're good enough,
Then that's going to block your ability to connect to higher self.
You can't live with a spiritual intelligence.
You can't grow spiritually.
If you,
At the psychological level,
Or even at the subconscious level,
Believe that you're not good enough,
That's going to block you.
If you have been taught that expressing your emotions or looking within is selfish,
At the psychological level,
Again,
Subconscious level,
You're going to associate pain with growing spiritually.
So you might recoil at the idea of breaking free of a toxic relationship because your family might disagree with you,
Or your narcissistic spouse is not giving you permission to feel what you feel.
That was definitely my case,
Where I was under the belief and the guise that I needed permission to feel my feelings.
And so when my ex-husband didn't agree that I thought that our marriage was so dysfunctional,
I've stayed stuck because I was below the veil of consciousness.
I didn't understand how my childhood had impacted me psychologically,
Had impacted me neurologically,
Had impacted me in terms of consciousness.
I was below the veil of consciousness.
When we understand that various levels of indoctrination,
Such as religion,
Can also cause us to be arrested.
And so if you are looking for a God that exists outside of you,
And you don't believe that whatever created you is also within you,
Or is you,
Then it's going to be difficult for you to spiritually grow.
It's going to be difficult for you to become self-actualized.
And so many of us have been taught that our salvation is outside of us,
And it makes sense.
But that's because things went awry from day one.
If we had incarnated on planet earth,
And we were allowed to stay connected to our divine wisdom,
We knew when to cry.
We knew when we were uncomfortable.
We knew when it was time to be comforted.
We knew when it was time to eat,
When we were infants and newborns.
But when we're born to people who basically send us the message that,
If you don't think like me,
I'm going to pull affection from you.
If you don't think like me,
If you don't behave the way I want to,
That love and that divinity that you're connected to is going to be in jeopardy,
Because I'm going to pull all of the love,
And all of my affection,
And all of my attention away from you,
Which is otherwise known as abandonment trauma.
And in this case,
Then,
I,
As a little girl,
Am being taught to push away myself.
I'm being taught not to know myself,
And to focus more on you.
You,
As a child,
Are taught that knowing yourself is not the way to experience peace,
Love,
And abundance in your life,
That your safety comes.
And it's true.
Your safety comes by abandoning the self,
And becoming hypervigilant,
And fawning after,
Or seeking the approval,
Or certainly avoiding the criticism and the rejection of the people that you rely on,
Also known as your caretakers.
And it's an important strategy.
It's a survival strategy.
Because if I come into this world,
And I know that sitting on my dad's knee,
Or dancing around the kitchen,
Like a little ballerina,
Annoys my mother,
Who is feeding me,
Who is clothing me,
And who is basically taking care of me,
And I can't take care of myself,
Then it's a good strategy to focus on her,
Become hyper-focused on her,
Pay attention to her mood,
And then to adjust my mood to what's happening with her.
It makes sense to shut myself down,
And to abandon the self for the sake of the connection to the person who is responsible for taking care of me.
The problem is that if we remain there,
If we allow trauma to control us,
Or the consequences of trauma to control us,
We cannot connect to our higher self.
We cannot connect to our authentic self.
So the whole point of this session is,
I go there.
I go into the darkness.
I show you exactly what was wrong,
So that you can develop the detached awareness and objectivity to recognize what's in the way of you connecting with your higher self.
Because what's in the way of you connecting with your higher self is the sense of separation consciousness from your inner child to your higher self.
And all of these stumbling blocks,
And all of these energetic blocks that you were not allowed to express as a child prevent you from transcending the trauma.
And so the healing work,
It's long sometimes.
It's arduous.
It can be painful.
But I think what happens is when you're doing this work correctly,
You become aware of the pain,
And you are processing the pain in real time.
When instead,
When you are codependent,
When you're a people pleaser,
When you're focused on egotistical things,
When you're seeking approval,
When you're trying to get a lot of likes on Instagram versus really honoring your true self,
When you are more other focused,
What does the world think about me?
Then what do I think about the world?
What do I think about myself?
Then you're not always in contact with how you are operating in a separation consciousness.
And I think what happens is as we heal,
The emotions that are stuck begin to come to the surface.
And so we're always suffering,
And we're bringing more suffering in the repetition compulsion of living below the veil.
And when you're healing,
We're bringing that pain to the surface.
We're bringing it to the light,
As Rumi says.
And we have the ability to do that.
We are more spirit than we are flesh and bones.
And I just hope that this session has been helpful.
Namaste,
Everybody.
It's a bow to love and light that is absolutely in you.
You are enough.
