Do You Abandon Self? Honoring The Lost Child Within

Feeling empty, alone, and like you do not belong is a valid experience for the adult who has experienced emotional neglect and or abuse as a small child. Children who are denied a secure attachment to their significant caregivers are forced to abandon the self. It can take a lifetime to find the authentic self, however, that is the journey for us all. In this episode, Lisa A. Romano Life Coach dives into painful emotions for the benefit of finding the road back to the divine self.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling 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 the concept of being a lost child.

And the reason we have conversations such as this is so that we can discover what has caused us to feel lost within the self,

What has caused and what is the root of this loss of selfhood.

If you're like me and so many of my clients who have come from homes that were emotionally neglectful,

I personally came from a home that both my parents were adult children of alcoholics,

I would say struggled with alcohol themselves,

And gambling.

And so when addiction is present and you have parents who are unaware that they're unaware,

Then there is a disconnect between them and their children.

And if parents are disconnected within themselves and struggle with addiction issues,

This could be a chemical dependency as well as a psychological dependency on another person,

As it is in the case of codependency and dependency disorders.

When we have parents who are struggling with dependencies,

They themselves are lost within themselves and the addiction is masking the anxiety and the grief and the unresolved,

Untapped emotions that really do fuel addiction processes.

No one is evil because they have an addiction.

No one is bad.

The brain is simply trying to cope with enormous emotions.

It has never learned to mentally process.

And let's face it,

When we are talking about strong emotions,

We need strong mental processes.

We need equations.

We need skills.

We need systems.

We need tasks like a task list.

So when this happens or when I feel this,

I do that.

This will help us reprogram the reactive mind and the propensity to be overreactive and to be driven by ego.

When you come from a home where you felt invisible,

This could be very difficult for someone to understand this enormous grief and this enormous loss because you don't know that you are in grief.

You don't know that there is loss.

If you came from a home that looked perfect,

If you came from a home where parents were gruff,

They minimized your emotions.

They didn't talk to one another about their emotion.

This becomes very difficult for a child in this situation because the child is learning about self and their emotions,

The value and how to process by how well the parents are able to process their emotions.

If there is no healthy communication between parents,

Children don't know how to communicate with the self.

We need people and parents who are able to handle their emotions,

Specifically strong negative emotions.

When parents are able to process strong emotions rather than react to frustration,

React to anger,

React through ego,

That is when they teach the children to do the same.

There is great benefit in that.

But most of us,

Many of us I should say,

Didn't have the benefit of such experiences and I am of the belief that that is why so many of us struggle with food addiction or love addiction,

Fantasy thinking,

Anxiety and depression.

If you are a lost child,

Your family may have had the no talk rule.

We didn't talk about what was really happening in the family.

We pretended that things were okay when they weren't okay or worse.

There was a scapegoated child,

Maybe that child was you.

There was one child that was picked on and the family dumped all of the dysfunction into the lap of that child.

What happens in the minds of a sibling is that,

Oh well,

My sister deserved to get yelled at,

My sister deserved to get punished,

My brother deserved for my father to do that thing because blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

The siblings can become indoctrinated to think that the abuse of one sibling was justified because they are not critical thinkers and we often assume that our parents are God,

Especially if our parents aren't picking on us and they're favoring us.

Being the lost child implies that there was no one there to really help you process emotions.

Parents didn't know how to communicate,

Didn't communicate or they communicated very gruffly.

They were abrasive,

They were toxic,

They were frustrated,

They were disconnected,

They were aloof,

They were in their own head.

This causes a child to come up with reasons why and oftentimes the reason why has to do with they're overwhelmed.

If you assumed that your parents were overwhelmed,

They had problems with other children or problems inside the marriage,

That becomes the why and then on top of it,

Children then try to figure out,

Well,

How can I not cause them more stress?

Now they're dissociating,

They're detaching from their own emotions and at the same time,

They're developing hypervigilance.

Now I notice mom and dad aren't talking,

They're not communicating,

My brother's giving dad a hard time,

He's super frustrated,

I better go in there and smile at my dad or get an A on my paper and not give him a hard time.

Here I am losing myself,

Creating a storyline as to why my dad is frustrated and it's never dad's fault.

Now I have this added layer of feeling loyal to my father,

I am not seeing things clearly,

I'm not understanding the family dynamics are toxic.

Now I have this layer of loyalty to my mom,

Loyalty to my dad,

I have beginnings of a very fractured sibling relationship.

Now my sibling and I are not going to get along,

It's their fault.

He should just do what dad tells him to do and he won't get into trouble.

This is loyalty to parents and then in the meantime,

What's happening is we're becoming disloyal to the self.

So we're not,

We don't know how to connect to our emotions,

We develop hypervigilance and this becomes a way of life and below the veil,

What's happening is unresolved grief.

There's grief work to be done but we can't acknowledge that there's loss because we're in this program and pattern of thinking that's habitual,

That has protected us since we're children but it doesn't work in our adult lives.

We end up with anxiety,

We end up thinking and blaming ourselves for why we're not happy,

We end up ruminating,

We end up obsessing,

We end up attracting people into our lives that are very wounded and we try to fix them and we protect them just like we protected our parents and what we don't realize that what we're doing is when we're protecting our parents and this is a big deal.

If you came from a home where there are a couple of things that could have happened,

If you had parents who told you that you had no right to feel what you felt,

Any form of abandonment trauma,

Whether it's physical abandonment or emotional abandonment will cause shame and that shame will cause us to basically turn on ourselves,

We cocoon ourselves and in the process,

We all develop a false self.

Codependency is a false self.

I need to take care of people.

I'm not enough as I am.

My feelings are unimportant.

I'm not permitted to feel my feelings.

I have to worry about what other people think about my feelings.

I have to be loyal to a fault and as we develop these coping strategies,

We are unaware that we're losing ourselves.

The first process in healing from this is coming out of the denial of the family of origin,

Taking off the rose-colored glasses and you know that you're ready to do this work when life feels like it just doesn't fit anymore,

Almost like you're breaking out of a cocoon,

You're breaking out of a shell,

Your anxiety is like at a point where you're just like,

Why am I like this?

You want to know why am I like this.

For me,

The breakthrough moment was,

Well,

There were many of them but my health was failing.

I was ruminating.

I was obsessing.

They put me on medication.

I wasn't getting the help that I needed.

What I needed was inner child work.

What I needed was to understand codependency,

The root causes of codependency.

What I needed was to allow myself permission to grieve the loss of childhood but no one was directing me in that direction.

When I went into marriage counseling,

I was told I didn't love my husband enough.

I wasn't trying hard enough.

I wanted too much.

I wanted things that didn't exist.

All of these opinions did nothing but induce more shame.

I had no ally in the world.

My parents weren't an ally.

They repeated the rhetoric of my ex-husband.

You're just too much.

You're a drama queen and no one can make you happy.

I didn't realize I had pretty much backed myself into a corner by not feeling my feelings.

I manifested somebody who was on a similar wavelength.

He was someone who believed that feelings were irrelevant.

At least my feelings were irrelevant and he was unaware that to him,

His feelings and his opinions were relevant but mine weren't.

I could never get him to see that dichotomy,

If you will.

There is this great divide where your feelings about me matter but my feelings about you are irrelevant.

I just couldn't get him to see that.

That's part of the cycle when you're codependent and you're in a toxic relationship.

You just think that I'm going to say it this time and he or she is going to get it.

Even with your parents,

I'm going to say,

I'm going to explain this and help them understand why this is so painful and they're going to get it.

It never works because there are just some people who are hardwired to not hear you and they won't awaken in this lifetime and that's difficult.

The first thing to do is to come out of denial.

The second phase,

Which I call it level two consciousness,

Is when we know that we were in a corn maze.

We know that this was programming.

We know that our childhood has done something to us.

We have new awarenesses.

We're becoming more cognitive and we're learning to feel our feelings.

We're in 12-step meetings.

We're starting to talk about what really happened.

We're finding allies,

Whether it's a coach or a therapist or a partner.

We're starting to tell the truth.

Sometimes it's a sibling where you start to just have more authentic conversations with the sibling,

But you're coming out of the program.

That's level two.

Level three consciousness is when you're in the process of reprogramming.

You're finding your true self.

You're understanding what you missed.

You're not going into codependent behaviors.

You're thinking more critically.

You're much more cognitive.

You're more accountable.

You're recognizing that it's not me.

It was my programming.

If you drank too much,

You're aware of that.

You're in 12-step meetings.

You're going to AA.

Maybe you go to church or you go to the synagogue,

But you're finding some faith in something or a higher power that's greater than you are,

Which is really important for some people.

Some people don't need the 12 steps,

But a lot of people do.

I coach people into the recovery process in a similar fashion.

Level three is about reprogramming.

In level three,

You're also re-experiencing what you were never allowed to experience as a child.

This is a corrective experience.

You're not running away from this pain anymore.

Level four is where you are discovering your true self.

You're not ashamed anymore.

This is who I am.

This is what I've been.

My alcoholism is part of my process.

My eating disorder was part of my process.

Anxiety is all part of my process.

That was a consequence of how I grew up.

You're transforming yourself.

You are directing your mind.

Level four is awesome.

Level four is serendipity.

Level four is serenity.

Level four is where you know that you are an extension of everything and everything is an extension of you.

It really is a process of leaving the original home and finding your true self,

Your relationship with your true self,

Which was corrupted in a home that may have looked perfect on the outside but was anything but.

But for those of us like myself,

We're using platforms such as this to share information,

To help people see through what's really happening in their lives,

To understand that you're missing a connection with you.

If you grew up feeling like the lost child,

That's why.

Your life makes sense.

Your trauma brain makes sense.

Your codependency,

Your fear,

Your obsession,

Your rumination,

Your fear of losing control,

Your need to control everything,

The way your mind processes information,

The inability to feel grounded.

Dear one,

That's not your fault.

You can reconnect to the self.

I highly recommend meditation.

As a matter of fact,

Meditation is my medication.

I don't know where I'd be without it.

How I started was very simply just going through YouTube and finding the voice of someone that I thought was helpful.

I did a lot of grounding meditations early on,

Chakra balancing meditations,

Third eye meditations.

Eventually,

It led me to creating my own meditations that help people become more receptive to healing information and untangling,

If you will,

The false narrative of the false self that was devised as a way of coping with this incredible grief and loss and pain and feeling abandoned and never being permitted to feel those feelings.

It's still within us.

We have to recognize that before we're even verbal,

We needed to know that our families loved us and wanted us.

We're happy that we were who we were.

They accepted us into the family.

Parents can give an infant and a newborn those feelings.

My granddaughter is almost three months old.

Every time I hold her,

I look her in the eye and I tell her,

I love you.

You are wanted.

You are safe.

You are protected.

You're meant to be here.

We're going to take care of you for the rest of your life.

We're going to encourage you.

What are your innate gifts?

I can't wait to see your gifts evolve.

She stares at me,

But that's the message.

It's the vibration that I want to send my granddaughter.

As she evolves and as we see innate gifts come out,

Now she expresses those gifts.

We'll support her.

It really is important.

When she becomes a toddler and she needs to separate and she needs to go her own way a little bit and try things and say no,

That will be encouraged because that's part of the letting go process.

We all have to cut the cord,

If you will.

The Bible says a man shall leave his mother.

That's what we're trying to do here.

We all have to leave our mother.

We all have to leave our fathers.

Figuratively as well as physically,

We have to leave them and we have to become our own person.

To do that,

We have to learn to see our childhood objectively.

Hopefully we will land in a place that allows us to forgive our parents for being wounded,

That allows us to forgive our parents for being men and women inside a toxic relationship.

We can think that our parents are God and they should never make a mistake.

That's just not realistic.

In psychology,

We call it whole object constancy,

The ability to see the good and the bad in our parents.

That is all part of the grief work.

That is all part of the recovery process.

I hope that this session has been helpful.

I hope it inspires you to stay on the path and to reconnect with your inner child.

Reviews

Wow! Me in a nutshell. Even in my 70's I'm still asking "why?" Thank you for presenting the 'why' in such a user-friendly, straight forward fashion. I understand myself with a much needed sympathetic eye.

This was very helpful and very timely for me. Thank you 🙏🏽

Very helpful, thank you 😊

Inspirational. You have become a beacon in my life to find and see those things I didn't understand. Lisa, thank you for your helpful guidance!
Steve

So insightful thank you

I love this ❤️ Thank you so much 🙏❤️

An amazing straight to the point practical explanation of the psychology of a dysfunctional family and its impacts and immediately applicable ways to reprogram. Wow! Should be mandated listening in high schools.

Healing and rings true

timely reminder 🙏 Thank you

Wonderful. 💖

She said everything I needed to hear, or reminded of, to see clearly how it all went down.
I'm at stage 4 of the process described for waking up, snapping out of the subconscious programs and patterns., I like to
call how I feel as that I'm on my Hero's Journey. ☯️☮️

Another great talk. Thank you Lisa for your work. You have helped my brother and I greatly. 🙏

👏🏻

Thank you Lisa, this was so insightful and gave me so much inspiration, 💛💛💛