Today, I want to talk to you about something very important, and that is what we are all experiencing in our bodies. Our bodies are here with us, trying to help us become who we are meant to become. And yet, we are not feeling very good in our bodies, are we? There are fully booked out massage therapists everywhere in the world right now because we are all wanting to have relief from the pain we are feeling in our necks and shoulders and our backs, and yet no matter how hard our massage therapist pushes and pulls and massages, the knots never go away. 

Why is this? Why do our bodies feel so terribly? Why do we feel so good as children growing up, and then once adulthood hits, we have back pain from getting out of bed in the morning? I have the answer, and it is very simple. The answer is stress. When we are children, our parents carry the stress for us. They carry it in their bodies while we are growing, to protect us from knowing the truth about the world. But once we leave home, we realize that the stress that our parents felt all the time wasn’t theirs to carry. It was created by the world we live in, and the world we live in is falling apart. This is why we all want to live on a massage table. The world is falling apart and our bodies can sense it. They are waiting for the final blow, the impact that we are all waiting for. 

The pandemic has created so many shifts in our world that we are still reverberating from. It is why we are all still bracing for the next thing to go wrong in our lives, and that my friends is where stress comes from. The need to survive instead of being able to thrive. When we are in survival mode, we are not able to be anything or anyone that we truly are. We need to put up walls to keep ourselves safe, and many of these are toxic towards ourselves and towards others around us. When we had to survive growing up, that stress that our parents were carrying for us also became our stress too. This is because the amount of stress they carried was far too heavy for one person to bear. That is what happens when there is extreme poverty or domestic abuse or drug addiction or divorce or unhappy marriages. Children have to carry some of the burdens because the family is not able to withstand the sheer volume of stress without their help. 

And that is what that family needed to do in order to survive. We are all here now, and that is exactly what our nervous system was helping us to do. Survive so that one day we would have the chance to thrive. When we survive, our nervous system sends important messages to our brains in order to save our precious energy. We won’t have to expend as much energy the second time someone hits us, or next time our parents come through the door completely done with the world and with you. 

And that is why we feel the way we feel now as adults. We feel the exact same as we did as children when bad things happened to us because our brains are very good at making connections with the world around us. The world is very unsafe most of the time for children, and we must make these connections in order to survive. When we learn that in order to make our parents happy we must have straight A’s and do the dishes every evening, we do that until we can’t anymore. When we can’t because our math teacher is unfair or we become teenagers and don’t want to do dishes to save our lives, we are lost and feel very unsafe. When our parents no longer are happy, we are unable to rest, and when we are striving for A’s and a clean kitchen all the time, we can’t rest either. So what does this mean for our existence? Are we relegated to becoming stressed no matter what our lives hold? Do we need to keep our children safe from all kinds of stress in order to save them from feeling as overwhelmed as we all are? Absolutely not. 

I want you all to know that this is not the answer. The true answer lies in self-awareness, and when we begin the journey towards becoming more aware about ourselves and our world then we no longer need to keep trying to please our parents even when we are in our mid-30’s and have children of our own. This is how our brain works. It keeps doing what we taught it to do through our lived experiences until we tell it that it doesn’t need to anymore. Our brains are very smart, and also very silly. It is silly because we are not needing to actually please our parents once we no longer live with them, and yet we always want to because it was how to spent 18 or so years of our lives. 

Children grow up wanting to please their parents even when they don’t appear to be wanting to. Children who are being bad, are not actually being bad. They are only appearing to be bad because their parents need them to be. Their parents need something in their lives to distract themselves from the truth, and the truth is that they don’t like themselves. The parents who have bad children are only punishing themselves as children. They are not seeing their children at all, they are seeing themselves when they were young. When we tell children that they are bad through punishments or reprimands, then they believe us and will continue to act badly. If we tell them they are good, they will become who they truly are – good. 

And I don’t mean good as in perfect cherubs who do and say everything we want. That is not the goodness I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is that goodness we all feel when we open our hearts and truly listen to what we are wanting in our lives. We are then able to see ourselves fully, and when we do we realize that there is nothing in the world that can take away that power of being. No matter what happens on the outside, we know that we are good on the inside. And that is the gift that we can all give to our children. When we give them this gift, they no longer need to think about what they want to be or who they are going to be when they grow up. They will only have to think about who they are, and who they are is good. And when they have your support to follow that path of goodness, they will become fully human and find their life’s purpose. 

Most of us didn’t get this growing up, and it is why many of us have had to try many different careers and paths in order to figure out who we really are. And it is not to say that our parents didn’t do the best with what they had. They did. They survived, just like their parents survived and their parent’s parents survived. Many of them endured significant hardships that we will talk more about another day. But for now, let’s just remember that our parents are good on the inside too, and many of them were told that they were bad. And when children are told that they are bad, they believe it. And when these children grow up to become adults, they may decide to have children, and then those children will remind the parents every day of what they went through as children themselves. 

When we become parents, our children are mirrors into our lived experiences. They make us remember what it was like for us to be yelled at and scolded when we were crying or what it was like to be bullied at school or what it was like to have a broken home with parents who could not see us. It is why all of us parents feel completely unhinged when our children start crying and they can’t stop when we tell them to. It isn’t because crying is bad, not at all. It is because crying is good. Crying allows us to release our emotions and to tell someone else how we are feeling about ourselves and the world around us. Crying is a way to connect with our loved ones and with ourselves. Crying is something that we should all do more of, and when we start, it may never end. I cry all the time now, and for the most part it is tears of pure joy. I feel so grateful for all that I have experienced and all that I have endured, and now I get to fully enjoy my life because I have let go of everything that I used to be carrying. 

I am not telling you that I have a perfect life, though. As a mom of 4 kids and a business owner, we have very busy lives with many moving parts. One week is always different from the next, and there is no telling what the next day will bring. That used to send me for a tailspin because I needed to plan everything in my head ahead of time in order to feel safe. This is because I came from a divorced family who was struggling to stay safe and they did everything in their power to keep us from feeling stressed. But as we know, when there is too much stress for the parents to hold, it leaks onto the children just like an overfilled pail of water when we try to carry it around with us everywhere we go. I was very stressed as a child, and no one really noticed because I was also trying to stay very calm. 

So this meant that on the outside I was very calm and mild-mannered, and on the inside I felt like my body was being eaten alive. I was unable to eat very much most days because of it, and it was why I was so slight. I didn’t think that I had an eating disorder, because I wasn’t even aware that my body was doing it. I didn’t care what I looked like on the outside at all, and the weight restriction wasn’t intentional. Instead, it was my way of controlling my stress, because eating didn’t feel good when my stomach was constantly feeling nauseous and the only thing that soothed it was pure sugar. I used to eat mountains of sugar as a child, hoping to soothe my stomach. 

And it worked well enough that no one really noticed what was happening on the inside. I lived across from a general store, and I used to steal candy from there in order to soothe myself. I didn’t know that I was doing it for a good reason, though. I did it for the right reason, but it wasn’t right at all. I shouldn’t have stolen, and that was not something that I was proud of. I was very embarrassed and ashamed of it, because it wasn’t right to my family or to the store owners. When we begin to see our children for who they truly are, we begin to become much more curious about why they behave the way they behave. I stole money from my mother too, when I was too scared to keep stealing from the store. I stole money from my mother because she was the safest person to steal money from at the time, and it was not something I was proud of either. 

I was feeling very bad about myself at that time in my life, and many of my thoughts were negative about who I was as a person. Who I was as a person wasn’t who I thought I was, though. Not even close. Who I was as a person was exactly who I am today, and I now know that that young child was trying to survive, and is extremely kind and caring with no inkling of bad in her body. I know this because everything that comes out of me now is good. I only speak good about others now and I only want to do good in this world because I have realized that everything that I once knew about myself and others was not the truth. The truth is we are all good. We are all important, and we are all going to be able to heal ourselves if we choose to. I say this because many of us have been told that we have this or that disease and that we will never be able to heal from it. I disagree. I know that we are all capable of healing ourselves if we are fully seen and heard. That is the true secret of healing. We must be fully seen and heard so that we can become aware of who we truly are. 

When we are, we don’t need to keep hiding behind all of the disease and destruction that we keep underneath our skin. We can shine bright like the sun does on a cloudless day. That’s all that disease is – clouds covering up our sunshine. And when we become aware of this, it is much easier to tell the clouds to go away. We will talk more about that another day too. Anyway, back to our topic of discussion today – being bad. I thought I was very bad as a child, and it wasn’t because my parents told me I was bad. It was actually because I wanted to be bad so that they would see me as something other than being perfect. I was always seen as perfect, even when I wasn’t, and that is almost just as bad as being seen as bad. 

Being seen as perfect is much harder on a child actually, because it is impossible to be perfect, and no matter how hard you try it never is enough. This not enoughness follows us all throughout our childhoods and teenage years and adulthood to death unless we open our eyes and realize why we believe that we are not enough. And it has nothing to do with what our parents did or didn’t do. It really isn’t. Once we become aware of our childhoods, that is exactly what we realize. All of the anger and frustration or ignorance that we have about our parents and our families suffering is not helpful in the least, and it is only through that anger and frustration can we truly see it. 

Isn’t that funny? I am telling you that it isn’t what matters, and yet it is the key to figuring out that it doesn’t matter. We must create space to feel all of our emotions about our life up until this point until we no longer have any more to share. The grief and the sadness and the loneliness and the pain and the anger and the irritation and the bitterness and the rage. It all needs to come bubbling up to the surface so that we can actually understand what we must understand to move forward in our lives as healed humans. When we heal ourselves, we heal our children. 

They don’t need healing because they are not broken. As soon as someone in their lives sees their goodness, they believe it to be the truth. This is because children are the most powerful healers in the world, and they are capable of healing themselves in one therapy session with me. I only need to sit down at a table with them and listen to their story while we play with clay or paint rocks or play chess. We only need to speak a little, and I already know their whole story. I do because I can see it in their eyes, and I know it because I know my story very well, and my story is their story. Their story may be different, but it is the same just like we are all the same but different, right? 

When I tell you this, it is because I have listened to every type of story that is possible and they all speak of suffering. And this suffering isn’t from not wanting to be good, it is from not knowing how to become good after so many years of being told that we are either bad or we are nothing else at all. Because when we tell children that they are perfect, we are actually telling them that they are nothing. Perfectionistic children grow into perfectionistic adults who only hold deep shame and resentment in their eyes. They are unable to see themselves for who they really are because they are not very aware of the messaging placed on them their whole lives. This is because as humans, we learn that our parents know best. And do they? Do they have our best interests at heart? I don’t believe they do, and I say this from the bottom of my heart because I am a parent who deeply loves her children and I have parents who deeply love me. Our parents are only able to do what they have been taught, and many of our parents were not taught how to become human very well. 

We have not been able to become human because we have spent so much time surviving, and our parents were doing the same. So now it is time for us to start living, and this starts with building your awareness about your past. This isn’t about dredging up all of the past hurts and pains of your life. No, absolutely not. It is about having the courage to listen to that little child within you who suffered immense suffering because they weren’t seen and heard. When we were young, you didn’t get to tell your parents how you really felt. We are often told that we must just move on and get on with our lives, and yet, everything that we do is dependent on what we did beforehand. 

So how is it possible to just get on with it when everything that we do is based on what we did before? It is not possible because it is actually the only thing that really matters to our future. Our past is our future and we will keep repeating the same cycles over and over again until we wake up one day and decide that “wow. I don’t want to do this anymore.” And usually it takes our world falling apart in order for this to happen. We don’t just one day decide to stop being our perfectionistic selves, at least for most of us. For me, it took leaving the hospital and becoming a terrible housewife while trying to build a failing business to learn that everything that I thought I was wasn’t actually anything close to the truth. 

It took me completely losing my sense of purpose and my sense of identity to become who I am now, because before that I thought I was exactly who I was meant to be – a wonderful nurse who saved lives, and wonderful wife who on the outside looked kind and caring, a wonderful mother who appeared to have it all together, a wonderful business owner who everyone thought was successful. And on the outside I was very put together and on the outside I was all of these things. And on the inside I was falling apart because of the tension that I carried around from years and years of toxic stress and strained relationships. I was carrying all of this around with me and no matter how many times I visited the chiropractor that week, it never lessened because it wasn’t in my muscles or my joints. It was in my blood. 

The tension was rising ever higher in my blood stream, ready to burst forth and release itself into every crevice of my tidy home. And when we realize this, we realize that no amount of chiropractors or massage therapists or osteopaths can save us from the stress that we feel in our bodies. It isn’t possible to release our tension in these ways because it isn’t a build up of muscle tension that is actually causing the pain. It is the pressure we are feeling from within our bloodstream, and it is causing pain in our muscles from the pressure felt within. Our hearts are ready to burst, and that is why so many people are having heart attacks right now. They are all needing a way out of their lives as they know it, and their bodies are sending very important messages. Your body is too. 

I know it, because every person that comes into my office has some sort of ache or pain that they are suffering from. I know it because I have them too, though I have been able to release the majority of it through many different ways. It is not possible to let go of this pain unless you become aware of it first, and that is also a big problem in our world. Many of us are walking around completely unaware of the tension that they are feeling inside of themselves, and they are not going to be able to let it go until they stop and realize that there is a body underneath their mind that is actually more powerful than that big beautiful brain that they have. They will one day wake up, I hope anyway, and realize that they have been avoiding looking at themselves in the mirror for far too long. They will realize this, just as I did a year ago when I finally was able to let go of all the pain of my childhood and begin to love myself again. And once I began to love myself again, I was able to begin to love my parents again. That is the beauty of self-love. It isn’t the act of loving others that is what makes us feel good. It is the act of loving ourselves through others. 

So it is actually much simpler just to love ourselves first, and that love naturally seeps out just like the water filling up our parent’s pails I talked about earlier. When we find true self-compassion, we don’t have to carry about the weight of that pail of stress and worry anymore, and instead we are able to carry around our hearts. That is all we need, and it feels weightless compared with all that we were carrying around before. This weight of your heart is all that you need after you let go of your past, and in order to let go of your past you need to let go of your future. 

Because that is often what holds us back, isn’t it? We don’t want to upset the apple cart with our measly worries about being hurt as small children. That is what we learned growing up, and it is also what we think about now as adults. Why bother bringing it up again? Why would we want to bring that up in therapy? Why would we want to tell our partner that we aren’t actually mad at them for constantly putting their boots on and walking around the house, but because our mother would scream every time someone made a mess because she was at her window of tolerance each and every day because her parents made her clean up after them as a young child? 

This is everything that I will leave you with today. I hope that it has made you think about your life more and your children’s lives and your parent’s lives. Because you are all important, and I want you to know how loved that you all are. You are all loved, and you are all worthy, just as you are. You don’t need to change a thing to be loved. You are loved unconditionally, and I am not the one who loves you, though there is always love for those of you who need it. The love I am speaking of comes from the sun, and it lives within you, remember? The sun is there, and it is always shining, even when the moon eclipses it completely. Please remember that. Take care, and God bless.