I haven’t written a blog in quite a while; in fact, I haven’t written much of anything for several months. First, it was just a general malaise that I was able to work somewhat through, but not completely solve. The body-mind has a way of insuring that what needs attention or to come out does and so I then tweaked my lower back while exercising. Some kind of pain, mental, emotional and/or physical, happens to us if we don’t try to track down the emotional signposts given to us, but that was not the case for me; nothing was revealed despite working the issue for a couple of weeks. However, when I did not follow through, my back began to spasm.
I have not had a part of my body hurt this bad in a long time. Normally, I have an agreement with my body to give me a not-to-severe wake-up call, but this time I quit working the issue. When it struck again, I couldn’t stand or sit for very long and was reduced to tears a couple of times. Needless to say, exercise and yoga were out, and my limited movement and pain put a real damper on Thanksgiving. Nothing like hurting and not being able to even stretch to help the situation!
Luckily, my relational somatic psychotherapy workshop, where we do exceedingly deep work, was scheduled in the first week of December. There, I got in touch with the issue and was able to work through it. Between a couple of massages, cranial sacral sessions, and chiropractic appointments, both before and after the workshop, I was also able to release the stored trauma from my body.
This brings me to a video I have seen lately on Facebook, which says quit blaming your parents, environment, and other external factors for the choices that you make. This is one of several lines of simplistic conservative thought that is akin to yelling at a panhandler, “get a job.” They can be both correct and incorrect at the same time; in the latter example, the panhandler might be searching for a job while at the same time feeding his family.
A simplistic liberal line of thinking would be to offer assistance and provide some government service, a Band-Aid for the present moment, but does not address the underlying issues. As long as any assistance is temporary while also encourages the participant to move back towards being self-sufficient, that support is beneficial. As shown in these two examples, they both “feel good” and ultimately do not help.
Going back to the video, I agree that, as adults, we have to begin to make choices that are positive for us notwithstanding any situation in our past. Simple enough, but can be very difficult to accomplish. I know this stuff, and it still took almost four weeks for me to find the issue that developed before my being 18 months old. While I was not blaming anyone for my circumstance, I was also unable to extract myself from it on my own.
To suggest that we are not affected by what happened around us from conception through about seven is absolutely not true. Our “choices” back then are determined for us, and without intervention, we will slavishly hold onto them; this usually is because we were punished for making the “wrong” choice as children and while we may not consciously remember the incident, the subconscious does. Then we add judgments to those not make our same “choices” to justifying our choices.
Unfortunately, the subconscious is just like water to a fish; it is all we have ever known! We keep making the same “choices” because a part of the subconscious that does not want to be punished again. However, the subconscious also remembers wanting to make the other choice before we were punished and so replicate the original issue, again and again, to help the adult grow beyond what the child knows to be true. We will continue to be constricted our by the past until we allow new information to change our thinking.
So while I do agree with the video that blaming our parents, etc. as adults is not healthy, I disagree with it because it takes some type of intervention as adults to obtain new information to free us from that subconscious constriction to make another choice. If we seem not to be able to make a different choice despite wanting to or begin to feel negative about the choice we made or what comes from that choice, use that emotional signpost to begin to discover why we are stuck making the same selections over and over. As what happened with me, the subconscious will continue to ramp up the hurt, be it mental, emotional, and/or physical, to push us to become more authentic. Unlike me, do not wait until the pain is excruciating!