Getting Past the Past

Our lives are an endless series of events - life lessons - that are experiences we file away and from which we hopefully learn. We tend to repeat the steps of those events because it is familiar to us (whether it was a good or bad experience). We make crucial decisions as a result of these events and how we handle the experience. Decisions about who we are and what we expect from the world around us.

Experiences make up our Life’s Knowledge

Some of our events are positive and we experience love, support, success, closeness. These positive events (which is a totally subjective analysis by each of us as we experience the event) are important for making us feel safe and capable. When these events happen early in life (up to say 5 or 6 years old) they usually involve our family members so they also help us form our vision of our primary relationships - first with parents and siblings and later with our love relationships and friendships.

We have other experiences that most would label negative. These incidents can run the gamut from mistakes, accidents, hurt, and loss to abuse and trauma. When these kind of experiences occur, we tend to remember the pain (keeping the wound open) or try to avoid the feelings by blocking the experience from our consciousness. Either way, we ultimately turn over much of the control of our life to experiences we won’t allow to heal or try to avoid.

The Path to Wholeness

The path to wholeness then becomes not to ignore the past but to incorporate those lessons learned into our present.

Our world understanding is different as adults than when we were kindergarteners. Our skills and abilities are much more advanced than when we were toddlers. The outcome of challenging situations can be different too.

Early Recollections

Skip and I used to facilitate 3-day intensive personal growth weekends. We illustrated the negative side of an early childhood experience above with this simplified idea.

A child is going along through his life and something happens. He hits a brick wall. He experiences a negative event, has a uncomfortable response and makes a decision about the incident - “it’s hurts too much” or “I’m bad” or maybe “I can’t handle it” and probably “I don’t want to feel this ever again!” He has decided he can’t get past the brick wall.

Now the little boy has grown up and something else happens. He runs into another wall that feels like the brick wall when he was young. He remains stuck in the idea that it hurts too much and he can’t handle it. He’s not in the present moment enough to realize he has new skills and abilities so he can simply step over the brick wall.

As a child, we can run into painful situations. We have limited abilities to have those negative events. But we often fail to notice how capable we are as adults. We have additional tools:

• our learning from the past

• our physical strength

• our words

• our cunning

• our ability to heal

All these skills can help us handle life’s worse and heal.

Dealing with Severe Trauma

Let’s be clear. I am NOT saying that we should soldier through every challenging situation. Nor am I saying we should remain unaffected by life’s worse. Indeed there are experiences that become survival events either for our bodies or our soul (or both). If you have experienced an extreme event, chronic abuse or sexual assault, for example, you may need help unwinding that experience and I encourage you to seek a counselor to help you work through this trauma. All trauma victims deserve a voice, deserve to take their power back, and deserve to heal. Call us, call a help line, call someone - take back your power!

All of us have had experiences and made decisions about ourselves and about our world. These decisions will form our beliefs and expectations about how our world is likely to be. And unfortunately they also an internal list of “things we can’t handle or should avoid at all costs”. Sort of the world’s worst “to-don’t list”.

We help clients move through these obstacles every day. We have a wonderful process that helps people unpack this original experience and deal with it in a new way. And to take back your power so you can create more joy in your life!

Are you ready for more joy in your life?

Wanna know what keeps them stuck?

or How the Personal Growth Movement helped build stronger, more loving relationships

The Personal Growth Movement (PGM), which included experiences such as EST and Fire Walks, was born out of the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Concepts of personal responsibility, life mastery and creating more joy in life were foundational to the movement.

Skip and I were children of those times and by the early 80s, we were certified instructors of personal growth weekends. Over the next 40+ year, we have taught thousands of people in weekend seminars and coached hundreds as individuals and couples across the country.

Unsplash photo by Wes Lewis

So what about the phrase “Want to know what keeps them stuck?” This simple phrase has been an integral part of most of the weekends we have taught and is just as important in our coaching sessions. The work “stuck” implies being mired in a moment of time or unable to move forward. And that is exactly the emotional description of what happens to a person who is unable to move past negative events in their lives. Trauma, confusing or negative experiences, even incorrectly assessed memories can put a person into a psychic loop that prevents them from moving forward with new relationships and events. It’s sorta like coming home from a bad vacation and continuing to drag your suitcases around behind you forever. When we are stuck with all that baggage, there is little hope to can define new experiences in their own context and make appropriate decisions for the current situation.

From a free-verse poem by Bill Riedler and Kath Kvols, the “keeps them stuck” phrase describes that point in anyone’s life when they become unable to move forward from a perceived role or unhappy life, stuck in protecting oneself from perceived pain or humiliation or, for many, simply stuck in the past.

“When we are stuck with all that baggage, there is little hope to can define new experiences in their own context and make appropriate decisions for the current situation.”

It means that when some of us are faced with a new experience or decision that we perceive as similar to a painful, sad or humiliating memory from our childhood or early adulthood, we get “stuck” in that memory and mistakenly think the same outcome is inevitable. What we decided back then about ourself and our place in the world must also apply to this current situation - whether it’s appropriate or not. That’s the psychic loop. Being stuck can prevent you from analyzing the current situation to decide the best course of action and instead subconsciously we say “Oh I know this one! This is just like when I was 5.”

For example, what if as a child, a child’s pet died or ran away. It would be reasonable to think that the child may have decided not to love anything so much because it might go away.

Now fast forward to adulthood and this belief that loved ones will go away may cause the adult to leave relationships before a deep commitment is made or may even avoid relationships altogether. This, of course, is a very simplistic description of the very involved state of human emotion but we all experience this concept as we grow up.

Often people do what they know even if it is not in their long-term best interest. For adults, it can be difficult to break out of this cycle or even realize they carry beliefs that are detrimental to their own happiness. They’re STUCK.

Unsplash photo by Anthony Tran

Some of our clients experiencing these self-limiting beliefs and we assist them in becoming aware so they can change the expectation, if they choose, that negatively impacts their happiness. It’s not about getting rid of these beliefs, it’s about being in charge, being aware and being in the moment when deciding how to react.

Beliefs have a very important role in our lives. They can protect us from harm. They must be managed though and not in charge. You can’t manage your beliefs and expectations if you don’t realize you have them.

I often tell our weekend seminar participants that this experience is like cleaning out your closet. “We’ll take everything out of the closet, decide what you don’t like anymore, figure out which things don’t fit any longer then you can keep whatever you want and add some new stuff if you want and there you go - beliefs and expectations that fit you as you are now in THIS moment.

Even with a new awareness of your beliefs, there is a process of unlearning and retraining your brain to analyze each new experience and not jump back into old habits. It takes practice and self-acceptance.

Here’s a personal example: I have lovingly been described as a very resistant, stubborn person (me?). It comes from a childhood with a very controlling mother. I grew up learning to resist every decision she made for my “own good”. Once I became aware that this was a filter for many of my life experiences, I slowly learned to be more aware of whether I was making decisions in my own best interest or merely against her. Although I aim at the former it doesn’t mean I don’t end up with the latter. Skip just gives me that “you’re resisting” look and a pause and smile while I make sure it’s the right decision at the right moment for me and no one else.

“What decisions, beliefs and expectations are any of us carrying from our early years that are negative, erroneous, or non-productive and getting in our way now?”

A client of ours years ago, explained her childhood. Elizabeth had grown up experiencing horrible physical abuse. It was a miracle she survived at all. Parents were alcoholics and Elizabeth often had to “parent” the drunk parents, clean house and feed her younger brothers while trying not to set off the violent moods of her parents in order to protect her siblings from the abuse.

She learned early to be constantly on edge and anticipating the worst that could be around every corner. She carried that forward into her adult life until she told us about it during a session and realized the beliefs she had developed and the expectation she carried about even the simplest things in her life. “If I don’t have a crisis to deal with constantly, I don’t know how to live my life!”

With some help, she learned how to stay in the moment when dealing with day to day activities. Instead of anticipating everything as a crisis, she slowly began to focus on all the normal and the positive going on in her life and how to handle the negative crisis from a slightly detached point of view if and when the crisis occurs. What a shift! She actually enjoys getting out of bed most days.

Being stuck is simply a state of mind. We can change it whenever we want. Sometimes it just takes a coach with a loving, patient smile that tells you that you’re being resistant or sad or guilty or whatever and says, ”Would you like to let go of that?” Can anything be more freeing?

Ready to let go of your self-limiting beliefs? Call/text for a FREE 30 MINUTE DISCOVERY APPOINTMENT 512-589-3422 or email swieslifecoach@gmail.com

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