How to ease emotional pain from bad relationships is probably the most difficult obstacle that many of us experience in our lives. The key to navigate these dangerous spiritual waters is understanding. It involves understanding the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. This will involve two separate steps: First is the ‘what’, to process the events or settings we experienced which hurt us. This will almost always require the sharing of things with loving nurturing people that will listen in sympathy. When others take time with us, they are imparting love and nurturing to us. Others’ time, attention, and personal presence with us are the currency of love. Love heals emotional trauma.
While we are putting things together in words, what is generally happening is we are pulling ourselves back from experiences and looking at it from a spiritual distance. This allows us to better define it and see the boundaries it has in our overall life. Emotional pain happens from relationships with poisoning people. The second step must be taken separately, often at the same time as the first step reflecting on the event, and relationships that made it.
This second step is the ‘why’, which is to look at ourselves and learn what it is in us that made us so very vulnerable to pain and abuse by others. Clearly not everyone has this vulnerability that we have, so then why do we have it? On this self-therapeutic adventure, we are going to look at how we learn things, very far upstream, in the early dawn of Humankind, in our childhood. This lesson may not have any connection to our emotional trauma and problems we are living in today, or does it? We will soon find out.
What I recently discovered in my years of reflecting on my own childhood, unique in its profile of much parental love from a saintly mother, also complete depravity of nurturing by my father, is how deeply we learn things. The simple model taught is that we learn things by copying observed behaviors. Our parents treat us with love, and we learn we are lovable, and we have some value, or they treat us poorly without nurturing and we learn to be mistrustful and predatory. On one level, the conscious level, that is true, but I discovered there is more to it than that, far more.
In this second step, I discovered we learn our world from two levels, the conscious level, and the below surface subconscious level. The learned behaviors are on the surface, like teaching our kids to clean their rooms, or listen to their teachers at school, doing their chores before playing outside, and so on. And the second level, the below surface subconscious level, we learn the deeper things, the 'why'. This level consists entirely of values that make the foundation for our choices. This foundation is learned and becomes all our values and standards we have about the world around us, including most importantly, ourselves.
This flawed 'why' value we learn as we try to see things through our own eyes, which are part of our seven spiritual activities. However, we are not being allowed to see things through our own eyes, we are being forced to see things through our abusive other’s eyes, and that is not good. The seven spiritual activities we have are a birthright from God. They are: Seeing things through our own eyes, feeling our own feelings, thinking our own thoughts, making our own choices. Beyond that we move on into our three higher spiritual activities, which are dream our own dreams (or develop our own talents), creating our own dreams (or build on our talents), lastly celebrate by sharing our dreams and creation with Humankind. We are getting ahead of ourselves.
Let us go back to the first two of our spiritual activities, seeing things through our own eyes and feeling our own feelings. Seeing things through our own eyes is done when we are emotionally healthy and nurtured. If we experience no nurturing, or lack of nurturing in the case of missing or bad parenting, then we learn bad things. These bad things we learn are to not see ourselves as we need to be encouraged to see ourselves, which is as beautiful, we see ourselves and other things through other people’s and circumstances eyes, not our own. Not seeing things through our own eyes is bad. We see ourselves through our abusive parent’s or setting’s eyes. Not only that we learn to hate ourselves because our barren settings and abusers hate us. We feel their feelings for us because we have been robbed of not feeling our own feelings, a poisoning extension of giving up our right to see things through our own eyes.
Let us go back to talking about the two levels of learning, conscious and subconscious. On the conscious level we learn love and nurturing when someone significant does good to us, such as care for us when we need love and attention. Consciously we experience the act just for what it is. However, on the subconscious level we learn the deep values behind it which we build as foundations for all future similar activities and behaviors for such treatment. Our conscious mind experiences the event or setting, but our subconscious mind sees the event or setting from the spiritual perspective of ‘why’ this is correct. The subconscious attaches a ‘why’ value to everything we experience by others and by circumstances, both good and bad. If we experienced good, why, because we deserved it, if we experience bad, why, because we deserved it. So, we must change the ‘why’ in our values so we will seek good nurturing settings and people instead of poisoning settings and people. Why, because we deserve it. Both are out there in our world and in our future, and if we can change the ‘why’, we will see and interact with the nurturing people and settings instead of seeing only the poisoning ones.
On the bad side, the subconscious not only learns that we experienced pain and loss but also learns that we deserve it, and it learns even more. The subconscious also learns that avoidance of pain and loss is a valuable moral skill, and moreover learns that others are a source of threat of pain and defending one’s emotional self from them is morally justifiable. We also learn subconsciously that others are a threat and exposure to threats must be minimized by alienation and inflicting pain on them first. This is usually done by exploitation, gaining their trust first, then betraying them. There is no end to the number of rational extrapolations of logic by which we can arrive at to get to this alienation destination, but the result is we not only feel something, like hate, but we also learn a whole reality of why it is all true, and justifiable to do so.
Let us go to the second step mentioned above which is to look at ourselves and learn what it is in us that made us so very vulnerable to abuse by others. In the case of missing parent or very scarce resources in childhood, then we must look within ourselves to make sure there are no ‘why’ supporting reasons we believe about ourselves that have caused us to replicate the relationships and settings later in life in more abundant environments. That is why we cannot just remove the source of our emotional abuse, such as a barren hostile living situation or an abusive spouse and it all will get better and heal. Emotional abuse victims will always return to or create new poisoning settings and bond with similar poisoners because of their ’why’ foundation that it is right to stay in pain is still there.
We believe it is right for us to experience abuse because our subconscious mind tells us that is all there is and that we deserve it. That is the subconscious imprinted deep part which creates all the bad things we then create in our future, even during better times. There is something else I have discovered, and that is this powerful fear we all must face that it is wrong to outgrow it and leave this setting because it is all we deserve. Experiencing abuse is subconsciously ‘why’ interpreted to mean we deserve abuse and escaping it is morally wrong. That is how the damaging situation and abusive others make you see things through their and life’s eyes and not your own eyes. The lower the self-esteem, the greater the fear and guilt felt to escape it.
We want you to focus strongly on this, so we repeat it again here: Conscious things you will role model copy from your parents. Things like highly visible acts in how they behave and interact with the world around them you will see and are copying. Our conscious mind notices and copies visible, overt behaviors. It does not pick up values our parents have which cause our parent’s behaviors, either good or bad. However subconscious things we learn are unseen values of how they view the world they never tell us which we do not consciously see but our subconscious mind clearly sees. Our subconscious mind sees values our parents have that create the behaviors they do which we role model copy. These are unspoken but are as solid as any behavior or specific instruction learned from our parents, source persons or settings. Memorizing this paragraph will help you focus on the ‘why’ energies in your life, to help you get rid of the pain.
These implied values are more powerful than any visible instruction or demonstrated behaviors we have experienced. Behaviors are learned consciously; values are learned subconsciously through implication. To look at ourselves and learn what is in us that made us so very vulnerable to abuse by others. We are going to have to look deeply at the way we see ourselves in our world and why we feel the way we feel about ourselves and our world and the subject of intimacy with others through the ‘why’ looking glass. That will answer the ‘what is in us that made us so very vulnerable to abuse by others’ question.
I am sure when looking at all this it will start you ‘seeing things through your own eyes’, instead of through the hateful eyes of you abusers or abusive settings that you have been experiencing. One thing for sure, is that when you begin looking at things through your own eyes, there will be something else you will be able to see soon as well, and that is your way out to a wholesome new life, one you richly deserve!
Just for the record, this is an emotional and spiritual encouragement ministry. We are selling nothing here and are not at the present time even set up to take donations, and probably never will. Your healed life are our reward enough, and we are very pleased with that. If you want to, please share your strength with others in your future so our nurturing can live on.