The healing process is a reverse dance, travelling from a triggering point in the present moment to a past event and dancing back to the now with new insights and renewed mental, emotional and physical experience.
From The Hurt Child to The Creator Adult
Healing is a process of maturation; it’s the move from the hurt child running the show of our life to the mature adult who wants to shape our reality.
The healing process involves meeting a past traumatic event, where we had a sudden or continuous intervention or neglect experience from a meaningful caretaker that shaped new inner learning and life practice.
Those new methods are stored in the back of our heads (literally, where our old, premature brain is) or in the mysterious depths of the unknown layers of our awareness. They appear as repetitive, unpleasant events, habits, places of interest, ideas, and ideologies that we hold on to.
Those inner modalities are responsible for repeatedly throwing us out of our natural state of growth and flourishing. They are not evil; they are here for a good reason: to protect us from the unpleasant sensations we experienced during the Event and to awaken us to the healing process.
Let’s clarify some terms before I jump to an Example:
First Layer: The Traumatic Event (The Event)
The Traumatic Event is most likely surprising. It can be fast, sudden, or subtle and continuous. It can be an invasion or neglect. A very innocent, vulnerable part of us experienced it and got hurt; the younger we are, the stronger the impact on our lives.
Second Layer: The Learning Process of Activating Blocking Beliefs.
After the Event, when we were left alone and became irritated, confused, and felt uncared for or unloved, we didn’t have the tools to regulate our nervous system or process what was happening. The “being left alone” phase is crucial for building the foundations of the Activating Blocking Beliefs (ABB) that will most likely remain as an inner melody and a brain circuit, like an inner stamp that we carry with us throughout life.
Third Layer: A New Life Practice — Coping Mechanisms or The New Job!
Because nature has endowed us with such brilliance, our survival mechanism has developed many ingenious ways to protect us from harm. So, after The Adupting Process, we create an inner map to keep us safe from falling back into anything that smells like The Event. In other words, we get a new job and start working as guards to protect ourselves from unpleasant feelings by running away from them, suppressing them, fighting against them or their ambassadors, getting frozen or trying to fix everything around us so that we won’t have to feel them ever again.
The Triggers
As part of our New Life Practice, we develop an inner radar that checks every millisecond, “Is it safe here or not?”. It tracks external data that can be dangerous enough to send us back to the experience of The Event and trigger a mental, physical, and emotional alarm — The Triggers. When it's not safe, we put on our guard; when it's safe, we open up.
Let’s take an example:
Before The Storm
Imagine a serene ocean, lake, or pond. Then, imagine a stone being thrown in the middle of the pond, creating a big circular wave. The further away from the centre, the bigger the wave grows.
Imagine a young girl, innocent, naive, and pure like the ocean, maybe 2.5–3.5 years old. She sits in the living room and watches TV. She is enjoying a children’s series when her hand starts touching her body. She explores some areas that provoke a new physical sensation. She gets curious and continues exploring while watching TV.
The Stone In The Pond or The Volcano — The Traumatic Event
When her father comes into the room (sorry for the stereotype; it's just an example), he becomes upset, irritated, nervous, and terrified by what he sees. “What are you doing here? If you want to do this kind of thing, go to your room,” he said in a non-friendly tone. The girl runs to her room.
The First Wave — The Learning Process of the ABB
While alone in the room, the girl is irritated, confused, and dysregulated. From being relaxed, quiet, naive, and curious about her body, a volcano interrupts and invades her space. In this case, the Event is invasive, controlling, and neglectful as well when nobody is going after her to her room to check in or be with her.
The Physical Emotional Brain Level
The physical sensation, the shutting down, the feeling of doing wrong, being wrong, and being ashamed start to build in the body and the brain. The brain records the state of the disturbed nervous system and stores it as a memory deep in the brain's older regions. This memory will remain to protect against repetitive events like this that may occur in the future.
The Mental Level
If we ask our girl how she feels, she will most likely not find words when it’s too close to the Event and be overwhelmed (with exceptions!), but if we insist on finding words for what she learned from The Event, it would probably be in kids’ language something like: “Feel good is bad.” Pleasure is danger!” Fun hurts.” “Yamm is yack,” and more. These new inner melodies are now resting at the mental level and will remain.
This naive new learning will later develop into Activating Blocking beliefs, such as: “When I enjoy myself, I am getting punished,” “When something feels good, I am shamed,” or “When I am opening to new experiences, I am humiliated and neglected.”
The Second Wave — The New Life Practice
Now, let’s meet our girl again, twenty years later. The Event repeated itself enough times or became more vigorous, so the invasions, control and neglect grew as she got older. At the same time, she developed new life practices. Now, she is a young woman in her early twenties.
The split — Complete Giving Up or Total Demand
I want to demonstrate the two standard life practices that our young girl adopted, so I cloned her just for the Example. There are two of them now.
One young woman had utterly given up on the belief that she deserved to enjoy intimacy, sexuality, food, and other sensual enjoyments in this lifetime. When triggered, she moves on a scale from slight irritation to terrifying, which throws her into fight, flight, freeze, or fix mode. There is no chance for any relationships, and lots of guilt, shame and deep sadness.
The other young woman is in total demand for her Enjoyment. She is obsessed with enjoying her sexuality, her senses and her physicality. She is running from one pleasure to another, from one holiday to the next. Life is a big, long-lasting party, but it's not always enjoyable. She is driven by a need to prove to herself that she deserves to enjoy life through external stimuli. She is unsatisfied, frustrated, exhausted, and often feels alone in her relationships.
The Third Wave — The Seed and the Tree
The Activating-Blocking Beliefs are like seeds planted deep in the fertile soil of our unconsciousness. They grow robust chunks, branches, and leaves and give us fruits never asked for.
For Example, both our young women, on a conscious level, want to have meaningful relationships, proximity, and intimacy, but often find themselves alone or replacing partners and struggle to be deeply committed.
Their life choices also come from the same seed: their choice of profession, career, daily habits of protection or avoidance, places of interest, and hobbies. They also experience repetitive events that evoke the familiar sensations of the Event within them.
Both ladies are now approaching their 30th birthday and wondering what’s wrong with them. Their life experiences are so perplexing that they can no longer cope. They have no peace and experience deep frustration, shame, or intense anger and rage.
The Call For Help
If lucky, it can eventually get to the point where they cannot stop the inner screaming voice of “ENOUGH!!! I DON’T WANT THIS ANYMORE!” The call for help is a crucial step towards the healing journey.
The Reverse Healing Process — Back To The Source
Remember the ocean, the stillness and the naive child we met 2000 words ago, before The Event. This state of purity and openness is The Source and the valley of healing we are travelling back to, but there are no shortcuts. We have to go back in time to The Event and travel through the fire over the lake, to the eye of the storm, and then take another step back to realise the Source of our existence and the way we used to be before The Event shaped us.
Not Alone Again — The Trustful Ally
As kids, we learned to cope with difficulties, mostly on our own. As adults, we have developed the mastery of dealing with challenges on our own. This time, when travelling back in our time machine towards the storm, we want to bring a stable rock with us — a couple of good eyes. This person needs to be able to stay with you when it’s painful without wanting to save, fix, or even heal you. It can be a partner, a trusted friend, a healer, or a therapist.
From Dysregulation to Co-Regulation
A healing process begins when you stay together with a trustworthy ally in the depths of pain. It is like bathing together in an oxidation pond without wanting to leave or staying in a deep, stinky hole without searching for a way out.
The inner movement from being alone in a dysregulated situation to being with another human while experiencing The Event’s mental, emotional, and physical sensations creates a new bodily experience, channelling new physio-nervous information and printing new brain circuits. Those circuits signal the body that what was previously unsafe has been changed and transformed, and is now safe, even when it still feels hurt.
From Shame to Acceptance and Love!
Going back to the Event hurts, but with a trustworthy ally and the will to visit the hurt child, this time as a mature, aware adult, you can surrender to sensations and emotions you resisted for years. You invite them to dance and to move inside you, rather than trying to get rid of them; you say yes to them, and by doing so, you develop your inner strength and resilience. You no longer fear those sensations and start recognising and accepting them.
The more you allow them to be, the more attention you give them, the more love they get, and the less grip they have on you. You transform the fear and shame from those emotions and sensations into acceptance and love. This inner movement significantly expands our physical container and our emotional capacity.
The Level of The Words — Not Only Somatic Experience!
It is not enough to remain in emotional and bodily sensations; the healing journey must extend to the level of words and the mind. During the healing process, we travel from the back side of our brain, where old memories are stored, to the frontal lobe, where new information is processed; from the right side of the brain, which is responsible for the experience, to the left side of the brain, where language is involved.
The Inner Movement of Awareness
My hurt child sits at the back of my brain, and my mature adult is in the frontal cortex. So, the healing journey is an inner move of only a few centimetres between our ears. In this inner movement of a few centimetres from the back side of the brain to the front lies the healing on the awareness level.
When you slow down and consciously pause in a triggered situation, your healed, mature, aware, conscious adult is in charge. When you recognise your hurt child running your show, jumping from the back seat to the steering wheel, it’s your awareness that will ask your hurt child to go back and rest again and that the creator adult you are will take over.
This everyday little moment of aha needs some backup and support, and that’s where the words come in as pointers and reminders of who we are.
New Statements Build Awareness.
If there are Activating-Blocking Beliefs, we can replace them with Responsive-Opening Beliefs! New Opening beliefs we can create for ourselves are excellent tools to implement and remind us during triggering moments of the conscious adult we are, and the latest upgraded version of ourselves.
Regarding our young women, they can sound like: “I am a fountain of pleasure!” “My sensuality is my vitality!” “My enjoyment is my power,” and so on. The Responsive-Opening Beliefs shift us back to the seat of our adult creator; they move us from childish victimhood to the consciousness of the architect of our life.
The Responsive-Opening Beliefs work best when they excite and empower us! Reread them and feel their impact on your body and mind.
Back to Old Habits
There are no magic solutions; as powerful as they may be, writing your statements will only do the job with a profound transformation process. The inner belief that you do not deserve something in life (in our girl’s Example, it was Enjoyment) needs a more profound transformative process than statement writing. Even when going through the most profound healing journeys, facing new challenges, goals, or any form of expansion might throw us back to doubting ourselves again.
Expansion of The Container
Whenever we face a new challenge in our lives, such as falling in love, becoming a parent, moving to a new country, changing careers, following our inner calling, or committing to something bigger than ourselves, our inner child panics and tries to keep us safe from being hurt by amplifying fears.
Those kinds of fears can be a sign of expansion! Breathe, pause, and remember that we can transform fear into excitement, which are great tools in those moments that can remind us of the Source we are.
Back To The Source.
The magical part of this fascinating healing journey occurs when we take another step back in our time machine to meet who we used to be before the traumatic Event—pure, innocent, naive, trustful, curious, and very open to life—The Source we are.
When I hold a photo of myself as a three — or four-year-old child in my hand, I can see a vital, shining, creative, open-hearted, crazy-free spirit in a tiny body. This image reminds me of who I used to be and always will be in my most profound nature — and guess what: you are, too!
It’s never too late to start!
Remembering who you are in every given moment is the cream of the healing process; knowing that you didn’t come into this short journey on planet Earth to hide or to stay small is the most potent, rewarding gift you can give to yourself in this lifetime. After being loyal to the Blocking Beliefs you adopted from your caregivers that have shaped your life into what it is now, and believing that this is all there is for you, it is never too late to start a transformation process of healing.
The Healing Process, a Transformation Journey, is a powerful force that shapes our lives. Our commitment to this journey and willingness to ‘work on ourselves’ accelerate it, turning life into an exciting art of maturation and creation. The healing process is a journey from the known and familiar to the unknown and mysterious, from the surface level of our existence to the depths of our being, and of discovering who we truly are.
In honour of:
Shai Orr, my teacher, and his Miraculous Parenting Therapeutic (MPT) approach gave me the courage and tools to lead deep, transformative healing processes in talk and movement for individuals and groups.