With Kate Schroeder, M.Ed, LPC, NCC
A Picture of Your Soul (part 2)
Last month, we talked a bit about “wounding” that a child receives when they are small and trying to make sense of their world. By no means an exhaustive list of all the ways that wounding occurs, what happens as a result of this wounding, is that a child pretty quickly learns to put that part of their self away for “safe-keeping” and learns to be other directed for their guidance about how they should be as opposed to who they really are.
They learn to smile when they are angry, laugh it off or pretend that things don’t really bother them, if this honest display of emotion could “get them into trouble” in some way. This does incredible damage as any time we put away a part of our soul, or our true self, we are effectively burying another part of our self.
What occurs in this wake is a “black hole” which over time grows bigger and bigger inside, and many people spend a lifetime working to fill this hole with whatever they can get their hands on: success, drugs, food, shopping, alcohol, children, religion, cigarettes, exercise: whatever they can find to “numb out” this awareness of the hole inside, a person will expend incredible effort attempting to attain that substance.
What also happens when we put away parts of our true self, our soul, is that we no longer have access to that wisdom that is inherent in our soul self. We effectively put it behind a wall, or our defense system as profiled by the Enneagram personality tool, and grow up determined to never show that part of our self again and receive the resulting pain or embarrassment or shame.
These early experiences of rejection or criticism are so painful, they emotionally imprint upon the child for a lifetime, and a child pretty quickly learns that in order to survive in the world, they must keep this defense or false sense of self up most of the time. They shrink or encapsulate their true self in order to survive.
What the child becomes good at is living out of self-preservation mode or their Enneagram defense, and they grow and develop into adults, all the time relying on their coping skills to survive. All the energy that originally was present for life now gets allocated towards keeping the defense up and functioning at all times. This protective strategy never truly stops until we reach a point in our lives where we take the necessary steps to acknowledge and deal with all the issues that we know, on a deep level, demand our attention if we are ever truly going to become the person we were designed to be early on in life.
Choosing to take these hard, but necessary steps to heal our whole self, has the ability to transform all areas of your life and relationships, including the generations to come.
For more information, you can purchase the complete digital program and guided imagery that accompanies this article at:
http://www.kateschroederlpc.com/store.html
You can contact Kate at:
Transformation Counseling, LLC
8084 Watson Road, Suite 226
Saint Louis, MO 63119
(314) 761-5310
kateschroederlpc@gmail.com
www.kateschroederlpc.com