Self relating is key to healing

Awareness is a great start to healing. Taking action is the next necessary step.

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How we talk to ourselves often reflects how we were spoken to in childhood and we carry these relating patterns with us in our bodies, we internalise the styles of relating that we received in childhood predominantly from our primary caregivers.

So do you recognise the harsh inner critic? We all have one. Do you recognise how this might be the voice of your mother or your father?

Awareness is a great start to healing. Taking action is the next necessary step.

Once we recognise the voice and the content of that voice - how all this should, ought to’s, musts might brow beat us daily. When we realise these judgments, opinions, viewpoints might not feel congruent to our true selves, and when we realise these might belong to somebody else - that these come from a parent or a former teacher perhaps;  then we have agency, then we have power, then we get to choose.

So we can choose to continue to keep on beating ourselves up or we can choose differently. We can challenge with compassion all these inner statements, views, judgments that might hurt us.

We can get to change our minds, we can decide to think and as a consequence feel differently about ourselves.

This is where healing occurs - when we recognise the patterns that we can repeat over and over again and use this recognition to do differently, to think differently independently of our former caregivers.