🌱Childhood Emotional Neglect and It's Link to Your Level of Consciousness
Sep 25, 2024
I will be sixty years old soon, and when I think back on how anxious, unhappy, sad, lonely, frustrated, and codependent I once was, despite how far I have come, I can still feel a pang of loss. From a higher state of consciousness and through the bittersweet lens of self-awareness, I can view my younger self on her quantum timeline and ache for her. No one knew how afraid, insecure, or unworthy my younger self felt, not even the 'me' I was back then.
How could they?
How could I have?
I was a master of deception and denial. All codependents are. We have learned that needing is akin to death, as it invites abandonment. So, we busy ourselves with silencing our authentic selves, ignoring red flags, and obsessing over what others think about us in a subconscious attempt to figure out how to ensure the object of our attention never leaves us behind to tend with our oozing, infected, bellowing holes within our souls.
We are unhealed children in adult bodies whose brains and psyches have been denied the right to grow and unfold in healthy ways. We were denied the opportunity to develop a healthy ego, to say no or yes from an authentic place. We were forced to worry about what might happen to us when, instead, we should have been encouraged to explore our inner landscape with ultimate freedom, unencumbered by the fear of abandonment, rejection or abuse.
Without a breakthrough in consciousness, all humans are subject to the divine law of cause and effect, otherwise known as karma, which, by the way, has nothing to do with being bad or good.
If you were raised in an unpredictable, rigid, authoritarian, or abusive childhood home, your brain must wire to meet the chaotic circumstances you were powerless to change as a child. Therefore, your 'fuses' will be shorter than a child who has been raised to feel loved, nurtured, and accepted and whose home has offered them the predictability a rapidly growing web of neurological pathways requires to grow long, fuses that increase one's chances of emotional regularity, the ability to trust and the courage to take measured risks to achieve something great without recoiling, raising the white flag and refusing to try again.
Yes, I had a short fuse. I was emotionally dysregulated, and I was emotionally dependent upon others for a sense of worthiness, safety, and control, and no, that was not my fault.
It could have been no other way.
To overcome my once fragile mind, I have learned to fully and enthusiastically embrace the concept of subject versus object. Through mental training, I have successfully changed my brain by committing to finding the cognitive space between my wounded ego and my higher self.
In that space, activated through meditation, self-inquiry, accountability, radical authenticity, and self-forgiveness, I could understand my mind as a garden whose harvest represented the quality of what had been sown. And what had been planted was not of my choosing.
I could, if I was willing, of my own free will, begin sowing seeds of my choice. This was where the rubber of recovery met the road and the many potholes that surfaced.
Once that breakthrough in consciousness had been achieved, it was time to work toward healing the wounded inner child's concept of self. This was the reprogramming phase, which required total commitment, as I had learned that for the brain to rewire itself, it is necessary to activate completely NEW focus points.
The brain can prune itself.
Did you know that?
Did you know that if you could change what you focused on every day, your brain would automatically prune synapses that were no longer activated to make room for new neural pathways?
YES! You bet your butt I wanted to learn how to do that!
YES! This was the secret I needed to accept, understand and commit to!
YES! This is why and how what we think about we become!
It's science!
So, Dear One, imagine if you believed what I just shared...
Imagine if every mental health expert, teacher, parent, and pediatrician first sought to validate your inner child and then helped you understand that your wounded ego represents an identity that was formed long ago and that within you was the power to activate higher consciousness so to transcend the limits of that story IF you truly desired to.
I ached and burned with a desire to transcend, and I was willing to do anything to release myself from my family's generational unhealed karma.
Our inner child lives in the amygdala and the hippocampus, while our higher selves live in the prefrontal lobe and cortex. Mental science and emotional healing help us transcend the past so we might live a life of freedom, clarity, and purpose, rather than a reactive life.
We got this!
Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach
