UnbreakYourHeart | Wiz Part 2 Pain Pg 1 - Painful Childhood Experiences 1

PART 2: WHY, WHY, WHY? #2 PAINFUL CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES

#2 The painful experiences in YOUR past and how they could be impacting you and your relationships

So now it’s time to move onto the second box in our infographic… we’re going to explore the kinds of painful experiences in childhood that can leave their mark and work out how YOUR past experiences might be affecting your relationships today.

Route to Heartbreak

This is what we’re going to be exploring together:

#2 Painful experiences in YOUR past and how they could be impacting you and your relationships

#2.1 Painful experiences in childhood – what were yours?
#2.2 Why are our earliest relationships so crucial?
#2.3 How our parents make us (IN)SECURE – introducing attachment theory
#2.4 What makes some of us especially vulnerable to our childhood experiences?
#2.5 What’s YOUR attachment style in romantic relationships?
#2.6 Relationships past and present… connecting the dots
#2.7 How an INSECURE attachment style can mess up YOUR relationship choices

SOMETIMES WHEN WE START TO THINK ABOUT OUR PAST, WE CAN FEEL UPSET OR IN NEED OF SUPPORT. PLEASE GET SPECIALIST PROFESSIONAL HELP IF YOU FEEL YOU MIGHT NEED IT. THERE’S MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HOW YOU MIGHT FIND A SUITABLY QUALIFIED PSYCHOLOGIST OR THERAPIST HERE

When I’m working with clients, they often feel nervous about remembering their childhood and wonder if they’re ready to reflect on their past. For example, some people think their childhood was unexceptional and no big deal. Others say they can’t remember much about their early years or feel uncomfortable about raking over old memories. Some even worry about uncovering memories they may have suppressed.

So if you’re not feeling totally relaxed about recalling your past, that’s quite normal… but here’s some information I always share at this point, which makes people feel a lot better:

If you think you had an ordinary childhood where nothing particularly distressing or traumatic happened, it’s important to remember that even everyday stresses and upsets can leave their mark on a sensitive child who doesn’t have the right kind of support.
Or if, like many women, you worry that you can’t remember much or anything about your early childhood, please be reassured that I’m going to provide you with lots of really helpful exercises and techniques throughout this programme, to help you recall what you need to remember in order to make sense of the past and let it go… in a calm and relaxed way.
Because, however upsetting some of our childhood experiences may have felt at the time, we can process them in a calm, detached way when we analyse them from a distance, using our adult logic… as we will be doing in this programme.
If you have a concern about ‘opening Pandora’s Box’ and recovering upsetting or suppressed memories, I can assure you that, most of the painful experiences that left their mark on us as children are things we already know about, though we may not realise how much they’re affecting us as adults. I have worked with many, many clients over more than twenty-five years, and only ONE of them has ever recalled an important and painful childhood experience they weren’t already consciously aware of: a violent fight between his parents when he was five years old that he had blocked out of his memory.
And even if you do have some old, upsetting memories, locked away outside your conscious awareness, keeping them ‘out of sight and out of mind’ doesn’t mean they’re not affecting you. Quite the opposite… they’re likely to be having a negative impact on you and your relationships today, even if you don’t consciously remember them. For example, If you’ve ever flown into a rage, felt a massive pang of jealousy, burst into tears when you wanted to be tough or done the complete opposite of what you knew was right for you in a relationship, the root cause was almost certainly the painful experiences from your distant past that you haven’t yet resolved in your mind.
The great news is that, when you bring painful memories to the surface and make sense of what happened, you can disconnect from them so they no longer affect you or mess up your relationships. Wouldn’t you rather let go of the past and move on, rather than keeping those old memories locked away and letting them stand in the way of your happiness?
And believe me… you CAN let go of those damaging experiences from the past, with all of the associated painful emotions and unhelpful expectations that you started accumulating so long ago (i.e. your Emotional Baggage). In the rest of this programme I’ll be providing you with tools and resources to help YOU disconnect from the pain of the past and move on to a happy, loving relationship using the unbreakyourheart process.
So remember… analysing your past is just an interim step on the way to fixing yourself and getting ready for love.