MW Facilitators 'Fridays on Zoom' Meditations
Healing from Trauma and Limiting Beliefs Through Insight Meditation
Becoming who we really are and living that in the world can be the work of a lifetime for some people, especially if you have been brought up in an atmosphere where you were not validated and loved just for who you were.
Even though each one of us is born perfect and is naturally wired to receive and give love, if we don’t receive unconditional love, touch, attention and validation from parents or caregivers in childhood based on who we are, not what we do or how we behave, over time we can slowly lose touch with our true selves.
Unfortunately, this lack of intrinsic validation and love in childhood is the lived experience of many people, and if the lack of love and validation is extreme – as in the case of Romanian orphan children, children can actually develop into adults with reduced brain function who end up struggling in many areas of life.
Though many people associate child abuse with very clear and obvious things such as physical and sexual abuse, failing to meet a child’s emotional needs is also abuse. This might happen in a variety of ways, but one of the most pervasive is when adults actually use the child to meet their unmet needs for unconditional love from their own parents. So instead of loving and validating the child, they expect the child to love and validate them. The child then grows up and learns that in order to survive and get the basic crumbs of love and affection they need, they have to tune into the needs of others and do their best to meet those needs. This might include becoming highly sensitive to the emotions of their parents and repressing their own self-expression so as not to trigger the unconscious reactivity of their parents and ‘get into trouble’.
The end result of this is that by the time the child is ready to leave such a home environment, their real self has become buried and repressed through the warping of their personality that has happened over the years as they have shrunk themselves so as not to trigger the anger or rage of their parents.