Many people say that a proper grown-up communicates clearly and assertively. By that measure, one person spent most of her life not feeling like a proper grown-up. There was a time when she could not even ask someone for a glass of water.
She felt crazy for not being able to do what others did without thinking. She asked herself why she could not say what she needed to say, or why she could not just be normal. Those questions fed a shame spiral she was trapped in at that time.
The question she should have been asking was not how to overcome being damaged, but how her struggles made sense based on how she was raised. Based on that, she said, her behaviors made perfect sense.
She was the child taught to be seen and not heard. She was the child whose feelings made others angry and violent. She was the child whose anger got her shamed and rejected by the person she needed most. She was the child who got hit again and again until she did not cry anymore.
She was the child whose needs inconvenienced those in charge of caring for her. She was the child whose wants were called selfish, attention-seeking, or ridiculous. She was the child who was made wrong for everything she felt, wanted, or needed. She was the child who was called a monster for being who she was, a child. She was the child who grew up feeling unwanted, alone, and entirely repulsive.
She asked why that child would ever speak or share anything about herself. She concluded that child would not. It made sense. It was a way of living and surviving. She had been taught that she did not matter, that what she wanted or needed and how she felt was something so abhorrent it needed to be hidden at any cost. She did it to avoid getting hurt, shamed, and rejected, even when she was with different people and even when she was an adult.
That pattern ran her life. She could not get herself to say the things she wanted and needed to say. It felt too scary, too dangerous, and too shame-inducing.
She said that if someone struggles to express themselves and feels embarrassed about that, it is not their fault. Life is harder when the only way to protect yourself was by being less of yourself, when you could never grow into yourself because that would have gotten you hurt, and when you could not learn to love yourself because that was the biggest risk of all.
Today, that risk only lives on within a person, in their conditioning. That is where inner healing work comes in. For her, that meant getting professional support to learn how to safely connect to herself and her truth, and how to banish the critical and demeaning internal voice that told her her feelings, needs, and wants were wrong.
It meant learning to regulate her nervous system so she could get past her fear and be honest about what worked for her and what did not. This was a major turning point in her relationships. She started to represent herself more openly and assertively, which meant her relationships either improved dramatically or she found out that other people did not really care about her and how she felt.
It also meant opening up emotionally and learning to understand what her feelings were trying to tell her. Since she had learned to avoid and suppress her emotions growing up, she knew it would be challenging to truly get to know herself. She had the opportunity of reparenting herself, giving herself the love, affection, and attention she did not receive as a kid.
That is what ultimately allowed her to finally feel safe enough to express herself. The relationship she had with herself started to become like a safe haven instead of a battleground. Her life has never been the same since. Everything on the outside started to align with what was going on inside of her. The safer she became for herself, the safer the people in her life became, which allowed them to develop deeper and more meaningful relationships.
She knows that kind of change is possible, even if it does not feel like it right now. She said she is the most authentic and expressed version of herself she has ever been. She no longer chokes on the words she was always meant to speak. She speaks them. She no longer holds back her feelings. She feels them and shares them freely. She no longer denies her needs or plays down her desires. She owns them, meets them, and fulfills them.
She said she hopes that by sharing her story and transformation, others will follow the spark of desire in them that wants them to express themselves. She said people were born to be fully expressed. That was their birthright. Just because the people who raised them did not understand them, that does not mean they have to deprive the world, and themselves, of experiencing who they are.
