Today is Valentine’s day: the day on which people traditionally express and celebrate their love for each other. But what about loving ourselves? Many people have had the idea of self-love beaten out of them through early life experiences, so here are Ten Steps Towards Loving Yourself: (more…)
Journaling is a great way to release unexpressed emotions that can otherwise accumulate and make us feel anxious. Here is an example of some free-flow journaling that I did last year at a time when I was feeling particularly anxious. It helped me identify and release how I was feeling, so writing it felt very cathartic.
I am so anxious sometimes that it’s literally hard to breathe. Why, why, why, why, why? Or more importantly, what can I do about it? Where is it coming from? I’ve been contemplating this recently, and here are my thoughts: (more…)
Unhealed childhood resentment is like a cancer that can destroy your adult life. We unconsciously project resentment towards our parents that we continue to carry from our childhood, onto other people. Especially people of the same gender as the parent we still resent.
If deep down you are still angry with your mother, you’ll tend to resent any woman who acts even remotely like her. If you still have resentment towards your father, it’s likely to negatively effect the way you relate to other men and authority figures in general. This operates unconsciously so you may not even be consciously aware of it.
If you grew up in an environment where anger wasn’t handled well and you learned to suppress your own anger, you could have a truckload of resentment simmering away beneath the surface that you’re not even consciously aware of. Symptoms of this are feeling rage when other people violate your boundaries, either exploding out of proportion to what’s actually happening or seething internally instead of standing up for yourself.
One of the best things I’ve ever done for my own self-confidence and for my relationship with my parents was to go “no-contact” with my narcissistic mother for over a year. Narcissistic parents create a family dynamic which is all about putting their own needs ahead of everyone else. This becomes a real problem when we become adults because we can end up trapped by the unconscious belief that our parent’s needs and desires must always come before our own.
Because the emotional dynamics of the parent/child relationship are so strong, this will keep us perpetually stuck as an emotional child emotionally even though we are physically adults. Since our unconscious mind projects our experience of our parents onto everyone else and onto the world at large, the limiting impact of being trapped in the role of a child who must always please their parents restricts our whole lives.
Going “No Contact” With A Narcissistic Parent Can Give You Space To Heal.
Going “no-contact” with a narcissistic parent is one way to grow up emotionally by breaking this unhealthy parental relationship dynamic.