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IT IS COMMON FOR OUR emotional health to get damaged during childhood. Somewhere along the line, many of us have received an emotional wounding as children that disconnects us from who we are. A painful experience in childhood can shape our adult personality and our strategies for how we show up. This experience often shapes how we view the world and often hasn’t been healed, even in adulthood. This wounding or fracture causes us to armor up in self-protection which can hinder our progress in life and block us from connecting with others as well as with ourselves. Childhood fractures are often centered around shame, the painful experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love. According to Lise Borbeau, author of Heal Your Wounds and Find Your True Self, there are five common types of wounding. These five types of wounding can show up in adults as fear of abandonment or fear of being alone; fear of rejection which can prevent us from accepting our own thoughts, feelings and perceptions; humiliation and fear of disapproval or criticism from others; betrayal or fear of trusting others; and injustice, which leads to feelings of powerlessness.
In my work with women, I typically see in equal measure the fear of rejection and the fear of humiliation as the most common causes of low self-esteem. Betrayal or fear of trusting others also shows up as a cause of perfectionism, not trusting anyone else to do the job “right.”
Sadly, many women tell me how as children, they were told they were stupid, bad, overweight, not smart enough, high maintenance, needy, emotional, ridiculous, nonsensical, exhausting, selfish, spoiled, disappointing, and heard things like “why can’t you be more like your brother?” It’s not hard to see how adult women might have internalized any of these messages and are now overcompensating to prove to the world that it isn’t true. What happened to the bright and shiny little girl that was bursting with eager anticipation about what life had to offer? Feeling flawed creates a feeling of being unlovable.
Without a tribe to belong to as a 10-year-old, I spent a lot of time alone, riding my bike all over the mudflats of Kihei. My bike delivered me into a feeling of freedom and still does. Every morning before school, at sunrise, I ran for miles down the beach in front of our house. My parents, although they were doing their best, didn’t notice how much pain I was in. Or they did, and because they were uncomfortable with my awkward loneliness, tried to turn me into a more acceptable version of myself. What I needed was to be told that I was good enough. That I was loved exactly as I was. To have someone hold me and tell me it would all be okay, that they were there for me as my biggest supporters. As parents will do, my mom criticized me in the hopes that it would force me to be a different or better version of myself so that I would be happy and acceptable so she wouldn’t have to worry about me. We want our children to be happy and it’s hard when we see them in pain. Perhaps my mom’s discomfort centered around her own feelings of inadequacy as a parent.
When I was 15 and a sophomore in high school, I had a profound experience that was to be my first Call. I was so highly tuned to the environment around me, the gift of spending time alone in communion with the land and the ocean where we lived. I sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night, acutely aware that something was wrong on the beach. I ran down to the beach and found an entire pod of dolphins had beached themselves in front of our house. I spent five hours with them, pouring water on their skin so it wouldn’t dry out and as the tide started coming in, helping them back into the water. By the time the sky started getting lighter and the sun popped up above the horizon, all but three of the dolphins had swum out beyond the reef to deeper waters. Over the next two hours, the three remaining dolphins stayed with me, what felt like a conscious choice for them. I can still remember their love and gratitude as it filled my heart. This was my first experience of acceptance.
At the time, I did not understand that my life was forever changed by that experience. A part of me that I didn’t realize was there, woke up. I had new eyes. I know now that I would not have had the awareness and sensitivity to feel what was happening with the dolphins, had I not been developing the depth of relationship with myself and other living beings around me all those years. That level of deep connection with an animal as intelligent as I could feel the dolphins were, confirmed my worth. The path to that experience couldn’t have been more perfectly laid out for me.
By the time I was starting college, I had mostly forgotten my prior shame of not fitting in. I had a new sense of myself, I knew there was a deeper purpose for my existence, although it was just a whisper. I still had my protective armor; I was still keeping myself safe from not belonging, or so I believed. What I didn’t realize at the time was I had picked up where the bullies left off. A steady barrage of mean self-attacks ran through my brain every day. Nobody knew. I didn’t even know for many years. I began striving in many ways to prove my worth. In Chapter 3, I’ll explain how striving is a classic survival strategy for women. At the time, I had no idea that this wasn’t going to bring me more happiness or belonging. I learned that much later.
The dolphins had ignited a glowing ember in me, but my armor blocked me from fanning the ember into a flame. Until my armor got blown to bits, when my Dad died suddenly, just a few years later.
When we understand where our fracture began and how we began to protect and adapt ourselves to compensate so that we would be worthier of love and belonging, we can get a sense for how we began to lose our true selves. In the next chapter, we will explore the most common ways that women compensate.
In my first ten years of clinical herbal practice, I documented an observation about healing, a common pattern that presented with many of my clients. I specialized in women’s health and saw clients with a myriad of presenting issues, from hormonal imbalances to digestive disorders and auto-immune disorders. After making nutritional and lifestyle changes and taking their herbal formulas for a period, most everyone would get better within a few months, even be symptom-free. Herbal medicine is extremely effective for chronic conditions. What I didn’t expect was that a year or two or three later, the presenting symptoms and condition would often have returned. When I reviewed the charts of the clients who had conditions that had returned, they all shared a similar experience of childhood wounding that hadn’t been healed. I became fascinated with the connection between and interdependence of the physical, emotional and spiritual bodies.
When something painful happens, particularly in childhood, we deal with it the best we know how with the resources we have in that moment. We carry on. This is how we cope and learn to protect ourselves. We tend to store life experiences in our bodies and when an experience is particularly painful, our mind avoids going there with our attention. Trauma can be any stressful experience in which we didn’t have the emotional resources to deal with it at the time. The brain considers stored life experiences to be a danger which can activate fear. This is a mind-body disconnect. Disassociation from the body is a natural survival technique. We can relearn the skill of staying with the body rather than leaving it when we experience discomfort. In Trauma Releasing Exercises, David Berceli writes, “Just as this body/mind continuum is a natural mechanism that has protected humans during their evolution, these same natural mechanisms continue to restore us to health.”
