When we start off on our journey through life, we learn things, we start to grow into our belief systems and we come to have some expectations of how things will go.
When we are young, we get most of our beliefs and expectations from our caregivers. Whoever that might have been.
Then as we grow, we see how other people live and do things and sometimes, not always but sometimes, it changes our perspective and our beliefs and expectations just a little. But we usually have our caregivers, parents, mentors guiding us along the way.
When we are young, what we learn really does set the tone for what we expect will happen in life. We either learn it or see it around us. When we are young, we tend to be easily influenced too.
If your childhood however, included neglect or abuse or just caregivers that were not nurturing, that sets a tone but really creates a space or hole in your heart. One that always is looking to be filled. We then spend much of our life trying to fill that void.
If your childhood was great and you had loving caregivers, building you up and making you feel good about yourself, then your beliefs and expectations on how you think life should unfold will be much different.
And if you had an experience with someone that hurt you deeply or changed your ideas and expectations of how you thought life should be, that will sometimes really stick with you and ruin your belief system. Your experience will then change what you thought that portion of your life would be.
Where we get into trouble is when we have certain expectations of how we think a relationship should be or how other people should behave and it doesn’t go that way, lots of emotions will come up. Confusion, anger, self doubt.
For the people with the unhealthy childhood, we come to learn that no one will be there for us and we are unlovable and life will be less than what we see other people living and doing. That will really set the tone for your future decisions. So from that point, your decisions about who you feel comfortable spending time with will really make an impact on your end results. All of the things come up inside you that will convince you that your past was correct and you won’t be able to thrive beyond where you see yourself at.
For the people who had a healthy upbringing, your expectations are higher and your view of how life should go is pretty much set, right? But sometimes you will get into a relationship with someone who doesn’t fit into your mold of how you think life should unfold. That presents struggle, confusion and self doubt. Or it simply breads anger or defiance on your part.
Can you see how the end results sometimes are the same no matter how you started out?
In either scenario, if a wound is created, it becomes your experience. Once that happens, it sometimes becomes your new belief and changes your expectations. If you believe, because of your experience, that your future will be now forever changed and you keep finding evidence to prove your experience right, it will be more difficult to change that.
It will take a disconfirming experience. Something to prove that your past doesn’t have to be your future. It takes some work but is really what will heal your emotional wounds.
Now, sometimes you meet someone who also has a broken past or has emotional wounds and they come into the relationship with their walls built up around their fears and expectations as well. Many times that person doesn’t manage their emotions and may be abusive toward others as a coping skill. That is not good. As women, we tend to be more nurturing and we tend to be caregivers so we overlook some of those bad behaviors because we think we can “fix” that person or make them see how awesome we are, so they will become magically better. It typically never works.
If you have pain and a void that you need to be filled with love and nurturing, something that you never had and so desire ….. but you are trying to get it from someone who has unmanaged emotions and who might be a bit abusive, that is when all sorts of problems happen.
The thing that needs to happen is finding safe relationships, safe environments and finding purpose in your life.
You must work on loving yourself first, giving yourself all the things you so deserve and never had. Filling that void from within. You cannot love another person without first loving yourself. That truly is how you heal your emotional wounds.
What is your desire? What do you really want?
What are your obstacles for getting there?
What is causing you pain?
I am here to help. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to start the healing process. You can go to my website and sign up for a confidential consultation, you can email me at karen@karenmessina.com
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