Childhood Beliefs Can Choke Your Magic (Copy)

Your magic has not fully manifest because you still carry childhood beliefs with you. Despite your efforts to ferret them out, some still remain. The deepest ones, the most influential ones, have yet to be discovered. Finding them will be an important part of this next transition. 

You do not want to dwell upon the past because you cannot change it. That’s a good attitude, except for the fact that you can’t know yourself and accept your empathic nature until you understand what happened to you as a child and how it affects you now. 

You don’t want to blame others, and you don’t want to come to hate your parents or family or clergy or teachers because of what they did or what they said. You’re strong enough to take responsibility for your own life. This attitude is also admirable. Your angelic nature makes you capable of forgiving them, and that is beautiful and proper. But their actions and their words affected you deeply – far more deeply because you are an empath – and you need to understand how you responded to them to take care of yourself today. I assure you of this: you can forgive them and love them and, at the same time, understand how they affected you.

Photo by Jessica Rockowitz on Unsplash

Much of what you are coping with now results from fundamental, ontological beliefs you formed  when you were a child. Going back to your childhood and understanding how you responded to what you perceived will unlock deep insights into your habits of mind today, and will enable you to take control of your consciousness and actions in new ways. Doing this is far better for you than drugs, prescribed or not. This has been true for every one of my clients.

But I don’t want to just gloss over the fact that many empaths have a very hard time doing this. The more traumatic your upbringing, and the more intense your empathy, the less memory you will have. People who were under a lot of stress as children have only disjointed flashes of memory. These memories are not strung together by a story of their life; they are strung together by their empathic journey.

Processing Childhood Indoctrination

It’s remarkable but true: we spend much of our adult life processing the indoctrination and the traumas we experienced as children. Those who had power over us imposed their will on our lives, and there was nothing we could do about it. 

While everyone responds to this differently, when we are very young, we all form assumptions about the world that stay with us for our whole lives, either consciously or subconsciously. These assumptions go so deep that we take them to be absolute truths, and they remain absolute truths at the core of our understanding of reality.

Some of these assumptions benefit us, and some work against us. Not many people can make the distinction. If we could select the good and disregard the bad, there would be far less mental anguish in the world than there is. Most of us internalize all of it equally, and we can’t tell what is good for us from what is bad for us.

Countless times I have worked with clients who are dumbfounded by their own behavior. They suffer addictions of all sorts, sometimes to drugs but more often to ways of thought. Some deep force controls their behavior before their conscious mind has a chance to intervene. They find themselves in situations that are eerily familiar, over and over, no matter how hard they try to escape them.

This happens because everything we do is ultimately controlled by our subconscious mind. Lots of self-help literature talks about the “lizard brain” or something similar, and they try to explain that our addictions come from survival instincts that attach themselves irrationally to destructive behaviors.

There’s a deep truth in this perception, but it misses something essential. It fails to explain how these survival instincts attached themselves to destructive impulses. The “how” is incredibly important. Only by understanding the “how” can we detach the instinct from the destructive behavior.

The Cause/Trigger is Childish

The cause can be deceptively simple. Ridiculous, even. But ifIf you're an empathic child, little things can be really traumatic when you're a kid. For example, I saw the first Godfather movie when I was way, way too young. It’s just a story, right?  But as a child, it seemed like this overwhelming reality that was playing out was beyond my control. I reacted viscerally. Witnessing such cruelty, done so casually and matter-of-factly, made me vomit. My reaction was itself very scary to me. I came to believe that the sort of tribal violence and utter viciousness depicted in the film existed all around me. I internalized this perception of reality and believed it to be completely true. For years afterwards, the music alone would make me sick.That was just from a movie. 

Empathic children, like the one you were, can have something just as solid and real arise from something very simple, something said to you, something done at the wrong time when you were in a vulnerable space. Maybe somebody told you something, or you had a dream, or you were told a story. These things can affect you indefinitely.

Food is always involved as a kid, and food and money are linked deeply. Of all the power your parents and authority figures held over you, the fact that they controlled food affected you at a core survival level from infancy. The way food was handled in your household taught you deep lessons about the world, lessons that are so deep you are probably still unaware of them. What you think is truth is actually an assumption.

If there was love at the table every night, when you ate with your family, then you would suffer far less trauma than others. Mother must give the milk and the honey, and ideally the child knows that the mother gives it to herself as well. Few are that fortunate. 

You knew exactly what your mother was feeling as she provided milk and honey. If she was not whole, if she was not happy, then you knew it. But you had no way to understand it. You had no context. So, you felt that you took the milk and honey from her. You helped kill her, you helped make her miserable, your existence itself made her suffer. None of that may be true, but you made it true in your child’s mind, and that belief is still there in your subconscious, guiding your behavior and dominating your perception of the world.

If you had to get your own meals out of the fridge every night when you were a child, and if the food available was not enough or just packaged junk, then you have experienced abandonment. You were not fed. You could not feed yourself. All you could do was scavenge for what was left over.

Empaths who go through something like that—even if it only happened a few times—will suffer for it decades later. They will have eating disorders, or they will suffer financial troubles because they believe in scarcity, they believe that they do not deserve love, they believe that when there is something there they can obtain, they have to consume all of it immediately because there is no knowing if anything will be there later.

When they manage to create security for themselves, they believe it can be snatched away at any time. When they find some glimmer of love from another, they live in terror instead of happiness because they fully expect that love to evaporate randomly.

That’s what happened when they were seven, and powerless. So, therefore, that is what will happen when they are fifty. That’s how deep this goes, and how long it can affect you.