You Are Not Broken – Soul Work NLP
‘Your emotions are everything. But if you let them control you, they will eat you alive.'”
You are not broken. Negative emotions, and your body-memory of old traumas, can color your experience for years, even for a lifetime. But they don’t define who you are. You are always more than your emotions, more than your memory, more than your thoughts. Once you get the big picture and understand that you are more than whatever you imagined you are, it’s much easier to heal than most people imagine.
Negative emotions and traumas from your past do not define who you are. A traumatic event solidifies into a pattern of negative emotion by freezing your thinking – like a deer in headlights. Your memory becomes frozen in time. You are always more than who you think you are, because the sort of thinking that unconsciously identifies with that moment in time is always incomplete.
Negative emotions are not hypothetical. Do you have money issues? Do you have a problem translating you talent into abundance? Do you have difficulty finding or sustaining a good relationship? Do you have a challenge with relationships in general? Do you sometimes wonder if it’s just ‘bad luck’, or if there’s something you’re not quite seeing?
The reason may be simple – trauma and unresolved emotions hidden just beyond the range of conscious awareness. Perhaps you’ve become so used to them you can’t feel them any more. But you always experience the residue, because they will continue effecting your life in significant ways, until such time as you address them.
A negative emotion, experience, habit, or trauma lost in the murky past can easily be located because it’s still alive in your body and your unconscious mind. The origins of many negative emotions are sometimes lost in a murky past, before conscious memory, or when your were too young to fully make sense of them. But somewhere back there you learned to take on those emotions as if they were a part of who you are. You kept them alive, all the way into the present, and you keep on feeding them unknowingly. When you identify them and learn to stop feeding them, everything changes.
It’s not about stuffing your feelings. Actually it’s the opposite. When you open to the emotions that you have been stuffing because you thought they would destroy you, they become a source of strength. You open the door to resources of insight and energy, that those old patterns of thinking and feeling were blocking you from using.
You can’t ignore emotions and feelings. You might think that this is about something that doesn’t have anything to do with your business, your relationships, your health, or your creativity. This has everything to do with those things. If you ignore them you might be able to get by through your cleverness, charm, strategy, education, connections, or any number of your assets, but in the end it catches up with you.
Are you someone who has different compartments for money, love, health, family, art? Really!? Are you? Most of us were brainwashed into thinking that everything should be put into separate compartments. But when you are the same person in all situations, when your ideals and values show up in how you treat others, no matter who they are, when everything is available and not locked away in boxes .. something magical happens. You have more energy, clarity, and more importantly you become a magnet for good things to happen to you. It’s weird how that works, but it does. And it all comes down to your ability to resolve those old traumas and negative emotions.
Walk your talk. People sometimes tell us, “You two really walk your talk.” Is that something people say about you ? For me that’s the greatest compliment anyone could give.
Be transparent. One of the hardest things for me to learn was to show my vulnerability. It was a left-over from my past. Growing up it was definitely not safe for me to show my vulnerability. I learned the piece about trusting the negative emotions and healing the trauma. But the other piece about vulnerability is still a lesson in progress.
It’s the same for all of us. Some things we’ve managed to learn and understand, other things we’re still learning. The work of healing and growing goes on for your lifetime. Don’t wait for some imaginary perfection to mark the end of the journey. Don’t think you’re ever finished. Trust that there’s always something new to learn. Trust that whatever you think you are, you are more than that.