The healing trap

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dy10f1CVhhc

Have you ever felt like no matter what you try to do to heal, nothing ever works? When you try to do the self-help techniques, matters get worse and worse and worse and worse? If the answer is yes to those questions. The chances are you're caught in the healing trap. The healing trap occurs when you have two completely contradictory needs. Which needs exactly? To understand that, we have to go back in time. We have been living in the emotional dark age for a very very long time. The reality is we don't understand emotion. We don't understand the function of emotion. We don't understand how to treat emotions, how to deal with it, what to do when they come up. As a result, even the most well-meaning and the best parents that we have on earth today mistreat their children's emotions. When we are little and we are facing a problem, what happens? Emotion arises. Same thing as when we're adults. But chances are when emotion arose within you, when you had a problem when you were younger, you are not treated well. Your emotions were not treated appropriately. For example, let's say that you didn't want to go to school. Obviously, doing something that you have to do, but don't want to do makes you feel powerless and also sad. But when you express that powerlessness and that sadness, what happened? Chances are you were invalidated. What they usually do is to disapprove of the way that you feel. At worst, they directly shame you for the way you feel. At best, they may say something along the lines of "Come on now, everyone has to go to school. Quit your whining, get in the car. We're going to be late". Essentially, the caregivers in your life made you feel like there was no good reason for you to feel the way you felt. And so you decided there must be something wrong with you and so you felt ashamed of yourself. To understand more about how to correctly deal with emotions, I suggest that you watch my video on YouTube titled The Emotional Wake Up Call. And to understand more about shame and how to heal it, I suggest that you watch my video on YouTube titled How To Overcome Shame. We as physical humans are dependent on our caregivers for a lot longer than the majority of species on this planet. And more than that, we're a group species. As a group species our survival and our ability to thrive depended on being a part of the group. And so quite literally any kind of separation or exclusion, any kind of disapproval showed to us from the group was actually a risk of death. Even though the modern world has evolved so that we can essentially live as single people in the world today, we are not wired for it. We are wired as a group species. We are wired to live communally. We are wired to be dependent on the group that we choose to be a part of or are born into. With this kind of wiring, the approval of our caregivers, mostly parents, mattered more than anything. Approval equals love and survival in our minds. Disapproval equals being unloved and thus being alone and not surviving in our minds. The process of socialization which all children go through including you is essentially a process of aspects of us being approved of and aspects of us being disapproved of. Parents demonstrate their approval and disapproval in various ways and also punish and reward according to their approval or disapproval in various ways. So, what did we do to ensure our survival and to fit into the group? We made damn sure that we had approval. We altered ourselves and suppressed all kinds of aspects of ourselves specifically so that we would get that approval. And what we don't remember is how incredibly painful this process was. What we learned is that love was absolutely conditional. It was conditioned upon us doing certain things and not doing other things. In order to be able to do this to ourselves, to say erase aspects of your being from your consciousness so that you were only what was acceptable to the beings that you were around as a child, you had to suppress a desire. That desire was to be loved and approved of exactly as you are. We wanted that look in our parents eyes that said nothing is wrong with you, nothing needs to be changed or fixed, you're perfect as you are. Let's call this unconditional approval. Alas, none of us really got this message, did we? No. Instead, we went on trying to fix ourselves and try to get approval any way we could. What happened, because it was so painful to meet with the disapproval of other people, is we became our own self moderators. We started to criticize ourselves to keep ourselves in line. We started to be the ones to make sure that we had punished ourselves when we stepped out of line. We became our own worst nightmare. We took on the endless task of fixing ourselves so that we would be lovable. Of course, it is at this point that the people around us started to call us good. So what happened when we decided to do this to ourselves, to disown aspect of ourselves, to suppress them to become only what was acceptable. Let's imagine this was you. At that moment, you created a major split inside yourself, a split between two halves with two competing needs, a split between the aspect of you who actually needs the solution to problems that you faced and the aspect of you who needs the exact opposite, the aspect of you who needs unconditional approval which is essentially to be told "Nope, there is no change that needs to be made to you, You do not need to be fixed." Let's call this unconditional approval. Because this is a need and this is a need, you end up completely stuck. To be crass about it, you end up screwed. Because anytime you're looking for a solution, you are essentially denying or going in direct opposition to this need and the side of you that needs unconditional approval is getting screwed. Or if you go with unconditional approval and say "You know what, you're fine the way you are", the side of you that needs a solution is not getting its need met and it's completely screwed. So you get stuck and there's no forward movement. And no matter which action you take, the other aspect of you is being denied its rightful place, is being denied what it actually needs. And you're in the state of fracture. On the one hand, healing is good. That's this side. It's great to find a solution to your problems when you're sick or when you're not feeling good or when you want to improve your life in some way. On the other hand, it implies that something isn't ok as it is and needs to be changed for the better, it needs to be fixed. So, what happens if this suppressed and highly subconscious need for unconditional approval is strong within you is that when you try to heal yourself, the aspect of you that needs unconditional approval will be triggered. It will dig its heels in to the degree that you obsessively try to fix yourself. It will resist that same amount and you will soon notice that nothing you ever do seems to work. This is the healing trap. A death-defying tug-of-war between the aspect of you who needs a solution that is pulling in this direction and the aspect of you that needs unconditional approval for exactly how it is which is pulling you in this direction. And the more you try to win the fight by trying to find a solution and by trying to heal, the more pain you'll feel. If you are caught in the healing trap, then it's necessary for you to find alignment between the two warring aspects of yourself. And how you do that is the following. 1. Showing the aspect of you that needs a solution that the conditional approval that is inherent in your quest for healing is the actual problem and thus unconditional approval is the actual solution. 2. Showing the aspect of you that needs unconditional approval that the other aspect of itself is trying to find solutions not because it needs it to change to be loved, but because it loves it already and thus obviously wants it to feel good instead of bad. In other words, healing can be loving instead of a commentary on wrongness. 3. Allow yourself to mentally leave one aspect of yourself out of the picture and where it wants to be while meeting the other aspects needs. We need to accept that as people, even though we may call ourselves by one name, we are not unified beings as we stand. We are in fact, many different aspects of self, many different selves. And those selves express themselves in different situations. Some come out sometimes and go away other times. You are a conglomeration of many fractured aspects of self. Until you are willing to admit to this, there's no hope that you can find integration and thus be in the state of wholeness. To address these two different aspects of self that we're talking about relative to the healing trap, I want you to do a meditation where you close your eyes and ask to see the two aspects of yourself in front of you, the one that needs unconditional approval and the one that needs the solution Then you're going to engage in an intentional visualization, an intuitive one where you interact with them each, ask them questions. For example, one question you could ask the aspect of you who wants healing is "What would be so bad about not having a solution?" You often find it boils down to the fear of being alone if the problem isn't fixed. You could ask the aspect that needs unconditional approval "Why don't you want to heal or get better?" You could have the aspect of you that wanted a solution provide for the aspect that wants unconditional approval whatever that side has always wanted and needed, but never got. For example, the message that it's never going to be alone. If you are stuck in a healing trap and you're really struggling with this and their meditations on your own don't work, I suggest that you look around your area to find a voice dialogue expert or a gestalt therapist, go have a session and when you walk through the door, I want you to present this exact dilemma and allow that therapist to lead you through a healing process with these two warring aspects of self. I will tip you off before you go into this process that the aspect of you that needs a solution is almost always a conscious adult aspect whereas the aspect of you that needs unconditional approval is almost always a child aspect. Circling back to the third point I made that must be done when we're looking to integrate these two fractured aspects of selves, I suggest that you allow for a conscious split within yourself between these two aspects where while you are meeting one of their needs, you are allowing the other to be in a space where its needs are being met and not forcing it to be usurped by the other. For example, let's say that one aspect of me wants significance and thus really wants to get up on stage and talk to a roomful of hundreds and hundreds of people. But let's say there's another aspect of me that wants the exact opposite of that. That's an unsafe proposition. And it just wants to be as far away from the pressure of that as it can possibly get. What I don't want to do is to use the aspect of me that wants to be on stage to bulldoze through the aspect of me that really doesn't. That's cruelty and in fact creates more fracture. What I can do instead is to create a conscious split where before I step on the stage, I imagine leaving the aspect of me that doesn't want to be on stage in a place that she really wants to be with someone she really wants to be with so that aspect of me doesn't even need to participate in the onstage experience. And when I step off stage, I can imagine bringing that aspect of myself back in. One thing that's crucial to understand when we're beginning this process of reintegration is that unconscious splits are what is truly dangerous. Conscious splitting may in fact be the very step that is necessary to take that actually leads you to integration in the state of wholeness. That's the only way to meet these sometimes highly contradictory needs that exist in the selves that live within you. As this concept applies to the healing trap, anytime you're seeking a solution to your problem, you can imagine consciously leaving the aspect of you that needs unconditional approval with someone who is unconditionally approving and far away from the hospital or self-improvement technique or seminar. To the contrary, anytime you are engaged in unconditional approval, you can for example, imagine the aspect of you that needs a solution being set loose in the library or meeting with a transcendent guide to tirelessly seek out the solution. So whenever you find yourself in a situation where no matter what you do, no matter how desperate you are to heal, everything you do makes you worse instead of better, consider that you may in fact, be inside the healing trap. Consider that there are two aspects of yourself that are at war and that alignment needs to happen between them, and that all you need to do to find that alignment is to put these two aspects of self in communication with each other to promote a positive relationship between them where there is space for each one of their needs to be met.