LESSON TWO: OUR MOST INFLUENTIAL EXPERIENCES

Life is full of experiences that leave marks and scars as well as those that bring us joy and hope. In our lifetime we will have had pain, suffering, and happiness and every one of those especially the deeper-rooted ones influence our perception of who we are and how we live life.

 Trauma, for instance, is one of the deeper-rooted marks that leaves a scar. Physical, sexual, emotional abuse, anything that made you doubt who you were versus who you thought you were or what the world is versus what you thought the world was becomes an influential experience.

Our childhood plays a large role in our development of the self. We learn who we are when we’re young by the way we were able to attach to our caregivers and the messages we received from them. Our caregivers serve as mirrors to reflect back to us who and what we thought we were when we were children.

 When we grow up, our partners become the mirrors which reflect those messages back to us as well. Yet often times, what we worry our partners will assume of us equally match our hidden fears of ourselves. We’re constantly on high alert to make sure that we’re defending ourselves against our own gremlins. This can happen pretty frequently and intensely around issues like identity, career, and parenting to name a few.

Our own self-doubts are quiet and sneaky and like to put the blame on our partner when in reality we’re hyper-aware of criticism in one area or another in our lives. It’s important we go back through some of our most influential experiences lived in order to understand our own internal messaging and where that came from. We have to be able to identify it in order to talk about it.