When we begin the journey inward to heal our emotional suffering and try to avoid falling into the ruts of familiar behaviour that doesn’t work for us

When we begin the journey inward to heal our emotional suffering and try to avoid falling into the ruts of familiar behaviour that doesn’t work for us, we’ll start to notice the feelings as they approach and we’ll be able to watch the behaviour that follows those feelings, as you move deeper and deeper into that all too familiar survival strategy. At this stage we have to jettison adult parental behaviour and relearn the language of the child within.
How do you begin to undo that learned behaviour?
We have to make friends with the child within
The first thing is to recognise that our feelings are being relived by learned parental behaviour and to make contact with our alienated child within we have to discount judgemental voices and reassure the child's simple belief system.The stuck childhood emotional reactions have acted as a survival mechanism and the child needs to be thanked for keeping us safe a situation that feels like a threatening action from long ago that has resulted in negative emotions needs to be addressed in current reality. Recognition is the first step on the healing path, and indeed, the first time we see it might be as far as you get in halting the behaviour that follows.We have to talk and reassure the child within that it is now safe to begin the process of letting go of some of its survival mechanisms. This becomes most successful with others who have suffered and are still suffering.Remember we are working towards redundancy, not change, reassurance not blame.
Over time, we will feel healing and clarity begin. We’ll understand what triggered it and we’ll make the decision to start the process of redundancy because responses will have no benefit to us.
Recovery won’t happen overnight, but the more we repeat our new gentle,quiet process of redundancy, the quicker the extremity of our reaction will begin to subside.