How to Process Uncomfortable Emotions Caused by Childhood Emotional Neglect Part 4

In order to process uncomfortable emotions, you need to have compassion for your inner-self. 

“If I don't have compassion for myself, I'll never be able to have compassion for you.”  

Having Compassion for the Self:

If you take children who have been beaten, ignored and treated like garbage, what'll happen is the child will learn to believe that they are nothing, and in order to survive the experience, that child will become very hard and cold. To save that child's self, they will flee into themselves because the brain is wired to avoid pain. So it's much easier for a child when the abuse is that extensive to run and hide within their conscious mind. They will not understand the innocence within them because that would be too painful to imagine themselves as innocent. Eventually, they would tap into rage and retaliation and become perpetrators and hurt people the way they have been hurt.

If we can't take that person and help them develop compassion for the abuse that they've suffered, we cannot expect that type of person to have compassion for others. They will continue to recycle their trauma.

So if we were able to help someone that has been severely traumatized as a child and is now as an adult caught in the perpetual cycle of doing this to other people, the goal would be to help that person come into awareness of what happened to them and to help them successfully integrate the pain, validate their experience and learn to have compassion for the inner child again. 

Seeking The Inner Child Within:

I'm not religious, but scripture says to seek the child within. If we can seek the child within and allow ourselves to experience the feelings that we were not allowed to experience, we could learn how to be the true mechanics of our own lives as adults. We can be the CEOs of our own lives, learn to validate ourselves, and learn to have compassion for other people then. 

“The goal has to be to seek the child within us first.”

Then it would be easier for us to see the child within all human beings. We have to seek oneness with the self, mind, body and soul first, and then we can seek compassion and oneness in one another. It's beautiful. 

It’s difficult for us to feel our feelings because we have been taught to disassociate from them. It happens organically because of the way the brain is wired; to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Seeking Validation from Others:

Emotionally we want to make other people happy. We seek our parents’ validation. We just want them to love us. We're seeking their validation, and if there's pain associated with having a need, the brain will dismiss and disassociate with it. We will make ourselves small instead of getting big and being who we are because more pain will be associated with expressing ourselves and how we feel. 

If you have been taught that your feelings don't matter, that's going to make you crazy. After all, you came here to feel because you’re a feeling being. You were intended to come here and tap into the way you feel so that you can figure out what you want to do with your life, what makes you happy, what kinds of things make your skin tingle, get you excited when you talk about them. Those are all feelings, and they are all unique. 

What kind of things upset you? What kind of news footage makes you sad? What kind of conversations upset you? You have to ask yourself these things and start addressing these feelings to begin building boundaries and saying no to the things you don’t want. 

“Without learning to tap into your emotions, you stay cognitive and on the surface of the water.”

To find out more about how you can learn to process these difficult emotions, watch this video on my YouTube Channel, where I dive into each aspect you should know about that can aid you in your recovery. 

You can also check out the rest of my website www.lisaaromano.com for some more resources, as well as my 12-Week Breakthrough Program and Codependency Quiz.