What You Don't Face Ends Up Controlling You

I'm Lisa 👋 Welcome to the latest edition of Stream of Consciousness!

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Hey 👋

There's a question that came up in a book I was reading a few years ago that really stuck with me:

Are you living from love or are you living from fear?

When we were young, many of us were not taught emotional skills to help us understand ourselves, our feelings, and how a regulated vs. dysregulated nervous system manifests.

Without these skills, and without emotionally in tune adult caretakers supporting us and showing us how to use them, many of us learned first hand that feeling emotions is overwhelming and scary.

Western society reinforces this in many cases - I can't tell you the number of times I watched movies and shows as a kid and every time a child cried the parents were like, “STOP”. It was just how it was handled.

Internally, I think this is how a lot of us face our emotions. We just say, “Go away” and have societal unwritten rules engrained in us, like it's not okay to cry in a restaurant or anywhere in public for that matter.

But the emotions we are running from can become the things that control us.

Looking back, I have made a lot of my decisions from a place of fear or feeling trapped or like I was choosing the lesser of two evils vs. really going for what ideal would feel like to me - expansive, supportive, and energy-giving.

I was scared of and didn't have the tools to face my emotions and they overwhelmed me. My nervous system was dysregulated and I was operating from a place of survival.

And guess what? A lot of those decisions made from that place actually made me feel a lot MORE trapped. The cycle kept repeating.

I don't play golf but have heard a saying “If you look at the sand, that's where your ball will go.”

In some ways I think that's true and if we make decisions from a scarcity of fear-based mind, the results will be more of those feelings.

But I also think we need to look at the sand sometimes - stare into it deeply. Feel it. Listen to what it's saying. Really listen.

I got to a point where it became apparent that I absolutely needed to press “pause” on many things in my life in order to create space to begin to learn this skill.

What we learn from this can help give us essential information to help us understand ourselves better and why we are scared of whatever it is we are.

It can help us understand and change the patterns that subconsciously control us.

Usually it comes from some kind of core wound stemming from unmet emotional needs in childhood like abandonment, rejection, or shame.

I don’t want to keep making decisions from these core wounds in the sand anymore. I want to move through the sand and make them from the green.

Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and it inspired you to think slightly differently about problems you encounter in your own life.

Thank you for supporting me, for following along, for emailing me, and sharing your thoughts and ideas 🙏

Always open to your feedback on each edition - it helps me feel less like a robot behind a glass wall.

Here’s to navigating life off of autopilot together.

Lisa ✌️