the past is here, now

The truth is that patterns of thought and behaviour like these are rooted in your subconscious, built on beliefs that can be hidden deep in your history. Your experience of childhood trauma – through abandonment, neglect, physical, sexual or emotional abuse – can have major consequences, if not resolved through awareness and guided exploration. 

Surviving childhood, when your own resources are much less than they are now, means you had to adapt – you created strategies to get by, and you learned to mask real feelings and needs. Those adaptations carry through into adult life, and produce “fixed” behaviours and responses, repeating the past trauma in the here and now. 

For example, being bullied or shamed as a child can greatly reduce your capacity to trust, to relate easily and with joy to others (and of course, to yourself).

Or having narcissistic parents, whose own expectations and ambitions are the measure of your worth, can lead to falling into a relationship now with a narcissist, which can make it seem impossible to find that healthy, wholesome sense of self. Instead, you always feel responsible for everything that’s going wrong. 

Struggling to cope with the inner feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt and even self-loathing can show up in physical illnesses and exhaustion beyond simply being ‘tired’.