Unlearning is a Crucial Step in Growing

It’s an enormous task to unlearn the habits and behaviors that you were taught as a child when many of those came from painful interactions in the family. What we grow up with always feels normal, even if it wasn’t the experience of other kids around us. We tend to assume that all the other kids are going through the same things that we are. We aren’t taught to fact check our own mind.

It takes years of meeting other people, growing up, and going out into the world without our parents to get some perspective on our childhood years.

When we want to do things differently from our family of origin, when we see the pains and we want to take action to change them, we are changing family patterns of harm. We are healing ourselves and our family line. To do this we need to grow our Inner Mother.

The Inner Mother’s first job is to acknowledge our own humanity. This is the foundation of Inner Mother/Inner Child work.
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But do we even know what our humanity is? It’s the part of us that makes mistakes, because this whole human experience is a trial and error thing.

It’s the part of us that doesn’t understand, because the world is complex and relationships are intricate and often unspoken connections that we make in each other’s presence.

Our humanity is in our grief in the face of difficulty.

Our humanity is in our anger in the face of injustice.

Our humanity is in our ability to give grace and assistance to those in need, and to acknowledge that sometimes the person in need is us.

But instead we’re often taught to bypass our humanity, and that of others through judgment, criticism, and blame. We’re taught that we don’t have to feel the bad feelings, we can project them on others. We may learn that when we struggle we cannot expect anyone to help us. We learn that unless others find us pleasant and easy we are not welcomed.

We may find that we have thoughts bumping around in our heads that are mean, critical, judgmental, shaming, and some of them can get downright cruel. We may direct them at others, but the cruelest ones we may direct at ourselves with the intention of keeping ourselves in line, acceptable, nice, helpful.

We push back on our own desires, dreams, and hopes.

We decide before we ever start going after our dreams that we can’t have them, that someone important wouldn’t like it, that we’d never be allowed. And so we keep ourselves from trying.

We often end up feeling frustrated.

Internally we have a desire, we judge it as unworthy, and we pretend it doesn’t exist. We pretend we’re not so weak as to want something unattainable. We pretend we don’t need any of what it has to offer.

And the antidote to this self-defeating cycle is to acknowledge our humanity. The ways we aren’t perfect, that we don’t know all the answers, that we have needs, and that we want things.

The antidote is in feeling our grief, our anger, our joy, and our desire.

This isn’t easy to do when we’ve spent most of our lives avoiding them.

Maybe it can begin with just wishing yourself well? This was my way in when I was feeling trapped by the internalized judgment of my own desires, and it was clear I needed to let that old judgment go.

I started by saying the Buddhist loving kindness prayer, metta. Every single morning for a whole summer I said metta for myself. There are many versions of this prayer and many applications, but this is what I did...

I cleaned my front porch, set up a small concrete altar for a candle, made a place where I could safely burn incense, and I sat in my rocking chair. I lit the candle, the incense, and said, with my hand on my heart:
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May I be well, happy, and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May no troubles or difficulties come to me. May I always meet with success. May I also have the patience, courage, understanding, and perseverance, to meet and overcome the inevitable troubles, difficulties, and failures in life. May I know that I am loved, may I know that I am cared for, and may I know that I belong.

Offering the words, receiving the words, and repetition changed something in my nervous system that summer.

Parts of me relaxed and made room for the difficult part of my humanity, the parts that had historically felt like failures. I became a little easier on myself, and I noticed that, without trying, I also had more grace for others.

In retrospect, this was one of the most important acts of self-parenting I did. The one who offered the words was my developing Inner Mother. And the one who received the words and was soothed by them was the Inner Child who had never felt she could never be good enough. And developing this kind of internal relationship helped me change my external relationships with very little effort.

I brought more empathy to myself and to my beloveds. I stopped holding grudges. I allowed that we all make mistakes, that we all get tired, that we all fail sometimes. And it doesn’t make us failures. It makes us human.

Being human is one big trial-and-error process anyway. In relating to each other we are always trying to let someone else know what is going on inside of us, and they’re always trying to understand something that is fundamentally unknowable. We do our best, and sometimes, maybe even often, our best falls short.
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