As we continue to talk about the role of healing let’s take a deeper look at symptoms. Commonly, symptoms are what bring individuals to coaching because there is something in your life that you want to change. Symptoms are the limiting, painful, and distracting aspects of your daily experience that get in the way of functioning to your full potential. To me, symptoms are always a clue—a doorway into the deeper self, and when I address symptoms with a client, the root cause of those symptoms comes up for healing. But how do these root causes create symptoms, and why?
Here’s one example. Let’s say you were abused as a young child. You were immersed in complex and painful emotions, including shock, shame, guilt, anger, and sadness. You may have felt betrayed and worthless. That experience is your original pain or root cause.
In response to that pain, you’ve built up protection over time. You decided that you’d never again trust the person who hurt you or anyone who reminds you of them. As you get older, that protective response expands into a limiting belief about the world in general. You become untrusting and keep your guard up. Your instincts about who can and can’t be trusted have turned into hypervigilance that doesn’t allow caring people to support you and makes it difficult to recognize good advice.
This situation can cause symptoms such as feeling distracted all the time, because so much of your energy is devoted to staying guarded and excessively testing everyone you meet, putting them through their paces to see if they are safe to be around. You may feel continually anxious due to your fear of being betrayed and hurt. You may feel defensive, shutting down potentially good relationships. You may find yourself twenty, thirty, or forty years after the original event, unfulfilled and angry, knowing you don’t have what you want . . . but not sure what you do want, or how to get there.
And that’s when you come to me, with symptoms that let you know you’re ready for change. I could ask you what happened to cause your symptoms, and you may be able to tell me, but it’s possible you may not know. You might identify something more recent as the root cause of your symptoms, not realizing how far back the root cause goes. As we work together to address your symptoms and clear that static, we’ll get a clear signal about the direction to follow and go deeper into healing to help you move toward what you really want.
It’s true that we all have difficult and emotionally challenging experiences. When we define our way of life, based on those experiences, we continue to carry that pain. The longer we create attitudes, habits, and beliefs in response to long-held pain, the more we reinforce that pain as a foundation for our behavior. In order to build a different foundation, we have to address the original pain. We address roadblocks—such as unresourceful beliefs and lack of confidence—that get in the way. We improve the skills you already have, and we build new ones. We heal the root causes of your symptoms so you can let go and truly move on. When you do that, you gain wisdom. You’re lighter, freer, and able to look at the future differently.
Are you ready to build a new foundation for the life you want? Schedule a Discovery Session!
Warmly,
