Growth Through Relationship: Shifting your Perspective to Receive Sacred Wisdom
Growth Through Relationship
Growth Through Relationship
One of the things I have learned in my training and experience as a counselor, therapist, intuitive healer, and coach is that the psychological wounds that we all carry with us to some extent, have all originated in relationship.
Relationships for so many of us have been dangerous places. Sometimes I have felt like this earth-plane is merely a torture chamber of trauma. But then again, I could be a bit jaded!
Because we do not live in isolation from one another, our entire lives are entwined in relationships.
And because of this integral nature of relationships, not only are they critical to our emotional, physical, and spiritual wellbeing, but they are also the places we have been abandoned, rejected, judged, criticized, shamed, blamed, and sometimes physically or sexually abused.
What most people fail to understand however is that because the rupture, the harm, the original wounding happened at the level of relationship, relationship is the only place to heal and repair that original harm.
What commonly tends to happen is that we pull away or avoid relationships altogether or, in the alternative, we develop unconscious psychological protective mechanisms that sabotage our inherent human need for connection, belonging and love which can only be found by and through our relationships to others.
You're Not an Island...
The saying no man is an island, is all too true.
And yet when we are hurt in a relationship, we often end up believing that we are islands, that we can heal our pain by avoiding future situations of the same nature, or by avoiding certain people or places, or by trying to have no needs or become self-sustaining and not needing others at all.
This is a trap.
And for most of us it is not only unsustainable, but emotionally and psychologically unhealthy, leading only to further feelings of isolation, abandonment, and pain.
Receiving Sacred Wisdom
Shifting Your Perspective
Sacred wounds become sacred wisdom when we learn to shift our perspective on relationship and relational wounds. At the core of every relationship with others is the relationship we have with ourselves, with our own feelings and emotions.
Part of learning to shift from powerlessness to power in relationships begins with strengthening our capacity to have clearer boundaries with ourselves, as well as learning new responses to our own internal “negative” emotions such as guilt or shame.
As we learn how to honor our internal relational space, we begin to develop better discernment in our outer realm.
We can sense better who to trust and who to avoid, when to speak up for ourselves and when to stay silent. As we validate our inner realm, we begin to show up differently in our outer relationships.
This how our relationships can eventually become a place of healing rather than a nightmare of repeated trauma and pain. Each time we experience a new response to an old pattern we grow new neurons in our brain, new pathways of safety and connection.
Each time that a wound is met with acceptance and compassion rather than further rupture and harm, we build a bridge between the pain of the past and the potential of a new more secure and life affirming future.
This is by no means easy work, but it is the only way to completely heal the core wounds which we have all experienced in relationship to some degree. As we shift into a new understanding of the relational realms, we access sacred wisdom that holds the power to not only set us free, but also to show us our own power as creators of our experience.