We see, as children, we are dependent on others for our survival. And so we begin to adapt our behaviour to get the approval we desire from our parents. We are geniuses at understanding patterns – it’s called pattern recognition. As children, we see the patterns that, if we follow them, get us rewards from our parents. And we see the patterns that will never get us rewards and approval from our parents.
This type of pattern recognition creates our “model of association,” i.e., how we learn to get approval from not only our parents, but also our immediate world. We then we take this model of behaviour that many times was decided by us by the time we were 5 or 6, into our adult life. What many of us have come to understand is that there is still a scared and helpless 5 or 6-year-old version of ourselves that is running the show in all our relationships – both romantically and professionally.
Obviously, what we learn from our parents, no matter if the experience was good or bad, has served us to this point. We made it to today and so we learned how to survive, cope and survive.
Many of us were praised when we achieved and followed the rules and not praised when we acted out, acted too silly or too empowered (a.k.a. against our parents’ will). Many parents value our security so much that they let financial certainty be the bottom line as far as what is “good” for us and what isn’t.
Very few parents actually want us to cultivate our creative or artistic skill set because the dominant belief in the world is that it’s very hard to get paid to do that. While they think they are loving us in that moment, they are actually holding us back from living an authentic life, because we want approval from our parents as a young child, we obey.
But could it be true that some of the decisions we made as a young child no longer serve us? Is there a part of us that we have been ignoring that wants to come out and play? Is that part of us is scared to come out because that part of us believes that our needs won’t be met if we show that part? What if our journey today was to show more of that other side of ourselves that has been shut away for so long? What if our needs can and WILL get met as we become more and more ourself? What if an even BETTER life was possible if we did that? Wouldn’t that be awesome!?
We see, we learned a model of approval in a different stage of life. If we tried to wear the same shoes that we wore when you were 6, chances are those shoes wouldn’t serve us now the way they did then. So don’t we think it’s time to upgrade our model of approval and consciously design it? Don’t we think it’s time to take charge of our life and start living it instead of letting it live us? Aren’t we ready to re-connect to our child hidden within us!?
Aren’t we ready to live a self-approved child withins life instead of being an old carbon copy of someone else’s desire for us?
This is what The Ten Stages Recovery Path is about. Learning what stories and patterns we’ve been running that no longer serve us and consciously create new contact with our child withins intuitive voice and CHOOSE to live with this contact every day.
So – what new model of our child withins life would we like to decide today? What new recovery story would we like to live shed of our old childhood coping strategies?
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