Childhood Trauma Survivors: Do Not Spiritual Bypass

Welcome to Breakdown to Breakthrough,

The podcast that empowers you to transform your life by awakening to your true,

Authentic self.

I'm Lisa A.

Romano,

Your host.

As an award-winning author and certified life coach,

I've dedicated my life to helping others understand the incredible power of an organized mind.

I believe that true empowerment begins with awakening to our false self.

My mission is to support you on your journey toward mental and emotional regeneration through conscious and deliberate awakening.

In this podcast,

I'll share insights,

Tools,

And transformative stories that illuminate the path to healing and self-discovery.

So today we're going to be talking about how childhood trauma will absolutely impede and affect every area of your life and some of the things that you can do to reverse engineer this emotional autoimmune disease process.

When we've experienced childhood trauma,

Especially at the hands of a narcissistic parent,

It's as if our emotional and psychological development gets stuck in time.

We may be adults on the outside,

But emotionally and psychologically,

We're frozen at the age when we first felt unsafe.

Our perceptions of the world,

Others,

And even ourselves becomes clouded by the lies and the manipulation we were fed as children.

The narcissist narrative stays lodged in our minds,

Shaping our beliefs about our worth,

Our abilities,

And identity.

Until we gain the awareness to challenge that narrative,

We continue living as though the story they wrote for us is our own.

Narcissistic abuse arrests our emotional development because it robs us of the opportunity to grow into a self that feels capable,

Worthy,

Deserving of love and respect.

We're not allowed to form healthy boundaries because in a narcissist world,

Our boundaries don't matter.

Their needs,

Their emotions,

Their wants,

And their desires were paramount.

If we dared to express a need when we were children,

We were labeled as selfish or ungrateful or worse.

Over time,

We learn to suppress our emotions,

Deny our needs,

And twist ourselves into knots and pretzels trying to appease the narcissist in our life.

This conditioning makes it nearly impossible to trust ourselves or feel safe in the world.

Imagine growing up in an environment where love was conditional based on whether or not you could meet the ever-changing demands of someone else.

I once worked with a woman who shared how,

As a child,

She learned to associate love with walking on eggshells.

Her mother would praise her at one moment and rage the next,

Depending on her mood.

As an adult,

This woman found herself in relationships with partners who were emotionally unavailable.

She was constantly seeking validation from other people who could never give it.

She didn't realize it at first,

But her childhood programming,

Her experience of love as something volatile and unpredictable was playing out in her adult life.

Childhood trauma impedes every area of our personal growth.

Let's talk about how childhood trauma will impact your finances.

Growing up in a chaotic or neglectful household can create a scarcity mindset.

If you were taught that there was never enough money,

Never enough attention,

Enough love or enough stability,

It's no surprise as an adult you might struggle to hold on to money or make it.

One man I knew found himself in a constant state of financial insecurity.

Even when he was making a decent income,

He couldn't shake the belief that he had to work twice as hard to survive.

Deep down,

He believed he didn't deserve financial abundance,

A belief he inherited from a father who always found a way to make him feel,

No matter how hard he worked,

To believe that this young man was not good enough.

Our health too suffers when we've lived in survival mode for so long.

Chronic stress,

Especially the kind caused by ongoing emotional abuse,

Can wreak havoc on our physical bodies.

I remember hearing from a woman who developed digestive issues that no doctor could explain.

It wasn't until she began to unpack her trauma that she realized that her body had been holding on to fear and anxiety for her entire life.

The tightness in her belly was a reflection of the emotional tension she carried since childhood,

Always bracing her for the next verbal attack.

Mental wellness and spiritual growth are also stunted by trauma.

When we grow up in homes where we are taught that we are not enough,

It becomes almost impossible to see ourselves as valuable beings worthy of love and of belonging.

Spiritually,

We feel disconnected,

Cut off from abundance.

That is actually our birthright.

I once met a man who couldn't shake the feeling that he was always separate.

No matter how much he meditated or tried to engage in spiritual practices,

He couldn't connect to a sense of inner peace.

It wasn't until he began to confront the narrative on unworthiness planted by his emotionally distant father that he started to experience spiritual growth.

When we are denied the right to feel safe,

We are denied the right to form a mature self capable of setting boundaries,

Self-respect,

And self-love.

Childhood trauma teaches us all that love is unsafe,

The earth is unsafe,

And people are unsafe,

That relationships are unsafe,

That we can't trust our own feelings,

That we can't trust ourselves,

So we are unsafe.

So we live in self-preservation mode,

Constantly on alert,

Always expecting the worst.

This keeps us stuck in fear and lack,

Unable to open ourselves up to the abundance the universe does have to offer us.

But trauma will prevent you from stepping into your human potential.

It will keep you stuck.

So how can we welcome in love financial security and well-being when we've been conditioned to believe we don't deserve it?

But I want to be clear.

This is not about blaming ourselves or labeling ourselves as victims.

Trauma creates what I call an emotional autoimmune disease,

Where instead of using our emotions as the tools they are,

We turn them against ourselves.

We become ashamed of what we feel.

We suppress what we feel.

We repress what we feel.

We project what we feel onto others.

The more we deny our emotions,

The more we suffer.

We feel like we're drowning in shame and fear,

But we don't even know why.

The truth is we're not broken.

We're unaware.

We're stuck.

We have an immature self,

But we're just living out a story written for us before we could write our own.

So healing begins when we start to question that story,

When we become aware that the lies we believed about ourselves aren't true,

And we reclaim our power.

We realize that we can rewrite our narrative.

We can honor our emotions instead of running from them.

We can learn to trust ourselves,

Set boundaries,

And stop living in fear.

In doing so,

We can finally break free from the prison of the past and step into abundance.

The abundance has always been there waiting for us.

This is not an easy journey,

Dear ones,

Because when you start to awaken from childhood trauma,

Perhaps for the first time,

Is when you start to feel your feelings.

What I teach my students is that we have to really reverse engineer.

We have to go back to the beginning.

We have to understand the program is not you.

We have to step out of compulsive thinking.

Most human beings are 95% unconscious.

That means they wake up in the morning,

They're making their cup of coffee,

And while they're making their cup of coffee,

They're not being objective about the thoughts that pop into their head.

So the 5% of them that is actually conscious thinks or assumes that the words and the phrases that they're seeing pop into their mental field are real,

Are valid,

And are theirs.

But yet,

That's not true.

The mind has been created to hold thought.

So whatever has been programmed in the subconscious mind must filter into the conscious mind.

And if you're not careful,

You'll believe what's in the mind.

Now,

This isn't bad news if you've experienced an awakening and you are reverse engineering and you are understanding that you are not your thoughts,

You are the observer of your thought and you have a clear path forward in terms of what tools you can use and mental toughness skills you can use and what psychological tools you can use to elevate your state of consciousness.

The only thing that matters in life,

In my opinion,

Is how conscious you lived your life.

If you're not conscious,

You're just regurgitating the past and your ego will believe the narrative in your head.

Your ego will believe that you're not good enough,

Even though that is absolutely not true.

That's a pattern in a program.

Your ego will believe that it is right and proper to be obedient and to just follow the rules that your parents have set before you,

Even if they're dysfunctional and they cause you to abandon the self,

Which happens in a lot of cultures.

Your ego will believe that it's your job to make sure that people like you,

That people agree with you,

That you don't cause too much trouble.

Or your ego might be on the other end of the spectrum and believe that you must get people to be afraid of you.

You must get people to listen to you.

You must get people to believe that you are the most powerful person in the room or that you are the one that is the smartest,

The most beautiful,

Or even the most wounded.

And so as long as we stay below the veil of consciousness,

Our ego is going to run the ship.

The 5% of us that is mildly conscious will assume that the ego's narrative is all there is.

This is living below the veil of consciousness.

And that's why I'm so big on teaching consciousness.

That's why I believe that codependency,

Which is really a program towards obedience,

When you are codependent,

You are obeying an inner narrative that is dysfunctional.

You have a collapsed sense of self.

You don't have a healthy sense of self.

And here's the kicker.

You don't even know that's what's going on.

You believe that you are put on this earth to rescue people.

You have a compulsion to fix people.

You have a compulsion to get people to understand you.

You have a compulsion to find people in the world that are broken,

And it's your job to fix them.

It's your job to bring them to Jesus.

It's your job to bring them to the mountain,

To heal themselves,

To come correct,

To heal their addictions.

You actually believe that's your job.

And you don't realize that what you're doing is that you're abandoning the self and trying to rescue another.

And what's really going on is that what codependents often miss is that if I can rescue you,

Then I get to feel good about me.

And you will be indebted to me forever.

And you will find value in me,

And then I can finally feel good enough.

That's why I always say that codependents are other-focused.

So even if you're a wounded mom,

I know that I was guilty of this.

As a wounded mother,

Once I realized and I awakened to the trauma that I caused my own children by living as a codependent person below the veil of consciousness,

Acting out my own trauma,

Trying to save my ex-husband,

Trying to gain his validation,

I was unaware that I was programming my children to do the same thing.

But I was also programming them to seek my validation as well.

I didn't know that at the time.

And when I saw my son act this out in real time with his first marriage,

I all but imploded.

I'd say,

No,

I did implode.

I couldn't continue writing.

That's how triggered I was by him marrying this person who,

By all accounts,

Had many,

Many troubles and was manipulative,

Was a pathological liar,

And was really manipulating my son emotionally through gaslighting.

It was really a difficult thing to watch and to know that so much of how he was behaving and responding was tied to how I had raised him.

And then below the veil of consciousness,

All I wanted to do was save him.

So here came my codependent fantasies again.

I'm going to save you from this person.

But what was really happening was I was trying to save myself.

I was trying to somehow resolve and absolve myself of the shame that I felt for hurting him,

For living out an unconscious program,

Generational trauma that I was unaware of,

Which is why I always say enlightenment and awakening is a bittersweet path.

It's a double-edged sword because in your awakening,

There is this aha moment.

There is this moment where you realize of accountability that you have hurt other people,

And that's why making amends is so powerful.

That's why loving yourself and offering yourself forgiveness and understanding it could be no other way.

This was just you acting out a natural holographic pattern,

And this is your opportunity to heal your family in a way that maybe your mom and your dad weren't able to.

But we need that awareness.

We need that awakening moment in order to shift generational trauma and bring our children into a higher state of consciousness.

And when we shift into a higher state of consciousness,

Which is painful because it means you're awakening and you're realizing that you have hurt your children in the process,

If you have children.

But even as a codependent,

Undoubtedly you've hurt other people because codependents are very controlling.

We think that other people should treat us a certain way because we've chosen to treat them in a certain way.

So if we're selfless and we're not taking care of ourselves,

It really makes sense to us that if I'm taking care of all your needs and I'm anticipating your needs,

Shouldn't you be anticipating mine?

It's outside of our consciousness to imagine that I should be taking care of my own needs and that you and I are two different people and you have your autonomous self and I have my autonomous self.

And it's immature for me to take care of you,

Expecting you to take care of me,

That that's an inside job.

And that anything that I do for you,

I do because I want to,

Not because I expect a certain return.

That's the difference between conditional and unconditional love.

But when you're codependent,

You don't know that you're operating that way.

Now the difference between being a codependent and a narcissist,

In my opinion,

Is that although I believe that they're on the same stick,

Where narcissism is on one end and codependency is on the other end,

In the middle there's a spectrum and then there's crossover.

So I can be a very highly narcissistic codependent but not have narcissistic personality disorder.

And I firmly believe that every narcissist is codependent because they need the other.

They're dependent.

They're enmeshed on the other.

They're dependent upon the other for some source of energy.

They want something from the other.

Codependence can exist independent of other people.

The codependency crazies show up,

As I call them,

When we attach to someone,

When someone becomes significant to us.

But when we're engaging with other people that we really don't have any type of intimacy involved with or we're really not personally involved with them,

Then we can stay pretty non-codependent.

But at any relationship that we have,

It could be a relationship with the person behind the counter at the post office where we can be easily insulted.

We can bring the crew Christmas cookies every year and when we don't get the accolades that we think we should,

Then we can have an emotional reaction.

That's a form or a symptom of codependency.

It's conditional love.

I loved you and I expect you to love me in a particular way.

And when you don't,

I feel wounded.

That's me just acting out the abandonment cycle.

What is that a mirror for?

Well,

When I was a child,

I was unable to love you enough to get you to love me.

And that's the danger of being a mom who is self-absorbed,

The danger of a dad who is self-absorbed.

And it is so easy to wound a child.

And even if,

Especially if,

And I hear this in my coaching groups,

At least two or three people every time we run a live class will say,

But I was raised by a mom and dad that seemed to love me.

Yes.

But did they emotionally attune themselves to you?

Were they emotionally present with you?

Or did they raise you in a way and give you things because they expected you to turn out a certain way?

It's sort of like you're this automated robot where I'm going to program you this way and then you're going to behave in a way that pleases me.

That's narcissism in a parent.

The job of a parent is to have a child and to support the natural innate needs,

Wants,

Desires,

And talents of that child,

Regardless of whether or not what is showing up is pleasing to the parent.

But when it comes to raising children,

Common sense has to be included.

In other words,

We don't encourage someone to go around and hurt people or hurt themselves or to have narcissistic traits.

We don't encourage that.

But certainly when it comes to a child that maybe we come from a long line of doctors,

Lawyers,

Football players,

Cheerleaders,

Whatever,

Or artists,

Poets,

Whatever,

And we have a child that is showing signs that he or she wants to experience something else and they're really good at it,

Then it's up to us to encourage that child to follow that path and give them their support and deal with their own level of egoic disappointment or frustration.

That's our job.

It's not our child's job.

But when you grow up in a home that lacks emotional connection where it's authoritarian,

Where it's controlling,

And parents can be controlling and authoritarian,

Disciplinarians to the extreme,

Thinking that they're doing a good thing,

And yet they miss the mark.

That's what the definition of sin is,

To miss the mark.

And scripture is very clear.

Even if you don't believe in scripture,

If you're not a spiritual person,

It's clear.

The evidence is clear.

The sins of the father and the mother fall on the children.

That's psychologically correct in that whatever is not healed in childhood is going to be passed on to our children.

That's generational karma.

That's generational trauma.

And so the purpose of this session was really to continue offering you content and information and data that comes into your consciousness that allows you to chew on something a little bit different.

My aim as a human being,

As a person who's incarnated on this timeline,

Is to really come here and help elevate other people's consciousness and to use my own personal experiences as data and a reference and a starting point for so many other people who may have been living and are living below the veil of consciousness as I was.

I feel that is how I can serve other people,

Is,

Hey,

Listen,

I was born to dysfunction.

I didn't know it.

I ended up with this maladaptive thinking,

This maladaptive thinking that was habitual.

It ended up being a neurological program and pattern.

It's all downloaded in the subconscious mind,

But hey,

If you reverse engineer,

You can actually change what's in the subconscious mind.

It is not easy.

That's why I create roadmaps for people who are really interested in the path that I've taken and want to get there faster than later,

Sooner than later,

With less grief and frustration and save you time because time is all we have.

Time is equal to life.

Is time ticking away?

Sure it is,

But so is your life because life is time.

And so I really hope that this session has inspired you to think a little bit deeper when you are here and obviously if you're listening to this information,

And I wish my children listen to this information because they don't.

Here I am and this is what I do for a living and my own children don't listen,

Which means that you can only receive if you're asking.

That's the only way that I received this wisdom.

The only way that I was able to elevate consciousness and come out of the matrix,

Come out of the holographic nature of reality and live a conscious life was because I was asking.

And in the asking,

I invited in information and data that helped me transform my life.

So transformation of life happens when you use time appropriately and when you dedicate time to healing your life,

To understanding yourself,

And then you put it into action,

You're living a conscious life that's going to take on momentum very,

Very quickly.

So healing that would have taken you,

Taken someone 25 years or 20 years,

It's not going to take you as much time to heal because you are asking,

You're receiving,

You're allowing the information in,

You're allowing the transformation of your consciousness,

And thus when you put it into practice,

That's when you're going to see your healing and your growth accelerate.

So childhood trauma will absolutely impede every area of your life.

It will impede your life financially.

If you are a business owner,

Childhood trauma is going to creep in.

If you are an entrepreneur and you suffer with codependency,

Then you may not be able to make the swift managerial decisions you need to make that are necessary to increase your profits,

To increase your impact in the world because you will struggle with setting boundaries with employees,

Especially employees who have narcissistic traits,

Who are manipulative and who have an excuse for not bringing it.

If you are struggling with depression and anxiety and you have childhood trauma,

That's not your fault.

Those are traits of childhood trauma.

If you are on this spiritual journey and you have childhood trauma,

Until you get your mind organized,

Until you do the psychological work necessary,

Then you're only going to be able to grow so far in spirituality.

To live a spiritual life essentially means that you respect the virtues of love and kindness and compassion and forgiveness and letting go and mindfulness,

And you are living in the upper end of the spectrum of what David Hawkins refers to as his map of consciousness.

You're living in the higher vibrations.

So if you're on this spiritual journey and you have childhood trauma and you're trying to spiritually bypass or you don't even realize you're spiritually bypassing,

I mean,

I know I've met those women and those men and I've coached them where they thought the answer was immediately jumping to forgiveness,

But they didn't do the cognitive behavioral work.

They didn't do the psychological work.

They didn't do the inner child healing work.

They didn't learn how to reparent the self.

They didn't heal from abandonment trauma.

They didn't take on the accountability necessary to actually act out better healthy behaviors such as setting a boundary with someone,

Which is really,

Really scary because when you start to set a boundary,

You're facing your abandonment trauma head on.

It's like you're sticking your head into the mouth of the lion.

You're saying no and in saying no,

You're facing your fear.

If I make things tough for you,

If I respect myself,

That you might see me as as difficult and you might leave me.

And so how about I just don't respect myself and make it really easy for you to love me and hang out with me and be my boyfriend or girlfriend,

But at least you'll never leave me.

That's self abandonment.

And people play that out for decades,

Sometimes until they actually transition.

And that's just not necessary.

I've gotten today's day and age with all the information,

All the technology and all the wisdom that is being shared at hyperspeed with so many different platforms today.

And I'm just so thankful that you've received this transmission from my soul to yours.