Universal Lessons You Learn Due To Childhood Trauma

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 I wanted to share with you one of the most profound lessons that I learned as a result of childhood trauma.

It's hard to imagine that trauma can be a teacher,

But if we have a particular perspective,

If we step into reframing,

If we understand that the way we look at things determines everything,

You can have two people look at a sunset or a sunrise.

One person can be in complete awe of that sunset or that sunrise,

And the other can be completely unaffected.

You could have two people in a room,

Both have their eyes closed,

But one is truly blind.

And when you open up the light,

When you turn the light on,

And the person who can actually see opens their eyes,

They can actually see.

But someone who has lost their sight is still blind in the light.

And I think that is what happens to a lot of us.

There are some of us who,

And good for you if you are that person,

There are some of us who are truly committed to the self-healing journey,

The personal development journey,

And essentially the inner transformation journey.

The journey from being unaware and ignorant,

Not even knowing that we're unaware or that we're ignorant,

Which I think is the supreme level of ignorance,

Is to be unaware that you're unaware.

I don't think that's any human's fault.

I think that is the default setting of consciousness,

And that without emotional growth,

Without pushing beyond the limits of trauma,

Without pushing past certain levels of consciousness,

Ego consciousness,

We all stay stuck,

We all stay arrested,

And in that state we do nothing but recycle generational trauma.

And I learned on my journey that it doesn't have to be that way.

There are three children in my family,

Me,

My sister,

My brother,

And I was the one who chose the road less traveled.

It doesn't mean that I'm better than them.

We are equal.

It just means that we've chosen to live our adult lives very differently.

And that,

Again,

Is not a judgment.

It's just an observation.

What changed in my life was when I realized,

When I finally went to a therapist after five or six therapists and was diagnosed with codependency,

And he finally started asking me about my childhood,

I was blown away.

Up until that time,

I had spent time with therapists who accused me of not loving God enough,

Who said I didn't love my husband enough,

And essentially made me feel like I wasn't enough.

I was doing something wrong.

If I was angry,

I was told that I shouldn't be angry.

But I wasn't given any tools for how to process anger,

And that was something that I had to learn to do on my own,

And I'm very grateful that I've been able to do that.

Emotions don't control me anymore.

So the number one thing that I want to share with everybody,

If you take nothing else from this session,

Take this,

That every experience in your life can be considered a teacher if you allow it.

That is how you take your power back.

When I began to understand trauma as an opportunity to ascend and transcend,

An opportunity to grow personally and emotionally,

It changed everything for me.

Once I realized that I was a victim of adult children of alcoholic issues,

That were not my fault.

My parents were unrecovered adult children of alcoholics.

Through this therapist,

It was like he gave me permission to look within.

And as a codependent who had been raised by a codependent mom,

Very passive-aggressive,

I would say,

Codependent mom with very high narcissistic traits,

And a dad who had very high overt narcissistic traits,

Being raised in that environment,

You grow up feeling invisible.

You grow up feeling unseen.

You grow up feeling full of shame because your little ego assumes that you're not good enough.

And when that happens,

You're corrupted on the inside,

And you get locked within the mind.

You get locked within limitations.

And ego isn't bad.

I love ego.

I look at ego as my wounded inner child or my stubborn 14-year-old self.

It's a child within me that's struggling,

And I don't have to have an ego death.

I can love my ego and recognize that if there is this reaction there,

Then there is a wound that's tied to that reaction.

That's nothing that I have to be afraid of or ashamed of.

As I was working with this therapist,

I was really dumbfounded at how interested he was in my childhood.

And it was as if a doorway in my mind was open or a window was open in my mind.

And I didn't understand it then,

But that was the beginning of the awakening.

That was the beginning of being able to get out of the aquarium that my mind had become that was governed by so many faulty beliefs that were downloaded into me by my parents and by my grandparents who were all victims of alcoholism,

Subject to alcoholism and gambling as well.

So when I began to talk about my childhood,

When I began to do that,

When I began to accept the label of being codependent,

My whole mind started to become reorganized.

There was this organizing principle that began to take place.

Suddenly,

I was feeling that I must make sense that the pain and the suffering that I feel,

The frustration,

The anxiety,

The depression,

The panic disorder,

The emotional disease,

The emotional unrest,

The mental unrest,

It has a cause.

I started to feel like if it had a cause,

Then there could be a solution.

You can't fix a hole in the wall that you can't see.

So if you are codependent,

If you lack intimacy with the self,

If you live in superficial realities,

If you strive for success,

But you have no real meaningful relationships with yourself or others,

That's a problem.

You might not even know it's a problem.

If you feel like you have imposter syndrome,

If you feel like you can't be your true self,

If you are afraid to tell your truth,

Then these are problems.

That means you're stuck in the box or the aquarium of the mind,

And you,

Dear one,

Are not the mind.

If you take nothing else from this session,

I would like you to start meditating on the idea that you are not your mind.

But here's the thing.

Trauma causes such mental and emotional unrest that the mind doesn't stop trying to figure out a solution.

To a trauma victim,

Our solution is to avoid pain.

So then the mind is on the lookout for pain.

So we're always looking for the lion,

The tiger,

Or the bear.

We're never calm.

We're never serene.

And when it comes to the quantum field,

The energy we're giving off is,

There's a problem.

There's a problem.

And so we never find serenity outside of us,

Because there's no serenity inside of us.

The people that I find struggle the most on social media,

Who reach out to me often,

Are people who have yet to accept that the answer is stillness,

That the answer is to go within,

That the answer is to meditate,

That the answer is to go into the silence.

The people that do the best or the quickest,

They heal the quickest,

Are those who say,

Just give me the tool to go within.

Teach me how to go within.

I had to learn how to look within,

Even though there were bats in the belfry,

Even though my thoughts felt like buzzing bees and wasps in my head,

Even though.

When I went into the stillness,

I was able to slowly over time recognize these thoughts are just,

They're just streams of consciousness.

They represent the way my mother used to talk to me.

They represent my fears around my mother rejecting me.

They represent fears around my father thinking bad things about me.

They represent the fear of rejection with boys.

They represent self-judgment,

Not being thin enough,

Not being pretty enough,

Not having nails that are long enough,

Just not enough,

Represent the fear of what my teachers thought about me,

Trying to keep up,

Trying to keep up with what I thought would avoid pain in my life.

And once I began to really learn how to still my mind,

I was able to observe these thoughts as patterns and as programs.

Now,

The uncomfortable thing about this is that when you start to go into the silence and you're an initial observer,

You're becoming that initial witness to what's happening inside of you,

You're very uncomfortable because you're making conscious contact with everything that you've denied.

Trauma causes you to deny and to suppress.

We have to unleash the mind.

We have to teach the mind that we can tolerate noticing this emotion because we're not the emotion.

We can,

We have to teach the mind,

We have to liberate the mind.

I just coached someone yesterday and she was asking me about her narcissistic husband and I said to her,

Dear one,

We have to teach you how to learn how to withstand the uncomfortable feelings of telling your truth in a way that is not as abrasive as you've been saying it and allows you to get your point across,

But not by poking your husband in the eye.

And what I was trying to get across was that the issue is within you.

You run from the anxiety of telling your truth because you have been programmed like a puppy that if you tell your truth,

A bad thing happens.

So if the puppy pees on the rug,

Somebody hits them on the nose with the newspaper.

If the puppy pees outside in the backyard,

They get a treat.

Humans are conditioned very similarly.

When you live with an abrasive person and you confront them,

Even if you just tell them their truth or your truth,

If they have very thin skin,

If they're a narcissist,

Either overt or covert,

Vulnerable narcissists will make you feel guilty.

They'll put you down.

They'll complain that you're trying to hurt them,

That you're jealous of them,

And that the world is out to get them.

And you will be taught through this behavior that confronting them or saying anything that you know they don't want you to say is going to be very uncomfortable for you.

It's going to create some pain.

So below the veil of consciousness,

You're being trained at the subconscious level to shut up,

To tone yourself down,

But you're stuck and you can't liberate yourself.

So you're operating like a fish in an aquarium and you don't even know that you're doing that.

That's why I love the phrase,

The truth sets you free.

Doesn't mean it's easy.

So the truth is you're not those thoughts.

You're not the anxiety that you feel when you're breaking a pattern,

When you're setting a boundary.

You're not that anxiety.

You're not the fear that you have over someone disliking you or betraying you.

You're not that fear.

You're the observer of that fear.

Now I know that this can be really hard for people to accept.

I know it was for me when I first started out,

But I'm so grateful.

It's been so many years now,

Almost three decades now of me practicing this thought over time,

This idea,

This mindfulness,

Going into the silence,

Becoming the observer,

Seeing every challenge as a teacher,

Seeing every trigger as a teacher,

An opportunity to break free,

To break through and get to another level of consciousness,

Which is the only thing that matters.

People who do the worst on planet earth are people who are stuck.

And to me,

What's sad is that it's not their fault that they're stuck.

That's what trauma does to you.

It arrests you at a particular level of consciousness.

You identify with these thoughts,

You identify with these ideas.

You identify with the beliefs that the world is out to get you,

Or you identify with this idea that you can't rock the boat,

Or you identify with this idea that your feelings don't matter.

I think the worst part for a lot of codependents,

I know this was for me and even my mom.

I didn't even know that I didn't have a self.

I didn't even know that I thought that I was put on earth to make everybody else happy.

I did not know that there was this subconscious belief that had me feeling like I wasn't good enough.

I didn't know that that was operating.

And that's why I ended up in a toxic narcissistic marriage and a number of relationships after that marriage ended.

And so if you take anything away from today's session,

Take away this idea that if you come from trauma,

Then your brain,

Your mind,

Your unmastered mind,

Your unevolved mind is going to work to get you to avoid the feelings that trauma created,

The somatic energy.

What helped me the most was recognizing,

Wait a minute,

I'm not my programming.

It's not me.

It's just programming.

Wait a minute.

I'm not my emotions.

Well,

Then what am I?

Who am I really?

Who is doing the observing of these emotions?

Who is witnessing these emotions?

Who is noticing the feelings within me?

I wanted to know what that was.

I wanted to know what that consciousness was.

And as I began to sit with that,

I had to go into the silence,

Which is why meditation is so important.

I had to craft certain journaling prompts to help me stay anchored in this awareness that I'm not my thoughts,

I'm not my emotions,

I'm not my fear of saying no.

And the more I did this over time,

The easier it has become to master my mind and master my emotion.

And within a short amount of time,

The narcissist in my life,

My ex-husband,

Went from being this six-foot-one monster,

From my perspective,

To a two-year-old child having a tantrum.

What changed?

He didn't change.

The observer changed.

What changed?

My perception changed.

What changed was slow and incremental,

But it did change.

Going from believing and allowing myself to believe that I am my emotions,

To recognizing I am not my emotions,

I am the observer of my emotions.

And from there,

I just kept going.

Namaste,

Everybody.

Until next time.

Bye for now.