Although this may seem like an obvious point to many readers, and certainly to anyone who works in the healing professions, it is worth stating clearly. Our lives are profoundly affected by the events and circumstances of our childhood and the ways we have invented to cope with those events. Children are extremely vulnerable and highly sensitive. They pick up what is around them like an antenna and record far more of it than adults often realize. Many things that would not be traumatic or painful to adults are terrifying to children. When a young child suffers any form of trauma or abuse, s/he does not have an adult’s mental and emotional capacity to process the resulting shock and pain or put the incident into perspective. Instead, the mind/body’s energy system registers and “stores” the pain in a very direct way.
Think of the body’s energy system as a river that is constantly flowing. When there are no blockages, the river flows freely. This feels good and leads to health and a feeling of buoyancy in life. But when a trauma or other negative event occurs, this creates a blockage, much like a boulder dropped into the river. The boulder disrupts and diverts the flow of the water. Once that boulder is in place, the river will flow around that blockage indefinitely. It will maintain an altered, disrupted pattern as long as that boulder remains in place, potentially for a lifetime.
Similarly, when childhood pain, insult, or injury causes a disruption in the energy system, this could permanently affect the flow of energy until the disruption is corrected. That disrupted, reshaped flow of energy almost always results in physical or emotional pain, or some kind of compromise to our overall sense of health, happiness, and wellbeing. The disruption remains ongoing, it is always with us even though we may not be consciously aware of it much of the time.
The Childhood Roots of Emotional Issues
Almost every emotional issue we face in adulthood has at least some, usually many, of its roots in early childhood. And yet, understanding these roots is often difficult and elusive. We feel pain or we behave in self-defeating ways and we don’t know why. That’s because our energy system is much more primitive than are the higher centers of the brain. The pain has been “stored” in our energy system since childhood, and when something in the present “re-awakens” it, the pain is felt again in all its fresh and primal fury. This process occurs outside the scope of intellectual understanding.
Some of the stored pain from our past stems from one-time incidents in which we were traumatized, abused, humiliated, frightened, or devalued. For example, we fall through the ice, are bitten by a dog, or we witness our mother being beaten. These are the dropped boulders in our lives. But pain can also result from long-term repeated exposure to false, hurtful, or negative messages about ourselves, and the world that we “downloaded” before we knew any better.
When we are young, we don’t have our own world view. We are sponges that absorb all of our information and attitudes from those around us. We are essentially defenseless; we just take it all in.
If we are repeatedly ignored, shamed, or given fearful and limiting messages, this has a cumulative effect on our energy system. Think now of handfuls of pebbles or sand being thrown into the river, over and over, rather than boulders. Handfuls of these small obstructions don’t change the course of the river immediately, as a boulder does, but they do build up and change its course over time.
If you are called “useless” once, it may not affect you in the long term, unless the circumstances were traumatizing and left an indelible impression. If you are called “useless” a thousand times over the years, you can be sure this will create an emotional “sandbar” or a “large dam of pebbles” that will alter your energy system in some fashion or form.
Most of the major emotional problems we experience in adulthood come down to issues of power or worth. We don’t feel capable of achieving what we want or we don’t feel worthy of achieving it. These feeling almost always originate in childhood.
So how do we resolve them? The problem with traditional means of treating childhood pain, such as using talk therapy alone, is that these rely solely on the use of the mind, and the mind can take us only so far. Much of the real, deep pain of our early lives was locked in place before we developed any kind of adult understanding, or it was installed during moments of shock when our logical reasoning powers were not functioning properly and we could not evaluate the situation properly.
Meridian tapping (commonly known as Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT Tapping) provides a mechanism not so much for understanding where our blockages came from but for removing the blockages directly. Remarkable insight, however, can spontaneously result from clearing an issue by tapping after the issue has been neutralized and its emotional charge removed. Tapping, in a sense, lets us wade out into the river and get rid of the boulder, or the sandbar, or the pebble dam, once and for all.
It can be beneficial, when dealing with serious emotional issues rooted in the past, to seek professional help from a skilled meridian tapping practitioner who can give you emotional support, encouragement to tap through the pain, and active guidance so that you can more thoroughly flush out all of the Aspects of your problem.
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