How Our Past Influences Our Present
By Colleen Hoffman Smith. Posted on .
Each one of us carries our past emotional wounds. This wound can ooze and open when confronted with the energy of the same experience that brings up our lack of love. Every relationship or experience that brings up the same void in us can trigger us to shut down part of our heart, creating walls like armor. We are all energy and we can feel someone's anger suppressed or projected. We can also feel people when they shut down abandoning us emotionally creating an uncomfortable experience in us of fear or self-doubt. When we are negatively triggered our wound may respond and open. Our intimate love making can become the stage where self-doubt and negative feelings from childhood abuse can surface.
Physical, emotional or sexual abuse leaves a memory or imprint in our bodies that creates deep scars. A client once told me that she remembers being picked up out of her bed and thrown across the room many nights as she was growing up. Another client as a young boy had deep wounds because he was sexually molested by priests. Other clients have come to me knowing that they were abused, but not remembering the details, only the feeling. We have all experienced, as children, the projection of shut-down or anger and remember how uncomfortable we felt.
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I know women as children, who were abandoned by their fathers, molested sexually by their grandfathers, and then emotionally and physically abandoned and betrayed by their husbands. Abandonment is a huge wound that could come from the memory of the cold, shut-down of a mother’s heart when she didn’t know how to feel her own love, show it or the unavailability of one or both parents.
Experiences of separation, feeling the void inside because of a death of a father or mother or the yearning for a relationship that we’ve never had are other examples of abandonment. Some people may look for love, peace and relationships their entire lives, without understanding what they are truly looking for.
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Abuse on any level is emotionally painful. Many people do not realize that it existed in their past until they start attracting abuse in their adult life. The experience or relationship can be the pathway to healing. You can recognize it when you have attracted a partner who becomes violent or verbally abusive. This relationship is an opportunity to go deep within and find a way to stand up for yourself. To go beyond your fear of losing the love and not allow this abuse in your life so that you can show your children that it is not healthy.
There is a wonderful movie called Bliss, about a man and a woman who get married and he starts noticing that she is obsessed with cleaning the house. Shortly after her daily behavior changes she tells him that she fakes her lovemaking. He is so confused because he believed that she was the most sexual being he knows and that they had a healthy sexual love life.
