Heroes in Business - Andy Hahn, Fearless Living, Healing Protection as the Problem

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

Distinguish reliving of trauma & reliving the choice to protect ourselves from re-experiencing the traumatic situation. Describe structure, role, behavior, shadow. How 2 resolve, Exercise to heal self in this episode of Dr Andy Hahn Guided Self Healing Fearless Living

Hi, I'm Dr. Andrew Hahn, and welcome to episode 46 of the podcast, Guided Self-Healing, Fearless Living. And we're going to continue on our journey on our book. And again, if you want to get the book, you can go to to our website lifecenteredtherapy.com and you will have a link and you can go any place you can go to the publisher you can go to amazon you can go anywhere and buy the book which is called the one hour miracle and of course we appreciate that so without any further ado let us continue we're now up to Chapter 10 in our book. And Chapter 10 is about when our problem is not a reenactment of a trauma, but a protection from ever putting ourselves back into that experience again.

And the protection, of course, protects us, but it also limits us because it means we don't get to be who we truly are. We have to cover over who we truly are with something that obscures it and by definition limits us. And if you think about this, you know, you can remember we, several podcasts ago, talk about the distinction of two different depressions. In one case, it was the reliving of a trauma and the person described their depression as, I feel weighed down, I feel helpless, I feel hopeless, I can't move. And in fact, she was in a story in the French Revolution where she was weighed down, helpless, hopeless, and she couldn't move and that was her depression. Revolution where she was weighed down, helpless, hopeless, and she couldn't move and that was her depression. And then we went on to talk about another situation of a young man who came in with depression. And if you recall, in that case, what happened was that he, when he was very young,

he was making his father a special gift and his father, who was having difficulties, gift and his father who was having difficulties not only couldn't receive the gift but in a sense pushed him away and walked out and drove off and this boy said at the time i don't care because trying to let himself experience the excruciating pain of his father not receiving his gift and abandoning him was too much. So he protected himself with, I don't care. And I don't care is a wonderful precursor on some levels to major depression when you get older in life, because depression of course is a non-feeling. So the key here is to remember that when our problems are protection, they are the best choice we could have made at the time,

because if we could have made another choice and let ourselves experience what we're experiencing and not protective ourselves, we would have done it. So we make the best choice we could have. Like with that young boy, it was just too overwhelming emotionally for him to feel the despair or the hurt or the anger. So he protected himself by experiencing, I don't care. Notice that it was a choice, although a pretty automatic choice. And then, of course, we forget we made a choice. If we could limit our choice to the moment that that happened, that would be great. But unfortunately, when we're traumatized, we forget we made the choice. It's sort of like

the one who made the choice becomes unavailable to us. And whenever anything looks like the original situation, we make the same choice without, of course, realizing we're making a choice. So in that case, the young man came in because he had a major depression. And we found out that it was a choice. And that made no sense to him that a depression could be a choice. So we went back to age three and found out the precursor of when this happened. And then we were able to go back to a few months prior to the session where I saw him, where he made this choice. And he realized, of course, that he had asked his father, many years later, to go to his opening of an improv acting class. Well, not class, but an improv acting opening. And his father said that he was so sorry, but he couldn't go because he had two toddlers. okay, I don't care. And immediately the next day went into a major depression because I don't care that associated with what happened at age three. And then of course he said, well, I thought this

was a biological depression. So what happened the year before my father impact went when I was a senior in high school, he went to my opening. So it doesn't make any sense. So I said, well, find the sensation you associate with, I don't care, which in his case was heavy white oatmeal. And he dropped himself into heavy white oatmeal. And he said, Oh, my goodness, I know exactly what happened. And he saw himself when he was a senior in high school, which was the year prior, which everyone thought was a biological depression, because it came back the same time every year, and it looked like one. He had made a special gift for his girlfriend, and he could relive the experience, and he realized something that was subliminal at the time, which is that his girlfriend, even though she received

the gift, so to speak, made a fake smile, and he could see this fake smile, and all of this happened out of his awareness, and he remembers thinking to himself, I't care except it wasn't just thinking it was experiencing i don't care and the next day of course he went into a major depression which there was no precipitant for uh and no one could figure out why because it's these things are so out of our awareness that they just happen so the key here is to realize you made a choice. It was just a choice you weren't aware of and that you are continuing to make the same choice even when the original situation may have happened in our childhood when we were adults or literally lifetimes ago and we could still be making the same choice with any circumstance

that looks like the original situation. So what we have to do is realize that the traumatized one made a choice to protect themselves. And you can feel the traumatized one and the choice in your body. In the case we were talking about with Nate, his name was Nate, which he lets us use his name, the choice was heavy white oatmeal, and the chooser was heavy white oatmeal. So what happens? We say, it's not who you are right now. You're just automatically making the same choice you made in the past. So of course, how do you heal this? You say, well, what would happen if we just sent loving energy to the you that was traumatized and the choice you made? So we can actually thank and be grateful for the depression because it saved us from something worse. And, you know,

it's just a dense energy that we asked to come in because we couldn't handle the situation. So we can channel loving energy into the protection and the us that's making that choice. And that will, of course, dissolve the protection and it will heal the us that's making the choice at which point we'll feel much lighter and then we can find the truer one of us that hid or was hiding or was hidden behind the protection that we chose and we can find that truer self and we can invite it to come out and expand in all directions and come into the present moment and can fill us fully and we get to be that truer self and keep the sense of wonder or aliveness that that true ourself had. But meanwhile, we can also incorporate into that true ourself all the experiences we've had since the moment we made the best choice we could have made, which of course protected and limited us. So that's what we do. And that's what we do. And, and that's what we do. And I've told you before that there are ways to just let go of belief structures.

dissolve it because it served us but it's not necessary anymore so we can just let it go we can let it dissolve um it's not a question of self-acceptance around depression it's a question of thanking the depression and saying we don't need you anymore and you can go back into your form which is free-flowing energy and it's going to be a win for everybody involved, and I don't have to automatically make that choice anymore, which is a great thing. Now, in order to understand this, we have to understand that there are several different layers of, several, I'd say several different layers we have to look at. We have to look at the structure of the protection, the role of the protection, and the behavior. And then there's a special case that we have to look at, which is shadow, which is

sort of the most, you could say in a funny way, the most primitive protection of all, but you know, when all else fails, so to speak. So when I say structure, what do I mean? Sometimes we make the choice in a two-person relationship and we call that dyadic. Sometimes we make the choice in a whole system and we make the choice, you know, in our role in the system and we call that systemic. And sometimes we make the choice, not because of anything that was directed at us, but that we witness a relationship that affects us. And so it wasn't even directed at us, let's say our parents are having terrible fights. And we're afraid we're young, so we're afraid that they will divorce or something awful

will happen and so what we do is as a protection we take in their relationship so that even if we lose them we get to keep the relationship inside us and then of, we act out that part of whatever's going on. So that is structure. Then there's the role we play. And sometimes we play a parallel role, which means that we make the same choice over and over and over again that we made when we were little. And sometimes we play a reversed role. We play a reversed role. The way we protect ourselves is we become like the one who is

in a sense we could say aggressive towards us. And we identify with the aggressor and then we protect ourselves you know by becoming them. And that certainly explains why, for example, those of us who may have been abused, abuse others, because the way we protected ourselves has become like the abusing parent, because you can play on either side. And then we look at the behavior, and the behavior can be parallel to what we did in the beginning, in the original situation, or we can also reverse the behavior and say I'm never going to behave like them, even if that causes great difficulty. useful to know the structure and the role and the behavior and to find out is it a two-person relationship directed at us is it our role in the system or is it that we take in a relationship that isn't overtly directed at us again structure then do we play the role that we were in the system or do we play the reverse role of somebody who's in the system

who's directing something at us and then the behavior do we behave the same way or do we behave the exact opposite way and if we know all of that that's very useful and then as i said again sometimes our protection is shadow and shadow since i just want to deal with that quickly now, basically says that instead of dealing with something painful inside of us, we project that pain onto the others, onto some other, and we judge them because of it. And an example we give is, let's suppose we're very judgmental of a pedophile, or we're very judgmental, you know, we have all of these, you know, preachers who, you know, are saying things about homosexuals, for example, and you find out that, of course, they get caught in a homosexual relationship. So there's something that they can't own in themselves that is something that is repugnant to them. And so they project it out into the world and then want to destroy it outside themselves.

outside themselves. Now, the thing to say here is sometimes when there's shadow, it's because we have the same material as the person who projected it on. For example, you know, the person who rails against homosexuals, but is in fact one himself or herself. But sometimes the reason we project is not because we have the same material as them, but because it triggers in us something else that we find unacceptable. So for example, let's suppose, again, to use the example used in the book, we might be very judgmental of a pedophile. And it's not that we ourselves have that material, but let's suppose we feel like we can't protect our children, and we're very scared about that. And instead of dealing with our fear that we can't protect, which would be so painful for us, we just attack critically. We become so critical and judgmental of the pedophile as a way not to have to deal with the pain of our fear that we can't protect our children.

the pain of our fear that we can't protect our children. Still in production. So we give lots of examples, you know, the example of Nate being, you know, dyadic, it was him and his father, right? He couldn't handle what his father did to him, right? And the role was parallel because he played it out over and over and over again in his life with his father and with his girlfriend and his behavior was parallel. So, but let's give, you know, a different example would have been, you know, if he had not been able to receive gifts himself and you know instead of receiving a gift kept telling people stop giving me gifts or something whatever then the situation would still be dyadic, but he would play the reversed role. He would play his father's role and he would behave, you know, the way his father behaved. So it would be parallel behavior and it would still be a protection. And really,

it's quite stunning for people when they realize something they may not have been aware of, people when they realize something they may not have been aware of, which is that they were just acting out their parents' role. And they made a choice to be like their parent because the alternative was too painful. And of course, then there's, you know, we haven't even talked about systemic, which is our role in the system. And, you know, I had a case not so long ago of a woman who really couldn't be an authority. And it was really affecting her relationship with her children because she just could never assert herself with them and it turned out that it was systemic reversed and reversed and she found an amazing story where she was a child and she was uh forced to be a child soldier and to uh as a child soldier to kill people.

And she made a choice. She said, when I have power, I am going to never force my children to do anything. So of course, when she became a parent, she said, I'm going to play out the role of these people that had forced her to be a child soldier. But she said, I'm never going to force me. So she plays out the reversed role in the system she identifies with people who force her to do something but in this case she says you know so it's systemic but she's gonna not play the role of the child she's gonna play the role of the people who force her to do something and her behavior is going to be the exact opposite even though it meant that she couldn't force her kids, quote unquote, to do anything. And when she realized this had been a choice not to ever be like these people were to her,

and she said, I can find this part of me that can actually assert themselves. And it made quite a difference in her relationship with her children because she found a truer self that had been hidden that was able to become more assertive as an authority and not think that she was forcing them to do something horrendous, which is clearly what her inner experience was. So, again, this is where we really do get to be grateful for our difficulty, because our difficulty is someone who is just there to help us, you know, a protector who's just there to help us. And we never want to strip away protection. We want to honor it very, very deeply.

So many people try to force their way around protection, and invariably that doesn't work. It's a dishonor. So we want to honor the protection and honor the protected, and then open to the possibility of making a different choice. So as a way of concluding this, I'd like to invite you into something. Find some behavior you do that you have a fairly good sense is a protection.

So for example, some of us, like me sometimes, we eat not in order to eat, but we eat in order not to feel something right it's a protection and you can do all kinds of things like that you can exercise as a protection instead of feeling something very painful you might go out run and there's nothing wrong of course with running just like there's nothing wrong with eating but if you do do it compulsively, in this case, really, you're not even exercising, because you're not, you never get to experience exercising for the point of exercising, you're exercising in order not to feel something else. So find something that you do, that you have a fairly good sense, really, even if it's created a problem for you, like eating, you know, compulsively eating or compulsively exercising

or whatever it is, or if you have any other kinds of compulsions, obsessive compulsions or whatever it is, and feel it in the body. And for one second, instead of thinking that it is a problem, think of it as something that you ask to protect you. So feel if you compulsively feel the sensation that is there when you compulsively eat, for example. Bring all your attention to it and you can ask it, where are you beginning? What's happening and what have you come to share about how you're trying to protect me? And I guarantee you if you do that and get receptive you'll know where you first made the choice. And then you can say, well I don't have to do that and get receptive you'll know where you first made the choice and then you

can say well i don't have to do that anymore because that was so many years ago and i just hadn't realized i was making a choice and at that point of course world's open to you because you can say i can heal the one who is feeling so traumatized they made the choice and i can let go of the protection all you have to do typically is just channel loving energy into the dense energy and it will begin to dissolve and that will heal you that made the choice and it will help that dense energy go back into its pure form, which is free-flowing energy. And then you can go into the spaciousness you feel, and just look for who you were, who was so traumatized that you made the best choice you could but it was really there waiting for you to find him or her and when you

find him or her whoever that is the one that was there underneath all of this you can very lovingly put your hand on your body where they are and just invite them to come out and touch your hand and expand forward and back and left and right and up and down until they fill you fully and you are them and they get to keep their true self but they also get to have all the wisdom wisdom and discernment that you have gathered since the time you made that choice, whether it was in this lifetime or maybe in some ancient past. So having said that, thank you very much. And again, if you want to reach me, you can always write me at A. Hahn, A-H-A-H-N, at LifeCenterTherapy.com. And if you want to find out more about our work and our practitioners and anything else you want to find or our trainings, you can go to lifecenteredtherapy.com.

And you can also go there and we'll have a link for buying the book, or you can, of course, buy the book wherever you like, but we do hope you read it. I think you'll find it wonderful. but we do hope you read it. I think you'll find it wonderful. But of course, I'm going to say that because I was one of the co-authors of the book. So having said that, thank you so much for joining us again today. And until the next episode,

be kind to yourself. And I wish you well with your healing because you can do it. You really can. Bye.