Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Assessing Your Inner Child’s Wants & Needs

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

What does it mean to shift a relationship that’s just not working? How do we reestablish independence and access our gifts while carrying childhood trauma?  This listener and I are breaking down these questions and assessing the state of her marriage in today’s Language of Love Session. It’s not uncommon for some people in long-term relationships to feel like their independence is tied to the presence of a partner – we almost revert to a child-like sense of ourselves. But we must teach our inner child to speak up for their wants and needs, so tune in to discover the valuable tips I offer this listener!  In today’s Session, we explore: The state of her marriage  The trauma we carry into our relationships Reestablishing independence as adults How to integrate the wants and needs of our inner child into our lives Why a somatic therapist can help  Releasing generational trauma  How our souls choose our family of origin Tips to cultivate connection and access our gifts We have to work through our fear and resistance to move toward love and intimacy. Check out my website for more information on how you can begin this journey!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman, and for the last 30 years, I've been helping people learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Sessions. This is where I get to work with you one-on-one, on air. You, my listeners, my goal in these sessions is to empower you to enjoy better relationships, both with others and with yourself, and to help you embrace how precious and sacred your body, your love life, and your sexuality really is. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Danielle, tell me what's on your mind. How can I help?

I've been married for 23 years. We have three children, a 22, almost 22 year old, a 10 year old and a nine year old. And our marriage has been challenging off the bat, like right off the get go. I think we both had, now that I've kind of dived into things, I see the trauma very clearly that I had. Mine was much more, much more like ignored. Like I just wasn't acknowledged at all. I was very, I was like done this for, and by 10 years and we traveled extensively. And so I think my mom was just exhausted by the time she had me. So neglect was your trauma. Yeah. Neglect. And it was like, when I dive into it, it was pretty severe neglect,

which has really affected so much of my life. I can see that now very clearly. And you've been doing your own healing work, I'm assuming, or. Yes. Okay. Yeah. I've been on my own journey for quite some time, but I think the, we moved down to Florida about a year ago and the whole way it happened was very traumatic for me. I think it was like a replay of my childhood where my voice wasn't heard I was ignored and all of a sudden we're in Florida and I didn't want to go and I sold my home up north which was like it was just a really magical home for lack of a better word it was like a storybook home

and it's like I lost that I get to Florida to a home that needed a lot of work and our marriage was has always been like this back and forth it's okay and then it's bad and then it's okay and then it's bad okay that and so I think the Florida thing really traumatized me again like just re-entering my trauma yeah and so we moved back up north and so now we're up north and we have the two younger kids and like I was trying to divorce my husband and go through all that so we moved back up north and I feel like I just always need him like I almost can't function like as a normal adult at 46 without him because he takes care of all of the finances all of the stuff I just I feel like I'm stuck at six and this adult body and I'm like the six-year-old

little girl who can't figure out like it's almost like I don't even know the concept of money You know, like it's the it's a weird now. So if you've been together, how many years? Twenty three years. Yeah. OK, so you were 40. You were 23 when you got together. Yeah. Twenty two. Yeah. Twenty two. So you were really young. And my guess is you stayed together because you got pregnant. Was that first pregnancy not planned or it was planned? It wasn't planned. And yes, it was one of those we had to get married because there was no way my mother would have accepted me not being married. So you went from your parents' house to this marriage house to being a mother, and he fulfilled the kind of parent role, at least as far as finances and logistics in your lives went. Exactly. Logistics, finances, just taking care of general stuff that I just can't seem to do ever. So are you saying that you want to get divorced now and every part of you wants to get divorced, but what's keeping you stuck is just figuring out how you can navigate adulting, so to speak,

the bill playing, the logistics on your own, and that you feel like you need him for that, But otherwise, there's no other reason why you want to stay married. Weirdly enough, it's like the coin just flipped. I was so angry and resentful for so long because I also never voiced any of my stuff. I never voiced it. I always just let things. OK, we'll listen to this music. We'll watch this movie.

And then you would resent it. Exactly. The resentment just built up and built up and built up and built up to extreme. And I did. We did separate for a year and he was out of the house for a year. This was right before Florida. And I just had this panic attack. And I was like, no, we have to be back together.

And within that panic attack was when we found the house in Florida. Fast forward to now, I've realized my part in the marriage, what I did to him. You know, to me, I always put him. You're 100% anyway in contributing to the problems between the two of you. Between the two of us. I, with our son, I became enmeshed with him. He was my partner, not my husband. I was very cold and aloof. I ignored everything. I said, oh, I don't have to do that. I didn't do

this. I was very, I was very unloving and very ungiving, which I understand why. But at the same time, it's like, I can see why he was so hurt because he loves me so much. And I see that our dynamics are very much codependent and he would be, you know, the narcissist. But I think we flip on that, you know, I think, I think it's just two sides. That's true. Listen, the codependent who likes to we like to see ourselves as these holier than thou sweetness and light all you want to do is love and be loved we're manipulative as shit i know are manipulative as shit and we have a lot of narcissism in us okay so this is tell me where we are right now and what right now is i want to try to salvage this marriage and we have two young kids the one has a lot of energy i just need

help in terms of communication in terms of opening up better in terms of like we're doing much better than we we have been but I still have these resentment from the past I still have the stuff that like I have a very hard time with intimacy yeah well you weren't it wasn't modeled for you and it wasn't safe I mean what you learned as a child is that I don't have any power and I'm the effect of the powerful people around me and I don't have a voice that's going to be heard. And that is a terrifying, rageful place to be reasonably. So like the child who's in that experience feels impotent rage and you're not allowed or you'd be punished or ignored or ridiculed or abandoned emotionally or literally if you spoke up and you wouldn't be heard anyway.

so what's the point? So that's what the not getting over the things he's done in the past is really just you not getting over your childhood. And your childhood is not something to get over. The way that you heal from that, which is what's going to lead to the healing in your relationship and your ability to set boundaries and your ability to speak your mind and your needs and everything else, that all comes from the healing, the individual healing work, right? So just using myself as an example, it wasn't until I really started working with and healing the trauma and the little girl parts of me that were stuck. It's almost like there's a million little parts of us that, especially those of us who had traumatic childhoods, which is most of us,

You know, you think about like your system, your energetic system and your psyche is filled with thousands of little shock bubbles of yourself at little ages as a child. Like if I could paint it and maybe I will someday, there are all these little versions. I'd paint my whole body and then these little versions, some of them are in my root chakra, some of them are in my solar plexus, you know, but there are all these versions of myself at moments in time where I, in my little child's mind, made some sort of unconscious contract or agreement to keep myself safe or to get love or to get approval. And those are the parts of ourselves. And some of them are more powerful than others that are driving the bus when we do self-destructive or relationship sabotaging things. So you have a little girl version of yourself who will not speak her needs and wants out

loud because she has a whole story around that. And she's the one who's deciding not to speak up and who is resentful as shit afterwards because the adult woman you are now, you know, and I could give you a whole list and I'm sure you've already read a million books about how to state your needs and speak your mind. That's not the problem. The problem is healing the one in you who doesn't want to do that and who still believes she's really scared and she's really hurt and she's furious and she still believes that this is what's necessary in order for you to stay safe, right?

So it's about the healing comes when we start to become friends with those parts. We start to attend to those parts. We let those parts be heard, not necessarily by our partners, but in a supportive environment by ourselves and maybe a trusted clinician. And then we start to build a relationship. Like there are so many times, even to this day, especially if I'm having an argument with my husband or he says or does something that triggers that wounded one in me, like I take her to the bathroom and I look in the mirror and I'm like, listen, this is not, you know, like I have to kind of talk her down sometimes because she still wants to hurt someone with her words when she

feels hurt or whatever. So you start to build a relationship with those parts of yourselves and reintegrate them back into yourself. To me, the healing that you're looking for in your relationship starts with you doing some intensive trauma healing. And I would encourage you to work with someone who does somatic experiencing. I'm a big fan of that. That's wonderful for trauma, especially any kind of trauma but especially kind of long-term entrenched trauma like you had yeah mine's entrenched it's like even now it's like I know so many things about myself but it's just she's there yeah I can't seem to I shut down whatever that fawning is yeah I'm a fawner so bad and I can't seem to escape it like even a mountain when I should say something to somebody

and I'm a target you know and I know that too like I got sexually assaulted down in Florida and I now have shut down around men because of it even more so because I'm too friendly and my guess is this is not the first time you've been sexually assaulted because if you were neglected in childhood they were not watching or protecting you and so there were probably many instances where your boundaries your sexual boundaries your bodily boundaries were not respected and protected because you weren't being watched I wasn't being watched especially when I was in, I was overseas. And during that time, I really, it was when I was really young and I don't remember things, but it's a feeling and it's always in my back and I can feel it. I'm like,

what is that? That's why somatic experiencing is so powerful because you release their, your body is holding on to all of those memories, even if you don't consciously remember them. And some of them doing this work, you will remember, but a lot of them, I can tell you from my own experience, but also shepherding so many others through this, that a lot of them, it's not even about remembering the specifics of what happened and you won't. I actually rather not. Yeah, I know. But your body, you will experience what your body was experiencing and needing to release. So just as an example, when you were four or five years old and you felt gobsmacked

by someone else's rage all of a sudden as you were skipping through the living room or whatever, there was a part of you that just got frozen there. Right. And you never thought about it again. You just maybe made a decision at that point to just be quieter and less joyful because it could be dangerous if someone wasn't down with that and I might get whopped or yelled at. So I'm just going to kind of bring it down and not be, you know, so you made a little agreement at that young age and your body remembers the feeling of what it felt like to have your joy whopped out of you, right? And so then for the rest of your life, there's a million different moments where you reenact that or where that one inside you is still kind of modulating how much

joy you allow yourself to feel or express in any given moment, right? And so until you go into the body and that part, you can really feel the stomach-dropping fear that you felt in that moment and you shake it or you pound a pillow or you dance it out or you scream it out or whatever your body wants to do in that moment with support, with the support of a somatic experiencing therapist, then that body memory is no longer there. It's no longer held in your system in the same way. Well, this actually like, cause I know that I do things with my kids too. Like if I'm, if i'm not present i'll have those moments of like you know turn to them and like please stop please stop please stop like i'm just begging you you need to stop because it's like my whole body

feels like it's about to like you know fall into pieces like i feel like i'm gonna die and you're translating as long as we don't heal our traumas and it doesn't you know i have a 26 year old and i didn't really start doing this healing work probably until he was like a sophomore or junior in high school. So he was pretty well baked by then, but I can tell you that it has changed his life because we have a quantum energetic connection that is beyond measure with our children. And we have even a cellular connection with them. And I have noticed, and he has even expressed it to me that as I have healed, he has healed too, just in some ways, because our dynamics have changed, but in a lot of ways that have nothing to do with me, because when

in the quantum field in which there is no linear time, when we heal ourselves, we are healing everyone who came before us, all the generational trauma that came before us. And we are interrupting the generational trauma that we are passing on. So what you're describing with your kids, and this is not to beat you up or tell you that you're a bad mama, because I can tell that you're a good mama, but that we unconsciously pass on just like your parents because of their wounds and your mom's inability to self-regulate and to maybe state her own needs and maybe claim her own power with anything from birth control to support around the kids or whatever else, she got resentful and shut down and disengaged and disassociated and then passed

that, then that led to your trauma, right? So that's what we do. We pass our trauma onto our kids, either through our actions or even just without even intending to on a cellular quantum level. So absolutely, as you do this healing work, two things happen. One, you are releasing that generational trauma. So you're actually helping to heal all of your siblings and all of your and your parents and all the generations that came before them without you ever having to have a conversation with them. You're doing that just by doing your own work, but you're also going to start showing up very differently in your relationships, including with your husband. So you won't have, you'll be able to start working through your fear and resistance when you want to stake a claim or draw a line in the sand about a decision or how you want to be treated. You will be able to work through your resistance and immobilized fear that you feel when you're faced with some sort of adult responsibility task that overwhelms the little girl you, right?

Because she's no longer going to be driving the bus. She may bubble up, but you will know her. You'll be familiar with her. You'll be friends with her. You'll be reparenting her in the way she should have been parented. and you'll be like, no, we got this. Like we can do this. We can figure this out. We are smart and we can figure this out. We just need to learn how to do it, right? So you're gonna be having a lot. You're gonna be talking to yourself a lot

and you're gonna be having a lot of conversations in the mirror and you're gonna be releasing a lot but it will make you show up differently. And I can tell that that's resonating because you're getting teary. So what's going on? What's resonating with you now? I guess it's like, it's a fear that comes up

But the idea of change, also, I think the thing that upsets me probably the most is feeling like, it's like almost acknowledging something makes me feel so bad about my family. Your family of origin, you mean? Yeah. It's my parents and everything. When I start to acknowledge things and I think about me as a six-year-old, I feel so bad for her, but then I feel bad for my family, too. Yeah, well, that you did that. That's part of your strategy, because the only way that you could not the only way you could survive in that family is if you took on the blame yourself and you took the blame. If you had really connected with how whacked and inappropriate it was the way that you were being neglected, that's that's not your personality. Right. Maybe another sibling did that. The one that was really acting out and the delinquent and the quote unquote black sheep in the family was the one that was acting out all the rage the rest of you felt but didn't feel like you had the power to act out. And I can tell you that this is just part of that sweet, good little girl in you that

doesn't want to make mom and dad wrong. But here's the thing. Understanding that they were wrong does not mean that they were bad. They are not bad people. No one in your family is. They were doing the very best they could. Hey, don't forget to go to drlauraberman.com. You can find so much great information there and sign up for my newsletter so you get weekly

updates on how to love and be loved better. And also on my website, you can get my brand new ebook, You're Not Crazy, You're Just Ascending. It's a practical guide to spiritual awakening that many of us are going through right now, and it's enough to make you feel crazy. So check it out. I'm here for you, always helping you learn to love and be loved better. So your parents were doing the very best they could with the resources they had and the trauma they had lived through. By no means does it mean they were bad people or bad parents. I mean,

I've said that to my kids since they were little. Listen, I already know I'm doing the best I can, but I know I'm still messing you up because that's what parents do, right? So you acknowledging inside yourself, it may mean that you never have to want to or need to say anything to them. Or maybe you will eventually want to have some reconciliation. I can tell you at the end of my dad's life, I was shocked because I didn't think I would ever have this, be wanting to have this conversation with him, but not long, like very close to when he died, I told him that I forgave him. And I told him what I forgave him for. And I told him the gifts that I had learned that had come from the pain and the things and they were immense gifts that I probably

that changed the trajectory in my life of my life in ways that were really hard but led ultimately to really amazing gifts and that I not only forgave him but in some ways I thanked him and that I knew my soul chose him to be my father for the shit he was going to put me through wow and our children have chosen us yes for that sole purpose as well yes we choose everyone we have these things that we want to learn or experience to expand our souls or to deal with our karma or to work through you know it all come basically is about recognizing how worthy of love you are and how sentient and empowered you truly are but we come back to have these experiences of separation, of trauma, of pain, of loss, and we choose the perfect parents to deliver the wounds

that our soul is here to heal from. So your soul chose your parents and your kids' souls chose you and all you have to do and all you need to worry about is your soul work. And as you do that, you change your entire reality and you change your family's reality and it changes how you show up. It changes how scared you are when you show up. It changes how able you are to show up and stand for yourself. And as you do that, it gets easier and easier and easier. But right now, the little girl you is driving the bus when it comes to articulating your needs or standing up for yourself or dealing with change, which change is always scary. But imagine how petrifying it would be to a little girl who has no say. Think about your kids when they moved, right? Where is

my room going to be? Can I bring my favorite toy? What kind of school am I going to go to? I want to be able to ride my bike. They have all these opinions and needs and wants, some of them realistic, some of them not so realistic, but they have a voice. Having a little bit of a voice, even if it's in what color their room is painted or what pillowcase goes on their bed, gives them a sense of control over the change and safety in the change you did not have any voice so change must have been like poop in your pants petrifying it was definitely poop in my pants like every time it was I just remember every moment whenever I try to voice something like getting my period was traumatic. I got in trouble for getting my period because I cried and my mom got mad at me.

And she told me the two things that are like, that highlight my childhood are stop being a baby, get over it, grow up. And you need to stop. I mean, those were like, you're too much. So you're too much. You're not allowed to have needs. You're not allowed to be sad. You're not allowed to be scared. You're not allowed to. So what do you do? You squelch all that. You repress all that. And then it comes out as resentment and rage. For others, it comes out as violence and addiction. For you, it came out as passive aggression and resentment. But if you don't have a voice and you're not allowed to feel and nobody ever soothed you and you needed to grow up, like, why would you ever want to grow up? Why would you ever? And as that little girl,

you're like, grow up. I can't even function in the world. What do you mean grow up? So that's the one that is looking at the bank accounts and being like, hell no, right? But that's just a little girl part of you that was never honored or supported. And the final thing I'll say to you, in addition, that will help in addition to doing this somatic experiencing work, also maybe The other thing you can explore is imago therapy. I am AGO. It's like a lot with that inner child work, which is really helpful, but I definitely would do the somatic piece as well. And then finally, what happens to us kids who are going through severe trauma of neglect or abuse or rejection or whatever it is, is that our parents are God to us. Every little kid, parents,

they're the key to your survival. Without them, you're starving, homeless, and freezing to death, right? So they're the key to your survival. They are like God, and we give them the power of God. And unless we are of the very, very, very small few who were taught through practice and modeling how to connect to a benevolent God, I'm not talking about the God in most churches and synagogues that kids are taught about. A benevolent, all-encompassing, all-loving, always supporting you, always holding you, God. Unless we were introduced to that God early and cultivated that relationship, which we typically weren't, growing up in a family like that, the people you gave the power of God to could not hold it. And then you experience yourself

as completely unmoored, ungrounded, and unsupported 24-7, right? So that's also what makes life, standing for yourself, and adulting so scary, right? Because there's no hammock underneath you. There's no loving arms holding you. And so that is the third prescription I will give you is to start on this journey, cultivating a relationship. It doesn't matter. You know, it's all the same. It's all love, right? Whether it's Jesus, Allah, spirit, universe, whatever resonates with, for me, it's holy oneness, like the oneness that connects all of us in that energetic universal consciousness that we all come from and are connected to and connected through. But everybody, you know, it doesn't matter what your image is, but to start calling in that connection and cultivating that connection through meditation, through prayer, through building.

You probably have tremendous psychic powers that you've repressed because they're scary and because they were giving you information that when you checked out with your parents, you got in trouble about because you were seeing things and feeling things that were the truth when the truth was not really welcomed. And so as you start to open up and welcome in those more psychic abilities, like I would say that you're definitely clairsentient, meaning that you can feel what other people are feeling really easily and that you are probably claircognizant, meaning that you get a knowing of things before they happen or you just know something about someone or whatever. I don't know if you ever hear things or see things, but my guess is that you definitely know things and feel things. Know things, feel things. Every once in a while, I'll hear things, but it's right in between that sleep and awake stage. Right.

Well, that makes sense because you're in a really, you're in a receptive state. And so that will happen if you start practicing meditation, you will start. And even if it's just sitting down for 10 minutes and taking some really deep breaths and opening up, you know, and saying, I open up my heart, my mind, my body, my spirit to the highest frequency of love. And I welcome in support and messages. And I want to feel that support and just put all of your conscious awareness. There is like, I think of it almost like a pilot light on a stove. There is this brilliant pilot light, which is this first seed of our consciousness in these human bodies, right in the center of the heart chakra, right in the

center of the heart. One of the easiest ways that I find to go into that connection, especially in the early days of me starting to do this, was to put all of my conscious awareness on that flame. It's like a bright, brilliant, purplish-blue flame right in the center of your chest. You let it build and build and build. You put all of your conscious awareness as you're calling in that spiritual connection, that awareness of the support. And you almost feel like you're dropping in. You're almost going like in versus up because that's really where source is found is in the very center of our consciousness. It's not up on a cloud in the sky somewhere. So as you start to practice that and welcome in, you're going to notice that a lot of the psychic stuff

you have available to you is going to come online more and that's going to give you a tremendous sense of safety as you start to realize how much you really do know and feel that can protect you and that can see what's coming and that can direct you. And it will also build your confidence and it will also, it's really hard to not recognize how worthy of love you are as you start to tap into these God-given gifts that you have.

It fosters that one, the spiritual connection fosters the psychic awareness and the psychic awareness fosters the spiritual connection. And I think both of those are going to be super important to your healing because part of the reason you don't stand for yourself, one of the strategies you come up with, I think, is to question whether it's not just that you're like, you can talk yourself down. No, my husband's not going to be mad at me. If he is, screw him. like that. It's more like, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he is right that blah, blah, blah, because you had to give your truth away every second of your life as a child. So trusting your own truth is a big learning edge for you. And if you don't trust your own truth, the world is really freaking

scary. Yeah, it's terrifying. You don't know what the truth is. So as you cultivate that knowing in you, you can start to depend. I mean, I had to do this at the beginning too, like, okay, is this true let me run it through my heart like my heart will tell me is this true what i'm thinking or is what my partner or someone else saying true and you can run both through your heart and know you start to know and trust your knowing and then you can hold on to that and then that gives you integrity and ground under what you're asking for or standing for yeah yeah that's brilliant i think when things come up within my family let's say as i you know begin this journey And something I think what really scares me is something comes up where I know that it's wrong or my mother needs to understand that that's just not right.

I don't know how to approach that. But I guess it's something I'd be working with a therapist. You'd be working with a therapist about how and when to do that. And it may, in fact, be that your mother in this lifetime is not able. Like if you were if I were your therapist and we were at that point, I would be really working through with you. is this, like, what are you hoping for in terms of reaction? Is it realistic to hope for that? Is it really going to give you what you want? Like, do you really need to complete with her in this way? Or can you write her a letter that you never even really send? Like, is it necessary

that they know and acknowledge and apologize for the ways that they've let you down? Because if your healing cannot and will not be contingent on that. Because if it is, you're stuck, right? Because 95% of the time, our toxic families, just because of their own wounds and unwillingness to do the healing work you're about to embark on, they just can't. That doesn't mean they don't love you or are horrible people. They just are incapable of that kind of integrity or responsibility or looking in the mirror, right? And so you can still be in relationship with them without having to make them claim the ways you're holding them accountable for the things they did wrong. It will change how you show up in relationship with them, how you protect yourself,

how you take care of yourself. You're going to get really comfortable with them with standing your ground when they try to gaslight you or exactly what i think that was the idea of the gaslighting i know when it comes up they see it with my mother and my my brother's really bad at it or just big you know he can't seem to he switches the he used to do two minutes a little too just switches it real quick and all of a sudden it's it's me i did something you know and yeah like so you that's once again the discernment thing the knowing your own truth so what you're going to do as you're doing this work. And it's a process, right? So I wouldn't even try to change anything in the dynamics of your important relationships for at least three to six months

into doing this work. And then as you're starting to practice, you start in the lower stakes situations, like maybe with your kids or with your friends or with colleagues or with neighbors or with someone in the checkout line. And then you move on maybe to your siblings that you have the safest connection with. And then maybe you move to your husband and then maybe to the really tough ones in your family. Because in many ways, our family of origin is even tougher to stand for ourselves where those initial wounds occurred than it even is in our love relationship. But you'll do that in a stepwise progression. And you'll also be supported through dealing with the shrapnel, the gaslighting shrapnel that they'll probably throw, especially your family

will throw at you. But as you start to cultivate and do this work and you start to make your own integrity with yourself and protecting those little girl parts of yourself more important than anything else, because it is the root of everything else, then it gets easier and easier. So that's the journey you're about to go on. And you have your marching orders now. Will you keep And 100% will. a prescription but there's no cure for a cry