Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - The Surprising Reason You Can't Let Go Of Your Past

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Do you ever feel like you are being haunted by your past? If so, you need to tune into “The Language of Love” to hear how you can heal your wounds so that you can finally let the past go. We all experienced trauma as children, even if you fortunately didn’t have hugely disturbing experiences like sexual assault, physical abuse, or extreme poverty in your childhood. I call these kind of traumas “Big T” traumas, because they’re easily identifiable to all of us as areas of pain and terror. However, there are also “little t” traumas, traumas that aren’t as easily identified as wounds. These events might include an overly critical parent, religious fear-mongering, bullying at school, weight struggles, learning difficulties, and sibling rivalry, just to name a few. All of these experiences impact our self-worth, our beliefs about ourselves, our beliefs about how we should be treated, and about how the world works. They may not feel as worthy of healing and attention as other major wounds like abuse, but this kind of thinking only allows your ‘little t’ traumas to bury deeper into your psyche and bleed into all areas of your life. That shame and embarrassment you feel about being gentle with your past wounds is in fact PART of your wound talking: If you feel like your pain isn’t serious enough or that you’re being too sensitive or that you don’t have the ‘right’ to feel upset about something that happened 20 years ago, guess what? That’s your core wound talking. Your core wound that tells you that you aren’t strong enough or that your pain isn’t worthy of tenderness or that other people have it worse than you, so you should just ‘get over it’….these are all messages we got from our family systems when our pain triggered them. They weren’t able to address our needs so they shamed us for having them: Now we as adults do the same thing. But we can change the pattern. This isn’t about wallowing in the past, it’s about healing it so we can finally move on. If you can’t bring attention and tenderness to these parts of you that need healing, you will forever be dominated and controlled by your past. You won’t be able to expertly manifest your dreams and work towards your goals, because your energy is being sapped by these invisible wounds that just won’t heal. Listen to this episode to find out how you can begin to let go of the past right now. 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 just like you learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Bites, where I tackle your most asked questions and requested topics. These episodes are designed to be fun, quick, and to the point. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. So much of what I talk about with you is all the ways that our past, our childhood and our earlier life experiences have long reaching, far reaching effects on our emotional health, our emotional maturity and how we operate in love, not to mention our sense of peace. And so I've highlighted for you and lots of other videos, the wounds that can cause to be out of

peace, to be struggling in love. But this video is really about how to heal. So the first step, obviously, is an understanding what happened to you, understanding that trauma happens with a big T and a little T. And a lot of people feel like, oh, I didn't have any trauma because I wasn't sexually abused or physically abused or even emotionally abused. Maybe I got spanked a few times. Maybe my parents were a little critical. But what you don't understand is that there are lots of little t traumas that happened to us, times that we were abandoned or humiliated or criticized or rejected in significant ways, not only in earlier childhood, but in adolescence or sometimes even later, not only in our family of origins, but in school and in our dating life,

our early dating life, our first experiences. Someone who sent a naked selfie to a boy when she was 14 and had it passed around the school, that's a serious humiliation trauma that affects you. It affects your ability to trust. It affects the way you feel about your body. It affects your self-worth. It affects the trajectory and the choices you made after that. It affected your friendships, right? So that's just one example, but there's a far-reaching way, not only sexually, but socially and emotionally within the home and without, that we all have these experiences that shape us and kind of change the trajectory of our lives in a way that can negatively impact our mental health and our well-being and our ability to sustain and attract

healthy love. So the first thing to understand is, what happened to me, right? What were the things that happened that maybe stand in the way of my peace, of what I really want to create in my life. And one of the things that I have found, I mean, obviously you can go to therapy and you can have your history taken and go through things that you remember. But I have found a really powerful way, and I do this with my people I work with all the time, is to let your body tell you. And this is why one of the keys to healing in general is what I call embodiment work, getting back into your body. Because if you had any kind of emotional, physical, sexual trauma in your life, big T or little t, there are so many parts of you that just left your body,

right? Because it's much easier than staying in the body and being present with the pain, the feelings that those experiences brought up. So we just put it away in the basement and we put it aside and we pretend it doesn't exist. But of course, it's coming out in all of these different ways. So if you don't know what happened to you, which often we don't, we don't remember, we don't really connect the dots, even if we do remember, go into your body as you think about what you're struggling with. Okay. So let's just follow the thread of love if that's what you're struggling with. So you're struggling in love, maybe in your relationship or calling love in and articulate the conflict. I keep getting ghosted

or I can't find someone who I really connect with, or my partner just won't show up for me in this way that I really want them to show up for. Right. And as you articulate that to yourself, After you take some grounding breaths, which if you go to drlauraberman.com to the Quantum Love page and click on those meditations, you'll find a really quick and easy grounding meditation, just two or three breaths, light in through the top of your head, out your tailbone as you breathe out, ground in your body. And then as you're articulating that story that you have to yourself about love, just pay attention, scan your body.

Where do you feel sensation, right? Often you'll feel it in your throat, tightness, constriction. You'll feel tension in your belly, tightness, nauseous, pain, maybe in your center, in your heart, but you'll notice sensations, okay? And then just stay with it because very often you'll first feel it in your throat and then it'll go down to your belly. And then all of a sudden your belly, you'll be like, oh yeah, the belly is really the one, right?

The throat I felt for a minute, but really it's the belly. So whatever feels strongest after you sit with it for a minute, just being really curious without judgment, without trying to name anything. Just stay with what you're feeling and something will come into focus in terms of the sensations you're having, okay? So, let's say it's your belly, right? It could be anything. I'm just using this as an example. Then the next step is to let it get a little bit bigger. It's not going to take you over, but in order for you to work with it and understand it, you have to fully be with it, okay? So, what I mean by getting it bigger is you put all of your conscious awareness on that area, on the sensation, and you just

almost say, get a little bigger. And it will immediately, you know, it's big already. It's just not, you're not paying attention to it, right? So let it get bigger, knowing that you're in control. It's not going to take you over. Maybe even notice if it has a color, if you were to give it a color or a texture. Is it lumpy? Is it smooth? Is it round? Is it oblong? Is it sharp? And once you're really, it's gotten big and you have a sense of shape and color, and there's no wrong answer here, right? This is you just becoming really present and consciously connected to what your body's about to tell you. I want you to ask yourself, what's the earliest memory I have of feeling this specific sensation? And nine times out of 10,

an image will come to you immediately. Maybe when you were five, maybe when you were 16, maybe when you were 20, whatever it was, that is a key point in your subconscious that plays a huge role in what's standing in the way of your peace and your love in your life. So there is a story attached to that image that you just saw as you asked yourself that question. So you want to go back to that in your mind's eye and look at it. And that will show you almost always, it will be a scene where you felt gobsmacked all of a sudden by one of your parents, or you were humiliated in front of the whole class, or somebody rejected you and you were heartbroken, or a parent abandoned you or abandoned the family and you thought

it was about you or something. It will come to you. It always does. That is your why, okay? Now, that doesn't mean that one incident is all that happened, but that incident represents the why. It's a theme in your life. And the theme is usually something around,

I need to be more of something or less of something in order to be loved or to be accepted or to be approved of or to be okay. It's always some flavor of that. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range, infused with functional benefits.

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grounding. Anytime you feel that same feeling, that is a cue to you that some of those old wounds are being triggered. Those old thorns are being touched and that's information for you and you're healing. Now, it's really hard to fully heal. And I'm not just saying this because I'm a therapist. I really do believe this. I go to therapy. I've gone to therapy my whole adult life and I still go to therapy every single week with a wonderful healer. She's been on my podcast before, Maureen Riley. But we all need support in healing and releasing the wounds. So I do think it's really important if you are struggling in life and in love, that getting support is super important. But what kind of support to get is also super important.

So I mentioned embodiment. In my experience, that is the most important aspect of healing. So the best kind of therapy to heal, I feel, is what's called somatic therapy, which is therapy that really is kind of a version of what I just walked you through, of really letting your body take the lead and release the emotions, energy and motions that are stored there from all of these wounds, become aware of these wounds. And so if you go to the Hakomi Institute or you can go to traumahealing.org, which is another organization, both of these are great. You can find a therapist in your area and work with them around somatically healing, starting with the body, letting your body take the lead. This is so important, both in understanding

what you're feeling moment to moment, because the more trauma you had, the less you're in your body. And the less you're in your body, the more you know how you feel. The less you're in your body, the less you know what you're feeling. And the less you can use your body as a compass and a guide, which is so important in calling healthy love into your life and just even having a healthy life and making healthy decisions. So it's about learning to be in your body, listening to your body, and letting your body lead in the healing. And that is what somatic therapy does so beautifully. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins,

like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune function and Coffee Plus B6 to keep your day moving or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight our new double espresso with ginseng extract whatever lies ahead don't change your morning let your morning change you discover coffee plus on espresso.com so i feel like that is really a beautiful form of healing for you so is something called a shamanic healing or soul retrieval it's an aspect of shamanic healing that a lot of clinicians do. I do it with people as well, but you basically go back to one of these wounds to that moment and you reconfigure it in a new way because the principle under or behind shamanic soul retrieval is that there are all these kinds of parts of ourselves

that are stuck in the past in that point of fracture or in that wound place. And when we go back to that place and we go back maybe to be with that little girl or boy part of ourselves in that scene that we remember also coming into the scene as an adult or bringing in someone else to help, often that piece of how your soul, your soul, running the shamans, or a piece of your inner child, as therapists may call it, that gets reintegrated through this process. So I do think that soul retrieval is a really beautiful healing process. Also, a spiritual teacher who I love and who's a dear friend of mine, Teal Swan, has a process called the completion process, which is really beautiful. It's kind of a combination of inner child work and soul retrieval and lots of

other things. And she has a book called The Completion Process, where you can actually learn how to do this for yourself. And also, which brings me to the final thing that helps with healing, which is inner child work. And all of us should be doing inner child work. You can do that with an actual therapist who does like imago therapy, inner child therapy, but also just really becoming friends with those little parts of yourselves that, by the way, are still driving the bus. They're the ones, those little small parts of yourselves that were left behind or traumatized with the bigger little T traumas. They're the ones that are getting in the way of your peace and your ability to attract love. They're the ones that are leading you to make

the decisions that don't serve you. So the only reason they're doing that is because they aren't resolved. They aren't reintegrated. They don't feel supported by you. They don't feel safe. So when you start becoming friends with those parts of yourself or friends with your shadows, as we like to say, those parts of yourselves you don't want to acknowledge, you're scared to look at. They're just these little, small, sweet parts of yourself that were left behind when you experienced something super painful. And just like you would to a little child, your child or your little sister or someone you deeply cared about and nurtured and wanted to cherish, you treat those parts of yourself the same way. And so all of that combined is such beautiful work.

It can be painful at times. You do need some bravery and some courageousness, but the rewards it reaps, not only in your well-being and the peace you feel and the clarity you feel and the boundaries you're able to set and the strength inside you feel and the happiness you feel, but also it makes you a very different magnet. then every ounce of healing you do is that much more of a quality experience you attract into your life, in life and in love. Because you are only going to be a vibrational match for people who vibrate at the same frequency you do. And as we heal, each little part we heal, our vibration rises and we attract in and are attracted to that much better of a partner for us. someone who's going to meet our needs and show up for us and love us in the way we deserve. But we have to get there first. And as we do, that's when the real magic starts to happen, not only in your love life, but also just in your life in general and in your ability to manifest

what you most desire. So I wish you all the love and light in your healing journey. And if you have any questions about this or anything else you ever want to hear about, you just let me know because I am here to help you learn to love and be loved better. this family is on the brink of civil war mob land the hit original series is now streaming on paramount plus we are the harrigans don't know the net and google us from the underworld of guy ritchie do you want to step up the ladder i want karma dead starring tom hardy pierce brosnan and helen mirren do i have to do everything myself You want a war? I'll give you a war!

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