Beliefs I learned a child : and some thoughts on meaning from Gabor Mate

I have been listening to more of Gabor Mate’s work on self abandonment.. I am recognizing more and more damaging beliefs I absorbed as a child. I am listing these below.

If you want to be loved, noticed and able to survive, pay good attention and revolve around others

Try extra hard to be clean and ‘good’ because there are parts of you that others find disturbing or unacceptable.

Work really hard at being perfect, always strive to improve yourself.

Develop self loathing, after all unless you criticize yourself and drive yourself with this anxiety, how will you get anything done?

There is no time to rest

There is little time to breathe

Its not allowed to relax or have fun, life is a very serious business. No laughing and make sure you keep those long legs of yours together!

Disconnect from how you feel otherwise you will be killed as after all, you are seen as a threat

Once we recognise these beliefs is can be possible to reverse the beliefs, the truth is that our unavailable or anxious parents were struggling and so we absorbed that struggle along with the mistaken beliefs. As a child our parents seem omnipotent so if they act in difficult ways, we have no way of knowing IT WAS NOT US WHO DID SOMETHING WRONG rather as a young child we struggled with no help to stop the internalizing of suffering and blame.

To heal involves the restoration of lost or broken and fragmented connections to our inner self, life and world we lost the way to when traumatized.

Gabor Mate’s work with those dying of terminal cancer who from a young age learned to turn against themselves showed the advent and bearing of the disease was often seen and felt as ‘the best thing that happened to me’. Many valued the wholeness they found by confronting death and via re-connected inwardly. to the true and disallowed feelings.. Sad to say in cancer, we so often have to bear feelings we were not conscious of passed down to us along the multi-generational line.

On this subject of dying into life I was directed by astrologer Melanie Reinhardt many years ago to the work of a man Stephen Levine who did a lot of inner meditative heart opening practices with those dying helping them to connect stored childhood pain in the body manifesting as tumors and illness.According to Gabor Mate finding the meaning in your symptoms and life can bring healing, seeing the illness makes sense in some way due to past painful experiences resulting in mistaken beliefs can bring a wholeness to the person.

In illness life energy gets damned up. The ancestral multigenerational trauma work of people like Mark Wolynn and Bert Hellinger shows where love energy is cut off love can no longer flow and then breakages occur along ancestral lines that may manifest generations along.

According to Mate creation and creativity = flow, or the restoring of flow of dammed up frozen healthy life energy. Healing often comes as we recognize the loving presence of something else, far larger, greater and more unifying than the limited ego. At heart it is the restored flow of connection to the true self that brings meaning to our life and helps us to authentically connect in love with others rather than stay trapped in feelings of fear hostility or separation.