“The idea of being alone terrifies me… makes me feel ashamed. I feel abandoned, like it’s the end of the world. I feel dead... unseen, unheard…. like I don’t exist.”
Why would a 37 year old European woman living in a safe society experience such distressing emotions at the thought of being alone?
Meet my client Emmi (name changed). She has come to me because she has ended her relationship with her boyfriend and she feels absolutely broken.
Today is our second session.
She explains to me that she has woken up in the middle of the night with a sense of panic. She feels terribly alone and has the feeling that everyone has disappeared.
When I hear of such strong emotions in a person, I immediately know that these feelings are not new and have very little to do with what is actually happening in the present. For emotions to be so strong and be triggered so easily and so often, there is only one reason: they are the result of deep trauma experienced in early childhood.
So, I invite her to do an exercise with me.
She closes her eyes, and I guide her to relax and in her mind go back to a time when she was a small child and she had this feeling for the first time.
Her earliest memory is of being a baby, around one and a half years old. She feels alone. Her parents are in the room, but do not pay any attention to her. They are shouting, arguing among themselves, and fail to notice that she needs them.
In her words, this makes her feel “unseen, unheard, disconnected, lost, alone… as if I don’t exist… as if I’m dead.”
Her feelings at that moment in time - as a baby - are exactly the feelings she regularly experiences as a 37 year old!
As I suspected, this strong association with loneliness was created in her life at a very early age… and she she has been dragging these awful feelings with her throughout her entire life.
The worst part? They can be triggered by the tiniest of events; events that the rest of us might find slightly annoying, but otherwise harmless: someone’s indifference, walking through a crowd and not knowing anybody in particular, a busy boyfriend, someone’s failure to respond to an sms… Anything that remotely resembles that feeling of disconnect she felt as a child.
We are all like that: if we haven’t healed, we are re-experiencing in our everyday lives the same traumas from our childhood!
This is a terrible way to live. To relive in all their amplitude and intensity the worst feelings we ever felt in our lives over and over again not only causes us tremendous pain, it also makes it very difficult for us to succeed in the area affected.
In Emmi’s case, her fear of loneliness had several immediate effects:
1) it prevented her from taking advantage of alone time (which can be extremely productive);
2) it prevented her from having a healthy relationship with a man; and
3) although she desired fervently to be a mother, she felt she would not be able to connect emotionally to her child, so she could not make up her mind about it.
Now, let me ask you: what are your repeated feelings? Are they self-pity, insecurity, fear, sadness, frustration, desperation, loneliness, abandonment, overwhelm….? Do you experience them with regards to romantic relationships or financial abundance or professional success... or everywhere?
Do you want to know how to heal them?
Many people spend their lifetime repeating affirmations or reading books on the subject or talking to a therapist or trying to control their behavior through will power… unfortunately these things yield very little change. The reason: these actions take place at the conscious level.
However, the only way to heal trauma is through the subconscious mind. This is what I did with Emmi.
Once we explored her feelings at that moment in time and the circumstances surrounding it, I guided her in having an energetic (quantum) conversation with her mother.
In it, she found out that her mother had always taken care of Emmi’s physical well-being, but she failed to take care of her emotionally. The reason for this was that her mother didn’t know how to deal with emotions: she had been a Holocaust survivor and the way she had coped with the traumatic events in her own life had been to shut down her emotions completely.
As a result, she had lost her ability to connect emotionally to anyone, including her children.
What we did next, allowed Emmi to experience things she had never experienced in her life.
You see, our nervous system doesn’t know whether something is real or is “pretend.” That is why, when we are in a movie, we feel exactly how the director wants us to feel.
In Emmi’s case, I had her imagine that her mother was doing something she never did before: her mother came over when Emmi needed her, took her in her arms, held her tightly against her bosom and told her how much she loved her.
As I described this new situation, Emmi started to sob. She was hearing her mother tell her things she had always wanted to hear: that she loved Emmi to the moon and back, that she was so proud of her, that she thought the world of her, that she admired her talents, her strength, her sensitivity, her intelligence…
She told her that she was going to have a brilliant future and would become a terrific mother… exactly addressing one of Emmi’s fears.
As Emmi heard those words and felt her mother’s love, she sobbed loudly.
For the first time of her life, she felt loved and secure. She not only felt seen and heard, she felt important and precious. She not only felt that she existed, she felt that she mattered deeply.
Instead of feeling dead, she now felt fully alive.
The next time Emmi was alone, she had a different feeling. The overwhelming sense of desolation and abandonment was gone.
Loneliness was starting to feel like independence and freedom now.
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Would you like to experience something like that for yourself? Then let's find out what you need: https://www.emotional-strength.com/appointment