HEALing Emotional Wounds

The most effective therapies involve telling stories. There is something powerful about telling your story to someone else, and writing out your story for yourself is just as healing. You are acknowledging your pain, and in the acknowledgment you are saying, Yes, this happened, but I am here now.

In the coming chapters you will be reading stories of people I have worked with, as well as my own story. Names and identifying information have been changed, except my own, and each person agreed that I could share their story with you. Through these stories you will see that when we experience a dramatic or emotionally significant event as a child, the resulting trauma coalesces to form a core wounding within. This wounding event gets linked with the age we were when it occurred, what I call the age of wounding. As a way to cope with this emotional wounding, we use immature emotional response tools to interact and deal with a confusing world based on the frozen emotion originating at the age of wounding. You will learn how to personify this part of yourself so that you can begin to relate more easily to it.

Please note that I will often use the terms wounded parts, wounded self, and wounded, lost inner child throughout the book to refer to the emotionally wounded inner child. As you work through the HEAL process, you may find your own way to address your lost inner child, either by a name you were called at that age or a nickname that feels right to you today. (To be clear, the concept of a wounded inner child doesn’t mean you have dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder.)

Your wounded parts have been trying to communicate with you through all of the wounded, impulsive reactions you use. It has been sending codes, red flags, and sirens, but you have probably ignored them, not knowing what they meant or what to do about them. The dysfunctional ways you interact with other people are your pain and wounding coming out, trying to communicate to you and others. Some of these wounded impulsive reactions may be more developed than a child’s response, but all have their roots in a painful experience.

Take a moment right now to go deeper within yourself. Think of the hurts, traumas, pains, and heavy things you carry. See if you can be still just long enough to hear the emotion or the traumatic wounding that is trying to get your attention. This could be a memory that keeps resurfacing or a feeling that comes up when you are in a certain situation. All of these feelings are natural and a part of you. Try to hold that emotion for a bit, then move on to the exercise below.

Take a moment to identify three feelings you have right now. They could be related to what is happening in your life today or connected to an experience you remember from when you were a child. These feelings are a reflection of what is going on inside of you; they are not good or bad, they are just feelings. What are you noticing? I invite you to become accustomed to checking in with your feelings, as they carry so much wisdom for you. (If you are having trouble finding feeling words, refer to the Feelings Chart in appendix A.)

Pain of any kind stays with us until it is addressed. It is the messenger of the wounding within, and it will keep sending messages in the form of depression, anxiety, heartache, and sometimes physical issues until we deal with them. These emotions can have a great influence on the choices we make in life. It is important to recognize them so we can make conscious, grounded choices of what to do with these pain messages.

How the HEAL Process Works

Ball up a piece of paper, and then start uncrumpling it. As you uncrumple it, you can see the paper take its original flat shape again. As you smooth it out on the table, you see that some areas look smooth and intact, and others are wrinkled and misshapen. Once you smooth out the paper as much as you can, notice the original flat areas and the wrinkled imperfections. Like the paper, we all have smooth parts and parts that are wrinkled and crumpled up. Together these parts are the sum total of who we are, neither good nor bad. This is how I would like you to begin to look at yourself, as the sum total of all of your parts.

After you experience some healing moments from this work, you will have a new smoothness to some parts of you that had been all scrunched and crumpled. A kind of magic happens as you go through the process and heal, and a new, smoother, more expanded version of yourself will become easier to access. A new confidence and wisdom will come through you, and you will not react to some things as dramatically as you have in the past. You may also notice that something or someone who didn’t bother you before will now irritate you and you won’t know why, or that you barely notice things that used to bother you. These are all indicators that you are moving through the expansion of yourself to a bigger field. You will begin to listen to yourself more, checking in and recognizing feelings that were probably always there, and asking yourself, What do I want to do with this now?

Through the process of healing and embracing an authentic life you will examine those parts of you that are already healed—your functional, integrated, responsible adult self—because you are already doing more things right than wrong. You will also examine the dysfunctional, separated parts of yourself, your wounded parts that need healing.

I use the word healing in a present and active sense because I believe we are always healing, expanding, and growing until we transition from the planet. We are all born healed, and then we experience life with all of its tragedies and triumphs, which in turn influences and changes our sense of self.

The HEAL process will help you to see yourself from a different perspective and with more clarity. When you begin to tie hurtful early childhood events to some of your present-day problems and reactions, you will have aha! moments that will shine a bright light on dysfunctional patterns. You will see clearly how your wounded inner child shows up and makes decisions that are based on a child’s emotional reasoning that carries hurt and misunderstanding. Once you consciously acknowledge that what you are doing is hurtful to yourself, continuing to do so becomes very difficult.

The HEAL process is a transformational experience designed to expand your awareness of yourself. It is a dynamic process, and you will read about the journeys that others have taken as you learn how to observe and describe your own journey. You will be guided through a process to map out significant events that happened in your life from birth to age twenty. You will examine these experiences and learn to identify which ones are emotional standouts. The experiences that were happy and joyful expanded you and helped you to feel grounded and authentic. The traumatic or wounding experiences contracted and restricted your authentic self from becoming full, free, and open.

By discovering the core woundings that stand out, you will more easily be able to correlate those experiences, feelings, and impulsive reactions to some of your present-day adult interactions. You will begin to connect the patterns established when you were younger to your reactions today. You will also see that there is a part of you that did grow up: the responsible adult that makes the mature decisions in your life now.

The Responsible Adult Self

The responsible adult self is the part of you that matured chronologically, mentally, and emotionally—the part that grew up. It is the part of you that is not stuck in the past, the part that behaves as an adult, is responsible, is grounded, pays the bills, and generally does the right thing. This is the best of you. The responsible adult self doesn’t always show up, but when it does, it tries to do the right thing and keeps everything moving along.

The responsible adult self did not get stuck in a dysfunctional wounding cycle. This is the part that went on and got through school, found a job, possibly a partner, and established a life in an adult world. The wounded part shows up in your adult life when your pain is triggered, but the responsible adult can step up when needed and make reasonable decisions when you are grounded and centered.

The responsible adult is the functional self that is able to set appropriate boundaries. This is the part of you that is going to help the wounded part heal. It is the part that is going to be strong, find a boundary voice, be steady, and be a champion for all parts of you. The responsible adult self is the most important component to making the HEAL process work successfully.

Story: Jennifer and Her Repeating Cycles

Jennifer is a smart woman who tried hard to understand why she kept making the same mistakes in her personal relationships. She chose men who did not treat her well and were in some cases abusive. Her first husband was not verbally abusive, but he was incapable of being in a committed, monogamous relationship and had multiple affairs. Her second husband had two teenage sons and a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. He was a nice guy around family and friends but was verbally abusive to Jennifer when they were alone. He had an affair during their relationship.

Jennifer’s third long-term relationship lasted twelve years. Fred was a widower who, she realized later, was a charming narcissist, controlling and abusive. He was raising three young children on his own when they met. Throughout the relationship he was verbally abusive to Jennifer and his children. She stayed with him primarily because she was afraid to leave the children alone with Fred. She made a promise to herself to stay until the last child went off to college. She was proud of herself when she left the relationship, but he wouldn’t let her go. He stalked her and placed tracking devices on her car, which terrified her when she learned of it.

When Jennifer came to see me, she was depressed and confused and tired of the roller coaster. She felt good about herself at work and tried to stay positive when she came home or met up with her girlfriends, but she still felt miserable inside. As a result of her ex-partner’s narcissistic gaslighting, sometimes she felt sane, and sometimes she felt crazy. She knew there was a better way, but she worried that this was how her life was going to be. Even though she had left him, she was experiencing some post-trauma symptom aftershocks from this highly dysfunctional relationship.

Jennifer began to work through the transformational HEAL process. When she created a timeline of her childhood from birth to age twenty, one event stood out when she was eight years old. She had sold watermelons for her grandfather at his fruit stand when she was a young girl. One day she was short twenty-five cents. Her grandfather, instead of being a rational adult and realizing that she had probably given out incorrect change, accused her of stealing the money. This experience crushed her. She felt horrible about letting her grandfather down, but she thought she had given out the correct change and kept track of the money. Jennifer trusted her grandfather— he must be right and she was wrong. After all, why would he lie to her or hurt her? This was her grandfather, who said he loved her, so of course she thought it was her fault.

At eight years old, Jennifer lacked the skills and perspective to set boundaries, and her mantra of “I’m sorry” began. She adopted a new way of interacting with the world: she learned to be the victim and take the blame for other people’s inappropriate behavior. She was learning to trust others more than she trusted herself.

This experience was a defining moment in Jennifer’s life and the story she began to tell to herself. Her age of wounding was activated at eight years old, and so began her lifelong belief that she was stupid and needed to take the blame and apologize for other people’s behaviors.

In her review of her adult life choices and patterns, Jennifer could see that all three men she had had relationships with had a great deal in common. They were all narcissistically wounded, selfish, abusive in their own ways, and were never who they said they were. She discovered that all three had characteristics similar to her grandfather: they all convinced her to believe she was worthless and unintelligent, and they perpetuated her deep-seated insecurities.

As she worked through the HEAL process, Jennifer clearly saw these patterns and learned the need for healthy boundaries, both with herself and in her relationships. She saw that she sought out these particular men, and that they were attracted to her, because of her victim wounding and her idea of herself. Her wounding was trying to heal, but not in a healthy way, by unconsciously attracting these men.

She learned how to set internal boundaries to stop the self-talk that she was bad and wrong all the time. She learned how to stop saying she was sorry for other people’s behaviors. She developed new functional response tools to better respond to triggering events. She later said that the most important thing she learned was to take responsibility for herself—that she was the only one who could fix her problems—and to stop blaming the men for the way her relationships ended.

Through her self-examination, Jennifer realized that it was her wounded inner child who was staying with these men, despite her adult self knowing that she was in unhealthy relationships and deserved better. The functional response tools and boundaries she developed for herself and others provided a foundation for her to say no to future bad relationships and break the cycle.

Jennifer had spent forty-five minutes during our first appointment telling me how mean all these men had been. I said I could help her if she could work hard to look at herself and her choices, to take responsibility for herself, and not try to figure out these narcissistically wounded men. I said that we could talk over and over about why these men did what they did to her, but we would never come to a conclusion. The healing she was looking for wasn’t about figuring those men out, it was about healing herself. This realization helped her redirect her focus away from others and toward the harder job of looking within.

Jennifer later told me that it wasn’t always easy to face herself, but once she did, everything began to change for her. She said that healing her wounding has allowed her to love and forgive herself, and she has attracted many wonderful people into her life whom she would not have had in her circle before, and for that she feels grateful.

Functional Response Tools

You learned through Jennifer’s story how she had developed a pattern of taking on the responsibility for other people’s behaviors and apologizing for everything as a way to interact and control her relationships. From her early wounding, she developed impulsive reactions such as being defensive, being overly apologetic, and blaming herself. She could have stayed in the cycle of blaming these men, including her grandfather, but the blame game would have just kept her as the victim. She learned to develop the functional response tools of taking responsibility for her life choices, not blaming others and herself, and learning how to set clear boundaries with herself and others. Her responsible adult self already had many functional response tools, and working through the HEAL process helped her see how to use them not just at work but also in her relationships.

We often have good boundaries at work, as Jennifer did, but think we don’t need them in our personal lives. Then we wonder why our lives are so disorganized and chaotic. We have the boundary tools, but we use them casually and not all the time. We also have a mix of impulsive reactions and functional response tools, but the skill is learning the right tool to use for the situation.

The responses in your functional toolbox are filled with thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are helpful in a positive and affirming way. These tools help you to have a grounded relationship to yourself and others. They did not grow out of a place of wounding; they developed from a healed or whole place within you, and are rooted in your authentic core. You use these tools when you are balanced, non-reactive, and neutral, whether you are alone or with others. You use them when you have a clear sense of what is good for you and what is not, and when you set good boundaries. You use your functional response tools when you feel authentic, confident, self-assured, clear-headed, strong, and balanced.

When you are not grounded or clear, accessing your functional response tools may be harder because we tend to grab the most accessible tools available in a situation. If you feel fearful or overwhelmed, the easiest tool to use won’t always the most functional, especially if you are off-center and feeling hurt. Shutting down or hurling insults is often easier than staying grounded, clearly expressing your feelings, and establishing healthy boundaries.

As you will read in chapter 3, many of the mature, functional tools I developed came from watching my parents and other adults when they were grounded and had clear thoughts and intentions. I learned how to be compassionate and kind, and how to extend a loving hand to help those less fortunate. I also learned functional tools by watching my grounded and authentically aligned friends to see how they handled situations.

Your functional tools and your impulsive reactions are in the same toolbox. As you work through the HEAL exercises, you will develop compassion for the wounded part of you that uses impulsive reaction tools. You will see how these impulsive tools served you at one time and how they now hold you back from having an integrated adult life.

Your functional response tools developed over time, just like your wounded tools did. These thoughts, feelings, and behaviors helped you when you were a child and may still be helping you today. They are the attributes and responses that help you stay grounded and connected to your authentic self.

The following list provides examples of functional response tools:

• Feeling proud of yourself even when you aren’t acknowledged by someone else
• Recognizing the healthy and positive actions and choices you need to help you through your day
• Acknowledging the friends who are good for you and encourage you
• Honoring yourself when you have accomplished something that was really challenging to do
• Respecting yourself and your decisions
• Recognizing when relationships are reciprocal and when they are not
• Knowing that you make the best choices possible each day, even if they are not perfect
• Encouraging yourself to move forward and finding the motivation to do things that you know are right for you
• Loving those parts of yourself that still need care so they will heal
• Asking for help from others
• Practicing good self-care by getting extra rest when you need to, or participating in hobbies or sports as a way to relax
• Being emotionally vulnerable with others whom you trust
• Connecting with family and friends who help you feel whole
• Discerning who or what is working for you, and who or what is working against you

Once you have a healed perspective, your functional tools will stand out to you because you will see the positive, healthy results you get from using them. It will then become easier to access these tools instead of wounded tools.

Exercise: Your Current Functional Response Tools

Using this bullet list of functional response tools, think about some of the functional response tools that help you today. In your notebook, write down the tools you use and the tools you would like to develop. Which tools do you intuitively know you need to develop?

Think about the functional response tools that others in your life use that you don’t. Which ones would you like to start using? Write them down, too. (Save these notes for the exercise called “Developing Your New Tools” in chapter 7.)

Goals of the HEAL Process

We each have experiences that encourage and nurture our healing. The goal of the HEAL process is to encourage all parts of you to heal on an ongoing basis and reach a state of integration with your responsible adult self. This is a transformational, dynamic, ongoing process. You are developing new thought and feeling paradigms that will become part of you, helping you feel more complete and authentic.

Authenticity

Authenticity refers to the core of who we are. It is our true nature when we are grounded, balanced, and centered, the part that knows we are worthy of love, respect, and trust. Your authentic self has never abandoned you, but you may have buried it with illusions that you created, or ideas that were projected onto you, such as being unworthy.

We often carry illusions that were put on us by others. These illusions smother the authentic self, burying it under heavy blankets of deception and untruths. A goal of the HEAL process is to reveal the authentic self; to encourage this part to transcend those illusions; and to grow louder, stronger, and fuller. When you connect with your authentic self, life will be much easier because all you will have to do is be yourself and show up.

Resilience

Resilience is like a boat on the water that never sinks, even in rough seas. It is the part of us that resurfaces when we get turned around and over, the part that goes forward with the momentum of life. When we need to overcome or work through a difficult time, the resilient self combines with the authentic self to help us transcend overwhelming or repetitive situations. It is a source of strength and steadfastness deep within.

The resilient self, in conjunction with the authentic self, helps us to find motivation when we are in a state of despair. It keeps us strong and helps us to remember that we are lovable even when love rejects us. It is the part that keeps getting up in the morning trusting that something—anything—will be better than the day before.

Resilience is our ability to adapt, navigate, and bounce back from adverse and challenging life experiences. The resilient self holds the hope for the authentic self when we have lost perspective and think all is lost. A goal of HEAL is to reinforce and restore your resilient self to its full potential so that it is easy to draw on when you need it. Just like your authentic self, it is waiting to be encouraged and reclaimed.

Attunement

Attunement is what we use to determine our responses to specific situations. It describes how responsive we are to others and their needs and how we reflect this back to them. Self-attunement is how aligned we are with our own life and our own needs.

You are shaped by all of your childhood experiences, whether you think of them as good or bad, and these experiences become part of your narrative, your story. Throughout your life you are weaving a tapestry that is specific to you and your experiences. No one else has a tapestry like you do, and this is what makes you, and each of us, unique, important, and special. Self-attunement is woven into your tapestry. The level of self-attunement you have is connected to the degree that you have healed within. If you have a lot of unresolved issues and resentments, then it will be harder for you to be in attunement.

No one else in the world operates in the same way that you do, because the sum total of the experiences that are woven into your tapestry are unique to you. Others may have had similar life experiences, but no one has the exact same perception of the world that you have. You are tuned in, or attuned, to a specific way of seeing that embodies your unique signature. This sense of uniqueness is why we want to be heard when we tell our story to someone else. Our story is special to us, and we want to be acknowledged and recognized for our specialness.

Self-attunement is related to unique aspects of ourselves, including personality (nature), environment (nurture), and our own sense of resilience, or our ability to navigate an experience. Based on the experiences that are woven into our life story tapestry, some of us can go through dramatic and exciting experiences without a scrape, and others can go through similar experiences and feel overwhelmed or emotionally and mentally flooded, and then shut down.

Our level of attunement with others accounts for the friend who loves loud concerts, loud noises, and exciting things and the friend who treasures quiet moments, silence, and small gestures. Each one experiences life through their own lens of self-attunement. We all gravitate toward things and people that feel good to us and that match who we are, what we naturally enjoy and feel energetic about. We interpret our experiences through an attuned response lens, so something is either synergistic (joins or flows) with who we are or is in opposition (jagged and rocky) to our personal attunement.

For example, for a quiet and introspective child, speaking in front of the class in fourth grade can be overwhelming and even traumatic. It may create a core wounding moment that feels jagged and harsh. But when the class clown gets up to speak, they have a stage that suits them, so that same event may feel smooth and flowing. One has an experience that is incongruent with who they naturally are, and the other is aligned with the experience. Both children in this example are just who they are. The introvert has just as many valuable skills and talents as the extrovert; they simply experience the situation differently.

If we take this example a bit further, we see that the introvert is often encouraged to change and become more like the extrovert. But this goes against the introverted child’s natural attunement. Another example is when you are not attuned to others and they are not attuned to you. These people will often try to change you because they don’t appreciate how special and unique you are. They tell you what they are attuned to, what they resonate to, and everything they like, which, in their opinion, is better than what you like. When this happens, you are not in synergy with them, you are in opposition. This creates an opportunistic moment for confusion and emotional wounding if you don’t have strong boundaries.

Wounding moments happen when others project their own perceptions onto us and we take those projections to heart. When you were young, for example, a parent or friend might have asked, “Are you going to wear that?”, or your parents might have asked you why you wanted to play volleyball or disapprovingly questioned why you were interested in a subject like ornithology. Such scenarios sound innocent enough, but when we hear these comments over and over, the messages go in. This is where negative self-talk, such as I’m a bad person, I’m so stupid, Why can’t I do this better? Why are they mean to me? and What did I do wrong? comes from. We began to replay other people’s words in our heads and started believing them.

This can create a lifetime habit of thought and feeling, of doubting oneself, questioning things, and being fearful of what others may say. People who struggle with such self-doubt are still attuned with themselves, but they have lost the connection to their sense of who they really are, their authenticity. They close down to their authentic self because they have given so much power to other people. They have come to believe this cloudy and incorrect perception of themselves. There is dissonance between the illusion of themselves they adopted along the way and their authentic self.

Those who have a clear connection with their attunement and authentic self don’t care what others say about them. They have strong boundaries and can shrug it off and not take it in. They are clear with their attuned response—their authentic sense of self—and their resilience and synergy are strong. Because of their consistently strong internal boundaries, they are able to stay aligned to their authentic self.

In summary, cultivating and maintaining a clear self-attunement— how you experience and interpret all of the interactions in your daily life—is a goal of the HEAL process.

Discernment

When you were young, you used discernment when you clearly didn’t like something or didn’t want to do something. Your discernment, or what you thought about that thing, was clear and focused. Over time, other people and events influenced you and may have interfered with your ability to discern what you liked and what you didn’t like, and your sense of self became blurry. From a place of loving and trusting others, you began to give them power to determine your sense of self-worth and identity.

Discernment is the decision point between doing something mindfully and reacting impulsively. Learning to discern the difference between your sense of self and someone else’s idea of you is an important part of the HEAL process.

The exercises you will do throughout the chapters will help you to learn the art of personal discernment. A goal of the process is for you to know, at a deep gut level, those with whom you are synergistically aligned and those with whom you are not. Learning to have clarity in your discernment is key to keeping strongly aligned with your authentic self.

The HEAL process will also help you to discern how you truly feel about yourself. You will learn whether your idea of self came from someone else or from your interpretation of life events. The art of discernment will help you to develop the ability to stand back and see that you were not born with the idea that you are bad or less-than, and to determine where that idea came from.

Exercise: Self-Discernment

Take a few moments to determine your skill at self-discernment with the following questions. If you need more prompts, you can refer to the self-reflection questions in the introduction. In your notebook, answer the following questions that apply to you:

• What is jamming your authentic, clear perception of self?
• How do you sabotage your life?
• What negative beliefs do you have about yourself? Where did they come from?
• Why is it hard some days to know you are loved?
• What sort of situation or person feels good to you? Why?
• What sort of situation or person does not feel good to you? Why?
• Why do you let others influence your choices most of the time?
• Whose voice is inside your head?
• Why do you think you doubt a choice or decision you made and then backtrack?
• How often do you make choices without even thinking about them?
• In what situations are you mindful of your choices? Why these situations and not others?
• With whom in your life do you have a difficult time knowing where they end and you begin?
• What feeling or idea do you carry that you adopted from someone else?
• From whom, where, or how did you acquire the belief that you are less-than?

Look over your answers. What themes do you see? Are there situations or names that you listed more than twice? What is the message you are discovering about your level of discernment?

If you responded to only a few of these questions, you may have a strong connection with yourself, know yourself very well, and make good choices. If you filled a page or two with responses, and wrote down many of the same people and situations, then you need to work on gaining clarity by using your discernment. If you have a lot of drama and dysfunction in your life, you probably need to do more work in your ability to discern situations and other people.

You have the ability to be discerning; you just learned to give away your power to others so they would like or love you. You made their needs more important than your own because of poor boundary setting.

Discernment is about clarity within ourselves, not confusion. If you are confused about why, when, and how you think or feel about something, then keep reading. Each step of the HEAL process will help you to develop a clear idea and connection to who you really are.

Unfreezing the Wounding

As you have read, some of the goals of healing and embracing an authentic life are to develop and honor your authenticity, resilience, self-attunement, and discernment. While these are important goals in your healing, they serve to support a deeper goal: to heal the younger, emotionally wounded part of you that is frozen in time so that it can integrate with your responsible adult self and allow you to become emotionally free. Healing this frozen part so that it does not continue to show up and make bad decisions is vital to your overall healing.

As you learned in chapter 1, this part of you is a wounded slice of your emotional development that is stuck and frozen in time. It is the part that is always on the lookout for a situation that feels like the original wounding event. The resulting wounded response pattern keeps repeating until you recognize and then heal it. Once it is healed, the part that holds the memory no longer becomes triggered, and you will no longer repeat the same patterns over and over. In other words, you will have a clear connection with your authentic self.

Boundaries

Boundaries help us to have a sense of safety in our personal relationships. In chapter 4 you will be learning how the lack of boundaries keeps your wounding stuck, and in chapter 6, you will learn how to create functional boundaries. For now, know that boundaries are your gut reaction to a situation. Boundaries come from the part of you that knows immediately whether you like something or not.

When we have strong connections to our boundaries, we know that we can look out for ourselves. Internal boundaries are commitments and agreements with ourselves about what is acceptable or unacceptable. External boundaries are statements or actions that we make to others that establish what we want or don’t want. In the context of the wounded inner child, the younger self needs to know that the responsible adult self is going to be there for protection and to set strong functional boundaries so the inner child does not get lost and hurt again. The wounded part looks to see if the responsible adult self is going to set boundaries in dysfunctional or chaotic situations.

There are many ways that people develop a homegrown boundary system. Most people have some boundaries that they use, and if they had good boundary role models in their childhood family, they are probably doing a good job of establishing boundaries in their adult relationships. But those who did not have good boundary role models often have inconsistent, broken, or nonexistent boundaries. When good internal and external boundary systems are lacking, a feeling of safety in personal relationships is missing.

Many people did not have a strong boundary system when they were children, and didn’t know that they could even set boundaries. The wounded part was all about self-protection, using wounded tools to try to defend instead of using appropriate boundaries to protect. This wounded part will keep stepping in front of the adult self using impulsive reactions until the responsible adult self sets clear boundaries.

Boundaries are a way for us to create a sense of personal, physical, intimate, emotional, and mental safety with someone else. Being able to set good boundaries allows us to maintain our sense of self when we are in a challenging or threatening situation. Having boundaries means saying no when we mean no. It means having a clear connection to our authentic self so we know how we feel about something.

Children who grow up in dysfunctional environments do not learn how to set good boundaries, and the boundaries that are in the household are typically not enforced. I learned to always put others first and to make others’ needs more important than my own. I kept shoving my emotions down, and the intensity I felt inside had to get really bad for me to finally say my big no. Even when I did say no or yell or become angry, I did not know how to maintain good boundaries. My boundaries were not clearly defined in my family, and I never really knew what situations I was responsible for and what my mom and dad should own. Because of this ambiguity, or enmeshment, I ended up with the idea that I should be the one to carry the blame when things were chaotic in the household.

Functional boundary systems are the glue that makes the HEAL process work together. You will learn the steps to take to establish good boundaries so your wounded parts know that they don’t have to be on the lookout all the time. You will learn that you don’t have to carry someone else’s wounding, and you will learn where you end and they begin. Once you learn to set boundaries, you can not only survive negative encounters but thrive in your life.

Integration

The final and most crucial goal of healing and embracing an authentic life is to create a foundation of support and encouragement for all of the wounded parts to integrate with your responsible adult self. Through your introspective work, this integration will bring together those parts of you that are stranded, frozen in time, and stuck.

Through your work to encourage your responsible adult self to step forward and set strong internal and external boundaries, your wounding will feel much less raw and unhealed. Your expanded awareness will allow you to see the impulsive and destructive patterns, giving you the power to change your responses to situations. As you heal, this wounded part of you will no longer be triggered, and it will have softer edges. You will still have your memories of what happened, but they won’t have as much charged emotional energy around them.

As the wounded part heals, it will no longer be isolated, dormant, and waiting for the next trigger. It will mature emotionally to integrate with the responsible adult self.

Story: Anya, a Brave Little Girl

Anya is an accomplished, professional thirty-two-year-old woman. Her parents are first-generation Americans. As teenagers, her parents emigrated separately to the United States, where they met, fell in love, went to work, and had two girls, Anya and her sister, Kiara. From the outside the family looked like it was living the American dream, but there was no happiness inside the house. Anya’s mom and dad worked opposite shifts, so the two children were shuttled between older relatives in their building and neighbors whom they didn’t know well.

At nine years old, Anya’s mother told her that she was to be the adult in the house until their dad got home. She was now responsible for six-year-old Kiara, so Anya became “little Mommy.” Her mother also told her that she had to make sure her father didn’t drink when he came home, as her mother worked second shift and their dad worked first. Anya had to get dinner on the table, make sure Kiara got her homework done, and hide the liquor bottles or distract her father long enough to keep him from drinking too much so that when her mom came home, she wouldn’t be mad at Anya for how drunk their father was. Whew! That is a lot for a little kid.

It was clear from her story that Anya suffered many core woundings. The more we talked, and the more she worked on her childhood timeline, the more she remembered. The therapy process gave her nine-year-old self a safe place to vent her feelings about all of the situations and feelings that no one in her family could hear. She began to connect with the feelings of her younger wounded self, and saw how those same feelings were still coming out in her adult life. She said it was like she was pulling back a big curtain and clearly seeing for the first time the emotional struggle she had suffered in her early life.

Anya began to see how much pressure her mother had put on her at such a young age. At the time, she was made to feel that this level of responsibility wasn’t strange or unusual, and her parents didn’t let her complain or have any feelings about it because they needed her to “pull her weight” to make the family work. Anya’s parents were relying on a child to do an adult’s job, so Anya’s childlike ways of playing, dreaming, and having a sense of freedom had to be put aside for survival. She could no longer be just a kid; she had a schedule and duties beyond her capabilities, and she had to manage and be responsible for her father’s alcoholism. She was becoming, in codependent terms, the caretaker, fixer, and controller, and becoming needless, wantless, and highly focused on other people. Unfortunately, no matter how hard she worked, it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t able to make anything better, and she was swimming upstream all the time.

Her parents did not acknowledge any of Anya’s struggle, which created anger and resentment in her that built up over the years. Now, as an adult and married with children, Anya didn’t know what to do with these feelings of frustration from a situation that she couldn’t go back in time and fix. Even in adulthood, Anya saw her mother continuing to put her in the role of taking care of everyone else. Her mother projected onto her that she should feel guilty if she did anything for herself. Anya loved her parents and was still trying to help them, but she felt overwhelmed and hopeless, and thought that the cycle would never end.

She eventually realized that a key emotional standout from her childhood was feeling unappreciated. Her little-girl feelings could have been validated if her parents had recognized and appreciated the weight of the responsibility she took on as a young child, but they were caught up in their own lives and were unaware of how impossible it was for a little girl to take on adult responsibilities.

As part of her HEAL process, Anya wrote healing letters back and forth to her younger self. She said this exercise gave her a great a sense of relief, as she was finally acknowledging and validating all of her hard work. She cried a lot for her little girl, as she was at last giving herself permission to look at the absurdity and enormity of what she had been asked to do as a child and the emotional burden that she carried. She had to grow up really fast, develop her cognitive skills to be strategic in planning and execution, and had no time or place for her feelings.

In cases like Anya’s, feelings are often pushed deep down inside. Children in such environments learn that their feelings aren’t going to help them, that they will only make things worse. These children grow up to be highly analytical and logical, almost unfeeling, because they had to use all of their brain power to literally think their way through complicated situations in order to survive emotionally.

Today Anya works at an extremely analytical job. She can read people well and knows whether someone is having a good day or a bad day. She also knows how to adapt herself to accommodate someone else’s mood. These are all wounded emotional response tools from her childhood that she carried with her into adulthood. These skills do help her in some ways, but her willingness to be a caretaker can be distracting, as she often attends to others instead of taking care of her own needs.

Anya finds it important that things be in order and under control, with absolutely no surprises. After all, she learned at a young age that she had to have control in the house or her mother would be mad at her. As she got older, she developed animosity toward her mother because of the unrealistic expectations that were placed on her. She often took out this anger on her husband.

Through her work to understand herself, Anya’s responsible adult self began to recognize when her younger wounded and hurt parts became triggered and impulsively tried to control and “survive” everything. Her responsible adult self was sad that these impulsive reactions were a result of all the pain and emotional struggle she went through as a child. As a result, much of her healing was centered around kindness and compassion for all the hard work her wounded little girl self had to do to make her complicated household as functional as it could be.

As Anya worked on her timeline, her letters to herself, and her self-awareness, her relationships with her husband and mother softened. She was able to get out of the survival/control mode she had been using for decades, and was able to relax and enjoy her life more. She also learned to set boundaries with herself and with those around her.

She is recognizing that she is expanding and transforming but that her mom still behaves the same. The difference is that Anya no longer does whatever her mother asks of her. She now verbalizes how she feels when her mother talks down to her or ignores her struggles. Her little girl has found a voice, and her adult self is finding the words to use to set boundaries with her mother.

Anya’s responsible adult self now reminds her wounded little girl self that the events from childhood are no longer happening. She reminds her younger self that she is safe, that she can set boundaries with those around her, that she is emotionally safer today than she has ever been before, and that she has a loving husband who helps with their children.

As you work through the HEAL process and heal your emotionally wounded inner child, you will find that those around you are not changing as you are; we can’t change and control others. However, you will be transforming and expanding yourself and your relationships from the inside out.