"Still Peeling The Onion" - JR Everhart

I recently discovered the following trauma concept - when a parent is overly critical of their children, those children don’t necessarily grow towards hating them (& their critiques), instead, they tend to grow towards hating themselves.  To take that a step further - when a parent doesn’t create a safe environment, instead promoting their own personal failures as some sort of positive learning experience, children become super confused. 

Here's how this applies to me:  I can remember countless times where I was made to feel unintelligent as a child by both my peers and my hyper-critical father.  It seemed like no matter what I did, I was a screw up who was absolutely unable to get it together.  Over time, this "negativity in its purest form" concretized into a foundation of shame.  A foundation that all my compulsive behaviors would springboard off of for decades to come.  Even today at 50-years-old, I struggle to not blame myself for everything that’s wrong within my life.  It’s part of the tapestry of who I am and something I readily must recognize in order to live a well-adjusted life. 

Nevertheless, that internalized, very frightened 12-year-old boy - inside of me - glaringly stares back each time I fail or screw something up.  

Describing this feels silly to me, yet this is my experience.  

The underdeveloped child's mind can give birth to toxic self-talk.  

It's a fact that every child needs room to fail, giving themselves the opportunity to learn from such experiences.  This, in lieu of beating ourselves to death over life’s inevitable stumbling blocks. 

The only way out of this is by finding safe healthy connection(s) with others that understand our pain.  From there, we must allow ourselves to feel and process those painful feelings of rejection in a healthy way (clinical mind approach versus an emotional one).  How to do that?  By absolutely knowing that I’m worthy to be known and loved, and that I need to protect myself from toxic self-talk.  

Emotionally, this unhelpful self-talk is a rollercoaster that will bring one tremendous highs prior to devastating lows before leaving behind a migraine headache, if you choose to stay strapped into that seat for too long.  And that ride too may very well distort your recollection of past arguments, potentially turning you into an eternal victim who blames the world for all their problems.  In the end, you're going through the motions of life but not actually living life by "maturing" into a reactor to this world who's hyper-sensitive to everything around him versus a mature actor.  

Know this:  Residing (long-term) inside that emotional state of mind is a very dangerous place to be.  To God by the glory!  Rational (clinical) thinking will almost always reel us back into a healthy place of good decision making and harmony with our social environment.