Learning How to Receive: Transforming Past Pain Into Present Empowerment

Do you find it difficult to let people who care about you do things for you without feeling indebted or obligated to reciprocate?

This could be because you learned at a young age that having desires was unsafe or unacceptable, maybe even shameful.

You might still hear or sense echoes of your caregivers making you feel bad for needing something from them when they were busy, tired, or caught up in their own problems. It could be that your needs and desires clashed with the religious beliefs you were raised with. Perhaps you were naturally expressive, but your parents wanted a quiet, obedient child.

Over time, you learned to ask for very little, if anything at all, and to suppress your discontent when your needs went unmet. You became an easy child who didn't make demands.

There's probably an inner voice now, a younger part of you, that shuts you down before you even figure out what you want. It's a critical voice that scolds you for having needs and tells you not to burden others with them.

You might also hear the voice of your parents or caregivers telling you not to cry or signaling that you shouldn't want anything from them. These experiences can carry over into your relationships and make it difficult for you to receive care, even though deep down, you crave the quality attention.

Understanding these dynamics and how your past influences your present is important. However, simply talking about these deep-seated issues is often not enough to resolve the pain and calm the critical voice inside you that berates you for having needs and desires.

Instead of intellectualizing your past pain, a more effective approach to moving on from these painful events is to pay attention to your body's response when you notice the inner dialogue being critical.

Your body constantly provides information that can help you unravel unpleasant past pain that keeps you stuck. We all have unresolved painful experiences that can be resolved through the felt experience.

For example, when your partner offers to massage your feet in the evening because they know you're really tired - and instead of receiving it and enjoying it, you react by saying no and immediately feel tightness in your body. If you were to allow yourself to explore what that tightness was telling you, you might find it telling you that you're afraid you would have to reciprocate when you have nothing to give.

And if you don't allow yourself to experience that tightness (or whatever sensation arises in you), and explore what's underneath it, you might just react by saying "no, I don't want a foot massage."

But the deeper truth is likely that you DO want the foot massage and you don't want to HAVE to give anything in return - and you judge that as wrong.

By also exploring where that judgment comes from, and where you learned that your natural desire to let go and simply receive care is unacceptable, what you will discover is a past part of yourself that needs focused, loving attention. And you can give that part the validation that it never received, that it’s needs and desires are not only acceptable, but they are approved of as is and worthy of love.

And your current self can go back to that past part and provide all of that.

By reparenting yourself in this way, you heal some of the pain that is currently expressing as the voice of the inner critic. This removes a key obstacle in your capacity to be able to say, "Hey honey, I would love a foot massage."

By exploring these seemingly subtle or insignificant little moments in your relational life, over time they add up to create big pattern shifts that can help you become a person who is met and fulfilled in relationship - rather than chronically experiencing maligned moments where what you want and need and what's actually happening don't match.

And this means being empowered to receive from your partner in your current relationship or, if you're currently single, being able to attract that kind of relationship.

Helping you to make these big shifts over time is what my 3-month 1-on-1 program is all about.

I'm with you through all of those little moments and supporting you through the process of identifying and processing your feelings, and healing any unresolved past pain that is still influencing you.

Having a guide who can support you in this process, ensuring you take it slowly and helping you feel centered, calm, and curious, is crucial. Diving in too quickly can retraumatize you because you may not have the capacity to process all the activated emotions that arise all at once.

There's a gentle and gradual way to move through these activated feelings from the past when you felt scared, hurt, helpless, or alone. Instead of accelerating full speed ahead, we take small steps forward and then pause, going back and forth until the pain from the past releases.

You'll know when it releases because you'll feel a pleasant wave of sensation moving through your body, as if that thing you've been trying to let go of has finally let go of you.

In addition to helping you with the healing processes described in this post, I also coach you on how to develop the language you need to express yourself based on what you discover that you're actually feeling and wanting.

All of this work over the 3 months is aimed at helping caring and attentive individuals like you who struggle to receive from the people they care about - without feeling guilty or pressured to give back.

If you're interested in this program and want to see if you're a good fit, feel free to send me a private message. If we determine it's a good match, we can get you started right away.