In doing deep one-on-one session work in the past, as well as doing Breakthrough calls for my 8-Week Transformation Program, one thing that I see in a lot of people is an attachment to the idea that the issues keeping someone stuck are mainly rooted in past lives, when in reality the issues can (nearly) all be traced back to wounds from childhood in this lifetime, which I call Invisible Traumas.
What makes a person prefer to look for causes in another life instead of this one?
The most obvious answer is that the New (c)Age is teeming with past life readers who advocate the narrative that a person’s deepest work lies in resolving issues formed in past lives. However, I feel that the deeper psychological roots of this idea comes from parents propagandizing their children to believe that they were better parents than they really were.
Parents who are living in denial and dysfunction will repeatedly tell their children that “things are fine” and that something is wrong with them (the child) if they’re upset or hurt about abusive or neglectful behaviors from the adults in their lives. These children grow into adults who truly believe that their childhood problems were their own fault, that they didn’t experience anything traumatic, or maybe one traumatic event happened which they feel they have to “put behind them” and not speak about in order to stay in good standing with their parents.
With a belief that their upbringing in this life was “fine” or “not so bad,” even when that’s not actually true, a person lacks the ability to delve into the childhood roots of their life challenges. As they look for answers to their seemingly inexplicable problems, past lives can often seem like the answer.
However, I have observed that 80-90% of people who feel anxiety, worry, depression or low self-esteem have experienced invalidation, neglect, and other forms of emotional abuse from one or both parents in their childhood. This emotional abuse can range from subtle to severe and still seem like a person had a “normal childhood.”
Due to the nature of psychological projection, it is unfortunately quite normal for children to experience subtle (or severe) emotional abuse from their parents, but as an adult, it can often be very difficult, even painful for a person to admit to themselves that their own mother or father unconsciously (or consciously) undermined them when they were children.
It takes deep levels of examination and questioning, which I do during breakthrough calls, in order for a person to connect the dots on how their current situation in life was imprinted and patterned in their formative childhood years, before they were old enough to question their parent’s motivations, before they could see that their parents behaviors were driven by their own unhealed traumas and unconscious behavior patterns.
Very often, the reality of how a child’s invalidating parents have undermined their sense of self-worth is buried underneath a pile of delusional lies told by parents that I call “The Family Story,” although I feel a more accurate title is “The Family Lie.” This Family Story is repeated often, almost like a mantra, and it can include phrases like, “You were such a difficult child” or “We tried our best, but we just didn’t know what to do with you.”
The Family Story could even include statements like, “You were such a quiet child, you could play by yourself for hours,” which is usually a sign that a child has become accustomed to parental neglect.
The reality underneath these responsibility-avoiding delusions is that the parents were deeply wounded and traumatized by their own parents, and they never had the awareness or tools to heal, so they continued the same (or similar) unconscious patterns of invalidating their children instead of being supportive, nurturing, affirming care-givers.
The Family Story/Lie becomes so deeply ingrained into the child’s subconscious, that they form blockages against unpacking the web of projection, invalidation, justification, emotional abuse and blame-shifting that they received from their parents, blockages that persist into adulthood. These blocks divert attention and awareness away from the Invisible Traumas from childhood, making them very difficult to identify and heal. This can lead a person back around to the idea that the problem might reside in a past life, because their childhood “really wasn’t so bad.”
This is a problem because the person is looking in the wrong place, as well as feeling like they have to go to someone else to tell them what their past life traumas are, and how to heal them.
My perspective formed through years of counseling, energy clearing and deep inner work is that 90% of what keeps us feeling stuck and unable to heal deeply is rooted in this life, in our childhood, in long-forgotten “Invisible Traumas” that we learned to “put behind us and move on,” but in reality are not behind us at all. They are simply buried in the subconscious mind, where they exert tremendous influence on our conscious self-expression in life.
These Invisible Traumas are very real wounds in our psyches that do not heal on their own over time. No, time does NOT heal all wounds. If that were true, everyone over 50 would be emotionally healthy, and that is obviously not the case. The truth is that it takes time to heal ourselves once we have the knowledge of how to do so.
What do Invisible Traumas look like? They are the minor traumas that are inflicted by and often unnoticed by parents, usually because they don’t realize how their unconscious behavior is impacting their children.
An Invisible Trauma occurred every time your parents denied that what you were feeling or seeing was true. Every time you felt unseen, unheard, unimportant, neglected or unloved. Every time you were punished for having emotions that they didn’t like. Every time they yelled at you, or yelled at each other when you could hear. Any time they pressured you to be something that they wanted you to be instead of encouraging you to explore what you desired to be. Any time they placed unrealistic expectations on you, tried to live through you, or pressured you to fulfill the dreams they didn’t achieve for themselves.
That’s just a small sample of Invisible Traumas that happen in “good, normal families” and it is much more severe and dissociation causing for people who had parents with serious mental-emotional issues due to their own unhealed traumas. Parents with alcoholism or other addictions, PTSD, borderline or narcissistic personality traits, workaholism, disinterest in their children, etc. will give their children many, many Invisible Traumas over the course of their childhood.
Unhealed wounding from Invisible Traumas affects every area of a person’s life, especially our closest relationships, because we tend to be drawn to people who subconsciously remind us of one of our parents, since that is what we knew as “home” while growing up, even if that parent wounded us deeply.
More generally, the results of unhealed Invisible Traumas play out in adulthood as feeling unworthy of love or success, with that unworthiness driving people-pleasing behaviors, being a “rescuer” for people in need and neglecting one’s own needs. Invisible Traumas can generate feelings of depression, anxiety, and worthlessness. They can lead to suppression of anger, resistance to “bad” emotions (no such thing in reality), attracting unhealthy relationships, feeling like a failure, not feeling “good enough,” and a feeling of fear that “something is wrong, and it’s probably ME.”
If any of this sounds familiar to you, I want to tell you something very important: Something WAS wrong in your childhood, and it WAS NOT YOU! It was actually your parents. They simply shifted the blame onto you.
Just sit with that for a moment, as hard as that might be for your conscious mind to accept.
This is not about avoiding the self-responsibility for doing one’s own healing work by just blaming your parents. It is about acknowledging the reality of buried traumas, deep in the subconscious, which are hidden from most people’s awareness because they don’t feel like they are allowed to see their past for what it is.
Seeing and acknowledging those hidden, Invisible Traumas can feel scary and even life-threatening because as children we instinctively know our survival depends on our parents, which impels a child to submit to their parent’s authority, even if that authority is being wielded in abusive, neglectful or reality-denying ways.
In the 8-Week Transformation Program, I teach you how to unpack the reality of the Invisible Traumas in your subconscious, and how to heal those wounds at their deepest levels, which is something that I haven’t seen in any other modality. Those deep areas of the subconscious can be difficult to work with, so I teach a holistic framework of self-healing based in self-awareness and self-acceptance that makes the process as smooth as possible.
One student described it as “True magic that heals the psyche” which is a description that I really like. This program is indeed magical, very powerful and deeply transformative.
In order to give everyone in the 8-Week Transformation Program the individual attention that they need, I limit each 8 Week Program to a small handful of participants.
If you would like to find out of the 8-Week Transformation Program is right for you, email me and I will send you more information about the program as well as a link to book your breakthrough call. On the call I will help you gain more clarity into the deeper layers underneath your current life challenges, and it will very likely be the best 45 minutes you’ve ever spent on your healing journey.
Much Love,
Cameron Day
