What have been your obstacles?

I mean like, here, right now, this week?

Part of why I have creates so much content on Instagram is because there are real obstacles that get in the way of your healing, every single day. Some of them we notice & others we've been taught to overlook or ignore.

Here are 10 things that I see (and some I've been through!) that can get in the way of your own healing...

1. YOU DON'T HAVE A COMMUNITY

Healing doesn't happen in a vacuum & when you have trauma that stems from the relationships in your life (family or otherwise) you have to heal through new, safe & loving relationships.

This means finding the "places of belonging" that help you feel supported & seen. This helps you rebuild trust.

2. YOU EXPECT PERFECTION FROM YOURSELF

If your healing looks like a massive to-do list that is way too time consuming & triggers guilt when you don't do it all... it's not helping you heal. It's an old pattern of...

Sometimes it's really clear that you have childhood trauma. You might have lived through tragedy, abuse or traumas that are undeniable but not all childhood trauma is obvious. In fact, childhood trauma includes a whole array of things you might have lived through and deemed "normal" because of the home you grew up in or the coping skills you developed. It also doesn't mean you had "bad" parents, sometimes life happens and families go through difficult things that leave us with trauma, even when our parents did their absolute best.

Trauma is not just physical pain. It can also be emotional and mental pain.

As Gabor Mate says "it is not what happens to you; it is what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you." If you had support, safety & access to other resources to help you make sense of what you went through, chances are you had a higher likelihood of moving through traumatic situations without them become trauma that is trapped in your body. 

But,...

Anytime we feel like our heart will break or that we can't get through something... we have the potential to build a Heartwall.

Essentially, the Heartwall is a layer of protection that we build up around our hearts to keep ourselves safe. In those moments where we feel unsafe, unloved or heartbroken, we pull in our unhealed emotions and begin to build this layer of protection around our hearts to keep us from feeling the pain. 

A lot of us (especially empaths) build them as children to protect ourselves from our emotions and the overwhelming feelings that come from not knowing how to deal with them. 

And then year by year, experience by experience we build this layer of protection thicker and thicker around our hearts, numbing us out to our feelings (along with the good emotions) and putting a barrier up in our relationships making it hard to find authentic connection and feel loved. 

There are 5 Major Childhood Experiences that set us up to build a Heartwall.

As an empath, we are naturally more sensitive to our own feelings & what's happening around us. It doesn't mean we are weak or overly sensitive but as kids, we naturally just feel things more deeply and read into the experiences we have & what other people are doing, more intensely.

Sometimes we get it right and we sense the things not spoken. 

And sometimes we get it wrong because after all, we were kids. 

But nonetheless, when we as empaths go through traumatic, stressful or painful experiences, the impact can weigh differently on us because we are so emotionally tuned into our experiences. Because we are so tuned in, we can also carry the weight of our Childhood Wounds in different ways, creating coping mechanisms, beliefs about the world & holding onto the emotional pain because we can't seem to understand WHY they happened. 

So, I want to share with you the 4 major Childhood Wounds and how they specifically can impact you as an empath and what you...

Childhood wounds can come from many places.

Sometimes they are from the places we usually think of like trauma or abuse but they just as often can come from things like stress in the family as a child, divorce, loss, parents who weren't emotionally mature & even from loving parents who just didn't know how to meet all of our needs. 

What's so important about them is that they impact YOU and the way you feel about yourself and your life. They become the thoughts and the feelings that are always rolling around telling us that we aren't enough or no one will love us if we show up as ourselves.

Some of the most common ways they can manifest is...

So if you are working on healing your childhood wounds, let me share a few things I've found to be so helpful in my own healing & also with my clients.

#1 PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR FEELINGS

How you feel when you're triggered is usually a re-enactment of the past. It's your emotions from that original...