After walking through the first three steps of the healing process…
- Awareness of your core wound
- Releasing stored negative emotions attached to it, and
- Forgiving the caretaker(s) who wounded you…
Comes the final task: The long, rewarding path of reparenting yourself, and choosing to live as a healed, functional adult…
Which is perhaps never a one-and-done job, but likely a tool you’ll practice consistently for years to come…
Because, though the sensitivity diminishes, and scar tissue may have formed… Your wound is still there. Healing, but not completely gone.
A functional adult begins living with awareness and ownership of their wound, and manages the emotional reactivity that wound often causes. They are in charge of the wound, instead of letting the wound run them.
In essence, they strive to master the following graph…
When a triggering event happens… (X)
It sets off a wounded emotional reaction… (the red line)
And left unmanaged, that reaction can take us on a roller coaster ride…
If we lose control, the reaction hits a tipping point and we get locked into an unhealthy pattern, taking the long tail back down to a regulated baseline…
But if we’re able to recognize the swell of that reaction soon enough, and intervene (Y), we can get off the ride, reset, and return to being the clear-headed, functional adult much sooner…
Which minimizes the time spent in reactivity, or regressed emotional states, thereby minimizing the costly damage those states often cause…
In the form of resentment, angry arguments, disconnection, self-loathing, and various other forms of acting out and acting in.
By learning to return to a healthy emotional baseline more quickly, this red arc gets lower and lower over time as your reactivity lessens and you’re able to make new choices in the moment…
And new choices create new futures—ones with unprecedented levels of harmony and connection to all of your relationships, as well as greater success in any creative or business endeavor.
Until one day, a triggering event occurs and you are amazed afterward that you barely reacted. Practice makes almost perfect.
To help with this practice, next time I’ll be sharing the script for learning to reparent yourself that I taught at our recent intensive…
It’s a set of tools you can use on the fly to intervene and return to regulation, when your core wound is activated.
This has been the single most valuable and frequently used item in my toolkit… And I’m sure it will be for many of you as well.
For Neil’s latest article: