All our beliefs come from the past, some of which we inherited from our parents and the people around us.
In the context of the colossal changes happening with the world, with us, and where we are all heading, it’s worth paying attention to default, destructive programs. After all, they have a negative impact on our lives as a whole, as well as on the decisions we make.
Let’s talk about this in the article.
Returning to your wholeness, realizing your own worth — this is perhaps one of the main themes for those people who embark on the path of spiritual and personal development.
Here are some programs whose influence and consequences many of you encounter in life. By unraveling this tangle, you get closer and closer to your true self.
The Roots of Problems Come from the Past
We all come from the Soviet Union, if not you, then your parents. To a greater or lesser extent, we are dealing with all the complexes characteristic of the Soviet era. Despite the fact that very few of us actually remember what it was like.
I’m not criticizing Soviet times, but there was a certain mindset, certain reactions, and norms of interaction in society that left their mark.
Throughout the Russian-speaking space, devaluation is rampant, and it originates from there. More than one generation will have to pass for devaluation as a given to disappear, or for this fear of standing up for yourself, of saying something, because it’s not nice, not accepted, “what will people think.”
This is clearly seen in contrast when you talk to the same Russian-speaking people, say, from Germany. They grew up there but didn’t absorb this experience. They are fine with personal boundaries and awareness of their own worth.
It’s a different mentality, without that all-pervasive feeling of shame for doing something wrong. Or that feeling of guilt when I feel something I’m not supposed to.
Someday we will eradicate this in ourselves too.
See also: Why it’s so hard to learn to value yourself
Devaluation Instead of Support
The concept of support is perceived differently by different people, depending on the worldview you live in and the specific situation.
To support does not mean to rescue. You can support a person only by understanding what they need.
You’ve probably encountered situations where you feel bad, you decided to share with your family, and your feelings are devalued: “come on, everyone lives like that, it’s normal.” Or they start teaching you about life, telling you how you should act.
You are grieving, you want support, what happened is serious for you, but in response, you are devalued. After one, two such situations, will you want to talk about your feelings later?
Your relatives, especially parents, simply don’t know any other way, they don’t know how to support. For them, support and help equal lecturing and giving advice. This also comes from the Soviet past.
But you don’t need to be taught about life, and you certainly don’t need to be devalued. You have a different need at that moment, which you put into the word “support.”
Let’s say you’re exhausted, dead on your feet. Maybe you don’t even need someone to take care of you in that moment; you just want everyone to leave, close the doors, take the kids for half an hour so you can simply lie down and not move, to be in a state of stillness for a while.
Or when you come home after a long absence, and everyone is talking, but you need to be in silence, to be given the chance to just breathe out.
We constantly face the problem of devaluation and violation of personal boundaries, especially when it comes to the older generation. The older we get, the harder it is to change, because we were taught differently; life was in a different mode.
See also: Four Psychological Needs. Who Should Fulfill Them
Acquired Sense of Shame
When I was a child in the first grade, I was forced to nap after school. My father traveled for work, my mother was a notary, and I was home alone.
After school, I was supposed to come home, eat lunch (they taught me how to reheat food), and then go to sleep. I honestly said I had eaten and slept, but in reality, I poured out the soup, didn’t sleep, and went out to play in the yard.
Several times my mother caught me, coming home early from work, out on the street. She punished me for not being the way I was supposed to be: “All children are like children — they sleep, but Alena is playing in the yard.”
Because of this, a sense of being shamed appeared, a feeling of shame associated with napping, which I worked through for many years afterwards.
At the same time, I had a normal childhood; I was truly loved and cared for. But I had a huge number of those traumatic stories that I had to untangle for a very, very long time afterwards.
And not because my parents were some kind of monsters; back then, it was normal upbringing.
Take the meditation See, Love and Value Yourself to help you see your true self, to show yourself and everyone around you who you are without fear and without regard for others’ opinions.
Acquired Sense of Guilt
The feeling of guilt and the victim mentality go hand in hand. Guilt is a prohibition against feeling everything you feel. Initially, it comes from the same place, from the past.
One way out of this situation is to allow yourself to accept by default that whatever you feel, you have the right to feel it.
We are not saints; there are no saints on this planet; there is no point for them to incarnate here. Even ascended masters come into bodies as ordinary people.
We are different, we experience different experiences, we are in different states. But we are so used to violating ourselves in so many ways. I had a thought — I scold myself for it. Here I feel shame, there I feel guilt. I am not doing things the way I should.
In the end, you start to doubt your very right to be here. And then you spend your whole life dealing with the feeling of having no self-worth.
I don’t have the right to be here. And I certainly don’t have the right to have any kind of blessings. After all, I was never the way I was supposed to be all those years.
This is an old story for many of us, and we pull it out of ourselves time and time again.
But over the past few years, we have traveled such a colossal path of returning to ourselves, to our normal selves, from that flawed, distorted version that ultimately resulted, in part, with the help of parents, friends, caregivers, and teachers.
But this isn’t because they are such jerks, such bad people, who did this to us on purpose. It was all done with the best of intentions.
See also Guilt, grievances against a person, explanations. What unites them
Your task right now is not to cling to that past, to the pain you experienced, not to cherish your traumas and wounds.
Track these destructive programs and thoughts, let them go with the awareness that you have done an enormous amount of work to piece yourself back together.
Praise yourself for the journey you’ve taken, recognize yourself as a whole being with gratitude for that past which you survived and not just survived, but took all the valuable experience that was there.
What destructive programs have you had to face?
The article is based on the broadcast #9 Ask KM
P.S. We invite you to the new course “Acceptance Workshop”, to free yourself from self-flagellation, negativity, and start accepting yourself.
See the detailed description here >>