Inner Child Healing
Getting to the Root-Cause of your negative thoughts, limiting beliefs & behaviours
Around most of who we are today is being influenced by our experiences from ages 0-7, crucially the first 2 years of life, often when our limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world around us are formed, then it makes sense that we are concerned with the 'inner child' in therapeutic settings.
When we have unmet needs, emotional pain, or trauma in early childhood, growing up, or later in life, we may get the message that “I am not worthy enough”, “I am not good enough”, “I fear being alone”, “I fear failure”, “I fear conflict”, sticking with us throughout our life unless fully processed and healed. Causing us to feel “stuck” and preventing us from achieving our goals, because we are making decisions from a limited view of ourselves and avoidance of pain.
These built-up layers that have caused us to forget that we are already worthy, we are already good enough, we are already valuable, and we are already lovable, can stop us from moving forward.
So in order to help you get closer to achieving your goals, and have peace-of-mind while you do, we have to first go back and heal the past. To let go of the parts that don’t believe you are already good enough, you are already worthy, you are already valuable, and you are already loveable, just as you are.
Otherwise we are going to come up against resistance - negative self talk & limiting beliefs coming up time and time again, telling you it’s not safe to do that, or you’re not good enough, or what if it doesn’t workout, what if I fail?
The Importance of the mind body connection to support your fertility
So often when trying to get pregnant the focus is on what we put into our body.
And yet the role the mind body connection plays, specifically our neuroendocrine system (nervous & endocrine [hormones]), in supporting the healing process, and in-turn optimising fertility success, is so critical it shouldn’t be ignored.
When we are living in a state of fear, we are in a state of protection, which is wired into the nervous system in the form of how we respond and react to our environment and the people around us.
We can’t be in a state of protection and connection at the same time, and this can cause us to feel discounted from ourselves, and the people around us. Which can impact our emotional health in the following ways:
🤍 We stop trusting our gut intuition, our innate ability to know what feels right for us, and instead allow the people around us to make decisions for you.
🤍 We feel isolated and alone, even when we’re not alone
🤍 We feel like we’ve lost our passion for the things we once loved
We feel like we have no purpose, and are just going through the motions
🤍 We feel disempowered and helpless
🤍 We feel triggered emotionally, such as when a friend announces she’s pregnant (especially if they didn’t have any difficulty getting pregnant), or seeing a pregnant woman in the street.
The disruption and overwhelm to our mind-body’s capacity to feel safe and secure, means the more we live impacted by stress hormones.
Disrupting homeostasis, placing huge pressure on the body, resulting in physiological and metabolic changes, required to cope with the demands of a homeostatic challenge. Inadvertently impacting fertility success.
Read the science👇
“Stressor-induced activation of the HPA axis and the SNS results in a series of neural and endocrine adaptations known as the "stress response" or "stress cascade."
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12040534/
YOU DESERVE TO take your life back whilst you wait.
Here are three things you can do daily to reduce the emotional impact of your fertility journey:
1. Let go of the things you can’t control
When you try to control an outcome that is out of your control, it prevents you from living in the here and Now, being present, and having peace of mind whilst you are waiting.
Keeping you stuck in the past, and spiraling into negative thinking about the worst case scenario, wearing you down over time, preventing you from growing and moving forward with your life.
By letting go of the things you can’t control, and instead learning from your experiences, so you no-longer keep repeating the same unhelpful behaviours, and experience the same unwanted thoughts, will help you to increase your self confidence, leading to improvements in your emotional and physical health.
2. Focus on the things that you can control.
When you feel like you’re losing control of your life, there are always things that you can do to regain a sense of control, and grow stronger.
Listen to your inner voice, think about the situation you are facing and notice the feelings that are coming up for you.
Accept your feelings and label them, and then analyse them to decide if this is something you have control over, and if so decide what small step(s) you can take to make a change to your current situation.
Tuning in to how you will feel once you have achieved that, will help you to feel empowered to want to make a change to your life.
Making sure you give yourself credit for each small step forward you take, by acknowledging your achievements, will help you to move beyond existing in a place of fear and hopelessness, to living a more fulfilling life.
3. Make taking care of yourself and your needs a priority.
When you’re feeling stressed, and being pulled in a million directions, trying to please and take care of everyone else, your body is crying out for you to stop, and listen to the wisdom your feelings and emotions are trying to send you. To help you decide on the next best step to take, to start taking care of yourself.
Such as how you can free up time to do the things that you want to do.
Ensuring you are always taking care of your emotional needs, and know how to take the appropriate action to ensure you are always moving forward in all the key areas of your life - your relationship with your partner, family, friends, colleagues, your work, finances, physical health, leisure, and mental health.
When you support your emotional health, by acknowledging and processing your difficult emotions in the right way, to decide on the next best action to take, it helps you to feel calmer, less anxious and more in control.
Sending the Brain a signal of safety, activating the parasympathetic nervous system, helping your body to return to calm, to a more neutral state.
Restoring energy to healing the body, and in-turn optimising fertility success.
Limiting beliefs begone!
Even though you may consciously want something, if you have a belief system that conflicts with having what you want, and your body/nervous system perceives that it may cause more stress…
Doesn’t feel it’s safe to have…
Then you may subconsciously sabotage.
To allow the reality you desire, it takes doing the inner healing work…
To be in a space of safety and confidence within yourself.
A space where you are reminded that you are already worthy of your desires, you are already good enough, and you are already loveable just as you are.
And that by shifting your beliefs your reality will shift as well.
To create a life with higher & higher levels of freedom, peace and fulfilment .
Are you on your self-healing journey and feel like you need some guidance?
Learn more about how Root-Cause Therapy can help you with your healing goals.
How beliefs are formed
Old patterns and beliefs are set in the blueprint of our Subconscious mind.
Planted messages created through imagery and emotion, that our Subconscious deemed to be important at the time, about our safety.
From as early on as being in our mothers womb, in particular the vibrational emotional energy to her ability to regulate stressors in her life.
During the crucial stages of our early years, up to age of seven, observing the behaviour and habits of people around us. Such as how they handled conflict - confrontational, walk away, or appease. To the kinds of messages they told themselves about their body image.
Through repetition, developing an emotional habit such as unconsciously training yourself to respond to a variety of triggers with a default emotional reaction. Such as feeling angry or anxious seeing a pregnant woman, or on hearing a pregnancy announcement.
From how we coped with a significant traumatic event, such as the loss of a loved one. Whether or not we got the emotional support we needed at the time to help us process our emotions.
And this continues for the rest of our life.
Thoughts that the subconscious mind believes to be reality about our safety, placing us in the appropriate state, causing us to take actions in alignment with these ingrained beliefs.
Replaying in our daily life, through our relationships, our work, how we respond to stress, and the way we treat ourselves, and the people around us.
The good news is these beliefs aren’t set in stone!
We can choose to remove old out dated route maps, that are no longer serving us as adults. In the same way they were created, through imagery and emotion.
And replace them with new updated route maps, that are aligned with how we want to live our life.
By getting our conscious and subconscious mind to work in harmony 💜.
Creating new beliefs, habits, and positive self-talk, through repetitive action.
Until old habits are broken, and the new habits become the norm.
Helping you to heal fear and anxiety, often as a result of unprocessed Trauma, regaining your true identity.
How is unresolved Trauma showing up in your life?
"Trauma is not just a catastrophic event. Just by being shamed for experiencing emotions has a damaging effect on our brain and nervous system..." - The centre for healing
When we experience trauma (whether that trauma is obvious or hidden), the brain & body store the traumatic painful event, in a way that it can be re-activated by how we respond emotionally, physically & verbally, to current situations in our life.
Effectively we are seeing the current situation through the filter of that past trauma.
What is trauma?
Trauma can be any situation that evokes a painful emotion, that a person finds traumatic.
Such as:
🤍 Feeling embarrassed in front of your class mates, because the teacher has asked you to read out in class.
🤍 Leaving your parents to go to nursery or school.
🤍 Being bullied at school or in the workplace.
🤍 It may be that from an early age you were never allowed to express anger, and instead told to be quiet and go to your room by a caregiver.
🤍 Uprooting, moving and changing schools/towns multiple times as a child.
🤍 Your parents separating.
🤍 The loss of a loved one.
🤍 A time you felt scared and alone.
🤍 An accident, an assault.
🤍 Witnessing or experiencing any form of abuse, including abandonment.
This can show up in your current life as:
🤍 Procrastination
🤍 Avoidance
🤍 Yelling, aggression. or lashing out
🤍 Perfectionism
🤍 Keeping busy
🤍 Pushing people away
🤍 Emotional eating
🤍 Addiction
🤍 Low self-esteem
🤍 Fear & anxiety
🤍 Physical pain & ill health
🤍 Limiting beliefs
🤍 Being in an emotionally, and or physically abusive relationship
🤍 Not setting boundaries around your time
🤍 PTSD
If you can relate to any of this, firstly I want you to know “it’s not your fault”, that you had to adapt by forming some unhealthy behaviours & beliefs, because of your past trauma(s).
“There’s nothing wrong with you”.
“You’re not alone.”
And you certainly “don’t need fixing”.
What you do need is awareness, kindness & compassion for all parts of you.
Ready to start talking about your difficult emotions with a trauma informed practitioner, so you can get to the root-cause & heal them on a deeper level?
Please do get in-touch with me.
Gaynor x
Living with anxiety
When I first start working with women on their fertility journey, we explore together how the different areas of their lives may be impacting their ability to move forward.
And in many cases Anxiety will come up for them, whether in the form of general or social anxiety, or as a result of unprocessed grief, trauma.
Having a debilitating impact on their everyday situations, relationships or tasks. And ultimately their emotional health and well-being.
When we are in this state of Fear, we become disconnected from ourselves, we stop listening to our gut intuition, our innate ability to know what Feels right for us, and our boundaries become blurred.
This is primarily where my clients will want me to focus my support, to teach them tools, techniques, and strategies that will enable them to start to take back control of their lives.
Reduce stress, and handle their fears and worries through emotional intelligence...learning how to process their emotions in the correct way.
So they are able to learn from their experiences, and no longer repeat the same unhelpful behaviour(s), and the same unwanted self-sabotaging thoughts and beliefs, finally putting an end to the continuous cycle of despair.
By ensuring they are always taking care of their emotional Needs, and know how to take the appropriate action in the form of small success steps, to ensure they are always moving forward.
These positive changes help to switch their mind and body out of a state of hypervigilance, and into a state of calm. Where they can heal, and start to live their life with joy again whilst they wait.
Having a positive impact on their natural fertility.
Because what has a positive impact on the mind, impacts the body, and vice versa.
Are you distracting yourself from your difficult feelings?
Do you find yourself avoiding your difficult feelings perhaps out of fear or habit?
Maybe using coping mechanisms such as keeping busy, comfort eating, shutting people out, or trying to force positivity, to distract from emotional pain?
This may help in the short term, but continually going around in circles, repeating the same unhelpful behaviours. can prevent you from moving forward, and lead to additional distress.
Processing Your Emotions Doesn’t Have To Feel Scary or Complicated, When You Feel Supported.
This first thing to recognise is that there is no such thing as a good or bad Emotion, they are actually messages that want to guide us to the next best action to take.
So the last thing we want to do is ignore these helpful messages.
I teach my clients to make a habit of processing their feelings in the moment, by first Identifying them, so they can determine if they have control over a situation or not.
If they do, they can decide on their next best action to take to help them resolve the problem.
Or if they don’t, they can put a strategy in place to better handle it going forward.
Helping them through Reprogramming, to let go of negative experiences and subconscious emotional blocks, that may be inadvertently affecting their fertility, and set up new Pathways for Success instead.
If you feel like your unprocessed difficult Emotions are holding you back, and would like to learn strategies and techniques to help you take back control of your fertility journey, get your life back, and live in joy whilst you wait.
Your first step is to DM me to arrange a Free Discovery chat, so I can I identify where you’re at right now, and how I can support you going forward.
Letting go of the things out of your control
Your fertility journey can be filled with uncertainty and relentless waiting, and this can often lead to attempts to try and control an outcome(s).
Because we feel safe and secure when we have a sense of control over a given situation.
But trying to control the things that are ‘out of our control‘ can cause even more Anxiety and worry, impacting our physical and emotional health.
However, while there are certain things we will never have control over, such as When or How we are going to get pregnant, we can Absolutely gain a sense of control by taking small measures to focus on the things we Can Control.
✨Start by writing down your worries on a piece of paper.
✨Ask yourself ‘are they things I can control?’
✨If so plan a small Success step to get closer to achieving your outcome.
✨ For the things that are out of your control, it’s still important to acknowledge your feelings, so you can assess how a situation is affecting you, and then make the necessary steps to ensure your Emotional needs are being met. Getting to a place of acceptance, can help prevent those feelings from overwhelming you.
Are you looking for step-by-step support, to help you unravel the emotional overwhelm of your difficult fertility journey?
Learn how to Process Your Feelings effectively, so you’re able to assess how a situation is affecting you, and then make necessary steps to ensure your needs are being met.
Feel Empowered to take back control of your Fertility journey, get your Life back, and have Peace of mind whilst you wait.
The first step is to arrange a FREE Discovery call with me.
Anxiety is fear gone wrong
The Fear response does an amazing job at keeping us safe from imminent danger, as soon as you become aware of fear, the amygdala in your brain alerts your nervous system into action.
Stress hormones are released, your blood pressure and heart rate increase, your breathing becomes faster, and blood flows into your limbs, ready for you to fight off, or run away from an impending threat.
However our Subconscious brain doesn’t know the difference between a real life threatening situation, or when we feel anxious over our current life situation for example.
It simply responds to the Emotion you’re feeling, believing anxiety to be an emotional response to a dangerous situation. Preparing your body for fight-or-flight.
When we are living in a state of Fear like this day in and day out, our mind and body gets stuck in protection mode, and our fight-flight or freeze response goes into overdrive.
The energy supply to our brain‘s frontal lobe, the cerebral cortex, responsible for logical thinking and planning, basically shuts down as the body gets ready for action. Making it really difficult for you to think what to do next.
And the survival part of our brain, the limbic brain responsible for processing feelings and emotions, takes over.
Left unprocessed, our physical body holds onto this stress, causing physiological changes in the body, manifesting in physical illness.
When we support our Emotional Health, by acknowledging and processing our difficult emotions in the right way, so we can decide on the next best action to take, it helps us to feel calmer, less anxious and more in Control.
Sending the Brain a signal of safety, activating the parasympathetic nervous system, helping the body to return to calm, to a more Neutral state. Restoring energy to healing the body, and in-turn optimising fertility success.
Three things that contributed to my clients getting their longed for positive pregnancy test
1. We didn’t make when or how they were going to get pregnant the goal.
This puts a huge amount of pressure on yourself, as we simply can’t control how or when you are going to get pregnant.
When you try to control an outcome that is out of your control, it prevents you from living in the NOW, and having peace of mind whilst you wait. Leading to a great deal of stress, worry and sadness.
Keeping you stuck in the past, spiralling into negative thinking about what could go wrong, preventing you from growing & living your life freely. Inadvertently impacting your fertility success.
So instead we turn this around and focus your attention on taking care of you and your needs and wants for a change, while you are waiting, holding gentle space for pregnancy to happen.
2. We focused on the things that were in their control.
When life feels totally out of control, there are always things that can help you reclaim a sense of control.
Learning to focus on what small steps you can take to make a change to your current situation.
Tuning in to how you will feel once you have achieved that, will help you to feel empowered to want to make a change to your life.
Helping you to move beyond existing in a place of fear and hopelessness, to living a more fulfilling life.
3. We helped them to consider how they can start to take care of themselves, instead of ignoring their own needs.
When you’re feeling stressed, and being pulled in a million directions, trying to take care of everyone else, your body is crying out for you to stop & decide how to start taking care of yourseif.
Learning how to use your feelings to guide you to the next best action to take.
Freeing up time to do the things that you want to do, to ensure your needs are always being met.
This help to take out of the ‘Emergency‘ state you are currently existing in, and into a calm more neutral state, for growth and repair, much more conducive to conception.
“The cure for the pain is in the pain.” - Rumi
There are many lessons to be learned when we start to listen to the messages, our difficult emotions are sending us.
But mostly we tend to ignore our painful emotions, often out of habit. Throwing ourselves into distraction to numb the pain.
But avoidance behaviours don’t solve the problem, and can lead to more anxiety.
If you experience negative self-talk, and unhelpful habits and behaviours, because of painful events from your past, or have anxiety about the future.
It’s time to not only start talking about how you are feeling, but to start to heal your unprocessed emotions.
To unravel why you do, think or feel the way you do.
To help you shift any unwanted patterns, so you can have more peace in your life, whilst you wait.
