Don't let your past destroy your future

By Sylvia Walukiewicz

'Yesterday' has a bigger influence on us than we might want to admit. It is not only our childhood, but also our other life- and relationship-experiences that contribute to the fact that we perceive the world through a certain type of lens. Everyone is re-living a past emotional reality at some point- so it's crucial to find a way to deal with it for ourselves.
Sylvia Walukiewicz shows in her book different ways on how we can better understand our vulnerability and on how we can transform our emotional past into a life of fulfillment in the present and live our true essence more. Don't let your past destroy your future - start now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: May 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9783347315761

Book preview

Preface

In my past, I used to think that I was able to suppress and ignore my emotional pain that had been evoked by painful situations, without having any negative consequences. In my past, I thought that I was able to just ‘delete’ some unpleasant events out of my mind and I had the impression that I was free of them. In my past, I was convinced that I had to be strong and suppress my vulnerability so that others would not have been able to hurt me. Today I know, that I was totally wrong about all that and now I have the deep understanding of how important it is to heal the past in order to create the life one wishes for from the depth of their heart. However, society teaches us something completely different.

As a child, I was taught how not to show my vulnerable side. I was expected to manage everything easily, to take care of everyone (except myself) and to pay attention to which emotions I expressed. In other words, I was taught to orientate myself towards the particular tasks, which had to be done the way others expected it and, on top of that, not to be authentic. The worst thing about all this was that these beliefs were supported by society. When I was at kindergarten, my teacher did not really know how to deal with the intense emotions of children. During my time at primary and secondary school, it was even worse with my peers: you had to be ‘cool’ in order to be liked by others and you were laughed at if you were caught crying or found to be afraid of something. A similar pattern continued through high school and through university. Finally, at work, I always found that in my jobs there was an underlying expectation just to function and to always be friendly and supportive to everybody. And, if someone was sad and had the courage to show itthere must have been a logical reason for being sad, for example a death of someone close to you. If someone was just sad or anxious about small things or even without any reason- he or she was very often judged as being vulnerable, weak or instable. These particular adjectives are not looked upon in a good way in society and so they have negative associations. It seems like there is no space for emotions, vulnerability and an authentic self in society. Moreover, we have never learned how to deal with our emotions in an appropriate way. Even if we have learned so many different, sometimes interesting and maybe useful things at school, we were never taught how to take care of ourselves, how to deal with our emotions and how to support other people in dealing with their emotions in an empathic way.

As a result, many people perceive emotions as something unknown, threatening and some even consider them too complicated to handle. A consequence of living with such a perception is the reaction of fight or flight, or even worse: to feign death. In short, we react to emotions with a behaviour we would normally show in a threatening situation. The thing is that our emotions are a very important part of us and if we start to fight against- or to fly from them, we are, in reality, fighting against or escaping from ourselves. How is it possible then to become complete and live up to our full and authentic essence? How can we find fulfilment and feel our real power when we are denying such important parts of ourselves?

Although all of us are looking for being complete and fulfilled, it seems that most of us never reach this meaning of life. One reason for this is mentioned above. One consequence of denying such important parts of ourselves is that we start looking for fulfilment in the outside world, instead of looking for that inside ourselves. Everyone of us needs and wants to be loved and accepted. As we have never learned how to really take care of ourselves, we have started to become dependent on external phenomena. For example, we start to be dependent upon our partner, on acknowledgement from our colleagues and friends, or even start to have the impression that materialistic things can make us happy. In short, when we start to become dependent on the outer world then we are more easily manipulated and our inner state is more easily influenced by external phenomena. And all this happens just because we do not want to accept our vulnerability or we are afraid of facing it and taking care of it.

The more we become aware that we can take care of ourselves, that we can heal our emotional wounds and so transform the blockages of our past, the more we can create the life we wish for from the depth of our heart. If we finally start to accept every single aspect of ourselves, we will be able to heal and integrate these rejected parts and become complete. The transformation will re-create the connection to your true self.

With this book Don’t let your past destroy your future, I would like to explain the impact our emotions and indoctrinated beliefs originating in the past can have on our present and our future life. I will go into more detail about what vulnerability really is and how we can better deal with different aspects of it in order to heal ourselves and become complete again. Moreover, I will explain and share some practical exercises which can be used to transform and heal our own emotional wounds and begin to connect more to our intuitive abilities. All the experiences and techniques described in this book I have learned or created and experienced myself and/or applied with my clients. Additionally, there will be many real life examples to better illustrate the profound wisdom described in this book and to show how these methods have been successfully applied. This book can be used as a guide to heal the emotional blockages of your past and to deeply connect to your true essence. You can free yourself from the old ‘chains’ that come from your childhood and maybe even from previous lifetimes. Through this healing process you will discover yourself more and more and your true essence will shine through. Your unique amazing essence.

Always remember that you are the ‘decision-maker’ and the creator of your life. You need the three things to put this in practice:

1. The decision that you really want it

2. The willingness and honesty to really look at what your vulnerability and your emotions are telling you and to take the outer world as a mirror of your inner world.

3. The method(s) that are best for you (in my opinion everyone is different and it’s crucial to find the method that suits best).

Chapter 1

What vulnerability really is and what society made of it

To begin with, I would like to say, that I find vulnerability is something very beautiful, touching and emotional. It allows us to connect with our true self and can show us how we really feel when emotions arise. Moreover, we are broadcasting our authenticity if we allow our emotions, feelings and other perceptions in our body, mind and soul to flow. This does not mean that we always have to react based on what we feel, but it is vitally important to perceive vulnerability as it is, without judging, denying, escaping or reinforcing it. However, the problem with this is that we have forgotten how to do it. In today’s society, it is not socially accepted to show how we really feel. In other words, according to what society wants to make us believe, we should always function, do the tasks we have to do and apply the cultural behaviours without criticising them. These beliefs and behaviours have their origins from many centuries ago… In the past everyone had to fit into the basic patterns of society and if he or she did not, there were several methods, such as torture or banishment from the village to punish those whose behaviour was different from what society wanted. As can be seen from this example, there have been expectations to submit oneself to the crowd for a very long time, instead of expressing oneself in an authentic manner. Consequently, this has led to a kind of indoctrination not to show, and even, not to allow oneself to feel one’s own emotions as they are. This indoctrination is so deep, that some of us do not even realise that we have been indoctrinated by it! It even seems that we do not know any other type of behaviour other than what we were taught. Indeed, we have almost never had the opportunity to experience any other type of behaviour, since these beliefs were passed down through generations, from parent to child. Therefore, it is understandable that we continue this pattern of behaviour and beliefs because, as a child, we adapted to the reality of our parents. As we were oriented towards them and our mind was not developed enough to question the experiences we had. Under these circumstances we started to adopt these beliefs and behaviours without ever questioning them and, so, they became our reality, and now we live our lives from out of this reality. Furthermore, as a child, we were dependent on other people and had the deep need to be loved by others. Consequently, we began to behave in a way that we believed would make others like us: we did things they wanted us to do and we avoided doing things they did not appreciate. Once again, we are applying the beliefs and opinions of others instead of listening to ourselves and perceiving what we really want in order to live our authentic self. In the past showing emotions like sadness or anger was not perceived in a good way by others and was sometimes even judged or criticised, making us begin to feel guilty and not accepted when we expressed them. Therefore, we gradually began to express our emotions less and less until we reached the point when we started to not accept them in ourselves. In other words, because of how we perceived others wanted to perceive us, we started to refuse our own vulnerability, not only when expressing it to other people, but also when expressing it to ourselves. Consequently, we have never felt free. We have always been living in that cage of not being allowed to do certain things and of having the fear of being judged, not only by others, but also by ourselves. How is it possible under these circumstances to reach the state of fulfilment? How can we feel ‘the flow of life’ when because of these old indoctrinated patterns we are not allowing it to flow naturally? How can we heal the wounds of our past if we do not allow them to arise nor to be accepted and taken care of?

Vulnerability is nothing you have to be afraid of. The key is just to accept one’s own vulnerability and learn to handle it in a right way. It’s as simple as that. Of course it sounds much easier than it actually is. However, since one’s own vulnerability is part and parcel of one’s life it is vitally important to handle it in a ‘right’ way. If we manage to do that, then life can become much easier, more fluid and there will be less fear around challenging situations, such as, dealing with a dispute with a close friend, or giving a lecture in front of a group of people. The reason for this decrease or even disappearance of such fear in these situations is that when one realises how one feels, then one can accept and acknowledge one’s vulnerable parts. It is these parts, which experience the nervousness or the insecurity around the challenging situation and, the most important point, one can take care of them in an appropriate way. As a result, one is able to handle the rising emotions before ‘the lecture’ or before ‘the dispute’. Therefore, during these situations one can remain in an emotionally balanced state and be able to react to the whole setting in a way that is independent of any emotions that may arise because of some old fears or negative experiences from the past. This type of behaviour requires, firstly, an awareness of one’s emotions, one’s emotional reactions and of one’s present emotional state. Secondly, it is necessary that one can have a constant contact to oneself and can perceive one’s own sensations that are passing through one’s body. This last point is very important as one needs to know how to react to these sensations by, for example, understanding them, accepting them and taking care of them in an appropriate way. Of course, none of these mentioned qualities can be developed overnight. However, it is possible to build them up steadily day by day, in order to know oneself better, to reach a state of greater emotional balance and to be able to live more in the present moment, instead of being afraid of future events or being sad about past situations. When a person is aware of what is going on in his/her emotional system and has learned how to take care of oneself, it is much easier to handle any situation, even if they happen unexpectedly, because one is connected to all parts of oneself and has, therefore, more stability, available energetic resources and a clearer mind. Alternatively, if one didn’t want to accept one’s own vulnerable parts, then they would anyway be influencing the emotional state in some way, such as in a situation which would trigger some deeply stored challenging emotions, and, this could happen even in moments in which one is not exposed to challenges. This can happen because we create a type of resistance within us when we haven’t accepted some parts of us: a resistance between our ‘executive’ conscious mind and our vulnerable parts which we are rejecting. Consequently, our inner emotional state is not balanced and we have less mental and energetic capacity to fulfil the activities we’re doing.

To sum up, to find an appropriate way of behaving with one’s vulnerable parts can significantly improve the quality of life because one is more aware of- and more aligned to oneself, can react better to emotionally challenging situations (which are inevitable in life) and has greater available mental resources. In addition to these points, one’s life can become more fulfilled, as one perceives one’s own vulnerability in a deeper way and therefore can reach a more profound connection and understanding of oneself. The alternative to that is to suppress our emotions, to ignore them, to fly from them or to ‘play the victim’ when an intense emotion comes up, which is in my opinion what most of us do. Behaving in this way means we will never be totally aligned with ourselves, nor will we get to know ourselves in a profound way. Given that, every human being has vulnerable parts, emotions and feelings it is vitally important to find an appropriate way to handle them. The problem is that we have never learned that at school, even if it is such an essential topic in life. So, if more and more people could learn how to handle their emotions it would create a huge change in society, in the occurrence of depression and other related mental health issues, and of course, within ourselves.

Everyone is vulnerable: every single person has this soft, loving and sensitive inner part which is just waiting to be discovered and accepted. This discovery may sometimes be painful, especially because this soft part has been suppressed, denied or left alone for such a long time. Now the question arises: what exactly is vulnerability? Is it just one ‘huge’ piece or does it consist of many little pieces which form the whole? Of course, everyone perceives it slightly differently and it is not my intention to impose my perception of it on you. However, I can give you a summary of my experiences which I have made during my own development process and from the observations I have made while working with my clients on their vulnerable parts.

Vulnerability: an umbrella term for all of the sensations which you can perceive in your body

Basically, I would say that vulnerability is the umbrella term for all of the sensations which you can perceive in your body that have no ‘physical explanation’, on the other hand, there are sensations, such as hunger, tiredness, a sore throat or stomachache that are definitely not vulnerable parts. However, they can rise up as a symptom whose origin is in a vulnerable part.

Consider the example of having a lot of fear about losing one’s partner because as a child one had been abandoned by one of our parents. If one hasn’t really accepted that emotion and worked through it, then this emotion still has an influence on one’s life, whether consciously or unconsciously. So, one might regularly experience the fear of being abandoned by their partner each time their partner goes out with other friends or even when they have meetings at work. On these occasions, there is an increase in the probability of getting to know somebody else and this feeds into one’s fear of being abandoned. If these situations happen on a regular basis, one will quite often be confronted by exactly that emotion. As expressing ‘negative’ emotions are not looked upon in a positive way in society and are, therefore, often criticised or not accepted, one tries to not to show it too obviously, or even to hide it. Until this point, the perception in one’s body can be clearly classified as a part of one’s vulnerability. When one is continuously hiding or in other words suppressing one’s emotions, they can very often turn into physical symptoms, such as stomachache, headache or digestive problems. In such a situation, I consider it very important to be honest with oneself and to ask oneself where the physical symptom comes from, and to find its origin, in order to take care of the emotion in an appropriate way.

One of the biggest parts of our vulnerability: emotions

So, this was an example of one important part of one’s vulnerability: emotions which turned into physical symptoms. This is only one main characteristic of emotions. However, there are other features by which we can recognize them: emotions are usually quite intense and we can normally feel them in our body, such as in our stomach, our throat or our heart. Emotions very often have an influence on our cognitive processes; they make us believe that what we feel is true and represents the reality and, in addition to that, they make it difficult to think clearly and to look at things, people and situations in an objective way which is not influenced by the present emotions. For example, if we are angry about something that happened at work very often we ‘take the anger with us’ and we can probably be irritable when we come home and could therefore respond in a harsh way to one of our family members, even if they have had nothing to do with the situation at work. Alternatively, if we are in love with someone and this person hurts us, we often ‘take the pain’ with us and start to see the world in a more negative way because of the influence of this emotion. Furthermore, emotions are usually evoked by outer circumstances, by our evaluation of our present capability in regards to handling the situation and by our old indoctrinations and beliefs which block the natural energetic flow. In addition to that, stored emotions can rise up having been evoked by a situation reminding us about the past, but which have never really been accepted or understood by ourselves. In other words, when a past event caused a challenging emotion which, in turn, created a lasting negative believe about ourselves, other people or a certain situation, then this emotion and this believe will be stored in the energetic system until they will be deeply understood and accepted. Otherwise, when we continue to suppress, ignore or escape from them, they will still influence us in the future. In the case of being confronted with a similar situation, the same emotions and beliefs will rise up and make us believe, that the present situation feels like the same as in the past, even if it’s different and we have the chance to act in a completely different way. For example, when we were a child we were dependent on our parents or other people in our social environment to be fed and to be given the emotional closeness which is so vitally important in the development of the ability of building a bond to someone. If our parents were angry with us and, for example, left us alone or even shut us away for some time with the objective of punishing us for ‘a mistake’ we’ve made, we could feel a lot of sadness, fear of being abandoned or even anger because they treated us in this way. As a child, we usually don’t have the necessary cognitive resources to understand the situation from a higher perspective and, therefore, our perception of the world is driven by the emotions that are present in each situation. So, if we started to feel anger, helplessness and/or sadness, which is a natural reaction to such circumstances, our cognitive resources would react to these emotions and classify such a situation as ‘negative’ and probably decide to avoid this type of situation in the future. In addition, in the situation described above firstly, we didn’t know how to cope with these emotions and so we were overwhelmed by them and, secondly, if we were unable to open the closed door or if our parents disappeared for a while and we couldn’t find them then, consequently, the impression of not being able to change this type of situation was lodged into our memory. Later on, when we were an adult and if our partner storms out of the apartment after an intense dispute then, since this situation resembles the circumstances in our childhood, the probability is very high that we will feel exactly the same emotions: sadness, helplessness and/or fear of abandonment. On top of that, these emotions will make it difficult to analyse this situation in an objective way in order that we can cope with it and take care of ourselves. To put it another way, the reality of the past situation from our childhood is emotionally relived, mostly in one-to-one situations, in the present situation, even if we had many possibilities to react to it in another way. The above example is typical of how stored emotions can influence our perception of reality in our present. Fortunately, there are plenty of possibilities of how to react in such a situation. From the third chapter on concrete methods and techniques to show you how to cope with these situations will be provided, as the probability of this happening in our lives is high.

In brief, emotions are an important part of our vulnerability. They are usually perceived quite strongly and they influence the way in which we see the outer world and ourselves. As a result, they can affect our behaviour in certain situations which, in turn, can make it more difficult to react in an appropriate manner. However, if we start to suppress our emotions, to ignore them, to escape from them or to ‘play the victim role’, (these will be expanded on in the next chapter), then it gets even worse because it creates an excessive activity in order to suppress them or to run away from them, or an excessive passivity when we just ignore them or ‘play the victim role’.

Our emotions have something to do with ourselves

The important thing to know is that every emotion we have has to do with ourselves in some way. From the previous example and explanation about how emotions are generated, we can conclude that they are a product of the outer situation, which evokes the emotions in a natural way and, the more important part for us, our evaluation of our capabilities and possibilities to cope with certain situations. Since it is difficult to work on and to change all of the outer circumstances, it is recommended to work on the internal part which we can influence in an easier way by changing our evaluation of our capabilities and by learning methods in order to cope emotionally and practically with challenging situations. Before we start to observe how we treat our emotions, determine where these behaviours come from and assert our evaluations of our capabilities, it is vitally important to understand that there are two main types of origin where our present emotions come from. The emotions we feel can be classified into two main categories: the so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ emotions. By ‘new’ emotions I mean emotions which you experience only in the present situation and which you have never experienced before. For example, the fear one can experience when he or she is being almost run over by a car or the first time we fall in love. In such a moment, the emotion we perceive is usually quite intense: we clearly feel it in our body and it influences our type of thinking and, consequently, our behaviour. In other words, it fulfils all of the prerequisites to be classified as an emotion. However, as we have never experienced a certain emotion before we have no reference point and so we naturally start to classify it as either a ‘negative’ emotion or as a ‘positive’ emotion. Next, we usually associate the situation which evoked the emotion with the emotion we experienced and consequently we create a positive or a negative association with the situation itself. This association is unconsciously memorized and will be stored in our body and in our energetic system. In contrast to that, if we just let the emotion flow through our body it will just pass through us in a short matter of time, we would be taking care of the emotion by listening to what it wants to tell us about ourselves in regards to that situation. In short, we have the choice how to behave when an emotion rises up: we can either just let it pass through us, which at the beginning is very difficult, especially with ‘old’ emotions, or we can start to create associations and/or judge ourselves, other people and/or the present situation for what they are.

A natural human reaction in such circumstances is to start to avoid any situation which evokes ‘negative’ emotions and begin to seek out situations which evoke ‘positive’ emotions. From an evolutionary point of view this reaction makes sense, since our neural systems are programmed to remember what things we need to avoid and what we should look for. However, there are many drawbacks if we want to find our true self because we will always be influenced by the effects of past events, instead of living in the present moment. As a result of having memorized the associations between the situation and the ‘classified’ emotion, our behaviour, thinking pattern and emotional state can be changed in the future by even only a single event in the past. If we are confronted in the future with a situation which is similar to that one in the past, the stored emotions usually rise up and start to influence our perception of the present situation in a way that we behave and think in a similar way to that one in the past. Consequently, the outcome of such a situation will be similar to the outcome in the past and so the probability to experience a change decreases. This in turn reinforces our conviction about the association we have made with a certain situation in a past event. As a result, this becomes more and more our reality, which we have created ourselves only because we started to associate, to classify and/or to judge the emotions which were evoked by this one situation in the past.

In the moment in which we experience an emotion again, it can be classified as an ‘old’ emotion because its origin is in a past situation and not in the present moment. Sometimes the origin of an emotion may not be conscious because either we don’t clearly see the connection between a past situation and the present reaction. Alternatively the past situation was so traumatic that we suppressed it, consciously or unconsciously, or we are not willing to look at the past situation and prefer to cut it out from ‘our lives’ which, fortunately, isn’t possible, as it is needed for our emotional development and maturity. However, to profoundly understand ourselves and to experience an inner transformation it is very advantageous to know which situations evoke certain emotions and, even more importantly, to know why we interpret them in a way that led to a ‘negative’ association with them and why these emotions were stored.

Looking at what we’ve discussed so far about emotions, I would like to emphasise the importance of being aware that we have ‘created’ every emotion ourselves because we interpreted situations in particular ways, depending on how we were perceiving ourselves in that moment. So, if we have contributed to its creation and, especially, to its storage, then only we have the power and the ability to transform this hurt part of us back into what it was before, namely into our true selves in order to live up to our full potential. The problem about that is, that most of us don’t want to take care of our emotions or don’t even want to just understand why they are there. It is also very common that many of us believe that what our emotions evoke in us in a certain moment corresponds to our reality and, therefore, we don’t take the effort to look at them more closely. Alternatively, a natural human reaction is to ignore or suppress the upcoming emotions as they hurt and, naturally, we don’t like to feel pain, even if it is ‘only’ emotional. Others start to do everything in order to escape from certain, painful emotions while doing everything to avoid perceiving them. Some of us even have forgotten about situation in which particular emotions first rose up and through our thinking patterns and their interpretations which have turned them into stored emotions and, consequently, into a stored belief and/or indoctrinated pattern. Consider the following true story about a young child who wasn’t appreciated by its parents, and how this affected its emotions and how it influenced its life further.

As a young girl, her parents wanted to push her to be a good student and started only to reward her and to appreciate her in a special way when she got good marks at school. Whereas, they were angry with her when her marks were not so good. Being a young child, she did not yet know her real values as a person and either didn’t she know, that she was lovable as she was, even without the good marks from school. So, from this situation she started to believe that she was only loved and accepted if she performed well and received good marks. As a result, this became her reality and her thoughts and behaviours started to unconsciously support this belief. Later on, when she had grown up and had become a young person, she was still living out of this reality because she did not know how it could be any different. She started to work in a company and every time when she performed well at work she was accepted and felt satisfied. However, when someone criticized her or when her work did not turn out well, she started to feel rejected, sad, not loved and even angry with herself (she started to treat herself in a similar way her parents did). Since she had not learned how to accept her vulnerability, nor how to treat it in the right way nor how to understand herself better, she started to escape from it, refuse it and to suppress it. In order not to feel the vulnerable part of her as it was, she started to work even harder and with more pressure to avoid such situations in the future. Alternatively, she could even have started to drink alcohol or take some drugs, just to escape from her vulnerable part, which was trying to tell her something about herself, but she just didn’t want to listen.

As can be seen from the above description, the origin of a wounded vulnerable part can be from a long time ago. The problem about this is that in the moment of being hurt, in whatever way, we usually start to blame others, to blame ourselves or to curse the situation. After some time, we forget the real origin of the emotion and, as mentioned before, it becomes our reality in which we live. If we continue to escape from or to suppress emotions it gets even worse and we will be even more stuck in our ‘created reality’. This is because of the arising vulnerable parts which create certain physical reactions and, what is even more problematic, trick our perception of the outer and inner situation. Since most of us don’t listen to what our emotions want to tell us, we will never profoundly understand why they are present and, therefore, we keep the hurt part inside.

Life is a learning process

As life can be considered a learning process in which a lesson is repeated until it is learned, there will be similar situations to evoke particular emotions until such time when they will be accepted. The underlying reason why we are repeatedly attracting the same situations in life, according to which of our emotions we still haven’t worked through, is the law of resonance or also called the law of attraction. In the next chapters this will be discussed in more detail and there will be some advice on how we can benefit from this law when we use it from a higher perspective. The process of deeply understanding and transforming our emotions is vitally essential for the growth of our consciousness and, consequently, to also live up to our full potential. It is impossible to be emotionally free, to live 100% in the present moment, to live the life we wish from the bottom of our hearts and to live up to our full potential if we haven’t accepted, understood and transformed our vulnerable parts to their true potential. The problem with this is that we have learned from society that we should not express our emotions as they are and, as some of us have even started to refuse our emotions even when we are by ourselves, this learning process has a long way to go before anything can ever be accomplished.

The purpose of the experiences we have during our lifetime is to reach a higher state of consciousness. This is achieved through the process of gaining experiences through situations which evoke emotions such as sadness, fear, joy or disappointment. So, when we perceive a certain emotion we gain knowledge about how it is to be in a certain emotional state. If we just let it ‘flow’ through our body and perceive it for what it is, it would naturally leave after a few minutes or even seconds. The most probable result would be that we could still be ourselves without having supressed or negatively transformed any part of us, but we would be richer