The Breakthrough Of You: Essential Tools to Kick-start Your Self-healing Journey

By Karla Buckner

In this empowering book, the author draws you into her personal odyssey of self-improvement, weaving together a tapestry of wisdom gleaned from a multitude of sources and an educational background in psychology. The author offers a unique lens through which to explore your own path of healing and self-discovery. This book is more than a compilation of knowledge; it's a testament to the author's personal evolution. With each chapter, you'll embark on a voyage of introspection, equipped with a toolkit of approachable insights to apply to your own healing and self-discovery endeavors. Whether you're seeking solace in your own healing journey or striving for a deeper understanding of your inner self, this book will serve as your trusted guide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Aug 28, 2023

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© Karla Buckner 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or modified in any form, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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The Breakthrough of You: Essential Tools to Kick-start Your Self-healing Journey

By: Karla Buckner

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A Note from the Author

Dear Reader,

I wrote this book because, while there are so many incredible resources that touch on healing, there wasn’t a combination of all the information I found helpful in one place. When I started my self-healing journey I was overwhelmed and didn’t know where to begin. Prioritizing healing in our busy lives can be a challenge. We make the bold decision that we want to dedicate our already limited time to our healing, but we don’t come equipped with all of the tools we need in order to do so. I also wrote this book for anyone who can’t afford or easily access therapy and is wanting to work on their healing. This book is not a replacement for professional therapy but there are, however, several resources and methods that you can apply to your self-discovery and self-healing journey. I am sharing some of the most significant materials, advice, tools, and lessons that stood out to me in my self-guided process that I refuse to gatekeep. With a background and degree in psychology, I have always been fascinated by human behavior. And so naturally, I have had many questions and curiosities about myself and how we are all connected. A few years ago, I decided to take agency over my life and dedicate time to my healing. I have spent years conducting research and will likely spend a lifetime continuing to get to know myself more as I continue to heal, grow, and evolve. The great thing about healing is that it’s not just bettering yourself and your personal quality of life, it also benefits others around you. Looking inward to heal can bring you understanding, peace, less mental tension, and free you of some of the emotional burdens you carry with you. This book is for anyone who is wanting to do the work and dig deep to discover more about yourself. It’s for anyone who doesn’t quite know where to start healing from traumas or past experiences. There is an exercise at the end of each chapter that ties into the chapter’s subject matter that I hope provides you with further personal insight. I hope that this book helps you embark on an approachable path to self-discovery and inner peace by providing you with some of the tools and information to get there.

Happy healing,

Karla

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Psychology 101

Let’s get the boring (okay not so boring) part of this journey underway. To understand yourself more, you have to better understand human behavior, conditions, and emotions. We have so many complexities as humans and those intricacies could fill the pages of an entire book and then some, so I will highlight a few of the subjects that helped me understand psychological concepts on a deeper level and have tied into my healing.

One of the first things I read that made me want to pursue a degree in psychology was a book called PostSecret. The book consisted of different postcards with each anonymous writer’s deepest secret, although some were funny or interesting and not all that deep. They were all sent to one address and then compiled into a book. When I read through them I felt a yearning. I wanted to help the people who were struggling and holding onto their secrets. I wondered if revealing a secret to strangers did anything for the person holding onto it, like how we write something and throw it to the fire to let it go and let it burn. And it ultimately led me to want to help people with the burdens, trauma, and past experiences they may still be holding onto.

There are a lot of complex ideas in psychology and comprehensive studies have been conducted for more than a century. And while the Pavlov’s Dogs experiment is pretty interesting and all, it doesn’t really tie into things that we may need to know about ourselves to heal. So instead, I will provide some takeaways that I believe can help you understand a little bit more about human nature and yourself.

Nature vs. Nurture

At the core of studying human behavior is the nature versus nurture debate, with nature representing traits we genetically inherit and nurture representing traits that we learn through observation. So if nature is how we are hard-wired, nurture is how we learn from experiences and modeled behaviors. And there isn’t a clear winner of this debate because it is a combination of both working together to form how we navigate, approach, and handle new experiences. If you know your biological parents, you may have noticed that you resemble one or both in many ways. Could it be the genetic makeup you share or the many years you have observed and perhaps adopted their behaviors? Or is it both? Obviously, things like skin color, eye color, and other physical traits are genetic. But what about demeanor, language and dialect, and how one handles emotions? It’s interesting to think about adopted children and if they are similar, behaviorally speaking, to the biological parents they never shadowed, or if they are more like the caregivers they spent time with and modeled for years.

Attachment Styles

This is one of my favorite psychology subjects and I’m so excited to talk about it. A lot about who we are now as adults calls back to who we were back when we could barely walk and talk and relied on an adult to care for us. During our early years, we all formed something called an attachment style. Attachment theory has been studied in young infants by several psychologists, but John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth pioneered this research. What I found really interesting about Mary’s work is her assessment called The Strange Situation. Essentially, a baby would start out in a room with their mother, a stranger would join, the mother would leave, the mother would return and the stranger would leave, then the mother leaves so that the baby is alone, the stranger would return, and then the mother would return. What was interesting about all of that coming and going is that Mary was scoring the baby based on their behaviors towards both the stranger and the mother and in the absence of both or one. Did they search for the mother, did they have a tantrum and get upset, did they play with a toy and not seem to care, or did they go towards either adult for contact? Those behaviors would become indicators of their attachment style. Today, there are four different attachment styles. Here are some of the characteristics and traits of each:

Secure - Characterized by the child’s needs being met by a parent or caregiver and the child’s ability to trust.

Traits of secure attachment style:

High self-esteem

Trusting of others

Capable of regulating emotions

Comfortable being alone or social

Anxious - Characterized by a fear of abandonment or rejection, having codependent tendencies, or needing validation to feel safe.

Traits of anxious attachment style:

Clingy or jealous tendencies

Fear of rejection or abandonment

Low self-esteem

A desire for acceptance

Highly sensitive to criticism

Dislikes being alone

Avoidant - Characterized by having issues creating committed relationships with others.

Traits of avoidant attachment style:

Difficulty expressing feelings

Spends a lot of time alone

Problems trusting others

Avoids intimacy

Uncomfortable with close bonds

Disorganized - Characterized by having fear of safety, perhaps correlated to experiencing abuse or trauma.

Traits of disorganized attachment style:

Polarizing emotions

Difficulty trusting others

Scared of rejection

Highly anxious (Mandriota 2021)

So how does something we form in our first years shape us and are they indicators of how we will attach or bond to people in adulthood? Can you work towards a secure attachment style? If you want to nerd out on attachment styles to a greater extent, I highly recommend the book Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller for further reading. Knowing which attachment style you have and why can be eye-opening. If you’re in a relationship or dating, knowing your potential partner or partner’s style can give you a lot of insight as well. My husband has a noticeably secure attachment style and that has helped me immensely. It makes me feel at ease and safe in our relationship.

The Id, Ego, and Superego

There’s a famous neurologist named Sigmund Freud and he became pretty popular in the psychology world. He claimed that the personality or psyche is made up of three parts. There’s the id (instincts), or our unconscious desires and needs. Then there’s the ego, which is a mediator between the id and the outside world. Then there’s the superego, or what is essentially your conscience. The superego is configured very early in life usually by receiving rewards and praise or shame and punishment from our caregivers or parents. So as an example of how these all work together, let’s say you want a cookie and your parents say you can’t have one until later. Your parents leave the kitchen and you are there alone with the cookie jar. The id says just take one it will be so good (desire). Then the ego will give into the desire of the id and you may think, will my parents even notice if I take one? Then you will likely eat the cookie and the superego will probably make you feel guilty for disobeying. This example is one of temptation but it’s not always that kind of predicament. It could be the id is all, Let’s apply for this job that sounds interesting. The ego could be like, This could be a great new opportunity. I’m going to apply. And the superego would assess the outcome of that. Even prior to the interview you may already be weighing the pros and cons. If you get the job you feel so happy and have a sense of pride for your achievement. If you don’t get the job, you could be really hard on yourself and upset or indifferent and think about the next job you will apply for. This depends on how you have historically been shaped by things not going to plan or working out the way you would have hoped.

When I think about the ego I think about how we blame that part of us for letting things go too far. We may take an instinct (id), and act on it without much consideration for how it will land. When we become disconnected from our inner self we can act out in ways that don’t really represent us which makes a lot of sense. The ego can be refined and also shaped by societal norms and experiences we go through in life. We can also work on our ego through introspection and gaining a connection to our truest inner self. When we think about the ego today, we likely think of self-esteem or self-importance. For instance, if someone has a big ego they probably think very highly of themselves and feel a great sense of pride. If someone’s ego is bruised, they might feel a lot of guilt and/or shame and have various insecurities. While this is different from Freud’s concept of ego, it does have some parallels and is also something we may have to work on. Both egos I’m referring to here can be fragile and delicate in helping us have self-awareness and assert our inner selves to the outer world.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn

When I think about the four F responses to stress, I can’t help but think about a mother who once lifted a car up by herself to save her own kid trapped underneath. This was a true story and her act of lifting the car was coined hysterical strength. Hysterical strength is essentially the fight response times ten and researchers believed that the added adrenaline in a near-death experience will somehow turn the average mother into a superhero if it means saving her child. So let’s talk about what is happening in the brain and body during a fight or flight response. First of all, fight or flight is exactly how it sounds. When in a dangerous, stressful, or overwhelming situation, you can either address it head-on or flee. So when experiencing