Children are the future: how we can heal our society
Note from the editor: One of the biggest goals of my blog is to spark a global conversation. To hear others’ opinions, experiences and stories. That’s why I’m extremely grateful to be surrounded by people who are willing to start that movement with me - who are willing to share their knowledge and thoughts in order to stimulate a mass awakening in our society. To that end, Natasha Khalife has gracefully written a captivating feature piece on the power of liberating your inner child and breaking generational trauma. Natasha is an Early Childhood Educator, a Yoga Teacher Trainee and an aspiring psychoeducator (youth social worker). Mostly, she is an advocate for holistic and integrative education and keeping your inner child alive. - Ayla
Written by Natasha Khalife
Have you ever heard people describe themselves as empaths? Or have you used this term to define yourself? For context, an empath is someone who can sense and experience the emotions of others as their own, someone who is emotionally invested in their relationships or in others in a hypersensitive capacity. They are the dreamers, feelers and over-thinkers of the world. Empaths have a pronounced connection with their intuitive sense along with their emotions. In addition, they can internalize the narratives of others, how they are seen and defined by their close ones, their community or society at large, and may feed negative thoughts more, hold limiting beliefs about themselves and develop mental illness as a result of low self confidence and toxic (i.e one-sided) relationships.
What happens when an empath becomes like a sponge of others’ feelings and thoughts? The result is a lack of self-actualization. Self-actualization is the complete realization of one’s potential. It is a process of personal responsibility or in other words - accountability. When empaths take in energy, they forget — or worse — suppress themselves and their needs for the sake of others. This creates an imbalance in their relationships with individuals as well as their community at large, they may be unable to verbalize their needs or their boundaries because they haven’t acknowledged and embraced that they have them in the first place. On Finding Yourself Again, Ayla has defined how this creates an environment of self-denial, trauma bonding, separation anxiety and the most relevant for this article, generational trauma; i.e, projecting and regenerating trauma in others time after time.
So what can you do as an empath to avoid contributing to more harm? Healing yourself is a non-linear and seemingly destructive process. However, it is a creative process, where destruction precedes regeneration (see “dark night of the soul”.) This destruction to attachments, to ego, is elusive - it’s not approachable or easy to access.
When people hear about non-attachment, they think of not being able to enjoy anything, giving up their material possessions and meditating all day. Although meditating, mindful movement and awareness of Spirit are great tools for healing, they may not resonate with you now. Simply put, non-attachment is a process of surrender, it is the breaking of bonds that create suffering. By surrendering to the present, you let go of expectations (future) and of narratives about yourself (past). You are as you are, an observer with no judgment, negative or positive. With this awareness and subtle mindset shift, there is no place for fear-based decisions, shame or insecurity, and emotional projections. Once you start healing, you notice these patterns and where they originate.
My best discovery to date in the healing process is inner child work. I come from a relatively stable and healthy family, but growing up as a gifted child, I grappled with an invisible attention and emotional disorder that led to disillusionment (negative world view), alienation from my peers, an eating disorder among other anxiety & self-hatred issues.
Our complexes, our contradictions and projections are deep rooted, and that’s why they are uncovered and amplified during our healing phases. In deconstructing the ego, we become our most vulnerable and basest self: the inner child. In these moments, it seems impossible and almost unbearable to admit that the parts of ourselves we connect with the most, the parts that define us (e.g. being an empath), just don’t. And that in fact, they may be hurting us.
If you are an empath, consider if you are taking on all the negative feelings of others, or resisting the world because of the injustices and pain you internalized? Are you non confrontational, unable to put up boundaries and therefore hold no space to heal yourself? How can you heal when you let others mistreat you because you “understand” them? And why is it that as people, we feel that our most negative traits, the darkest part of us, define who we really are?
In my experience as an early childhood educator, and specifically a toddler teacher, I can tell you it has everything to do with the way we were treated as children.
In childhood, we learn to label ourselves as soon as we can understand language. Seemingly harmless phrases – that are very commonplace – like “you are not being very nice!”, “be careful with that!” or “good girl/boy!” condition children to identify themselves with words and judge these words as negative or positive. In reality, when kids hear “no!” and “be careful!” often, they begin to internalize and to use fear as a motivator and they lose the confidence to solve problems or take initiative in high-stress situations. They start losing their trust in themselves solely by recognizing that you don’t trust them.
Labeling with the intention of being positive can also be harmful, something like “Wow you are so smart for completing that puzzle!” teaches children that when they fail to overcome a challenge, they are less capable and not “smart” enough. You may find these phrases well-intentioned and loving, and they are! Although these interactions are fleeting in an adult’s relationship with a child, a child’s long lasting sense of reality and their world view are being built on the foundations you are setting for them; and these comments resonate with children deeply. Attributing any achievement or accomplishment to their character will teach them to only value themselves through their success, and it eventually feeds into a complex based on validation from others (e.g., attributing inherent self-worth in adulthood to good grades, job success, etc).
Another common experience in childhood is the innocent and well-meaning “oh no! Don’t cry! You're okay, look!” This one is definitely not obvious to adults because we don’t burst out in tears in public, we have learned to regulate or suppress emotional “outbursts” and maintain composure in social settings. Not only is this unrealistic for children when they haven’t reached emotional regulation as a developmental milestone, but it is unrealistic for any mature person either.
Social and gender norms have conditioned us to disallow feeling, to contain it and label it from a young age. It doesn’t matter that we feel things, as long as we don’t show the extent of our emotion and we don’t lose our grip on it. As we grow into adults, we carry the same shame around pain and “weakness” (vulnerability) as kids when they are told “no don’t cry! It’s okay you’re okay!”. In hindsight, how are you expected to let go of hurt, and in turn avoid hurting others, when pain is vilified and not allowed to be felt, fully? A wound that isn’t cared for can only fester.
At the end of the day, we are all children that have been abandoned to our futures, mercilessly. With virtually no education formalized on the subject of emotional growth and freedom. We’ve been given no tools for coping, no healing from institutional, interpersonal and social barriers, and no spiritual and emotional connection to our inner children.
The wellness industry, the beauty industry, the education system, all are put in place and meant to keep you complicit in your own self-destruction. In an obsession to make yourself better, you are still in a state of ‘negative’, in a state of lack: needing more, feeling incomplete, disembodied and alone. The desperation we feel trying to better ourselves comes from wanting a sense of control. Letting go of control, and letting go of our own self-judgment is the hardest part of it all, since we are trying to separate ourselves from a system that has groomed us, a system that created all our relationships, our upbringing, our material circumstances, and of course our self-perception.
The moral of this article is that your worth is inherent, you have it as soon as your soul is born into your body. And the sense of control you feel from your story or your perception of who you are is an illusion. It is an illusion that only serves to limit you, to keep you where you are and where you don’t want to be.
With my kids, I teach them that it’s okay to cry, I don’t try to change how they feel and I tell them that I am here for them if they want comfort and affection. And when I am hurt, I tell myself the same. I teach them that they don’t have to get it on the first try, that courage is in trying and risking and failing. I teach them that if they are hurt there is a reason, and they can take their time figuring it out before talking about it, but talking about it will help. You would never think of telling a child you love that their “belly looks huge in that picture”, that their face is too round, too long, too asymmetrical. You would not tell a child they’re only as good as the puzzles they complete or as good as the number of play dates they’re invited to. If it doesn’t make sense to say it to a child, it doesn’t make sense to say it to yourself!
All we want as people is to feel connected to others. But the only way to accept love is to accept it from ourselves first, by giving it to ourselves as we would to a child. To accept our faults, our flaws —and yes — our ugliness, fully.
Love,
Natasha