Articulate Your Story To Finally Heal
I rarely talk about my childhood because regurgitating our stories is not very helpful, especially when you’re a spiritual guide and mentor like me. I share this today to help you articulate your own story so you can finally let it go. Mine was quite dramatic, so I’ll share a few key highlights and spare you the gory details.
Why let your story go? It’s a remnant of the past and can no longer lead to healing. For a time, it was a doorway to self-understanding. But now, it’s a shackle. I’ll explain the process of releasing our stories in a minute.
The Field Of My Liberation
I grew up in a toxic feminist family obsessed with guilt and martyrdom. Though we “spiritually evolved” to become elitist Pentecostals and later festive new-agers, we were initially Brooklyn Catholics.
While my cruel father was the reason for my family’s hatred of men, it imbued our family with an intense paradigm focused on emasculation, which was enthusiastically practiced by the women in the family and aggressively impressed upon me.
My older sister, somewhat of a nun, constructed the religious ideology for our family and “trained” us. With a heavy moralistic hand, she tried to empower my abused mother while attempting to feminize me. If I used coarse language, expressed any measure of my masculinity, or did anything off-color, they either judged me or gaslit me into an explosive fit of rage and self-hatred. Without realizing it, they were projecting their hatred of my father onto me, not realizing its damaging effects on me.
It was always – “Paul, you’re angry; you need to do something about it” – when in fact, THEY were angry. Turns out, I’m quite peaceful and lovely.
It was never – “We were complicit in creating an intolerable and unjust environment for you.”
When I was a boy, my mother and nun-sister abandoned me, blissfully following my older professional prostitute sister to live in New Mexico. Without as much as a discussion or apology, they stone-cold left me alone with my monster father – to drown in a molten stew of shadow and emotion.
While all this drama could have killed me, it eventually broke my sense of reality and led to my liberation from religion, culture, family, and myriad other illusory constructs.
In many ways, my family’s insanity and darkness freed me.
Each of us comes into this life after having lived thousands of other lives, each entrenched in dizzying storms of addiction, passion, desire, and delusion. Because of this long, seemingly endless sojourn leading up to this life, we can barely blame the crazy people in our families. More importantly, we can scarcely blame ourselves.
Your personal and evolutionary work might start as story therapy, where you regurgitate your stories ad infinitum to a “therapist” for weeks, months, or years. It might include journaling, an intervention, or “setting some ground rules.” The “therapist” might truncate some parts of your story while emphasizing others – all to help you construct yet another temporary, illusory self and reality.
If your therapist is not guiding you into your emotions (or using somatic practices), helping you acknowledge, allow, and release those emotions, their paradigm is just an intellectual fantasy. It’ll bind you rather than free you.
At best, talk-therapy is a warm-fuzzy, egoistic trip into Candy Mountain, where you’re validated for every insight and extrapolation related to your stories. It would be wonderful if this type of experience sparked your interest in liberation – but that’s rarely the case – because therapists are seldom interested in breaking the chains of suffering; they’re mostly trying to help you tolerate them.
Therapy is a generally comfortable process where both the therapist and patient are locked in an outdated and limited paradigm, each addicted to their co-contrived, co-dependent relationship, as both participate to falsy identify and further cement the patient into a socially acceptable and productive persona.
In other words, you and your therapist are merely masturbating into the same jar to limited effect.
Try to move on from this candy-trip as quickly as possible. It eventually creates spiritual diabetes.
More profound healing is a much more intense, obsessive, and self-focused process: It requires articulating what happened to you and what you believe about yourself and life, releasing all oppressed emotions, releasing emotional energies connected to all mental and emotional imagery, and forgiving every aspect, experience, and person – most importantly your Self.
Along this spiritual warrior journey, you might declare your truth and set boundaries with those who judged, denied, harmed, or abandoned you. While you’ll unlikely win hearts and validation during this timeframe, you’ll come to know yourself profoundly and further define who you are.
When dealing with ancient systems of oppression and religious contrivance, it’s challenging to confront the related patterns of manipulation and dishonesty. I mean, who wants to admit to their reflections found in these systems?
Nowhere does The Divine say: “Your raw nature and genuine reaction to trauma should be judged into the ground.” But let’s face it, most people cannot handle even a tiny sprinkle of the truth.
If your family has turned against you in some way, here’s what you can do about it:
- Articulate your feelings, which are often somewhat complex. Spell them out in no uncertain terms.
- Articulate the most straightforward emotions you experienced.
- Articulate the specific injustices, gaslighting, projection, and bullshit you experienced from your unconscious, judgmental, or hypocritical family.
- Articulate a more straightforward list based on the above injustices so they are more quickly relatable.
- Articulate the images embedded in your heart and mind that frustrate, trouble, hurt, and keep you up at night.
- Articulate the specific family members and outline in a few sentences how each hurt you, even if they did not intend to do so.
- Articulate ways to give them the benefit of the doubt and forgive them.
- Explore The Ho’Oponopono in pursuit of a loving forgiveness of yourself and others. If you can’t forgive them now, it’s okay. But you must find a pathway to forgive yourself.
- Articulate why you refuse to participate in relating with them.
- Should the opportunity to reengage them arise, outline your demands and boundaries.
- List the people who genuinely love, respect, and appreciate you.
- Articulate how you would like to feel when engaging with people you call “family.”
- Create an affirmation for yourself that helps you feel peaceful when your family gaslights or denies you. This will help you remember who you are and the power you have.
The Blacksheep Identity
Many people who go through the first phase of this process – articulating and declaring the truth of their experience – might be labeled The Blacksheep. Some might later be manipulated into seeing themselves as The Prodigal Child who is “welcomed back” into the illusion of the contrived family.
The best of The Blacksheep will enthusiastically embrace their newly minted title. After all, you deconstructed a complex reality – and called everybody out on their shit! This is wonderful – and you deserve to celebrate the title of The Blacksheep.
But that’s also an illusion.
Releasing the past and shedding The Blacksheep identity is never about abandoning your sense of Self or individuality, and it’s not about embracing those who hurt you. It’s about realizing that the stories, roles, and divisions you’ve carried are no longer necessary for your happiness and evolution.
At this point in the process, you are releasing a helpful but no longer relevant crutch – and you’re stepping into your expansion.
So, dear Blacksheep, try this:
Validate your experience without drowning in it: Yes, you were gaslit, judged, hurt, and abandoned, but your healing won’t come from retelling the story at every cocktail party. Acknowledge the reality and impact of your experiences, then let them fuel your transcendence. You need not carry the weight. Releasing it, you create space and a pathway for your liberation.
You owe no one a round-trip ticket: You are not required to return to toxic or denying relationships or to “welcome” any person or experience back into your life just because you see them as part of the divine fabric. Forgive them energetically, but at every juncture, you must consciously choose who you allow in your space, heart, mind, and immediate field of consciousness.
Redefine your boundaries with spiritual clarity: Boundaries are sacred acts of love – stunning. You do this first for yourself, then for others. Setting clear limits for how you will experience reality creates a space where healing and growth can flourish. Meanwhile, you protect the peace in every area of your life.
Release the identity of separation: Being the Blacksheep, while once empowering (even intoxicating), becomes a prison over time. Release this identity to make way for a revised Self and a deeper truth – remembering there is no “other.” In fact, you are the “other!” Dear soul, you are part of the whole, but ONLY YOU will decide your engagement with it. Be bold and beautiful – and allow what is to come.
Forgiveness is for you, not for them. Forgive others – not to let them back in but to release the emotional charge that imprisons you. Through practices like The Ho’oponopono and The Sedona Method, you liberate your heart, mind, and entire being, creating space for new, vibrant aspects to emerge and fulfill you.
Honor your divine Self: Your ultimate task is to recognize The Divine in all people, aspects, events, and experiences without attaching to the identity, desires, pain, or projections inherent in them. Step into your Divine Wholeness! Choose peace, clarity, and a deep love of your eternal Self over your stories and living in the past.
Onward And Inward!
You’ve worn various identities like armor, protecting your soul and spirit from aggression, abuse, and refusal – while you navigated rejection, alienation, and misunderstanding. But once you’ve milked all the electrifying power from it all, you must finally decide to liberate yourself from every limiting aspect.
At some point, your stories, emotions, projections, desires, roles, positions, and attachments can no longer serve your highest expression of self – your pure divinity. Soon, you’ll release the need to separate yourself through pain, demands, declarations, or defiance.
You’ll gently go within yourself to reclaim your wholeness, purity, and loveliness – beyond all constructs.
Dear soul, you are not obligated to invite any of the naysayers and abusers back into your life – simply because you now understand them to be manifestations of The Divine. The understanding is enough. The awareness is enough. YOU are enough.
Boundaries are sacred! They protect your essence – your eternal soul from penetration and corruption – while creating space for your transformation and transcendence. Boundaries are genuinely divine – and you need not carry any person, construct, or aspect who limits or unseats you.
You are not required to rejoin toxic dynamics at any time, but within your core Self, in the center of your Being, you must recognize the oneness of all consciousness throughout spacetime.
Therefore, the actual task, the more profound journey – is to release the desire to feel separate from anything or anyone.
The Divine dances within every aspect of Creation – every object, every person, and all experiences – but your sovereignty lies in choosing how you engage with it.
Going forward, your power, enjoyment of life, and effulgent self-expression depend on how you see and experience every moment.
Real liberation comes from seeing yourself as part of The Eternal And Universal Fabric Of Consciousness Throughout Spacetime, without EVER clinging to old stories, outdated identities, or the need to resist what once defined you.
While this can take some time and patience, it is your birthright – your soul’s potential – to rise into this awareness and state of Being.
Speaking Your Truth + Boundaries + Space + Gentle Detachment + Awareness = A Fulfilling Life.
You are everything you once were, everything you are, and everything you are yet to become.
You are your mother, sister, and every “other” in your life.
YOU ARE ALL IT!
Relax, gently step forward, and seek to embody clarity, spaciousness, peacefulness, and the highest field of consciousness.
