The deeper I got into healing and self-development, the more I realized how fundamental attachment stuff and inner child work is to, basically, everything.
The answers to the basic questions of “Am I loved?” and “Am I safe?” get answered our earliest years and etched into our psyche.
The questions have sub-questions like “Am I loved unconditionally?” “Who do I need to be to be loved?” “Am I safe to be in my body?” “Am I safe to be myself?” “Am I safe to be truly seen?” The answers to these questions form our blueprint to life, and the questions act as our compass.
You mosey along, following the blueprint, sometimes doing well, sometimes not so well, but more or less able to move through.
Until one day, the map leads you straight into a hole.
“Goddamnit!” you shout. “But I followed the map correctly. How the hell did I end up here?!”
The hole could be a particularly bad breakup, one you can’t shake. It could be a toxic job in a string of toxic jobs. It could be waking up one day, realizing you’re married to the wrong person. It doesn’t matter really. Cause you’re in a hole, regardless.
You do some digging, to try and get yourself out of the hole. What else is there to do?
While you are digging, you come across some crumpled pieces of paper.
“It’s a… map?”
You compare this dug-up map that you found to the one you’ve had from the beginning.
The map is different from the one you’ve always had. It doesn’t lead to holes, or the holes it does lead to are far less severe. It doesn’t involve contortions and convolutions like the ones you have been doing your whole life without noticing;
all those hairpin turns and sharp lefts and steep grades you did to earn love, avoid love, avoid yourself, feel safe, keep people close but not too close, make yourself big and scary so you wouldn’t feel small, make yourself small and meek so you wouldn’t have to be big, keep yourself low to please others, keep yourself high off the ground so you would never have to deal with others, shapeshift yourself into what others wanted until you did not know who you were.
“Goddamnit!” you shout. “I’ve been following a bad map this whole time.”
This is essentially what healing and self-development is: realizing you have a fucked up map and replacing it with better and better maps each time. Because of the way things are, most have us have started with fucked up maps. If you think you didn’t, you are kidding yourself and just haven’t come across a big enough hole yet.
Replacing the first map is always the hardest, but eventually, your newer maps lead you to some pretty damn beautiful places. With a minimal amount of hairpin turns.
❤️ Tasmia
thuss-me-ah, Smia for short
(Inspired by Anne Boyer’s poem “What Resembles the Grave But Isn’t”)
Where I mention holes a bunch of times
