Sweat The Small Stuff
I had a weird dream last night. So, as usual, I tapped on it.
Thing is, I could feel that while it was helping, it wasn’t really getting to the root of the problem. In my dream, I dunno, I was in this weird war zone – kindof. I had a gun, there were people out to get me – all of them, it seemed. Very odd. When I woke things weren’t very clear, so I was struggling a bit to connect with it.
So, I did what I often do – pulled up a text editor, cleared my mind, and just started typing. Whatever popped in my head I wrote down – particularly the stupid stuff. Almost like automatic writing, I suppose. Meditating around the subject would do the same thing, but this way I have a record.
Here’s what popped out:
WHY IS EVERYONE STILL OUT TO GET ME? [nice big header to keep me focussed]
- or hurt me
- or make things difficult for me
- or trip me up
And a little lightbulb came on in my head “trip me up”? WtF? That’s.. odd.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a very specific incident came to mind. When I was 7, running along in school, some random kid sitting next to the path stuck his foot out & tripped me up – just for laughs, I think. I grazed my hands & got a bit upset.
On the scale of things, how big is this, I mean. Really? Getting tripped up at school? It’s ridiculous. I know people that have been caught in the middle of mass murders. Killed dozens of people in wars. Been repeatedly raped for years. That’s trauma. Getting tripped up? It’s so trivial it’s laughable.
And yet.
I started tapping on this, and the picture started to open out.
pic by jeaniepaul
The thing that’s important to remember is this: What’s tiny to an adult is gigantic to a child. Also, at that age, we have very little experience & our brains haven’t even finished developing yet (they don’t until our early 20’s).
You can pretty much guarantee that we will interpret things in a way that is both wrong, and childish, to our adult brains. However, we never stop & reassess these situations. Even as adults, we take these childish interpretations, and they become our truth. Our core beliefs. The basis for our lives.
For me, this innocuous situation left me with the beliefs that:
- I couldn’t trust anyone
- Everyone was ‘out to get me’
This trust issue is something that’s been niggling me for years now – and of course caused problems in every relationship, intimate, business, or otherwise, that I’ve ever been in. However, until now, I haven’t really been able to see below the surface.
Could it all stem from that one silly incident? Now, there was another kid who tripped me up on my birthday once (same school, boy oh boy). But those two incidents combined together? Sure. Definitely.
It’s ridiculous, looking back as an adult, to see such a forgettable incident causing such long term damage, and yet this sort of thing happens all the time.
There is no incident too small. Remember, we were children then, we saw things in a childish way. If we’re looking to heal ourselves, it’s important to pay particular attention to the kinds of things that as an adult we now see as trivial. If we still remember them, they’re still in our consciousness, in our awareness. So they’re significant, no matter how they might look now. In fact, a good rule of thumb is – the sillier & more trivial it seems, the more important it really is.
After all, if an event is really that trivial, why have we bothered to remember it all these years?
