Let me see

Dad please don't go. We are happy. We are perfect. We need you.

If you go, I will pack my bag, (my little red suitcase) and leave too.

Mom please say "sorry." Please make him stay. 

Don't ruin us.

If he goes, I will beg. I will try to go too because we all need to be together.

Forever.

It will tear me apart. Please don't fight. Please be my friends. You know me well, You know me best.

I need you two to stay and be my friends or else I will have no friends.

I don't want to lose our happiness. Mom and Dad should always be happy and together.

I will cry, cry, cry.

I was five, and it was the first time I had ever witnessed and mentally processed that my parents were fighting. It wasn't the end of the world, and it was perhaps not a huuuge fight...but it was my first memory of pain. It was a pain that made me fear my world was coming to an end.  A pain that set the tone and created a lie I would live by: I'm not worthy of love outside my parents...thus, I'm not worthy of love. 

We did this exercise in our study group today. We recreated our first memory of emotional pain and journaled from the perspective of that child.  We then coupled into pairs and read our stories over and over, uninterrupted until we could read them without being overwhelmed by our emotion.  

While this may seem self-indulgent, narcissistic, or even masochistic to some...it's not. Consider for a moment that it could be liberating. Because in actuality it was. Entertain the thought that you have lived a lie your whole life, blinded in a pattern of actions and reactions stemming from your first painful infantile memory.
 

The beauty lies in discovering that lie. In the way that we wipe our windshields when there is too much shit to drive safely, we must wipe away the lies we created to live authentically.  It's deep work, but it's totally worth it. 

I'm currently reading a book called "Women Who Run With The Wolves." It's filled with intercultural myths, fairytales, and stories to help women reconnect with their instinctual nature. 

"...La Que Sabe [The One Who Knows] had created women from a wrinkle

on the sole of her divine foot: This is why women are knowing creatures;

they are made, in essence, of the skin of the sole, which feels everything. This

idea that the skin of the foot is sentient had the ring of a truth, for an acculturated Kiche 

tribeswoman once told me that she'd worn her first pair of shoes when she was twenty

years old and was still not used to walking con los ojos vendados, [with blindfolds on her feet]."

If we don't do the work, if we don't delve deep into those memories, we might forever walk blindly. Blind to the fact that our intuition is telling us something, blind to the patterns we continually recreate in our lives, and blind to the lies we create at the beginning of our journey: I'm not worthy of love.

Find that inner child and grieve for her; hold her hand, tell her the truth, and be weary of the lie that does not allow you to see.