In today’s episode of Healing From Within, your host, Sheryl Glick author of The Living Spirit: Answers for Healing and Infinite Love, which shares an in depth view of the Universal Laws of Energy, healing, spiritual communication, offering ways to harness this energy, awaken your intuition and discover your amazing personal power to manifest a great life, welcomes Pegi Burdick The Financial Whisperer author of It’s Never About the Money….Even When It Is who will show us how to untangle our emotions from our money and recognize possible unconscious habits of behavior which do not allow us to utilize money or other resources influences and behaviors in the most beneficial way.
Pegi Burdick, who founded Home Loans For Women, a mortgage company specializing in helping women in bankruptcy reclaim their homes, shows us how to learn more about our finances relationships health concerns and raising our children with greater confidence and trust. Pegi will show us our lives on “Two Tracks” and how to recognize what part of yourself is directing your decisions at various times in life.
Pegi says she wrote It’s Never About the Money…Even When It Is because, “Life is simple if we let it be. I wished to share with those who were struggling key words that could help them feel more in control when they were experiencing anything but control..If we slow ourselves down, breathe, use simple accurate words to express our deepest feelings, we automatically gain control of ourselves: not others, but only ourselves.”
It is clearly obvious that people struggle with the same issues regardless of their culture, fear, shame, unidentified anger and the desire for love and feelings of connectedness
Pegi writes “When all is said and done and we have lain our head down for the last time, let us feel we have done our best, loved to the edge, and have peace within our hearts.”
Pegi writes “When our needs do not get properly met as young children we create a survival system to manage the road ahead… This process to create a survival system can start as soon as we exit the womb. Because the need to survive is a primal drive: our greatest fear is to be abandoned. As Daniel Goleman concludes in his book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Social Relationships… “The more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the greater the mutual force.” The bond between a mother and her infant is unique and imprinted forever. Those early days of being out of the womb are precious for a child’s sense of trust as they are with every species. In order to survive our childhood we create a system that is all about reading signals and then making choices t o support that system even when it does not really serve us well. Pegi calls this your Life on “Two Tracks.” The two tracks represent you as an authentic person (how you really feel) and you as an adapted person the other you who you have created in order to maintain your personal survival system. These tracks are parallel: as one goes left, the other follows seemingly without protest until you begin to suffer from bouts of depression, expressions of self-loathing, a constant sense of hopelessness and rage, feelings of isolation and the fear that you will never be happy, never be loved and then you want your power back to have joy finally.These dual tracks are the reason you can appear one way but actually be very different inside. When this survival system your second track adapted persona has outlived its purpose and you realize these old needs of childhood no longer exist except in your head and fears you can realize how you move through the world versus how you feel should be consistent….It’s when the two conflict that we shut down and sabotage ourselves..This is where we make poor financial choices, harm our bodies, and rationalize our negative behavior. BUT THAT INTERSECTION OF CONFLICT ACTUALLY IS THE STARTING PLACE TO HEAL.”
Pegi describes a wagon wheel that represents life as it is today and that the financial issues many people struggle with are not about dollars and cents but are about deeper older issues carried from our childhood.
Everything in your life in interrelated: when the core of who you are is cracked it wobbles and feels out of control…Regaining control is the journey of self recovery, the journey of ownership in regard to all life issues…Partner, career pets finances spiritual children fun health friends siblings all part of our life functions…
Pegi writes… “We are all social animals needing love in order to feel a sense of value and purpose Anything other than that plays itself out in the material world in a variety of ways including how we handle money. It becomes a statement about our inner world.”
The emptiness in the pit of our stomachs is unbearable. As we begin to live a more authentic life embracing that which is really important and not the superficial values of society or others the overindulging, the feeling of loneliness and other painful emotions shrink and we feel freer and freer.
An example Pegi gives is Jessica who had been living a 2 track life as Jessica began to talk about her childhood, It was obvious why she was having money issues…Her parents made it clear to her that she was an unexpected birth not wanted only tolerated..an inconvenience. Her physical needs were met but not her emotional needs…her parents had no time for her. Jessica became an avid reader and grew up lonely and so Jessica never felt Whole. As Susan Piver says “Attention is the most basic form of love.” Jessica picked money to express her pain. Having money or the result of how we manage it is very external very visible. Earning money is often the reflection of performance..the harder you work the more money you make. But many of us get a different message in childhood …don’t compete for you may steal the glory and love from your siblings and there is only one reward and it will go to him or her and not you….no room for 2 winners. So we shut down divert our real feelings and get onto our unauthentic self track.
Isolation like loneliness is really a cry for help as Pegi tells us but because of fear of expressing needs as some people feel expressing needs is shameful and so many people lack this internal sense of confidence or competence so they often appear withdrawn shy and avoid contact. Children need early on to feel competent and as they get older to trust their own instincts …it is important to allow moments where the child is engaged with himself and his imagination and where the mother or father do not constantly interrupt the child’s sense of confidence and self-esteem.
Sheryl and Pegi go on to discuss depression which is an emotional state that prevents freedom of being and loving. Depression is in truth anger turned inward and the ultimate drug for removal from the moment and self responsibility for creating an authentic life. Depression makes us act emotionally dead and life is then less and we become a spectator rather than a participant in the game of life. Depression is also a subtle form of manipulation –being physically present and emotionally absent. It can often invite a strong negative response from those around the depressed person.
The question is where does all this anger come from? It comes from separating oneself from their authentic self due to acute pain and fear all statements of a misperceived lack of power….People do have choices in which mode they show up and how they wish to stay in the shadow of their childhood patterns and the loss of confidence experienced when they were children. Depression is a defense mechanism and addiction is a form of depression…they are angry but cannot identify their anger….
Alice Miller writes in The Drama of the Gifted Child “The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings which is importance for us if we want to live without depression and addiction.”
In Sheryl’s book “The Living Spirit,” she addresses our soulful and unalienable right to happiness and wrote, ”Finding true happiness and joy is the natural outcome of self-investigation. There are no shortcuts. No one can make you happy or unhappy unless you give him or her the power to do that by surrendering or giving your own power away….It may seem easier to become a victim and align yourself with other unhappy people, making your status or inclusion in a group secure. But this is a copout. Most people want to be loved and accepted by a group regardless of the cost to their own individual character. However, it is not only by our own efforts and choices that each of us can develop a sense of accomplishment and self-growth but by recognizing the greater whole of our being and the role we play in creating everything in our lives.
So Pegi and Sheryl direct us to look back to our beginning life experiences to see how important it is to realize our childhood patterns and family structure and then to begin to move past blame and limitation to a more authentic and loving way to exist in the here and now without blame judgment fear anger loneliness shame and isolation.
The only way to cure addictions is to build our self awareness instincts. Really knowing ourselves and being able to accept our flaws as gifts, being 100% accountable to ourselves and the outside world, taking responsibility for our stuff allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and learning how to give and receive love are the tenants to changing past limiting behaviors and restrictions and to create new patterns that serve us well.
One of the greatest fears we all have is fear of abandonment. The reality is that so many of our behaviors today no matter what our age is are rooted in early childhood experiences and often we are reacting to situations as if we were still 5 years old. Though they happened a long time ago the pain we felt as children are scars today but can be healed. Feeling shame anger make us resist intimacy and is a sign that we are not feeling a sense of trust. All of these emotions have equal energies and rub up against each other
We know fear is the opposite of trust and the level of physical discomfort we can experience from fear can change temperature, our stomachs acidity our palms to sweat our breathing to change.
The most effective way to manage fear is to be still—and let it be. Creating a relationship with fear embracing it rather than denying it or running from it allows it to roll over us helps us to calm down eventually and choose to gain perspective.
We have discussed shame. Pegi believes;
Secrets support shame
Secrets perpetuate a double track life.
Shame is the opposite of Spirituality or Self Awareness
Shame is the opposite of creativity
Shame is the opposite of respect
Shame won’t allow trust in
Shame is like a robe placed onto you: you are the innocent receiver
Shame births insecurities, shyness, isolation and hidden anger
Letting go of your shame allows healing, breaks the vicious cycle and gives you a second chance at true respect, trust and love.
Pegi wants her readers to develop compassion and softness, acceptance and surrender to the past and the hardships of the physical world, release shame…remember the destination is intimacy getting to love yourself and others and gratitude for life regardless of the challenges and hurts of our childhood…the day is today to make a wonderful new version of yourself beyond blame pain fear loneliness abandonment or any of the emotions that have held us back..We create today as an image of love.
We have seen that the basic element of trust and love are necessary to overcome any loss of Self or confidence or self-esteem that often occurs in childhood and can lead to painful emotions of shame loneliness fear and a damaged view of safety in our everyday world…No one means to harm their children but as Pegi writes “Most parents are emotional train wrecks themselves because they never got a clean start: their lives were shaped by their parents, and their environment and is what fueled their assumptions. The double standards that most people live by, combined with their own survival system, create the nest that their own children ultimately grow up in. Children observe what adults and older siblings do and how they do it. For them this is a clue as to what is assumed to be acceptable behavior, or what is not…..but when they tell us not to smoke, curse or be disrespectful and yet the do all those things, we get confused over the double standard. Being consistent, saying what you mean and meaning what you say teaches a child about trust or becomes a warning not to trust.
Pegi and Sheryl would hope that as caretakers parents educators and evolved humans hoping for more love compassion and cooperation in our families, schools, workplaces, and the world in general that we begin to investigate our earlier views of life the events and patterns that were formed and begin to rethink reshape and encourage a more trustful view of self and others so we can live authentically and not fearfully in survival mode alone.
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