Image by Angel C Davis
Narrated by Marie T. Russell.
If you want to be as big as you can be,
you need to let go of those who make you feel smaller.
Although you may know you’re a good person who has something to offer the world, when your victim pattern runs your life, you inevitably feel stifled and trapped by people you’ve encountered in the past or are dealing with now. A parent who hurt, abused, or neglected you during your childhood. A teacher who made fun of you in front of the class. An ex who betrayed and disappointed you, or your current spouse who’s becoming increasingly critical and angry. Or you may feel held hostage by circumstances—your job, your financial situation, the government, or even by your own mind.
It makes sense that one of the essential steps to self-empowerment is to take your power back from the people and events of your past. But how do you reclaim your power? Isn’t the damage already done?
Well, A. you never lost your power in the first place, and B. for your subconscious, the past isn’t chiseled in stone. Research shows that every time you recall a memory, it organically changes. You could say as you grow and change, so does your past.
For example, Dan, a high school friend, struggled for years with how our teacher ridiculed him for his atrocious writing skills. Even after we graduated, the thought of the fear of embarrassment caused his stomach to twist into knots. However, his poor grades hadn’t extinguished his desire to write and express his vivid imagination.
Fast forward twenty years, my friend became a celebrated author of several award-winning books. Now, when we tease him about his sharpest critic, he only shares his gratitude for our teacher. “I think the fact that she didn’t believe in me forced me to believe twice as much in myself—and work infinitely harder on my craft. Without her making fun of me, I may have never had the ‘I’ll show you’ attitude to go after my dream.”
The Self-Responsibility Key
My friend unknowingly used the self-responsibility key to take back his power. Self-responsibility is not an invitation to find excuses for those who hurt you and turn the blame game on yourself.
When you take self-responsibility, you don’t wonder who is at fault for whatever happened to you in the past. Instead, you start with letting go of the anger, pain, fear, or shame that used to chain you to it.
Then you accept that no matter what happened, or what was done to you, you always have the power to choose how you want to interpret and respond to your experiences. This way, you no longer perceive your life as a string of random events but as an extension of your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions.
Finally, you vow to create your reality to the best of your abilities, even if things don’t always go according to plan. In other words, by taking self-responsibility, you are making four empowering choices:
• To commit to your wholeness and well-being, regardless of whether others made you believe you don’t deserve to be treated with kindness and care.
• To take charge of your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions.
• To be curious and open to how you can learn and grow from the past.
• To take ownership of your present and future and become the creator of your reality.
Self-responsibility is the key to self-empowerment and personal freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt said
“Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”
To be free to be your empowered self, you need to grow beyond the self-defensive beliefs and survival patterns that are rooted in your past. The authentically empowered you is a competent, mature, and caring adult who takes responsibility for all aspects of your life—even those that made you feel victimized and powerless.
Unattended Wounds
During our work, Lindsay came to understand that her anxiety didn’t intend to torture or entrap her. While she had felt victimized by her anxiety, all her emotions did was make her aware of the unattended wounds her parents had inflicted on her.
The victim part of her subconscious, which she had tried to ignore for many years, was still reeling from childhood traumas. Once Lindsay began to see the world through the eyes of her child-like inner victim, she felt trapped, threatened, and overwhelmed by other people.
As we began our work together, Lindsay recognized that even though she had perceived herself as empowered and liberated from her parents’ abuse, she was still living in survival mode. She’d been running away from her childhood because, subconsciously, she still felt held hostage by her abusive father.
When this realization hit her, Lindsay looked at me with desperation. “So I tried to escape my father’s prison by running away from myself. What is the key to set me free?”
“Are you ready to forgive your parents?” I asked. She inhaled sharply but remained silent.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “forgiveness isn’t doing your parents any favors or letting them off the hook. Forgiveness is all about you taking charge of your healing by liberating yourself from the past.”
You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide
Like Lindsay, you may have believed that by refusing to think about those who’ve hurt you, your pain will go away. Although this method may work for a while, in the end, it’s like avoiding a stack of bills hoping they will eventually pay themselves. Usually, your inner victim doesn’t forget what’s happened to you.
While you may successfully bury the villains of your past in oblivion, the injuries they caused don’t heal on a deeper subconscious level. Chances are that others are re-triggering and potentially worsening these wounds. You can run from those who’ve hurt you, but you can’t hide from the pain they created. Eventually, it will catch up to you.
Freedom through Forgiveness
What keeps your inner victim bound to the perpetrator, besides your emotional attachments is the sticky mixture of negative emotions and beliefs you’ve taken on from this person and the personal power you’ve surrendered to them.
Let me explain. To protect you, the victim survival pattern makes you keenly aware of what the people you interact with are thinking and feeling, even if they don’t openly express themselves. In this survival pattern, your subconscious mind not only registers their negativity, but it also takes everything personally and thus absorbs, in a sponge-like fashion, all their judgments, criticism, insults, and perceptions. Other people’s negativity, anger, or insecurities become yours. Their critical and distorted perceptions about who you are, which again are often rooted in their struggles with themselves, become the suffocating framework for your own identity.
Take a deep breath in and declare to your-self that you’re no longer willing to:
1) Base your sense of self on the negativity this person projected onto you.
2) Give your power away and hold yourself back from personal growth and empowerment.
3) Cling to the list of debts this person has accumulated with you.
4) Wait for an apology or compensation for the pain this person caused you.
5) Hold on to resentment, anger, or the need for retribution.
Instead, you choose to release this person and yourself from all hurtful, negative, and dysfunctional attachments. You choose freedom over the false comfort of hiding behind your inner victim. You choose forgiveness over the self-destructive desire for revenge. Kindness over the need to be right.
Now, in your mind’s eye, share with the individual all you’ve gained and learned from the relationship, and anything that you still want to express before you disentangle. Then, when you are ready, declare out loud or to yourself three times, “I forgive you. I release you. I let go of the past.”
Imagine that as you say these words, you’re sending forgiveness, compassion, and healing energy from your heart to the other. You can visualize this energy as a beam of white or golden light emanating from your heart and starting to envelop and permeate the person you’re forgiving.
After a few moments, pour the soot of all the negativity you’ve absorbed from this person into the healing light. All criticism, insults, or abuse that has been projected onto you. All anger, disregard or neglect you have taken personally. All limiting beliefs, distorted perceptions, and self-sabotaging patterns you’ve acquired in response to this relationship. Drain all the waste of the past into the warm and powerful ray of compassion and forgiveness, and then send it back to its origin.
Once you feel complete, take a deep breath in and state again, “I forgive you. I release you. I let go of the past.” Now, add to this healing light of compassion and forgiveness all the anger, resentment, pain, anxiety, guilt, and shame you’ve felt as a result of this relationship. Let go of the need to receive acknowledgment of your suffering, an apology for the injustice, or some sort of redemption for the hardship this person caused you.
Release the blame and self-loathing you may have used to punish yourself for something that wasn’t your fault in the first place. Commit to completely letting go of all the negativity that tied you to that person.
As you release all the negative energy toward this individual, you free up space inside yourself to be filled with the personal power you had given away. Take another deep breath and confirm once again, “I forgive you. I release you. I let go of the past.”
Then choose to reclaim all the power you surrendered to the person you’re disentangling from. You can imagine this power like a wave of energy that swooshes toward you, or like spheres of light in different sizes and colors floating out of the person and heading in your direction. Continue to send from your heart forgiveness, compassion, and healing rays, while you let your power gently re-enter your core.
As you absorb your personal power, you may sense your entire being becoming lighter and more expansive. At the same time, the individual appears to deflate and become increasingly smaller. You’re outgrowing the limiting dynamics of this relationship by letting go of the energies, emotions, and imprints that don’t belong to you, and taking back your power, which allows you to be your authentic, unbridled self.
Again, say or think three times, “I forgive you. I release you. I let go of the past,” and watch the person becoming more and more infused with your healing light of compassion and forgiveness. At some point, they are nothing but a shiny white or golden silhouette, without any trace of the negative energy you’ve returned to them. This is the sign from your subconscious mind that the slate is wiped clean.
Copyright ©2023. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of Destiny books,
an imprint of Inner Traditions Intl.
Article Source:The Empowerment Solution
The Empowerment Solution: Six Keys to Unlocking Your Full Potential with the Subconscious Mind
by Friedemann Schaub
In this step-by-step guide, Friedemann Schaub, M.D., Ph.D., explores how to break free from the six most common survival patterns—the victim, invisibility, the procrastinator, the chameleon, the helper, and the lover—by engaging the part of the mind that created them in the first place: the subconscious.
Providing research-backed insights and brain- rewiring methods based on his 20 years’ experience, Dr. Friedemann details how, through activating the healing power of the subconscious, you can throw off the shackles of these self-sabotaging patterns and “flip” them into the six keys to self-empowerment, allowing you to take self-reliant ownership of your life.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Friedemann Schaub, M.D., Ph.D., a physician with a Ph.D. in molecular biology, left his career in allopathic medicine to pursue his passion and purpose of helping people overcome fear and anxiety without medication. For more than twenty years, he has helped thousands of his clients worldwide to break through their mental and emotional blocks and become the empowered leaders of their lives.
Dr. Friedemann is the author of the award-winning book, The Fear and Anxiety Solution. His newest book, The Empowerment Solution, focuses on activating the healing power of the subconscious mind to switch out of stress- and anxiety-driven survival mode and make authenticity and confidence the everyday way of being.
For more details about his work, please visit www.DrFriedemann.com
