Removing Shame and Shedding Limiting Beliefs: How Core Wounds Can Unlock Healing

Before I had moved back to my hometown of Conway, Arkansas, over a year ago, I had some unspoken expectations of what I thought my life would look like when I returned. In my effort to see the best in every situation, I’d imagined some specific moments and memories I wanted to create.

After being back for a few months, I started noticing this creeping feeling that those moments and memories… weren’t going to be my reality. I had put my hope in this version of life back in my hometown that would make returning “worth it,” and when that didn’t come to fruition, I felt stuck, a little hopeless, and more than a little devastated. It was that shame + limiting belief spiral coming back to bite me.

How am I still dealing with these same issues, I wondered. I thought I had looked through everything. I had peeled back layers. I had done some major healing. For a year.

And that’s when I woke up to the real cause– and purpose– of these wounded cycles we inflict upon ourselves.

Each of us has some core wounds we internalize in childhood. They’re not always the result of bad parents or abusive situations or neglect, although they can be. They can also be interactions with friends, teachers, coaches, and strangers.

Core wounds are more than just general shame or limiting beliefs. It’s an insult or situation or feeling that starts as a one-time thing, but then we start seeing it confirmed time and time again. It’s not a passing feeling that we are bad, but a wounding that changes how we behave going forward that only confirms our deepest fears about ourselves and causes us to act in ways that continue to prove that fear to be true.

Once we internalize those core wounds, throughout our lives we “call in” scenarios that confirm the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Because even if the message we’ve internalized isn’t kind or loving, seeing it confirmed feels familiar, which can be mistaken for comfort.

**If we don’t heal from these childhood wounds, we spend our adulthoods recreating them.**

Do you see this playing out in your own life?

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It’s not coincidence or bad luck. It’s our subconscious recreating situations that expose us to our core wounds so we can either heal from them or confirm the lie that we’re believing about ourselves. The search for our true identity is messy and imperfect, and it takes practicing self awareness to separate the truth of who we really are from lies we’ve become comfortable believing.

Here’s another way I like to think about this– God is unconditional love. That is who God is. And Jesus is God manifested in physical form. When Jesus walked the Earth, he didn’t have lessons to learn. He knew exactly who and what he was. And that’s what made him so hated by the religious leaders around him– that he claimed to be the Son of God. But he looked differently and acted differently and led differently than they thought he would, and that made them uncomfortable, even angry. But he didn’t let their wounding messages deter him from knowing who he was.

When we see how Jesus trusted God and believed that he was who God said he was, we see a life lived with total trust and confidence, free from fear, even when experiencing pain and rejection. He ran towards the outcasts instead of running from them. He spent time with children instead of religious royalty. He washed feet instead of seeking a throne.

That’s what we have access to. That complete confidence in knowing who we were made to be and what we were made to do. That’s what acting like a king or queen really looks like.

But we did not come to this earth like Jesus in the regard that we didn’t have lessons to learn. We do have lessons to learn. In this world, we will feel fear, lack, want; we will question who we are and what we are here to do, and this points us to the areas we need to heal.

So just before this realization that I had moved to Conway and nothing was how I thought it would be, I remember closing my eyes and praying– through feeling– because the language of God and the love of God is to be felt, so with feeling I prayed,

“GOD, WHATEVER LESSON I STILL NEED TO LEARN…I NEED YOU TO BRING IT. HOWEVER YOU HAVE TO SHOW IT TO ME. SHOW ME. I CAN HANDLE IT. I’M TIRED. I’M READY FOR MY LIFE OF PLEASURE AND PLAY. I KNOW IT IS RIGHT THERE. I ALSO KNOW IT WON’T COME UNTIL I HEAL WHATEVER IT IS I HAVE LEFT TO HEAL. SO BRING IT. LET IT CRASH INTO ME IN A WAY SO DIRECT THAT I CAN’T MISS THE LESSON THIS TIME. LET IT BE OBVIOUS. LET ME FEEL IT SO I CAN FINALLY HEAL IT. LET IT RISE TO THE SURFACE SO I CAN RELEASE IT FOR GOOD.”

And you know that phrase, be careful what you wish for…

I had been missing a lesson, one of those core wounding lies I’d been believing, and God had been trying to teach me throughout relationships in my life, but God finally got the point across through each of the most pivotal relationships in my life, my “soulmates.”

I believe we all have soulmates. And I don’t mean soulmates in the way Hollywood movies portray them. Soulmates don’t have to be romantic relationships. Soulmates are people in your life who you feel that instant connection to, but not in a dependent or needy way. The guiding principle in a relationship between soulmates is that needs are equally met.

It’s someone that when you first see them, you are drawn to them. You have this feeling of either, “I feel like I know you” OR “I feel like I’m supposed to know you.”

In soulmate relationships, you can see and be seen as you truly are.

So when I prayed for God to show me what I was missing, God used the people who had always felt the closest to me. Because the core wound I had was all wrapped up in abandonment.

The lesson, the false identity that I kept calling in and confirming, is that I had been abandoned. By my sister, who, through no fault of her own, had left me when she died.

By friends. By boyfriends. By family. Every time I felt misunderstood. Every time someone had the chance to stick up for me but then didn’t. Every time someone could have picked me but chose someone else.

Finally, I realized that I hadn’t really been abandoned. Not by any soulmate, not by anyone… anyone but myself.

In truth, I had been self-abandoning my whole life and I needed to see that every single time I felt abandoned, it was actually me abandoning myself.

Once I started to learn the lesson, I realized how many times I’d missed it. For example, in 2014, I hired a business coach. She was someone who worked on her time only. If I needed her outside of our scheduled time, she was never available. Which I can respect– that’s called having boundaries.

But if she called me or needed me outside of that time, I always made myself available. Until one day, when my own business really began to show signs of success, she left. She accused me of something that was untrue, and she used that to validate her leaving. I now know that she was threatened by my success, but that didn’t make sense at the time because wasn’t her whole job to see me succeed?

But I continually self sacrificed my own business growth to put time into hers. I was self abandoning.

Once I could identify the self-abandonment, I started to understand that every painful memory where I’d felt abandoned, I had called in that experience. I asked for the good life. And we don’t get the good life without having learned the lessons. Since I wasn’t learning the lesson, I kept experiencing the pain that would (eventually) let me face the truth.

Because the good life is a life of unconditional love and that doesn’t happen until we first and foremost love ourselves unconditionally, until we can live out of our true identity.

I started realizing that I didn’t need to convince anyone of my worth. I knew it. I also knew that everything that is meant for me will never leave me. Never pass me by. I couldn’t possibly miss what was meant for me.

And this lesson didn’t stop with an epiphany. I got many opportunities to learn how to stop self-abandoning. So many.

A month after my big epiphany, God taught me the same lesson with the soulmate I met in kindergarten.

And a month after that, I went through the same lesson with Brian.

And just to round it out, another month later, I checked off this lesson with another soulmate, the one I met on the playground when I was eight years old.

These soulmates came in to set me free by showing me my true, God-given, divine identity.

**MY TELL-ALL MEMOIR**

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I am not the core wounds I’d been believing. I am worthy because I was made in love by the God who is love. That is the truest thing about me. Not that my sister died. Not that I’d been abandoned. Not even that I’d been self-abandoned. I am loved. I am love.

I have access to sovereign love all day every day. I know who I am and what I was made for, and no one can take that from me just through leaving me. Once I realized that, I stopped trying to make people stay, to force them to see my worth, and in doing so, I was able to give up some of my final bondage to this core wound.

It can be tempting to get frustrated with yourself when you have to learn the same lesson over and over again. I’d try to just be aware of those moments and remind myself that you can’t shame yourself through the process of healing.

At the beginning, anytime I battled or said things like, “I should…” I thought, “What if my daughter Stella came to me with this thought? How would I respond to her?” And I began to reparent the little girl who was still alive in me. I began to treat her with the kind of love and patience and grace I give my own daughter. I didn’t rush her. I didn’t shame her.

And throughout that process, bit by bit, I could travel back through everything I’d experienced as an adult, then an adolescent, then a child, and undo the trauma and hurts until I could embody the person I was meant to be. I was recreated and reborn.

I didn’t have to become someone else to find healing, I just had to forget everything that wasn’t my truest self.

And that’s what The Path Back to You is all about. Not changing who you are, but re-learning to become who you were made to be before wounds and life and disappointments and survival made you into someone you’re not.

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And in The Path Back to You, we don’t just talk about what core wounds are, we talk about how to identify them and heal. Want to do this good, hard work with us? Check out The Path Back to You.