Feeling Stuck? Look at your parents role

If you’re feeling stuck in any way in your life moving forward, whether it’s a physical, mental or emotional issue, money, career, relationships or health, have you considered the role your parents may be playing in these issues?

You may already blame your parents for a lot of the problems in your life, you may have cut ties with them, or you may be at a point where you think you have resolved everything with them, or you might think your parents are great….

…. but you’re still feeling stuck.

I wanted to share with you a different angle of an unconscious pattern I was actually unaware of that was related to my parents. You may or not be aware of this yourself but this could be a game changer for you if you are still feeling stuck. 

I thought I had done all the work on myself around this issue but I clearly missed one piece of the puzzle and I’ll explain how I discovered it. 

As kids we look to our parents as we need their safety during our early years of life for our survival. 

During these early years of life we are learning about our environment and how we fit in the world. Our view of the world is very closely linked to the view of our parents and their beliefs. 

If we agree with our parents beliefs and conform to them, then according to our subconscious and survival we will belong, feel safe and receive love. 

It doesn’t matter if you think your parents were good people or not, whether you had a good upbringing or not, we all had to take on some of our parents beliefs of the world to survive. 

The problem comes when we get the chance to leave home and go out into the world on our own. 

When we have been living with our parents or caregivers for so long and relying on them to make us feel safe and for our survival, we develop an unconscious need to feel safe and receive love from our parents that continues long after we have moved out of home. 

These needs are very strong because they are linked directly to our survival. Even when our parents aren't around us all the time, we can unconsciously take actions that align with not upsetting them. 

Sometimes if we do take action outside of their belief systems we can feel a sense of guilt or shame because it doesn’t fit into the belief system that was originally approved by our parents. We try and hide our actions from them to keep us safe.

This pattern of conforming to our parents' beliefs can be the hardest to shift, because they were created in our early years of life when we did actually need them for our survival. It is a firm pattern that is deeply rooted. 

An example of a pattern from my childhood was around money. 

My parents acted as if money was scarce. Dad would say turn the lights off if you’re not using them, you're wasting electricity as if it was costing him money. 

If I asked for something I wanted, my mum would say ‘wish in one hand, spit in the other and see which one fills up first’ basically meaning that I couldn’t have what I wanted and I associated that with money. 

To keep them happy I went along with their belief that money was scarce. 

I stopped asking for things that were not necessary and I made sure the lights were turned off if I wasn’t using them. I was keeping them happy by agreeing with their beliefs, so I felt safe.

Now as I got older I started to see other people with a lot of money and spending it without a care in the world, and buying whatever they felt like they wanted. 

It was so hard to see, and hard for me to understand why they were wasting their money. 

I would think to myself, didn’t they know their money might run out and that money was so hard to come by. 

I’d get really angry and resentful towards people that I believed were wasting money unnecessarily and just getting what they wanted. 

I got annoyed because I felt I couldn't do that with my own money. 

I started questioning what was wrong with me. These people were earning the same amount as me and living a similar life but where were they getting all this money from to spend?

I wanted desperately to go out and earn lots of money so I could spend it on whatever I wanted and experience that feeling. 

I felt so stuck because I wanted to go for what my heart wanted, but I did not want to disappoint my parents, because disappointing them was linked to my safety and survival as a small child.

So unconsciously I would sabotage myself out of every chance I had to earn money, because if I did earn a lot of money and could spend it how I wanted it would contradict my parents belief of how money was scarce. 

And I didn’t want to upset my parents by disagreeing with them because I felt the need for their safety.

If I was to go out and spend money on myself without a care how would they judge me?

I believed they may have gotten angry or upset at me…

…. and if they were angry or upset at me I would feel like I didn’t belong, and that would be unsafe for me.

I knew from the work I had done on myself that there was a belief of scarcity around money from my parents but I felt I had resolved that belief about myself. 

But what I failed to do is link this to the beliefs of my parents and how they would judge me because of their belief around money.

How they perceived me was unconsciously linked to my need to belong and survive even though I didn’t need that safety from them anymore. 

Another money belief that I witnessed was my mum's belief that the only way she was going to be able to afford to have the things she truly desired was by winning lotto. 

To come into a large amount of money was pure luck. Looking at it now she was giving her power away by believing she didn't have the ability within her to get money any other way and be able to spoil herself.  

A few years ago we (my wife and I) sold a business for a good return but instead of investing and using that money wisely, I didn’t do anything with it and let it gradually run down. 

I had started another business a year prior to the sale that was starting to take off, but as soon as we sold the other business and had the money in the bank, I didn’t push myself harder to establish it further. 

For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to grow my new business. The money slowly ran down over a year because the business stopped growing. 

I was stuck in procrastination simply because of this belief of my mums that large sums of money could only come through luck. 

Because we had achieved this through our business and created this wealth through our knowledge, I was unconsciously giving it all back.

And because this didn’t match with my mum’s belief of only being lucky, I felt needed to get back to the reality of having a limited amount of money because I didn't want to be perceived by her as having a lot of money, again that might make her upset that I had proven her belief wrong.

What we're doing in these situations is unconsciously acting like a 5 year old version of ourselves that needs our parents for our safety, but just in an older body, because we are still afraid to be abandoned by them. 

Crazy isn't it how our mind unconsciously works! 

These are our perceptions and they may not be the same as what our parents actually believe, but we carry these with us as truth until they are addressed. 

Why we feel stuck

If we want to do something that we don’t believe our parents would approve of we may feel like we will be betraying them and risk losing our safety (even though we don’t need it any more)...

…and if we stay where we are, continuing to not go for what we want, we end up betraying ourselves for not going with our heart.

We start to feel stuck, we are either living in fear of being abandoned by our parents or we are angry and resentful towards them, because we feel like they are holding us back from what we want. 

What happens when we feel stuck? We feel powerless to move forward. When we feel powerless we feel stressed. 

Most people like myself deal with this nagging stress and emotions in many ways. A lot of the time it’s too painful to face the situation, so we try to distract ourselves from feeling these emotions.

We distract ourselves and mask our underlying emotions a number of ways, maybe eating, drinking, smoking, drugs, medication, gambling, work, more negative emotions, gaming, sex, social media etc

As you probably know the nagging feeling doesn’t go away. It always comes back. 

How this almost always leads to health issues.

When we feel stressed we are activating our fight or flight response which puts us in survival mode. 

When our body is in survival mode our energy gets diverted from our digestive system, immune system, reproductive system and other important systems to give us the energy to fight or run away from danger.

If we don’t address this danger we become stuck in survival mode and our body cannot repair itself or grow. 

And when it is not repairing itself or growing it is starting to die. 

Our body is then in dis-ease and we start getting sick or injured regularly, and that in turn can lead to chronic illness. 

I was able to stop this cycle when I realised I was getting sick or injured regularly. It was almost at the point of chronic illness. 

When we just tolerate feeling stuck, the stress is always there nagging away at us even when we think we are distracted. It doesn’t leave until we resolve the issue.  

With the Emotion Code and Body Code we connect with your subconscious and can help identify some of these unconscious patterns that may be causing any number of issues for you. 

We can help remove the underlying emotions that are keeping you stuck, so that you live the life you want to create. 

If you are feeling stuck and want to move forward the best way to get started working with us is our New Client Package. 

Looking forward to hearing from you and helping you become free from these limiting patterns.