What’s your trauma?

I’ve had this tremendous revelation. It deals with the trauma that I’ve been carrying for I don’t even know how long now. And recently, due to my newfound experience concerning a particular self love journey I’ve come to understand the root of a lot of the issues that I have, mainly in regards to my relationships with other people. The self love came first here, after almost 40 years of not having any self love, while on the contrary I had tremendous amounts of love for other people but I hated myself. I came to love myself, to become the biggest cheerleader of myself, and to put into practice daily affirmations. I hate that I never learned any of things until now. But at least I’m here...

My father was a tremendously wealthy high powered corporate attorney. At one one point the house we were living in was one of the largest in our neighborhood. He lost a lot of money at some point, and financially it was all downhill after that. Going back a bit in his life, he was a star football player at The University of Texas. Knowing this as a child was an exceedingly challenging thing to live up to. I wanted to race BMX bikes; I lived for my bicycle, it’s all I cared about. I remember telling my older brother this, that I was going to race on the Diamond Back Factory Team or whatever and me thinking that was going to impress him (I always wanted to impress him; what younger brother didn’t want to impress his older brother? I was certainly no exception...) he told me, “well, I’m sure dad’s gonna want you to be an attorney of some sort...” I was crushed. I knew law school was years extra of school, I currently hated school in the 7th grade as it was, so law school was out.

I then began to pay more attention to my dad and I would gauge his reactions to the things that I wanted to do. If it didn’t include football or college he had no interest in it. And it’s here that I believe I began to pick up this trauma. I knew that me being myself, having the interests that I had and pursuing the things I was into, was not what my dad wanted, and only served to broaden the distance between us. And granted I can attribute this to the idea of the men of his age and of that time didn’t talk about “toxic behavior” or “trauma” or anything of that sort; it wasn’t his fault, you can’t talk about the things you neither know about or understand. And those things made me the person I am today. They made me appreciate how my own children are different than I am and have different interests than I have.

But knowing that my father never seemed to be pleased with me, he never really ever seemed proud of me, and conversely from all that I felt like I was the child he never really wanted is something that I carried. It was heavy. Imagine a weighted backpack that you can never take off. But make it really heavy...

He died and I still carried that weight. I had children and I said I would never make them feel like that and I still carried that weight. That weight finally subsided when I decided that was all part of the past and the longer I thought about it and gave energy to that past that it would always be there.

So I stopped giving energy to that past.

I began to continue my journey of self love and I ramped up my daily affirmations and I lived more intensely in the day, because the right now is all any of us have.

If you’re anything like my father in how you regard others I would suggest you do the same. If you’re anything like how I was as a child, I would suggest you do the same. Your mental clarity depends on it.