Healing Childhood Wounds—The Enmeshed Family & 5 Toxic Patterns that Affect Your Ability to Thrive in Adult Relationships
Episode Notes
Are patterns from your past influencing how you show up in relationships today?
In this episode, we explore how early family dynamics—like criticism, control, & emotional immaturity—shape our adult relationships. This process isn’t about placing blame but about building awareness of behaviors that impact self-worth, boundaries, and relational health. By naming these patterns, we open a path to greater confidence, healthier connections, autonomy, and healing.
In this episode, we cover:
* The two essential ingredients for building secure parent-child attachment
* The role of enmeshment and individuation in emotional health
* 5 common parenting patterns that disrupt secure attachment
* 5 questions to assess how these patterns may be impacting you today
* Practical steps to heal and change
Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here.
Have questions or episode ideas? Leave them here.
If you enjoyed this episode, you'll love:
The Best of You: Break Free From Painful Patterns, Mend Your Past, and Discover Your True Self In God
Episode 109: Healing Burdens From the Past—How to Overcome Childhood Wounds and Heal Your Younger Self with Tammy Sollenberger
Resources:
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Episode 16: What are Attachment Styles and Why Does it Matter?
- Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay Gibson
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison: Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so thrilled to be with you today. We are diving into a topic that resonates with every single one of us. It's that parent-child relationship–particularly how our own parents shape us well into adulthood.
Please hear me say, we are not here to lay blame on parents today, because a lot of us are parents, and so we're very well aware of all of our own shortcomings. The minute we start looking back and looking at our own childhoods and looking at some of our own wounds, it can stir up some of that terror inside of us.Oh my goodness, I hope I'm not doing this to my own child.
This is very unique to all of us. Our generation of parenting, whether you're parenting young kids or teenagers, or maybe your own kids have already left the nest, we're so much more aware of these wounds that we all bring from childhood into adulthood. Again, we're not here to lay blame. As I like to say, we're here to name. We're not labeling other people, we’re naming patterns of behavior.
In this case, we're naming patterns of behavior that maybe occurred when we were children that have an influence over who we are today. These patterns of behavior are real. They affect us. And we need to be able to name them in order to understand their effect on us today and how we can heal and change things, not only in our own lives, but as we parent our own kids.
So remember, we're here to name, not blame, but it is so important to do this work so that we can heal from the past and move forward with confidence and clarity in claiming the life God has for us.
Many of you have written to me about various forms of challenges in your relationships with your own parents, whether you're caring for aging parents, or whether you're aware of some of the residual effects of your own childhood on your current life.
This question comes up in so many different ways. For example, Mary wrote to me that she really appreciated the episodes on emotional immaturity and that she would love to hear me talk about the specific challenges for children who are caring for aging parents who are emotionally immature.
Bernadette wrote that she's coming to terms as an adult with some insecurity issues that resulted in deficits from her imperfect parents. She wrote in parentheses, we’re all imperfect, which is exactly true. That's exactly right. We are all working to heal from some of these deficits, no matter how good or toxic your parents and primary caregivers were.
And then Leslie wrote this beautiful message, talking about how it's only been in the last two years that she has begun to realize that she is not a terrible person. The messages she received from a very critical and emotionally abusive mother were actually about her mother’s issues and her unresolved pain, and had absolutely nothing to do with the beautiful soul that she was.
Thank you for writing about that, Leslie. I'm so grateful that you are learning that you are worthy of love. You were worthy of care and you are finally learning that you were not the problem in that relationship.
Those are a few of the many messages I've received from people who are really trying to come to terms with the wounds from the past and then figure out, how do I heal myself now? How do I also ensure that I don't pass these wounds down on to the next generation? What about when I need to care for these people, especially aging parents who have actually been really harmful to me and, and now I have to figure out how to care for them?
Okay, so that's the lay of the land of this topic. We're not going to get into every single aspect of that today. I've got a couple of episodes coming up designed to address a lot of this. If you continue to have questions, you can always leave those questions for me on The Best of You Podcast question form. There's a link to it in this episode show notes. You can also go to my website, dralisoncook.com/podcast, and find that link on this episode's webpage.
I love hearing from you. It's really helpful for me to take in this information from you so I can see what you're grappling with. When I start to see themes emerge, it helps me understand, oh, we need to do some episodes on this. So thank you for taking the time to write to me about these topics.
Now listen, before we get started, some of you may have really healthy relationships with your parents. Maybe they're not perfect, but for the most part, your parents were reliable. They showed up for you, they support you. Even when there were ruptures, you knew that you could repair, you knew that you could find a way back to each other
For some of you listening, there's no relationship anymore with your parents. The relationship got so toxic and the trauma was so deep. You can't be in a relationship with those people. And that's so painful, when you have to remove yourself from those relationships.
For many of you listening, you're somewhere in the middle with your parents. There were some really good and supportive things that you got from your parents, and there were also some hard things, some things you're trying to unlearn no matter where you fall on that spectrum.
So there are two crucibles where we typically become aware of these childhood wounds. Number one is our intimate relationships. Our intimate relationships, especially our marriage relationships, are so often the relationships where suddenly we begin to notice our own patterns and we're like, oh my goodness, why can't I engage in a healthy conversation about conflict?
I tend to go into flight mode or I go into fight mode or I shut down or I withdraw. Oh my goodness, that's what I did in my family of origin. That's what I had to do in my family of origin to survive. That's great knowledge, but now I've got to figure out how to heal so that I can show up in this current relationship in a different way.
That's one of the gifts of intimate relationships; they bring to the surface some of these areas where we've got wounds from our past that we need to heal so that we can show up differently in the current relationship going forward.
The second big place where a lot of these wounds begin to surface is when we have kids of our own. We begin to realize, oh my goodness, I didn't even realize. Now I'm trying to parent this child. I want to do it differently. And suddenly I notice myself behaving in ways I don't like. I notice myself getting angry. I notice myself getting avoidant. I notice myself avoiding these hard conversations.
Or I notice myself having a really hard time figuring out how to set boundaries, or I notice myself having a really hard time when I need to let my child find their own way apart from me. We begin to notice some of these patterns that likely go all the way back to our own childhoods, when we begin to parent ourselves.
The stakes can feel really high, because we begin to realize, I've got to heal these patterns because I don't want to repeat them in these relationships I care so much about in this present day with my spouse, with my kids, with my friends. I want to say to you right at the top of this episode, the goal is not perfection.
This is a process of awareness–yeah, I've got some growing to do. I've got some things from the past I have to undo and it's going to take me a little while, but my ability to name those things and begin to even say some of those things to the people that I love, “Hey, I know I'm not great at conflict. I know sometimes I can actually flee any conflicts before it even surfaces.
And I want to let you know that I'm aware of that. And I may not be able to change that right away, but I'm going to work on it. And I promise you, I'm going to keep coming back.” Or you might need to say to those loved ones, “I know I've got some anger. I can get really angry and I'm becoming more and more aware of it and I want you to know that I see it and I'm working on it. When I notice it, I can become aware of it more quickly and I can come back to you and say, I'm sorry that didn't come out right. Can we do a take two on that conversation?”
There are lots of ways you can let your loved ones know, I'm healing some stuff here. These patterns go way back. I'm not going to change overnight, but I'm aware. I'm honoring that and I'm committed to growing and healing and moving forward in a new and better way.
When you give yourself that spaciousness, you're calming your nervous system, which allows you to show up more authentically, with more calm, with more courage, with more confidence. If your spouse or your friend came to you and said, hey, I know I still do this thing. It's got a long tail. It goes all the way back. This is deeply rooted. I'm aware. I'm sorry. I know that's hard for you. We don't expect people to change on a dime, but that awareness is a huge step toward health in all of our relationships.
So remember you're committing to this journey of healing. We often on the podcast use that Greek word, sozo, in the Bible that means salvation that can also be translated as healing. We are on this journey of sanctification. We are on this journey of being made more and more like Christ, which means being made more and more like that person who God wants us to become, the most beautiful version of ourselves.
This is a process that we will be on throughout our entire lifetime. But every single step you can take to own it, to honor it, to name it without shame, both to yourself and to your loved one, is a huge step and a success in and of itself.
I want to start off by naming some key anchoring terms, because I'm going to be using these terms a lot. And then I'm going to move into the five toxic patterns of behaviors that may have impacted you as a child and that you're carrying with you into adulthood.
The first word I want to name is enmeshment. Sometimes, the emotional bond between a parent and child becomes so intertwined that it's hard to distinguish who you are and your own feelings, your own thoughts, your own beliefs from that of your parents. This is what we mean by enmeshment. We can actually become too close, too enmeshed. We become so caught up in another person that we don't know where they end and I begin.
When you're a child, you are dependent on the adult who is caring for you to be the adult. It's the adult's responsibility to help honor that balance, that dance. I go deep into this topic in my book, The Best of You. I call it that dance between connection and autonomy, closeness and distance.
We need both in healthy relationships, and it's the parent's job to really delineate that dance of being close, but also honoring difference. I love you. You are my child, and, you're different from me. You're a unique individual. It's my job sometimes to step back and see you for who you are as someone different from me.
That's a really nuanced dance between parent and child. Enmeshment occurs when a parent begins to blur those lines, and typically the parent is depending too much on the child. They want to see the child as an extension of themselves. This creates a blurred boundary between parent and child.
Enmeshment can make the healthy process of what psychologists call individuation, the process of becoming your own person, really, really difficult. Even if you've created physical distance, that emotional hold can remain really strong. Someone who grew up in an enmeshed relationship where your parent kind of lived their life through you, even when you moved away from home, even when you got your own job, maybe even got married, even had kids or yourself, you might find yourself struggling to know what you think, know what you want, know your own feelings as separate from the people who raised you.
You might even feel guilty about that. That's because it's been really hard for you to individuate. A parent's job is to essentially raise your child to leave you. I think about this in nature. We see in moms that there's a point at which you're raising that child, you're nurturing that child, but eventually you aware that child has to leave the nest and learn to fly without you.
When you have that endgame in mind, when you understand that eventually your child needs to leave you, you're going to love that child, but you're also going to equip them to leave you to function on their own apart from you. That's your job. And when you do that well, your child will be delighted to continue to stay connected to you because those roles are clear.
You've built that trust. You've made yourself a safe place for your child to return to as an adult, because paradoxically, you've honored their need to leave you. You're not trying to keep them close to you in an unhealthy way. You get that your best way of staying close to your child is to honor that they need to leave you. It's a beautiful paradox.
Now, the other term I want to throw out here is attachment theory. Some of you might be thinking about attachment as I'm talking, and it can be a really helpful framework for understanding how our earliest bonds with our caregivers shape our future relationships.
I did a whole episode on attachment styles in episode 16, so you can go back and listen to that episode. We'll link to it in the show notes. But for today's purposes, it's important to understand that a secure attachment happens when your parents offer that consistent love and support, where they're allowing you to feel safe with them.
But here's the thing. They're allowing you to feel safe with them so that you can explore life independent from them. That's the essence of secure attachment. I'm safe enough with these people who love me that I can go out into the world and explore it on my own. And there are different milestones that I go through in The Best of You of how that happens at different junctures and different ages.
Throughout your developing years as a child, that's essentially what's happening–a healthy, secure attachment. There's that safety from those parents at home that allows you to go out and explore the world independently. And when that doesn't happen, we start to notice those anxious attachments, those avoidant attachments, those mixed attachments, where we don't have that safety at home.
It inhibits our ability to explore the world outside of us with confidence. So there are a lot of things that can disrupt secure attachment. Abuse disrupts secure attachment, neglect disrupts secure attachment, and enmeshment can disrupt secure attachment where it's not actually safe in the sense of that stable home base where this person loves you, but does not need you.
When enmeshment occurs, this person loves you to make themselves feel better. There's a sense of closeness that you learn to understand as comfort when you're doing what the caregiver wants and needs you to do for their sake. That feels like comfort, but it's not actually safety.
So here's what I want you to remember. Healthy parent-child relationships are built on two key building blocks. Connection and separation; both are necessary. A parent's job is to help you develop a strong sense of self while also supporting you as you learn to live your own life.
This involves encouraging you to learn how to trust your own instincts, how to make your own decisions, how to explore your own ideas and feelings. And that leads to healthy individuation. When enmeshment occurs, you can feel like you're betraying your caregiver. You can feel like you should defer your own needs, your own instincts, your own decision-making, to fulfill the perceived needs of the parent.
Now, there's a really good book–I've recommended this book before. It's a bestselling book by Lindsay Gibson. It's called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. And there's a reason this book is everywhere, because this text so clearly lays out what some of these patterns look like in emotionally immature parents.
I'm going to give a really condensed version of how I have noticed some of these behaviors of an emotionally immature parent showing up. But that's really what's happening here. It's where a parent doesn't have the maturity to do what the child needs to become a healthy autonomous adult.
Number one is unpredictability. When your parents’ emotional states are unpredictable, maybe they had an undiagnosed mental illness, maybe there was an addiction, maybe they had a lot of emotional outbursts, or any difficulty managing their own emotions, where they couldn't take responsibility for their own emotions.
That can leave a child with that anxious attachment. There isn't that sense of safety. It's like one day, mom is great. The next day, mom can't get out of bed. And there's nothing to explain that. I want to be clear. It's not that parents can't struggle while raising kids. We can, but we have to be able to name it for them. We have to be able to talk to our kids about that.
Listen, your dad struggles with depression. Sometimes you're going to notice that he has a hard time getting up. It has nothing to do with you. He's getting help for that. We're working on that. We love you. Here's what's happening. This isn't your fault.
It's in the absence of that communication and that honoring of what's truly happening that kids begin to make up stories. This is my fault. And kids start to connect dots that aren't meant to be connected when there's unpredictability. I come home from school and my mom is really sad today and she's not naming that. She's crying off in the corner and I can see that and that affects me, but she's not talking to me about it. I don't know what's happening.
So as a child, in my little brain, what I assume is, this is my fault. I have to come home from school every day, super duper happy, because somehow the way I'm coming home from school is making mom behave differently, even when that's not true.
So again, unpredictability is when a parent's emotional state is unpredictable and unaccounted for. The parent does not take responsibility for what's happening. Another example, a parent loses their temper and gets really angry. We don't love that. That's not great. That's hard for kids. But what makes it even harder is when it goes unaddressed and unnamed and unrepaired.
If a parent is struggling with an anger issue and they sometimes come down hard, the ability to come back and say, I got angry, I have a temper. That is not your fault. You did nothing to evoke that kind of reaction in me, that's my fault. That's my job, to work through that anger. That is not your fault.
We're naming it, which allows the child to release the pain of that and understand that it's not their fault and see an adult be an adult. An adult takes responsibility. An adult takes accountability and hopefully, presumably, the adult begins to make changes as well.
Unpredictability can also be part of neglect. Sometimes a parent is absent. They're not in the room. They might not be yelling. They might not be crying, but due to their own problems and their own heartaches and their own hardships, they're maybe going through the motions of sitting at the dinner table, of getting you to bed, getting you to school, but they're absent.
There's no emotional presence and it's erratic. Sometimes they're present. A lot of times they're not. Kids make up narratives in the absence of consistency. They will make up a narrative about that. Those narratives are almost always self-shaming. It's my fault. I'm the problem.
Number two, the other one I see so commonly, is what we call parentification. This occurs when the parent relies on the child to meet the parent's emotional needs. So if you were conditioned to take care of your parent's emotions, you became the parent for your parents, you may struggle to understand healthy boundaries in adult relationships.
You may feel like it's your job to be the adult in the room for everyone around you. You may take on more responsibility for other people's emotions than is your responsibility to take. It's really hard to change this pattern if you were parentified as a child. So for example, even with a well meaning parent, maybe you're a highly empathetic kid.
You're pretty precocious, and you can read the cues and you can tell that mom is sad, or dad is upset, and you go to them and you say, oh man, are you okay? Slowly, over time, mom or dad or whoever the person is caring for you begins to confide in you. This is really hard.
You actually have the ability to be there for them, to help them through those emotions, to cheer them up, to make them feel better. Maybe as you begin to get a little older, you might even have wisdom for them and slowly, you start parenting your parents.
Now listen, when you're in an adult relationship with your parents, this is going to happen a little more. We move into two-way relationships a little bit more with our parents as we become adults, although it's always really a one-way relationship, because a parent always has more power than the child, even in adult parent-child relationships.
But man, when you're a kid, if the primary means by which you're relating to a parent is that you're caring for them, it's a big problem, because two things are happening there.
Number one, you're learning how to always prioritize someone else over your own needs. And number two, you're not getting your needs met. Think about that. You're not getting your needs met as a child. Your parent isn't attuning to you and attuning to your emotional states and saying things like, I love your empathy. I love that you care about me, but I want you to know this is not your problem.
This is my problem. I'm the adult here. Thank you for noticing that I was sad. I appreciate that. And this is not your problem to solve. This is my problem. I'm an adult. I have other adults who will help me through this. I'm here for you. I want to know what's going on with you.
That's what a healthy parent does in those situations. It's not that we don't want to honor the empathy of our kids. It's beautiful, but we don't want to take that slippery slope down to letting our kids parent us. And it happens all the time. We have to watch that as parents, because two things are happening there.
They're overdeveloping that attunement muscle to other people, but they're also underdeveloping what it feels like to have someone else attune to them. And this sets you up for all kinds of issues in adult relationships. When you go into your adulthood, you don't know what it looks like to be in a relationship with someone who's there for you. You only know how to show up for other people, and that sets you up for a lot of codependency.
It sets you up to be taken advantage of by other people. It sets you up for one-way relationships that are unsatisfying, where a lack of intimacy occurs. So this is a big one to understand if you see some of those patterns in your adult life, where you really have a hard time receiving care from others, asking for what you need, even identifying what you need.
It may well be that you grew up in an environment where you had to be the adult. From a very young age, you were pretty good at assessing the needs around you, but you did not know how to be a child and receive the care of someone else. And that's really important in healthy relationships, the ability to both give out and receive care.
Thirdly, we're going to talk about criticism. If you grew up in a culture of constant criticism, this damages your core sense of self. It's really hard for a child to understand that all of this criticism around me is not actually about me. Because these are my parents. They know best. That's what kids think.
So all of this criticism that I'm getting, that must be the truth. I must be a bad kid. I must not be okay. They're criticizing me for a reason. This is really unhealthy. We don't grow up with a healthy sense of our goodness, of our God given worth, of the beauty in our soul.
We grow up feeling inferior, feeling insecure, feeling unworthy. We don't understand inherently that we are a beloved child of God. You can heal, but it is so important to begin to connect those dots and go, you know what? Part of the reason I can't actually believe in myself and believe that I'm worthy of good love is that I've never experienced it.
I've been told in one way or another that I was worthless, that I wouldn't amount to anything, that I was a failure, that I could never get anything right since the day I was born. I don't have any other memories. So how would I know what it's like to internalize an entirely different message, which is, “I am beloved. I am worthy of love. I'm not perfect. Of course, who is? And I am a beautiful soul made in the image of God”?
Number four, control. If you grew up in an environment that was highly controlled, again, sometimes well-intended parents want to keep you overly safe and they want to control everything. Sometimes it's out of a good intention, but they don't let you take enough healthy risks.
Sometimes it's coming from a selfish motivation, where they're more concerned about how they appear in the world. They control your behavior so they can look good in the world to their friends. They want you to go to the right school or play the right sport or have the right friends. And that's really more about them than it is about you.
So whether that's coming from a desire to keep you from harm and they control too much, or if it's coming from a more self-serving place, it makes it hard for you when you get into your adult world to understand how to take healthy risks. If you grew up in a highly controlled environment, you might go one of two directions.
You might take too many risks and overcorrect and kind of blow everything up. Or you might be really, really scared and stay really, really small because you've never learned how to develop that healthy resilience, that healthy tolerance for some of the uncertainty, some of the stressors, even some of even the hardships of life.
Lastly, I want to talk about rescuing, and I see this in certain types of families where the parents, out of usually a goodness of heart, they're constantly swooping in and rescuing kids out of any discomfort, out of any hardship. They're fighting their kids' battles. Now, sometimes as parents, we need to intervene on behalf of our kids. Something's happening that is wrong. There's an injustice and we need to intervene to protect our kids. That is absolutely true.
But in parents who are rescuing, it's those normal everyday incidents. I didn't get invited to this birthday party. No, they're not ganging up and bullying me, but they're not including me in their group, and it's really painful. As a parent, we have to help our kids honor that that's hard and also teach them how to tolerate the pain of that.
Two things can be true. You have to learn how to navigate challenges in life. You have to learn how to do that with your parents there as that safe anchor. They're never going to leave you, but they're also not always swooping in to rescue you out of it. Sometimes doing things that are hard or even doing things where we try and we're not successful at them are really important for our character and our growth.
Rescuing can also create a situation in which you arrive at adulthood without those necessary skills to tolerate the things that come our way in life as adults. There can sometimes be an entitlement, a constant kind of feeling disappointed by other people, when maybe those other people are actually exhibiting normal behaviors.
They're not taking responsibility for something that isn't theirs to take. It's actually yours to take responsibility for. So all of this comes down to that separation and connection. How do I stay connected to people while also understanding what's mine is mine and what's theirs is theirs?
So here are five questions that you might ask yourself. Maybe you ask a loved one or a trusted advisor to reflect on these five parenting patterns, if you suspect that they may have an impact on you today. These are some questions to think about and notice and wonder about and get curious about, because it will help you begin to frame your experience so that you can take brave steps toward healing.
Regarding unpredictability, how do I react when someone I care about is emotionally volatile or inconsistent? Do I find myself constantly trying to manage their feelings or walking on eggshells? If you notice that inside of you, when someone else is emotionally volatile or inconsistent, it triggers a part of you that's like, oh, I need to do something to fix that.
I need to change something about myself to fix their feelings. That's a cue that there's a wound there that you could begin to heal. The truth is, if someone else is emotionally volatile, that's their responsibility to work through that. It's your responsibility to be aware, to notice what happens inside of you, to take responsibility for yourself in that moment. It's not your responsibility to try to fix their emotions.
Number two, as it relates to parentification, do I feel responsible for taking care of others' emotional needs before my own in my adult relationships? Do I struggle to ask for help or set boundaries because I'm so used to always prioritizing others? Notice if that's true. My default is to immediately take care of them, immediately go to their needs, whether it's your friends, whether it's your spouse, whether it's your own parents.
I've got to take care of them. I've got to be the bigger person. I've got to do what they need, versus sitting with the sometimes uncomfortable feeling of, I wonder what I need in this situation for myself or from another person. And that may be beginning to notice the effects of that parentification in your own adult life.
And then number three, when it comes to criticism, how do I respond to feedback or criticism from others? Do I immediately internalize it? Criticize myself or feel like I need to perfect myself to avoid being judged? In other words, if I notice criticism around me or even any healthy feedback, do I immediately assume I'm at fault?
I must've gotten it wrong. I've got to do better. And if so, that's something to notice. What if instead I could take a deep breath and wonder, is it true? Is that criticism even about me? Or is it more about this other person? It's possible this has nothing to do with me. It's possible I haven't done anything wrong. You can begin to build up that new muscle.
Number four, control. Do I find it difficult to make decisions without seeking approval or validation from others? Am I able to pursue my own interests or do I feel pressure to live up to the expectations of others? And notice, if I were to vote a certain way, if I were to attend a certain church, if I were to wear a certain article of clothing as an adult, is there sort of this internal backlash?
Notice that. Begin to pay attention. What if I could challenge myself to take some small steps toward autonomy, toward doing some things that I like to do, even though they're different from what I was taught was okay? You might start with some low hanging fruit. It might start with something you wear, a food that you eat that's a little bit different from what you were allowed as a child.
And then number five, rescuing. When facing challenges, do I tend to rely on others to bail me out, to fix things for me? Or do I feel empowered to tackle problems on my own? How comfortable am I with allowing others to fail and learn from their mistakes? How often am I wanting to swoop in and rescue others?
That might be another way this shows up. Notice that and maybe ask for feedback again from a trusted advisor because you're beginning to identify patterns. There's a reason you're this way. Likely this goes all the way back to childhood. So these questions should help you identify how these early patterns might still be affecting your adult life and your relationships.
I want you to remember this above all else: healing starts with you. No matter what happened in your past, you have the power to begin to change some of these patterns. You can do this inside of you.
It starts with beginning to notice and name some of these patterns and beginning to entertain the thought, what if it could be different? What if there was another way? You will begin to unlock the natural God-given healing inside of your soul. Because no matter what happened to you in the past, your body is designed with a bent toward healing.
Invite God's spirit into that process and ask God to begin to nudge you when one of those patterns is showing up in your life. And I promise you, you will begin to see numerous opportunities and numerous occasions to make a tiny change, one brave step at a time.