Healing from growing up controlled has three steps:
Step One: Emotionally leaving home by
separating from the hurtful aspects of your upbringing, parents and family role.
Step Two: Bringing balance to your
relationship with your parents.
Step Three: Redefining your life.
Emotional healing is like physical healing. If you cut
your finger, you clean the wound and protect it from infection with a bandage. If you
break your leg, you set the bone and wear a cast to protect from further trauma. This
allows your body’s natural healing process to work.
It’s the same with emotional healing. When
you’re emotionally wounded by a controlling childhood, "cleaning" the wound
means facing your true past and speaking about it. And the "bandage" or
"cast" that protects these wounds from further injury is emotionally leaving
home. This doesn’t necessarily mean a physical separation from your parents, but
it may entail letting go of counterproductive links with them and your upbringing.
You cannot mend a broken bone faster by telling it to
"heal quicker." Healing a broken leg means wearing a cast, which can make
walking difficult. Similarly, emotional healing may mean changes in habits that at first
feel awkward.
Like physical healing, emotional healing can happen 24
hours a day without conscious effort. You may not know exactly how a cut heals; you just
notice that each day it gets a little healthier. Similarly, people who begin emotionally
separating from a controlled upbringing frequently notice over time that they develop more
positive values and a greater sense of freedom, often without knowing precisely how.
Emotional separation opens the way for you to bring
balance to your relationship with your parents, whether they are living or dead.
Emotional separation also permits you to redefine your life and yourself in terms
of who you really are and where you really want to go, not in terms of your parents or
your past.
