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Laurie Weiss
a book bubble about
Letting It Go
Self-Help
Author Insight
Really? Wow!
As a psychotherapist for 45 years I “know” from experience that people are affected by things that happened to them when they were children. Now scientific validation shows the correlation between “adverse childhood experiences” and problems later in life. The Center for Disease Control-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations of childhood abuse and neglect and later-life health and well-being. www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/ From 1995 to 1997 over 17,000 people received physical exams and completed confidential surveys about their childhood experiences and current health status and behaviors. And ACE’s are common!!! Almost two-thirds of participants reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more ACEs. I believe each ACE is a childhood experience that most children do not have sufficient resources to manage. Therefor they freeze their energy to protect themselves. I believe that learning to release the frozen energy helps protect us from the otherwise negative effects shown in the study. The research shows that as the number of ACEs increases so does the risk for a long list of difficulties in adult life. The list includes addictions of all kinds, depression, financial stress, many physical illnesses and many types of violence. If this fascinates you the way it does me, start with the link above and explore.
Book Excerpt
Letting It Go
You Try to Protect Yourself by Holding On
It takes some of your energy to hold on or freeze your negative experiences, and that energy gets stuck in place and isn’t available for you to use to handle whatever is in front of you right now. So, paradoxically, something you did to protect yourself in the past causes a problem in your present life.
Sometimes we don’t have those resources simply because we are powerless children in a world of grownups. Sometimes it’s because the adults who should have been able to protect us are not immediately available for a variety of benign or traumatic reasons.
One toddler wandered a few feet away from his watching mother and encountered a stress that was toxic for him that other children usually did not find stressful at all. He simply saw a clown who was there to entertain children. The toddler was terrified and inconsolable and set his autopilot to protect him from these dangerous creatures. That protection lasted for years and the autopilot was very difficult to reset.
Sometimes we are overwhelmed by trauma which no ordinary human can manage. This often happens to military personnel who serve in war zones and to the first responders who protect us as police, firefighters and medical professionals. When we encounter too many losses in a short period of time and can’t process them, we tend to freeze energy around them to protect ourselves from feeling the pain of our experiences.
Sometimes we hold on to something because it is incomplete and we want a satisfactory ending. This can be especially problematic when the person or event with whom we want to complete something is long gone from our lives, either because they have died or have changed so much that the original just no longer exists. It’s like wanting to complete something with a 30-year-old parent who is now 80 years old and does not even remember the incident that you have held on to for 50 years.
The more things you are holding on to, the more likely it is that some of them will be reactivated by the ordinary stress of just living. That’s when we sometimes experience anxiety or depression that seems to have no particular cause.
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