Some of us can feel empty and lonely on the inside, despite having on the outside what most people will describe as a good life.
Some of us just can’t shake the feeling that “I’m a bad person” or “Nobody really likes me”, despite also having evidence that they maintain positive relationships.
These may be deeply rooted beliefs developed and reinforced over a person’s lifetime. The stronger and inexplicable the belief seems, the likelier that it might have stemmed from very early life experiences.
Few of us have memories we can tell people about the time when we were very little. But the physical and emotional parts of us remember. For instance, I cannot tell you as a fact whether I was often left alone as a baby when I really needed a parent to come to me. But after I read a story about parent-child separation or child loneliness, I might relate to it so much that I feel very real and intense feelings of abandonment and loss “for no reason” and “out of nowhere”. I might notice “I don’t know where this came from but it feels so real”.
Babies don’t have the cognitive and language abilities to form a narrative of an event, so those early experiences can’t be recalled later by words and logic. By the time we have language we can store memory like little movie clips complete with sensory details, feelings and emotions. The earliest memories, however, may be imprints of feelings and emotions that appear without context.
In Core Energetics we don’t have to know the facts of our past. We can process by responding to feelings and emotions as they surface. We can begin to release some of those formative beliefs and strategies (some of them we learned as a baby!) and live in the present with our full potential.
Rebecca Liu 