Shefali Tsabary - A Radical Awakening: Turn Pain into Power, Embrace Your Truth, Live Free

Like a sword in a sheath, her brilliance stays dormant

Like a bow in a quiver, her power stays invisible

Like a pea in a pod, her worth stays small

Like a trapped animal in a cage, she awaits permission to be freed

Like a butterfly in formation, she will only emerge when her old skin dies.

I knew I was in trouble when I found myself in a ditch on the side of the road with zero recollection of how I got there. I had fallen asleep at the wheel and my car had stopped inches from a tree. Exhausted from mothering my toddler and coping with a rigorous PhD program in tandem, without any help from relatives or nannies, I had burnt myself to the ground. The jolt woke me up. I could barely breathe and my entire body was shaking. Jittery and confused, I was luckily able to get my car back onto the highway. Thankfully, there was no injury to anyone. Even my vehicle was undamaged.

The incident brought to the fore another kind of casualty that had been eroding me from within for a long timethe serious destruction I had been doing to my soul.

Soul erosion is a gradual processa slow, creeping, chipping away of our inner being, resulting in the inevitable death of all we know to be our truest selves. Its a disease that begins in childhood and spreads contagiously, especially in women. Its symptoms include loss of power, authenticity, voice, and vision. Soul erosion is essentially an obliteration of our inner knowing. Each incident in which we suppress our inner truth, we engage in the erosion of our most precious treasureour essence.

Let me illustrate how this happens. Trista, one of my clients, remembers being around four years old when she broke her favorite toya doll she had named after herself and took care of like it was her little baby. Heartbroken, she recalls crying for hours. Her father, a strict disciplinarian, told her to stop crying or else she would get a spanking. This made her cry even more.

When she continued crying at the dinner table, her father lost his temper, broke the rest of her doll, and dumped it in the garbage. Shocked by his rage, Trista recalls being stupefied. It was like he had broken me into pieces and dumped me in the garbage. I wanted to cry and scream. I actually wanted to hit him and break him, but instead I just stood there, frozen. No one came to my rescue. No one comforted me. For the first time I realized what it meant to be abandoned. He didnt just throw my precious doll away, he discarded my entire sense of safety, security, and worth. I could never trust him or my mother in the same way again. From that moment, it dawned on her that she needed to hide her true self. This is how her lifetime armor of emotional stoicism formed.

To this day, even in her forties, Trista has a challenging time expressing her inner world and feelings articulately. Both her husband and children often complain to her that they dont feel connected to her because she is too harsh and rigid. Her teenage son, Matt, in particular had been entering into almost daily conflicts with her, which led her to seek therapy with me. It was only after much processing that she came to understand how her childhood defensesemotional withdrawal and suppressionwere now interfering with her ability to connect with her son.

Trista was repeating her childhood pattern to the letter, even personifying some of her fathers old ways. When Matt expressed his feelings, Trista found herself being critical and harsh with him. Now she understood why. He reminded her of her younger self, the one who was reprimanded by her father. When she saw him being emotional, she interpreted it as weakness and sought to squash his feelings, invalidating him just as she had been. As she brought her old memories into awareness, she began to heal the wounds of her old self and, in this way, opened her heart to her son.

At first, our true self fights for survival. It protests loudly, so much so that we feel nauseated. As we continue to ignore it, the protesting fades until its a mere whimper. As the years erase all memory of its existence, the plaintive cries recede altogether.

This loss of self is universal. We have all felt its ravaging wounds. As our authenticity erodes, whats left behind is a cavernous inner crater filled with a cacophony of chaos that infects every part of how we now live. It manifests in all sorts of insidious and seemingly insignificant ways: