When someone is criticising you and you feel rejected or upset, even if it seems that they are the cause of your emotions, in reality the reason that you felt rejected was most likely because their criticism activated the feelings of rejection that you already had about yourself, within you. So that person essentially mirrors back to you how you are feeling about yourself. You might be thinking that you wouldn’t consciously choose to reject yourself and that’s true, because it didn’t happen on a conscious level but rather unconsciously. As children, we deeply stored information in our subconscious and when we were facing situations that were not processed (by having an adult explain, understand or hold space for us and our emotions) it is easy for a child to perceive themselves as the cause of what was happening. So that they don’t blame the adults - who a child thinks that they must know what they’re doing because they’re grown ups and experienced- the child chooses to internalise the emotions they are experiencing and then make meanings of those emotions often against themselves, such as “you are not good enough”, “you are not accepted”, “you are not loved” etc. In reality it’s not the adult that is creating this within the child but rather the interpretation that the child is giving in that moment, choosing to reject themselves as they have not developed the ability for critical thinking yet. The child cannot know or understand that the adult is also possibly rejecting themselves and that they are just projecting this to the child as well. All of these bottled up interpretations and emotions are stored in our subconscious and are coming up through the situations in our adult lives to be relived, as we never got to properly process them and release them, but instead we push them back in our subconscious because we might be afraid to feel them. But this is were the freedom lies as we can heal those aspects of ourselves and connect with our authentic expression. We can use these real-life experiences when we observe ourselves being triggered through another person’s actions, to understand ourselves more as this is a way we can see what is going on inside of us that needs tending, love and care.
These situations are calling us to break free from the baggage that is weighing us down and can show us the way back to ourselves. ✨