Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about how to effectively meet your old pain. More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. Okay. So in this session, I think at the heart of what I want to communicate is that often simply being present with your pain isn't enough to actually alchemize and change it. It is much more useful and

powerful than disconnecting from your pain. But we often need something else that we're bringing

into the presence with our pain to really start to get some

transformation to happen and so when i'm talking about being with with past pain talking about

relational wounds childhood wounds things that have gone awry in the past.

A lot of it is often related to childhood.

And then there is a trigger in the present moment,

perhaps in relationship to someone or something or something happening at work.

And we feel something that is like very reminiscent of something that happened

in the past where we felt unsafe, insecure, not good enough. And often that will subconsciously

trigger our old reactive defense mechanisms and patterns, which is to maybe get aggressive, maybe run from

the system and withdraw, you know, go into a freeze response. It could cause us to fawn

over the person that's there as a protective mechanism, or it could just cause us to go into ruminative cycles of not being good enough

or feeling insecure or just getting small, you know, weak in ourselves,

needing someone to be something in order for us to be okay.

Chances are all of us are familiar to some extent with

these patterns within us. And maybe there's even the possibility that you've done a lot of

exploration around these patterns. You're very much aware of them, especially as they're happening.

But you find that even with that awareness, you can still

get sucked into the pattern or feel like you're stuck there or confused. And how do I navigate

this? How do I get out of this? The pattern can feel so strong and the emotions associated feel so true that even though in a previous

moment where you were aware of this pattern and said, oh, next time this happens, I'm going to do this,

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