Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting

a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, 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 a 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.

So when I'm talking about being 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 very reminiscent of something that happened in the past,

where we felt unsafe and secure, 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, 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 rheumative cycles of not being good enough or feeling insecure

or just getting small, weak in ourselves, needing someone to be something in order for

...