Are your emotions holding you back?

Are your ‘unresolved wounds’ from your past really why you haven’t moved forward on your goals? Or is something more sinister inside your head… something perhaps so diabolical that it’s using emotional pain from your history to protect you from moving forward into the wrong destiny?

Time and time again, I have conversations with facilitators of transformative psychology processes who have clients coming back the next day with severe levels of anxiety and fear. I’ve also experienced this while working with a few people in my coaching practice. It’s the minority, but I’m dedicated to trying to understand any’ negative’ consequences completely.

So why do some clients experience gut-wrenching anxiety after going through a transformative process designed to help them ‘heal from trauma’ or some other personal challenge? My observation is that this result relies on a few factors — the most prominent being:

What expectation or fantasy does the client have tied to the other side of their emotion?

Whenever I work with clients, I ask them what is on the other side of clearing this emotion for me. And some clients have pretty amazing answers. The last client who’s experienced this ‘post-work anxiety’ answered the following: freedom, financial freedom, 1000 acre ranch, no concerns or stress ever…

In their own words, what’s keeping them from these results is their emotional wounds regarding their late Father. As’ healers’ themselves, they traced a persistent feeling of ‘I don’t deserve it’ back into their very early childhood. As a result of this and the amount of future reality they had riding on overcoming this emotional constraint, they were very motivated to find a way to clear this ‘limiting belief.’

Transforming that limiting belief was very easy, and the shift the client experienced was visceral, but what happened at that moment was more than removing a limiting belief. It deleted the client’s capacity to use that emotion as THE REASON they don’t have what they said they wanted. This means that they now have NO REASON NOT TO go after what they want, which is where the trouble starts.

Ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you can live a concern-free life for more than 24 hours? While taking care of a 1000-acre ranch? And having to manage the amount of money you’d need to be financially free with that much responsibility? Is that a reasonable expectation to have?

If you’re not completely deluded, you’ve said, ‘Of course not.’ No human being is getting out of being concerned. Financial freedom takes a lot of work and effort, most of which is not an automatically manifested response to clearing an emotional wound. Financial freedom only happens with investments, saving, controlling spending, and producing services and products people want to buy.

There are infinite things to worry about while on the path to financial freedom, owning a 1000-acre ranch, and trying to police your reality to the point where you have no concerns ever again. Being concerned is part of the setup if your goal is never to be worried.

And this is the reality for many people. Many people would instead distract themselves with emotional wounds, past traumas, and other self-proclaimed ‘limits’ rather than recognize the truth about their fantasy — that it’s precisely A FANTASY. It takes a specific skill to acknowledge your reality, what you’re capable of, and be honest about what you want to be responsible for. What’s more intense is that that skill is owned by only 2% of the population, while everyone else lives in a fantasy about what’s possible.

The moral of the story: Be warned in advance about personal development. You might assume that it always leads to a positive result. In reality, especially in my personal development business, most people need more help associating with their reality than they do dissolving their self-proclaimed issues that are holding them back from what they believe is possible.

In reality, if your goal is truly congruent with who you are, the ‘I don’t deserve it’ shouldn’t be part of the equation. This is just one of the many ways we use our ‘wounds’ as genius strategies to help us avoid consequences that we aren’t prepared to accept.