In this Soul teaching on playing out subconscious trauma, you will learn:
- How your subconscious is creating your reality
- Why your subconscious will have you re-enact unresolved pain over and over throughout your life
- How to bring your unconscious wounding into your awareness
- How to liberate yourself from deep subconscious programming
- And more…
Your life is being created by default
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung
I have quoted this specific Carl Jung quote in almost every teaching I have written and you have maybe read it 100 times or more. But I don’t think that there is any other story that I can share with you that illustrates the truth of this quote, as this story from my personal life that I share with you today….
But first, let’s dive deeper into what Swiss psychiatrist and founder of psychoanalysis Carl Jung meant when he said this because it is something that not many people are aware of in their own lives.
He is saying that the unconscious creates our reality without us realizing it because we are not conscious of the unconscious. In other words, we don’t know what we don’t know and because we are unaware of this dynamic playing out in our lives, we simply believe that the events in our lives are how they are meant to be or according to our destiny.
If you look at the definition of the word ‘fate’ it means; the development of events outside a person’s control, regarded as predetermined by a supernatural power.
So, to hone in deeper on what Carl Jung meant: it’s because we do not know what is in the subconscious, that it seems as if the events of our life happen outside of our control or were predetermined by a supernatural power. However, if we would know what is in the subconscious (by making it conscious) we would see, that it is exactly what is held within the subconscious that we are now living out as our reality.
Because hardly anyone is aware of this dynamic, the majority of the human species has lived or is currently living their life by default. They live out what is held within their subconscious, believing that this is just the hand that they were dealt by the Universe. Never realizing that just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, they had the power all along to change their own destiny.
In this teaching, I explain how we become the masters of our own destiny.
The subconscious creates your reality
The reason why visualizing, affirmations, guided meditation, vision boards and so on often don’t make a dent, is because only 5% of our reality is created consciously. The other 95% of our reality is created through our subconscious.
The subconscious is where we hold the majority of our programming and this is where it gets interesting because there are a lot more ‘people’ in your head influencing your thinking, than you may be aware of. This is because we hold our collective programming, our cultural and religious programming, our ancestral programming, past life programming, and our childhood programming in our subconscious.
And all of this programming (which includes many voices of the past) is co-creating our current life experience without us realizing it.
Not all of this programming is so-called ‘bad’, there is a lot of good stuff in there that makes certain areas of our life work really well. The problem is that there are so many different timelines coming together in one place; when there is unresolved pain and trauma held in any of these previous timelines, it bleeds through in our current life (our current timeline).
This is what Carl Jung was talking about when he said that without making the unconscious conscious, it would seem that fate is at play in our lives when in reality it is ‘our’ unresolved pain whether directly experienced, remembered from other lifetimes, or passed down through our family lineages.
Life is always working for us not against us and this is especially true for the subconscious mind whose top priority is to protect us and keep us safe. Too much unresolved trauma and pain is a threat to the system, you cannot allow it to stack up indefinitely – because the person or host of the system will not be able to function in the long run, if you allow this.
The subconscious mind who is meant to ensure our survival knows this; which is why the subconscious pulls in the people, situations, and experiences that allow us to re-enact our unresolved pain in an attempt to heal it this time around. It allows us to play out the unresolved issues from the past so that we can resolve them and move past them.
However, because we don’t understand this underlying dynamic, it doesn’t always work out this way. Instead, we often end up feeling re-traumatized by the re-enactment of the drama, that the subconscious mind offered us to help us heal the underlying pain.
Read this teaching here on how your past life trauma becomes your current life drama,
My own personal story is the perfect example of how we can subconsciously repeat the same drama/trauma over and over again, without even realizing it. I’ll share my story with you now.
You are playing out your wounding
I recently booked a session with a new therapist in a similar price category as my own and these things can either be a big waste of money or totally worth it. You don’t know if you have never worked with this person before. The reason why so many of my clients continue to work one-on-one with me is that they get so much out of each session, that the price is worth it to them. My clients often say that one session with me is the equivalent of months of working with other healers.
I was also very happy with my investment with this new healer, because the understanding I gained from the session was huge.
In this specific method, you go into the heart and you look at the relationship you had as a child with a caretaker or parent. So, instead of going in to remember a traumatic incident, you look at the relationship and how it made you feel.
For me, it was the relationship as a one-year-old with my dad who I felt didn’t listen to me or take me seriously. The emotion I felt was shame, which is not an emotion that consciously debilitates me. It’s not an emotion that I consciously felt to be sensitive towards, which is often a sign of repression or disownment of the emotion. If you don’t really know what an emotion feels like, it’s likely because you don’t allow yourself to feel it.
I know from all the inner work I have done that my father started sexually abusing me in the age range from 2-3 years old. Shame is deeply connected to sexual abuse, this could be an indication that the sexual abuse started even earlier or that my father had violated my boundaries ‘didn’t listen’ or ‘take me seriously’ in other ways. It’s difficult to say because the vocabulary of a one-year-old is very limited.
The realization that in a way shame is such a foreign emotion to me, made me realize that it was an emotion that I did not allow myself to feel. Yet, instantly I remembered all the times I would wake up sweating in the middle of the night with this intense fear of being judged, misunderstood, and so on based on the very intimate sharings of my own process in my teachings online – for the whole world to see.
Subconsciously shame was there, triggering a response to keep me small and unseen.
I immediately understood why I had been stuck at the same level of success, for the past couple of years because this was the maximum level of visibility that I subconsciously could allow myself to have despite the fact that I consciously knew how many people I helped by being so transparent in my own journey.
Over and over and over again
Having done so much past life work and knowing that this is where our wounds originate* from, I looked back at the lifetimes where shame was involved.
*The fact that our wounds originate from previous lifetimes, does not excuse my father’s behavior on a human level. His actions were wrong and he violated the sacredness of our father-daughter relationship with them.
However, from going back all the way to the beginning I know that the theme of shame has been with me since my first incarnation. I have been crusading against shame for eons and eons, I have had three lifetimes for example where I was sexually abused as a nun within the church.
But the origin of shame comes from my incarnation wound. These are the lifetimes when we started incarnating in human form, in a way we had not in for example the Lemurian and Atlantean timelines where we were still more etheric beings learning to ground in density.
It was a lifetime in Egypt where I was a 13-year-old boy with a great gift to see the invisible or what others couldn’t see. This threatened the powers that be and they tricked me into doing a ceremony, believing that I was going to be initiated into a higher rank within the community. When it was my turn to be initiated, they instead performed an exorcism on me claiming that I had been possessed by the devil. This was of course not true, but it did what they wanted it to do; I was discredited, my spiritual gifts were now seen as the work of the devil and I was shunned by my community.
This caused a lot of shame and self-doubt because it was literally my whole community against my own inner knowing which made me doubt myself and my gifts at that time.
As shame expert Brené Brown says ‘Guilt = I did something bad. Shame = I am bad.’
In that lifetime I (the past life expression of my soul) couldn’t change the perception of my community who thought ‘I was bad’, believing I was in league with the devil because the elders in our community had portrayed me as such. I resisted it as much as I could, but the seed was planted through that experience that started me doubting my innate goodness. Setting a pattern that I would continue repeating over and over again, in fighting back against being or feeling shamed.
When it comes to shame there are two options, you can either accept it or fight against it. I chose the latter, instead of resigning in shame I fought back.
The seeds that bear fruits
This brings me to my life now, because this repressed shame did not limit itself to the relationship with my father or the limiting of the amount of success I was able to allow into my life. It went much further than that and my love life is a great example of that.
When I looked at the three most important relationships in my life, my two marriages and my Twin Flame experience I suddenly saw the common thread that connected them all. Before I just seemed to be unlucky in love, my first ex-husband repeated the domestic violence issues that we both had experienced in our families of origin (we both grew up in domestic warzones). My second ex-husband cheated on me with the same woman, both times that I was pregnant with his children. My twin married the girl his Indian family picked for him as part of an arranged marriage agreement, despite him claiming that if he had felt free to make his own choice he would be together with me.
These scenarios seem to all be unrelated, but they are not.
When I left my first ex-husband he knew that what I had to say about him and our marriage would not be pretty, so he made sure to discredit me everywhere by telling people I was crazy, unstable and that he had tried to save me but couldn’t. It wasn’t true, but people were willing to believe it anyway. Those who didn’t buy into it, he broke off contact with. He recently died quite unexpectedly, but never stopped telling this story. Even a decade later when I would run into mutual friends they would tell me some of the things he would still say about me.
My second marriage had already failed before it started, my then-husband had met someone else when I was eight months pregnant and had started an affair with her. I wrote a book on relationships during that time that was published and after the affair came to light, we tried to pick up the broken pieces of our marriage. I became pregnant unexpectedly again and my husband secretly started the affair back up again. Our daughter died and shortly after the second affair came to light and now I was not only this poor woman who had just lost her child, but her husband had also cheated on her twice. Again a lot of people talking behind my back, within my family, the children’s school, and so on. The fact that I had written a book on relationships (using them as a mirror for our own healing – a completely radical new idea in 2005) made me look even more ridiculous to some people because my own relationship was such a ‘disaster’ according to them.
Then in 2014 I met my twin we fell in love, danced around each other a lot, and then after meeting him and being together in India at a mutual friend’s wedding he pushed me out of his life completely. Not because he wanted to, but because his internal programming left him no choice but to follow what had been ingrained in him through his culture, religion, ancestors, and the family values imprinted on him. The week I launched my website as a Twin Flame coach, my twin unexpectedly got married to the girl his family had picked for him and there I was following my inner guidance looking like a ‘fool’. That’s of course not how I saw it myself, but others did, in his friend’s circle (who knew me from the wedding), in my friend’s circle and even some of the hundreds of thousands of people who have since read our story online.
My subconscious reaction to all three of these experiences was to prove my worth.
After I divorced husband number one, I started writing, first I wrote for internet sites and then I became a first-time published author basically to the very first publisher that I pitched. I got interviewed for well-read Dutch magazines, for which I posed in beautiful pictures. He may have not let by any opportunity to drag me through the mud, but as time went by his stories became less and less credible for anyone who took the trouble to check up on what I was doing now.
Let me emphasize that these were my subconscious reactions, not conscious ones. I didn’t consciously realize that I was trying to prove anything. I thought I was merely building my life back up after a marriage and a divorce from hell.
What broke my second marriage wasn’t the infidelity, it was the lack of financial security. My then-husband was afraid of the financial responsibility for a family of 5 or 6. I had already brought in two children from my first marriage and then we had two children as well, of which the youngest died of a rare birth defect shortly after birth. Coming out of that experience I vowed to change my money story and I did. I was a single mother on welfare, who started a business from my kitchen table and became financially independent in a short amount of time. Again I was featured in many newspapers, it started a whole discussion in the media asking if this could be a way for other mothers on financial support from the government to exit welfare?
After twin got married I asked myself what I wanted to manifest next and I got the intuitive hit to move to Ibiza. I broke through to the six figures, traveled the world with my family for two years, and then moved to a beautiful luxury home in Ibiza with a jacuzzi and a pool. Not, that I needed to do any of this because I was already the epitome of success in my twin’s eyes before I achieved all this. But again, this is not about what consciously drives us, it’s about what subconsciously drives us and therefore dictates our behavior.
Because although these are all wonderful achievements that beneffitted me, they all come from the same seed. The seed of wanting to prove my worth to, as one of the healers I work with put it so eloquently. all these men who like my own father had treated me like trash. They had treated me like garbage, each and every one of them.
These men could not see my worth, because they were all battling their own issues. I know my father’s traumas that he couldn’t face, ex-husband number 1 who had extreme childhood traumas he never dealt with, ex-husband number 2 who was beaten into the hospital by both his parents and always resorted to stonewalling because he could not express himself and twin who was caught in his conflict in loyalty to his culture, religion, family, and ancestry.
But they were beautiful mirrors to me as well – because shame leaves us feeling insecure, worthless, stupid, foolish, silly, inadequate, or simply less than. And as long as I did not deal with the deeply repressed shame I was carrying subconsciously, I would continue to not be able to see my own worth and attract people, situations, and experiences that would trigger my own deeply disowned feelings of worthlessness.
Yet, the sobering truth was as well, that everything that I had built, everything that I had achieved was in fact trauma-driven. The seed of proving my worth was at the basis of everything I have ever created because it was the filter through which I viewed life.
But this was no longer how I wanted to live my life.
I don’t want to live my life by default. I don’t want to live my wounding.
I choose to be the master of my own destiny instead of a victim of fate!
Making the unconscious conscious
This is what making the unconscious, conscious looked like for me. It took me seven years of deep inner healing work, to get to this layer of depth in my own journey. Shame is both the deepest layered emotion as well as the lowest vibrational frequency in the emotional spectrum. That I was able to access this straight away in the session with this new healer was because of all the inner work I had done, prior to working with her. Had I not worked with a small army of healers and therapists, I would have never seen this pattern for what it is.
Nor would I have seen how it was playing out in my life. I might have simply believed that I had been dealt a rotten hand by the Universe when it comes to intimate relationships. Bad karma perhaps, if I had not known what karma really is.
I now understand why I was always in these difficult love relationships with men because it allowed me to prove my worth externally. My first ex-husband was a typical bad boy and if I could ‘make’ him good, it would prove my worth. Of course, I couldn’t change him, I only exhausted myself trying. My second ex-husband, I needed to ‘win’ back from the other woman, to prove my worth. We both dumped him and he never spoke to her again. He and I are on good terms as parents to our child. My twin was the ultimate proof of my worth if he would leave his life and family (prior to his marriage) to be with me, it would have definitely ‘proved’ my worthiness. Until I realized years ago that this was a ridiculous sacrifice to want someone to make, but even that realization did not allow me to see the full picture at that time.
There is lots more to be said on shame, that I am excluding from this teaching so that we can stay focussed on the primary theme. I could write a whole teaching on shame and in the future, I probably will. This teaching in itself is not really about shame, I have used the example of shame from my own experiences to bring the dynamic being explained to life. But, this dynamic may show up entirely different for you. The only thing that is sure is that this dynamic shows up for everyone because everyone carries unresolved pain in their subconscious mind.
And just like me, unless you go looking for the deeper underlying connections, you will be oblivious to how you are playing out your trauma in your life without even seeing it.
This is why we need to make the unconscious, conscious – so that we can stop playing it out in our reality. I spent most of my adult life playing out this specific wounding and it not only took long, but it was also very painful to go through. It left me heartbroken, not once but multiple times. I felt betrayed and hurt. I felt rejected, ridiculed, and made a fool of.
But here’s the thing you don’t have to play out your wounding, you can actually clear it out by bringing up the subconscious wounding into your conscious awareness. Playing out your wounding is a survival mechanism that the subconscious mind employs in order to push for healing. Your drama in your life is basically a symptom of unresolved trauma, in the same way, that a headache or vomiting are symptoms of certain illnesses.
Treating only the symptoms doesn’t actually address the root cause.
This is why we need to work with healers and therapists to find and address the root causes of our traumas, beyond the obvious because the root causes aren’t solely held within the obvious places of trauma. Yes, my childhood sexual abuse hugely impacted this pattern, but it was not the sole source of it. Both ancestral trauma, as well as past life wounding, were underlying it as well.
In a session with another healer, I was shown that I had been one of my own ancestors and that my father from this life had been my son then. In that life, I had sexually abused him and I still carried guilt (because of my actions) and shame especially around the homosexual aspect of it in my energy field. This 7th generation male ancestor kept saying that he saw himself as morally corrupt. This is an indication of shame, he not only condemned his actions – he condemned himself and he was a past life expression of me. I carried this shame, not only as his descendant but through the fact that this ancestor and I share the same soul.
Merely addressing the incest I experienced in my current lifetime, would not allow me to fully release this pattern because this shame started long before this current lifetime. What I was shown was that the pattern of incest as a man was the flip side of the sexual abuse I had experienced as a woman within the church. This is something that comes up more often in the Askasha that we flip from victim to perpetrator.
The incest had started with this 7th generation ancestor and it had stopped with me. I, in my current life broke the pattern of incest within our family lineage, not only by of course not sexually abusing my own children but also through healing the ancestral lineage within which this pattern had been passed down from father to child since this 7th generation.
Another healer had already seen that this pattern had been passed down from father to child in my paternal lineage, what I never expected was that a past life expression of my soul would be involved or in fact the initiator of the pattern that I became a victim of, in this lifetime I am living now. You can imagine that this led to a deeper forgiveness of my father, but also forgiveness for the great-great-great,-great-great-grandfather who was now finally able to forgive himself which worked through two-fold to me as his descendant and as the new expression of the same soul, as I had subconsciously carried his guilt and shame as my own because it was a memory of my soul’s experience. The soul that he had been an expression of in that lifetime and that I am now an expression of.
It’s important to understand however that even though he is a past life expression of me, that we are not the people we were in a previous lifetime. You can compare it to siblings, siblings share the same parent but are each their own unique individual with their own personality and they may seem alike or share common traits but they are not the same person. The same is true for past life expressions of the soul, they feel like you because you recognize the essence of your soul – but you and they are not the same person.
However, without doing this inner work to bring into the conscious our unconscious programming, we are doomed to continue recreating these same unresolved themes over and over again.
Because we aren’t actually learning from them as we recreate them. You can see that in the example of my current life love life, I recreated this same theme in every one of the three most important relationships of my life. I met my first husband when I was fifteen and I was married to my second husband until I was thirty-eight. I of course learned other things from my relationships, but these very deep subconscious drivers behind my behavior were completely invisible to me.
I think that is one of the biggest pay-offs of doing this inner work, is to liberate yourself from these deep subconscious programs that not only limit you but in fact hijack your life without you even noticing it.
This allows you to truly be the captain of your own ship and not just live out your wounding which is true for the majority of humanity. Most human beings are living out their subconscious wounding whether that stems from personal trauma, collective trauma, or trauma passed on through the DNA (ancestral). In most cases, like my own, the trauma of these different past timelines is not neatly divided into separate containers but deeply intertwined and sometimes even entangled.
All the various wounds tying into each other, holding the unprocessed pain into place.
It takes time and patience to detangle them. There are no magic pills or quick fixes, yet when we continue to look deeper and deeper into the origins of our long-held unresolved pain we can start to unravel even the deepest ingrained patterns that are keeping us from fully and authentically being who we are.
Because let’s face it we are not our wounding.
We are what is hidden underneath our subconscious wounding, the eternal expression of our soul. It is when we remove all the gunk and sludge that is covering our true nature, that we get to live our life from who we truly are instead of from our unresolved pain.
I pray that sharing my own personal story of how this dynamic can play out in our physical reality, inspires you to find the subconscious patterns that are playing out in your life without you even noticing it. The only way to make them visible is by making the unconscious conscious.
With my deepest love,
