1. Stuffed Closet Syndrome

2. Its not my Fault

3. Old wine in a new bottle

1. Stuffed Closet Syndrome

What?

Stuffed closet syndrome refers to the situation when we keep suppressing negative emotions, memories and past events in our relationships without really resolving them because its too painful or depressing or embarrassing to remember them and we don’t really know how to let them go peacefully.

What is it really?

We all have faced moments and situations that hurt us or made us feel bad, sometimes even traumatic so much so that we wish we never had that or somehow we could just erase it out of our memories. It may be something that we never want to talk about because its too painful or something that we talk and think about all the time because it seems just impossible to get over it and let it go.

The fact is, no amount of talking about it or repressing it is going to make it go away or stop hurting us. in fact, it is just going to sit inside our mind, sometimes hidden from our consciousness and still keep affecting us in our everyday lives. its like you go on accumulating old clothes and keep piling on the new without ever cleaning the closet. sooner or later, the closet is ready to burst even at the slightest of touch. 

Why do we need to understand and heal it?

Body has its own mechanism of throwing out the old emotions. It happens naturally through the emotion of sadness and the act of crying. The sad part is that most of us haven’t been taught to allow emotions, especially the negative emotions, to flow and be released. This causes the emotions to stay stuck inside us forever, still affecting us from behind the curtains causing us emotional and physical issues as well as reinforcing negative or self-sabotaging patterns in our life in relationships, money, job, health, etc.

Nothing ever goes away until it is healed and resolved completely. And we are not talking about forgiving. 

Self Sabotaging Beliefs

Events that caused emotional pain (it could be something as simple as being shouted upon by a parent or teacher to full-blown physical, verbal or sexual abuse) can create negative emotions of varying intensities like anger, hurt, guilt, betrayal and so on. These emotions are responsible for the beliefs we carry throughout our life like “I don’t deserve” or “I am not good enough”. These beliefs act like roadblocks in our way to good health, great relationships and abundance. 

2. Its not my Fault

What it means?

Whenever we go through a bad phase or situation, our first instinct is to find where does the fault lie. According to our personalities, we either find factors outside of us in our environment, for example – people, time, situation, planets etc. or we find fault inside of us which we commonly know as criticism. Most of us do both these things at different points of time. Let’s talk about the first – finding fault outside us. 

What is it really?

Say, if someone doesn’t speak to me in a nice way, I get angry or upset and would usually say something like – they made me angry or upset. Anytime a negative emotion is triggered, we usually say – that person or situation made me (emotion). And it’s not just for bad emotions, its also for good emotions – like feeling loved, feeling special, relaxed, comforted, safe etc. A person can make you feel good about yourself or a substance like cigarette, alcohol, chocolate or chips can make you feel calm and relaxed. People, situation and things can make you feel good or bad. 

This all looks fine as long as we talk about good feelings. But once the negative feelings come into picture, we want to escape them or drive them away by either going away, avoiding or fighting with the situation, person or the thing. 

Why we need to work on this?

As long as we keep putting the fault on something outside us, we cannot really do something about the situation. Its like our remote control is in someone else’s hand and whatever button they press, we react to them in that exact way. How disempowering can that be? 

It is important to understand here as to what is actually going on in the situation. For example: If someone is making you feel good, that feeling of good is generated inside your body. It doesn’t come from the outside. The person is only triggering that feeling. 

In the same way, when someone makes you feel angry or bad, they are only triggering that feeling inside you. 

Right now it feels as if it is no longer in our control, its involuntary, we have no choice or control over what we feel. Since the feeling is being generated inside us, there must be way in which it can be under our control. Here comes the concept of choice. 

A good question to ask here is what is the reason that that person or their behaviour is triggering this emotion is me?

Say for example, you want to quit smoking. But smoking makes you feel relaxed and good. These are good feelings that your body may not want to give up. So even if you try to quit smoking, its urge being so strong, you end up failing every time. Until the body and mind doesn’t find something else that gives equal or more feeling of relaxing and good, is easy and available anytime you want, giving up smoking will be almost next to impossible. 

Let us take another example. Say you are in a relationship that is suffocating for you because the person is too demanding. You finally end up breaking up with the person and moving on to maintain your sanity. You find someone else and coincidently, that person also is similar to the previous person in more or less ways. This could be your significant other, boyfriend, girlfriend, friend, boss, colleague etc. 

When we look deeper into this issue, we find that we have some filters inside of us that attract a particular set of people into our life with similar qualities and personality traits. Its like we are pieces of jigsaw puzzle that can only fit in with a particular pattern of another piece. Because of this, we constantly attract the pieces into our life with whom we fit perfectly. So no matter how much or how many places and people we change, we always end up attracting similar places and people. 

Why we attract similar people and how Law of Attraction works?

Lets look at another example. A woman came to me and during the conversation she said that people backstab her often. So I asked her, “Do all people backstab you?” She became more specific now and said that only people whom she loved and cared for genuinely backstabbed her and told me incidences of backstabbing done by her husband, close friends and clients whom she cared for outside of her therapeutic environment.

Then I asked her what was her behaviour or actions with them before they backstabbed her? She said she behaves like “mother hen” with them taking care of them, their food, checking up on them to see if they are doing ok and even going out of her way to make sure they are comfortable and taken care of. She is a good caretaker and knows how to comfort people in their time of need. 

Next I asked her what does she believe about her ‘environment and people’ based on all this. She said “People I love always backstab me”. So I asked her “When people backstab you, what does that mean about you?” to which she replied, “I am too loving.”

We went on going deeper into his issue till we came to the point where she said she felt no one loved and cared for her. So her behaviour was always geared towards attracting love and care. Her strategy was when she gives care and love, people will also love and care for her. Due to her childhood experiences, her pattern became such that she always attracted people who, even though they were good, would let her down or in her words –  backstab her.

In such situations, if we keep blaming others for troubling us, we are choosing to be a victim in that situation. If we can look at our patterns, choose to heal them so we can attract people who no longer let us down, we would be taking our power back, our remote control in our hands and not be a victim of our circumstances.

3. Old Wine in a New Bottle

What does it mean?

Old wine in a new bottle simply means that reacting in the old behaviour in a new situation and still expecting a different result. 

What does it really mean?

If something isn’t working for us – say for example a relationship or a job – we still keep working on it to repair it expecting things will get better this time. But we haven’t really addressed the reason because of which the problem happened in the first place. 

Why is it important to understand this?

Most often the problems we see are simply symptoms of some deep rooted issue that may not be visible on the surface. It is like an ice berg. What is visible may not be the complete picture. This can be easily explained as the “Cause-Effect” principle. 

Most often the problems are effects of something or simply symptoms. Their cause may be something that is not easily visible right now. If we keep trying to work on the effects, the problem will only erupt in some other way. It is like cutting the branches of the tree but new branches will keep popping out until the roots of the tree are not cut. So we keep trying to use the axe to cut branches whereas a shovel or a saw may be needed. 

Many a times we presume that there may be a problem and react accordingly. However this doesn’t allow us to be spontaneous and open to the possibility that things have changed and perhaps we need a new approach to handle them now. This is because every time a situation comes up, we have a movie running inside our mind about an old similar experience and we react in the same way as we did in the past without actually understanding the real issue in the present expecting a different result. When it doesn’t happen, we get disappointed and frustrated as to when will this situation change. 

All that is needed is to change the movie inside the head. It will change our reactions to the present situations and we will begin to respond instead of reacting.

How to change this?

The first step to change is accepting that something needs to be changed. second step is taking the responsibility to do it instead of waiting for others to change themselves. if we are in a problematic situation, we are equally responsible for it – consciously or unconsciously. Make a choice today. Tools that can help you in this change process are EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and Inner Child Work. 

what is really needed is to release the old emotional baggage because of which we are still reacting to the situations in the same way, rewire our brain by shifting the patterns that were created long back so that we can start looking at the present from a new fresh perspective instead of from a lens of the past and respond accordingly. 

Transformation Circle Workshop is a platform that provides you the space and tools to heal your patterns, release your emotional baggage and blocks and recreate your life the way you want. The tools we use are EFT and Inner Child Work. You learn the tools and as well as how to use them for yourself to heal your life. 

For more details and dates for the upcoming event, connect with me on 9953753637 or meetu.sehgal@gmail.com

–Meetu Sehgal

Meetu Sehgal, Personal Transformation Coach, EFT Trainer, NLP Practitioner, Tarot Reader and Holistic Healer, is Masters is Psychology and MBA graduate from SRCC, Delhi University. Through her training and coaching sessions, she has been passionately working with individuals helping them resolve health, wealth and relationship challenges. You can reach her at meetu.sehgal@gmail.com or www.divineinnovations.org