By Evelyn M Ryan

Well, certainly being healed, powerful and authentic do not take the same level of thinking that cause our wounds, powerlessness, and inauthenticity. Odd and sad, isn’t it, that we were taught this thinking that does not serve us by the same people who were responsible to keep us safe and protected? This is also the same thinking that as adults continues to cause us and our children the most harm. Let’s explore this.

We are born uncivilized, totally dependent on our care takers not only for food and shelter but also for love, emotional validation, and guidance to become functioning civilized adaptable humans, have healthy relationships and grow, learn, discover who we uniquely are, what we are worthy of becoming.

As we grow and interact with others inside and outside our homes, we learn more and apply what we learn through witnessing others, practice, trial and error, and making mistakes. We seek guidance from our parents, relatives, caretakers, coaches, friends and teachers. This is how we learn about ourselves, learn how to self-correct, care for ourselves, and use our emotions and compassion effectively. We collect evidence that validates us and motivates us to set goals that bring us value and support our health, joy, safety, and continued growth.

These abilities are worked for, earned and honed over time as we acquire more knowledge about ourselves from our good and bad experiences.

The knowledge acquired from one year of experience 30 times over, however, will not bring us the same value as 30 years of a broad-based variety of experiences. This is why we should always be clear on what we are worthy of achieving and never settle for less.

The choices we make on the depth and breadth of our experiences, then, fuel the level of the power and authenticity we potentially can achieve. That is a right of choice we all have and should be free to choose. Why is this so important?

These decisions can serve to add value and benefit and empower us or limit us, do us harm, and disempower us. Our opportunities afforded us and the choices we make, then, have a huge negative or positive impact on our growth, beliefs, character, lessons learned, decision-making, emotional health, relationships, personal power and resilience.

The more experiences and more variety of experiences we have, the more powerful we become.

The more powerful we become, the more able we are to make reliable decisions that bring us sustainable value and joy we know we are capable and worthy of achieving in spite of the effort it took and obstacles we faced to achieve them. We do not fear the unknown. We embrace it.

So to be powerful, we need to expand the depth and breadth of our experiences and work on our

1. Ability to discern truth from lies, facts from fiction regardless of obstacles we face.
2. Ability to use the facts to benefit ourselves and others regardless of obstacles we face.
3. Knowledge of our worthiness of those benefits regardless of the obstacles we face.
4. Coping skills, wisdom, and resilience to overcome the obstacles, bounce back from disappointments and allow a clear path for growth, joy, good health, healthy relationships and an overall healthy lifestyle.

What are the biggest obstacles we will face in our journeys?

Note: All of these are learned obstacles that limit our own abilities, skew our thinking, and make us vulnerable to emotional manipulators. They all, nevertheless, just like they were learned, can be unlearned.

1. Unclear understanding of our personal rights and authorities and those of other’s.
2. Believing lies exploitive people have taught us to believe to serve them.
3. Believing we are powerless to our pain and blaming others for our problems, powerlessness, and fears.
4. Learning to rely on others to relieve our pain and define our worth.
5. Inability to use our compassion responsibly to benefit ourselves as well as others without doing ourselves harm.
6. Inability to delay gratification.
7. Inability to manage our own emotions effectively.
8. Believing we are not worthy of better and
9. Believing we must suffer to be lovable.

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