Clink, Clink, Clink

The sound of her keys being picked up from the pewter dish we kept them in by the front door used to trigger the shit out of my nervous system because I knew it meant she was leaving.

She is my mother, and she could have been going to the grocery store. But my nervous system didn't know the difference between being left alone and being left. So every time I heard that sound, I would fly up the stairs, trying to conceal my fight-or-flight state, to see where she was going.

This isn't a story about being left by my mom, though. It's a story about being hairline-deep in the curriculum I came to go through and move all the way through as a soul having a human experience.

I experienced the bottom dropping out from under me a lot in childhood (I call this "little t trauma") because I needed to know the ins and outs of instability, inside and outside of myself.

Hence, the triggered response to the sound of keys being retrieved from the key tray. That was hard-wired in. My response to being left by important people was akin to a big earthquake followed by the aftershocks, but for years, maybe closer to decades.

I was programmed to believe I was a burden and not worth sticking around for. I got ripped open every time someone left or when I had to leave (like every summer when my dad would take me to the Portland airport to fly back to California. I still feel the same sensations I did then when I see the iconic carpet in the PDX airport).

For some reason, the memory of the keys came to me a few days ago, and I kind of giggled at it. I had completely forgotten about how sensitive to that I'd been. As I got older, I cared less about the sound of keys, but that meant I'd become more numb or ambivalent to it, not that it had been healed. I'd just buried it and gotten great at managing it.

What I'd buried created my reality for more decades. I had a fearfully avoidant attachment style (which I only learned about in premarital counseling at 30 years old), and my 29 years without a boyfriend (and celibate, because I went the chaste way, not the promiscuous way, to handle my abandonment issues) to then marry a man who was paralyzed were the pinnacle of my curriculum.

I was earning my security and safety in my marriage because helping someone more dependent on help made me feel like I'd always be needed and never abandoned.

Joke's on me.

I was abandoned in new ways in my marriage that had my (now ex) husband write to me and say, "I'm so sorry, I did exactly what I never wanted to do to you, and that was to repeat what you'd experienced growing up. I was a ghost of a husband."

But I only received that lovely and very humble letter from him because I'd healed, and didn't need it from him.

I needed to experience this abandonment curriculum in heavy, repeated doses because it was my assignment. And I've learned it so well that I won't abandon myself. I would be sad if Aaron decided to up and leave me, but I know I'd be way ok because I'm deeply in love with my soul and what I'm here to live out.

Our childhoods are just the installation years. What we don't heal then, we will find in our adulthood. The same themes will show up in different teachers and scenarios. What repeats is trying to get your attention. But are we paying attention?

And beyond becoming bloated with awareness around the pattern itself and who installed it, are we healing it to become whole and get onto the other side of learning what we're here to learn?

This is the entire point of being down here. And if you're reading this, you've chosen to be here at a time that is suuuuuuuper significant. You don't want to sleep on this. It's the most incredible opportunity to become a powerful source for profound good.

Can you imagine not being triggered? I'm over here cueing up the Untriggered Era for everyone who makes their way through Soul Forward Method, so that we exist as steady pillars for everyone around us.

We're leaving legacies that heal the upline, downline, and sidelines, because no one needs to still be triggered by the keys leaving the dish for their entire lives. And no one needs to live with the weight of what's been buried, densifying their experience of life.

This work is so beautiful.