“I just hurt all the time.”

When someone says they just hurt inside, it is because they are out of Alignment with themselves. On this page, we’re going to walk you through what’s happening inside of you, why you hurt so much, and how to begin resolving it.

Hurting inside is caused by the misalignment of your Cognitive Core located inside of your subconscious. Most of us have heard about Freud’s Id, Ego, and Super Ego. For this exercise, we are only going to focus on the Id.

What is the Id?

The Id is your Identity. It is the Self.

The Self is made up of Five Elements:

• Your Ethics
• Your Beliefs
• Your Actions
• Your Voice

These elements, when combined, make up your Perspective.

Ethics and Belief are the two elements that Identify who we are. Our Actions or Behavior and our Voice are the elements that enforce and protect the Identity.

Alignment occurs when your Ethics and Beliefs are matched. When your actions and your voice work together to preserve and protect your Ethics and Beliefs. The alignment of these four elements work together to provide you with a strong, solid perspective.

In a healthy, well-balanced subconscious, our Ethics and Beliefs are identified and known. Our actions and our voice are used to enforce and protect our ethics and beliefs from the elements of others that contradict our elements. This preserves our perspective from harm and keeps the system aligned.

Our Id runs and operates this system. Our subconscious is the defense system that forms around the Id and the Cognitive Core.

When we are children, we are taught ethics based on our religions, culture, society, environment, and experiences. All of these factors are dictated by our parents who have hand selected exactly what factors will build our ethics.

Now, it is not just our Alignment that we are sensitive to. It is the Alignment of others. As children, we are tuned into the Cognitive Core and Alignment of our Mother. We are tuned into the Cognitive Core and Alignment of our Father. We are tuned into the Cognitive Core and Alignment of our siblings, our grandparents, teachers, religious leaders, babysitters, aunts, uncles, peers…

Wherever there is misalignment or contradiction, the Cognitive Core creates EMOTION to communicate this misalignment to the Conscious mind.

This emotional misalignment is called Cognitive Dissonance.

To understand Cognitive Dissonance, you must first understand what pain is and where it comes from.

What is Pain?

Pain is simply extreme discomfort. Take a look at the diagram below. The Comfort Zone is “A” where there is a state of no discomfort or pain. But, step outside of the Comfort Zone, and discomfort, not pain, follows. Lower levels of discomfort is where growth happens, but, too much discomfort, and that discomfort turns into pain.

Too may pain re-wires the nervous system and becomes Trauma.

What is familiar gives us comfort even if it causes us physical and emotional pain.

It is possible to have both pain and comfort at the same time. We see this a lot with pain seekers. One subject, a break up, can cause severe pain. But we can also take a bubble bath and enjoy a massage or a glass of wine at the same time. We are experiencing both pain and pleasure simultaneously.

Self-care turns up the volume of comfort, but does not necessarily turn down the volume to pain. In order to get this to work, you have to work on turning down the pain as well as turning up the comfort.

So… why do you hurt all the time?

Because you had abusers in your past who forced their toxic beliefs into you. When they did that, you buried your own beliefs, gave up your own Agency, and in severe cases, completely severed your own beliefs from yourself to make room for the beliefs and perspective of your abusers. One cannot serve two masters after all.

The toxic beliefs of your abuser(s) contradicts your ethics. Worse yet, this contradiction creates the emotion CONFUSION. Confusion is just a conflicted perspective and prevents you from forming a solid perspective.

A conflicted perspective forces you to rely on your abuser to decide for you, which leaves you open and vulnerable to accept more abuse. In turn, you begin to doubt your own ability to form your own perspective, which erodes your confidence and self-esteem.

So long as you depend on others to form perspectives and beliefs for you, you remain open to receive more toxic beliefs. The continual addition of toxic beliefs piles up, creating more misalignment, causing you more pain and, eventually trauma.

The Solution?

You must correct the alignment in your cognitive core. To do this, start by defining your ethics. Define your beliefs and start to nurture your own Agency and Self-Love. As you restore your Agency and revisit your ethics, you begin to see which beliefs are yours and which ones belong to your abusers.

Turn up your self-care. Restore your agency. Nurture the Self. Practice forming your own perspective. Practice forming your own beliefs. When you do this, confidence and self-esteem are authentically restored.

Shadow Work is the process required to locate toxic beliefs that you then remove and replace with your own beliefs.

Become a Healing Garden Member and get:

• The Ethics Identifying Worksheet
• The Beliefs Identifying Worksheet
• Full access to our monthly workshops (a $600 value)
• Our Full Masterclass 8-Week Course ($10,000 value)
• Weekly Q&A Session on Thursdays