Tainted by Traditions, Rituals and Vows

A Story of What If...

Top row, second from the left is me. Class of 1977/78

Kindergarten is that time in your life when you are conditioned to believe going to school is fun.

I most certainly enjoyed going to kindergarten. I recall a time I got myself up and ready for school. Then I walked there on my own, a fair distance, to discover the doors were locked. I thought everyone was inside. Maybe I was late, and they had locked me out!

I walked around the school to see if there was another way inside or if I could find anyone, to no avail.

Confused and distraught, I returned home. No one had even noticed I had been gone.

The school was locked because it was the weekend! I felt foolish for not understanding this.

Most children at this age can speak in sentences, whereas I was just starting to use my words.

One day at school, our teacher asked us to go back out into the hall to sit at our cubbyhole, where we hung our coats, and wait. She was preparing a surprise for us. The other kids were excited, but my stomach was in knots.

This would be my first Easter egg hunt.

We were let back into the brightly lit classroom and told to find the chocolate eggs. You know, the mini-chocolate eggs wrapped in colorful foil that still exist today – those eggs.

The race was on!

Kids scattered.

I spotted the eggs quickly. Anything that is “out of place” I notice. However, I didn’t move as fast as the other kids. Plus, we weren’t given a basket to hold them.

There! One on a chair, tucked under the table. I pulled out the chair, and a kid grabbed the egg.

There! One in the bin with the crayons. I reached for it, but another kid, bigger than me, got to it first.

There were lots of eggs everywhere, so I tried again. A couple of steps away, there was another egg on the floor by a chair leg.

I got it! My first egg! Standing there with it in my hand, palm open, someone grabbed it right out of my hand and dashed off.

Kids darting in every direction, screaming with excitement. It suddenly felt too scary being in the center of the action. I went to the walls for safety.

There were fewer eggs, but I still spotted some. There, beside the sink! I hurried, but someone saw me move towards it and got to it first.

It was all over in less time than we had waited.

Now it was picture time, and the teacher called us over to sit on the floor to form a big circle.

We were to display our captured eggs. Some kids held their two hands stretched out, filled with eggs. A few kids had so many that they held their shirts, creating a bowl for their eggs to sit in. All the kids had big smiles on their faces.

I don’t know what expression I had on my face.

I sat there empty-handed. I didn’t have a single egg.

The teacher was unprepared for this scenario as she didn’t have any extra eggs to give me.

She asked other kids to give me some of their eggs. No one wanted to.

She attempted to take some eggs from some of the kids. They protested by screaming.

The teacher was determined not to have a group picture taken with a single child without eggs. In that regard, she was successful. She negotiated with them to allow me to hold a few eggs, for the picture, if I gave them back.

Traditions, rituals, and the vows we make, even those we don’t necessarily speak out loud but are carried unconsciously through our family bonds and our DNA, are neither good nor bad.

It’s the significance we give them that gives them their meaning and power.

So, there was my first Easter egg hunt and my first sense of feeling like an outcast. I felt alone even though I was surrounded by people. An island unto myself with the waves crashing against my shores.

On a deeper level, because this holiday is related to God, that little girl wondered, “Am I a bad person?”

This is one of my earliest memories of feeling like everyone and everything was against me. I felt abandoned by God.

I’ve written extensively about this core wound in my series about healing from sexual trauma.

You, as an adult, can recognize how innocent children are. Children are inherently pure and deserving of love.

That little girl didn’t do anything wrong to make her bad or for God to abandon her.

Can you see the difference?

She wasn’t broken. She didn’t need to be fixed. She was still herself.

It’s the emotional pain of feeling isolated in that moment that got distorted by reasoning that she would carry into adulthood, believing she was different and undeserving of love.

The question is, how can we heal our childhood wounds or core wounds?

How can we heal wounds stemming from traditions, rituals, or broken vows?

We often tell ourselves that we cannot change the past, and that is true enough.

I cannot go back to that exact moment and rewrite what happened, even though I have done that many times in my mind, it hasn’t changed how I felt about that moment.

What if the teacher hadn’t put out all the eggs and had kept a bag aside, just in case?

What if I had been more assertive?

What if I had been faster?

What if?

What if?

What if?

What if we allow ourselves to rewrite those moments through ritual?

I had shared this story with someone who, one day, surprised me with a Kinder egg hunt of my own.

He had me wait outside my front door while he prepared the surprise. He then gave me the same instructions I’d gotten on that day, but this time, instead of having competition, I had an audience of one cheering me on.

I darted from room to room, in excitement, to find the eggs.

He had hidden the eggs out in the open just like my teacher had.

There was one on my toaster.

There was one on each bedpost.

There was one in the living room balanced atop my mini buddha.

There was one by my bathroom sink.

And so on. Eight eggs in all.

I was delighted.

He brought it full circle by asking to take a picture of me sitting with my treasure. The picture says it all!

In that moment, I was a child again and made to feel special. My pain had been acknowledged. I had been seen and set free to be a child, innocent and loved.

I have not looked back on that childhood memory and felt the same emotional pain. The emotional baggage had been transformed.

Your inner child has done something similar to your life events by attaching some story to them.

I want you to know that your inner child is not broken and doesn’t need fixing any more than mine did.

What you need is to have your feelings acknowledged and supported.

It’s ironic that the very thing that can cause our pain also has the potential to heal our wounds; I’m speaking about traditions, rituals, or vows that have tainted our self-love.

Rituals may be things like saying grace before a meal or bedtime prayers, but they don’t necessarily have to be for a religious reason.

Rituals may be part of cultural traditions, but may also be more personal.

Playing national anthems before sports events, for example.

Or two people who join in marriage may want to break from their family traditions and create their own family rituals, which become their traditions.

Again, rituals can invoke strong feelings like national pride, but they only have power over us if we give them significance. Rituals gain power through repetition.

A modern-day example is self-affirmations.

I have never witnessed any transformation from self-affirmations, no matter how consistently they were practiced. If we don’t believe them, it just feels like we are lying to ourselves.

A long time ago, when I was working with an NLP coach, I devised a ritual of my own. I didn’t realize at the time that it was a ritual.

I was working through different traumas I had experienced as a child; one specifically was the feeling of being abandoned by my family.

I had done the whole writing letters to my inner child or to the people who had hurt me, and all that did was stir up my emotions more. It was like adding fuel to the flames.

The ritual I devised came about rather spontaneously.

One day, at the dollar store, I spotted a doll with yarn for hair wearing a brown plaid dress, and I bought it. Something inside me drove my actions. I decided this doll would represent my inner wounded child.

When my husband got home later that day, I told him what my intentions were and asked for his full support.

It was crucial that this little doll, “mini-me”, never be left alone. She would have to be in the same room as me at all times. But more than that, she had to be the focal point. Not just there and forgotten about.

I made her a small bed at the top of our bed, and we would tuck her in at night.

I bought a fanny pack so she could sit in it, as if looking forward, and took her with me in public, everywhere.

She couldn’t be left home, alone.

She sat on the table between us when we went out to restaurants.

My husband went along with all of it, and this went on for quite some time.

Then one day, when I had just returned home from walking our three dogs, the landline started to ring. I hadn’t unleashed the dogs yet. All I had done was place “mini-me” on the window sill to keep her safe while I took care of the dogs. The phone was only a few steps away.

My husband walked in the door to find me on the phone, the dogs with their leashes still hanging from their collars, and “mini-me” sitting on the window sill.

Not more than a minute had gone by when he entered.

We made eye contact. Then he looked at “mini-me” sitting there alone and back at me.

Mini-me

It was that moment when he made eye contact with me, and looked at her… sitting there alone, the air became electric.

He put down his work bag and picked up “mini-me” and hugged her.

There he was, standing over six feet tall, hugging this doll that’s no more than 9” from end to end, as if she were a real child.

My whole body became weak.

I quickly hung up the phone. Luckily, it was my mother, and I could say, “I’ll call you back”, without explanation.

But the tears were already flowing.

In that simple act, I was hit with a tidal wave of love and acceptance. I had never felt as seen and loved like in that moment.

He truly gave me a gift that day. It was my starting point to open up and actively seek to repair the bonds in my relationships.

Lastly, we don’t always have to involve others in these traditions or rituals.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the end of my marriage and the vows that were broken.

I had decided that when the time felt right, I would burn my wedding dress.

I had shared this idea with other friends who asked to join me in that ritual. Some just wanted to support me, to bear witness. Some were divorced and had wedding dresses, under their bed or in closets somewhere. I thought it was a good idea and thought I could draw some strength and solidarity from them.

But when the time came, I wanted to do it alone.

I put flames to the symbol of the vows I had made to another person. But it was more than symbolic. It was like the phoenix that rises from the ashes.

On that day, in that act, I made a new vow. A vow to myself.

This is what I vowed:

“I promise to stand by my convictions. I shall respect my values, my beliefs, my boundaries, my heart, my authentic way of being. I promise to love myself, always, without sacrificing any part of me, in the name of love for someone else.”

The mind is a curious thing. It can be your gatekeeper or it can set you free. It’s up to you what you do with your memories. You can choose to hold onto them and let them continue to define who you are. Or you can remember that you aren’t broken, just like that little girl wasn’t broken…

You have feelings that were never acknowledged. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge them.

We need to feel, to heal.

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