May 24, 2018

Women Who Are Afraid Of Men Have A Right To Be

by Lisa A. Romano

awakening childhood programming fear pain vs. pleasure reflex unconsciousness

I want to thank one of the members of my 12 Week Breakthrough Codependency Coaching Program for giving me such a great topic to write about. It seems she is concerned that because she is 'afraid of men', that perhaps she will never attract the kind of man she truly desires.  I wanted to expand on this topic because it is so relevant, especially to wounded adult children who have been abused in childhood.

If you have been conditioned to fear feeling vulnerable because as a child your vulnerability and powerlessness was exploited, it is very natural for you to fear getting too close to the opposite sex.  As an adult female, if you are finding it particularly difficult to feel comfortable around men, and you have been emotionally, sexually or physically abused in childhood, your brain is simply trying to protect you from getting hurt again today.

The brain is highly sophisticated, but it is also very simple.  The pain vs. pleasure reflex is always operating, and its program is not very sophisticated. If you loved somoene who hurt you, your brain has registered all the data and information that corresponds to feeling wounded by someone else's treatment of you. For instance, if your parents mocked you when you cried when you were a child, your brain correlates crying with being mocked.  The brain may simply associate the painful outcome of being mocked with you crying.  Because your brain knows you cannot control how your parents choose to treat you, and it knows it can control whether or not you cry, the pain vs. pleasure reflex will work diligently to prevent you from cyring in the future, because it has learned to associate pain with crying.

This operation is all unconscious, which is the reason why so many people live their lives running around in circles unable to understand why they do what they do.  Even if you consciously tell yourself it is okay to cry, the neural associations that have been created so long ago that have been reinforced throughout the years, will make it all but almost impossible for you to be able to cry.  If you do find yourself able to cry, that may be because the brain was overloaded with pain at the moment you actually cried.  In this case, the neural scales were tipped in the favor of crying.

Women who are afraid of men have every right to be.  Somewhere in their history they have been wounded by men they once trusted.  The key however, is to heal so thoroughly that one no longer allows the childhood programming from the past to dictate what kinds of experiences one has as an adult.

It is my opinion that most people are unconscious to the true driving forces behind their beliefs, thought patterns and actions.  Most people never think about the way they think, or stop to question whether or not they have to react to every thought or emotion that runs across the screen in their mental field.  The mental field is simply a screen that the subconscious mind is projecting upon, and until people awaken they will be unaware that all of their creative potential is being ambushed by their unconsciousness.  

Every human being has the potential to literally design their life. But just as a sleeping architect cannot possibly sketch his masterpiece or ever hope to see his design manifest due to his unconsciousness, an unawakened human being has no other choice but to live their life by default.  The saddest thing to realize is the fact that ALL human beings have the potential to live beautiful, peaceful, and abundant lives, but sadly because most have been terribly wounded in their childhoods, their unconsciousness causes their potential to be lost, as the human mind is held as an innocent captive of the pain vs. pleasure reflex.  It seems the very design that has been divinely created to keep human beings safe, has at same time become the guard that keeps human potential locked inside a box.  Only an awakening can save us.