The Myth of Regression
There is no going backwards, only forward
During a recent workshop, I was guiding a client who is going through the challenge of having moved back home with her parents in order to provide a better role model and protection for her tween sister and to save money for some of her shorter term goals.
What makes her current circumstances so challenging is that she has served as the financial buffer of her family since she was in her early 20s. This is a role that she finds highly distressing, and the financial expectations that she endures, along with other factors that contribute to a tumultuous relationship with her parents, has left her feeling raw, tender, and easily triggered as of late.
While tearfully sharing her story, she shared, “I feel like I’m regressing. How did I end up back here again?”
She has done so much deep work to heal her inner child wounds, strengthen her emotional intelligence, regulate her nervous system, and show up as a woman who embodies her power and autonomy. She was heartbroken to look at her current circumstances and feel confused and disappointed that in her early 30s, she’s back at home, reliving the same patterns that she worked so hard to deconstruct.
Not only could I fully understand how she could feel so displaced and disappointed, especially because the socially imposed ideas that we internalize around age and the supposed milestones or accomplishments we should have met by a certain point, but I had damn near gone through the exact same scenario in my own life just a couple of years ago.
More on that later.
For now, I want to focus on the core feelings of failure, unworthiness, and shame associated with the perception of not being where you feel you should be in life.
From a young age we are instilled with very powerful ideas of what life is supposed to look like for each person in order to be considered a successful, self-reliant, and socially acceptable adult. We are told that we will graduate from high school at 18 years old, already having a firm grasp on what we want to do with the rest of our lives, study that field in college, get a job in that field, marry and have children before our eggs dry up, spend our lives working and, as women, also shoulder the massive burden of caring for everyone around us.
When we don’t live up to these expectations, or worse, do live up to those expectations, but experience a setback such as job loss or divorce or environmental catastrophe which brings us back to what we feel is square one, it creates a tremendous amount of distress in our hearts and minds.
In the context of a spiritual healing journey, that sense of failure can be quite depressing. Spending years in therapy, facing your shadows, healing your wounds, taking responsibility for your life, only to be sent into a rage after one triggering phrase from your mother is maddening and can bring about feelings of powerlessness and frustration.
But all of these feelings of failure and shame originate in our perception of our circumstances, rather than the divine reality, which is…
Wherever you are is exactly where you are supposed to be.
Re-Opening My Mother Wound
When I purchased my school bus in 2021 and found someone to help me build it, I was given a 3-4 month timeline for it’s completion. It was supposed to be ready by October of that year and I chose not to extend the lease on my house that was set to end November 1st. But what actually happened(italicize) is that the contractor started giving me issues after a couple of months of work, and then chose not to finish the build, essentially leaving me homeless.
I had to drive all of my things to Texas, put it in storage, and then come back to California to retrieve my half finished bus so that I could finish the build myself at my mom’s house in Texas. The contractor had told me that I should be able to finish in a few weeks, but there was so much work to do, and with my limited experience, it took me almost 7 months.
Within a few weeks of parking the bus on my mom’s driveway, I knew that the purpose of me being there had nothing to do with the bus.
I won’t be diving too deep into the details of my relationship with my mother in this letter, but what I will share with you is that I experienced tremendous abuse at her hands, literally and figuratively, and vowed to myself when I moved out at 18 years old, that I would never go back.
At 35 years old, I was humbled by God and spent 7 months sleeping in the same bedroom where I used to contemplate slitting my wrists before crying myself to sleep.
I won’t lie and say that I didn’t have moments of pure ‘what the fuck?!’ confusion and anger over my circumstances, but thankfully, due to my deep spiritual work over the past several years, I had the grounding awareness that my soul had called me back to the origin point of some of my worst trauma because, regardless of the deep work I had done to heal my mother wound, reparent myself, and stand in my sovereignty, I had much more healing to do.
I realized in those first couple of months how much a part of me still deeply craved her acceptance and acknowledgment of me as a person, not her projections of me, but who I truly am. I sat with the version of me that was still begging her to listen to me, to hear me, to see me.
I cried a lot.
I cried for the little version of me that was still hurting.
I cried for the big, grown version of me that was hurting.
It was so hard to keep my nervous system regulated during this time, and I’m not convinced that I was successful at it. On top of being back at my childhood home, I became jobless when I was fired from my tv show, and then I had to worry about how I would make money when my entire industry decided that people like me—not vaxxed—weren’t worthy of work for nearly 18 months.
And through it all, I remained connected to the knowledge that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. That knowing is what pulled me out of the darkest feelings that arose during that era of my life. And despite because of the painful growth of that experience, not only did my bus get finished, I learned to show up even more grounded, with greater grace and tolerance for my mom’s bullshit, having strengthened my inner pillar, allowing me to be even more connected and attuned to myself in those triggering moments.
The Spiral of Growth & Healing
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If you have the most basic understanding of time as a construct, then you’re likely aware that time does not operate in a linear fashion, as we are conditioned to believe. We’re given a 24 hour clock, 12 months, and 365 days per year, with each second, each minute, each day occurring in succession, one after another. In broader terms, we understand time as existing as either the past, the present, or the future.
Most people spend the majority of their time living in either the past—experienced as trauma triggers, regret, and depression—or living in the future—often experienced as anxiety or a general sense of unease or urgency to get somewhere or accomplish something.
Very rarely are we attuned to the present moment.
This is why when we experience “setbacks” or feel as if we’re repeating a cycle, we have such a difficult time coping. We are seeing the experience through the lens of our previous self, or wanting it to be something different than what it is.
It’s from seeing through this disconnected lens that causes us to miss the gift and wisdom that is being presented to us in the present.
As I shared before, time is not linear, nor is growth and healing.
Our existence and the energy that fuels it operates in a spiral, a vortex of power and transformation that moves upwards and downwards, but always forward.
This is how I knew, despite how tender and raw I felt when I landed back at my mom’s house, that I was there to deepen my healing. I wasn’t being punished by God, I wasn’t moving backwards. I was ready to unearth new layers of wounding and trauma that I didn’t previously have the capacity to excavate.
It was exactly because of my growth, devotion to radical responsibility, and depth of awareness that I was able to not only occupy a space that carried such tremendous grief for me, but I was able to do so with grace, compassion, and love. For both myself and my mother.
When I first began doing the work to reparent my inner child and heal my mother wound, I did not have the capacity to be in the same space as her. I needed distance, boundaries of low contact, and the ability to quickly extricate myself if need be. When I returned to my childhood home a few years ago, I had developed a powerful sense of grounding, awareness, and the ability to stay calm (for the most part) in triggering moments.
To witness myself in that energy was not only heartening, it was liberating and made me feel joyful and incredibly proud of myself. I felt as though I had leveled up in a tremendous way, but I would not have been able to recognize that within myself had I not had the experience of “moving backwards”.
Get Curious
When you find yourself faced with familiar patterns or triggers, it’s easy to shame yourself for regressing, or returning to an old energy that you were so certain you’d shifted away from.
Instead of directing judgement towards yourself, try getting curious.
Ask yourself, “What is this experience offering me as a gift? As a lesson? As an opportunity for deeper remembrance?
When we allow ourself to become curious, it grounds us into the present. It’s incredibly easy to revert to our old narratives and stories around the circumstances of our lives, and it’s the willingness to consider broader possibilities that anchors us into the now and opens doorways to deeper healing.
The client that I referenced in the beginning hadn’t considered the beautiful possibilities of her circumstances, because she was keeping herself stuck in narratives that had been constructed by her younger, wounded self. In her desperation to not feel what she was feeling, she was missing the opportunity to recognize just how far she has come.
We do ourselves a great disservice when we act as though healing is a destination, rather than a lifelong journey of discovery, excavation, and remembrance.
Yes, it’s very true that oftentimes we are repeating painful loops due to our unwillingness to recognize our patterns and make the necessary changes, but for those of us that are deepening our awareness, committed to our growth, and devoted to the visions of our future selves, sometimes we have to experience the sensation of moving backward, of regressing, in order to recognize that we are not only further along than we could have imagined, but that life will continue to get better and better.
Thank you for reading. If this letter resonated with you and you’re looking for deeper support, I’d love to invite you to take advantage of my offerings.
I have limited availability for the summer, but if you don’t see an appointment time or date that works for you, email me at andrea@goddessvibes.com.
Thank you. I can relate to recently returninŚ home after doing some healing work regarding my father. Fortunately, there was no physical abuse, but there was the abuse of control and narcissistic behavior. I know that while being there for my mother, who was ill, I managed to find grace in spaces without being triggered. We are where we are supposed to be for our healing.
When we met a few years ago at that Harvest Host, I said, "I don't believe in coincidences and that our paths were spiritually intertwined for a reason." The more I follow your work, the more this thought has been rooted as truth. My journey of deconstructing the myths that have been mentally ingrained in us has been mentally and spiritually exhausting, but also very rewarding. I am able to reflect on my own personal journeys, such as the story you shared above, and understand why these trials were so necessary for my growth. Thank you for allowing God to use you as a vessel of light to help guide our wounded souls to a path of recovery and self discovery.