Good evening ladies and gentlemen.
Many thanks for attending today,
and a special thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a tool with you
that has truly changed my life.
I learned this tool from reading a book called
"Heal your wounds and find your true self" by Lise Bourbeau.
But before that, first things first, let me introduce myself.
So, I'm Carolina.
I'm what you might call a "YouTuber".
For three and a half years now, I've been making YouTube videos
in which I share my concerns, my soul-searching,
and lots of things about the human experience
because this what I do all the time:
wondering and trying to understand the how, why and what
of absolutely everything that happens to me.
I read a book, "Heal your wounds and find your true self"
that helped me change my relationship with myself
and thus my relationships with others as well.
Before we begin, I'd like to make a disclaimer
as I usually do in my videos.
It's that I'm going to present a model that I consider simple,
understandable, and very attainable that really speaks to me.
However, this model is presented among a bunch of the author's other beliefs
that are a matter of faith.
For example, she talks about reincarnation
about the apparition of wounds on the body, etc.,
things in which I personally do not believe.
So you need to take some distance while you read it.
If it speaks to you then good for you,
otherwise take away what you can, it's still very interesting.
So, what does Lise Bourbeau talk about?
As the book's title indicates, she talks about the soul's wounds.
In our society as we know it,
it is true that the emotional body is often put on the back burner
in terms of the attention and care that we give it.
But of course, if we get hurt -
although some of you may put off going to the doctor or hospital -
usually when we get hurt, we seek treatment
such as when we break a limb or feel pain somewhere.
But when it comes to the emotional body
and what's going on in our minds and in our souls,
it is much more complicated to see
that indeed, we may have wounds, and indeed, we may even suffer from them.
So Lise Bourbeau explains that we can classify
the wounds made to the emotional body
into five large categories of negative emotions.
Later on, I'll present them in detail but just to list them,
these are betrayal, abandonment, rejection, humiliation, and injustice.
We all pretty much know what these emotions feel like.
We've all experienced them before.
But Lise Bourbeau says that these emotions
leave a mark on us from a very young age and play a part in forming our ego.
Now there are plenty of different definitions of "ego".
It depends on your affinity with different fields
because you can study the ego in a lot of different domains.
Lise Bourbeau explains that, in fact,
these wounds create in us the need to protect ourselves.
How? By using what she calls "a mask".
I'll show you that later.
If we were to make a comparison between this mask and a physical trait,
we could compare it to a glove that we put on a wounded hand,
the wound being this emotion that affected us as young children.
So I'm going to show you a little table.
There's a lot of information, but I'm going to explain everything.
So she tells us that these wounds that I was telling you about
are sometimes things that we experienced unconsciously,
things that perhaps we don't remember anymore
because it seems to me that human memory
really begins around age five - correct me if I'm wrong.
So obviously, within five years of living,
we've had the opportunity to experience many different emotions.
These emotions that are listed here in the first column,
create in us behaviors aimed at protecting the ego,
listed in the second column, that we call "the mask".
So this mask, according to our previous metaphor,
is a glove with which we cover our wound.
We all know that when we get hurt, to stop the pain we need treatment.
So in this case, when we use the mask,
that is when we put a glove over this wound,
we don't take into account the pain that the wound can inflict upon us.
And sadly, if someone reaches out to try to help us and touches it,
we are likely to have a rejection response
and react in a way where we misunderstand the other person.
We're going to say, "Why are you hurting me? Don't touch me."
But others can't know that we're hurt if we wear a glove.
They only see that we're hurt.
And so Lise Bourbeau's model helps us understand
how these masks
create a barrier between us and others but also between us and ourselves
because oftentimes, we're not aware of them.
We don't know why we use them.
We don't know what they are or what they are trying to protect.
Now rest assured, we don't always wear these masks.
We only wear them in situations in which the ego is afraid of getting hurt again
and suffering from these large wounds that we carry within ourselves.
So, for the first ...
For the first wound, the associated mask is the mask of "the controller".
Personally, I relate to this one. Why?
Because acting in a controlling manner in any situation,
wanting to keep control of it,
is a way of ensuring that nothing and no one can betray us.
Obviously, if I call over and over to be sure that we'll be on time,
that we'll be at the given place, that I'm not going to be let down, etc.,
I'm making sure that I won't be betrayed, so I'm wearing the mask of the controller.
For the second wound, abandonment, we will use the mask of "the dependent".
Why?
Because if I act as if I depend on the other,
this way I reassure myself that he or she will not abandon me.
It's a way of ensuring I won't be alone and this person won't let me down
in the same circumstances where I felt abandoned in the past.
And so the dependent mask serves to hide the wound of abandonment.
For the third wound, rejection, we'll use the mask of "the fugitive".
Why?
Because when we flee a situation, it's a way of anticipating getting rejected.
If I'm facing someone and start imagining that this person is going to reject me,
by fleeing, I deprive him or her of the opportunity to reject me.
By doing so, I avoid the situation in which I might feel rejected.
For the fourth wound, humiliation,
the mask is that of "the masochist".
The masochist is the person who always puts himself down, belittles himself,
or may excessively self-deprecate.
And consequently, like the fugitive,
the masochist prevents others from doing it.
If I spend my time putting myself down, making bad jokes about myself,
and showing that I am stupid, ugly, and so on,
it doesn't leave room for others to humiliate me since I'm already doing it.
So this allows me to protect myself from the wound of humiliation.
And to conclude, the fifth wound, injustice,
is associated with the mask of "the rigid".
When we act in an unyielding way,
consistently within a framework or a protocol so to speak,
and when we don't want to leave our little boxes or our beaten tracks,
it's a way of making sure that there won't be any injustice
and that we won't experience unfairness.
It's similar to the controller but in a more precise context
and within very precise limits.
So Lise Bourbeau says that, unfortunately,
one of these five wounds is likely to dominate over the others.
Maybe you can see yourself in one of those five, or maybe in several,
in any case, some are usually more present than others.
Often, we created these wounds during our first encounters with humans
when we arrived on little Planet Earth.
It could be the presence of our parents and our relationship with them
just as it could be their absence.
You can imagine that if I was a child born an orphan,
the main wound would perhaps be that of abandonment or rejection.
But the fact remains that even if we had parents,
and even if we had the opportunity to live with them,
our first interaction with them
can potentially cause these wounds in our emotional body.
And so we grow up through our life
with behaviors sometimes protective and sometimes not,
but behaviors that seem completely innate, natural to us,
that are part of our identity our personality,
while in fact, for many of them,
it"s just a way to believe that we are protecting ourselves
and doing all we can to not suffer.
So, this prevents us from getting to the third column,
which I named "Solution".
In the solutions - again, I'm going to go through them one by one -
we can see how we need to let go
if we use the mask of controller to hide the wound of betrayal.
It's very difficult, and I'm proof when it comes to betrayal.
It's true that many times in my life,
I had a hard time letting go in certain situations
because I always wanted to control everything.
Ultimately, instead of truly protecting myself from suffering,
it kept me from being happy
when I should have let go in certain situations when I needed to.
For the second, how can we become autonomous
in circumstances in which we should,
if we always use the mask of dependency to ensure we won't be abandoned ?
That's quite difficult!
For the third,
having to confront situations is something extremely painful and hard to do
if we always use the mask of the fugive to avoid the wound of rejection.
It's the same for self-esteem regarding the wound of humiliation:
How can we develop self-esteem when we spend our time putting ourselves down
and end up believing what we say about ourselves?
We often say that it's humorous and for fun,
and we know it makes people laugh, but in reality, there's a big chance
that when we put ourselves down, there's some truth behind it,
or we end up believing it.
So that's what we use to hide, the wound of humiliation.
And the last is flexibility.
How to succeed in having a certain degree of flexibility in any situation,
if we spend our time having a strict behavior so as to avoid injustice?
It's quite complicated.
Personally, reading this book helped me a lot,
to the extent that I guess, studies have been made in psychology and neuroscience
that have tried to explain this in a much more Cartesian and scientific manner.
It helped me a lot because it allowed me to stop identifying with my suffering,
and stop believing that I was inherently somebody like this, that is, controlling -
indeed, I do have concerns for others, don't worry.
So she enabled me to realize that there are times
where we can spot ourselves using our masks.
There's certainly a moment in your lives or maybe several,
when you've asked yourself more or less regularly,
"Why on Earth did I react like that? That didn't make sense."
Sometimes, a misunderstanding occurred with people who didn't mean harm,
but we had no doubt that they wanted to abandon us, reject us, humiliate us,
or we deemed the situation unjust or they had betrayed us.
Yet, on their side, that was not necessarily the case.
Therefore, instead of protecting us, these masks do nothing more than limit us.
Now this does protect us at times.
The ego protects us in some cases and it's necessary.
But very often, it's just an obstacle
in our personal fulfillment and in our self-understanding.
Once we realize when we wear the mask, we can ask ourselves where it comes from,
where it originates, when did we start wearing it,
with whom do we wear it, in which moments of our lives,
and when was it most difficult to take it off.
This enables us to get past our toxic behaviors towards ourselves
and even sometimes the wall we put between ourselves and others,
so that we can try to discover another part of us,
another facet of our personality,
that matches more closely with the person we'd like to be.
So if you're interested, I invite you to read Lise Bourbeau's work,
but also see if you can find this kind of model in other fields - I'm sure there is.
But most importantly, I invite you to take off your mask.
Thank you.