What happens when something is not working and we want to know where it comes from?
For those who don’t know me, I was born in Brasil and taken to Israel in the age of 9. I speak 3 different languages but English and Hebrew are the ones I feel comfortable working with. When my family and I moved to Brasil almost 3 years ago, I was sure the Portuguese will come back to me naturally and effortlessly, as I am good with languages. But it wasn’t the case. Not only I can’t pick up and improve it, I feel a block whenever I try to read in Portuguese. And my eldest son, who is 14 now, has a strong feeling against this language. He is brilliant but doesn’t want to learn nor speak it. He really hates it…
While speaking to a dear colleague of mine regarding this issue, she said she has a similar issue with her own ‘mother-tongue’.
And then it landed. Mother tongue.
Is it be possible that our brain refuse to learn a languange which most of our traumas are related with? If bad things happened to me in a certain language, and I blocked them, is it possible that I also suppressed my ability to ‘understand’ it? Even develop dislexia as a survival strategy?
So I dived in. Set an intention sentence with my colleagues in my last self-encounter. The intention was:
I want to improve my Portuguese. I chose to resonate with my I, want and Portuguese.
And sure enough there it was. My biological mother (I am an adopted child), was entangled with the Portuguese. What I was saying is “I want my mother”. But she gave me up. And this “love” and “rejection” is entangled with my ‘mother-tongue’, the first language I heard and was exposed to in the womb, which was a very unsafe and confused place to grow in.
I must say that since this process, my son is more open to Portuguese.
IoPT and self-encounters do bring clarity to problems we may see them as ‘non fixable’.
There is always more to explore.
Can you please talk more about the self-encouter?