Krissy Hodges 
Healing – Transformation – Empowerment 

Moving Into Gentleness ~ Personal Story

Hello and welcome to my little share on moving into Gentleness and Grace. It’s a story that spans a lifetime, so you may want to grab a cuppa before you join me 😉

Gentleness is something I feel, deep in my bones and Soul. It was an energy I was born with and I have many memories as a young child, gently moving through life, curious, happy, open, kind and I always, always wanted to help others. If there was even an ant that needed to be rescued, I’d do my very best to save it and feel broken hearted when that wasn’t possible. I was a creative, dreamy, nature child who just wanted everyone to feel as happy and as connected as I did. I wanted to be out in the fields, on the marshlands conversing with the horses and playing in the rivers & woods when in England and out in the desert sands when in the Middle East. As a highly empathic child, it was peaceful being around animals and outside, often on my own, compared to being indoors with people. Adults were always quite loud/harsh to me. The World felt very noisy.

Unfortunately, life has a way of giving us experiences that cause us to cut off, suppress, disregard or completely block out parts of ourselves. We do this in order to survive, in order to please, in order to gain approval, comfort, protection or love as children. For me, the part of me I cut away and rejected was my gentleness.

It started with my Dad not really wanting a girl. I have clear memories of my parents discussing it, of his disappointment when I was born and of being so highly aware of that. I literally tried to turn myself into a boy in order to please him. I moved from loving girlie things and dolls to more and more ‘boy’ type activities and clothes. I wouldn’t be seen dead in a dress and was more often found exploring nature miles away from home, climbing trees or bombing around on my bike with the boys. ‘Boys’ in my dad’s eyes weren’t gentle. They were strong, rough & tumble, hard workers, protective, logical, practical ~ in fact, the total opposite of everything I was. So the first chunk of gentleness within me was cut away and shoved in a box as it really didn’t serve me in pleasing my daddy.

My Mum had a tough time. My parents marriage wasn’t the best and we were living in a foreign country where she had no support network for many years. Mum struggled a lot to stay in her own gentleness. Life was swiftly building up reason after reason that made her feel she had to protect herself. She could trigger into high emotion quite suddenly, which scared the daylights out of me. I still jump at every little unexpected noise, however small, to this day. So gentleness didn’t belong there either. I had to be strong for my mum and didn’t want to upset her, so I cut away even more of my gentleness and focused on whatever I thought would make my parents happy. Both of my parents are good people and I adore them. Am merely sharing this perspective from that very young age. We all make decisions or have experiences as children that our parents have no awareness of.

An experience neither of them were aware of is that age 7-9, I was sexually groomed by the father of a child I occasionally played with. That created all sorts of psychological problems as an adult. The decisions I made as a child due to these early experiences started to create more and more reasons for me to feel unsafe and unhappy. As I reached puberty and started interacting with boys, the ‘relationships road map’ my parents had showed me started to play out in my relationships too. I didn’t know anything else. I hadn’t experienced healthy examples of relationship outside of one set of grandparents, who were amazing, but also highly codependent, so I carried that too. Layer the trauma of being groomed on top and I was a car crash in relationship. Drawing broken man after broken man to me, desperately trying to ‘fix’ them when who I really needed to ‘fix’ was myself. Those men were merely reflections to show me how broken I was inside. With each one, however, another chunk of gentleness slipped away and I developed an incredibly sharp, hard edge in order to protect myself from any further pain.

By the time I reached my early 20s, I wasn’t gentle any more. I was edgy, defensive, quick to react, harsh with my words, highly emotional, controlling, codependent and could send people packing with one look. Being this way protected me and kept me safe. I would be open and share myself with others, but never all of myself with any one person. I always kept something back, something hidden…….. never feeling safe enough to be all of who I was. I judged myself so harshly over the trauma I’d experienced. Some parts of my mind literally felt like they’d gone insane!

It was impossible for me to be open AND gentle. I didn’t want people to see those, inner, dirty parts of me that I judged as damaged, broken or shameful. So I rejected gentleness even further and wore my warrior armour with pride. I refused to accept I had been a victim and remained very much in practical, masculine, controlling, defensive energy most of the time. This was mainly in my personal life, but could occasionally creep into work, which wasn’t great given I’m an intuitive who guides people through their pain, stagnation or discomfort.

This protective armour started to cause major issues a decade ago. I had reached the point where I’d done enough inner work to finally want to get closer to people in my life. To learn how to trust and fully open up to them. Yet time and again, I’d trigger into defence or even worse, into sabotaging relationships as my mind returned to that default, childhood survival pattern over and over again.

The adult, mature woman in me knew it was time to let people in and deepen my connections to those I love. I just didn’t know how. The younger part of me was absolutely terrified. It felt like my true self had been rejected by my parents and it was my true self that drew abuse to me ~ so trying to rediscover the authentic self I entered the World with came with a LOT of fear and resistance.

In simple terms, our conscious mind is our adult self. Our subconscious mind is predominantly our inner child self. Unfortunately for us, it’s our subconscious mind that calls the shots when we’re not 100% present and aware. No one is 100% present all of the time, so for the majority, our life is actually being controlled, in large part, by a child.

Without working with our inner child to discover what decisions we made when we were little, there is no chance of reprogramming our mind to think differently. NLP works on a psychological level, but it rarely clears the emotion trapped in our body and boy, do kids feel a lot of high, dramatic emotion! Other modalities work on releasing the emotion, but don’t alter the programming. It’s only when we work to release the trapped emotion AND reprogram ourselves that magic happens!

This inner child programming exists within all of us. The more trauma we experience as children, the more neglect, expectation, rejection or pain we experience, the stronger that programming is geared towards survival, protection and safety. However, having a fabulous upbringing doesn’t mean anyone escapes the programming. It’s how our brain forms the basic neural pathways (programming) of our psychology.

People who have wonderful childhoods also made decisions as children that may not serve them as adults. Perfectly innocent ones. For example, a little boy ran down the garden path and fell over, cutting his knee open. His dad ran over, picked him up, dusted him off and said ‘There there, you’re alright, big boys don’t cry, there’s no need for tears’. Parents all over the World have done this untold times. However, for that particular little boy, in that moment, he made the decision to NEVER cry again ~ as he wanted so badly to be a ‘big boy’ and gain his daddy’s approval. At the age of five years old, that little boy formed a psychological program and judgement that crying was a ‘weakness’. This resulted in him never being able to use tears as an outlet for emotional expression or overwhelm and caused him to suppress huge amounts of emotion over the years, creating problems in his life as an adult.

There was no trauma. His dad is a wonderful father, but that decision made at age five laid down programming that will run for a lifetime if it isn’t changed. No matter how hard we try, our brain is set with many many programs and decisions that were made between the ages of three and seven. It becomes our psychological default, which is why many try to heal something and move on, but somehow, always find themselves back in the same place: feeling, thinking or experiencing things that are all too familiar and unpleasant. Those default programs are the strongest running programs in the brain as they’ve been there the longest. They are our default.

So, this year, I dived into that programming big time. Up until that point, I’d done a lot of deep work motivated by my son as I wanted to become a better Mum. Then for my partner, because I wanted to become a better ‘wife’. Then on my abilities & education as I wanted to become a better guide & support to others. This year, I stepped up and decided to do the work for myself as a woman, just for me. Sessions started every two weeks, working with my inner child to alter her perception of the World. To clear the old, faulty programming that was no longer working for me and to replace it with bright, shiny new programs that would become the upgraded default. At no point, did I imagine that work would take me to hell before moving me into the beautiful place I am now. I didn’t even really know where it was all heading if honest, only that I couldn’t stay where I was any longer.

As I dived in, my body went absolutely bonkers. All the emotion that had been suppressed and stored in my body started to flood out after each healing session and an underlying problem with my parathyroid glands was revealed. A problem that was causing insane amounts of issues, pain and imbalance on a physical level. It explained why I had been in & out of hospital for several years now, with nothing ever really explaining what was wrong. It got to the point where my diet was so clean, the doctors were baffled. So as I hit the core of that childhood programming, the core of the physical imbalance was revealed simultaneously.

Doing this work has not been easy. However, each session brought me to a place of compassion, love and protection for that little, traumatised girl within me. I could suddenly see how she had simply responded to trauma in the only way she knew how ~ by watching what those around her did to protect themselves and taking on every single action she saw as her own.

Reconnecting to that gentle, frightened, confused part of myself brought so much love ~ for her strength and determination ~ for trying to protect us for all these years, even though she felt so alone and misunderstood. It was a lot for her to carry and there were so many ages of myself from three right through to adult life that needed acknowledgement and support. Slowly, but surely, the reins of responsibility for keeping us ‘safe’ passed from that younger part of my psychology and subconscious mind to the adult, conscious part of myself.

As I gentled deeply towards myself, the Universe started showing up in ways that made it very clear I had to be gentle in every, single aspect of my life. No messing around, my health was now seriously at risk and I was exhausted on every level. Some call this an Ego death, but it didn’t really feel like that as my awareness was so present ~ I just knew I was letting go of a huge part of who I was and how I moved through the World to be replaced by something better. At this point, the penny around gentleness still hadn’t dropped.

Several specialists told me, my kinesiologist told me, friends, my partner, my own guides and intuition and Mum told me. I had to stop, to slow down, to be gentle with myself and above all, to remove all stress immediately. My body and entire energy system were actually in crisis and shock from shifting as deeply and quickly as I had. I had been the opposite of gentle and my body was letting me know, in no uncertain terms, what the outcome of that was. All I will say is having kidney stones that are too big to come out, yet insist on trying to, is more painful than childbirth! I have never broken down and cried from pain like that in my life ~ something inside me cracked and all I could do was surrender and sob for a very, very long time.

Finally, I listened and put everything down. For the first time since starting the business 16 years ago, I put work down and trusted the lovely women who work with me to be able to hold the fort. For days at a time, I didn’t even walk into my office or turn the computer on. Anyone who has ever been self employed knows how hard it is to put work down completely ~ we’re responsible for so much!

Everything in life suddenly slowed down and became incredibly soft and gentle. I could feel parts of me wanting to get going, to ‘do’ something, to be responsible as I had work to do ~ I wasn’t in any pain at this point and felt quite good, so to have to do nothing except potter around, read, meditate, watch movies, do only light things in the garden……. even as I’m typing this now, am realising that so many people dream of being able to live like that and there I was, resisting it! It didn’t feel right if I wasn’t ‘achieving’ or ‘serving’ in some capacity. Particularly when I wasn’t in pain. This made me aware of how many illnesses are silent and how much we can continue to push our body when we don’t feel the pain or discomfort of something going awry.

I gently worked through all of that to a place where there was no guilt. Something cracked and broke through again when I let go of guilt. The expansiveness was incredible ~ I felt amazing. What a gift!! So I took a GUILT FREE week out and went to visit some beautiful, female friends and filled up my system with sisterhood, motherhood, family, joy, love, laughter & happiness. These women had always seen the gentle, loving core of me and reflected this back to me in how kind, caring and thoughtful they were in taking care of me. Another gift of this experience is the lovely relationship I now have with my mum and the phenomenal women who have my back and love me for who I am ~ my true self ~ still a work in progress 😉

I’ve struggled with female friendships and relationships all my life, yet in getting to know the little girl I was and being more solid in the woman I’ve become ~ in reconnecting to the feminine parts of myself, I’m now able to truly connect to the feminine all round. I came back from the trip to receive a huge bunch of the most stunning flowers from a gorgeous female friend in Hong Kong. Then a parcel arrived from a magical woman I haven’t spoken to in a long time ~ a gift of Frankincense and Myrrh, out of the blue. My Mum has been hugely supportive, running me to appointments and making me laugh nearly every day. I feel so blessed to get to spend quality time with her. The feminine are showing up in work too as I’m making some beautiful connections with women all over the World ~ deeper connections as we’re called together to support each other and stand in solidarity.

 

And the gifts just keep on coming as I’m no longer a workaholic!! In an effort to please my dad, I mimicked his workaholic ethic and have slogged my guts out for years, always feeling that push to work hard and ‘achieve’ ~ and I took this into every area of life. Parenting felt like work, the house felt like work, my relationship felt like work ~ flipping everything felt like ‘work’. Arrgggh! In putting everything down, I’ve realised how much better I can manage my time, what is truly essential to keeping the business running on a healthy keel and that I have actually achieved a dream without even knowing! I have always wanted to be able to go part time or to work only 3-4 days a week. Impossible you’d think being self employed ~ or so I thought.

I’d never realised how much ‘busy-ness’ I’d manifested in perceiving everything in life as ‘work’ to keep that feeling of ‘slogging’ going. Stopping everything made me finally see ~ I had made it. I was always going too fast and creating too many things to do in an ad hoc way to notice. I don’t need to slog my guts out any more. I don’t need to work 24/7 or every day of every week. I have reclaimed and am learning to embody the energy of gentleness & grace ~ which is slowly manifesting in every area of life. I don’t have to move at 100mph multi tasking my backside off any more. I can be absolutely present and do one thing at a time, with ease, with grace, with enjoyment, engagement and a smile.

So here I am, at 48 years old, reuniting with many parts of myself that have been locked away since childhood. It feels so gentle, so graceful and beautiful in ways words can’t describe. I still have days where I trigger, when that old ‘fast’ energy tries to get back in and I find myself escalating into stress quite quickly. That old, speedy energy feels incredibly harsh and unnatural now. Yet I lived like that for decades! Despite now feeling gentle, I also feel strong. Things don’t phase me like before. The strength that comes from being in my calm, adult, loving, open hearted, womanly energy beats the warrior armour, hands down. It’s a strength that brings joy, vulnerability and delight, not defence. Even laying down boundaries feels like an act of kindness instead of a struggle. It’s blowing my mind daily!

This is all still playing out, so I’m still experiencing things each day that are different ~ a really good kind of different.  For anyone reading who is being asked to dive deep into their own childhood or past, I hope this blog brings some comfort or reassurance. I don’t know what will be on the other side for you personally ~ however, I can promise it will be worth the effort. I feel like a different woman, which is ironic given all I’ve really done, is reconnect to a huge part of my authentic self ~ I do love a bit of irony though and IMHO, the Universe definitely has a warped sense of humour 😉

With much love and gentle hugs

Krissy xxx

5 thoughts on “Moving Into Gentleness ~ Personal Story”

  1. Laura Townson

    What a wonderful blog thank you for sharing. I too struggle making female friendships.
    Laura

  2. Pauline Read – what a story ,what a lady to be able to put that down so eloquently.thank you for sharing .
    I too find relationships hard , wasnt loved as a child as my sister was the star. From parents side it is very hard to do the right thing and balanced .
    Similar to you I have just started kinesiology with the hope it will help a lot of my underlying pains and ailments that I have gathered .
    You sent me a present in my order that was truly amazing that made me cry it was so on point for which I would truly thank you for . Then reading your amazing story in black and white ,it is all making sense . I feel the universe is trying to guide and help us clear a lot of passed lives and this life times traumas . I am very grateful for all the help that is coming forward .
    I do wish you well on your continued journey 💗💗💗
    Kindest Blessings
    Pauline xx
    Ps I have forwarded to my eldest daughter who I think it might help on her journey so I hope that ok ? X

    1. Kristy Hodges

      Thanks so much Pauline, it’s lovely to hear from you again 🙂 I fully agree that now is the time for us to clear our personal wounding and issues ~ if we do this work on an individual level, it will help to shift the energy of the collective to a better place. I’d be honoured to help your daughter lovely, so look forward to connecting with her. With much love and hugs, Krissy xxx

  3. Hi Krissy,
    Thank you for sharing your personal story, it really resonated with me. I had a difficult childhood having watched my mother walk out on the family & then being put into care. I found it difficult to allow people to get close to me & built a wall around myself. It has taken a long time to start taking that wall down but with the help of a trusted therapist friend I have managed to move forward. So thank you Krissy I wish you well as you continue on your journey.
    Love, light & reiki blessings,
    Sylvie, x

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