3 Shadow Wounds of Having Brothers and Sisters (and you don't even know it)

The trees behind me that you see, they're casting a shadow. And in its environment, as you look around right now, the shade that I'm in is a reflection of the tree. Now what happens is we all have a shadow, an unconscious part of ourselves. And as we go out into the world, what happens is we are projecting that shadow onto other people, onto our environment. And until we become aware of the shadow, it will run many different layers of our life. Now in this video, I wanna show you 3 shadow wounds that come from being a sibling. So if you have brothers or sisters, if you're one of many kids, you will be able to see through this video how that may have affected you, how that may be showing up in the world. Maybe you're holding yourself back from being your true self. Maybe you felt jealous of other, the siblings that you have. Maybe you felt like you were unworthy if different siblings you have got treated differently. Well, in this video I'm going to be showing you the 3 major shadow wounds that I've noticed in my own life and that I notice a lot of people experience, and I'm going to show you how to heal them. So if you're a sibling, then this video is for you. Welcome back to another video. My name is Aaron and I help people expand their consciousness. Now on this video, I want to share with you those 3 shadow wounds that I've noticed in my own life right now. I'm actually in Costa Rica. I just got done doing 3 days of plant medicine. So today, or these last 2 days, I've done 2 days of something called ayahuasca and then 1 day of what's called huachuma or San Pedro. And these plant medicines, what they do is they bring up things in the subconscious that you were priorly unaware of. And you know, it's every time I do it, you know, every, every year normally I'll come to Costa Rica where it's you know, legal, and I do it, and it is always so transformative. You know, this last 6 months, what I've been working with and is, is really going into my own shadow, and a lot of that has been me becoming aware of different dynamics between me and my parents. I think that our relationship with our mom and our relationship with our dad is the first relationship that we have, and what happens is, is because of that relationship, the beliefs, the stories that come from that dynamic. So if you had a parent that's really strict on you, and then you may have felt like, you know, you couldn't just be yourself or like you had to be a certain way to be loved, or maybe you— we'll talk about that in a minute, the whole, you know, the sibling part of this, because a lot of times what happens is through the way that we're treated and through the way our siblings are treated, we're then making stories about who we are and how we relate to other people. And these stories or these beliefs then remain on autopilot until we become aware of them. So what I became aware of in this ceremony is very powerful. So for the last couple months now, I have an amazing mom who also went through a lot of stuff growing up. And in a way, this trickle-down effect happened within kind of like my family line, I guess you could say. And basically what happened is, for those of you that don't know my story, From 7 to 16 years old, I had an abusive ex-stepmom in my life who was very controlling, very manipulative. During that time, my brother and I weren't allowed to see our real mom. Anytime we'd go to her house, my mom's house, we'd come back, we'd immediately get in trouble. We'd get in trouble for random stupid stuff. And we got primed into believing or thinking that, hey, if we go to our mom's house, we get in trouble, so why go over there? And then we were eventually kind of brainwashed to also not see our mom in the best light. and a lot of stuff wasn't true or was exaggerated. And it was, yeah, it was, that was that period of time. But before that, I used to always think that I have a feminine wound and I'm almost afraid of getting into relationships or afraid of commitment because I'm secretly afraid that I'm gonna attract somebody like my ex-stepmom that's gonna try to control me. So that was like an old shadow thing in of itself. I had to change my perception and my beliefs about women. And after 16, 17 came around, when my dad divorced my ex-stepmom, I then had all this freedom. but I kept attracting women into my life that wanted to control me because somehow I felt safe under that control. That was the payoff I was getting by attracting people that were trying to control me. Now, in this ceremony, what I realized, I was doing Wachuma, which is an all day from 8 in the morning till like 10 or like 12 o'clock at night. It's this feeling of unconditional love that comes, but you get all these insights of awareness. And there were different themes of this ceremony where we go through different, you know, it's a very social thing, but you're going through and you're, you know, you're sending, you're doing this little ceremony where you put tobacco in this little piece of cloth and you put it up and you put it in this altar, you throw it in this altar and that's like a prayer that you're putting in. I had this desire to do it for my brother. And in this moment that I was doing it for my brother, I had this absolute realization that changed my life. I used to always say that my sense of self-worth and I am almost afraid of being abandoned because when I was 3 or 4 years old, I just had this, experience or this feeling that I felt emotionally abandoned by my own mom because my mom was dealing with so much stuff. And that then I thought there was something wrong with me and there's like something I need to be doing differently in order to get love, or maybe I can be differently and mom would, you know, engage more, something like that. And of course my mom was doing the best she could with where she was. I also found out my mom had like a mom wound from her mom. So it was just, this was just trickled down. And I have a great relationship with my mom now. However, From 3 years old, we're making these meanings. And what happened is I made a meaning when I was 2 or 3 years old around my mom and me thinking that maybe I'm unworthy or that then had this fear of abandonment. So I found out in my life now there's a shadow because sometimes I'm trying to please other people or I'm trying not to be polarizing or be myself because maybe I have to change in order to get attention. And I had this huge epiphany. This is a whole nother video I'll make, but I realized that my YouTube channel is a reflection of my relationship and how I relate to my mom. It sounds kind of crazy, but basically there was a strong drive for significance that I feel like I had for me to like get well known on YouTube and to get my message out there. And I've realized that that unhealthy thing I was searching in other people and in an audience was the thing I was searching for in my own mother, my own mom. And I used to always think it was because my mom's dad passed away when I was like 3 or 4 years old. But the epiphany that I had on last yesterday or 2 days ago on doing Wachuma was that when my brother was born, when I was 2 and a half, 3 years old, what happened is all the attention shifted from me to my brother. And it was because my brother had asthma. My brother had a whole bunch of health complications and my mom was very reactive to that and very trying, doing her best to be a great mom. But then the attention shifted and I would, I never knew this. Like literally for years, I never knew that I had this wound inside of myself where I didn't feel worthy or I felt like there was something wrong Is there something wrong with me? Because when you're an only, I'm an oldest, so when you're the only child, it's like all the attention's on me, and then you lose that attention. You think, well, maybe there's something wrong with me. Mom's not gonna get, mom's, it's just all about, it's all about Zach now. And I thought that maybe I'm not worthy, and that caused a whole shadow. So the third shadow wound, we're gonna go from 3 to 1, we're going backwards. The third shadow wound is that when one of the siblings is born, there's a new meaning that we then make about ourselves. And that new meaning could be that we're not worthy. That new meaning could be if the attention shifts, that maybe there's something wrong with me. So the shadow of that then shows up in our life because we feel unworthy or we feel like we're seeking significance or attention in almost like a, like, I'll show you type way. I realized that in my own life, like, a lot of people didn't believe in me when I started like making YouTube videos. They thought what I do is kind of weird. And then as I started growing, more and more people believed in me and more and more friends and family, I feel like that significance, that drive that I had was a part of my shadow that just wanted to be seen, that just wanted to be heard, that just wanted to be and feel worthy. And that's driven me for so much of my life. And I'm now becoming aware of that more than ever. But I had no idea that it was directly related to my brother and that energy. Now, my brother, I can also see he just has a, you know, because he's had that attention, maybe in another way he seeks that attention too, but in different ways. Because he's so used to it. But there was a hole that I felt, and that caused me to then project that shadow onto everybody else, and then to not be myself, to be more of like a people pleaser. So that's the third shadow wound. Maybe you realize that you were— the attention shifted when one of your siblings was born, or when maybe one of your siblings gets other treatment. And then in that moment, what is that story that you made about yourself? Maybe there's a story that you made that said that I'm not worthy, this person's more special than me. Or maybe you were the special kid, and then you realize that you see other people as less than, or maybe you feel a disconnect with other people, or you feel like everyone should, you expect everybody to treat you that way. Now, the next part of this is the competitiveness. This is the second shadow wound. Between my brother and I growing up, we're 3 years apart, and there was definitely a level of competitiveness that ran through us. And there was a moment though, it's gonna sound kind of cheesy. I feel like sharing this though. My brother and I were always kind of like, we were kind of protecting. The way that it worked is our ex-stepmom was so crazy and manipulative that we would have to tattle on each other in order to receive love. So we would tattle on each other and then we'd get rewarded to be allowed to have privileges. We weren't allowed to like eat the kind of, We barely got enough food to eat. We got a bowl of cereal in the morning, TV dinner at night. We were 120 pounds up until my dad divorced my ex-stepmom. And we weren't allowed to watch TV. We weren't allowed to have friends. We weren't allowed to go to school activities. We'd get school activities taken away and we normally locked outside working all day. So my brother and I were kind of looking out for ourselves because we had to tattle on each other to get love. But there's this other aspect to where there was, there was one time we went camping somehow. We got away. And went camping with somebody else. And we were watching this movie called Boondock Saints. And, you know, my brother and I were Irish and Scottish. So this movie Boondock Saints about these two, like, Irish brothers that go out and they had this, like, tattoos and stuff. And my brother and I really bonded over that movie. And it was a really cool experience because then we became more like a unit. But there was also this— the shadow of this competitiveness was like that. I know, I know it wasn't as much there for me as him. And what I mean by that is I know, like, even with girls, for example, I remember one time I found out that he was like talking smack about me to some girls that I was like flirting with or talking with. And I realized that it was this competitiveness because maybe, you know, maybe he felt like— he probably felt like the attention was always on me because I was the older one or something like that. Damn, there's these mangoes at all these trees, so they just fall randomly. So I hope mango doesn't fall on me. There's these howler monkeys that walk around too. It's really cool. But this competitiveness where we were originally like in our own frames, but then eventually we came together. But even then, even after we came together, we would flow in and out of this competitiveness. And the shadow of that is that it's because comparison factor. I can see how even with this relationship with my brother, even some of my friends, you know, a lot of my friends do YouTube videos and stuff. I can see how maybe some of that competitiveness is always for me to like work harder than everybody else. And I can see how that shadow has played out in my life in a very powerful way. So that's the second shadow I wanted to become aware of. And the first one, one of the ones that I think the most of you need to hear, is I think a lot of siblings are afraid to shine bright because they're afraid of outshining other siblings. Or some siblings believe that what they need to do is they need to shine brighter than other people in order for them to feel significance. So I was talking to my friend Patty, my friend Victor's wife, she was also one of many kids, and she felt kind of the same way. She was afraid of shining because her sister, there was some of her family that was always like, oh, she's the youngest, prettiest, little petite thing. And some of her family has different body types and stuff like that. So they would always compare them to her and she felt like she couldn't shine. And I know that even with my brother, I remember when I started becoming successful, my brother came over to my house and I was like, almost afraid of showing him how successful, like, look at this, I have a big house and I don't, I won't wanna share it because I'd play it off small. Like, I was almost one time gonna pretend I had roommates or something because I didn't want him to think that I did this all by myself. So I was afraid of shining. And I think that an important thing to realize is that if you're afraid of shining, if you're afraid of like being your true authentic light or you're afraid of polarizing other people or you're afraid or think that you need to please other people to get worthy, just realize that may be the shadow. Maybe the shadow is for you to focus on being authentic. For you to being real. Maybe that includes you needing to shine. And a lot of this, in my opinion, has to do with healing the inner child, healing and realizing the meanings you made when you were a kid. These stories about me being worthy, not worthy, meaning to change to be loved. And as you become aware of these beliefs, as you become aware of these stories, you then become free. And the moment I became aware that when my brother was born, I felt unseen, and I am now creating through my YouTube channel some form of people seeing me so that I can fill that hole. It was an epiphany. And it was epiphany when I realized that my brother, and that when that attention shifted, that that was actually the emotional unavailability that I felt from my mom was more so the attention going to him. My mom was doing the best she could with where she was. So really the key to this is me forgiving my mom and knowing she's just doing the best she could and forgiving and understanding. So when I go back to the States here in a couple of days, I'm gonna go and I'm actually gonna go to Vegas to talk to my mom, to share this with her. To really let her know that I forgive her and that I see her. And I can also see how maybe my mom feels not seen sometimes. And these are just little, little shadow aspects that I've realized from my own life. And my question for you is, do you have any of these? Do you recognize any other shadows that come from you and your parents or you and your siblings? You know, the relationship with our siblings, the relationship with our parents trickles through in every area of our life. And until we become aware of it, becomes just this autopilot thing. So comment below and let me know, are there any shadows that you recognize? And maybe we'll all like the ones that resonate with us to see which ones are the ones in our subconscious that we're not aware of. Also, I have an inner child meditation where we energetically go to Kauai, Hawaii, and we heal our own inner child. It's a very powerful activation. It's completely free. Click the link in the description box below or go to aarondoughty.com/child, C-H-I-L-D, for the child meditation. Listen to that for 21 days. Watch what happens. Other than that, I hope you enjoyed this video, and as always, I'm gonna talk to you in the next one. Peace, much love, and namaste.