Or How a Glass of Lemon Squash Impacted My Future.
Most people probably wouldn’t describe me as an angry person, but if I’m honest, I knew something was there. A frustration. An irritation. Something simmering just below the surface. So I decided to go through the Time Line Therapy® process myself. The same process I use with many of my clients.
When we’re working with emotions in Time Line Therapy®, we always start with anger. I love this process because it’s incredibly gentle; we simply follow the emotion back to where it first began to release the emotional charge that’s still affecting you today.
My subconscious knew exactly where to take me, and the answer came back almost immediately: I was three years old and it involved a glass of lemon squash.
I had a friend over to play and my mum made us both a glass of lemon squash. She handed my friend her glass first, and three-year-old Samantha thought this was so unfair. I remember feeling absolutely furious, so I did what any emotionally mature three-year-old would do: I poured my friend’s squash down the sink. Unfortunately, my actions had consequences.
My mum made my friend another drink, and she then poured my drink down the sink. I was so shocked that I couldn’t believe she’d done it, and in that moment, I learned something: guests come first.
At least, that’s what three-year-old Samantha decided. Looking back, it sounds ridiculous. A grown woman tracing her anger back to a glass of lemon squash? But when I looked at it more closely, it made perfect sense. I have five older brothers, but they didn’t grow up with me, so I grew up as an only child.
I wasn’t used to coming second. The event lasted seconds, but the emotional charge lasted much longer. And every time something similar happened, it got a little stronger. For quite a while afterwards, whenever my mum served a friend before me, I could feel that same frustration rising.
But I’d learned something else too; if I reacted the way I had with the lemon squash, there would be consequences. So I pushed it down. I suppressed it. On the outside, I looked fine, but on the inside, I was boiling up with anger, and I could almost feel myself shaking as I tried to keep it in. As a result, the emotion didn’t disappear; it simply went underground.
In that moment, I felt an injustice. Why should Mum serve her before me? This highlighted a pattern to me that I’ve experienced throughout my life: I can’t stand any injustice. This is when you will see me lose my temper and stand up for what’s right. Now I understood my trigger.
During the session, when I floated higher and viewed the situation from a different perspective, I realized how silly it was and understood that my mum was simply being kind to our guest to make her feel welcome. It’s nice to make others feel special and loved.
What I love about Time Line Therapy® work is that we don’t have to revisit every frustrating thing that has ever happened to us.
Think of it like a necklace – you might have hundreds of beads which are connected by the same thread. When we find the first bead and cut the string, the rest of the necklace unravels and the emotional charge disappears so that situations that used to trigger you no longer affect you in the same way.
This story isn’t really about lemon squash; it’s about how I reacted to a situation and how that created the very first bead of anger that I carried with me for years. As children, we experience something and make sense of it the best we can, and carry that on into adulthood.
Sometimes what we’re reacting to isn’t what’s happening now at all; it’s something we’ve been carrying for years. Once we release that emotional charge, things that used to trigger us simply lose their grip.
For me, it started with a glass of lemon squash. What was your first bead?