You Hurt Yourself
Topics:
“You Hurt Yourself”
“You’ve Never Stopped Doing It”
“Genuinely Looking at Coping Mechanisms”
Tuesday, November 4, 2025 (Private/In Person)
Participants: Mary (Michael) and Jean (Lyla)
(Audio begins partway through session)
ELIAS: Therefore it's a matter of looking at: What are you doing now? How are you creating what you're creating? And where is the correlation to when it began? What influenced you to begin creating this behavior that has become familiar? And therefore when something is significantly bothering you and you are significantly in that direction of being a victim, this is what you do. You do something to yourself. You hurt yourself. You either create a physical manifestation that is painful or you become sick. And you've done that many times with your husband, when you're frustrated and when you're moving in that direction of being a victim to him, you become sick.
JEAN: (Quietly) Right.
ELIAS: And you've done that repeatedly. Therefore these types of physical manifestations are familiar to you, but they began somewhere.
JEAN: Can we get to where it, this began? This had to go to, back to childhood.
ELIAS: Yes, it does.
JEAN: And does this go back to the other part I wanted to bring up that you were talking about, how children, they want to be a part of, they want to emulate, and they change who they genuinely are. Is this related somehow to that?
ELIAS: Yes.
JEAN: Can we talk about that and use myself as an example? So I was born and I had my brother and my next oldest sister and my mom and my father in a tiny little house and… (Sighs)
ELIAS: How did your parents express themselves in relation to your birth defect?
JEAN: They didn't know I had it.
ELIAS: Ever?
JEAN: Not to my knowledge. The only way I found out is a chiropractor. I was radiographed. And I remember you talking about how had they known, it would have frustrated my mother even more or angered her even more, but my father may have had more compassion.
ELIAS: Let me restate the question.
JEAN: Okay.
ELIAS: Because whether they had the information or not, they knew something.
JEAN: Really?
ELIAS: Yes. Therefore when a child has, let's say a birth defect or an illness or some type of injury that is ongoing, whether the parents know about it objectively or not, that energy is still there and they respond to it anyway. And in that, they're going to be responding to that type of energy in a manner that is consistent with (pause) their perception of something not being whole or something being less than or something being defective in the child.
Which then in turn generally influences the child in one of two capacities. Either the child keeps creating physical manifestations because it's expected, because they're already defective – they're already receiving that message repeatedly – therefore either they will continue to create physical manifestations or they'll move in the opposite direction and be expressing in a manner in which they push, push, push themselves to excel in anything and everything. Therefore they're still, in a manner of speaking, doing the same thing. They're still hurting themselves, they're still damaging themselves, but they're doing it in a different outward capacity. Therefore looking at that, which is the same as what you're doing now, therefore HOW were you doing it before, and what started it?
JEAN: (Pause) Okay, well, let me try to back up. The reason we talked about I created a spina bifida was to get them. I was going to go into a hostile environment, and I was looking… If I was infirm, they might treat me differently. And then the only other thing I remember is almost dying from appendicitis a little while… like two or three years of age. So is…? Am I on the right track? I don't… (Sighs)
ELIAS: Your direction, as you developed and as you got older, older meaning still at an age of elementary school but not a toddler –
JEAN: Okay.
ELIAS: — was to move in the direction of pushing yourself to excel.
JEAN: Oh. No, undoubtedly, yes,
ELIAS: But that's still reinforcing the victim. Because if you weren't, you wouldn't have to push yourself to excel and prove yourself, prove yourself to be different than the energy and the expressions and the behaviors that you're receiving,
JEAN: And I'm receiving that there's something wrong with me?
ELIAS: Yes.
JEAN: Oh my god, Elias!
ELIAS: Which, for the most part, you accepted throughout your entire development. I'd say, for the most part, you've accepted throughout your entire life, which is the reason you're constantly attempting to prove yourself. And when you become too exhausted with proving yourself, you become sick or infirmed.
JEAN: You know, but I look back and I say, I haven't been… I've pushed myself, but I don't think I've been that sick or infirmed in my life. Or have I?
ELIAS: Physical manifestations don't simply appear in a moment.
JEAN: Okay.
ELIAS: They take time to build.
JEAN: Okay. (Pause) My siblings had a lot of physical manifestations though as well, but it was it for…? And worse than me you could say, but was it for different reasons? Not that they had a birth defect.
ELIAS: No, I'd say similar reasons, not necessarily in relation to a birth defect but that the energy that was expressed by your parents was that – and their expressions objectively, their behaviors -- was that none of them were good enough.
JEAN: How can that be?
ELIAS: (Chuckles) Meaning?
JEAN: I mean we were all relatively intelligent, all beautiful children. How can you not be…?
ELIAS: You're not them. Your perception isn't the same.
JEAN: But what was their perception of how we weren't good enough?
ELIAS: First of all, I'd say that your mother didn't actually genuinely want children.
JEAN: Right, right.
ELIAS: And therefore there was a lot of blame towards your father—
JEAN: Right.
ELIAS: — for having children, which he responded in becoming defeated. And then there was more blame, because then he would move in directions of attempting to compensate for the defective child.
JEAN: Meaning just me or all of us?
ELIAS: I’d say in different manners, all of you.
JEAN: Okay.
ELIAS: Yours were more overt, more recognizable objectively, but he did the same with the others also and that created even MORE anger with your mother.
Now; then I would pose the question again about: When did you begin creating these behaviors of being a victim? Even though you're not looking at yourself, you're not seeing yourself as a victim, you were doing that. When did you begin doing that as a coping mechanism in that environment, knowing that all of your siblings are much older than you, the gap is considerable, and therefore you're watching not only how you're being treated and raised, but you're watching what they're becoming and how they're treated.
JEAN: Okay, the first one I'm going to say after we moved into the house my mom and dad built, which was when I was three. It happened after that.
ELIAS: I agree. (Pause) You don't have to look at a specific incident. It's more about first recognizing certain behaviors, certain manners in general, of how you were coping with THEIR behaviors. The family unit itself was very dysfunctional, therefore their behaviors with each other and their behaviors with their other children, because you were watching all of that and that frightened you. In addition to—
JEAN: I just remember being very quiet and not talking. They thought I was autistic at one point because I just stopped. Maybe “If I make myself small, then I won't get hurt,” or something like that. Is that it?
ELIAS: Now it's a matter of you—
JEAN: (Whispers) Oh my god!
ELIAS: — being able to go back into that and observe those experiences to understand how you do this now, because you're continuing to repeat behaviors. Therefore, if you can move in the direction of genuinely looking at those experiences and genuinely seeing how you created these coping mechanisms, how you created these behaviors of what you did that correlates with what you're doing now, you've, in a manner of speaking, systematically moved in a direction of increasingly generating physical manifestations that you didn't do as much of as a child.
JEAN: Yeah.
ELIAS: You’ve translated the emotional manifestations, and considerable hurt in that, into physical. It's easier to deal with physical than the emotional. Not for everyone, but I'm being specific with you, that it's easier for you to deal with getting sick or creating a pain or being infirmed in some manner than to move in those gut-wrenching emotional directions in which all you want to do is cry and hide.
JEAN: Is this getting back to what I witnessed with the animals? Yeah.
ELIAS: That’s definitely a significant part of it.
JEAN: Yeah.
ELIAS: (Pause) I'd say that you played that out as you got older, in relation to your own experiences with animals in emotionally devastating capacities. And as I said, it became easier to hurt yourself in a physical manner than the emotional manner.
JEAN: So I transferred it to doing to the physical. So where does this lead us?
ELIAS: As I said, if you can see – and it doesn't necessarily have to be when you were a child with the physical aspects – If you can see as a child, your coping mechanisms or how you were developing coping mechanisms and behaviors in relation to the emotional experiences that you were having, and then if you can move forward and see how you began to turn that and change it into physical manifestations, if you can begin to see how you moved in that direction with the physical manifestations of injury or illness, anything that creates an expression of you being infirmed -- because then you don't have to take responsibility for any of the emotional expressions because you're hurt or you're ill, you can't be expected to be dealing with emotional expressions. In that, if you can look back and you can see the experiences of how that began to change and how it insulates you.
JEAN: But did it begin to change after the California experiences? Because I don't think I... Yeah.
ELIAS: Yes.
JEAN: After the California, yes, it went from, “I can't. This is so devastating. I can't live.”
ELIAS: Yes.
JEAN: You know, “I can't, can't deal with this, so now I've got to do the physical manifestations.“
ELIAS: Yes.
JEAN: Oh, wow, wow, wow!
ELIAS: But it's a matter of actually, beyond simply knowing that, going back and looking at or observing how you changed that into the physical manifestations, and how you created and developed those behaviors of generating the physical manifestations, and what would trigger them. Because that's what you're doing now, because you've never stopped doing it. You simply—
JEAN: Flipped to another.
ELIAS: Yes, but you couldn't see it.
JEAN: So I'm not understanding what my homework is.
ELIAS: Your homework is to be thinking about first, how the emotional infirmities, so to speak, developed to such a fever pitch that you couldn't do it any longer. And seeing the progression of that, seeing your progression in creating and developing emotional entanglements, in a manner of speaking, that were overwhelming to you, and how that moved you in directions of being able to be a victim and point to: “It's this person's fault,” “It's that person's fault,” and continuing in that direction until you couldn't move in that direction any longer, and therefore began to create the physical manifestations.
But actually being able to see it, being able to see how you started to turn that into physical manifestations, how you started to be that victim in a different manner.
JEAN: Wow.
ELIAS: And when you can see that, because you can see how you were doing it day by day and even hour by hour, and in that how that insulated you, how it shielded you from all of this, outside things that are affecting you that is their fault. If they weren't all doing all of this, you wouldn't be broken.
JEAN: Okay. Wow. Elias. How many people go to this depth? Wow!
ELIAS: What I would say to you is most people that actually try to move in this direction and to this depth do it with therapists, and it takes them years and years and years, fifteen, twenty, thirty years to move through it.
JEAN: But with you? Are you working with anybody asking the questions that I'm asking? And… that's amazing!
ELIAS: Yes, yes. Not many, because most individuals move to a certain point and then they stop. They won't move past a particular point. Therefore there are some such as yourself, but not many.
JEAN: And just this conversation right now gives me compassion, more compassion.
ELIAS: Good.
JEAN: I could cry.
ELIAS: Yes. Good. (Jean sighs) You deserve that compassion. (Pause)
JEAN: (Crying) What's being touched right now?
ELIAS: All of it. What I'd say is, it's not necessarily one thing that's being touched. What—
JEAN: And I’m shaking.
ELIAS: What it is, is letting yourself be a little bit more open. You're opening that door a little bit more.
JEAN: Well, not just compassion for myself but compassion for other people.
ELIAS: For other people. I understand.
JEAN: Yeah. I just like… I understand. I've got a whole different perspective with the people I judge and blame and…. (Sighs) Because you think you're right and you're shielding behind being judgmental and arrogant and…
ELIAS: But those words take on a different meaning when you understand that they are encompassing you, that they are shielding you from the things that are too hurtful for you to let yourself experience. You've already done that, and you very much didn't like it, and therefore you partially have disassociated emotionally and turned it into the physical.
JEAN: Wow.
(Portion omitted)
JEAN: (Pause) I just don't know what to say right now. I'm just kind of overwhelmed and stunned. So with this conversation, and given I'm intermediate, will a lot of this processing happen subjectively?
ELIAS: Yes.
JEAN: Okay, so I don't have to force… I’ve got to figure it out. I've got to listen to this thing a thousand times, I’ve got to…
ELIAS: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I know what you're saying. I know that that is a compulsion of yours, but it's not necessary.
JEAN: Okay.
ELIAS: Most of it will be processed subjectively. But remember: you're doing the same objectively. They're moving as one. Therefore you'll see different aspects of your life objectively that are changing. You're already changing.
JEAN: Oh, yeah.
ELIAS: Therefore, I'd say that it's—
JEAN: (As Mary’s dog frantically tries to recapture her ball) Excuse me for a minute. I’m going to pull a ball out from under your butt.
ELIAS: Very well. (Laughs) It's a matter of recognizing that things are changing objectively also, as you are addressing to subjective. But it doesn't have to look like complete analyzation.
JEAN: Okay.
ELIAS: But rather simply moving in a direction of allowance, and therefore you'll see objective changes for the benefit.
JEAN: Wow. So I'm sitting here obsessing over, “I've got to come back with Elias with definitive answers about—"
ELIAS: No.
JEAN: — “when did this happen, and how did… and I've got to go back and dissect every year.”
ELIAS: As I expressed, it's not about an event.
JEAN: Right. Right.
ELIAS: You moved gradually into the physical manifestations. It didn't happen overnight in one event. And it's not about that anyway. It's simply a matter of being able to recognize what the impetus was, not in one thing, but over time, what was influencing you to shut down in one direction and switch to another.
JEAN: Okay. Okay, I'll work on that. Let's see how much… where we are timewise. Oh! We're almost finished here. Let me see if I have a question inside. (Pause)
You know what, Elias? We're just going to shut this down here and give Mary a few extra minutes.
ELIAS: Very well.
JEAN: Because I don't need to cram something in, you know? (Elias laughs) I'll create more sessions.
ELIAS: Good for you.
JEAN: Yeah.
ELIAS: And I am acknowledging of you and the progress that you have made, which is significant.
JEAN: Thank you.
ELIAS: You're very welcome.
JEAN: I'm going to make this, all right? I'm going to do this.
ELIAS: Yes.
JEAN: Okay.
ELIAS: And what you have already accomplished is phenomenal.
JEAN: Thank you.
ELIAS: You are definitely welcome and worth it. Very well my dear friend, I shall be looking forward to our next meeting.
JEAN: Thank you.
ELIAS: And will be offering my energy to you continuously.
JEAN: Thank you.
ELIAS: You're very welcome, tremendous, tremendous love and exquisite friendship, as always and never ending.
JEAN: Thank you.
ELIAS: Au revoir.
JEAN: Au revoir.
(Excerpt ends after 34 minutes)
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