Welcome to the world of emotional healing and self-discovery, where Dominique O’Brien shines as a beacon of transformation and empowerment. As a Certified Emotion Code Practitioner, Dominique has honed her skills in unlocking the hidden layers of emotional baggage that often weigh us down. In a fast-paced world that often overlooks the profound impact of unprocessed emotions, Dominique’s expertise offers a refreshing and unique approach to holistic well-being. Join Mystic Mag on a journey to delve into the realms of emotional release and find out how Dominique O’Brien is reshaping the way we perceive and heal our inner selves.
Can you share a personal experience or case study where your Emotion Code techniques specifically helped a mother achieve a significant reduction in stress and subsequently improve her relationship with her children?
Yes, I can. I have a client who I’ve worked with for several years. She has a stressful job, her family got hit hard with the pandemic and she’s had to evacuate for multiple wildfires over the last few years. All of these experiences led to her feeling overwhelmed with stress and out of control emotionally. She found herself in repeated power struggles with her two young children.
She felt like she was not able to maintain a calm presence with her kids or husband and felt like she was destroying her family relationships. We did several sessions to clear trapped emotions from her childhood, and recent stressful events. This helped diffuse the intensity of her reactions and allowed her to stop losing her temper and yelling at her kids.
We also worked with each child remotely to release trapped emotions from them so that they could work through emotional challenges and not get stuck with trapped emotions from the stressful experiences they all went through.
I’m happy to report that my client has been able to regain her calm, patient and compassionate presence with her family. She’s been able to reconnect and enjoy very close, trusting and joyful relationships with her kids and her husband since then. We still do maintenance sessions as needed to keep her from accumulating too much stress from work, parenting and life, but overall it’s been a big shift.
Emotionally resilient kids often excel in various aspects of life. How do your methods empower moms to foster emotional resilience in their children, and can you provide an example of a transformation you’ve witnessed?
My methods help empower moms to foster emotional resilience in their children in a few different ways. First, by helping moms with their own emotional well being and emotional fitness, and second, by helping them not pass on extra emotional baggage to their kids.
I believe our kids mirror back to us where we have emotional wounds to heal or emotional blind spots. That’s why we say our kids are our best teachers. When a mom is having some kind of struggle or conflict with her child, it can be hard for her to see what is really at the root of the issue. Most of the time, the underlying issue is actually unprocessed emotions from earlier in life or inherited from an ancestor.
The problem with this unprocessed emotional energy for a mom, is that it can cause her to get easily triggered into a fight or flight response, which in turn makes her react unconsciously to the situation instead of being able to respond with consideration and intention. This can result in yelling, issuing threats, and saying things she doesn’t mean, leading to hurt feelings, conflict, and disconnection. It is not a recipe for good communication and healthy relationships.
I help my clients to see these challenges that arise with their children as opportunities to heal old wounds. We work to clear the stuck energy causing the challenge so that they can respond to their child instead of react, conflict can dissolve, and relationships can be mended. Not only does this help the mom feel more confident and connected with her kids, they are filled with gratitude, knowing that they aren’t passing that emotional baggage on to their kids.
Many times people feel resigned to their emotional triggers and feel like there is nothing they can do about them. They think, “oh I’m just sensitive” or “I’m just angry” or “something is wrong with me”. But that’s not true.
I’ll share a story here about my own son. When he started preschool at age 3, he had such terrible separation anxiety. He was terrified of me leaving. He was only going for 2 half days a week, but it was still too much for him. It was such a lovely little preschool with a wonderfully loving attentive staff. All of the other kids were happy and clearly enjoying being there. However, when I would pick my son up I could tell he was just so stressed the entire time I was gone, and his teachers confirmed this. I thought about pulling him out and just waiting another year. I felt like the worst mom ever, and that it was my fault that my son was struggling so much. Luckily, it was around this time that I started learning The Emotion Code.
I released a few trapped emotions from my son one day, and was astounded by the results. The next time I took him to preschool, he was able to start an activity and say goodbye without needing extra time, or a lot of reassurance. And when I picked him up, he had a totally different energy about him. Instead of looking like he’d been holding his breath or something the entire time I was gone, he ran up to me with a smile wanting to show me what he had done that day. It was a completely different experience than what had previously been the norm.
I continued to release other trapped emotions from him and myself over the following months and years as we encountered various challenges. By the end of his 3 years at that preschool, the director said to me “I can’t believe how much he’s changed. He’s like a totally different kid than when he started.” I told her that I was sure all kids changed so much, she probably sees that all the time. I’ll never forget, she looked me in the eye and said “No. Not like that.” It really stuck with me, because I know that the energy healing work we did made all the difference for him, and I am so so grateful. I also felt so much more confident and trusted myself so much more than I had those first few months of his preschool journey. He went from being afraid of everything, not really engaging with any of the other kids, and barely talking, to being a very engaging, happy chatterbox, loving going to preschool and developing close relationships with some friends and the teachers.
What type of services do you offer?
I offer virtual energy healing sessions with clients either over video conferencing or just over email. For busy moms this can be a really great option.
How do you guide mothers to prioritize their own emotional well-being while managing the demands of parenting?
I help moms understand that it is an ongoing process to work on our emotional baggage. That we all have some. And help them understand the hidden toll it is taking on their relationships with their kids, with themselves, and with their child’s developing sense of self. Parents who are committed to raising kids who are happy in their own skin, who know who they are, who follow their passions and express themselves freely come to realize how important it is to prioritize their own emotional well being.
As parents, everything we do is a model for our kids. If we want to raise emotionally resilient, kind, considerate, empathetic and happy kids, we have to model those things for them. Otherwise, how can we help them learn it. They don’t learn these things from school. It has to start at home. And it has to be a continuous process that grows with parent and child.
I also help moms see that the more we are able to engage with and accept all of our own emotions, we are better able to help our children process their own emotions. This makes for a much more peaceful home. There are so many challenges that children will face in their lives. It is vital to be able to give our kids a safe place to talk about what they’re going through and what they’re feeling.
I help provide a safe space for moms to share what they are going through and feeling, so they can be able to hold space for their children’s feelings, leading to more connection, harmony and joy.
The Emotion Code approach focuses on releasing trapped emotions. Can you explain how identifying and releasing these emotions contribute to building healthier relationships within a family?
Before using The Emotion Code, I wasn’t sure how to actually move through my issues. I knew I had them, and I knew it was negatively affecting my marriage, my relationship with my son and also with my mom and my siblings. I had many journals filled with all of the observations and feelings about my tendency to self sabotage, to get into unhealthy relationships, and feelings of unworthiness and more. I knew I had a lot of emotional baggage from dealing with my parents’ ugly divorce and losing my father to a three year long illness, and finding myself in a dysfunctional marriage. I just did not know how to resolve these issues. Will power did not work, ignoring it did not work, trying to think my way to a solution did not work, relationship coaching did not work. I even spent a year in an ashram in India (in my late 20’s) meditating and doing other spiritual practices every day. I didn’t feel like I moved the needle much.
The Emotion Code changed all of that. Suddenly, I could quickly and easily release the stuck emotional energy I had been carrying around for years that was keeping me buried in layers of stress, anxiety and fear. The Emotion Code work helped me show up more authentically in my relationships, speak up for myself, and set better boundaries. Ultimately shifting those relationships dramatically in some cases.
Our subconscious minds or energy system is brilliant at helping us survive. When we go through a challenging or stressful period, and either don’t have time, support or the skills to deal with big emotions, our subconscious tucks it away for later. When an emotion is fully processed it will naturally go through a cycle, where it is felt, peaks and then dissipates. When an emotion is not processed, it gets stuck somewhere in that cycle and is literally trapped in the body. According to the Emotion Code, it is trapped as a sphere of energy. These spheres of vibrating energy can then attract more of that energy, and they can accumulate in different parts of the body, and can influence the way we process future emotions, experience situations and view the world.
A common place for trapped emotions to get stuck is around the heart. When we feel hurt, we subconsciously want to protect ourselves from getting hurt in that way again. So our subconscious builds an energetic wall around the heart in order to protect it. The problem with that, is the “protection” does not allow the free flow of energy in and out of the heart. We need an open heart in order to express love and trust ourselves and others. If we are constantly feeling like we need to protect ourselves, we might hold back our real feelings, or not take a chance on a new relationship because we don’t trust that it might work out.
I like to explain it to clients like a filter that surrounds the heart. Love either going out or coming in will get distorted as it passes through. That means that when we try to express our love it may not feel like love to the other person because it’s been distorted by fear, anger or whatever else is in the heart wall layers. And when someone else expresses love to us, we may not experience it as love because it is getting distorted through all of the heart wall emotions before it is felt by our heart.
You can see how this would make relationships difficult. It is easy to misunderstand each other, get hurt feelings, or lash out as a way to protect from perceived hurt. After a person’s heart wall is released, they are better able to access their true feelings, have more empathy for others, and cultivate more self compassion. It results in more connected, healthier relationships, especially with the people we are closest to.
Technology has transformed how families interact. In what ways do you help mothers navigate the digital age while maintaining authentic emotional bonds with their children and mitigating potential stressors?
One of the biggest challenges with technology is that it brings everything to us so much faster than before. Both for kids and for parents. There are so many stressful things happening in the world, and so many opportunities for bullying and mean comments that it is impossible to really process everything. As a result, we find ourselves piling on more and more emotional baggage and feeling more and more stressed, but not really knowing how to make it stop.
I’ve found that when we have open hearts and are connected with our kids and our feelings, we can choose to use technology in a more responsible and positive way, and reduce the amount of stuff coming at us. Just like any other knee jerk reaction or pattern, our unprocessed emotions play a big role in what motivates us to make the choices and habitual patterns that we do.
Emotional energy clearing work like what I do is essential to reducing the toxic emotional buildup so that we can make intentional decisions and have the kind of connected relationships we want to have with our kids.
Also, just the idea of technology can be a big trigger for parents and can cause stress if not addressed. If technology is triggering for a mom, it would be really hard for her to have constructive conversations with her kids about creating healthy boundaries with technology.
Many parents resort to putting time limits or making arbitrary rules about technology. This results in disintegrating trust between parent and child. The underlying reason parents reach for control however is that there is some kind of underlying fear driving it. Parents want to do what’s best for their kids and fear that technology is bad for them. So they try to limit it. However, this misses a really important aspect of technology. It isn’t going anywhere. Kids need to learn how to manage it in a healthy way, and they need their parents to help them navigate the journey.
So if we can release the fear that’s underneath the underlying fear, then the parent can approach the situation with curiosity and openness instead of “needing to control”. Then parent and child can work together to come up with a plan or solution to the problem that works for them.
Obviously, there are more nuances and everyone has a unique situation, which is another reason why I love the energy work I do. We all have individual experiences and circumstances, and every child is unique. There are multiple reasons why someone may get triggered by the same situation. With the Emotion Code, we are able to tap into and release the exact energies that are contributing to the exact situation for each individual person, and work with those, instead of having a one size fits all approach.
