By Sheila Marina, Planet of Peace Energy Healing
He was three years old. They were walking through a parking lot toward the grocery store. And he was crying — loudly, the way three-year-olds cry, with his whole body, without apology.
His mother bent down to his level. She placed her hands on his arms. And she told him how useless it is to cry. How you get nothing when you cry.
She made him repeat it. Twice. While the tears were still on his face.
“You get nothing when you cry.”
Then she said good. She stood up. She took his hand. And they walked the rest of the way to the store.
Twenty-two years later — at 25 — he repeated that day back to his mother. Verbatim. As though it had occurred yesterday. Every detail. The parking lot. Her hands on his arms. The words. The repetition. The walk to the store.
And he told her something she had never considered: he was unable to cry. The instruction she had given him in thirty seconds had become the operating system his body ran for over two decades.
A child’s subconscious mind is extraordinarily receptive. It is designed to be — this is how humans learn language, social behaviour, safety, and the fundamental rules of the world they have been born into. The subconscious absorbs everything: the content of the words, the tone in which they are delivered, the emotional frequency of the moment, and the physical sensations present in the body when the words arrive.
At age three, a child does not have the cognitive framework to evaluate a statement, to place it in context, to consider the possibility that their parent is stressed, or exhausted, or repeating something that was said to them when they were small. A child at three receives the words as absolute truth — as a law of the universe, as real and immovable as gravity.
“You get nothing when you cry” did not land as advice. It landed as an instruction. And the body — which was in the act of crying when the instruction was delivered, which was at its most open and most vulnerable in that precise moment — received it with the full fidelity of a system designed to absorb and obey.
The child stopped crying. Eventually, the child lost the ability to cry altogether. The instruction was followed so completely that by the time he was an adult, the emotional release that crying provides — one of the body’s most fundamental mechanisms for processing grief, frustration, overwhelm, and sadness — was no longer available to him.
One sentence. Spoken once. Repeated twice in a parking lot. Carried for twenty-two years.
This is where I want every parent reading this to pause — with compassion for yourself, and with a willingness to look honestly at what you may have planted without intending to.
The sentences that become trapped beliefs in a child’s body are almost always spoken without awareness of their power. They arrive in moments of stress, of frustration, of the ordinary overwhelm of raising a human being. They are often the same sentences the parent heard when they were small — passed forward through the family line, generation to generation, each parent repeating what was modeled for them.
Here are sentences I have found lodged in clients’ bodies — sometimes decades after they were first spoken:
“You’re too sensitive.” This lands in the throat chakra as an instruction to suppress emotional expression. The child learns that what they feel is excessive, inconvenient, unwelcome. They grow into an adult who monitors their own emotional responses with constant vigilance — editing, minimizing, apologizing for feeling what they feel.
“You should know better.” This installs in the solar plexus as a belief about perpetual inadequacy. The child learns that their current understanding is always insufficient — that they are, by definition, behind where they should be. The adult version carries a persistent sense of falling short, even in the midst of genuine accomplishment.
“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” This is perhaps the most common sentence in the English-speaking parenting tradition. It teaches the child that emotional expression invites punishment — that vulnerability is dangerous, that the safest response to pain is silence. The body learns: hold it in. Whatever you do, hold it in.
“What will people think?” This relocates the child’s centre of gravity from their own experience to the perception of others. The child learns that their behaviour is primarily a performance for an external audience. The adult version organizes their entire life around the management of how they appear rather than the truth of how they feel.
“You’re just like your father.” Or mother. Or uncle. Or grandmother. This sentence assigns an identity based on someone else’s patterns — and the child’s subconscious accepts it as a blueprint. The comparison becomes a prediction. The child grows into the resemblance, fulfilling the prophecy the parent unwittingly authored.
Each of these sentences was spoken by a parent who was doing their best. Each one was delivered in a moment of stress, of fear, of genuine concern for the child’s wellbeing or social acceptance. The intention was almost always protective.
The impact was almost always the opposite of what was intended.
The mother who told her son to stop crying did not come to me because of her son. She came because she had been carrying five years of guilt — since the day he repeated the parking lot back to her and she understood, for the first time, what her words had done.
Using the Body Code, we identified something remarkable. Her subconscious mind had been radiating a Broadcast Message for those five years: “I am unforgivable.”
A Broadcast Message is an energetic signal that the body transmits continuously — a frequency that shapes how others perceive you and how you perceive yourself. For five years, her body had been broadcasting the belief that what she had done placed her beyond the reach of forgiveness. Every interaction, every relationship, every moment of self-reflection was filtered through that frequency.
In her heart chakra, we found a negative belief that had been installed alongside the guilt: “A parent’s success is defined by their child’s success.”
This belief — that her worth as a mother was measured entirely by her child’s outcome — had turned her son’s emotional difficulty into a verdict on her own value. The guilt became unbearable because it confirmed what the heart chakra had been holding: that she had failed at the one thing that defined her.
When the broadcast message was cleared and the heart chakra belief was released and replaced, something settled in her that had been unsettled for years. The guilt did not vanish — she is a thoughtful, loving mother and she will always care about the impact of that moment. What shifted was the belief that she is beyond forgiveness. What shifted was the belief that one moment in a parking lot defined her as a parent.
She is human. She was overwhelmed. She repeated what her own nervous system had learned. And she is allowed to grow beyond that moment — just as her son is allowed to learn to cry again.
This is the principle that underlies everything in this post — and everything I speak about when I address schools, parent groups, and corporate wellness audiences:
Words carry frequency. The subconscious mind receives that frequency as instruction. And the body organizes itself around the instructions it receives most consistently.
A child who hears “you are so brave” absorbs the frequency of courage. A child who hears “you always figure it out” absorbs the frequency of resourcefulness. A child who hears “your feelings make sense to me” absorbs the frequency of emotional validity — the understanding that what they feel is welcome in the world.
These are installations. They are as real and as measurable as the trapped emotions I identify in sessions. They create neural pathways that strengthen with repetition. They become the operating instructions the child’s body follows — through adolescence, through adulthood, through their own parenting.
The experiment I once conducted at my workplace — City of Toronto Children’s Services — demonstrated this at its most elemental. Two cups of soil. Two sunflower seeds. One word of encouragement on one cup. One word of criticism on the other. Same water. Same sunlight. Same soil. The only variable was the energetic frequency of the language directed toward each seed.
The results spoke for themselves.
If a sunflower seed responds to the frequency of language, consider the nervous system of a child — infinitely more sensitive, infinitely more absorptive, infinitely more shaped by the words that surround it.
If you are a parent reading this — and something in you has tightened with recognition — I want to offer you two things simultaneously: an honest acknowledgment that the words you have spoken carry weight, and genuine compassion for the fact that you were doing your best with the language you were given.
Most of the sentences parents regret were first spoken to them. They are inherited — passed through the family line, generation to generation, the same way trapped emotions travel. The mother in the parking lot was repeating a pattern she absorbed from her own childhood. The pattern is older than she is. And it can end with her.
Here is how to begin:
“Stop yelling” becomes “I hear you. Use your steady voice so I can understand what you need.”
“You’re being ridiculous” becomes “Something big is happening for you right now. I am here.”
“You get nothing when you cry” becomes “Crying is your body’s way of letting something out. I am right here while it moves through you.”
Choose one sentence you want your child to carry into adulthood. Make it true. Make it simple. Make it something their body can receive as an instruction for living.
“Your feelings are always welcome here.” “You are allowed to take up space.” “I see you — all of you — and I love what I see.” “You are learning, and learning is allowed to take time.”
Speak it tonight. At bedtime, when the nervous system is settling and the subconscious mind is most receptive. Place your hand on their back or hold their hand. Say the sentence slowly, with warmth, with intention.
Then repeat it tomorrow night. And the night after that.
You are planting a seed. And every time you water it with repetition, it grows stronger — becoming a neural pathway, then a belief, then a foundation upon which your child will build their understanding of who they are and what they are worth.
You are the first author of your child’s internal script. Choose the words with the same care you would choose anything that will last a lifetime — because they will.
If you are a parent holding guilt about words you have spoken — or if you are an adult still carrying sentences your own parents planted in you years ago — energy healing offers a way to identify exactly what was installed, where it lives in the body, and release it at the root.
My articles Education Reimagined — Why Emotional Literacy Should Be the New Curriculum and Two Boys, One System — And How It Shaped Us explore how the words and systems surrounding our children shape their nervous systems in ways most of us were never taught to recognize.
When you are ready to release what you have been carrying — as a parent, as a child, as a person whose body is still running a sentence from a parking lot or a kitchen or a hallway — sessions are available in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom.
The words we carry become the beliefs we live inside. And every belief that was installed can be identified, released, and replaced with something truer.
It is never too late to rewrite the script — for yourself, and for the ones who come after you.
Sheila Marina is the founder of Planet of Peace Energy Healing and a certified Emotion Code, Body Code, and Belief Code Practitioner with over three decades of experience helping people understand what they carry — first in Children’s Services and now in energy healing. She sees clients in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom. planetofpeace.org
