I had a vision of myself in the shape of a turkey running into the sunset making one last ditch attempt to take flight while hysterically shrieking “I want a do-over, I want to live life to the full”, all the while knowing my epitaph was more likely going to be “Triggered and Distracted, Try Again Next Time”.

Triggered and distracted, these were the words that came to me after I was considering how sidetracked a conversation with my partner had gotten, and I realised that would be a good description of much of our time together, and much of our individual and collective lives.

The start of a new year has been and gone, that time of self reflection and hope already a distant memory. Time has marched on, eaten up in the business of day to day living. Sure, I have a few nice memories here and there, but it feels like it could be so much more – and I know why, I keep getting triggered and distracted by a whole bunch of (not living life to the full) stuff.

Listening to more of Sarah Blondin’s soothing tones this week, I was captivated by her meditation on Our Warring Self versus Our Infinite Self.

She describes the warring self as “the part of you that hides under the surface and surprises you when she shows her teeth. The part of you that you deny, push away, pretend does not live in you. She is your darkness, the one who dwells in the shallow waters of your being, riding up on the back of your self righteous ego. She is in every one of us.”

I felt guilty because my warring self showed her teeth last weekend when I was in a store buying a new top. The label on it had the wrong code, and the young sales girl was doing her best to find a code so she could put it through the system. A supervisor was drafted in to help, but to no avail, and I was getting anxious.

I had headed to the checkout after receiving a phonecall that the rest of my family were ready to be picked up in the forest where they had been riding. I had said I would be there in ten minutes, and was acutely aware that it was now taking longer.

There are so many subtle layers mixed in to just this one tiny example, but I can summarise by saying my people pleasing tendencies together with childhood lessons about “being on time” had kicked into overdrive. Eventually, after standing smiling and waiting patiently, my inner turmoil was enough to alert my warrior that I’d had enough and needed to take immediate action to alleviate the discomfort.

On the inside I felt incredibly anxious, and it turned to anger. On the outside, I have a mental snapshot of the sales girl’s surprised face in my head as the patient customer in front of her suddenly turned into a tense, complaining one. “I will just have to leave it” I said in a clipped tone, “I have family waiting to be collected. But I am very disappointed that I have stood here for ten minutes and can’t buy the top I wanted despite having the ability to pay.”

Now while all of that is legitimate, and it probably wouldn’t rate as one of the worst experiences the sales girl has had in her job, the internal intensity of it for me was very much one of the warring self.
In contrast, the infinite self is “tender, able to withstand storms” Sarah Blondin says. This is who “catches the furious pain of others, the difficult experiences you face, the things that make you want to fight, and she cradles them, swaddles them in unconditional love over and over. She is the bottomless source of light and love, she is your essence. Pure and wise, she lives in your deepest depths.”

Most importantly, Sarah adds “She is the one you can choose to embody, to call forth as you navigate your life... she serves where the other severs; she heals where the other wounds...you have the power to choose which to call into form. They are two polar energies, forces living within you, a choice for you to make in every triggering moment in your life. There is no question which makes us feel more alive. More vivid”.

This reminded me of another quote I heard recently “Nothing that needs to hide in the dark has an authentic power of its own”. Yet here I am actively seeking to free myself from the shackles of the shadows of my childhood; the turkey trying to become a bird of flight.  How powerful those shackles become because the voice in my head is the voice of a parent or my resistance to the parent, old outdated well-worn recordings that no longer serve.

As Sarah Blondin put it “such intensity and emotion is very powerful, palpable, weak in root but alluring in force”.

And all the while time is ticking. And the only way to end up with that “Lived Life to the Full” epitaph is to take one conscious breath after another, to become more present and grounded in the moment I am in. Or as worded more poetically by Sarah “feeling your softness, returning to your nature, is the only thing that will feed your life in the ways it is asking.”

I think of all those moments in my life where I’ve been triggered and distracted and I compare them to those where I’ve been present and my sense of humour is happy to play, I know which feels better.  

I also know that doesn’t mean I have to be a doormat in any shape or form, it’s all in the way in which I stand in my truth and, more importantly, which truth I’m subscribing to. Am I reacting from the (often) much exaggerated place of the wounded child within, or am I acting from the point of a healthy, present adult?

Ultimately, I want to feel delighted and amazed when I reach the end of my life and think “well, I really did learn how to live it to the full!” What about you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think and Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“A part of me is scared to open my eyes because the very nature of waking up is to be aware, to be accountable, to be responsible for the healing of my life and take on the task of loving me until I feel full... But another part of me knows, in every inch and ounce of its being, that I am serving no one – not one single life – by staying asleep.” Sarah Blondin from Healing Through Letting Go

Someone commented to me that my life load seemed heavy. I hadn’t heard that expression before and I really liked it because it takes into account more than just a person’s seen productivity, it takes into account the unseen burdens of a life beyond the observable circumstances.

In this case I was talking to another parent about a huge organising role she had voluntarily taken on, expressing my admiration in light of mentally projecting myself into that role and shuddering at the thought; “I am often just trying to get through the days” I said honestly.

While my observable circumstances are pretty busy, it isn’t those in themselves that create the load, it is more about what is going on beneath the surface, within my mental, emotional and spiritual worlds. When things get out of balance life feels heavy.

Last week I got a really sharp insight into an emotional load I’ve been subconsciously carrying and how it has been affecting me. Basically I was at the local pool nearing the end of my swim, which I do a couple of times each week. I have been going to this pool for a few years and can probably count on one hand how often I have had to share a lane; if I do, we usually just split the lane (one on each side) so we can do our own thing and go at our own pace.

Anyway, this guy gets into my lane and – unlike most people – didn’t stop to say a courteous hello or confirm how we would use the lane; he just starts swimming up and down. Keeping to my side I changed to backstroke. The guy comes crashing into me, demanding “what am you doing?” and decreeing that we should always keep to the left (the way a swim squad does when training).

That is necessary when there are more than two people in the lane but, as mentioned, in all the years I have been going to that pool it has been rare to share a lane with even one other person never mind more than two. It also means everyone has to be swimming at roughly the same speed or it quickly becomes an aquatic pile-up.

Now I would have been happy to have a collegial conversation about this, but the guy swam off and did not stop in all the time I waited at the end of the lane in the pool, he kept right on turning and swimming. Short of manhandling him, creating a deliberate crash or waiting until he came out the pool, I was left with no option but to get with his programme or end my swim.

Seeing as I had been nearing the end of my swim anyway and my friend (who was, by now, sharing her lane also) was relying on me to drop her back home, I basically left it at that. As we drove away I observed to my friend how shaken I felt after the encounter; I felt powerless, furious and close to tears.

After dropping her off, I drove across town to pick up some library books and, as I was alone on a country road, I let rip one guttural scream after another and tore that man to shreds (well, the virtual version of him in my head) for his arrogant and dictatorial behaviour.

It did strike me as interesting timing when I had just been feeling so proud of myself lately for learning to speak my truth in a calm, assertive manner as I described in How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight.

I realised just how frustrating and – frankly – traumatising it was to be in a situation where I felt powerless to try out my new prowess. I also held a deep sense of shock at being spoken to in this way by a stranger.

I noted as I screamed my way to the library, liberated in my travelling cocoon (though I may have traumatised half the wildlife as I sped past), that the feelings the situation had brought up were nothing more than a big fat reflection of the powerlessness I had felt as a child.

The part of me who had to do as I was told, regardless of what I thought or felt, was rebelling in a way that could have started an avalanche if I had been near any snow capped mountains. Another part of me observed in astonishment the sheer scale of negative energy pouring forth that I would ordinarily stuff down inside.

It was no surprise then, really, that in the next few days I had severe renal colic (the area of the body that processes anger and resentment) and my voice sounded like a teenage boy’s breaking as he hits puberty. Given the enormity of my reaction, I knew I’d hit upon something that had definitely been affecting the weight of my life load.

This led me to do the Completion Process when I next had some space to myself, so I could transmute this emotional trauma into something softer in order to avoid being thrown into the stratosphere in future. And of course I listened to the hypnotic sound of Sarah Blondin’s raw and soothing Healing Through Letting Go meditation, I highly recommend both.

I could also see the burden related to interactions with my partner and others over the years who have spoken to me in a derogatory, demeaning or dictatorial way. I had quickly learned that angry rebuffs were not helpful, but my system would be stuck in fight-fight mode none-the-less and I’d often be unable to get past it productively.

In addition to the stance I outlined in How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight, a couple of other Wendy Behary’s insights I’ve also found helpful are:
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• Transforming the voice of my stress response:
  1. Fight/counter-attack – I’m prone to fighting back when I feel attacked in some way, my inner voice says “I’ll show you”, Wendy suggests modifying this to “I have rights too” which I now use as a mental anchor
  2. Avoidance/flight – those who are prone to running away when things get difficult have an inner voice staying “See you later” which would be better modified to “I need a time-out”
  3. Surrender/freeze – those who become immobilised in interactions that feel threatening  have an inner dialogue saying “You’re right, it’s my fault” would benefit from changing that to “I may not be perfect but it’s not all my fault”.

 

• Having photos of my partner and I as children displayed in the house, because when times get tough in our interactions, they are a great reminder of the hurt children underneath whose responses are no doubt at play in whatever is going on.

Letting go of the life load is an ongoing process. As a parent it has been confronting in many ways as I wrote about in Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master and When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom.

One of the things that has really made a difference in my life is having a felt sense of my spirituality, meaning a sense of connection to all living things and the laws of cause and effect. I know I don’t live in an isolated bubble whether I want to or not, all living things, including my mind, body, emotions and spirituality as connected.

Having already awoken to many of the aspects of myself that cause life to feel heavy, I do sometimes think it would be blissful to simply abandon my lifeload, but it’s more a case of surrendering to it as my teacher and guide I think.

If there was some quick way to retain all my wisdom and simply ditch all the unhelpful patterns then I might be tempted, but I’m guessing that would carry the dangers of a body that has been starved and is suddenly fed a rich diet, or conversely a body that has gone from snowman to supermodel overnight under a blade and suction. In themselves both would create major trauma, even death.

So I will stick to the gentler unfolding. In the wise and oh-so-soothing words of Sarah Blondin “There, inside of you, a wondrous part of you is calling you to step into the land of your great, unbounding potential, freedom and abundance. Any change or forgiveness you have experienced in your life was not just because someone else made you let go, it was because you chose to. The power is yours, the choice is yours.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, Our Children Are Changing – We Need to Move with the Times, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think and Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was listening to an interview with Amy Scher this week, author of How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can, and while her experiences and conclusions were so familiar to me she reframed them in a way that I hadn’t considered before.

In talking about her experiences in healing herself from an autoimmune disease, which she was unable to do until she started looking beyond the physical landscape at her inner world, she said “I sometimes feel like there’s missing piece we’re not talking about, which is the greatest fear that we have is the fear of being who we really are.”

Interestingly, as I am finishing off a dive into the world of narcissistic traits, a description Wendy Behary gave as representative of a childhood in Disarming the Narcissist also caught my attention:

“The most popular proposal for the typical origins of narcissism is that the child grew up feeling conditionally loved, meaning that love was based upon performance.

This could come about through a number of scenarios. One might be where the child was criticised by one parent, who made them feel that whatever they did was not really good enough, whereas the other parent may then have doted on, overprotected or used them as a surrogate spouse.

The end result is a child not loved for who he or she was, not guided nor encouraged in the discovery of their true inclinations, never held in the arms of a caregiver who would make them feel completely safe and unquestionable cherished.”

Whether narcissistic traits or people pleasing ones like those I developed, I suspect they all come from conditional love in childhood.

Over the years, with deliberate inquiry, I’ve started to make the links and connections back to those childhood perceptions I had about the need to defend my position, the need to be perfect, the guilt and blame I felt when things went wrong.

Being triggered is a regular occurrence for me. I still take far too much upon my shoulders.

There are times when I find myself longing for acceptance, validation, recognition of who I am, what I need, feel and achieve. There is a longing for support and connection, a need to feel safe to be vulnerable.

All of that is grounded in fear, a fear of putting the real me, the one who was berated as a child, out there to get hurt.

When I watched a SuperSoul Session with Oprah and Gary Zukov a couple of years ago, he made a statement that has stayed with me “Authentic power is the ability to distinguish within you the difference between love and fear, and choose love no matter what it happening inside of you or outside of you.”

This has helped me realise that in order to fully express who I am there is a need to be vulnerable. I have to take responsibility for who I am being, how I am limiting myself and what I am receiving in this world, because I am not a helpless child anymore, I am an adult who can make different choices.
 
As Amy Scher described when asked how she responds to people who bristle at the idea that our thoughts, beliefs and emotions affect our physical landscape:
 
“I had doctors who asked Are you under stress? And I was even mad at them for that. There was nothing worse for me than something being my fault. In fact I spent so much of my life not wanting anything to be my fault that one day I just decided to play devil’s advocate and thought What if it is my fault? What if I did unconsciously in some way play some part in the manifestation of my illness?”
 
And the conclusion it led her to, I think, is really powerful:
 
“What does that say about me except I’m human? And when I surrendered to the idea that in some shape or form I could have contributed to where I was, I stopped resisting and bristling against the thing that could help me.
 
I discovered that some of the patterns in my life were crushing my spirit, and when a spirit is crushed it has an effect on the physical body. And interestingly, some of those patterns come back to the fear of it being my fault. I was a people pleaser, I didn’t like anyone to be upset and I was a perfectionist. I had completely irrational expectations of myself.”
 
What she goes on to say, I have profoundly felt the truth of in my own life too:
 
“I lived in deep fear of being who I really was. So I had started to contract myself and by contracting who I am, I contracted my body, my energy systems and my emotions.”
 
I didn’t think of it as being in fear of being me, I just saw it as being a good person, the good girl, the good member of society I’d been taught to be. I had learned to feel comfortable in the discomfort of that skin, never really looking at those parts of me that I’d disowned or suppressed.
 
When I look back at, say, the panic attacks I had in my early twenties, I can relate to this idea of bristling when a doctor asks about stress. I took pride in being strong and resilient. But if I am honest, I can see in retrospect that I was not in a good place, I’d been through a painful breakup, and I believed I was unworthy of the kind of love I longed for.
 
With the benefit of hindsight, as scary as it to be vulnerable, I can definitely attest it’s far better than a life half lived, always hiding what I’d really rather say, do or be – even from myself at times. That is why I decided on the journey to me, to take each of these things that show up as less than desirable in my life, or that really trigger me, and to take the time to make the connections with the ways in which old thought patterns might still be at play.

Once I identify the patterns, bringing them into the light of conscious awareness, I work on them in many ways, shapes and forms as I talk about in Want More Energy, Clarity and Time?

What about you? What was it like growing up in your home? What were the expectations and values? What was it you had to work hard to maintain? In what ways have some of those things possibly shown up in your life to your detriment? How did you promise to yourself you’d be different if you have kids? Is it time to overcome your greatest fear and embrace who you truly are?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom , Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Support Are You Blocking Yourself From Receiving? and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“For Presence to become deeply rooted, it must be tested in the fire of relationships.” Eckhart Tolle

I really have relished this lesson, more now that I am finally getting more successful at achieving it as opposed to when I’m in the midst of the fire. It’s been a bumpy road that was fraught with suppressing my feelings at times, inappropriately expressing them at others and generally leaving trail of carnage either in my inner or outer world depending on how I had dealt with situations.

Listening to Wendy Behary talk to therapists on how to deal with clients who exhibit narcissistic traits this week, I realised that her advice summed up well what I have learned in general about speaking my truth, to anyone.

She talks about developing the ability to stand your own ground with a firm, steady posture and an attitude of “I see you. I know you. I know what you are up to”, rather than a defensive one. She describes the aim as:

To be able to state your truth, be real, in a calm, clear way. And to recognise and connect with that part of yourself that stands to get angry or hurt, feel threatened or incompetent, and to get it out of the room.

That is the bit I used to have real trouble with. I had a pattern of getting triggered and acting from that provoked part of me, rather than taking the time to observe what about what had happened/was happening that was actually triggering me. It wasn’t until I took the time to go deeper, make the links, and deal with my life story that I started to make progress.

I did relate to one case study she shared of a woman who didn’t feel sure of herself. The lady had been brought up to believe she had to forfeit her needs for the needs of others and, if she expressed her opinion, she was at risk of being humiliated or abandoned.

The client did her work to repair the internal damage and re-parent herself to reinstate the bright, capable being that she was. She was able to get to a point of not being so frightened of losing her husband that she was able to choose him. And once she was able to become more secure in her choices, she became more vocal in expressing her needs.

When I am dealing with interpersonal difficulty I always go back to the Teal Swan’s article on Attunement. She points out, “We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me?
• Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not?
• Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way?
• How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

I would imagine as most people read this, they would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

She says “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:
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1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience. Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm.”

I certainly feel the truth of this in my own life, in hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings and co-dependent in my relationships. It’s no surprise that each of these coping styles tends to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs - neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own.

Fighting is just one outcome when I am not attuned to my needs and able to be fully present, what is really happening underneath is a reaction to unconscious memories of those early years, my physiology goes into flight-or-fight mode. As Bessel Van Der Kolk relates in his book The Body Keeps The Score the goal is really self regulation.

It is probably no coincidence that, as I listened to some stories from people around me in the last few days, I began to see how these dynamics play out in all sorts of ways, big and small. I could also see how each of these scenarios could improve hugely by just one of the party’s taking Wendy’s approach.

One man was telling me about the dynamics between his wife, who is a teacher aide specifically hired for her skills in dealing with neuro-diverse kids in the classroom, and the class teacher. The teacher appears to take a very black and white approach and expects the aide to get the disruptive children to behave like every other child.

Knowing a little about the common neuro-diversities seen in classrooms (meaning autism, dyslexia, attention deficit, hyperactivity and so forth), I know a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work, we didn’t all come out a cookie cutter machine. However, it’s possible the teacher was parented in that way and so it has become her modus operandi and her safe place.

Meanwhile, the teacher aide is well attuned to the diversity she is experiencing in the children and adapts her approach to each child, often – in this case – having to act as a buffer between teacher and pupil. I can only imagine the relationship is rather strained, especially since the teacher apparently sees herself as the person who dictates what happens in her classroom.

So this man was relating to me his wife’s frustration and the interactions that have occurred between her and the teacher, sounding not unlike Wendy’s case study of the woman who was afraid of losing her husband, only in this example it’s a job at stake.

I imagined if his wife were able to approach the teacher with a firm, steady posture and an attitude of “I see you” rather than a defensive one. If she could learn how to be able to state her truth, be real, in a calm, clear way. And to recognise and connect with that part of herself that stands to get angry or get hurt, feel threatened, or incompetent, and to get it out of the room.

I imagine her calmly telling the teacher after lesson how keen she’s sure her little pupil is to learn from the teacher, but how humiliated he had felt when the teacher shamed him for being late, which was the fault of the parent, and further punished him by not allowing him to participate fully in the game the class were playing.

The teacher would no doubt have leap to her own defence, and perhaps started to lash out verbally at the teacher aide, but I could imagine the aide standing her ground calmly and saying “Well, that’s the way I saw it” and leaving the class, no argument, no defence. “Gosh, I thought, what a difference that would make”. It might not change the teacher’s entire behaviour, but I’ll bet she would be more cautious the next time a pupil was late.

Then there was one of our neighbour’s sons who was sitting out in his car at 11.30 at night beeping his horn randomly. He is a teenage boy on the brink of passing his driver’s test, no doubt longing for the freedom of the road. While another neighbour went out, understandably angry, I could imagine myself getting in the passenger seat instead and having a chat about life, I feel like his beeping horn was an outward expression of some bottled up things spilling over.

And, in my own world, I have talked before about the dynamic in my own relationship and how that has improved by learning to stand more calmly in my truth.

But in another realm of my interpersonal relationships there was an issue that came up over the school fair. Only a couple of years ago the school fair was something I couldn’t even think about without getting highly triggered.

Thankfully, after the work I had done to break that cycle of instant anger that arose in me every time I felt like someone was stepping over my boundaries, which usually escalated to some call to arms on behalf of a bigger cause, I was able to calmly articulate how an intended approach was making me feel. This resulted in a genuine interest in my insights rather than a wall of silence, a standoff or a dust cloud from people running in the opposite direction.

What is it that has to happen to allow you to state your truth, be real, in a calm, clear way? And to recognise and connect with that part of yourself that stands to get angry or get hurt, feel threatened, or incompetent, and to get it out of the room? Will you take the time to go deeper, make the links, and deal with your life story so you can start to make progress?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Makes You So Afraid of Conflict?, Value Your Unique Perspective – Especially When You Feel Rejected, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth and How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.