Glennon Doyle tells the story about challenging a preacher (who had been talking about the “sins” of homosexuality and abortion), who (after much discussion) finally responded with “What you say makes sense in the ways of the world. But God’s ways are not our ways. You must not lean on your own understanding. Faith is about trusting.”

She realised that he wanted her to believe that trusting him was trusting God. She says very pointedly “My heart and mind are my connections to God. If I shut those down, I’d be trusting the men who led the church instead of trusting God”.

I was confronted by this same dynamic myself a few weeks ago when two brave or foolish people knocked on my door to tell me about their God. They asked if I believed in God the Heavenly Father. I replied “If you mean in the sense of some hierarchy where God is separate from me then no. If you mean in the sense that I am, you are, that tree and all that is, is a projection of something you want to call God then, sure, I can go with that.”

The man at my doorstop heard not a word, he was so intent on selling me his own beliefs; that there is both a God the Heavenly Father and God the Heavenly mother. And when I moved to respond to this again with my own view, he asked where I got this from.

I replied “From within me, it is what I know to be true for me”. Then he started to aggressively come at me with these words “Which book did you read this in? Who taught you this? We have been taught false beliefs”.
“Mm” I thought “How ridiculous that you think you are offering anything different. You are not interested in me having my own inner relationship with that which you call God, all you are interested in is me believing what you tell me”.

At this point I stated that, while I’m happy to have a conversation on the topic, I wasn’t happy to have someone come to my doorstep to force feed me their own views and attack my own beliefs; and abruptly shut the door.

Then this week I was talking to someone who was feeling very torn. Their long-standing therapist had told them – despite their strong desires around finding a new partner and making money – that this wasn’t their life path.

I started to get quite agitated on their behalf as I listened to the story. From my own journey through life there is one thing that stands out to me as a guide, and that is the desire for something healthy is a sure-fire signal to go after it.

The question of whether these are healthy desires is a valid one of course. If what the therapist was saying was some form of “You would be wise to proceed with caution in terms of attracting a mate because you have some inner work to do, and who you attract right now may not line up with your highest and best potential, let’s at least do some work on healthy boundaries first” I could understand it.

If the therapist was saying “Hey, remember you have issues with using spending as a coping mechanism and tend to get yourself deeply in debt, let’s work on some healthy financial goals first” or similar, then great. But this was a flat out “No, you are not destined for a mate and money this life”.

I was incredulous that someone who has a yearning for a deeper connection with another, and who would like not to have to worry about money, was being led to believe that this was simply not in their escrow and – worse – feeling bad for wanting those things and left wondering what to believe.

Then I realised that it is really not so long ago I too had no idea what to believe anymore. I remember all too well the point in my mid thirties suddenly realising that I was trying to be so perfect; to be everything for everyone else I actually had no idea who I was.

In her book Untamed: Stop Pleasing Start Living Glennon sums up my own experience quite well when she talks about how returning to ourselves is confusing at first. She says “It’s not as simple as listening for the voices inside of us. Because sometimes the voices inside of us, which we’ve assumed speak the Truth, are just the voices of human beings who told us what to believe; it’s our indoctrination.”

Going on from there she acknowledges “Some of the hardest and most important work of our lives is learning to separate the voices of teachers from wisdom, propaganda from truth, fear from love and – in her earlier example – the voices of God’s self-appointed representatives from the voices of God Herself”.

My own journey was not an overnight one, but I absolutely can discern between my intuition and knowing and the more fearful indoctrinated beliefs and propaganda. As Sarah Blondin puts it, the first step is to sit down in the stillness and listen. But getting from confusion to clarity is a process, and requires practice.

I heard a broadcast by Neil Oliver recently, another person who has learned to listen to his inner knowing and question things, and he quoted the phrase “the truth shall set you free”.

That got me thinking, the truth can be painful. On the journey from confusion to clarity, which is ongoing given that there are often many hidden agendas even in the most benign crevices of day to day life, there have been many “ah ha” moments.

That first moment when I realise that something or someone in my world is not as I believe it to be, everything becomes disorientated, and the ground beneath my feet no longer feels solid. I can get angry, go through stages of grief and then, of course, there is fear and shame and guilt for having been gullible in some way.

As a coach I am aware that it is my job to equip people to hear and believe in their own inner guidance and wisdom, and to discern their truth from their fears. I will not be the one running their business, or living their life. As a wise lady said to me recently “You are not meant to be their crutches, you are meant to hand them their crutches and make them aware – even give them a push – celebrate when they no longer need them”.

Having been taught from childhood (as most of us are) to look outside ourselves for answers (I only have to think of the New Zeeland Government’s approach to managing COVID19 and positioning themselves as “the one source of truth” to see blatant examples of this everywhere), I know that along my journey there are many people I have overly relied upon for advice and support in the absence of inner clarity and confidence.

But therein lays the key. The goal is to gain that. With inner clarity and confidence no one will be able to tell you what to believe, they can only help lead you to what you already know.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Is Holding You Back? Reclaim Your Worth, Your Love, Your Power, The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Shine Your Inner Light - Let No One Keep You Down and How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I know what it is to be with someone who values me, and know what it is to be with someone who values only what I can do for them, and I know the difference; the heartbreaking, devastating difference.

“You were the only one who couldn’t see he didn’t value you hon” my friend said. “You are wrong” I told her “My heart broke every day”.

Being with someone so locked in their own pain, unaware even of their wound, projecting the pain back on me – always – is an absolute mind bender. I was brought up to be honest and to value honesty, and when someone blatantly lies, projects back their own poor behaviour directly at me and leaves me in no doubt as to their disdain it is shocking.

It is so shocking because it is said with such conviction that I begin to doubt myself. So many instances and in so many ways, all the while busy, so busy and distracted by life, too busy to have the space to step back and take proper note of it all and see what was actually happening – until I did.

So long as I was for him and not against him, so long as I fed his need to feel important then all was well in our world. I was his emotional regulation.

But don’t dare to crtitise, don’t dare to ask a simple, reasonable request. For anything that required any more was met with nothing less than non committal, often deflecting responses. That was at best. At worst it would be like standing in the direct line of staccato machine gun fire while all the oxygen was sucked from the room.

Though now and again, after a long time usually, an occasional request might be met, intermittent reward psychologists call it. It keeps the nervous system on alert the whole time, nerves become frayed and the rewards so few and far between it creates more desire than regular rewards ever can. It is cruel and dispassionate, a power play designed to keep its perpetrator feeling in control.

It is manipulation, not necessarily conscious, though the perpetrator is not unaware how appropriate their behaviour is, they just feel entitled to that which they take. What is wanted is positive attention and, like the toddler they once were, now dressed in an adult body and clothing, they rage and tantrum if their needs are not met and everything is your fault. Negative attention is better than no attention.

Really, I only asked him to clear up the cushions he’d scattered, or pack his own suitcase the next time we went away. That was the one that ended it, the “final straw”.

“He didn’t pack his own things?” my friend asked in awe. “I’ll tell you how that began, long ago” I responded. “When we met I wasn’t working and the first few times we went away, I would have packed while he was at work, just to be nice. He would have been grateful, and it would at first have been one of those things that was simply nice to do for someone.”

Then, it became not only an expectation but an entitlement. Proving how good I am, proving my value, as heartbreaking as it was, it was familiar. These were the fruits of my own wounds, and those had been there long before we met.

Yet on the inside a part of me knew, always knew, my worth. “You were born worthy” I hear Sarah Blondin’s voice. I know. Yet, child me did not get that memo. I understood I had to be good “or else”, to do as I was told. Oh I raged and protested at times like children do, but relatively little in comparison to what I felt on the inside.

I know. My children rage, I let them. I let them express all those big feelings in a world that wants to suppress their experiences and their feelings. They had lots of rage at times and when they were younger, they had the most awful meltdowns.

After being cooped up once in the car driving fast along a highway, back from a holiday, my daughter lost all control when she discovered the cake she hadn’t finished on our last stop was safely locked away in the back of the car, unable to be reached. Having no capacity for rational thought, and with me driving and unable to solidly be there for her, she was unable to regulate her emotions and threw her bottle of milk square between the seats in frustration; it hit the windscreen.

After a few miles I was able to pull off the highway and stop. Then I was able to go take my daughter in my arms and just hold her until she calmed.

My visiting parents, who had also been held hostage in the car during all this, were shocked. It was plain to my mum that this wasn’t a one off, my calm and steady approach told her this had happened before. She worried – genuinely I think – that if I didn’t take this in hand then I would soon have a grown teenager on my hands raging at me. My dad asked how I could stomach it.

As I’ve often quoted, in the words of Dr Gabor Maté “It is often not our children’s behaviour, but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates difficulties. The only thing the parent needs to gain control over is our own anxiety and lack of self control.”

My parents were anxious, little wonder, it was not a comfortable experience, and keen for me to discipline my child so that she would behave. That is what they had been taught, and that is what they taught me.

But I knew that “behaving” meant suppressing feelings. It meant that at the very time my child had gone into flight or fight mode – which is, in essence, our body signalling that it feels under threat – I would further threaten them. Me. Who is the one person in their whole world whose job it is to make them feel safe.

No. Let me correct that. My children have two parents, but I was the one in this case who had the day to day responsibility for my children, I was the one with whom they had and have a strong attachment bond.

So when I would feel my anxiety well up in response to some of my kids behaviours in those early years, just as Dr Gabor Maté had observed, I had to learn to calm my own nervous system first. It took a huge amount of emotional energy and focus.

And there I was, unsupported, dealing with children and with other adults who never learned healthy emotional regulation. Too many stuff it all down, others blow up and project it out.

To my friends, to others I worked with and who knew me in different arenas I was and am a strong, capable woman. I always knew this. Always. Even when I lived with someone who could not see my value nor would ever acknowledge it.

Even when faced with burn out from the conflicting demands of my career and very young children, or the regular awful meltdowns that carried on into those early school years having young kids with (at that time undiagnosed) dyslexic tendencies who struggled so much in the school system that they came home wiped and seeking emotional balance, or the hands on support to help their dad get set up and run his own business, or then the cruel depleting death of my mum.

I was the rock for everyone, and managed to manifest some rocks of my own, with kidney stones entering the landscape of my health.

And faced with all of this, amid entitlement and derision, I continued with a steely determination to figure out who I am beneath the suppressed emotions and dysfunctional beliefs. I rediscovered my inner knowing. I took the time while the children were at school to explore my passions:

• Becoming me, exploring the knowing versus the beliefs. Encouraging and coaching my kids to be an authentic expression of themselves and helping others (who want help) do the same
• Exploring the interconnectedness of everything and the clues that gives us in our lives about fulfilling our potential while simultaneously living symbiotically with everyone and everything
• Leveraging the power of intentionality, wonder and faith
• I love psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology and other social and behavioural sciences. But I also love philosophy, the wisdom traditions, epigenetics, quantum physics, the science of consciousness and where these things converge with sacred science. In short I like to make sense of the natural world and also enjoy all the therapies rooted in observations of the natural world and wisdom passed down through the ages.
• Reading, writing, beach walks, walks in nature, time with friends

Small drops, tiny scoops, step by step. I’d study free content, read books, I was resourceful as I eked out time between my child care and domestic responsibilities. Never encouraged, always disparaged.

But my inner knowing grew. And, when at last he led me to therapy “to fix me”, I then became more aware of the dynamics not just within me but between us. I then started to track the lies, the hypocrisy, the spite and controlling behaviours. I began to stand on solid ground again rather than feeling caught in a flush system swirling around and around.

Yes I know what it is to be with someone who values me, and know what it is to be with someone who values only what I can do for them, and I know the difference; the heartbreaking, devastating difference.

There are so many chapters to this story, so many aspects to speak to, so much I could share and relate. But for now, the thing I have learned is that my heart did not break, it can hurt but it never can nor will break. My heart is full of love and, at worst, someone else trying to exert their will over me can obscure me from feeling that if I am unwise and look outside of myself for validation and love.

What a huge gift that is in a way. When kept from something, the will to find it and reclaim it grows stronger. The more it is denied, the stronger the desire becomes. We have seen this in many ways across society in the last two years.

So what are you being held back from and what can you do to reclaim your worth, your love, your power and the full potential of your life?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Be Compassionate and Curious to Live Your Best Life, What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People and How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“Just because it’s common doesn’t make it right” I said. I was talking to a lawyer about a response she was composing for a client. Her client had been acting in accordance with initial good faith agreements between the parties involved while, instead of just saying they had changed their mind, the other party had been denying there had ever been any agreements.

Not only that, but rather than addressing anything directly, the other party had started accusing her client of excessive expenditures never made, threatening to cut off finances and being verbally abusive on a number of occasions, with many examples of petty, spiteful and dishonest behaviours.

Her client had wanted to address these directly along with the evidence that had been carefully documented through emails, texts, social media trails, recorded conversations and others who could confirm what had actually taken place.

The lawyer seemed reluctant, she said “We are trying to reach agreement; I like to keep emotions out of it, stick to the facts and just focus on the deal. Going down that road will just piss off the other party”.

While I could see the sense in that, I said “But isn’t that precisely what the other party is doing? Meanwhile they are not being confronted with the evidence of their lies and are actually dictating the narrative while not even coming close to a fair deal”. She responded “It’s just tactics, I see it all the time, and it washes over me mostly”.

“Yes,” I said “But just because it happens all the time does not make it right”.

This reminded me of an interview I heard last year with a national politician I used to work with. In retaliation for whistle blowing he found himself personally attacked through revelations of his private life. He commented on how affairs were rife in Parliament and said “While I’m not saying it was right, it was all part of the game, it was the accepted norm”.

I used to see this often in corporate cultures too where behaviours that would not be misplaced in a school playground would often come to the fore wrapped in a professional gloss.

It puts me in mind of a talk I once attended with author John Parsons, whose most popular book is about keeping children safe online. He points to this tendency for us to look at online games as being a separate reality that exists outside of ours where it’s okay to kill people because “it’s not real”. Yet the themes and narratives of the games are played by real people, through real interactions.  

Just as they are in the legal system, or the political system, or any other system I could care to mention.

It’s as if we live in a society where the fundamental traits that create cooperation, cohesion, compassion and a more joyful and peaceful existence, are just swept aside in a bid for power and control. What happens in the legal arena, the political arena, the corporate arena and the online world, are just examples of sub sections of our culture that are somehow seen as less real and just a game making quite deplorable behaviours somehow okay.

As I had been contemplating all this I opened up my Insight Timer app to listen to a Sarah Blondin meditation and the quote “What you allow is what will continue” popped up on my screen.

There are many people who help those at the receiving end of toxic behaviours, but who is holding those responsible for them accountable? Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “There comes a point when we need to stop just pulling people out the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in”.

When author, philanthropist and activist Glennon Doyle started looking upstream, she learned that where there is great suffering, there is often great profit. Now when she encounters someone struggling to stay afloat she knows not only to ask “How can I help you right now” but, once they are safe, to also ask “What institution or person is benefitting from your suffering?” which is how she became an activist.

At what point do we stand up and say, actually, our legal system isn’t working, our political system isn’t working, our corporate cultures don’t work, these online gaming systems don’t work, nothing big and institutional works, it’s simply breeding grounds for the power hungry and the worst of human behaviours get perpetuated.

Another interesting point Glennon  makes, when asked about why she refers to god as a she, and whether she believes god is female, she says “I don’t. I think it’s ridiculous to think of god as anything that could be gendered, but as long as women continue to be undervalued and abused and controlled here on Earth I’ll keep using it.”

She makes a point worthy of exploration. It does seem that these covert power plays, that are rife in our society, do play nicely into suppressing females in many ways – though not exclusively by any means.

I can certainly attest that, as someone who was very independent (financially and otherwise), it was extremely hard for me to forego that in order to look after my children. When I met their father he had talked about being a stay-at-home dad initially, but isn’t something that appealed so much when up close and personal with the tasks of daily child rearing and domesticity.

I too had wanted to give our children that gift of my attention they needed but, as the main breadwinner at the time, it wasn’t feasible. Nonetheless with a baby and toddler at home wanting my attention all night long after being farmed out all day – albeit to a beautiful and loving soul who looked after them well – I was soon in the burn out zone and knew something had to give.

Moving to another part of the country where house prices were more affordable meant being able to be with the kids in the ways that they needed.  However it also meant moving away from the opportunity for me to earn income in the way I had previously.

The last 15 years of my paid career were spent in senior management roles working for large organisations advising on and leading strategic people changes to enable transformation to their customer experience. These roles are few and far between in New Zealand as a whole, but generally not available where I now live.

In the meantime I helped the children’s father establish and run his business, which is now thriving. My personal intention in returning to work, when the children were old enough, was to use some of my previous skills and experience to work more directly with individuals.  

With a special interest in the field of trauma and how it impacts on human potential, I have been on a very personal journey of study and self growth and have amassed a large body of published work in the years since I left my corporate career. Training in clinical hypnotherapy was how I had planned to re-enter the workforce and make a living.

But with the urgency of a separation, and the introduction of restrictions in the educational sector as well as mandates in the healthcare sector, I instead decided to combine all my previous experience to provide business coaching, contracting and consulting to businesses.

What that means though, is that - in addition to the initial period of financial uncertainly while establishing a business and hours obviously restricted within school hours and term time - being full-time carer of our children put me at a financial disadvantage both during the relationship and post separation.

Given that it will likely take at least 12-18 months to establish a stable income history to enable a home loan to be secured, house price rises and loan restrictions could make this an impossible goal. In the meantime, my share of the equity from the sale of our family home will diminish as it will be needed in order to pay for living costs. This is a common scenario facing women everywhere.

Then when you add to that some of these common underhand tactics being played out between parties in the legal system, it’s not hard to see where Glennon Doyle’s conclusions have come from.

I for one intend to ensure that I fully express what life is like from within these sorts of unjust scenarios, and what I have and can learn from them, in the hope that by sharing it brings into the light what lives in our shadows and plays over time and time again. Only through examining the toxicity that we allow and learning new ways of approaching things, will we start to foster the kind of cooperation, cohesion, compassion and a more joyful and peaceful existence that we all deserve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was talking to various friends this week about those three magic words I love you. Our experiences of hearing and speaking those words all vary widely, and my own relationship with them has changed dramatically over the years.

The first person I ever said those words to, and recall hearing those words from, was my boyfriend when we were twelve or thirteen and we used to write letters to one another. I grew up believing – mainly through movies and books - those romantic relationships were where a person expressed any kind of big feelings.

Saying I love you to family members was more in the domain of those crazy Americans we used to watch on TV. Certainly not in our homes, nor in popular culture in the UK, it just wasn’t something people said to each other; a definite overhang of centuries of emotional repression.

Yet in recent years it has crept in. I personally remember the creep very well, I didn’t just suddenly find myself saying those words to all and sundry, and still don’t of course, I am selective. But my world of expressing and receiving love now goes beyond romantic relationships and it was a process.

My niece and I were having a conversation about what is happening with Russia and the Ukraine. To me, this is all connected; it isn’t something that happens in isolation. I was sharing with her that I resonated with one of Brene Brown’s posts where she said “We stand with every Ukrainian. We stand with the thousands of brave Russians demonstrating in protest, risking their safety to do so, and all those devastated by this unprovoked, terrifying, and reprehensible war”.

It also brought up for me the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world whose governments are not only ignoring their messages about the overreach in regards to COVID19 restrictions, but vilifying peaceful protesters in the mainstream media as violent troublemakers. I’ve seen many times now firsthand live footage of what is actually happening versus what gets reported.

So, what do I think is really going on... first COVID19 extremism and now Putin invades the Ukraine, is the world going to hell in a hand cart? 

No I'd say not. I'd say it's more like Mother Earth is ridding herself of a poison. All that was hidden beneath is bubbling to the surface. The atrocities of 80 years ago amid the horrors of WW2, with characters like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco etc did not just disappear. The narcissistic traits that created pain and war then are still seen in many people today, in many households, workplaces and they are very obviously and sadly seen in many people in power positions.

I think this is a time of taking off rose coloured glasses, and many still have them on so there could be more to come, but we are collectively starting the process of clearing out all the junk in our trunk.

As I awakened to the lie that power is an external force to be complied with, and is instead an internal allowing of love from within, that is when space was cleared within me. I have come to feel this love as the powerful force it is.

I think it was around the time I started to find my feet as an adult I can remember my mum saying “Love you Sho”. For a long time those words would send me into freeze mode. As I spoke to in Who Are You Protecting? Why Telling Your Story Is Powerful the relationship I had had with my mum in childhood had created a lot of anxiety as I grew. Love was not unconditional.

As in most households and upbringings, there were expectations around behaviour and, if not met, there would be punishment, withdrawal of love and words such as “you should be ashamed”. So for many years I was not able to receive those three words I love you from my mum, nor anyone else outside of a romantic relationship.

I would feel like a cat caught in the headlights and avoid saying anything in response and come up with other phrases to smooth over that awkward moment. It wasn’t really until I started doing my own inner work not long before my mum died that I began to clear space for the love that I am to rise up within me.

There was – and is ongoing – a necessary and conscious look at all that dwells in the shadows, and a deliberate process of forgiveness and healing. This also gave rise to new possibilities, new connections and a place to receive and give those three words more freely.

But perhaps the biggest gift has been the ability to feel those three words in relation to myself. As I have begun to reintegrate the parts of me I had rejected as I grew, because they hadn’t fit into what was expected or desired of me back then.

In recent years I’ve been able to more easily say to my closest confidants, family members and girlfriends “I love you” with more and more ease. To me it means something like “I see you, the real you, in all your glory and pain. I’ve got your back. I trust you not to betray me. And it hurts my heart when I see you being dishonored”.

And it’s also been easier to say it to my guy friends recently without that romantic overlay/entanglement. That boyfriend from my younger days is still in my world. The level of intimacy in our relationship has obviously changed over the years as we each went on to have other relationships, had kids and moved to different countries.

But our friendship has endured and I love to hear how he and his family are doing, and we generally have the other’s back when life throws some pain our way. These things are not always easy, and I have to respect and honour the other people in my people’s lives. Everyone is at a different stage of their own journey and the relationship they have in terms of self love and the words I love you.

I do believe that as each person finds their way back to and expresses the love that they are, it purges more and more of the poison that stops each of us from feeling and receiving the love that is there.

The more we take responsibility for healing our own wounds, the less we will see of the atrocities that are happening today. We can rise in anger, and well we should, it is better than powerlessness, but we can also find the powerful force of love within and allow that to rise up and to get to know our true nature which is powerful beyond imagination.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race, How to Quieten the Inner Critic, When to Act on Possibility, Embracing the Feminine within All of Us, , What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution, Connect to Your Well-Being  and Could a Broader Perspective Benefit Us All Right Now? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A man told me a story of a woman he had known growing up and, one night, their relationship unexpectedly became more than friendship. It had all felt so natural and he had never felt so in tune with anyone as he did then. However, the next day he panicked, lost in a sea of feeling unworthy and misplaced loyalties to others.

As a result, theirs was a story that never unfolded. Both went on to other relationships, the kind of relationships that played out every painful thing they had each believed about themselves.

It was a sad tale, and one particularly poignant for me, I was that woman.

What could have been I wondered? Yet if I am to wonder anything, it cannot be regrets for there is a future still to be lived. I certainly wonder at the path I took, always looking outside myself for love.

I had had some really good relationships up until the one. As he walked across the train station, a friend of a friend coming out with us that night, the moment seemed to slow and everything else faded away except him walking. I knew right then I was in trouble, my heart lost.

After almost two years together, he decided it was time to leave, and I was broken; devastated, left standing at the edge of an abyss. I wallowed for a long time in a sea of utter misery, blaming myself for who I was, who I had been. I had grown up thinking relationships are where I find the love I had been seeking, and if this guy didn’t think I was worthy then that was my truth.

Other relationships followed, all reflecting the parts of me I rejected through their incompatibilities or – if they were compatible – they were unavailable. Each one reinforced the painful beliefs I had about me. These ranged from lack of worth, to feeling like I was too much, through to feeling like I was unseen, with many others in between.

So in the aftermath of that night with my friend, it was just further confirmation, and I felt hurt, abandoned and alone.

Now many years later, I look back and see so clearly that it was me who had abandoned myself thirty years ago, when the one turned out not to be.

It isn’t until recent years that I began to really wake up to how much more I deserve, and how that it is an inside job. I have to love me before anyone else can.

My friend said he often thinks of that night when he wants to forget the painful things in his life for a while. I replied “The thing is, I’m not a forgetting-things-for-a-while kind of woman. I’m a remembering who you truly are kind of woman.” I guess that is why the memory has stayed with us both.

I had decided this week to participate in Teal Swan’s 7-day self love challenge. On day four she posed a list of ten questions, I got stuck at the first one “What thought do I most want to think about myself?” I couldn’t think of anything, “Something kind and loving but what?” I wondered. I thought if I could look at what’s on my mind most, what I am feeling the most, then I could flip it and create a loving thought.

There’s an almost constant pain in my throat and chest, like I’m trying to swallow down big emotions. I’m sure that is exactly what it is, I’m well practiced, and now I am feeling into the pain of the last fifty years instead of pushing it away. But I couldn’t match the thoughts to the feelings, they were at the edge of my awareness beyond my reach. I decided just to wonder and to let the words arise in their own time.

Learning to love myself is one of the hardest, most gratifying things I have ever done. I feel pain a lot, I think it’s inevitable and most probably temporary. It’s certainly better than the pain of rejected myself and all that life brought me in response.

Glennon Doyle talks about this when she tells the story about going to her fifth recovery meeting (on her sixth day of sobriety) and how she decided to explain how much she hurt and how being alive doesn’t seem as hard for others as is for her. Someone explained to her “It’s okay to feel all the stuff you’re feeling. You’re not doing life wrong, you’re just human, feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re there for. Feelings are for feelings. All of them. Even the hard ones.”

She did not know that all feelings were for feeling. She had thought she was supposed to feel happy. That happy was for feeling and pain was for fixing and numbing and hiding and deflecting and ignoring. She thought when life got hard she’d gone wrong somewhere, that pain was weakness and she was supposed to suck it up. The more she sucked it up the more booze she drank down.

From that day she began to return to herself, to practice feeling it all. She learned “Firstly, I can feel everything and survive. Second, I can use pain to become. I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not pain is the fire of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.”

I see and feel many aspects of who I am reflected back in many ways through others. There have been tens of thousands of people doing this 7-day Self Love challenge right along with me, I hear their stories and feel their pain, and everyone has a story.

The years of stuffing down my own needs and desires and true feelings, are now welling up and wanting to be seen. I imagine it’s very much like the pain of coming off a drug, the pain wants to be seen and acknowledged. There are only two choices, one is to seek a salve, for me that would be connection with others who can validate me externally. The other is to sit with the pain, and validate myself.

A good friend said to me this week “Name one thing you love about Shona”. It gave me pause. At first I was actually unable to answer. “After all this work I’ve done, surely I can find one thing to love about me?” I thought.

Then a voice within me said “kind”. Yes, I can own that, I am a kind person and I do love that. Then the voice said “perceptive”. Yes, I can own that too. Then the voice kept coming, soon I had a decent list.

Circling back to the question I couldn’t answer on the Self Love challenge “What thought do I most want to think about myself?” it’s “I’m here, I’m listening”. And I am listening, I feel and am processing the hurt of having abandoned myself for decades, but it’s better late than never. I’m coming home.

In her book Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living, Glennon says we are all bilingual, we speak the language of indoctrination but our native tongue is the language of imagination:

“The language of indoctrination is the language of the mind, with it’s should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad. In order to get beyond our training, we need to activate our imaginations, our storytelling faculty. So instead of asking ourselves what is right and wrong, ask ourselves, what is true and beautiful?”

She asks:

“What is the truest, most beautiful life you can imagine?

What is the truest, most beautiful family you can imagine?

What is the truest, most beautiful world you can hope for?

Write it down, these are out blueprints, our marching orders...”

So did you, like Glennon, like me, like too many, believe that happiness was for feeling and pain was for fixing and numbing and hiding and deflecting and ignoring? Are you ready to sit with your pain and make plans for a more beautiful version of your life? What is the truest most beautiful version of your life you can imagine right now?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Attract the Blissful Relationships You Actually Deserve, Do You Want to Make a Heartfelt Change to Your Career?, Simplify Your Life to Be Accepted and Loved as Your Authentic Self, Does Your Heart Long to Be Accepted for Being Just You? and How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Having had my share of unhappy relationships, both personally and some professionally, I’ve reflected a lot on the question of how to attract better relationships; ones that nourish rather than deplete me.

The key, I’ve decided, is in that word deserve and there are two angles to that.

The first is like mine, going about my life for years believing that - since I was attracting poor situations and behaviours - it must just be as good as it gets. I felt that, clearly on some level, I must be undeserving, or unlucky, or this is simply how life is.

The other angle, if I look at it from the perspective of some of the self centred people and circumstances I seem to have attracted, is that clearly there are people who go about their life fundamentally believing that others exist to serve their needs, the deserving manifests as a sense of entitlement without any conscience or consideration towards the rights and feelings of those others.

Of course there are all shades of grey in between these two angles, but it demonstrates a spectrum of sorts, along which people sit.

So, with this in mind, I was reading an article by Teal Swan about people who experience some sort of dishonour in their relationships (which inevitably stems from their childhood experiences) and come out with an attitude of wanting to be accepted “no matter what”. This effectively makes them the aggressor, perpetuating dysfunctional behaviour, and expecting unconditional love from another “no matter what” they do/don’t do or who they are/aren’t.

The juicy bit for me, was when Teal explained:
“It is important to beware that when we first get into relationships, we often do so by hiding the parts of ourselves that got us rejected before. But this means we are selling someone on something that isn’t the full truth of us. It is guaranteed that sooner or later, we will either bring out or switch into the part of us that we were hiding. And the other person will feel duped.”

She says that the what in “no matter what” is actually very specific; it is a specific thing, or multiple specific things that we need someone to want and value. The answer involves the very things about us that were rejected, not accepted, pushed away, unwanted, not valued, disapproved of and/or unloved.

Teal asserts “By figuring out what that specific thing is, we can improve our own relationship with that thing and then we can go about finding conscious and direct ways for that thing to be accepted, included, wanted, valued, appreciated and loved in compatible ways i.e. finding people who do want that. People, who can accept, include, value, appreciate and love that.”

So the real question, she says, is:

“Who is the me that I need people to want? Or what about me do I need people to want?”

This struck me in its simplicity, it makes so much sense.

In A Triumph of Authenticity - Can You Embrace the Totality of Your Being? I shared that I wrote in my journal, quite some time ago, “Imagine what it might feel like to be with a person who takes an interest in me, in what I think, do or feel, or someone who offers to do things for me, or someone who does stuff with pleasing me in mind.”

That had kicked off some soul searching about the aspects of myself I had rejected along life’s path. So instead I imagined a life in which I reflected and embraced the totality of who I am, especially in the way I interact with others. Today I am deeply grateful for my closest confidants who know and love me as the curious, deep thinker I am, which was the example I talked about.

But another aspect of me that has come to light recently, after having been shoved in a dark closest for too long, is the part of me that really likes to take my own sweet time going about things. As opposed to feeling constantly harangued and rushed, which actually triggers me into flight/fight or – most often - freeze.

When I took my kids away a couple of weeks ago, we rented a holiday home for the week in a beautiful area we had never visited before. It was lovely to just get up in the morning and take our time getting ready, deciding whether we wanted to go somewhere or not, or just hang out and relax.

When I think back to my childhood, rushing here and there was just part and parcel of life that involved school, training (I swam competitively), family commitments, and friends and so on. Really, I feel we live in a society that values productivity above all else, yet I find I am far more productive given space to allow my creative thoughts to wander untethered across the vast fields of possibilities in my mind.

Having and holding healthy boundaries has been revolutionary, to uncover my boundaries was a process, answering questions about my needs and desires. But this was a new angle, that helped me cross reference and sense check how I’m putting myself across.

I was laughing with some friends about the irony of all that I’ve attracted into my life in recent weeks, after saying how new relationships were not top of my agenda, in fact not particularly even on my radar, yet all that the universe seems to have served up is guidance about relationships in various guises.

That probably makes a huge amount of sense given I’m on the cusp of re-establishing my career and no doubt making many more new contacts and forging relationships in the months and years ahead.

I’m in no doubt that all the inner work I’ve done will pay dividends and help me recognise which relationships are compatible and which are incompatible. Especially without feeling the need to morph into someone else and to have the courage to let the incompatible ones go regardless of the opportunities i might be afraid I’ll miss.

I have learned the hard way, if there are red flags, pay attention. If someone seems unreasonable one time, fine, if it happens with regularity, they aren’t going to change. And if they treat other people badly, you won’t be the exception forever even if you are now.  

Watching other friends struggle in relationships where they are treated in ways that are far from blissful and are certainly not deserved, I can now appreciate how my closest friends felt watching me from the sidelines for years. Of course it’s also now gratifying for them to watch me step into authenticity.

One of my dearest friends told me the other day “How inspiring you are at this juncture Shona, I see you just going from strength to strength...Just love witnessing this bud beginning to bloom”.

That is what I want for everyone else too. We are all buds waiting to bloom, whether we are the oppressor or suppressed, people are in pain. Incompatible relationships serve to help us see ourselves just the same as compatible ones do, but they are more painful. Let’s stop the pain, and learn to attract the blissful relationships you actually deserve.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Simplify Your Life to Be Accepted and Loved as Your Authentic Self, Does Your Heart Long to Be Accepted for Being Just You?, Ask No One to Be Different So That You Can Feel Good, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? and How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Perhaps you do not understand
This thing you think funny, where it will land?
It hits a spot deep down inside
I feel myself recoil, wanting to hide
If I tell you my story will you then comprehend?
Or will what is between us lie cold on the floor my friend?
 
Too deep, too much, I hear you say
Well, that no longer touches me, no longer holds any sway
For all my life I have made myself small
Bent and shrunk my shape instead of standing tall
So serious, you say, lighten up
Take a chill pill, relax Buttercup
Yours is the drum beat of a familiar song
One where the other tries to make me wrong
Wrong for standing up for what I believe
Yet in my heart I grieve
For do you not see when you make fun of another
It is not comical, it is denigration of your sister or brother
 
This time it was female anatomy
Inviting shame not flattery
Others have found it funny you say
That may be, but perhaps they are misguided in the same way?
The young girl that I was, was warned of this crap
Mother told me, “beware, men want nothing but sex, it’s a trap”
That young girl was fed a lie in a way
But the young boy that was you also fell prey
You were taught to belittle and laugh at another
To joke about that which would otherwise flourish and flower
Stuck in old patterns we grew up to the beat of the same drum
But let’s set aside what was taught by uncle, dad or mum
We can be different and break the chain
Not be the one that keeps on dealing out endless pain
Revise what is funny, if it comes at the expense of another
It hurts us all, sister and brother
Compassion is where it truly is at
Anything else will simply fall flat
 
Well... that is my truth, I have no real wish to make you wrong
For in my having a go we are singing the same song
I have to laugh at myself ranting and raving
Indignation at being made to feel wrong created a craving
I only wish for you to understand
Where what you found funny would actually land
You are me and I am you
Reflections of the other in some insane human brew
Perhaps it is time to take another peep
At something in which I’d rather steep
“Each to their own” I hear myself say
Let’s find some fun in something we both see as play
For when I allow myself to let go and laugh
Especially at myself on this crazy path
I find we are more alike than I’d often own
But when I do, my heart feels like it has come home
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other poems, or articles like How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think?, How to Receive and Be More Confident in Your Needs, Desires and Opinions, Embrace Your Authentic Self, Shed the Toxic People in Your Life and How Living Your Passions Fully Combats Feeling Lonely. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A whole week to myself, I haven’t had so much me-time in over fifteen years, and it’s been an absolute tonic.

One of my friends asked, as we headed into 2022, what my objectives are. On the cusp of my fiftieth birthday, it really feels like I am stepping into the second part of my life which – in many ways – will be quite contrary to the first part. As much as the first half century amounted to giving away my personal power, the second half is about fully embodying and embracing my personal power and settling for nothing less than I deserve in all respects.

Those are some great words, but as another friend said in frustration of her own personal growth journey “how?”

Setting an intention is one thing but making it happen requires a mixture of new skills, awareness, patience and fortitude. I happened to be listening to a video from Brianna McWilliams, a therapist who specialises in helping those with insecure attachment styles, talking about three things needed to get the best from relationships of all kinds, from personal to professional.

She says that, particularly for people pleasers with an open heart attachment style, it’s about:

• Learning to receive (rather than just give)
• Learning to have and hold good boundaries
• Learning to self advocate (express my opinion and own the fullness of who I am)

She makes the point that “People pleasers don’t know how to receive because they don’t want to be burdensome or dependant on another person’s generosity; because generally that generosity has come at a cost in the past and makes us suspicious. So remaining in a giving position keeps us in control but also makes us thoroughly unavailable”.

In situations when others offer to do something for me and I say “It’s okay thanks, I’ve got it”, she says that it isn’t about whether I’m capable of the task, it’s about letting other people in to be able to show their appreciation and love.

“Okay” I thought, that’s one objective then. Certainly when I hear someone offering to do something for me, it might take quite a bit of practice to allow them to. Because also attached to this is the desire for perfection. Again, not because I personally value perfection – in fact I would argue there is no such thing – but because striving for it was always a way to get ahead of any critics.

As a wise friend said “strive for progression not perfection”. To progress, I recognise I am so independent that it would be wise to ask my closest confidants to help me become aware at times when I am shutting people out from opportunities to contribute to my life.

When it comes to boundaries, I’m already on the right track. That said, I hadn’t heard about having personal boundaries until fairly recently in the scheme of things, and I still have a way to go, especially on being really specific about what I want – I still have a tendency to be too vague and accommodating.

This is particularly true of people who tell me what they are going to do (rather than ask me) when it is something that involves me, which I still find a little jarring. The trick is, I believe, is to respond as if they had asked my opinion and be very specific in stating my own preferences. People who act like this, I’ve found, are generally as poor at knowing and stating their own boundaries as I am, but come at it from a position of entitlement rather than subservience.

“Boundaries are guidelines for how someone relates the self to the rest of the world. They are rules of conduct built out of a mix of beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning. Personal boundaries operate in two directions, affecting both the incoming and outgoing interactions between people. Personal boundaries help to define an individual by outlining likes and dislikes and what is right for them personally or wrong for them personally. Defining these things helps us to know how we will and won’t allow ourselves to be treated by others”  - Teal Swan

There are some great resources out there for learning this skill, my go-to is Boundary Boss by Terri Cole, an amazing book, and this podcast is a fantastic introduction to the topic. There are many other resources, the inimitable Teal Swan has taught a lot about boundaries from a number of perspectives and is great to listen to or read, and Yvette Rose also has her own slant.

As an objective, while I have had a good introduction to this concept and some good practice, I still have a way to go in mastering this skill. Again, trusted confidants and mentors are those I rely upon with my vulnerabilities around this.

Lastly there is self advocacy, an interesting topic. One example Brianna gave was about expressing a personal opinion, particularly if it’s contrary to an expert or mainstream opinion. Anyone who knows me knows that I have little difficulty in doing this. However, what they may not know is the whole twisted inner landscape that goes with it.

As another friend, also a recovering people pleaser, said “That’s fecking hard to do without wondering if you’ll hurt someone or worrying about what people’s opinions are etc”. Indeed. Not caring what someone thinks or feels is not where I want to head, but I don’t want to abandon myself in the process of trying to fulfil others’ desires, that is the unhealthy part.

And of course self advocacy is also about putting oneself forward, something I have an opportunity to relook at right now as I orientate myself towards making an independent income again. I have had a bad habit of making myself seem smaller to avoid looking too big for my boots. In fact I’ve probably constricted so much I’ve been rattling around inside my proverbial boots, lost in the darkness for years.

In my alone time this week, my inner voice reminded me to breathe life into the fullness of who I am. I’m not just a writer, or a pursuer and facilitator of personal growth, or an all-things strategically people related business consultant I’m all those things and more.     

In fact, these beautiful words came to me:
“You are a life that has known itself in pieces, and the pain of holding those pieces apart from themselves, but at the same time you are the life of everything in synchronicity. There is only love and resistance to love, that is everything. If you let go - you will see that the pieces cannot do anything but integrate when in the flow, they only fracture in resistance”.

I recognise the truth of that in all of us. It relates directly to what Tony Robbins said “Inside of you, there are parts of you that are incredibly gracious and generous, but there is also a part that is selfish. We all have loving parts and not so loving parts, playful parts and boring parts, courageous parts and fearful parts”.

Then he said poignantly, “The real question is not Who are you? The real question is Which part of you is in charge right now?”

So when it comes to self advocacy, I think it’s as much about putting on my big girl pants and being brave as I go about breaking the old patterns of staying small. I believe we each have a lot to offer and it can be many things to many people. I certainly would like to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it keeps my life interesting and fulfilling.

As I was reminded this week, looking back on 2021, if all that happened was that I just feel a bit better about myself, or I became clearer about what I truly need to be happy and healthy or I uncovered some of the things that truly matter to me and have taken steps towards living according to them, then – as Teal Swan says - “Congratulations you have attuned yourself to the bigger picture”.

Evolution, growth and inner work are journeys that require time, commitment and effort. So as you step into 2022, in what ways can you learn how to receive more? And what steps can you take towards becoming more confident around asserting your own needs, desires and opinions? This world is not only waiting for you to step into the fullness of who you are, it needs us each to do this. Let us take small steps together.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think?. Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, Empower Yourself - When a Difficult Reaction Sends You Into a Tailspin, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? and How Living Your Passions Fully Combats Feeling Lonely. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I am alone on Christmas Day for the first time in my life, but I will say that I am not lonely.

Instead, I feel a strange sense of spending time with someone that I have felt awkward with for too long – me. It used to be that I could barely stand to spend any time with me; it was a concept so foreign that I would even say I was afraid to be alone.

Today as I sat on the beach by myself, I no longer feel that fear. A memory sprang up of sitting alone in a park in Sweden after a break up long ago. It was a beautiful summer’s day, and the park was busy with families and couples and people connecting. I sat in the grass among them feeling conspicuous, anxious, thinking “I could do this; I can be on my own”.

And for a while, a short while, I was. I had some time to connect in with myself, but I gave it up without having found any of the real answers I was looking for. There were possibilities laid at my door: join Al Gore’s ranks in Aussie, creating awareness about climate change; head to an African country to volunteer my services with an organisation I knew of through a leadership development programme I had worked with; or forego those and satisfy the internal clock that was ticking oh so loudly.

Making a conscious decision, I chose the opportunity to start a family. Not that it was easy, I had to earn an income and I had turned away from those other possibilities not yet knowing this me I had only just become aware of. At the time it was with a heavy heart that I turned back back to what had been tried and tested for me in a career sense.

And the starting a family part took a further three years, and two more miscarriages. But finally I satisfied that internal clock that had, in some ways, distracted me further from who I am. Because being codependent in my relationship style, knowing nothing else, I turned my back on that me I had a brief dalliance with.

I regret nothing though, it has been my honour to birth and raise such beautiful people into the world, and I enjoy seeing who they are becoming. And their birth was also my rebirth in many ways.

My closest friends called me a doormat in reference to what became in those years afterward. While that was rather jarring to hear, at one time I would have raged with indignation at such a statement, I am grateful to have such honest friends. “How did a strong, independent woman like me become a doormat?” I wondered. It is a long story and not one for the telling now, but as I slowly became reacquainted with the me that I am, being a doormat was never going to be sustainable.

I listened to Jim Carrey talk about his role playing Andy Kaufman in Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, and I was struck by his analogy between the way a pearl is formed and the way people take on a persona that is different to their inherent self.

He said that no matter what masterpiece we create to hide the parts of us we don’t feel are acceptable – in his case it was the comedic guise he took on - at some point we have to put the real us out there.
Otherwise, for him, it was an empty existence, all that fame and wealth meant nothing when hiding from himself.

I can understand that, I’ve longed to be seen and valued for so much of my life, yet I am the one who rejected parts of myself I didn’t feel were acceptable. Of course, a lot of this rejection was subconscious and part of the normal childhood adapting to fit in.

I certainly know who I had become. In the words of Lisa Romano, people who are codependent in their relationship style “feel better when rescuing, fixing and managing the poor choices of others”. And, she says “abandonment issues keep us stuck in the past, we worry, we are not true to ourselves because we are too busy trying to be what we think others need us to be and we often deny our needs for the sake of others and feel invisible in our relationships”.

To sum up the desires driving me, I wished for peace, fun, love, to feel enough and to feel seen.
But who is this me I so utterly rejected? That is who I completely lost sight of, the person my heart longed to be accepted.

As someone who loves to learn, to explore ideas, to be in my inner world and connect with others through emotional and spiritual awareness, it is bewildering to look back now and see just how much I had rejected those part of myself.

I bought into the idea that in order to be an acceptable daughter, employee, partner and mother I had to do it all or die trying. I would always do all the things I felt were expected of me and then – if there was time or (more importantly) energy - I could do the things I love.

My beliefs were also so compromised it’s ridiculous. Why should I have been afraid to explore that broader part of me that knows so much more than I ever learned from a school teacher, a doctor or a minister? Was I really so threatened by mainstream narrative and the narrow range of vision of those around me at times throughout my life?

I see now that it has often been from a very contained and restrained place of pleasing others I have looked out through eyes and into the world over the years.

I will be forever grateful for the blunt lessons that called me back from the fog. For no matter how well I kept the house, no matter how well I ran the finances, no matter how well I did in my career, no matter how well I looked after the kids and nurtured them through emotionally trying times, no matter how well I anticipated and took care of everyone’s needs, it was never enough.

There was always some criticism; the windows needed cleaning, or the way I had cooked the meal wasn’t right, or the meal itself wasn’t right, or the groceries I purchased weren’t right, or the hotel I had booked wasn’t good enough. The list was endless.

And should I take time to self care, that always attracted unwanted attention. Comments in a tone that were decidedly divisive and designed to ensure I knew that it was not acceptable for me to sit and read my book for half an hour, or go for walk along the beach in the middle of the day, or invite friends or family over or to stay for any length of time to name a few.

All of these things were absolute gifts, because they caused me to get angry and to stand up for myself, albeit carrying a great deal of grief at not feeling seen or valued for who I am. Well, now the constraints are gone. I am alone and I feel relief.

And a little awkwardness at denying and disowning the authentic parts of me, that would so fascinate me in others, for so long. As I have begun to know myself more, I say “Hello world, here I am” and it is on those terms you will meet me.

I have learned the valuable lesson that I can never be good enough to please other people all of the time. The number one person I need to respect is my self, a self that I am thoroughly enjoying getting reacquainted with and reclaiming.

Over this holiday season, are you able to take a little time to become aware of parts of yourself that you may be rejecting in order to feel accepted? In your heart, might you even want to become reacquainted with the you that you were born to be? After all, if we are not being ourselves then who is the person that is living your life other than an illusion?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Who Are You Protecting? Why Telling Your Story Is Powerful, Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation and Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

As someone who sought approval as a way to feel safe, disagreement with others has always felt very unsafe to me. So getting comfortable with another person’s opinion that is contrary to mine – especially if it is about me – has been quite a journey.

Tony Robbins says “Whether we feel pain or love depends on three things: our story, our strategy and our state; and changing any one will change the other two”.

I had a big story going on about other people’s opinions and what they meant for me. A recent email from Lisa Romano really sums up the worst of the story, she said:

“If you are like most people, you've been pushed around by somebody who thought they had a right to control, manipulate, harass, devalue or minimize you. Perhaps this person was a parent, a sibling, a partner, a friend, or a boss you have known. Whatever your unique experience and circumstance, most likely having someone try to make you feel bad about yourself may have worked to some degree. 

Again, if you're like most people and you are not a raging narcissist, chances are when someone you knew pushed your buttons, for a moment you may have wondered if what this person was saying was true. If this person accused you of something you were not guilty of, or if they deliberately gaslit you, blameshifted, and messed with your head, there may have been a moment where you questioned your reality.”

Lisa is an expert on codependency and narcissistic abuse, so she is used to working with people who seem to attract experiences like this to the degree it’s a pattern in at least one their relationships; thus reinforcing a painful story.

She says “Many of us can get caught up trying to get an abusive person to admit what they've done, but it never works. All an abusive person will do is deny, pretend, and gaslight you even further...and if you don't quit trying to find resolution, an abusive person will discard you, or worse.”

This is precisely the sort of intensive personal growth bootcamp I have attracted into my life a few times, ultimately I believe to help me let go of the need for approval. And to allow others to have their own opinions – be what they may – without it taking up my whole time and attention.

Rebbeca Zung says that when she was dealing with two covert narcissists in her professional life, this is precisely how she felt. She says:

“It's a constant siege.  You're always feeling like you're under attack, always on the defensive, like you can never get ahead. They are always lining up the flying monkeys, not providing the documents they are supposed to, ignoring the court orders and getting away with it; lying, lying and more lying and everyone seems to be believing them.”

And now, on a more macro level, I find myself living in times where people are becoming more polarized. Those unvaccinated in New Zealand face a life of exclusion from the December third when the government begin a new system. A key part of this is the introduction of vaccine certificates which will be digitally recorded, stored and shared on a national system.

The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, when asked whether New Zealand would ever follow Austria's example of mandating the vaccination for everybody, was quoted in a national newspaper this week as saying " No. It is just not something we would do."

And yet, as part of the new vaccine certificate system, businesses are incentivized to deal only with vaccinated people in a very clear way. Businesses that choose to deal with unvaccinated people face restrictions in how they operate. Businesses will be also given verification apps to ensure that those people vaccinated have had both initial shots and 6 monthly booster shots in order to still qualify as “vaccinated”.

For those who haven’t got these, there will be access to groceries and emergency medical services, everything else will be either off the table or restricted depending on what alert level the country is in.

For example, the local swim school (at an outdoor pool) says people over the age of twelve must be double vaccinated and this, apparently, is across the board with all swim schools and teaching complexes in New Zealand. If the child is under the age of twelve and parents are not double vaccinated, then children must be dropped off and parents will not allowed to enter the premises.

A post I have previously mentioned came to mind again when I read this “Kind of weird I have to explain this, but taking things away from people until they agree to do what you say isn’t giving them a choice, it’s punishing them until they concede to your demands. Normally we would refer to this type of behaviour as manipulation and abuse”.

So on the macro level, choosing to remain unvaccinated at this stage may be the greatest challenge yet in integrating others’ opinions. Big story, feels painful right?

How do I change the story? In the context of the broader picture I understand there has to be division before there is unity, and all is well. In the words of Abraham Hicks “This isn’t about what you do or don’t do. You either line up with taking it and take it, or you line up with not taking it and don’t. Just don’t decide not to take it and push against – or decide to take it and push against – because it is the pushing against that takes your freedom and your wellbeing and your joy”

What feels right for me might change, at each decision point I’ll be leaning towards the path of least resistance. Each to their own without a need for assertion I say, some people are more afraid of the vaccine than the illness, others are the opposite, and others still are afraid of neither or both. Remember the old adage “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”.

While it’s healthy to consider others’ feelings and circumstances, it is not healthy to consider them above my own. I was always abandoning myself to satisfy others until I finally learned about healthy boundaries and some strategies around implementing them.

I heard a snippet from Teal Swan this week that was examining the word healing, because by saying that something needs healed is to make it wrong, and therefore creates resistance to it. The key, she said, was integration.

I think this is the key when it comes to others’ opinions too.

As I said in How to Reclaim Your Freedom Instead of Feeling Trapped the commonality in this issue is freedom, which I discerned by zooming out of the issues and looking at people’s differing fears and motivations and taking a broader view.

Despite the emotional entanglement of my approval seeking habit, one positive was that it also taught me to reconcile contrasting views. Conflicting viewpoints drive me to go wide and deep to reconcile what I am hearing but doesn't resonate. The point of commonality is what I’m always looking for, what is in within what is being said or felt that I (inner me) can agree with? It taught me that – on one level - I am not you and you are not me and yet – on another level - we are one.

This is about integration, a good strategy. I can hold that your opinion is valid and – at the same time – mine is also. In the past I have always known this, but in the words of a friend of mine, the gold for them this week is knowing they can have a different point of view to another and not need to change it (or what they are doing) in order to please someone else.

All of this though is much easier when my state of being is in a place of love rather than pain as Tony put it. In Learning to Surrender, Sarah Blondin says “The more we constrict, the more worry and burden we pick up along the way. The denser we become, the more we sink like rocks to the bottom of our river. We then ground ourselves in the turbulent waters rather than allowing ourselves to be carried to the cool, calm waters”.

The words I hear when I tune in from a more relaxed state are “Let go”, and imagining myself being carried along in a stream helps to let go of worry, let go of others’ expectations, let go of others’ opinions and let go of seeking others’ approval.

In order to honour what you believe, what can you change right now about the story, strategy or your state of being in order to care less about what others think?
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What If The Thing You Dread Is Actually Your Dreams Trying to Unfold?, When Life Is Uncertain It Feels Good to Take a Positive Step, Ask No One to Be Different So That You Can Feel Good, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? and Reclaim the Sweet Spot of Being in Your Element. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom this week, and out of interest I asked my (soon to turn teen) niece what her definition of freedom was. She responded “the feeling of relief and the feeling that nothing is holding you back in life”.

I couldn’t have defined it better if I had tried. I have heard others define it by conditions that need to exist, rather than as a feeling. But I have read accounts of people who have lived in the absolute worst of human conditions – such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps - who still felt freer than others who would appear to be privileged and yet feel trapped.

Freedom has come up for me both on a micro and macro level, with global restrictions in place and whole swathes of people becoming polarized against one another. And I am pondering this on both levels.

When someone asked me recently about some undesirable conditions I had lived with in my life, and why I had put up with them for so long, I responded that once I became aware of my situation I had made a choice and – while staying within it for a certain amount of time – had chosen to focus on the positive aspects.

Yet, as I wrote about a few years ago in Why Does She Stay? … and What Makes You So Different?  it can so often be the case that people are unaware that they have a choice. Lack of confidence, shame, a misplaced sense of duty - all some version of fear – and all have a familiar resonance with feelings from childhood.

For me these feelings drew more experiences that led me to wonder thoughts like “perhaps what I seek is a fantasy, perhaps this is just what life is”. I wrote at the time:

“She stays because she’s rooted in fear, what is known seems safer somehow that what is unknown. The same as why the other s(he) is violent to begin with, or why you stay in that job you hate, or stick with that diet you loathe, or with that person you don’t love, it’s all rooted in fear. Life will often present you with BIG things, like near misses, disease or death, because it knows you need dislodged to get out your comfort zone and show you that you can do it…

So you can wait for the slam dunk, or you can start to see the fear for what it is. It’s a thought. And thoughts can be changed. You just need to start reaching for better feeling thoughts”

It’s fear that takes our sense of freedom.

Over the course of my life, any time I became aware that I was entrenched in circumstances that really weren’t serving me, I usually moved on. But after decades of repeating the same experiences –the same theme with variations on the story and people – I finally started seeing patterns.

This led me to look in the mirror and start to wonder who I was showing up as that kept attracting these same sorts of themes. In turn this led to a juicy and oftentimes uncomfortable perpetual journey of self reflection, awareness and growth.

And so it is I find myself in 2021 with all aspects of my life in movement. Some feel good, some feel not so good, but only in the moment; I feel strongly it’s all okay in the now and it’s all headed in the right direction. Some of it is within my control, some of it isn’t. My reaction to my changing circumstances though is completely within my control.

I was listening to the words of Abraham Hicks this week, who was speaking on Government Control (well worth a listen for anyone currently feeling somewhat constrained at the moment) but it spoke equally to me on the topic of feeling trapped in any way:

“You think nothing comes if you don’t fight for it and we say it comes in spite of your fighting for it. All individuals have the power to feel good and to be free. But when you turn your power over to anybody and say that they need to do something different before you can feel better, you are in trouble because you cannot control them. No one has the ability to take your freedom from you, and no one does when you know that. And until you do, a 2-year old can entrap you.”

Strong words.

In another response to someone, who was deliberating whether to have a vaccine, Abraham Hicks said:

“We are not saying to you that you can give away your freedoms and like it, we are saying to you that you are giving away your freedoms in ways you don’t even know.

This isn’t about what you do or don’t do. You either line up with taking it and take it, or you line up with not taking it and don’t. Just don’t decide not to take it and push against – or decide to take it and push against – because it is the pushing against that takes your freedom and your wellbeing and your joy.

Every time you push against anything you give away freedom and alignment with who you are. But there is so much more evolution and expansion than the decision you are making.”

This pondering has led me to realise that, despite some obvious disagreements over the issues of the COVID19 vaccines, on both sides of that argument people are seeking freedom.

Some, who have always placed their faith in the medical systems and never experienced anything negative as a result – or may in fact feel they owe their physical wellbeing entirely to medical interventions – have had no issues taking the recommended course of action from their governments.

Others, who have had negative experiences of pharmaceuticals and/or the medical system, are understandably wary – or in some cases downright fearful – of the recommended course of action and mandates.

I personally feel the same way about my body as I do about my levels of conscious awareness of my thoughts in recent years, in that I am far more attuned and aware of what my body wants and needs than I was in the past. It does not sit at all well with me that anyone except me should think they are qualified to tell me what my body wants and needs.

Talking with a friend of mine in another country this week about the mandates here in New Zealand for teachers and healthcare works to have had their first jab by 15 November, or not be allowed to continue in their roles, I mentioned a post I had seen which said “Kind of weird I have to explain this, but taking things away from people until they agree to do what you say isn’t giving them a choice, it’s punishing them until they concede to your demands. Normally we would refer to this type of behaviour as manipulation and abuse”.

He was telling me that – after having had a bad reaction to a flu vaccination many years ago – he personally would rather take his chances with his immune system. However, given restrictions on travel and a close family member’s deteriorating health (nothing to do with the virus), he felt he needed to go get the vaccine so he was in a position to get on a plane at a moment’s notice.

Now, while this is far from ideal in terms of “conditions” relating to personal freedoms, it’s an excellent example of what Abraham Hicks is pointing to; and indeed what my niece said so eloquently.

When faced with a choice, choose the one that gives you the most relief.

And for each person, that will result in different choices. Honour that. Some people will choose to vaccinate over losing their job, some will choose to walk away from their job. Others will choose to abstain from seeing their loved ones, while others will choose to vaccinate in order to travel or be allowed in care homes and so on.

And remember the statement from the Abraham Hicks’ excerpt on Government control “When you turn your power over to anybody and say that they need to do something different before you can feel better, you are in trouble because you cannot control them”.

I think that's the essence of our experience here perhaps, to know ourselves in this oppression so that we can come into the fullest expressions of ourselves. It seems to me, there has never before been a time when so many are governed by so few, and the desire for freedom, be it personal, social, racial, gender identity, economic, health, education or whatever, there is a rising desire for freedom world over.

Esther Hicks said, “My only hope is that ‘what is’ becomes so evident to people that it fuels their desire for freedom”. Ultimately I believe I can and will achieve freedom from the micro and macro situations in my life that oftentimes constrain me, but I’m human, and it’s fair to say I spend more time dwelling on and dissecting ‘what is’ instead of focusing on ‘what I want’ to be.

And that is okay. Even in my resistance, my fighting, ultimately what is so desired will come in spite of my fighting it.

As I was swimming up the lane on my back yesterday I looked at the cobalt blue sky and shining sun beyond the mass of grey and white clouds drifting past. And as I watched the sky I saw it as a beautiful metaphor for this thing called freedom.

Freedom is the basis of life, it is always there like the cobalt blue sky and shining sun, regardless of what is blocking it from view. I can fight against the clouds, or the tilt of the earth, but ultimately they will continue on as they always have, my situation in relation to those is only temporary.

And so that is how I choose to see any obstruction to my freedom.

“Those who feel all powerful, who think they can control the outcome of your experience and others, don’t and can’t” is the final Abraham Hicks quote I’ll share. I choose to see those people or institutions like clouds in the sky. And, just as I do in my meditation each day with my thoughts, I take my attention from those clouds and let them drift on by.

In what ways do you feel your freedom being taken right now? Are there alternative ways of looking at the situation, perhaps as clouds in the sky, which feel better to you? And in what other thoughts or decisions are you able to find relief?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy When Life Is Uncertain It Feels Good to Take a Positive Step, Ask No One to Be Different So That You Can Feel Good, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? and Reclaim the Sweet Spot of Being in Your Element. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Over the course of my life I noticed I had developed a habit of second guessing myself, I was also constantly ruminating over past conversations and trying to get ahead of any future conflict, as well as feeling like I had brain fog a lot of the time.

In short, I had allowed the essence of who I am to be slowly overshadowed because my attention was always way more focused on pleasing others and what other people thought of who I am.
I was doing an inner healing process this week that involved imagining taking out any hooks that people have into me. The hooks represent other people’s expectations, responsibilities laid at my door that were never my responsibilities to take.

The process starts with imagining one parent and then the other, giving back everything that is theirs, knowing they too don’t need to carry responsibilities that are not their own, they can give back whatever is not theirs too, and so on down through the generations like a ripple effect.

Then I imagined doing it with other people in my life, going back through those who put expectations and responsibilities on my shoulders that belonged to them, not me. Once I started this process is was very easy to feel from the weight of the memory just who had hooks in me and who didn’t.

While this sounds quite abstract, some tangible examples of how these hooks show up are: being constantly questioned in a disdainful tone on my expenditure while the questioner is off spending with little accountability; or having how I spend my time frequently remarked upon scornfully by someone who does as they please; or having my contribution continually belittled and dismissed by someone who is quick to build themselves up.

As I have started to see this more objectively, there is a grief within me that I have allowed others to treat me this way over the years. It’s not as though I was entirely submissive and allowed these sorts of things to go unchallenged, but more the feeling inside of wanting to be seen, to be recognised and accepted for the person that I am.

The sorts of adaptations I made in my life, to gain the love and approval of those who I was dependent on, were: becoming a perfectionist, anticipating others’ needs, and taking on too much of other people’s responsibilities to name a few.

But, as Terri Cole says, there is a fine line between being loving and generous versus giving/doing from a place of need to feel valued, recognised or loved. Over the years that approval seeking behaviour has caused me to align with others who are more narcissistic and demand approval, control and compliance. It’s like a subconscious do-over, repeating patterns from childhood in the hope of a different outcome.

Lisa Romano states this false premise well when talking about her own experiences:

“As an adult, this pattern remained active. I continued to automatically operate on the premise that in order to feel good enough, someone out there had to say so. My saviour was out there somewhere and – one day – if I could finally figure out how to change myself enough, I would feel good enough.”

Of course this can go on throughout life without any conscious awareness. But in my case I have become aware, acutely aware, and have been determined to take back my own power.

When I was picturing myself as a young child, I realised that this need to change myself in order to feel good enough was driven by that younger version of me; it was my child-self’s survival mechanism. Yet, if that were one of my own children I would be telling them, finding ways to show them, that they were born good enough, there’s nothing they need to say, do or be in order for them to receive my love.

Having kids has been a revelation of personal insights and growth. That they need not say, do or be anything different than who they are has been like a driving force in how I approach my role as a mother. I even have a sign on our wall saying “Simply Be Who You Are”. But I also know the many times in each day that I sail dangerously close to waters that speak the language of “in order for you to be accepted in this family/school/relationship you must do this”.

I have (and continue to) examine all my expectations of my kids, the expectations others have of them, and how these are conveyed, all through the lenses of “does this allow them to be who they are without causing harm to others”.  Even that, I know, is a restraining step beyond “simply being who you are”. What does harm look like?

Am I going to stand by and let one of my kids take a long turn on something I can see the other child is desperate to play with? Is that causing the other child harm? Frankly no, it’s teaching them boundaries and patience, but I had certainly been wired to share regardless of whether or not I had finished.

Am I going to stand by if one of my kids starts hitting the other? Or manipulating the other? No, physical, psychological and emotional abuse all cross the line and need me to step in and help them navigate.

Am I great at doing all these things on a consistent basis? Pretty good, and I’m getting better and better all the time. I put in conscious effort to turn the tide from my default responses. When the kids first started expressing themselves in ways that triggered me (and it’s fair to say that happened from the get-go, with nightly screaming from 7-11pm daily for months with my first child for no obvious reason) it was more than a little wearing.

Why make all this effort for my own kids and neglect that child within me? It didn’t make sense. And, besides, I realised it’s not just about who I am being towards my children, it’s about who I am being when I am around my children. For example, if I pass off controlling behaviour from other people towards me as normal in their presence, what silent messages are they taking in?

So defining my own boundaries and learning how to hold them with grace has been top of my agenda as they have grown, both with them and others around me. And by doing that, and learning that I am enough already, I don’t need to prove myself on that front, I am also honouring that younger me as the grown adult who can now take a different, healthier stance.

I also realise that there is nothing to fear except fear itself. My survival no longer depends on those around me. I am an adult who can choose a new mindset, a less encumbered mindset without the hooks of others.

If you are someone who second guesses themselves all the time, constantly feel like you have brain fog and ruminate over past conversations and try to get ahead of any future issues, perhaps it’s time to take a good hard look at who has what hooks in you? Remember, you were born good enough, be fearless, and let no one cast shadow on your light.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Embrace Your Authentic Self, Shed the Toxic People in Your Life, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Empower Yourself - When a Difficult Reaction Sends You Into a Tailspin, Are You Overly Responsible? Actually Seeing Yourself Through Fresh Eyes, and Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I’ve always believed in the inherent goodness of people and, although I learned about different personality types and behavioural styles in my early adulthood, I always assumed people were generally fair minded and want to do the right thing by others.

I knew there were exceptions of course, when I studied psychology we learned about mental illnesses and behavioural disorders and I sort of assigned any mal-intent to that minority. Many years ago when I heard someone say “People don’t do things to you, they do things for themselves” it rang true.

As a result, when I’ve been hurt I have tried not to take it too personally, choosing instead to seek to understand what pain might be driving that poor behaviour, and excused too much of it as a result. In close relationships I would see a person’s true potential, believe I could help them reach it, and want to help fix the problems.

The issue with that is it assumes that person can also see just how encumbered they are with unhelpful beliefs (that drive some gnarly behavioural patterns causing problems in their life), and wants to embark on a journey to reach their potential. Frankly, who needs that uninvited though? It’s like saying “you are not good enough as you are”.

I’ve learned that kind of journey needs to be entirely self motivated. It’s not my business to try to help anyone who hasn’t asked for help. But, I also don’t need to put up with poor behaviours just because I might understand where they are driven from. And, believe me, I’ve put up with a lot of poor behaviours from others in my life.

I clearly had my own journey to go on and my focus shifted years ago from blaming others and circumstances for any unhappiness, to looking within to my beliefs, behaviours and what I’m allowing from others.

This week I have been listening to a series of experts being interviewed on the topic of toxic relationships, a term I haven’t particularly thought much about until this point. But it’s added another layer of realisation in terms of how I allow others to treat me.

Therapist Briana MacWilliam explains that a toxic relationship is one where “a person discounts the other person as autonomous from themselves and treats them as poorly as they treat themselves on the inside”. She goes on to explain this can mean dismissing someone’s feelings and degrading their character – the key being that it is a pattern of behaviour not just a one-off.

When she talked about different forms of relationship attachment styles, the one she described as an “anxious attachment” (or an open heart) rang true for the me I was before I started my inner work:

• I have been accustomed to a lack of love in my romantic relationships and fallen into people-pleasing mode.
• I have tended to give too much, and wait around too long for the reciprocation of loving feelings.
• I have taken on more than the Lion's Share of the responsibility, guilt, and blame in any relationship because I think if I am responsible for something going wrong, it must be within my power to fix it.
• I have had low self-esteem and struggled with feelings of unworthiness.
• Deep down, I have believed I have to earn love and approval and so have been drawn to partners that are “challenging” or “edgy,” that make me work for it.
• By being over-helpful, I have perhaps subconsciously tried to make myself indispensable to partners, the underlying invisible premise being “If they need me, they won’t leave me”. But this is a double edged sword; working so hard, I then question whether or not they really love me for me…(and struggled with knowing who the “real” me was too).
•  I have tended to get lost in the potential of the relationship, rather than the reality of it.

• But the hardest thing is I’ve usually attracted others with insecure attachment styles, who don’t appreciate me and take my generosity for granted.

Many of the discussions in the conference centred on narcissistic behaviours, certainly one I’ve had the misfortune of encountering a number of times. I used to hear the term narcissist and think of it rather like a cliché, but as I have lived through various toxic relationships I’ve begun to recognise just how common this is – and how ill equipped I was to recognise and deal with narcissistic behaviours.

Dr Les Carter is quick to point out narcissistic behaviours can be plotted on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum there is healthy narcissism, a positive sense of self that is in alignment with the greater good. At the other end of the spectrum there is more destructive narcissism characterised by a consistent pattern of grandiose attitudes and behaviours.

As Dr Carter mentions, it is perfectly normal for people to display thoughtless, selfish behaviour once in a while, it’s the recurring pattern of that behaviour that causes toxic relationships. If someone acts that way, say, twenty percent of the time, that’s obviously quite different from someone who acts that way eighty percent of the time.

He says “Narcissists bring out the worst in us, wearing you down over time. Their desire to be in control puts you in the inferior position and you’re on the receiving end of a lot of criticism, gas lighting (denial, lies, smoke and mirrors), second guessing and –over time – a building sense of frustration, tension and confusion”.

He goes on to explain “You want collaboration in a relationship, they see it as a competition to stay superior. They need to be admired; other people are their potential supply to build up their fragile egos. They whittle away at your dignity, your reasoning and mock your emotions. They want to eliminate your free will.”

Now all this kind of talk sounded much too fantastical to me because it elicits a picture in my head of a person sitting in a room strategising all the ways in which they could consciously entrap me. Whereas in reality I’ve found it’s more a set of subconscious behaviours driven by deep insecurities and shame. And people with these behavioural patterns are not interested in anything but their own truth.

I can see the wasted hours and energy I have spent trying to get other people (who seem bound and determined to dismiss, demean and belittle me) to try to see my perspective. When Dr Carter said “Don’t even attempt to make them think differently, there is only one opinion that matters and it isn’t yours” I realised just how true that is. 

Other tell-tale signs Dr Carter cited that I recognise from experience:

• No empathy – narcissists don’t identify with the feelings or emotions of others, so they don’t care who they hurt to get what they need
• A sense of entitlement – narcissists and other toxic personalities have a sense of entitlement when it comes to their needs always coming first
• Walking on eggshells –erratic behaviours and responses; not knowing from day to day what their mood will be or what you will need to do to appease them.

Then Lisa Romano talked about another common red flag, a pattern of someone getting enraged when you try to raise an issue with them in a civil manner. I have experienced this frequently; there is simply no space for considering another’s opinion, whereas in a healthy relationship there is give and take and mutual respect.

I first came across Lisa last year when I read her story in The Road Back to Me and My Road Beyond the Codependent Divorce. Her story is very compelling as it charts her childhood experiences through to her adult relationships, where cause and effect can clearly be seen.

Circling back to Briana MacWilliam’s definition of a toxic relationship, about treating others “as poorly as they treat themselves on the inside”, Lisa’s story demonstrates exactly how the way a person treats themselves on the inside comes about in those early childhood and adolescent years.

When I read Lisa’s story, I felt grateful I hadn’t had her experiences. Yet when I reflected on my own childhood experiences, I realised that other people heard my story and thought in the same terms (grateful they hadn’t led my life).

My experiences have led me to some very unhealthy entanglements as an adult. I have been in at least two so-called romantic relationships like this, and also had a toxic relationship with a work colleague which fell into this category.

I am realizing that I kept making the same mistakes over and over, excusing poor behaviour towards myself and to others, trying to get them to see me, trying to get them to acknowledge my intentions and contributions, trying to get them to accept that I am entitled to an opinion that differs from theirs and trying to even just get them to care.

Because I could see those people so clearly, I wanted them to see me. But now I know they were not capable (without awareness and desire to change) of seeing me as anything other than a source to feed their own fragile ego.

While there has been a silver lining in my relationships with people who display these toxic characteristics, I often tried to stick with them in the hope they would see the light and change and finally give me the respect and/or love I deserved to feel (or at least respect my right to my own opinions). Meanwhile my own confidence and self esteem would get eroded and I would begin to question my own validity.

The silver lining for me is the intensity to which I’ve experienced these things was what prodded me into taking my own journey to self healing. Here are the things I’ve learned I needed to do to detoxify and rebuild my sense of self worth and self esteem:

1. Self Care – Michelle Farris said “if someone is not ready to leave a toxic relationship, at least try to get them to focus on self care. A good night’s sleep, exercise, seeing friends and having fun”. There are many aspects of self care that I have had to stand up for in toxic relationships, even though it makes me feel like a twisted car wreck inside. It sounds ridiculous to some people to have arguments about spending an extra $4 on a free range chicken as opposed to a factory farmed one, or taking care of my body by seeing a health practitioner, or receiving bitter complaints about friends or family members visiting (and making the atmosphere more than a little awkward when they do). And while experiencing intensive disdain towards my healthy choices, I have been more than accommodating of their choices that I would personally consider unhealthy and damaging. The respect went one way, but I saw that hypocrisy for what it was and stood determined to take care of myself despite the emotional backlash that ensued.
2. Healthy Boundaries – If, like me until a year or so ago, you don’t even really know what this term means, that is a big red flag to go check it out. There were a lot of speakers at the conference talking on this topic, but I personally got a lot of out of Terri Cole’s book Boundary Boss. All three of these points interlink, and I have become much more adept at self care by learning better boundaries and by learning to become less reactive.
3. Become Non-Reactive – As Dr Carter said, the behaviour of toxic people is wearing and it leads to a lot of anger and resentment among other strong emotions. Plus there is that persistent desire to try to convince someone who is being toxic towards me that I deserve fairness, that I am a good person and so on. He recommends “no pleading, no coaxing and no convincing, it’s going into their territory, this person is not interested in anything but their own truth”. Instead he recommends taking a stance of “I understand our opinions differ, none the less that s what I am going to do anyway” Lisa Romano pointed out that “you can’t have something different until l you do something different”. As I said, I had a lot of experience of trying to convince others of my good intentions and trying to get them to see my viewpoint. An old colleague took exception to me and would regularly challenge and belittle my opinions in meetings, and just as regularly I would take her aside for a discussion afterwards. We would get locked in conversations for hours and it became utterly exhausting. In hindsight I can see how fruitless that was, my attention and energy would have benefitted by being directed elsewhere and dealing with her in a more direct way.

​And the absolute worst thing about toxic relationships I’ve found is they are hard to recognise when in them. It’s so confusing because the other person is always deflecting blame.

But it’s simple really, with that person do you mostly feel good or bad, love or fear (p.s. I would never admit to being afraid, but my body said otherwise with my nervous system on constant high alert and my tummy constantly churning)? You deserve respectful communication, to feel seen and heard, to have give/take. You can forgive one-off transgressions but not a pattern. Go detoxify, you deserve it.
​
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, Empower Yourself - When a Difficult Reaction Sends You Into a Tailspin, Are You Overly Responsible? Actually Seeing Yourself Through Fresh Eyes, Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You 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.

This is the story of my childhood and the inadvertent trauma I experienced that wove its way into the fabric of who I became in ways that were not always helpful - as published on TinyBuddha.com. Click here to read 

Every now and then I hear something that feels like a fundamental truth about how life works. When I hear it, there is an internal shift, a feeling that something has just clicked into place.

One of the most pivotal things I’ve heard in my life, were these words:

“YOU are the only one who creates your reality. If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you could feel good. You would free yourself of the cumbersome impossibility of needing to control people and circumstances.”

Cumbersome impossibility, those words felt richly mined from the depths of my experiences. At the time I heard them, back in 2006, I was reflecting on every relationship with every person I had ever had to that point. I could see the countless times I had not just tried to persuade people to my way of thinking on any number of things, but literally believing my way was the right way.

And over the years that followed I observed it both within myself and among others. Those words have remained with me like a rod that will not be broken, pointing to a true north it cannot deny. Over the years I have slowly broken old habits and softened my stances and now generally stand in an attitude of live and let live much more of the time.

There are a collection of those kinds of beliefs within me, some that are harder to articulate because I haven’t yet perhaps taken them out into the light, dusted them off and been awed with how they shimmer and gleam. But one I have always felt within me as a truth is “Everything works out for the greater good”.

I mean this in a broader, collective sense. Words that speak to this, and come to mind, were written in one of Belinda Alexandra’s novels, reflected by one of the main characters:

“All honourable causes eventually succeed even if at first they fail. The spirits of good people – even if they die in defeat, return in future generations to continue moving the human race forwards to higher and better things.”

The same character also reflected that “Out of darkness and suffering can come hope, joy and progress”.

I was asking my almost-teen niece this week what she thinks the most important thing is right now for people in the world to consider.

She mentioned both that COVID19 isn’t yet gone and, separately, how she is seeing anger getting played out in ways that aren’t getting the attention needed to resolve the issues. One of the examples she gave was a 13-year old who was stabbed by a so called friend, and she was trying to fathom how a 13-year old had enough anger that he could actually kill his classmate.

I could relate to this as I can recall being shocked when two boys at my own school got into a fight and one stabbed the other. As I’ve learned more about childhood trauma I’ve learned that anger is an emotional reaction that occurs when boundaries have been overstepped. And often that anger gets misdirected at someone whose actions were simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I have often wondered, looking back on that fight at my school, what sort of emotional or otherwise abuse was going on at home for both the kids involved.

I agree with my niece that waking up to that is important in our society. Becoming consciously aware of the narratives in my head, and what narratives I’m passing onto my kids either intentionally or unintentionally, has been life transforming for me as I explained in Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity.

But I feel this lack of general awareness and intentionality is actually tied to the other issue my niece mentioned, that COVID19 hasn’t gone away. How many kids around the world right now are hearing a narrative in their homes about COVID19, its effects and government restrictions? And what sort of impact is it having on them I wonder? Are these narratives ones that are making them feel empowered or disempowered? Fearful or safe? Angry or apathetic?

The arguments appear to becoming more polarised and fear driven. In particular the central, single most damaging theme – in my opinion – is a narrative that says “my safety and freedom depends on your actions”.

These are the very antithesis of those words I heard back in 2006, that feel to me like a fundamental truth:

“YOU are the only one who creates your reality. If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you could feel good. You would free yourself of the cumbersome impossibility of needing to control people and circumstances.”

I can’t help compare that with political statements and media campaigns I’m seeing at this time in our society. Trying to persuade people that one way is right and another wrong is what has started every human conflict on the face of the planet.

Going back to that same novel of Belinda Alexandra’s, which was set in the era of the Second World War, the character reflected further:

“While most had not wanted war, they had chosen a path of greed and pride and the result had been war. For where else does violence begin but within each individual human heart? It started with violence of thought and action, jealousy of others and loathing of oneself.

It had its beginning in the daily choices one made. Including indifference to others’ suffering and oppression. From there it escalated into a collective competitiveness, selfishness, pettiness, spite and greed. Violence of even the seemingly innocuous kind begets more violence. That was the origin of war.”

While I can readily sense the violence of the 13-year old my niece mentioned, I can sense it just as much in trying to force people to do something they don’t want to. And I mean this in both senses when it comes to choosing a course of action for each individual.

I have seen those who have chosen to accept a vaccine come under as much pressure from well-intentioned family members as those who don’t. “My safety and freedom depends on your actions” is the narrative I am hearing from our government. I am seeing anything that speaks against this narrative – or which even questions it – being torn to shreds, censored and outright vilified.

But what about having the freedom of choice I wonder? Of having sovereignty over my own body? Has that been lost in the fog? Have people been beaten down by the endless lockdowns and loss of other freedoms? The lack of connection with loved ones?

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said “No price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself”.
And what is the price in this case I wonder? These issues are not going away.

Final reflections from the character in Belinda’s novel might add some insight into my own way forward as I navigate these times:

“Peace on a worldwide scale is determined by each of us creating peace in our own hearts and minds first, and doing our best to live in harmony with people and other living creatures around us. When we can do that, I believe we will become a force powerful enough to create positive change on a scale never before conceived.”

I believe this too. But it was so much easier in easier times. Now is among the worst of times, and it may get even worse before it gets better.

The most important task for me has been creating peace in my own heart and mind. And to stick to what I felt true, and still do - to ask no one to be different (or do differently) so that I can feel good. I didn’t feel it as a fundamental truth and now think “ah yes, well COVID19 will be the exception”. No, what is happening right now is not the exception; it’s simply an extreme circumstance to which the same truth applies.

“Live and let live” isn’t something I aspired to in the best of times and am now going to ditch. The privilege of owning myself is one that is not always comfortable. The external world can force itself physically, but it cannot change my mind, my beliefs or my values – and the more force it applies the more it exposes its true nature.

Going back to what I said in Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race, the current world view – Materialism – is based on physical objects as the stuff of creation and yet reality remains inexplicable.

In that article I shared that Deepak Chopra cites our most urgent problems as overpopulation, pandemic disease, refugeeism and climate change and says “you may hope and pray that science and technology (which have been the most urgent things in the age of materialism) will come to the rescue, but the chances are tenuous without a huge change in how we think”. All of this leads him to conclude that the change necessary is a change in self awareness.

I also recall a talk by Eckhart Tolle talking frankly about the human need to be right, and the shift in self awareness required to see our thoughts as nothing more than subjective opinions.  And what has been thought of collectively as “good and true” among us simply marks a point in time.

Remember the widespread belief that all computers and electronics would crash as the clock struck midnight heralding the year 2000? I was even paid to do training with companies to protect them against the so-called Millennium Bug. Remember the panic in the 1970’s that oil was going to run out within 30 years? And the panic was purely consumer driven; there was zero thought about what we were doing to the eco-system. Remember the belief that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling nuclear weapons which launched a war killing tens of thousands of people?

This list could go on and on and without even including the vastly differing beliefs of people in societies depending on who is in rule and which dogmas are in place at the time, and without even pointing to some of the fundamental shifts in beliefs that civil rights movements have driven. It is inconceivable to many people now that humans were thought of as unequal just because of their gender or race, and yet that oppression existed and stay plays out today in many ways seen and unseen.

Therefore challenging and compelling people to change their beliefs or their actions does to me feel like a cumbersome impossibility. What if, instead, I just trust my own inner knowing about what is best for me? And trust that others can do the same for themselves? And to trust in the overall direction of life, that the human race is – even if in a snake-and-ladder type fashion at any point in time – moving forwards to higher and better things.

Are you able to ask no one to be different, or take different action, at this time so that you can feel good? What would it take for you to create peace in your own heart and mind right now? Which narratives would feel more empowering?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do YOUR Research! Strengthen Your Character to Stop Getting Triggered by Wild Beliefs, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them, Empower Yourself - When a Difficult Reaction Sends You Into a Tailspin and Make the Invisible Visible - Celebrate the Gold in Your Emotional Reactions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Knowing I’ve been going through a separation, I was asked whether I feel lonely which caused me to stop and think. My immediate reaction was “Not any more than I did before”. Sure, there are times I feel lonely, this is a natural by product of letting go of the old, there’s a space that opens up for the new, without that space the new cannot arise.

The very definition of being lonely though is about feeling disconnected. I can be alone or I can be surrounded by other people and still feel lonely. Conversely I can be on my own or with others and feel connected, content, alive, or maybe even joyful.

When I feel lonely, it’s a strong indicator to me that there is something within me – usually thoughts that have been subconsciously circling around – not serving me well. As I was talking to a good friend of mine I realised this is one of the biggest shifts in awareness I’ve long since made in my life. There was a time when I would have looked outside of myself to fill the emptiness within.

In fact there was a pivotal moment, almost two decades ago now, when a partner of mine decided he was going to commit to a new hobby, which meant I would be alone in the house every Sunday night. I literally couldn’t stand the feelings it evoked within me, I felt totally abandoned. Having said goodbye at the front door that first evening, I turned around, closed it, slid to the floor and sat there and sobbed for a good half hour.

I also felt a good deal of self loathing for feeling so needy. It was at that point in my life I started to face the pain that being alone meant I could no longer ignore. Sure, I could have watched more TV, socialised with girlfriends or taken up a hobby of my own, but I didn’t feel drawn to any of those options; I just felt a heavy grey cloud within me.

Most of the time I was too busy working or giving my attention to the person I lived with, or my family, to pay any heed to the nondescript heavy weight inside that was stopping me from fully connecting with life. “Maybe it’s time to face it” I thought.

That is the point in my life I started doing emotional journey work. A friend of mine introduced me to a process developed by Brandon Bays, and I used it to bring some awareness to what was going on inside me. It was the beginning of the journey to me, as I started to unravel this identity called Shona, and uncover the layers that defined it: including feelings about a lack of self worth, a sense of not belonging, about not being important, and the source of those feelings.

It wasn’t a one hit wonder, it was a moment in time where I started the journey and began to look forward to my Sunday night solitude. This led to me making big changes in my life, and moving to the other side of the world.

As I described in Are the Most Loving, Courageous and Compassionate Parts of You in the Driving Seat? I still wasn’t clear on what my role in life was at that point, though I felt strongly there was one, and I entered another phase of life in which I had little solitude for a number of years.

Then in 2014, struggling with the duality of motherhood and career responsibilities, I took my exit from the corporate world with a fierce determination to continue this inner journey I had begun the decade before. Motherhood has been an invitation to strip away those layers of unhelpful beliefs like no other.

I sort of picture this a bit like having been wrapped in layers and layers of soft gauze over the years and then the kids come along, with all their big untamed energy and self-centred desires, and start tearing the gauze to shreds.

Each time this happens I have a choice:

• I can use dominance and control to defend and reinforce my comfy gauze/beliefs (and thus further entrench myself and them in a world where others needs are more important, and I feel obligated to certain things even though I would rather poke out my eyes with a pin); this has been the norm for generations
• Or I can look at the raw wound and start to heal it; which also means learning new skills in managing my reactions, developing healthy boundaries and communicating those in a peaceful, honest and direct way (thus teaching the children healthier choices by example).

I have chosen the latter. But what does this have do with living my passion? Never has this been so clear to me than hearing these questions posed by Janet Attwood, author of The Passion Test:

• How clear are you on your top 5 passions in life?
• Do you make decisions based on what will help you live those passions most fully?
• Do you spend your days doing things you love surrounded by people you love?

What I realised in undertaking the journey to me, is I have a real passion for authenticity. So I set about defining my top five passions:

1. Being the full authentic expression of myself; and helping others discover their own unique authentic expression
2. Being with my children in full authentic connection and being a space in which they can express their authentic selves
3. Recognising the body as a litmus test of how close or how far to that authentic expression I am  and the patterns, illness and disease that show up within it when I’m not
4. Creating structures in society that thrive on and enhance people being their full authentic expressions of themselves
5. The inherent connection I have to all of life, and the idea of thriving on that and enhancing others and things because of that connection.

Janet’s observations nailed it “You have been torn between the desire to follow your heart and your beliefs about what you think you have to do. You may have felt you can’t do what you love because you have responsibilities, or others who need your help, or because you need money. They are all beliefs that keep you separated from joy and fulfillment”.

Something else I heard Tony Robbins speak about recently then came to mind, about immersing myself in things and around people who are aligned with my own aspirations. I began to see that while I’ve been living my first three passions to a large extent for a few years now, there is a huge opportunity gap to make decisions going forwards that align with all of those passions and to seek out more people who feel the same way.

I recognise that if I make decisions that allow me to live my passions most fully, then feeling lonely would be nothing more than a memory.

As Janet Atwood puts it “When you do what is best for you, you’re simultaneously doing what is best for others. When you clarify the things that mean the most to you in your life, and then make choices based on what will allow you to align your life with those things, then you will not only enjoy your life more, but others will also enjoy being around you”.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change the World One Day at a Time, Put Money in its Place, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)?, Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, and Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

With all the parenting advice I’ve read and heard, which has a wealth of information about understanding the different developments stages and what is needed at each, and how to manage my kids undesirable behaviour, there seems to be one huge piece missing and that is about how to manage myself.

No one forewarned me that, as Lisa Marchiano puts it “You’re going to project your stuff on your kids. There is no way that you are going to get through any amount of time with your children and not meet those parts of yourself you cut off and sent backstage (the aspects of yourself that are unconscious but we see in others, our blind spots)”. It just brings up so much discomfort and pain.

The inherited patterns of behaviour in parents that children react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to, are essential for survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life; and will certainly get passed on unless the cycle is broken.

The best description I’ve seen of these is in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, he describes four archetypes (on a scale of aggressive to passive) that are “control strategies we each develop in order to stop others’ draining our energy”. I summarised these more in Normal Is Dysfunctional - That Is the Growth Opportunity.

The thing is, normal developmental trauma arises from normal parenting and remains largely unseen precisely because it is deemed normal. Yet it creates power struggles and destruction; it creates disease, chronic pain and illness; and it stunts individual and collective abilities to address systemic issues within relationships and society.

That is the ultimate challenge of parenthood, the ultimate responsibility, to recognise and break the cycles of dysfunction that are still very much alive.

Amy McCready of Positive Parenting Solutions says “Children have two major needs: attention and power. And if they are not getting positive attention and positive opportunities to make their own choices they will settle for negative attention and ways to gain a feeling of personal power”.

Not only that, the lack of positive attention or opportunity to express personal needs and desires is precisely what leads to the kind of dysfunction that is prevalent in society today.

Yet we live in a society of distraction – parents distracted by devices and responsibilities. Not to mention the pass-the-parcel of before/after school care, split families/housing.  Men and women, whether parents or not, really struggle in relationships today with break ups rates higher than ever before. Where in all of that, I wonder, are we allowing for and compelling attention on our kids’ development?

Relationship expert Terry Real says that the traditional walls for men and women in a patriarchal culture are changing, but are far from changed – and those traditional walls preclude intimacy.  As Raine Eisler said “It’s an old fashioned word, but patriarchy really means dominion (power over) instead of power with.”

I was sent one of Constance Hall’s blog post’s this week that demonstrates how patriarchy is still very active and it really resonated for me. Her main point was that every consenting partnership should consist of two adults whose working hours are equal regardless of whether they are paid or unpaid work.

The original has a sort of angry rant feel to it, yet she makes some really good points, so here is a version with the emotional charge toned down a bit:

“The thing about not doing your share of house work or child rearing is that is more insidious than a simple “I can’t be bothered”; domestic responsibilities do not disappear.

Children do not raise themselves. Housework doesn’t do itself.
 
Every time you sit on the toilet, eat food from a clean plate, watch on with pride while your fed, educated children smile, it’s because someone has put in effort for you to receive that privilege. And if it wasn’t you, it was someone doing your share.

Remember that expecting someone else to do your workload is oppressive. It’s saying “you can have equal rights only when you’ve met the basic needs of others”.

Support each other because domestic duties are about so much more than clean sheets, it’s about respect and showing your kids what is and what isn’t a healthy way to care for themselves.”

I think that is a great message, but there is another side to it, which is the person who allows that to happen. I know because I am one of those people who has too often taken more than my fair share of responsibility and felt overwhelmed and overburdened and then resented the heck out of it.

This represents a typical narcissistic/codependent relationship, which is also typical of the type of normal dysfunction I refer to earlier in the piece. Trauma expert Pete Walker describes this as the most common relational hybrid. Terry Real describes the same blueprint as grandiosity versus inferiority/shame-based and is the most prevalent pattern he sees in relationships also.

“While women can show up as narcissistic”, he says “it is more common for men to be this way”.

Terry’s view is that we don’t value relational skills in a patriarchal culture. He goes on to say “We code relationship as feminine and we do to intimacy what we do to many things feminine: we idealise it in principle and we devalue it in fact”.

I know this reality well. Having worked since I was fifteen, first through school and university and then in a corporate career, I know what working long hours and having high levels of responsibility looks like.  What I didn’t know was what motherhood looked like.

At first I saw my corporate career as a welcome temporary escape from the monotony of those early childrearing years, but then it became clear that regardless of how I felt (which with a baby and toddler was starting to look more like burnout), my children needed me at home.

There was a piece I wrote describing a typical night after getting home from work, and one day I will publish it, because it heralded the start of this journey to me, but for now I’ll just share my concluding thoughts that night:

I know it’s too much. I know my child is telling me this. Yes, as exhausted as I am, as distracted by work, the long arduous and unfulfilling hours of work, it’s time. Time to uncover what the heart and soul desire, for all of us.

Six months on from that I published my first blog and have done so ever week since, recording the deliberate journey to a more authentic me, which included balking and rallying against this idea of my own feminine nature and role as a mother.

I was raised in an era where I was brought up to believe that women can do anything men do. But as a friend of mine said beautifully “that overlooks the essence of the feminine, the need to find her own rhythm and inner desires in her own time and in her own reflection”.

We had been having a discussion about the government’s financial support for parents with low income. I find it infuriating that - on one hand - our law (through Property Relationship law) recognizes that a stay-at-home parent is equal to a full time job, yet the government will not support a stay at home parent of school age kids unless they are at least in part time work.

When I recently tracked how many hours of my week are dedicated to childcare and domestic duties, it was seventy hours on a typical school week and ninety on a non school week. Bear in mind school weeks typically only represent 180 days (allowing for ten days where at least one child is sick), how many employers are happy with employees only working half the year?

Recognising that encouragement of women into the workforce was an attempt to stop the judgements of not only solo mothers but women in jobs, it was however done in the context of patriarchal structures.

Quite aside of keeping the toilets clean and putting food on the table, the job as taxi driver, chief attention giver, boundary holder and referee, the role and responsibility of a parent can be all consuming.

One night when my kids’ father and I were talking, our youngest daughter came into the room and asked for my help with something. I thought then that this is precisely what being a mum looks like, constantly being interrupted and on duty. And those interruptions can range from an innocuous “how do I spell...?” through to world-war-three erupting in the lounge.

In fact, I find distraction my biggest challenge in parenting. If I am distracted, there is no connection, and the constant pull on my attention triggers responses that are less than optimal for my kids.

As the primary caregiver, my attention being on the kids is just a part of the job when they are around, from the minute they wake up to the minute they go to sleep. Adapting that attention as they grow to help them towards independence is also part of the job, but that’s on a continuum; in development terms though kids are in their teens before they can healthily handle longer periods of more independence.

So while going to work as soon as kids are in school is encouraged, to me it’s not okay to be required to work on top of the typical seventy hours of attention required on the home and kids in order to receive financial help. 

Before the world of COVID19 restrictions we had been on a family holiday in Hawaii. In conversation with the retail assistants, hotel staff and restaurant workers, it became clear that working two jobs to support their families was necessary, and this was women who had partners who also worked.

What kind of quality parenting can people give in these scenarios?

Terry Real is quick to point out that both men and women are knocked out of real intimacy and connection with themselves and others from childhood. Citing the work of Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan at the Stone Centre, he says:

• “Young women are knocked out of real, honest connection at the edge of womanhood. They stop telling the truth and instead they move into – as Carol Gilligan puts it - “the tyranny of the nice and kind”; they lose their voice. It’s changing but it still needs a lot of work”. And
• “Boys are knocked out of authentic connection much younger, by the time they enter kindergarten they’ve already internalised the code to be invulnerable. What research tells us is they are no less emotional or sensitive than girls at that age but they’re less expressive. They’ve learned to keep their mouths shut, to wall it off”.

The problem is, as author, research professor and social expert Brené Brown has taught us, we connect through vulnerability. Terry believes that “While Millennial’s (thankfully) are different, the rest of us are still suffering under the old codes. Leading men and women into real intimacy is synonymous with leading men out of patriarchy.”

In Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race I quote Teal Swan as saying “The restoration of balance within the human race is not about decreasing masculine power while increasing feminine power...it is about both rising to power simultaneously”.

I particularly like the short article from psychologist Shari Derkson that explains the aspects of masculine and feminine and what integrating them within ourselves might look like.

She says “There is a movement towards inviting more feminine aspects into our lives, states of being, rather than doing; such as through stillness, meditation and tapping into our intuition and creative processes. Equally, it is important for both male and females to develop the more masculine qualities of rational and logical ability, clear non-attached thought and problem solving etc.”

James French, who works with rescue animals and cultivated The Trust Technique, demonstrates through his work how lack of connection in humans (and propensity towards dominion or power over instead of power with) shows up just the same in animals as it does in children.  

James says "Any animal displaying fear, aggression, anxiety etc is a sign of an over-thinking state, but when brought into a peaceful state you can connect through more positive imagining/feeling states instead”.  

What I love is his observation that sensitivity in animals or people doesn’t change, it just transforms from positive sensitivity (the feelings of connection, joy, love) to negative sensitivity (the feelings of fear, shame, guilt). This could equally be applied to children.

“As a child”, as Dr Gabor Maté explains, “we are born feeling our connection to our parents and we are reliant on them for survival. Being rejected by them in any way, big or small, is devastating. So when we are rejected, we have a choice, to reject them or reject ourselves (or more likely parts of ourselves). But we can’t reject them as our survival depends upon them.”

Luckily the skills needed for connection with children, and with each other, are skills that can be learned. Terry Real makes the point “There’s skills in learning to connect to yourself and others. There’s skill in learning to love yourself. There’s a skill in learning good boundaries. And there are skills in learning how to stand up for yourself with love and respond with generosity instead of defensiveness.”

Changing the way we see parenting is pivotal, but that requires first a change in who we are as individuals. To begin to recognise our dysfunctional stances and structures and perhaps to look at them through more integrated eyes that include more of the aspects of our true nature without the walls we have erected around us in response to our own childhoods.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, How Dead Does the Horse Need to Be to Want to Get Off?,  Womanhood: A Story of Our Time and Embracing the Feminine within All of Us. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

One of the biggest challenges for me in learning and maintaining healthy boundaries is letting other people own their own reactions, rather than taking them personally.

I was reading a booklet on managing separation for children, which sums this up nicely under a section on reassuring them. One of the key points is “Just listen, don’t feel you have to fix their feelings; it’s painful and you can’t change that”.

However well placed that advice is “don’t feel you have to fix their feelings” telling me (or anyone) not to feel something is not helpful. I feel what I feel. It has been more helpful to me to explore why I feel the need to fix other people’s feelings.

In particular, in the last few years I’ve become aware that my people pleasing tendencies have deep hooks. Usually the more critical a relationship is to me the more I’ll bend over backward to please, not just to be nice or considerate, but rather as a response rooted in trauma.

That said, I have also always had a critical mass where I eventually get fed up and blow up about injustice and exploitation, which Complex PTSD expert Pete Walker says is typical of people who have codependent relational tendencies.

Codependency is the continual state of being focused on the needs, wants and problems of others in order to gain approval and attempt to control outcomes. It's very intertwined with enmeshment trauma and people pleasing.

Enmeshment is when there is no real recognition of self in the family or relationship. The signs I have learned to recognise are when I find myself confusing my emotions with those of a person I have a relationship with, and the cost of individuality feels high.

This means that when someone who is important to my perceived survival (be it in personal or professional relationships) has a negative opinion of me or a negative reaction towards me it can elicit a trauma response within me.

Once I understood why I felt this way, which began in childhood as I explored in Are You Overly Responsible? Actually Seeing Yourself Through Fresh Eyes, then it was a matter of starting to recognise my reactions in the moment and changing my response.

None of this is comfortable, not by a long way. In Perpetua Neo’s article on Fawning: The Fourth Trauma Response After Fight, Flight, Freeze, she talks about stress responses and trauma responses. She says “These are ways the body automatically reacts to stress and danger, controlled by your brain's autonomic nervous system, part of the limbic system. Depending on our upbringing, we can sometimes learn to rely too heavily on one of these responses and this is where the trauma comes into play”.

A critical part of healing is learning to reset my limbic system to, as Perpetua puts it, “update the timekeeper in your brain to understand that then is not now”. This way old trauma can stop replaying in my body in the present.

It sounds simple, but rewiring my brain is a matter of consciously catching what’s going on in the moment and actively working to regulate the nervous system while changing how I react. This is no easy task when, by the very nature of these triggers, the frontal thinking part of the brain shuts down.

To give an illustration of just how challenging this can be in everyday life, I only have to look at what relationship expert Terry Real refers to as the Core Negative Image (CNI) we have of our partners. He says it’s an exaggerated version of our partner at their worst.

For example, Terry’s wife Belinda has a CNI of him as an irresponsible, selfish, undependable, charming boy. His CNI of her is a demanding, insatiable, critical, micromanaging witch.  As Terry says, it’s not their baseline, it’s certainly not their best, it’s not even an accurate description of them at their worst, it’s more like a caricature of them at their worst.

So, in action, Terry might leave the milk out of the refrigerator on the kitchen counter, just as he used to do years ago when their kids were growing up. This triggers Belinda’s CNI of Terry, so she starts talking to him like he’s an irresponsible child. This would trigger his CNI of her and he’d react saying something like “Oh come on it’s just a milk carton, don’t be such a witch” and so on it goes.

Most people react to the exaggeration and fight against it. To break this cycle, Terry says our CNI of our partner is something we want to learn take with a grain of salt. What we should really take notice of is our partner’s CNI of us.

Most people know exactly what this is without asking, because it’s the characteristics and behaviours that get thrown at us like bombs when the other person is triggered.

He says “The beauty of knowing their CNI of you is, instead of fighting, you can duck under. The more you push against it the tighter it gets, so move under or into it instead of opposing it. That would mean, instead of opposing Belinda’s opinion about him being irresponsible, he could own it and say “I know I can be like that at times, I just forgot sorry (and puts the milk away).”

I suspect anyone putting themselves in these shoes can appreciate how tricky it could be to do this without getting sucked into the CNI wrangle. While it is very disarming to know and own the CNI someone has of me, there’s still that deep tap root that feels owning something that is not only negative but perhaps untrue (or at least grossly over exaggerated) feels really unsafe in my body.

For this reason Terry recommends firstly having a modicum of self recovery around self esteem and good internal and external boundaries. Once good boundaries are developed a person is then better placed to observe and think “Mm, so this is what my partner is making up about me. This is their CNI of me, isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that important information about my partner?”

What I notice in going through a separation, if not careful, the predominant interactions can be a tango between each person’s Core Negative Image of the other, making all the sensible advice I was reading extremely challenging.

Even with something that doesn’t elicit a trauma response though, it can still be a challenge to let others have their own reactions. This week I was talking with a close friend who is going through what I can only describe as an existential crisis.

My heart aches for all the challenges life has thrown her way over the last few years, it’s been incredibly intense. My tendency is to want to find words to help, to at least sooth. Nothing I could think of felt adequate. Then I remembered some words I’d read in an email from Teal Swan about self love:

“When people tell you about themselves, receive them without trying to fix them or change their minds. Provide a safe apace to connect.”

So I focused on just that, stopped thinking about it and spoke from the heart instead just acknowledging where she was at and that it’s okay to be there. I just wanted her to feel seen and held.

Then I realised, that is my job, it’s not to fix anything, I simply want the people I love to feel seen and held (emotionally) by me. And, when dealing with negative reactions directed towards me, I want to feel seen and held – by me first and foremost. That is where my boundary work comes in.

There are lots of wonderful boundary statements I’ve read but I’ve found that, in that moment of fire when the frontal lobe of my brain closes up shop and ducks for cover, the only statement I’ve been capable of is the raw observation of the emotional reaction I’m witnessing.

But the great thing is, instead of getting stuck for words, pulled into the line of fire, pushing onward in frustration through the emotional blast determined to make my point, or exploding in fury, I reflect what I am observing and retreat with dignity.

While I’d love to do some deeper somatic work, I know that by calling out the reaction and retreating I’m rewiring my brain and retraining my body to feel more confident and less threatened in those situations. It just takes practice.

​Are you able to see how your nervous system reacts in response to someone else’s difficult emotional reactions? Ultimately becoming aware of why it is happening and when it is happening, then starting to change your reaction is the work to empower yourself instead of allowing it to throw you into a tailspin. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak 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.

Space to me feels like opening, expansiveness, finding my centre. But it can also be terrifying when the cosy world of my making seems suddenly blown apart and I find myself freefalling through the vast darkness of an unwelcome space.

My friend asked me to name the three biggest moments in my life when things felt out of control, she recognised my trauma and distress. It was hard to prioritise just three if I’m honest. 

There were the days, weeks, months and years that followed when the person I loved with all my heart told me our relationship was over; the same when I had my first experience of death and both my paternal grandparents died within a couple of months of each other. And there was the day I started at university, alone, and had to navigate my way to a lecture theatre holding three hundred students I didn’t know to study a subject I hadn’t a clue about (computer science), to name just a few.

Then there was, of course, the childhood memory of the day I accompanied my dad to the hospital when my brother was born, all excited, to be left on the stairwell alone while dad went to visit mum and new baby. Children were not allowed in the wards, so I waited unaccompanied, age three, and recall hearing every set of footsteps, watching the door open in hope, anxiously awaiting my dad’s return.

I remember thinking “What if he doesn’t return?”

Circumstances beyond my control that shake the foundations of the reality upon which I’m standing are not new to me. The feeling of being in freefall is not new to me. The fear of the huge space that opens up uninvited can be overwhelming, but I’ve been through this enough to know that the space which appears can also be my growth and expansion if I will befriend it.

As Sarah Blondin says “We walk invisibly cocooned with all the things we wish to control, we think that by keeping these things close that we will be able to manage them. If we keep our worries in plain sight we will have less of a chance of them coming true”.

I have always believed that, once children were involved in a relationship there is no backing out. Of course, that is my belief and a relationship consists of two people. Having had the experience of being jilted before, I was well aware that I actually have no control over whether the other person will stay in relationship with me.

So, since having children, it is fair to say that I have always harboured a fear about this. No more so than since leaving my career, and my financial independence, to be at home with my kids.

In Learning to Surrender, Sarah says “The more we constrict, the more worry and burden we pick up along the way. The denser we become, the more we sink like rocks to the bottom of our river. We then ground ourselves in the turbulent waters rather than allowing ourselves to be carried to the cool, calm waters”.

When I listen to Sarah’s captivating voice her words come from a place far beyond her lips and far beyond the reaches of my mind, the words carry truths that only my heart instantly recognises:

There will be moments in my life where all will seem in chaos and disharmony, and in those moments I must remember the universe is reordering my life to match more of what I am calling forth. Fear is useless in these times; trust – however - is paramount.

This is what I know above all else, I have known this with certainty for a long time.

So while I rage and feel helpless against this dramatic change in my circumstances, it is a dance of the mind versus the heart. My body, knowing this sense of abandonment, begins its trauma response.The mind, in trying to keep me safe, plays out all the “what if” scenarios and, meanwhile, my friend asks me to remember because – in remembering – I also remember the vital part: this too shall pass.

At some point I will stop freefalling through the empty black space and start to construct a different reality. In fact, I can see the glimmers of it now, the many positives that could exist on the other side of the many changes afoot for me and for our kids.

Some words Teal Swan wrote this week in relation to self love caught my interest. She said “The tension you experience is a sign you are giving away your power. It is calling your attention to the areas of your life where your free will is needed as a necessary agent for progress.”

Tension was the word that reeled me in, having chronic tense headaches, shoulders and neck. It will be no accident that in Learning to Surrender, Sarah Blondin also says “These places of tension are where you are holding a secret fear that you are not supported, you’ve been forgotten, that life does not love you, and that you are failing. Imagine cutting the ties to these tense places and allow yourself to be carried into the mysterious and rushing waters raging around you”.

She explains that this does not mean I stop trying to create my best life. It does not mean I give up in the face of stress or adversity. It simply means I let go of the hold it has on my physical body.

I can do this, I know I can, I just need constant reminders right now. And they come in many guises and forms, through the friends who love me, and the wise sharing of people like Teal and Sarah, whose work I love.

It occurs to me that the space that feels like freefalling through the vast darkness and the space that feels like opening, expansiveness and finding my centre, are one in the same. It’s all about perspective.

I hear Sarah’s words “You are being asked to surrender to the beauty trying to unfold, the beauty of that far off land of dreams you have been looking outside yourself for. Understand that it has been trying to take you there all along. Now get out of your own way and allow it to.”

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Even in Grief There Are lessons to Be Learned, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, The Soul’s Yearning – How to Recognise Your Inner Work, and Make the Invisible Visible - Celebrate the Gold in Your Emotional Reactions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In a podcast called Making Money, Making Change, Rha Goddess said “For a lot of us, we’ve been taught that we have to do certain things in order to get love, and that love is just not forthcoming, When we feel that anything we want to do, or feel passionate about, isn’t important or doesn’t deserve to be sustained, we are in the wounding of indoctrination”.

The wounding of indoctrination basically points to the way my inner world was shaped by my upbringing and the unhelpful beliefs I developed about myself and others along the way.

For example, Lisa Romano, who specialises in co-dependency and enmeshment trauma, makes the point “If a child does not know they have a self, how can that child love, honour, respect or care for the self it does not yet have conscious awareness of?”

Codependency is the continual state of being focused on the needs, wants and problems of others in order to gain approval and attempt to control outcomes. It's very intertwined with enmeshment trauma and people pleasing.

Typical codependency behaviours are compulsively wanting to fix others problems, perfectionism and doing for others things for that they should do for themselves. A great statement I read is "High functioning codependents may find themselves believing they are acting out of love, when in reality they are acting out of fear"

Enmeshment is when there is no real recognition of self in the family or relationship. The signs I learned to recognise are when I find myself confusing my emotions with those of a person I have a relationship with, and the cost of individuality feels high.

Lisa talks about common situations where this arises: if one parent is narcissistic, or one is self sacrificing, or parents live in denial, or addiction is the go-to, chaos is the norm, or poverty the reality.

She says “Yes, emotional, verbal and financial abuse all count; demeaning, devaluing and demonising a child counts; being conditioned to be your parent’s therapist, caretaker or pseudo partner counts; and being raised in any form of chaos, unpredictability and instability counts. Unless something changes within us, patterns continue to unfold outside of us”.

Rha, in the podcast, paints a beautiful picture of possibility when she says “There are, however, others who have been loved and love positively, especially in the formative years, who hold maybe a different belief system. They see love everywhere, they have no problem receiving love and participating in the laws of reciprocity, the giving and the receiving”.

For someone like me, who in Lisa’s terms suffers from codependency post traumatic stress syndrome, I aspire to see the world in this way. I can and do for short bursts, but I want to be able to sustain it, that is my work because I truly believe there is only love and resistance to love.

Lisa asks “Imagine if within every atom of your being you felt and believed you are enough and it’s your birthright to imagine the life you desire, in spite of any unwanted experiences?”

Yet those unwanted experiences can be traumatizing, bewildering and downright distracting. I’d go so far as to say they have completely consumed my existence for the most part of my life. In my relationships I’ve often attracted people who are very different to me, opposites in many ways: I find myself being the giver in relationships with a taker, the internaliser with the externaliser. Why does this happen?

“Understanding and changing is healing” Annette Noontil

If part of healing is understanding I am pretty sure I have that part down pat. While I’ve written in the past about What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, I recently read a fictional novel by Santa Montefiore that helped me understand this dynamic more deeply from a soul perspective.
The Secrets of the Lighthouse is focused around a wife and mother who has died but, rather than following the light, she remains tethered to the earthly plane unseen by the people she has loved and lost.

In life she had constantly set her husband challenges to prove his love, and nothing he ever gave was enough, eventually he inevitably became weary and resentful. He had given her everything he had to give and still she wanted ever increasing devotion.

As she watches on she initially delights in her husband’s misery at her death but, eventually, she begins to see the light, and reflects:

“I know I have little love in my heart that is not tarnished by jealousy. I also know that light is love and it is strong enough to slay the snake. I realise then that I do have the power to raise my vibration, after all the only thing capable of transmuting negativity is love… I recognise that this pain that weakens my jealousy and fills me with guilt is compassion.

This new longing to take away his pain makes me feel strangely uplifted. How odd it is to feel pleasure in this way. I have only ever thought of myself. My love was a selfish love and therefore not love at all, but neediness. I realise now my whole life was driven by this desperate need – and my death a result of it.

I wanted more and more and went to terrible lengths to get it. I never felt loved enough. If only I had thought of what I could give and not of how much I could be given, I would have been happy. If only I had shown him love, I would have felt loved enough, that’s the irony of it.

I am not as powerless as I had previously thought; I am powerful if my actions are motivated by true love. Why does it take so much unhappiness to make us realise there is nothing of value in our lives but love? … It is all that I am, I just never knew it.”

Having given everything I had to give in my relationships, I could identify with the widower. While it was useful to see a possible return to love from the other perspective, it was also a useful message in the futility of hanging on in the hopes someone will change and validate and love me by just doing more of the same things.  

So identifying the parts of me that were self sacrificing and over giving, and why, has been a huge part of the journey. As has recognizing that these are not patterns I’d want to perpetuate in my own children.

Changing is the harder part, and for that I have worked consciously to define and start to hold my boundaries and to ask myself in more situations “What would someone who loves themselves do in this situation?”

To end on another quote of Rha’s “We do have to, on some level, make peace with the fact we are here to grow. Sometimes those lessons feel yummy and sometimes they feel lousy. But if we can get the insight, if we can pay enough attention to get the gift of the lesson, we do become more of who we are meant to be. This work is all about the invitation to become more of who you really are, then you are free.”

Do you yet recognise your inner work?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak 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.

When I was growing up, I tried to minimise the exposure I had to any kind of negative emotional reactions towards me, having been at the sharp end of many of those from my mother. I did this by trying to be good, and thinking ahead about the consequences of my actions on her emotional state.

How that has translated to my adult life is an over developed sense of responsibility towards the way other people feel. It is one thing for me to be considerate, another to lose myself in the process. This of course points to learning about having and communicating healthy boundaries, something that was a foreign concept to me until the last year or two.

I was under the impression that being in relationship meant doing things I wasn’t actually all that comfortable doing in order to make other people happy, and them doing things for me in return. Making sure other people were not unhappy with me is what felt safe for me within my body, when they were unhappy it made me feel anxious and out-of-kilter.

While I have a huge capacity to do a lot for others, and a high tolerance in not necessarily receiving much gratitude, there has always been a limit to my martyrdom. Inside, I’m sure my soul has been screaming, and when this limit had been reached – albeit when I’m way beyond an already unhealthy threshold – that expresses through me in anger and resentment.

Then I read Annette Noontil’s life lessons and I had lots of ah-ha moments. Annette Noontil was involved in looking after others for a large part of her life, first in caring for her father, then in nursing before having a family. Later she took what she had learned about healing and, with more research and determination, she began to share the wisdom she had gained, summed up as “your attitude is reflected in your body”.

This resulted in one of my favourite do-it-yourself books The Body is the Barometer of the Soul 2 which helps people recognise the concepts that limit them, how they show up in the body and how to look within for answers and activate change. In her very Aussie ‘to-the-point’ way of describing things, here is what jumped out at me initially:

• We only see what we need to see and grow from, so what we see in others we have in ourselves. If it aggravates you, you have that attitude or concept quite badly. “Wow, that takes a lot of swallowing” I thought, “but it kind of rings true”.
• Treat others as your equal, we all have good points. Take note of everything positive in people as they reflect you also. “That also takes a bit of swallowing, but if it’s true of the bad stuff then it makes sense it’s true of the good stuff too right?”
• You attract what you need to learn. “I’m starting to get it”
• We have all come here to learn from each other. “Okay, it makes sense”
• Respect people for where they are at and accept them when they challenge your patience. Notice their good qualities and just get on with your life. Nobody needs to be saved. “Really? This is kind of taking away my excuses to be mad at people.”
• Understanding and changing is healing. “Gotcha!”

Then there were the parts that popped out and helped straighten my thinking around this issue of responsibility:

• We love to be of service but nobody loves being a servant. “You got that sister!” I thought
• It is best not to do more than 50% for people because you take away their opportunity to learn and grow. “Um, yes, okay that makes sense, oops!”
• If you have to do for others make sure you learn something for yourself from what you have done and then you will not be drained. “Drained, yes, that is how I feel”
• Ask for what you want instead of waiting for permission. “Really? But shouldn’t people who truly love me know what I want?” Uncomfortable realising dawning...
• Your life is your business and you have to take responsibility for it. “Oh crap, I’ve been too busy taking care of everyone else’s business.”
• If you are about to do for others, make sure they have asked for your help. “Really but am I not just being nice? Mm, light bulb moment, on occasions when others do do something for me I can feel like they think I’m inadequate. Drats!”
• By doing for others what they could be doing for themselves you are taking away their opportunity to grow. “Oh, I didn’t think of it that way.”
• Learn to receive as well as to give. “Receive? How?”

This was a bit of a wakeup call. While I didn’t have a name for it then, she also said a lot about boundaries:

• You need to be caring for yourself then those others will begin to respect you because you will have respect for yourself. “I didn’t think of it that way before but it makes sense.”
• Beingness is using all your inner power to be yourself and in your own energy, no matter what negativity is around you. It is living in your feelings and letting others do the same. When you are in control of your power you do not want to control others. “But I often don’t know how I feel until I get mad.”
• The compassion you seek is mostly for yourself, so when you learn to show it to yourself, you will then show it to others and more loving relationships flow. “That sounds good, but how?”
• You need strong boundaries to practice detachment, but life is so much more relaxed when you do. “Strong boundaries sound exhausting” was my first thought.
• Be married to the process of looking inside yourself for answers and divorced from the result – what people do with your information is none of your business. “Mm, I might have to work on my delivery then..and what if they still get mad? Oh, how they react is not my business. Lightbulb moment!”

From there I started to read a lot more about boundaries, Evette Rose’s Healing Your Boundaries book was great for helping me define my boundaries, and Terri Cole’s book Boundary Boss for giving me tools and words to help communicate my boundaries and hold them in difficult situations.

This hasn’t been a linear learning path, it’s been more like one step forward, two to the side, five back and finally another leap forward again. A lot of my old stuff got dragged up out of the murky waters and continues to as I react to situations, reflect and relearn.

In my experience it’s often the very thing I try to avoid, or to resist, that needs to be faced in order for me to grow and fulfil my potential. Relationships that aren’t working, or jobs that are miserable, I plough on in a state of discontent, fear and anxiety. That is what it comes down to, a deep seated fear that the real me, my real needs and desires won’t be accepted. I’m trying to avoid rejection. And yet,in the process I’m rejecting myself.

Eleanor Roosevelt said “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility.  For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”

When I was taking responsibility for other people who gladly let me, I used to think of this quote smugly. But now I realise I was a co-conspirator in that and the quote applies equally to me.

Ironically for someone with an over-developed sense of responsibility (towards others), it’s actually taking responsibility for me that matters most. Each time I come back to myself after taking responsibility for what I really need and asserting my boundaries, I wonder why I hadn’t done it so much sooner.

Have you caught a glimpse of yourself anew in reading this? Are you ready to take a helicopter ride high above the canopy and see yourself from a different perspective? To see that all you desire awaits
if only you can take more responsibility for your own needs? Are you ready to face your fears?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak 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.

I was listening to relationship expert Terry Real recount a conversation with a client whose partner had really changed his ways. He had become a nice, thoughtful, connected guy; having previously been a “prize jerk”. Despite this, his client was still stuck in resentment, what he calls “her dysfunctional stance”.

So Terry asks his client who the resentful one was in her family growing up, where did she learn this from? He knows that his clients are either reacting to this, or learning to repeat it, or some combination of the two.

She responds “My mom, she was resentful for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She hated my dad and made it perfectly clear”. Rather than enlisting her daughter as a co-conspirator against her father (one possibility), she had instead been very narcissistic and had little connection with her daughter. So the client’s stance in resentment was actually a way to be close to a parent who did not want to be close to her at all.

He observes “So resentment is the family business. You are in union with your mother by sharing a vision of what a relationship looks like. If you let this new man in, you’re going to be leaving your mother.”

In short, she unleashed a lot of grief as she let go of the last vestige of unity with her mother and embraced her husband. And, so far at least, the resentment hasn’t resurfaced.

While I didn’t have that same dynamic growing up, I recognise the ugly truth of resentment in my life.
I grew up with a mother whom I felt resented having to take care of me. She was often tense and overwhelmed, especially when on her own with my brother and I (which, since she was the primary caregiver was often). And if we “weren’t being good” it would throw her into fits of rage.

In short, I grew up feeling that my needs and desires were secondary to ensuring that my mum’s emotional landscape was smooth and even, and I was responsible for that. This developed into a pattern of being a co-dependent people pleaser with no idea about boundaries and – as I grew – I resented my mother for putting all that on me as a young child.

In How to Let Go of Resentment Teal Swan defines resentment as “a state of being in pain as a result of perceiving you have been treated wrongly, unfairly and unjustly”.

She makes the following key points:

• Whether something is right, fair or just is subjective
• Whether circumstances were such that a person was or was not treated fairly, either way resentment can be present
• Resentment is one of the strongest hooks that anchors a person to the past
• Resentment immediately converts itself to distrust (when you feel you’ve been treated wrongly you cannot rely on the person to care for your best interests)
• Resentment is almost always fuelled by years’ worth of earlier experiences of being treated unfairly
• Letting go (or forgiving) can give people the feeling that they have to let go of the unmet need to be treated fairly and justly, and so to honour this need they will not forgive
• Resentment may be kept as both a boundary and a personal reminder as if to say “no one will ever do this to me again”
• The ego can feel a sense of itself being right and good when it is in the victim role with someone else in the perpetrator role
• In close relationships being the one who was wronged puts the other person in a role where they have to “make it up to you”, creating a power imbalance
• Resentment kills relationships but it is not a monster or enemy, just the natural by-product of a lack of resolution.

I can attest to all of that. Resentment is the toxic by-product of the unhealthy cycle my children’s father and I were stuck in for years. Coming into the relationship we were two people seeking to find ourselves and to have a family. Both those things happened, and both are true blessings. But they happened painfully because we were both unconsciously stuck in unhealthy patterns of behaviour and unable to express our personal truths.

We were two symbiotic dysfunctional beings, one accustomed to taking on too much responsibility (especially for others), the other accustomed to having others take responsibility for them. Putting this another way, I felt safe and like I was fulfilling my duty to love by doing for him things he was capable of doing for himself. He felt safe and entitled to those things in a love relationship. Yet both of us were resentful.

Annette Noontil says “By doing for others what they could be doing for themselves you are taking away their opportunity to grow.” Both souls were calling out for a healthy balance, replaying ingrained patterns in hope of a resolution.

From a broader perspective I definitely feel happy to have arrived at a point of being able to express my truths, and he his. But – as with all growth – I often shake my head in wonder at why it took so long and had to be so painful.

Terry Real says “What we long for is the divine... the gods and goddesses that are going to complete us...and what we’re stuck with is an imperfect being. What we’ve lost in our culture is that it’s exactly the collision of your particular imperfections with mine (and how we manage that together) which is the stuff of intimacy...that’s what drives us deep”.

In her article (which is also available as a video) How to Let Go of Resentment Teal gives a wealth of information which she then sums up as “Focus directly on resolution and the by-products of non-resolution – including resentment – will cease to exist.”

So what remains unresolved in your life? Where do you still feel pain as a result of perceiving you have been treated wrongly, unfairly and unjustly? Has resentment become your family business? And what are you willing to do to let it go?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Take Heart - It Takes Courage and Tenacity to Step Into Your Power, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, Are You Aching to Be Accepted By Someone Who Doesn’t See You?, Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity and Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Shame, pain and guilt have a lot to answer for. I remember thinking that a while back when I heard of someone who had committed suicide and his family hadn’t known what had driven him to it because, on the face of it, nothing was amiss. There seems to be so much we humans keep hidden because of shame, pain and guilt.

V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), who wrote The Vagina Monologues, an episodic play that began in the 1990’s and speaks in many voices and in many ways about violence against women, said recently:  

“If something doesn’t exist you can do anything to it. If something only exists in the dark you can rape it, colonise it, own it and destroy it. Once you declare Vagina Monologues you’re saying vaginas have voices, they can speak, they can be seen, and they can be visible.”

Her feeling is that making the invisible visible is a very scary thing, especially in a time when people wanted women to be controlled. As a child she suffered violence, sexual abuse and humiliation at the hands of her father. As an adult she is determined and says “I’m not going to have shame, I’m going to be powerful, funny, I’m going to own it”.

In a world where movements like Black Lives Matter and Ni Una Menos are gaining traction, there continues to be a lot of big-T trauma being outed so to speak. Yet, in tracking the human rights movement back to Cyrus the Great, who freed all slaves in Babylon and declared in 539 BC that people should choose their own religion, it becomes painfully obvious that we humans are not quick learners.

I suspect that is because behind all big-T trauma lies little-t trauma. I’m talking about the kind of trauma that derives from the more insidious kinds of behaviours that result in adults who feel the need to take power from others (by projecting and deflecting their own pain) in order to feel worthy in themselves.

I call it insidious because I think we each have our own little stories, which seem so benign in the face of the stories of the horrific big-T trauma we hear about every day, yet shapes lives nonetheless.

Although I grew up with two parents who loved me and wanted me, I felt loved conditionally. As I said in Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, for a long time the predominant theme of child rearing has been about teaching children to be good and fit in.
​
So growing up conditioned to “be good and do not upset my parents” seems a typical experience. Certainly I didn’t feel like I was in any better or any worse a position than any of the other kids I grew up with. Grooming us kids to fit in and be good members of society was where it was at. 

However, in terms of the development of the human psyche, growing loving and connected adults first requires kids who have a healthy sense of self and safety.

It’s not the forced sleeping and eating schedules I remember, though I suspect my body does, it’s the anxiety I felt being around my mother (who was the one at home looking after us most of the time). When I read Dr Maté’s words “it’s not our children’s behaviour but the anxiety it elicits within us that we have to learn how to manage” I knew I’d finally found an explanation for what I sensed my whole childhood.

Left on her own with us kids, my mum was always hyper-tense, it was like entering an alternate reality as she wasn’t like that around others. I learned to anticipate how things might play out and to be as perfect as I could to stay out of trouble. Looking back through adult eyes I can connect the dots to her own childhood, something I only really learned about when she was dying.

Although I had always sensed my mum’s dislike of her father (who had died when she was seven), she never told me anything specific until just before she died, when she said “I remember sitting on the floor drawing, and hearing the crack behind me, and seeing your gran go from one side of my peripheral vision to the other”.

Trauma begets trauma. I know because when I had my own kids and they needed my positive attention all the time, I came unwound. I found myself getting angry at them, yelling at them and wandering around chuntering the same way my mother used to chunter – even using some of the same words.

That “oh my, I’ve become my mother” moment was a wakeup call. Instead of putting it all on my kids, as I’d had done to me, I decided to take full ownership of my behaviour before it became ingrained and marked the pattern of another childhood.

Basically, I had to reparent myself. If I caught myself reacting, I’d stop mid-yell, apologise for yelling and actively work to calm my triggered nervous system. I explained to my kids what I was doing. They may have experienced schizophrenic behaviour but I figured that it was better than experiencing me putting it all on them.

I also made myself a chart and got my kids to decide whether I got a tick for talking to them respectfully. They still had boundaries, but I was getting better at holding them in a healthy way. In short, I made the invisible visible.

When my youngest daughter had a bout of meltdowns recently and started lashing out, I was inspired by a story I’d heard from relationship expert Terry Real, I said:

“Hey, you’re my daughter, I love you and I’m always going to love you. But it’s not ever going to be okay for you to yell and scream and lash out at us like this. You know dad and I grew up with too much yelling and screaming and we work hard to make this a better environment, what do you need right now to help you calm down?”

We are committed to breaking the chain of pain, but it’s not always easy. I don’t know about you, but my litmus test has always been who I am at home, that is where any mask I’ve been subconsciously wearing falls.

It is easy to blame other people and circumstances, but most of the time I’m emotionally charged it’s because I’ve triggered the little child inside who is subconsciously trying to be good to appease her inner parents.

“When we give ourselves permission to stop being the obedient daughter, we become the responsible adult.” Glennon Doyle

I suspect that is the case for most people when they are emotionally charged and it’s out of kilter with the actual circumstances. Well, either being obedient towards or rebelling against the inner parent.

When I look through my adult eyes, once the emotional charge has passed, I find I’ve either not had or I’m not holding a healthy boundary and I’ve over reacted towards the person or circumstances.

For example, when I had to catch a return flight home the other day, I was in a pretty triggered state because of the time constraints involved. As I child I was always being hurried along by mum, who used to speed walk everywhere with us, and was always anxious in case we were late.

I even have recurring dreams about not being able to get packed in time to catch a flight. So when my partner saw me having trouble packing the cases and said “you’re shaking”, I was aware that I was in a traumatised state, my body remembering.

While we caught our taxi and go to the airport in plenty of time, my nervous system was still on high alert, anticipating getting through check in and safely home (flying not being a favourite thing of mine at the best of times).

When one of our bags registered slightly overweight – and the others being underweight - I will confess I had a momentary meltdown. The airline we were flying with is really pedantic about the 23kg limit, and the choice is to repack your bag there on the check in floor or pay an $80 excess fee.

Having felt like I’d just survived something in getting the bag packed in the first place, there was a moment when I had to shift gear to get the job done. That moment felt like a slow motion freefall, and the airline worker’s calm but directive voice cut through to restart my system. She said “it’s okay; it’s only a kilo or so, find a couple of books or toiletry bag and put them in your other bag.”

Part of me wanted to scream “it’s not okay!” but another part of me knew the futility of my resistance so I obeyed and moved past the moment. After the emotional charge had calmed I was extremely grateful I hadn’t completely humiliated myself by expressing the full blown tantrum I’d wanted to have.

But it also made me realise I hadn’t actually catered to my needs by organising the help I needed to pack and get us back to the airport, instead I’d just taken it all on my shoulders, and I then wanted to lay that anger and resentment at the feet of those I travelled with. I became aware that, on the inside, I was waiting for my hard work to be noticed, resentful it wasn’t an old well worn pattern.

Lesson learned, I resolved to organise things quite differently the next time we took a trip, having each person pack and unpack their own case instead of playing the martyr.

This is the essence of small-t trauma. It lives within, invisible, reigniting the well worn thought patterns and pathways in my nervous system. But by making the invisible visible, becoming conscious of what is really at play, and learning how to react differently, I can create newer, healthier reactions that empower and serve me - and those around me - much better.

What is within you that would benefit from being brought into the light?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Is Your Responsibility and Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Someone, who knows I’m interested in childhood trauma, recently told me she thinks I should “just let go of negative memories”. Another person wondered, if something was so lacking in my relationship with my parents, how am I not experiencing greater dysfunction or even death, which he proposed was statistically more likely than being able to draw intelligent conclusions.

Interestingly I have never said nor felt that my childhood was negative, it was normal, with some good memories and some not so good memories; and I certainly had two parents who wanted and loved me. They were just two people doing the best they could, parenting in the normal way.

So I decided to write this as resource for people like me who do personal work in order to move past any suboptimal wiring and fulfil my potential, while some look on in bemusement wondering why I would feel the need to do any work when I had such a normal childhood.

Normal doesn’t mean optimal, and can be as traumatic within our bodies as a readily recognised trauma. In fact, I believe this is society’s biggest opportunity for growth.

For a long time the predominant theme of child rearing has been about teaching children to be good and fit in. This is all very well, but it is best done after a healthy sense of self and safety has been established, and this appears to be little understood.

Feeling safe relates directly to the nervous system, the command centre of a human’s flight-fight response. Neural pathways connect one part of the nervous system to the other and neural pathways do not care whether parents/caregivers intentions are good or how much they love their children; they simply start forming in response to the child’s reaction to how well (or not) their needs are met.

“As a child”, as Dr Gabor Maté explains, “we are born feeling our connection to our parents and we are reliant on them for survival. Being rejected by them in any way, big or small, is devastating. So when we are rejected, we have a choice, to reject them or reject ourselves (or more likely parts of ourselves). But we can’t reject them as our survival depends upon them.”

Some examples I gave recently: there is the baby who is left to cry, the baby or child who has to eat to a schedule, the child who wants their parent’s attention and will do anything – positive or negative – to get it, the child who is given no opportunity to explain their side of the story, the child who is left alone to think about their actions, the list goes on. These are all normal, everyday occurrences, not things an adult necessarily thinks of as rejecting their child.

However, if I put my adult self in those shoes, imagine I am so upset I’m crying and everyone ignores me, how do I feel? If I’m not hungry (or feeling sick) and I’m made to eat how do I feel? If I am trying to get someone’s attention and they ignore me, how do I feel? If I appear to have upset someone and yet they won’t communicate with me, how do I feel?

None of these feel comfortable; at one extreme they actually make me question my very existence (especially if they are regularly occurring situations) and, at best, make me feel isolated and unimportant in the moment. So it’s not hard to imagine how utterly devastating such things are to a baby or small child who is completely dependant on that adult to meet their needs.

This creates a type of developmental trauma, which is sometimes known as small-t trauma. This kind of trauma is normal in our society, and it happens bit by bit over time.

Then there are the inherited patterns of behaviour in parents that children react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to. These are essential for survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life, and will certainly get passed on unless the cycle is broken.

The best description I’ve seen of these is in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, he describes four archetypes (on a scale of aggressive to passive) that are “control strategies we each develop in order to stop others’ draining our energy”. He says “It’s often easiest if you start by taking a look at which strategies your parents employed:

• Intimidators threaten verbally or physically and come on too strong, making others frightened. They are so wrapped up in their own anger they don’t care what is happening inside the other person.
• Interrogators constantly question, criticize, nag and find fault, making others self conscious and eroding their confidence.
• Aloofs shut down when confrontation happens. They often withdraw physically or verbally, forcing others to struggle and dig to find out their true feelings.
• Poor Me’s tend to guilt trip, projecting themselves as the helpless victim in need of care and attention. This makes others feel guilty even if they know there is no real reason to feel this way.

Each of these are linked with the corresponding strategies that created them, and that they create. For example, Intimidators create Poor Me’s appealing for mercy, or, the child will endure until they are old enough and big enough to fight back, creating another Intimidator, and so the cycle continues”.

I suspect no one wants to feel like a victim or held hostage to their past circumstances, but rejecting the idea that unconscious reactions in childhood may have inadvertently created limitations or unhelpful belief patterns and behaviours is a missed opportunity for growth.

The kinds of common subconscious unhelpful belief patterns that get perpetuated are: I’m unworthy, I’m too much, I’m alone, I don’t have, I’m powerless, I’m not wanted, I’m invisible, I’m bad, I don’t belong, I’m a burden, I’m crazy, I’m different, I’m not enough, I’m a failure, I’m not important, I’m inferior, I’m not loved, I don’t matter, I’m not safe and/or I’m worthless.

Claire Zammit and Kathrine Woodward Thomas created a fantastic document that goes into each of these in much more depth and is well worth a read.

This is not our only trauma of course, I just think it’s by far the most common and least recognised and – bottom line – the one that needs addressed in order to grow and evolve from the other types of trauma we create.

One therapist told me she has worked with children who have no apparent developmental issues but instead inherited predispositions to emotional dysregulation (having emotions that are overly intense in comparison to the situation that triggered them). Considering genetics does, on the face of it, seem sensible.

But as you may deduce from what I have written above, I find it hard to imagine that most people are not in some way affected by parental – usually well meaning – interactions in our early years. I am also not keen on the genetics argument; it feels too much like a free pass to behaving poorly on an all-too-regular basis, when I truly believe that (if you can read this) it is within your gift to change how you react when triggered, and also in fact your responsibility.

Remember those neural pathways? As in the seemingly normal and benign examples I gave of rejection, these became very entrenched in my system throughout childhood, as my nervous system did what it needed to continue to do to keep me feeling safe.

I can’t change those pathways that fire ever time, say, someone criticises me (which is exactly the kind of situation in which I may have emotions that are more charged than the situation warrants). However I can:

• Become more aware of my reactions and start to understand if and why I overreact
• Take responsibility for helping my body feel safer, using techniques to calm/regulate my nervous system
• Learn new ways to respond, like learning how to have compassion and to have and hold healthy boundaries

I cannot change my reactions through a decision alone; it requires awareness, curiosity, focus in learning new skills and persistence.

Also bear in mind that no child is born with emotional regulation, so it’s having a parent or caregiver who cannot model effective coping skills that puts a child at risk of emotional dysregulation.

Upon suggesting we educate future generations on the impacts they have on newborns and young children through secure attachment and attunement, the therapist I was talking to was concerned that would put huge pressure on parents and create a sense of blame for those who are doing their best.

I believe each person is always doing their best (in any given situation, with the cards they have been dealt and with what they know). But it is the adults (not the children in their care) who have the capacity for reflection, insight and change, to develop healthier coping styles.

That said, even with good intentions and good emotional regulation it is inevitable people will suffer other types of trauma in the journey through life. But, overall, people would begin with a sense of safety and self, and that would make a huge difference to the way other trauma is dealt with and, in fact, whether it is even created.

Therapists like Dr Terry Levy, who runs the Evergreen Psychotherapy Centre, won’t work with children until they’ve worked with the parents. They also use a life script that gathers the kind of information that is relevant to getting to the heart of the types of dysfunctional beliefs and behaviours at play in a person’s life.

For me it's not about "oh look at my trauma" in the sense of "isn't it terrible". As light-touch as my experiences are (in comparison to some of the atrocities that happen to people), they have shaped me deeply. I see how I have been limited by my own beliefs and trauma reactions within my body, it has kept me playing small, from fulfilling my potential and acting from a place of compassion.

So I can wholeheartedly appreciate that if light-touch trauma can do that, what a slam-dunk the big-T trauma (sexual abuse, violence, war or political violence, natural disasters, serious accidents, life threatening illnesses etc) causes.

Now the real key for me is this. Big-T trauma and its effects are becoming well recognized. But little-t trauma, especially normal developmental trauma, remains largely unseen and yet lives within almost every single person on the planet today. It creates disease, chronic pain and illness and it stunts our ability to address systemic issues within our relationships and within our society.

That is why I share my experiences and insights, to shine a light on the microscopic stuff, the irritating sand in the oyster shell that are our pearls of wisdom, our key to compassion and evolution.

Could I be wrong? Sure there’s always room for a misread of reality because it’s all about perspective. But if this resonates with you then I have every confidence that with awareness, curiosity, focus in learning new skills and persistence, you can fulfil your potential in every area of your life.

As family therapist and author Terry Real says “We may not (right now) be able to bring peace to the Middle East or to Syria or whatever else but we can bring peace to our living rooms. So start with your life. And your life is your relationships. So learn how to do that and do it really well.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Life Really Does Support Your Deepest Desires (And How to Access Its Support), You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Is Your Responsibility and Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“When people treat you like they don’t care, believe them.” Samuel Rodenhizer

One of my big discoveries in the last year was this premise that some of us internalise feelings, thoughts and emotions, whereas others externalise them. What I’ve found, put simply, is people who internalise things feel pain; people who externalise have troubles (usually because the people around them are in pain).

I’m an internaliser, and I’m hyper-attuned to other people’s feelings. I used to live in hope that people would see just how hurt or upset I was, the same way I could tell that they were upset at me, and – in the same way I would seek to create harmony – they would seek to create harmony with me. But it’s often not the case, especially since I seem to attract people who externalise their feelings.

The best explanation I have found for this dynamic/ coping style/ way of being in the world, takes this back to how well caregivers tune into a child’s needs from the cradle through the school years. When I ask myself:

• 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?”

This gives me an indication of how attuned my parents were to my needs. Big clue here is that parenting until the late twentieth century predominantly treated kids as an empty vessel who needed moulded to fit society. A child’s feelings did not feature so much as the drive to be good, to fit in and most definitely – as I quickly learned - not to upset the apple cart (being my parents and their anxieties).

So, as Teal swan 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:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). 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 (otherwise defined as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

Understanding this helped me to understand my partner (and others) more, because he is an externaliser. There was many a time he would project something onto me and cause me pain, or I would be feeling pain from an interaction from some other quarter, and he just couldn’t empathise.

Something relationship expert Terry Real (founder of Relational Life Therapy) talks about in his series Fierce Intimacy, and Wendy Behary in her book Disarming the Narcissist, is that people who externalise their pain (Terry refers to their behaviour as grandiosity), projecting it onto others, need motivation to change.

They agree that people who externalise don’t feel bad, in fact Teal Swan goes so far as to say “the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble”.

Terry Real says the kind of conversation he has when working with someone who has this coping style might go along the lines of “What kind of father did you have? What kind of father do you want to be? It must really kill you to realise that – in this family – you’ve become your father. What kind of relationship do you want your kids to have with you?”

He has a saying “Pass it back or pass it on. If we don’t wrestle this together, the people who are going to be most damaged are your children.”

For both my partner and I this has become our biggest motivator for change, we don’t want to pass on our dysfunctional ways of being in the world to our kids. We want our kids to have healthy self esteem, healthy boundaries, compassion and empathy for their fellow beings and the creatures and planet around us.

Figuring out what my limitations are, as a result of the way I subconsciously reacted to the people and my environment growing up (psychologists call this maladaptive schemas), and weeding them out, has been part of a healing journey.

As an adult I found myself longing for acceptance, validation and recognition of who I am, what I need, what I feel and what I achieve. I was longing for support and connection, and a feeling of safety to be vulnerable. I began to understand that the way I was being in the world was basically subconsciously attracting repeat experiences into my life as opportunities to have a more successful outcome.

Once I became conscious of a lot of these patterns of beliefs and behaviours, and why I had developed them, it became a lot easier to see where I was shooting myself in the metaphorical foot.

But as Terry Real says, “it takes more than putting our past in the past, it takes skills to have healthy relationships with people, and skills can be learned”. He explains “There’s a skill in learning to love yourself, there is skill in learning good boundaries, there are skills in learning how to stand up for yourself with love and how to respond with generosity instead of defensiveness”.

I was asked by someone why they found themselves having to discard friendships, because she seemed to be attracting friends who could only talk about themselves and never asked about her. She couldn’t figure out how some people could focus so totally on themselves.

I shared with her that I’ve found it takes getting good at expressing and holding my boundaries to get what I need from relationships and, for that, I’d definitely recommend both Evette Rose’s Healing Your Boundaries and Terry Cole’s Boundary Boss.

But I also really like Terry Real’s approach where, in Relational Life Therapy, he teaches relational empowerment, the golden rule being “What can I give you to help you to give me what I want?”

While that is indeed empowering, he also admits that one of the core skills required in any relationship, and he calls this the proto-skill, is shifting out of that triggered part of you (the wounded child that is the knee-jerk reaction, automatic, unthought, compulsive response) back into the adult part, with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex that can think and make deliberate decisions.

Regardless of the new skills I’ve learned, I was somewhat heartened to hear him admit that one of the things he personally still finds hard is containing that desire to react when his wife comes at him with a triggered self-righteous energy. He says:

“Containing that impulse, settling into my adult, holding myself with warm regard, holding her in warm regard (even though she’s out of her mind), and doing whatever I can to make things better, that moment right there, that’s a tough moment.”

The point is, though, it can be done. And while some people seem not to care about others, I find it useful to remember it’s just a coping style, and I am often able to have compassion for why this is the case (if not in the moment, enough to keep me in the game in some longer term relationships).

I also have figured out my boundaries, what I am and am not willing to put up with, what the deal breakers are and what I’m willing to do about it. I am getting better and better at speaking my truth and holding those boundaries. What I know for sure, though, is I cannot change anyone else; the only thing I can change is how I think, feel and react.

Ironically the more those of us who do care about others can connect in with ourselves and honour our own needs, wants and desires, and can hold those who seem self absorbed accountable in a loving way, the more aware of our own needs and those of others we will all become.

In addendum, I observe we all have the capacity to internalise and externalise, just the same as we all have the capacity to be narcissistic or people pleasers at times. It’s perhaps more helpful to think of these things in more general terms rather than as definitive labels. For example, as a newborn and young child, I internalised a lot of pain, shame and guilt, but as an adult I often subconsciously projected this outwardly when triggered (meaning I experienced emotions that were overly intense in comparison to the present situation as it had re-triggered the pain I internalised as a child and I then put that pain on/blamed something/someone else). Different circumstances and different people elicit different responses depending on what they echo from our earliest experiences of feeling safe and seen. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.