The Soul’s Yearning – How to Recognise Your Inner Work

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay 

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.