In case you haven’t heard, I am planning an amazing trip to Australia and New Zealand.  I am very excited to take my children to the other side of the world and cross many things off my bucket list.  As a travel addict, my bucket list is not short.  But I am willing to give it a try.  This trip has a ton of moving parts.  There are 8 cities.  There are 9 planes, two trains, several rental cars and a ferry.  There are tons of AirBnb contacts.  There are 3 workshops in 3 cities with 3 different conference rooms.  There are 2 12-year-olds in tow.  And that is all before we book one tour or excursion.  But so far, everything has been working out.  Things have been coming together.

Most importantly, I have received approval for work visas in both countries.  This is an incredibly complex task.  In some ways, it has consumed me.  And I am sure it has consumed me more than someone with less or different trauma.  I don’t do bureaucracy well.  My belief systems don’t align with it.  There too many hoops to jump through.  There are too many forms to fill out.  There are too many uncontrollable elements to the process.  And there are too many power-trippy authority figures involved.  I can’t force my way through the process.  I have to trust.  And my controller doesn’t have time for silly things like trust.  So when the visas came through, my controller switched their approach.  They decided that the problem isn’t on the front-end so it must be on the back-end.  We travel all he way there and be ambushed by angry Australian authority figures.  Why?  I have no idea.  Probably just for existing.

I am sure you are not surprised to hear that I have been journaling about this quite a bit.  There has been many different attempts by my defenders to keep me safe and small and risk-free.  In general, they are not happy about all the balls I am throwing into the air without a fool-proof plan to keep them there.  Don’t get me wrong.  I have planned.  I have lots and lots of plans.  My use of Excel spreadsheets should have Microsoft seeking me out as their spokesperson.  But when it comes to something like this, there has to be some trust things will work out.  And my journaling has not reflected a trusting and peaceful inner response.  So I thought I would share some of my inner beliefs with you.  Something tells me you might relate.

The universe is stacked against me at all times.  With everything that happened to me as a child, there is no way I could make any other conclusion.  My family wanted to make sure I knew I was alone with no support.  They made it a point to show me the futility of my actions.  They squashed those momentary glimpses of hope.  Whenever I showed a semblance of confidence, they were there to knock me down.  They made it clear that their control was global and inescapable.  And they even made it appear that everyone in the world was on their side.  That meant I only had one choice.  I could conform to my role in the family or fight a losing battle to be free.  Both were miserable and exhausting options.  But that was all I was given.

Authority figures are meant to punish me.  As with every single child in the world, I modeled my image of authority figures after my parents.  This is not some enigmatic experience caused by trauma.  This is exactly how children think.  And it applies to anyone who has power including God.  So when someone has more power than me in any situation, I assume they will do bad things with it.  And the fear that often shows up in my system can drive my actions in the wrong direction.  Authority figures respond to my fear in a way that often proves me right.  And this is how my cycles perpetuated themselves until I started waking up and considering the possibility that people might be helpful.

Everything good is a set-up.  In my childhood, everything good was temporary.  But that’s not really unusual.  Everything is temporary.  That’s the truth.  But it happened differently in my childhood.  There were some not-so-random random events which ended most of what mattered to me.  If I was excited about something, my family knew they had to find a way to squash it.  This included everything from friendships to hobbies.  If something built my confidence, it had to go.  So I learned not to get too excited when something seemed like it might work out.  I kept it all a bit muted on the happiness scale.  That way, my family would no longer be able to figure out how to get me.  But it also meant I could not dive into anything with the passion I needed to succeed.

These beliefs are detrimental to living a life of purpose, but we can move to the other side of them.  We can accept them for what they are, write from them, question their accuracy in our current life and shift them.  We will have to come back around to them each time we take the next amazing step, but we can keep taking our lives forward in passionate and purposeful ways.  Our families may have planted these detrimental beliefs into our systems, but we can move them out.  It is our right to believe anything is possible.  It is our right to live purposefully.  And we can take that right back.