Making Sense of our Search for Love
Our search for love is a fallible, desperate and often unproductive venture. We can spend decades looking for some way to end our painful loneliness until we give up and isolate. It is a debilitating swing from one painful way of living to another. And it seems to be completely out of our control. We may make resolutions and goals. We may decide we won’t date any more addicts. We may promise ourselves we won’t ignore any more red flags. We might convince ourselves that we are strong enough to avoid self-erasure the next time. But when the next time rolls around, we are swept away by our dreams of the perfect love. We rush. We don’t set boundaries. We excuse the red flags. And we end up in another painful and futile spot.
So the inevitable happens. We isolate. We sit in our loneliness while feeling there is no hope to have a reasonable relationship with another person. We decide that the world is made of horrible people who we cannot trust. We agree that relationships are not for us. We stay away. We find new hobbies that don’t involve people. We watch lots of movies on Netflix. We scroll through a ton of social media. We work too much. We may even find other addictions to numb ourselves out. And we convince ourselves everything is okay. We are happy enough. The emptiness is tolerable on most days. But then sometimes, it isn’t.
And the cycle continues with painful extremes. There does not appear to be a way out. And honestly, we are all tired of the misery it brings. But it feels so hopeless. There doesn’t seem to be a way out of this excruciating pendulum of searching and giving up. But I am here to tell you that there is hope. I don’t have a quick fix. I don’t have a fix you will like. Your defenses will fight me every step of the way. They may even start distracting you now. But I have a solution. For those who are willing to power through their defenses, there is a way to live life with fulfilling relationships. But first, we must build our awareness of what is actually happening. We have to understand what is driving this process. So here are some secrets to help you make some sense of the process.
Your choice of partner is not random. Have you ever looked back on your history of partners and wondered why they all seemed to have the same triggering characteristics? You may have sworn they didn’t when you were in relationship. But hindsight was 20/20. And you can’t understand how it happened again and again. Well, that was your love seeker in action. They are desperate to resolve their pain about the love they never received. And they will resolve it by recreating childhood relationships until they figure out how to get their love. If they can do it, it will resolve the past pain without the need to grieve. They will have their answer and the pain can finally end. But they keep choosing and attracting the same type of people from childhood. They are the only people who would interest the love seeker. If someone healthy comes along and expresses real love, the love seeker rejects them as boring or a liar. And the pattern continues.
Your loneliness is a flashback. I am not suggesting you aren’t lonely today. Humans are meant to be with other humans. We desire connection. But when you feel the desperate, pained need for another person, you are feeling what it was like to be a child in an abusive family. You are feeling the life or death fear of being neglected and abandoned. You are feeling the desperation that convinced you to leave yourself behind for one or two snippets of appreciation and attention. You are experiencing a flashback. And you are probably experiencing the desperate desire to numb that flashback with any addiction or person available. If you can sit with the flashback and help your love seeker through it, you can stop the cycle. If not, the pattern will continue.
You are never going to find what you are looking for externally. As you may have gathered, there is not an external solution to your internal pain. You can make it stop temporarily. That is the truth of all addictions. They are meant to give you relief for a moment or two. But without the healing on the inside, the same patterns will continue on the outside. The love seeker needs to get their love from you. They need to be heard by you. They need to feel validated through your compassion. The internal re-traumatizing self-hatred has to move out through expression. These internal changes will give you the grounded self-respect necessary to set boundaries and reject those red flags. It is the way to end the pattern for good.
Your love seeker hates that idea. You may be thinking that your love seeker will love the idea of finally being heard. But this is not something the love seeker wants anything to do with. They want their external savior and they want it now. They will not stop until they get it. So even once you get past your defenses, you will have to work with a love seeker who doesn’t want your love … at least for a while. But that’s okay. Stay persistent. Persevere through the blocks. They will change their mind over time. And you will begin to feel peace for the first time in your life. This pattern doesn’t have to be a life sentence. You can change it for good.
Give yourself the gift of awareness when it comes to your love seeking patterns. You don’t have to be a victim to the beliefs your childhood abusers instilled in you. With the right understanding of how your past is driving your present, you can move out of this pain and into a better life … a life with real love. It is possible. Come join me in Survivor’s Guide for Life in June as we explore how to break this cycle.
5 Signs You are Addicted to Love
As I mentioned last week, addiction is everywhere. Some addictions are considered perfectly acceptable by the norms of society. And some addictions are not. But those acceptable forms of addiction are not less devastating to our inner peace. They just happen to be approved by the controller. But there is an addiction above all addictions. Actually, it is the foundation of all addictions really. It is at the basis for everything we do. And this addiction plays out within the norms of society most of the time. That makes it stealthy on an individual and societal level. So awareness is low and the impact is high. And that addiction is the love addiction.
You might be thinking that you can’t be addicted to something you need. But that’s not true. You can be incredibly addicted to something you need. Food is a great example. It isn’t an issue that you want it. It is an issue with how you get it and what you do with it. It is about the approach and not the thing itself. Love addiction is very real. It may be the most pervasive addiction in the world. It is not just reserved for those with complex trauma. It is born from the loss of the love we needed in childhood. Even the best parents failed at this sometimes. It is fueled by the grief of those losses. And we will do almost anything to avoid that grief.
It might not seem like it, but this addiction can destroy our lives. It destroys our lives by keeping us on an endless quest to find an external solution to an internal problem. We jump through hoop after hoop in the desperation to finally end our pain. And it takes our focus far away from where it should be. So let’s look at how a love addiction manifests in our lives. When we know what it looks like on the outside, we have a chance of bringing awareness to the inner pain driving it.
You don’t know who you are without a relationship. After years of abuse, you have lost yourself so thoroughly that you can only define yourself through the mirror that relationship provides. This means that if nobody is there, you are nobody. You are nothing. This makes a relationship absolutely imperative at all times. There is no option but to make something work. An abusive or unfulfilling relationship is better than being alone. But being another person is not sustainable.
You are constantly asking yourself what the other person wants to hear. When you consider answering a question, what is the first thing that goes through your mind? Do you focus on what feels right to you or what you think the other wants to hear? If you often choose the later, you are attempting to meet their needs above your own. But prioritizing another person above your own identity is not going to create a lasting relationship.
You feel unheard, unseen and misunderstood by everyone. When you erase yourself for others, you are training them how to treat you. You are unconsciously informing them that you do not prioritize yourself so they don’t have to either. You are not showing them who you are so they have no chance of actually getting to know who you are. When you want them to know you, they can’t. They have never learned who you are. So unless they can read minds, they cannot possibly understand the real you. And a masked relationship won’t last.
You make excuses for red flags. When you come from relational trauma, you have learned that most behaviors from others are excusable. You may get to the point where you can’t even see the red flags at all. But if you do, you will be quick to provide excuses for those behaviors. This stems from your deep need to be in relationship at all costs and the belief that people who will be in relationship with you are scarce. As the abusive behaviors get bigger, so do the excuses until it implodes. Abusive relationships will never work.
You believe you can change another person. You will likely come into adult relationships with the same mentality as childhood relationships. And in childhood, the only way to fight hopelessness was to believe you were somehow in control. This was likely accomplished through self-blame. If it was your fault, it was fixable. But there was a problem. It wasn’t your fault. And it wasn’t fixable. And with that unresolved problem, you have parts who want to fix it by finally figuring out how to change the next person. But people cannot be changed. So the relationship is not sustainable.
Love addiction leads to constant pain in relationships. So the next time you find yourself mired in desperation and hopelessness about a relationship, ask yourself about its origins. Did it come from a place of mutual love and respect? Or is it an attempt to resolve a deep grief from years of losses? Use these signs to help identify the answer. Next week, I will write about some steps to stop the love addiction cycle. And if you want to dive deeper into the nuances of finding and stopping this cycle, join Survivor’s Guide for Life and explore more about love addiction.
It’s Time to Grieve
I heard another song on the radio today about a break-up. It was also about alcohol. It focused on alcohol being the only hope for coping with the break-up. I can’t count the number of songs about alcohol fixing the broken heart. It is everywhere. Alcohol is glorified as the proper numbing solution for those pesky emotions. It is normalized as a way to get through almost anything: a break-up, a bad day at work, motherhood. We only talk negatively about alcohol when it gets in the way of our manic functioning, our other major numbing tool. Only then is it a problem. Only then do we judge people for their alcohol use because we consider them too weak. There are only societal rewards for those who are able to properly numb out their emotions without letting their crazy daily schedule falter. Everyone else gets the stigma.
Alcohol or no alcohol, our society considers emotional numbing to be a strength. That is the truth. The less we feel, the more normal we are. And it is a massive problem. Running from our emotions causes most of what is wrong with the world today. All addictions are caused by emotional suppression. Most physical illnesses are caused by emotional suppression. Wars, hatred and the general drive for power over others are caused by emotional suppression. The huge discrepancy in lifestyle between the rich and the poor is caused by emotional suppression. The destruction of our planet is caused by emotional suppression. You get the idea. So why can’t we see this? Why can’t we wake up to something that sounds so simple? There’s an easy answer. We are terrified.
We are terrified of the emotions we hold. We are afraid they will kill us. We are afraid we will not be able to handle them in our body. We are afraid these emotions will bring unmanageable change. We are afraid of our vulnerability and what that might make us susceptible to. We are afraid. We learned to be afraid in childhood. Our defenders took on the brainwashing held by the rest of society. What started as a tiny human who was ready to flow with their emotions and body sensations became a rigid, “zombiefied”, floating head. The idea of going back where we came from, of sorting through all that unfelt muck feels like a death sentence. In other words, our defenders have traded our fear of death for a figurative death of not living life and a literal early death from the toll this takes on our bodies.
I know I am being blunt, but I believe it is the only way to get through. Our defenses are walls. They block the messages we need to hear from our internal worlds and our external worlds. So I will get a bit loud and blunt because without emotional expression, we will not heal. We will not heal our inner worlds. And we will not heal our external worlds. It just won’t happen. We can run. We can drink all the alcohol and take all the drugs. We can rise to the top of companies and organizations. We can buy the biggest houses. We can travel the entire world. And we will not heal. Life will not get better for us. We will not find peace. And I don’t want you to go through that kind of fruitless searching. So I will be blunt.
In my experience with healing myself and working with clients, the most difficult emotion for people to reach is grief. I am not referring to crying. Some survivors may find it easy to cry. They might even cry all day. But grieving is different. It is a deep letting go of what we cannot change. It often dances with anger. The more anger we express, the more access we have to grief. And the more grief we express, the more we ground into the anger we need to change our lives. You can’t have one without the other. But it is hard to reach. Our defenses go out of their way to shut it down and numb it out. And until we build awareness of these defenses and how they work, we won’t get past them.
But in my own recovery, it is the grief that has been life changing. And contrary to the defenders’ expectations, it has all been good. We have to let go of what we are holding on to so we must grieve it. We must grieve the lack of unconditional love. We must grieve the lost time we have spent looking for another way to fix the pain. We must grieve those who have come and gone from our lives as we have tried to get our needs met. We must grieve our missing selves as they have lied dormant waiting for us to come back. We must grieve the lost opportunities we could not see because we were not awake to see them. And we must grieve the actual deaths of people and pets, the deaths we could not grieve because we believed it would have opened up a tidal wave of grief we could not handle. We have to let ourselves wail and sob and heave in pain. We must not listen to the defenders who say this lead to annihilation. We must jump into this grief. We owe it to ourselves to do this. It is the ultimate self-care. In doing this, our lives will shift and change in amazing ways. It will seem almost magical although we will know it isn’t. People will ask what changed and we can answer them with one powerful phrase.
I let go.
Waltzing Into Life
(photo courtesy of Fred Astaire Dance Studio Richmond)
I danced this weekend. For anyone who knows me well, this is not surprising. I have always loved to dance. I have taken ballroom dancing classes off and on since I was in high school. I will go out of my way to go to a swing or salsa night. Most of my life partners have been chosen based on their ability to dance (which has not proven to be the best approach). And I know that I am happiest when I am dancing. But there have always been problems with my ability to embrace ballroom dancing to the extent I want. My back scoliosis and overall posture were never good enough for me to get the true form I wanted. My heavy dissociation caused problems with my coordination and balance, making it hard to master some of the more complicated moves. And while I have always been able to dance well on a crowded dance floor, my overall fear of visibility and attention was never going to let me perform in one of those sparkly outfits in front of others. That was out of the question … until this weekend.
I picked up formal dance lessons again last August. I don’t know what came over me. I just knew intuitively that it was time. And the universe confirmed this decision by providing a brand new studio and the undying support of those who worked there. I started slow. My dissociation made it difficult for me to put the names of the steps with the actual movements. And with a week between lessons, forgetfulness was higher than usual. My instructors were patient though. They didn’t understand the trauma side of things, but they were kind. I went to see a competition. Honestly, I had no logical understanding of why I was there. I performed in a group dance with my studio and had a wonderful day. And I let them convince me to work on a showcase (a dance routine to my own song-choice to be performed in front of an audience). My daughter picked the song: Maleficent’s Once Upon a Dream. And we started to prepare a Viennese Waltz. I’ll be honest. It was terrifying.
We spent most of this time working on my balance and posture. And it did pay off. My spine and shoulders and neck made massive shifts (which also brought up memories and emotions I needed to process). I was able to memorize the routine and coordinate some complex moves after tons of practice. I even found a two-tone dress that would symbolize the duality within all humans, an ode to our parts. When I waltzed out on that dance floor, I am sure most people assumed this was easy for me. They probably decided that I had no problem with the visibility required for this dance. They may have assumed I was just one of those confident people who could naturally do this. They may have even wondered why I wasn’t a bit better based on all their initial conclusions. But honestly, this is a defense. When we want to excuse ourselves from doing hard things, we decide that these things were not hard for the person doing them. It is a classic defensive move and it keeps us small. In reality, I have spent the past year inundated by my defenders about this desire to dance. And today, I am going to share some of those messages with you because we need to know the truth. We are supposed to be terrified when we do what we want. These are the things I have been hearing.
Who do you think you are? Nobody wants to watch you dance. You aren’t as good as those other people who have been dancing for years. You will never be as good as them. Stop trying to be someone you’re not. You are not a dancer. You are just an uncoordinated average person. Quit being ridiculous.
You are wasting time. There are so many things you need to be doing. You are a single parent and you run your own business. Why do you think you have time for this stuff? You are supposed to be working. You don’t get to have fun. I am not sure why you think you get to have fun like that.
You are wasting money. Seriously. This shit is expensive. Quit spending all the money on frivolous things. The dress is expensive and you don’t even wear dresses. Why did you have to buy those sparkly things for your hair? These lessons cost too much. The competitions cost too much. We don’t have money to burn. It doesn’t grow on trees. You are being irresponsible. You should be spending this on your children. You should be spending this on marketing. Stop it!
You are too old for this. You look like a fool. You are a 46-year-old woman trying to dance in front of others. You are past the age to do this crap. This is for young people. You missed your window. It is over now. Act your age. Take up knitting or something.
You will never be the best. There is no satisfying end-goal. You are not going to travel to some international ballroom competition and get a big trophy. Others are so much better than you. Why would you want to do something if you can’t be the best? What is the point of that?
If you put yourself out there, you will draw attention from your abusers. I don’t know why they haven’t noticed you yet with all this stuff you have been doing on the internet, but you are asking for trouble with this visibility thing. They are going to find you. They will show up at one of these events and taunt you, embarrass you in front of an audience or make you mess up. You need to hide from them.
Every single one of these objections is a defense. They are based on the lies I heard when I was growing up. It is meant to keep me safe by keeping me small. It is based on the fears of living with horrific trauma. And it is very convincing until it is questioned. When I question it, none of it makes sense. I am not supposed to live life tied to my home, my computer or my parenting. I am supposed to live, really live. So the next time you come up with an idea that feels exciting and are suddenly inundated with all the reasons you cannot do it, write from them. Question them. Acknowledge your fear. Validate its existence. And do it anyway.
Breaking Through our Inner Obstacles
We live in a world that focuses on the external. We are consumed by the need for status, labels, money and approval. But we are missing the valuable information about what lies underneath this drive. At the foundation is the need to survive. And driving that need is the controller, the inner part within us that keeps us running away from ourselves and toward whatever society thinks we should be. They will flood the mind with plans to secure our external life, but they didn’t get this way on their own. They were inundated with nonstop threats and traumatic experiences. They had no choice. They had to survive. And this is how they did it. But we were never meant to be that way. And unfortunately, the controller problem is much more pervasive than we think. It is everywhere.
So we run around playing whack-a-mole with our external problems. We desperately try to make a life that others will respect or even envy. We try to keep up with the Jones’. But it seems that no matter what we do, life keeps throwing us the same patterns and cycles. The details might be a bit dissimilar. They might be dressed a little differently. They might have diverse characteristics. But in the end, it is more of the same. And we end up in a place of exhaustion and futility. We give up.
But what if I told you the answer was never in the external world. Don’t get me wrong, watching our external world can be a powerful way to bring an understanding of what really does matter. But in the end, the answers aren’t there. They are within us. Even when we see very tangible problems in the outside world, the seemingly unresolvable has a solution. But we won’t see it without an understanding of how we stop ourselves from seeing it. We must go deep within ourselves. I am not talking about the conscious mind. We already know what that says. We have molded it to say what we think we need to say. We have to go where we haven’t been. We must go to the unconscious and delve into what we are telling ourselves, the world, the universe. All the manifestation power in the world is stored in our unconscious. And until we go there, we won’t change things externally.
Not surprisingly, that is easier said than done. Why? We have defenders. And those defenders are trying to keep us from seeing what we need to see. They will tell us we can try to find that savior one more time. They will tell us we can set one more goal at school or at work or at the gym and this time, it will work. They will tell us that we just have to lose the weight, get the promotion or change to that new job. That will make our pain go away. But it never works, does it? The inner obstacles are stronger. We must build awareness of them to have a hope of moving out of our pain and into some peace. So let’s take a look at how the inner obstacles work.
They look for evidence that the past is right. Our defenders act like lawyers in a courtroom. If we were told we were unworthy in childhood, they will only take in the evidence that supports our unworthiness. They won’t let us see any level of worthiness the world is reflecting toward us. If we experienced thwarting of our success and happiness in childhood, our defenders will keep showing us how others are still trying to thwart us. They will ignore any support we may be receiving. They will heavily weight these events in the mind because they are in support of the wiring in the brain.
They paralyze us from the actions we need to take. While some of us don’t know our purpose because it has been blocked from our conscious mind, some of us have ideas of the direction we would like to take. But if we don’t believe we can attain our dreams, we will be unable to take the steps in the external world to make it happen. If we do take a step and are faced with difficulties in the external world, our defenders will use that as evidence to stay futile and to shut down any further attempts. They don’t understand that it is normal to face challenges. They will convince us that it is a sign and we should quit. That futility will keep us stuck even when we have a sense of where we would like life to go.
They change our energy. The law of attraction is often sold in a way that is unhelpful to trauma survivors. Positive intentions are not successful for us because the conscious mind does not manifest. But the unconscious mind does manifest quite powerfully. And when we hold the brainwashing from childhood in our unconscious, it blocks the energy that can attract the positive things we are looking for. As we release the unconscious beliefs telling us we can’t, the energy to attract it is unblocked. They go together. And they are powerful.
If we want to shift our inner obstacles and make room for new patterns, we must start by seeing them in our inner parts. We need to accept they are there, validate their perspectives, feel their pain and listen to their examples from the past. As we do this, we bring those unconscious beliefs forward and allow them to transform in the conscious adult mind. We can allow ourselves to consider other possibilities, different scenarios than what the unconscious past has always created. As we open ourselves up to these new beliefs, we will begin to see our external world shift. This is why we will be exploring how to break through our inner obstacles for the month of May in Survivor’s Guide. Come join us and learn how to change your external world from the inside out.
Letting Go
Our cat died this week. She actually passed on Easter Sunday. She didn’t pick the best day. After 14 years of life, she might have been a little more considerate than to choose a holiday. This isn’t about me though. It is about the kids. I was not her biggest fan. She was supposed to be my ex’s cat. He adopted her when we were together. And like everything and everyone else, she was left behind. She became just another symbol of abandonment. And she played the part well. She scratched up one piece of expensive furniture at a time. She had literal pissing contests with my dog ruining multiple rugs. She hated my kids when they were toddlers and refused to come inside until they were in bed at night. Whenever I watched a movie at night, she would need to come in and out of the house 25 times, usually during the best scenes. She never knew how to retract her claws which hurt … a lot.
My inner conversation about this was not good. There was a deep unconscious connection between this cat and my ex. She fueled my karma kid like nothing else. I was being punished by my ex for thinking I was strong and could raise the kids on my own. I was being punished by my ex for actually being strong and raising the kids on my own. I was being punished by my ex for not needing him even though he left me. I was being punished by my ex for not taking care of him anymore. Even after he died, I was being punished by my ex from “the other side”. To my karma kid, he had a hold on me even though he was gone. And this is typical for the karma kid. They really do see people as powerful in these ways. They are often told by abusers that they would always be bound to others and would be punished if they dared to think otherwise.
So I didn’t really like the cat. But I also knew it wasn’t her fault that she was crazy. And I knew she wasn’t really punishing me. I never gave up on her. I even brought her back to life once when she had a heart attack and died while sitting next to me. I performed kitty CPR which I didn’t even know what a thing. She revived, sat up and looked at me like, “What are you looking at?” She always had her food and her water (dripped from the faucet of course). And I look her to the vet despite the near death experiences with her claws. I would never give up on an animal. That’s not my style. And she grew to love the kids as they stopped grabbing her tail. And we even had our moments. Two nights before she died, I actually looked at her and said, “You’re really not that bad.” I think she appreciated it in her own way. She gave me a long, slow blink.
Maybe that’s what she needed. Maybe my karma kid had finally energetically separated her from my ex. And maybe, just maybe, I was able to let go of him (and apparently her) on a deeper level. I am not suggesting my recovery killed my cat. She was 14. For an outdoor hunting cat who never backed down from a fight, that’s a good life. I know I am not powerful enough to dictate her life and death. But animals are very tuned in to energies. They know their job and they know when they are done. They can let go, something most humans can’t do. We hold on and hold on and hold on to everything and everyone and every animal. We resist change like there is nothing good that could ever come from it. When in reality, it is our purpose to learn how to let go. It is why we are here.
I have worked hard to learn the art of letting go. It is a quintessential part of the recovery process. We can’t recover without it. This is why I am constantly preaching to my clients to grieve. Grieving is the most productive emotion we can express. It clears out connections that no longer support our growth. And it makes room for the new. In my case, I am letting go of my ex (and the 100 people he represents) so that I can make room for new friendships (and maybe more). And it is scary to let go of the way I have always defined myself. I don’t want to figure out life without all the old rules. There is too much to figure out. There are too many directions it could all go. But there is hope too. There are soooooo many directions it could all go. And that has an interesting ring to it. My freedom fighters think it could be cool. So I’ll keep working to let go. I’ll keep peeling off the layers of my ties to the past. I’ll keep ending my contracts that I never wanted to make. And maybe I’ll miss that cat a little too.
Team Self
I have been working through some huge resistance from my karma kid this week. They are feeling anxious about the direction I am heading in this life. They are convinced I will be punished for my newfound boldness as I explore what life really has to offer me. Believe me, I never really thought life had much to offer until the past couple of years. But that’s changing and I am happy with that. Well, most of me is happy with that. My karma kid is terrified. They believe I will take it too far and be dropkicked by the universe in the process. I get it. It was what they were taught. Since I returned from my trip to London and Paris, I have contemplated some bold ideas for next steps in life and business. And my karma kid has inundated me with resistance.
First, they have made me sick. It hasn’t been debilitating. I am still functioning. But it has definitely impacted my overall productivity. And that infuriates my controller. Next, they have brought in futility. They have tried to convince me that life will never be what I want it to be. They have tried to tell me I will never escape my role in my family. But it is getting harder and harder for them to convince me of that. I have seen too many changes. And then, the pièce de résistance came two days ago when they decided the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral was my fault. If I had not shown up in Paris after being told never to go back, this would not have happened. My karma kid believes that death and destruction follow me wherever I go. And honestly, I feel bad for this part. The life of an unhealed karma kid is torture. They live in a constant hell of fear and futility and shame. And when we are enmeshed with a karma kid, we are in that same place.
But I have been on this road for a while now. And I see how this karma kid can make things look different than they really are. I am pushing past these things with a focus on all that is right in my current life and potentially in my future. I am excited about all my crazy ideas even if I can hear my karma kid’s fears about them. I can see my karma kid starting to shift. I can see a very muted optimism about the potential end to their jail sentence. I can tell that deep down inside, they want to believe. But moving past a karma kid has taken a ton of effort and learning. They are the stealthiest inner part. It has taken an awareness of my unconscious on levels to which most humans don’t care to venture. It is hard work and frankly, it takes guts. But that’s why you are here, isn’t it? You have the guts to do this work. So I wanted to share some of the most common beliefs I have uncovered from my own karma kid so that you can look for them too.
I don’t deserve that thing I want. This is one of the most common shame-based beliefs for a karma kid to hold. They believe this because of how many things they were blamed for in childhood. They are often blamed for their own abuse. But abusers don’t stop there. Karma kids take the blame for other actions and emotions coming from the abusers. Karma kids will be blamed for an abuser’s anger. They will be blamed for random occurrences (think Notre Dame fire). They will be blamed for mistakes by others. They will be blamed for bad luck. And they will take on all the shame associated with it.
I am going to be punished. Abusers made it clear to the karma kid that any steps outside of the expectations would be met with punishment. They taught the karma kid to see random events as punishment. Anything bad that happened was the karma kid’s fault. And if something bad happened to the abuser, it was because of their association with the karma kid. So the karma kid was trained to look for punishment from every person, animal, rock and the universe as a whole. And they live in fear because of it.
I can’t live the life I want. Karma kids sign contracts with abusers. Maybe they don’t literally sign something (maybe they do). But they come to understand their life as a contract. They have a certain role and they are not permitted to consider life outside of it. If they do, they will be punished. If they do, they will fail because they are not worthy of it. So there is no point in trying. There is no point in reaching for the stars when they are mired in the quicksand. They are not meant for anything more than what their abusers assigned them. And they are inundated with futility because of it.
But our karma kids are not correct in their understanding of life. They have been brainwashed by people who are abusive and jealous and nasty. The source of their information is not credible. We can teach our karma kids to trust a new source and that is us. The grounded adult self knows the way forward to our best life. It can be more than our minds can fathom. But first, we have to help the karma kid find their way out of the muck. We need to free them from their jail cell. We need to help them see there is a new team to join. We need them on “team self”. That team is going places. And those places are amazing.
Lost on Vacation
I took a vacation last week. It was an epic vacation. I was brave. I went to two of the busiest cities with two of the most energetic kids. It wasn’t about relaxing. It was about experiencing. And we certainly did that. We did amazing things in both London and Paris. We saw shows, we visited sites, we ate lots of food, we shopped (a little), and I even met some of my clients. The kids handled the busy train systems with grace. It was a very good week. But not surprisingly, my parts were battling it out. I say it wasn’t surprising, but I was hoping it wouldn’t happen. I was hoping for one week without any recovery work. Even after all this time, even now that the work isn’t as overwhelming as it used to be, I still wanted to put the writing away for one week. But that wasn’t meant to be. The messages that came through on vacation were not new, but they were intensified by the situation.
It all started with a flashback in Paris. And I guess I could have expected it. If there is one thing I have learned about recovery, we tend to have trauma around our favorite things. There are blocks to our purpose. I am not suggesting that my purpose is to be a professional tourist (although I would consider it if the logistics worked out). But I do see travel as a part of my work and life. I am just too invested in people and cultures. I truly am a sociologist at heart, even with all my psychobabble. But I digress.
The flashback sent me spinning for a couple of days. Apparently, I was not supposed to return to Paris because of a contract with my father from 30 years ago. I am quite proud of it really. We were staying in a hotel and I knew he would try to come in my room. At this point, I was 15 and wizening up to his strategies. So I changed my room key. When he tried to come in, he was locked out. He pitched a fit in the hallway and drew attention from the employees of the hotel. Apparently, this scene he caused (which was of course my fault) made it impossible for us to ever return to this city. Yet here I was. And the anxiety was palpable.
I wasn’t able to move out of it until we left Paris unfortunately. I figured it out as soon as I hit English soil. It was frustrating. My freedom fighters wanted to have fun. My controller was using their normal strategies to prevent a disaster. And the result was unrest. And now, the battle was waging in my system. All the parts were angry. And I was just trying to have some damn fun. There were two messages I heard loud and clear.
I should be able to have a vacation without recovery. I could hear my controller loud and clear. They were furious. “I never get a break. It never ends. I just wanted a week with nothing to process. I should be able to have that. I work hard. Where is my reward? Why can’t this be my reward? I’m going to quit recovery because I am angry with the universe.” And I got it. I felt it. It made sense. This work is exhausting. But let’s face it. Outside of these travels, I have created a safe life. My freedom fighters would even call it boring. Triggers are as minimized as they can be with two children at home and a trauma recovery business. There is no more likely place to bring trauma forward than when everything changes. I get it … in theory.
I want to escape no matter what it takes. I could also hear my freedom fighters loud and clear. And they were furious too. “This is my chance. I can run. I can escape. I can get away from life. Nobody will ever find me here. I can live life to the fullest without all this responsibility. It will be different here. It will be better here. There will be no pain and only fun. I can finally be myself.” And I do know the feeling. I do know that my entire early life was enslavement. And I get that being a single parent can feel like a prison some days. But life doesn’t get easier when we run away. One of the best pieces of advice I received before I started this deep recovery was from a friend and co-worker. He said, “Elisabeth, you can’t escape yourself.” And he was right. But my freedom fighters want to try. Life isn’t about escaping. It is about shaping it to be what we want. That might seem harder at first glance. But when we realize that there is no escape from the one thing we want to escape, we can acknowledge there is no choice. We must make our lives instead of running from them.
So I am back from vacation with greater insights about who I am and what I have been through. I also had a good time running around a couple of great cities. And I recognize the importance of what all my parts brought to the table last week. We will find the balance we need to create the free life we deserve. And I know it will feel like a life we don’t need to control or escape from. I know I am stepping closer to that life every day.
It’s Not All About You
We heard many confusing statements when we were children. Let’s face it. Our entire environment was incredibly confusing. We didn’t know what the rules were. We weren’t supposed to know. Our abusers wanted us to feel unsure about our reality so we would not fight back. And it worked. Our role in relationships was the most confusing. From some perspectives, it seemed like we were very important. We were responsible every time our abusers felt an emotion. We were in charge of making sure everything was perfect for them. We were told our abuse was our fault. That was so much control. It was too much control. We couldn’t handle it. But simultaneously, we seemed to have no value at all. We were nothing. Our opinions didn’t matter. Our needs weren’t important. Our emotions weren’t allowed. We were non-existent. The difference was too much to reconcile for our child minds. So we stored these very different understandings within parts of self.
In adulthood, that created problems. It has left us grappling with the truth. We have attracted the wrong people and have been unsure how to navigate the responsibility and worthlessness reflected by these relationships. We don’t have boundaries. If we do, they aren’t respected by others. We try to save and rescue others because we believe we are responsible for their pain and struggles. In the end, we are blamed for things that cannot possibly be our responsibility. And we are told we are selfish when we have spent every minute trying to appease the other. This is the life of the co-dependent. These cycles create overwhelm leaving us with only one choice. Isolation.
But maybe what we are doing is selfish in some ways. We are trying to fix another person and put them in the box we need them to be in. We want to fix our childhood relationships by repeating them with a happy ending. And we desperately want this person to be the one who finally takes away our pain. Maybe if we just work hard enough, they will finally get it and do the right thing. But they never get it, do they? And they never will. They aren’t meant to get it. They are meant to be yet another reminder about our need to look inward for resolution. We need to find our unconditional love by healing our need for the wrong kind of love. We need to find our answers by undoing the self-erasure and living authentically. It is only when we recognize just how amazing we are and stop caring if anyone else gets it that the unconditional love comes from others. That is the unfair, terrible and stupid truth of this life. But any other choice will simply take us for another spin. If we spend our entire lives making it about every other person in the world, doesn’t that turn us into a pinball bouncing all over the machine of life?
When I was in childhood and early adulthood, I spent a lot of time trying to find love by forcing others into the box I made for them. I just knew I could create the perfect solution to my years of unexpressed grief. Not surprisingly, it never worked. I was confused when people would say to me, “It’s not all about you.” I thought I was making it all about them. But in reality, I was making it all about fixing them. And my help was really control. I really did want them to heal me by being the right person and making the right choices. It was all about me in that way. I was being selfish. But these past few days, I have been asking myself some questions. What if it is all about me? What if my entire life is completely about me? What if it is about my purpose? What if life is about my power to heal my trauma and change my life? What if others really do come second? What if having a life that is completely about me is the only way to make any difference in this world for anyone else?
This is not a popular opinion. I get that. We are taught to be selfless. We are taught to make life all about others. But that doesn’t eliminate our needs. And that’s how we end up in this co-dependent mess. So maybe another approach is needed here. Maybe we need to meet our needs so fully and authentically that we have no choice but to shine for others. Maybe we need to throw the self-sacrificial rules out the window. Maybe we need to be so selfish that we are labeled irresponsible and weird. Maybe it is okay if people roll their eyes at us when we are excited about our life. Is their jealousy really about us? Of course not.
I have understood in recent years that my life is more about me than I thought in childhood. I have come to understand my importance to myself. I have learned that if I want something in life, I have to give it to myself. Nobody else is going to do those things for me. And I am being unfair to ask it from them. But it is starting to occur to me that I am not taking it far enough. I have to throw out the rules and the contracts and become completely unapologetic about meeting my own needs. I need to give myself everything I have ever wanted. I have to reject the notion that it matters if other people find it “over the top”. This has to be my life. And in the process, I will teach others to live their lives. And that is the most selfless thing I could ever do.
Saving the Truth-Tellers
My son was bullied yesterday at school. He’s in middle school which is the worst time and place in my opinion. Kids are cruel at this age. And kids are also desperately trying to fit in. This is a recipe for disaster. I have learned that it is a really good idea to watch middle school kids closely. You never know what ideas they are going to come up with. You never know what they might say. You never know what they might do. I would even go as far as to say that incidents of middle school bullying are inevitable based on how children are raised today. And while that makes me sad and frustrated, there is a much bigger problem with this scenario. This bullying came from an adult teacher.
My son was out sick for a week recently and he has been catching up on his work. I had to push him multiple times to get him to follow up with a particular teacher about his make-up work. He made it clear he felt intimated by her. And even from my standpoint, I have noticed her lack of tolerance for some of the kids and their age-appropriate behavior. But when he asked about making up the work, she made up a story about how it wasn’t because he was absent for illness. And then she told him to sit down, do his work and be a man.
When he told me this, I was dumbfounded for so many reasons. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. I was frustrated she wouldn’t want to help him with his grade, but I have also seen this apathy before. I was disturbed that she would try to hand my son a new story about his reality. I have seen that far too much in my abusive family to be okay with that. But I was most concerned about her statement, “Be a man.” This one is particularly infuriating. What does it even mean? Is he a man if he doesn’t do his make-up work? Or is he a man if he doesn’t bother or inconvenience her? What makes a 12-year-old boy into a man? Oh that’s right. He’s NOT A MAN! He is a boy and he needs support in his educational experience. He needs support in life. And he doesn’t need to be shut down by traumatized adults who get their kicks out of bullying kids.
We have to stop this pattern. We have a childism problem in this world. And we have it for a calculated reason. Kids are treated like they don’t matter because they are truth-tellers. They are the most likely to question the convenient reality we have created. We have set up an entire system to squelch their voices, their creativity and their truth. And in the case of abusers, this system is incredibly malicious. But there is a problem with stopping this cycle. Once we have been programmed with intolerance for our own inner children, we will tend to project this intolerance on to other children (especially our own). To stop it, we must bring awareness to the patterns that are not okay. We must find our own self-compassion toward our inner children. And we must shift our mindset about the priority of children in this world. If you are concerned you might be a part of the problem, here are some questions you can ask yourself.
How am I emotionally squelching my own inner children? It is incredibly common for trauma survivors to minimize their own emotional reactions to their experiences in the past and present. This has been a pattern for their entire lives. We have to recognize how we are invalidating our emotions by saying they are over-reactions or calling ourselves overly sensitive. If we are squelching our own need for expression, our unconscious instincts will make it impossible for us to hold compassionate space for the full emotional expression coming from a child.
How am I afraid of the truth? When we grow up with trauma, we try to tell the truth, but we experience gas-lighting and manipulation to tell the convenient story. The convenient story is the masked story the adults want everyone to support. And we build up defenses to continue that effort in our adult lives. When a child comes along and mirrors that forbidden story (and believe me they will), it can send our defenses into a panic. Our unconscious instincts will move into “shut this down” mode. So we have to address how we are lying to ourselves so we don’t stop the truth.
How am I prioritizing the external world over connection? When we were children, we were seeking connection with adults. But the adults had already been taught that they needed to keep their focus on the external world and finding success per it’s standards. Our needs were considered unimportant. Our needs were minimized. And now, we minimize those exact needs that were never met. We tell ourselves they aren’t real needs. They are silly. They don’t matter. And when a child comes to us for connection, our unconscious instincts will not allow it, at least not on the level it is needed.
If we want to change this world to a less traumatized, violent and abusive place to live, we have to look at how we are treating our children. And if we want to change how we are treating our children, we have to look at how we are treating ourselves, especially those deeply unconscious parts of self we pushed away. It is time to wake up and stop invalidating ourselves and the children around us. Let’s get busy doing the hard work it takes to stop this cycle for good.
