Emotional Honesty and Emotional Responsibility
Toward a Better and Healthier
Emotional Life
Excerpts from “Co-dependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls”
Introduction 2
How You Have Survived 4
Victimising 4
Perpetrating 4
Denying 5
Destructive Patterns 6
Turning Inward 8
Focus on Self 8
Self-Honesty 9
Confronting Your (Difficult) Emotional Life 10
Emotions = energy in motion 10
Anger and Grief 11
Guilt – Healthy and Unhealthy 12
Shame 13
Worry 15
The Nature of Dependence 17
What is Your Poison? 17
Co-Dependence and Counter-Dependence 19
Deciding to Change – A New Dance 22
Loosening Control, Letting Go 23
Healthy Boundaries 25
As You Change, What Happens For Others…. 25
Boundaries Are There To Protect 26
How To Set A Boundary 28
Consequences 29
Choices 31
Healthy Relationships 33
Interdependence 33
Emotionally Honest Communication 34
Honesty…..Plus Safety 37
Discernment 38
Pay Attention 39
Negotiate, Speak Up 39
Lose the Extremes 40
Progress not Perfection 42
Introduction
When it comes down to it your emotions are at the heart of every matter. At some stage in our adulthood we will invariably look back on our upbringing and realise it played an important part in who we are today. Many adults at one time or another are dissatisfied with their current relationships, or they may be stuck in self-destructive patterns, or frustrated that they cannot express themselves, are ashamed to do so or just don’t know how. All these difficulties invariably have their roots in childhood.
From an emotional point of view you may be becoming gradually aware of past emotional limitations, difficulties (for a few deprivation, conflict, abuse). Whatever you call it, this awareness can become the beginning of a process of learning to live differently, more peacefully with your self and others. It can become the start of having a healthier relationship with your self so that you can start to have healthier relationships with others.
Changing your behaviour in relation to your emotional life is a journey - a journey from living unconsciously in reaction to your old wounds - setting yourself up to be a victim of yourself and other people - to learning how to find a healthy balance. To move into a place where it is possible for you to recognise what it feels like to conduct healthier relationships. You may grow to understand: what it means to be emotionally honest with yourself; how to protect yourself by having boundaries; how to take responsibility for your own emotions; how to stop giving other people the power to perpetuate the damaging effects of emotional attacks.
Such a journey is multi-levelled and multi-dimensional. What that means is that there are really no simple answers to the question "what do I do when I realise I have been emotionally abused/deprived/conflicted?" There are simple answers that you need to hear on a basic level in the beginning, but those simple answers are just the beginning.
Each of those answers opens up a new range of questions. For example, telling someone they need to learn to have better boundaries with others opens up a range of questions about what boundaries are and how does one set them. Any single topic or issue opens up a range of other interrelated areas.
To change therefore, is risky. It is a double-edged sword – at one level you desire it but you also fear giving up what you know because that's how you've got as far as you have in life. Therapy can help through this fear: the therapist's stance of validating your experience can be the first step. It is vital to be validated - to have someone tell you "Yes, you were abused in that situation. I am really sorry that happened."
Your emotions may have been discounted and invalidated in childhood (and probably for most of your adult lives due to the repeating of such patterns); because you may have been taught not to trust your own feelings and perceptions; because you may have learned to have twisted, distorted relationships with your self and your own emotions; everyone needs validation from other people that what you are awakening to is in fact real and not some product of your self image.
The journey involves bringing to consciousness those beliefs and attitudes in your subconscious that are causing dysfunctional reactions. It involves challenging your ego defences to allow you to live a healthy, fulfilling life. The journey undertaken will allow you to own your power to make choices for yourself about your beliefs and values instead of unconsciously reacting to the old tapes or scripts. The journey is about consciousness raising. It is en-light-enment - bringing the dysfunctional attitudes and beliefs out of the darkness of our subconscious into the light of consciousness.
How You Have Survived
When the role model of what a man is does not allow a man to cry or express fear, when the role model for what a woman is does not allow a woman to be angry or aggressive, that is emotional dishonesty. When the standards of a society deny the full range of the emotional spectrum and label certain emotions as negative - that is not only emotionally dishonest, it creates emotional dis-ease. If a culture is based on emotional dishonesty, with role models that are not honest emotionally, then that culture is also emotionally dysfunctional - because the people of that society are set up to be emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional in getting their emotional needs met.
Attempting to suppress emotions is dysfunctional; it does not work. Emotions are energy: E-motion = energy in motion. It is supposed to be in motion, it was meant to flow. Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be, even those emotions that feel uncomfortable. Fear is a warning, anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing. These are not negative emotional responses. We were taught to react negatively to them. It is our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion.
Emotional honesty is absolutely vital to the health of the being. Denying, distorting, and blocking our emotions in reaction to false beliefs and dishonest attitudes causes emotional, mental, if not physical dis-ease.
Victimising
You may feel like a victim. You may have a pattern of setting yourself up to be taken advantage of, or dominated, or abused, because that is all you have known. To continue to blame and complain is not healthy, however. It is also not honest to blame yourself. You may in fact be buying into the critical parent voice that tells you it is your fault, that you are a loser or failure who deserves to be treated badly. If that is happening then you are being the victim of yourself.
Invariable, adults who have emotional difficulties involve other people in their pain. There is often a co-dependent pattern in which they gather allies. To have people to complain to, who will sympathise with them and tell them how awful the other person/people you are for hurting them. They may gather allies that will give approval to their self righteous indignation. When these feelings emerge, that is buying into the victim perspective.
It is vital to stop buying into the belief that you are victim. Anytime that you are focusing on the situation at hand and giving power to the belief that you are victims of the situation/people you have just interacted with, without looking at how that situation is connected to your childhood wounds – you are not being as honest with yourself as you could, and this prevents growth.
Perpetrating
As a child you were indeed a victim (of neglect, conflict, abuse) and you did need to heal those wounds. But if you perpetuate the patterns as adults, you are a volunteer - victims of your conditioning, or unmet needs. The people in your lives are actors and actresses whom you cast in the roles that would recreate the childhood dynamics of attacks, abandonment, betrayal and deprivation. By attending to your emotional life, you may now begin to move on from those roles.
You may have been just as much perpetrators in your adult relationships as victims. Every victim is a perpetrator because when you are buying into being the victim, when you are giving power to your unconscious self, you are perpetrating on the people around you.
One needs to heal the wounds without blaming others. And one needs to own the responsibility without blaming yourself. The only villain here is the condition and it is within you.
When it is said healing yourself, "without blaming others," it is not mean to deny your own anger. You need to own and release the anger and rage – but in a constructive and safe way. It may be toward your parents, your teachers, or other authority figures. The anger does not necessarily need to be vented directly to them but you need to release the energy. You need to let that child inside of you scream out, beat on pillows or some such thing.
That does not mean that you have to buy into the attitude that they are to blame for everything. That is not helpful in moving on. There is a balance here between the emotional and mental. Blame has to do with attitudes, with buying into the false beliefs - it does not really have anything to do with the process of releasing yourself, releasing the emotional energy.
Denying
“Oh, he’s just in denial”. The term has become quite pejorative as an adult, but as a child it was vital.
Healing and growth is a process of peeling away levels of denial. Denial is a wonderful human survival tool that made it possible to survive the pain of childhood. It is also a powerful block to healing in your adult lives.
With each level of denial you peel away, like peeling the layers of an onion, there is pain and grief about the truths that get revealed. 'The truth will set you free' so the saying goes - but it is also very painful to see truth on a new level each time you peel away some denial.
There are a multitude of facets to a particular emotional level that has just been revealed to you. It will be important to get more conscious of your self, your relationship with self (and all the parts of self), and of your history and patterns in relationship to life and other people.
It is important to use this opportunity as a new beginning - a doorway into a new way of living life. In order to do that, it will be necessary to start looking at how the incident, incidents or patterns relate to your childhood and to your patterns in adult life. You will need to get honest with yourself about: how you set yourself up in this situation; what your motives and agenda you are; what your ‘pay off’ is; etc. As you get honest about these different aspects of the situation, the challenge is to have compassion for yourself - because you have been powerless over the attitudes and behaviour patterns you learned in childhood.
You are going to find that healing and growth is an adventure in which each question leads to another series of questions. Each revelation will take you to new perspectives.
Destructive Patterns
In a war, soldiers are forced to deny their emotions in order to survive. This emotional denial works to help the soldier survive the war, but later can have devastating delayed consequences. The medical profession has now recognised the trauma and damage that this emotional denial can cause, and have coined a term to describe the effects of this type of denial. That term is ‘Delayed Stress Syndrome’.
In a war soldiers have to deny what it feels like to see friends killed and maimed; what it feels like to kill other human beings and have them attempting to kill you. There is trauma caused by the events themselves. There is trauma due to the necessity of denying the emotional impact of the events. There is trauma from the effects the emotional denial has on the person's life after he/she has returned from the war because as long as the person is denying his/her emotional trauma she/he is denying a part of her/himself.
The stress caused by the trauma, and the effect of denying the trauma, by denying self, eventually surfaces in ways which produce new trauma - anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse, nightmares, uncontrollable rage, inability to maintain relationships, inability to hold jobs, suicide, etc.
Instead of blood and death (although some do experience blood and death literally), what happened in children was emotional damage. You were forced to grow up denying the reality of what was happening in your homes. You were forced to deny your feelings about what you were experiencing and seeing and sensing. You were forced to deny your selves.
You may have grown up having to deny the emotional reality of: parental alcoholism, addiction, mental illness, rage, violence, depression, abandonment, betrayal, deprivation, neglect, incest, etc. etc.; of your parents fighting or the underlying tension and anger because they weren't being honest enough to fight; of dad's ignoring you because of his workaholism and/or mum smothering us because she had no other identity than being a mother; of the abuse that one parent heaped on another who wouldn't defend him/herself and/or the abuse you received from one of your parents while the other wouldn't defend us; of having only one parent or of having two parents who stayed together and shouldn't have; etc., etc.
You may have grew up with messages like: children should be seen and not heard; big boys don't cry and little ladies don't get angry; it is not okay to be angry at someone you love - especially your parents; god loves you but will send you to burn in hell forever if you touch your shameful private parts; don't make noise or run or in any way be a normal child; do not make mistakes or do anything wrong; etc., etc.
The war you were born into, the battlefield each of us grew up in, was not in some foreign country against some identified "enemy" - it was in the "homes" which were supposed to be your safe haven with your parents whom you loved and trusted to take care of you. It was not for a year or two or three - it was for sixteen or seventeen or eighteen years.
You experienced what is called "sanctuary trauma" - your safest place to be was not safe - and you experienced it on a daily basis for years and years. Some of the greatest damage was done to you in subtle ways on a daily basis because your sanctuary was a battlefield.
It was not a battlefield because your parents were wrong or bad - it was a battlefield because they were at war within, because they were born into the middle of a war. By doing your healing you are becoming the emotionally honest role models that your parents never had the chance to be. Through this journey you are helping to break the cycles of self-destructive behaviour that have dictated human existence for thousands of years.
Co-dependence is a very vicious and powerful form of Delayed Stress Syndrome. The trauma of feeling like we were not safe in our own homes makes it very difficult to feel like we are safe anywhere. Feeling like we were not lovable to our own parents makes it very difficult to believe that anyone can love us.
This happens because such people feel familiar. Unfortunately in childhood the people whom you trusted the most - you are the most familiar – invariably hurt you the most. So the effect is that you keep repeating your patterns and being given the reminder that it is not safe to trust yourself or other people.
Once you begin healing you can see that the Truth is that it is not safe to trust as long as you are reacting out of the emotional wounds and attitudes of your childhoods.
Turning Inward
Focus on Self
To begin the journey, you must first commit to know you better; “know thyself” said the Socratic Oath. It begins with separating and owning all of the different parts of your self within. From there, clearer boundaries between your self and others need to emerge – otherwise you cannot know where you end and someone else starts - you cannot get clear on what is your stuff and what is theirs. As long as you don't have clear boundaries within yourself, you are set up to be the victim of your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.
As you become aware of how you have set yourself up to be emotionally abused it is important not to judge and blame yourself for behaviour and attitudes that you are unconsciously empowering. If you beat yourself up for being emotionally abused, then you are emotionally abusing yourself.
It is vital to start recognising how the childhood emotional and intellectual programming set you up. It is very important to start recognising your powerlessness to change your patterns until you became aware of them. In order to stop emotionally abusing yourself, and allowing others to emotionally abuse you, it is very important to become aware of how powerful your childhood programming has been in your life.
You must start recognising your powerlessness over this dependence. As long as you did not know you had a choice you did not have one. If you never knew how to say "no," then you never really said "yes." You are powerless to do anything any different than you did it. You are doing the best you knew how with the tools that you had. None of you had the power to write a different script for your lives, until now.
(From the 'Dance of Wounded Souls'): This is an example of how powerful the intellectual and emotional programming is until you get conscious of it and be honest with yourself about how the past is dictating your life today. This example is from my own personal process about the breakthrough that started my breakout from (emotional) co-dependence. "I went home to do some writing and was pretty amazed at what it revealed. I realised that I was still reacting to life out of the religious programming of my childhood - even though I had thrown out that belief system on a conscious, intellectual level in my late teens and early twenties. It helped me to recognise that my emotional programming was dictating my relationship with life even though it was not what I consciously believed.
“I realised that the belief that "life was about sin and punishment and I was a sinner who deserved to be punished" was running my life. When I felt "bad" or "bad" things happened to me - I tried to blame it on others to keep from realising how much I was hating myself for being flawed and defective, a sinner. When I felt good or good things happened I was holding my breath because I knew it would be taken away because I didn't deserve it. Often when things got too good I would sabotage it because I couldn't stand the suspense of waiting for god to take it away - which "he" would because I didn't deserve it.
“. . . I said to myself - this is no way to live life, I need to change this. So that night I started to focus changing the subconscious programming from my childhood. I didn't know how I was going to do it - but I was determined to find out".
Self-Honesty
Honesty with self is the foundation of the journey, the cornerstone of any effective healing path. Without being honest with your self, you cannot be honest with anyone in your life. Without being honest with your self, you cannot see your behaviours, patterns, or relationships clearly. Without being honest with yourself, you cannot know who you truly are - or see others clearly.
It is important to start detaching from your own process so that you can observe it instead of just being caught up in your reactions. In order to start seeing other people more clearly, you need to detach from feeling responsible for their feelings and behaviour - from taking their behaviour personally.
Confronting Your (Difficult) Emotional Life
Emotions = energy in motion
Feelings, emotions, are energy.
Emotions are energy: E-motion = energy in motion. It is supposed to be in motion, it was meant to flow.
Your emotional energy is the fuel that propels you down the path of your life journey. The fuel of inspiration and perspiration. Another metaphor comes from music: emotions are the orchestra that provide the music for your individual dance - that dictate the rhythmic flow and movement of your human dance. Your feelings help you to define yourself and then provide the combustible fuel that dictates the speed and direction of your motion and communication - rather you are flowing with it or damming it up within yourself.
Emotional energy is not only supposed to be in motion, to flow, it is also the energy that gets you in motion. It is what drives you, what propels you forward through life. When emotional flow is blocked and suppressed it does not go away. Energy cannot simply disappear. It can transform but it cannot disappear. That is a law of physics.
Emotional energy that is suppressed still drives you. It is what causes obsessive-compulsive behaviour and thoughts, it is what drives addictions, what drives anger, it’s what causes us to shutdown with depression. Repressed emotional energy builds up pressure that has to be released. . . . . .
The emotional energy generated by the circumstances of your childhood and early life does not go away just because you are forced to deny it. It is still trapped in your body - in a pressurised, explosive state, as a result of being suppressed. . . . . As long as you have pockets of pressurised emotional energy that you have to avoid dealing with - those emotional wounds will run your life.
The reason that it is so important to clear up your relationship with your own emotions, to learn to be emotionally honest with yourself is because emotions are such a powerful part of your being, such a vital and controlling influence in how you live your life.
We can not know better who we are if our relationship with our own emotional process is twisted, distorted, or repressed. Body, mind, and spirit are three parts of a four part equation. Emotions are at the heart of the matter.
Our emotional reactions are messages from our being to our consciousness.
Emotions are energy that is manifested in our bodies. They exist below the neck. They are not thoughts (although attitudes set up our emotional reactions.) In order to do the emotional healing it is vital to start paying attention to where energy is manifesting in our bodies. Where is there tension, tightness? Could that "indigestion" really be some feelings? Are those "butterflies" in my stomach telling me something emotionally? . . . . .
Western civilization has for many years been way out of balance towards the left brain way of thinking - concrete, rational, what you see is all there is (this was in reaction to earlier times of being out of balance the other way, towards superstition and ignorance.) Because emotional energy can not be seen or measured or weighed ("The x-ray shows you've got 5 pounds of grief in there.") emotions were discounted and devalued. This has started to change somewhat in recent years but most of us grew up in a society that taught us that being too emotional was a bad thing that we should avoid (certain cultures/sub-cultures give more permission for emotions but those are usually out of balance to the other extreme of allowing the emotions to rule - the goal is balance: between mental and emotional, between intuitive and rational.). . . . .
Our problem has been that because of our unhealed childhood wounds it has been very difficult to tell the difference between an intuitive emotional Truth and the emotional truth that comes from our childhood wounds. When one of our buttons is pushed and we react out of the insecure, scared little kid inside of us (or the angry/rage filled kid, or the powerless/helpless kid, etc.) then we are reacting to what our emotional truth was when we were 5 or 9 or 14 - not to what is happening now. Since we have been doing that all of our lives, we learned not to trust our emotional reactions (and got the message not to trust them in a variety of ways when we were kids.)
Anger and Grief
Anger is a common emotion with emotional neglect, conflict, abuse. But going from feeling suicidal to feeling homicidal is a sign of progress! Owning the anger is an important part of pulling yourself out of the depression that turning the anger back on yourself has created. It is often necessary to own the anger before you can get in touch with the emotion in a healthy way.
So, it is very important to own your right to be angry. That is a stage of the process that also needs to be moved through so you don't get stuck in an angry victim place. For some people it is an important part of the process to confront the people who were responsible for their anger. Hopefully this can be done in an appropriate environment - although sometimes that is not possible. What is important to emphasise, is that you can grow emotionally without directly confronting those people directly - because the relationship that needs to be healed is within. To go to a place where you are lashing out (at those responsible or indeed, those close to you) will often be just going to the other extreme - where you abuse the people who abused you.
After anger, comes the reality the behind anger is sadness, if not grief. And this means you cannot get clearly in touch with the drivers of emotion without doing the grief work. It is tied to the emotional wounds you suffered and many years of suppressing those feelings has also buried the attitudes, definitions, and beliefs that are connected to those emotional wounds. It is not too difficult to get intellectually aware of some of them, but you cannot really understand how much power they carry without feeling the emotional context - and cannot change them without reducing the emotional charge / releasing the emotional energy tied to them. Knowing they are there will not make them go away.
A good example of how this works: A man came to therapy in emotional agony because his wife was leaving him. He was adamant that he did not want a divorce and kept saying how much he loved his wife and how he could not stand to lose his family (he had a daughter about 4.) The therapist told him the first day he came in that the pain he was suffering did not really have that much to do with his wife and present situation - but was rooted in some attitude from his childhood. But that did not mean anything to him on a practical level, on a level of being able to let go of the attitude that was causing him so much pain. It was only while doing grief work that he got in touch with the pain of his parents divorce when he was 10 years old. In the midst of doing that grief work the memory of promising himself that he would never get a divorce, and cause his child the kind of pain he was experiencing, surfaced.
Once he had gotten in touch with, and released, the emotional charge connected to the idea of divorce, he was able to look at his present situation more clearly. Then he could see that the marriage had never been a good one - that he had sacrificed himself and his own needs from the beginning to comply with his dream / concept of what a marriage should be. He could then see that staying in the marriage was not serving him or his daughter. Once he got past the promise he made to himself in childhood, he was able to let go of his wife and start building a solid relationship with his daughter based on the reality of today instead of the grief of the past.
Guilt – Healthy and Unhealthy
Another emotion to discern is guilt. Guilt is an emotional energy whose purpose is to communicate with your consciousness about your behaviour. It is important to make a distinction between healthy guilt and unhealthy guilt in relationship to discernment and emotional honesty.
Within the definition shame is a term that relates to being (feeling that something is wrong with who you are, that your being is defective) - while guilt refers to behaviour.
You do not need fixing. You are not broken. Your sense of self, your self perception, was fractured, not your Self. You are not broken. That is what toxic guilt and shame is - thinking that you are broken, believing that you are somehow inherently defective.
Healthy guilt is what one feels when one violates one’s own value system. It is an important intuitive component in maintaining a healthy, honest relationship with yourself. Guilt sensitises you to areas that need more healing - behaviour that is a reaction to old wounds and old tapes. It is generated when you have acted in ways which you need to make amends for, when your humanness has caused you to act in a way that does not respect and honour your Self.
Unhealthy guilt is when you feel guilty for violating someone else's value system. You are programmed to react to life based on value systems that you are dysfunctional, dependent, and unhealthy. You had them imposed upon you, and programmed into your intellectual perspective and emotional reactions, value systems you learned from the emotional experiences, intellectual teachings, and role modelling of those around you in childhood. In order to survive, you adapted the value systems imposed upon you - even though they often did not make sense to you even then.
The critical parent voice probably developed within you in order to try to control your behaviour and feelings using the same tools that are used on you - guilt, shame, and fear. As a result of that programming, it is normal for you to feel guilty about violating that value system. Then when you begin to set boundaries, saying no, speaking your truth, being emotionally honest, etc., feelings of guilt and shame are generated.
As you awaken to your power to make choices about your beliefs, you can start sorting out which values that you are holding resonate with you (as you feel them intuitively) - and which ones are a result of the old patterns. Some of the values your parents held will also be your intuitive values. Many will not because they you are programmed in their childhoods. Often you are taught values in - but which in practice you are not followed. This was part of the crazy making inconsistency that caused you to think something was wrong with you.
Discerning your own truth, your values, is often like recovering treasure from shipwrecks that have been sitting on the ocean floor for hundreds of years - the grains of truth, the nuggets of gold, have become encrusted with garbage over the years.
As you heal and awaken you get clearer on what your values, the intuitive messages from your selves, are - and can discern more often when you are experiencing unhealthy guilt so that you do not give it power. As with any part of the process, your intuition is your guide. Your minds have a great tendency to slip back into the polarised ruts of trying to figure out what is right and what is wrong - whereas your gut feelings will most often be coming from your intuition.
In her wonderful daily meditation book, Melody Beattie calls the unhealthy guilt and shame generated when you start to change to new healthier behaviour "after burn", and talks about just letting it burn off without giving it power. This is what can be referred to as having a boundary between emotional and mental. You can feel the guilt and recognise it as unhealthy so that you do not give the critical parent voice the power to get you into a frenzy of mental activity worrying if you have done something "wrong." You can talk to the child within you that is feeling guilty for setting a boundary and tell that child that it is good to set boundaries - that it is the loving thing to do for yourself.
Shame
(Taken from Dance of the Wounded Souls): “I was not able to start seeing my Self as separate in a healthy way (I had always felt that I was separate in an unhealthy way - shameful and unworthy) until I started to see that I had been powerless over the behaviour patterns I learned in childhood. Since my behaviour patterns, my behavioural and emotional defence systems, had developed in reaction to the feeling that there was something wrong with me, I had to learn to start taking power away from the toxic shame that is at the core of this disease. Toxic shame involves thinking that there is something wrong with who you are. Guilt - in my definition - involves behaviour, while shame is about your being. Guilt is: I did something wrong; I made a mistake. Shame is: I am a mistake; something is wrong with me”.
On an emotional level healing is honouring the emotional wounds so that you can release the grief energy - the pain, rage, terror, and shame that is driving you. That shame is toxic and is not yours - it never was! You did nothing to be ashamed of - you are just kids. This is shame about being human that has been passed down from generation to generation.
(From Dance of the Wounded Souls): “I used to refer to responsibility as the R word. It was a trigger word for me that carried shame and judgment. I thought of it as having chains hanging off of it because being responsible to me seemed to mean being what society (and my parents) wanted me to be. That I wasn't living up to those expectations seemed to reinforce my feeling that I was unworthy and defective. It was only in my dependence that I came to realise that such behaviour as not getting the grades I could have in school was in reality a passive aggressive retaliation towards my parents - the "I'll show you, I'll get me" battle cry of counter-dependence. And I came to understand that not fitting into society's idea of how to live life and define success, was in reality being true to myself by not conforming to standards that did not resonate with me”.
As long as you are reacting to old wounds and old tapes you cannot respond to the now. The more you heal, the more responsibility you have - that is, ability to respond. The ability to respond in the moment.
(Dance of the Wounded Souls): “As a little boy I got the message from my father's perfectionistic standards and raging verbal abuse, and from my shameful inability to fulfil the role of surrogate spouse and protector for my mother, that there was something wrong with me. I was raised in a religion that taught me that I was born shameful and sinful, and if I did something "wrong" I would burn in hell forever. Because of my fear of doing it "wrong," of making shameful mistakes, I did not want to take responsibility for my life. Because of my emotional wounds and all of the anger and rage I was suppressing, I was powerless to do anything but react to life. I reacted to expectations by passive aggressively sabotaging myself. I rebelled against society's standards in ways that hurt me.
“I did not trust myself for good reasons - because of the reactive way I was living my life. I did not want to take responsibility for my life, for my choices and the consequences of those choices, so I set other people up to make the choices. That way I had someone to blame.
“Being honest with myself emotionally led me to wallowing in shame and self hatred - blaming myself for being unworthy and defective, for being a loser and a failure. Focusing on something or someone outside of me, that I could blame for victimising me or obsess about because it/she would fix me (relationship, money, success, etc.), was an attempt to avoid having to feel the incredible hole within me - the abyss of wish to die pain and shame, the pressurised Pandora's box of terror and rage, that I had to keep suppressing and denying. Survival involved using whatever means I could to go unconscious and/or deflect the blame away from me. Unconsciousness was my main tool for protecting and nurturing myself - my only real escape from the emotional extremes spawned by the black and white thinking of dependence.
“In my personal journey, I had to encounter the concept that I was not shameful and defective as a being but rather that I had been powerless over, before I could start to shine some light into the darkness of the abyss within me. Starting to be open to the possibility that perhaps I wasn't being punished but was rather being given opportunities for growth - helped me to start letting go of some of the fear of making choices and some of the shame about the consequences I had experienced”.
Worry
If you ever catch yourself worrying about right and wrong, it is a sure sign that emotional dependence is up and running - that you have slipped back into that rut. When the mind has gone into a right and wrong type feeding frenzy, it is usually because you have some feelings going on that are making you uncomfortable. You may be afraid of what the consequences of your choice will be - the outcome of the actions you have set in motion. You may be sad that you had to set a boundary. Whatever you are feeling, it is better for you to get in touch with the feeling than to be in your head in a frenzy of worry.
Worry is negative fantasising. It is a fantasy that is being created in reaction to feeling fear. It is not real - it is something that is being created because your mind has slipped into the old familiar rut of right and wrong thinking. Worry is not a feeling - it is a reaction, a negative emotional state that is created by the perspectives of a belief system that empowers illusions like failure. The sooner that you can pull yourself out of that rut and start seeing the situation as part of a learning process - shift back into a recovery perspective - the less negative emotional response you will generate in relationship to the situation.
Emotions do not have value in and of themselves - they just are. What gives emotions value is how you react to them. You are programmed to react negatively to emotions and adapted defences to try to keep from feeling emotional energy. Being in your head worrying about the past or the future, is a defence against being in your own skin and feeling your feelings. But it is dysfunctional - it does not work. Reacting negatively to your feelings generates more feelings. The more you worry, the more fear you generate. You create negative feeling emotional states because you are empowering negative perspectives of life.
You are talking about balance between the emotional and mental here again. Blame has to do with attitudes, with buying into the false beliefs - it does not really have anything to do with the process of releasing the emotional energy.
Worry, like blame (and such things as resentment, despair, and self pity), is a negative emotional state that is created by the intellectual paradigm that you are filtering your life experience through, that you are allowing to interpret and translate life for you. The more you try to avoid the discomfort of feeling fear or sadness or anger, the more emotional energy you generate in relationship to whatever situation you are reacting to. It is a really dysfunctional, vicious cycle if your goal is to be happy and at peace. The cycle is there because it creates justification for rescuing yourself by continuing unconsciously some self abusive behaviour - which then creates more shame, which creates more judgment, which creates more fear, which creates more worry, etc., etc.
As long as you are judging and shaming yourself you are giving power to your emotional dependence. You are feeding the monster that is devouring you. Worry is a symptom that should tell you that you are avoiding some feelings.
The key is to be aware of when you slip back into those ruts of right and wrong thinking so that you can pull yourself out of the rut and get back into balance. You need to let go of the perspectives or expectation that are causing more fear. You need to own the feelings instead of trying to avoid them - because trying to avoid them just generates more of them.
“When I catch myself worrying it is very important not to judge myself for it. What I need to do is be patient and kind and compassionate towards myself. I can say catch myself, take a couple of deep breaths and say something to myself like:
“Oh here I am worrying. I must be afraid. I am feeling fear about the outcome of this situation. I have bought into the belief that if this does not come out the way I want it to, I am not going to be OK. It is time to stop and remember that I trust myself to get through whatever I'm going through. I need to let go of those old beliefs in lack and scarcity”.
The Nature of Dependence
What is Your Poison?
Dependence is outer or external control, of or from, others. As long as you are focused:
➢ outside of yourself - looking for the prince or princess who would fix you – Dependence,
➢ Gathering allies to keep you fixed in your pain – Co-Dependence, or
➢ Blaming the villains who you are ruining your life – ie. I was set up to be the victim of my self and others – Counter-Dependence, then
The condition of co-dependence can be described as outer or external dependence. Where did it come from? We formed our core relationship with self in early childhood - and built our relationship with self, life, and other humans based on that foundation.
Co-dependence is an emotional and behavioural defence system which was adopted by our egos in order to meet our need to survive as a child. Because we had no tools for re-establishing our egos and healing our emotional wounds (culturally approved grieving, training and initiation rites, healthy role models, etc.), the effect is that as an adult we keep reacting to the programming of our childhood and do not get our needs met - our emotional, mental, spiritual, or physical needs. Co-dependence allows us to survive physically but causes us to feel empty and dead inside.
Traditionally in this society women were taught to be co-dependent on - that is take their self-definition and self-worth from - their relationships with men, while men have been taught to be co-dependent on their success/career/work. That has changed somewhat in the past twenty or thirty years - but is still part of the reason that women have more of a tendency to sell their souls for relationships than men do. Co-dependence is all about giving outside or external influences power over our self-esteem. Everything outside of our 'self' - rather that is people, places and things or our own external appearance - has to do with ego-strength not self-worth.
One of the most important tools in the process of getting honest with your self is detachment. As long as you are reacting unconsciously to old wounds and old tapes, it is impossible to see yourself clearly - you are dancing in the dark. As long as you haven't become aware of your patterns, and started healing your wounds, then you can not be honest with yourself or anyone else.
Detachment is a vital technique in starting to see your self and others more clearly and seeing the co-dependence that has developed.
Detaching from feeling responsible for the feelings and behaviour of other people is one of the initial stages of any journey out of co-dependence. You learned in childhood that you had the power to make your parents happy or sad, angry or scared. You experienced painful consequences when your behaviour was not what the adults around you considered acceptable. Some of you came from families where being a human child was not acceptable behaviour. Some of you came from families afflicted with alcoholism or mental illness, in which case the definition of acceptable behaviour varied wildly from one day to the next. Some of you came from families where as children you are allowed to have the power and be in control - which is terrifying and abusive to a child. Some of you came from families where no one in the family had permission to be human. None of these environments taught you how to relate to self and life in a healthy way.
You grew up getting the message that you are responsible for other peoples’ feelings and behaviour. And you were taught to give other people or outside agencies power over how you felt about yourself. You learned to do life backwards.
(From Dance of the Wounded Souls): "I spent most of my life doing the Serenity prayer backwards, that is, trying to change the external things over which I had no control - other people and life events mostly - and taking no responsibility (except shaming and blaming myself) for my own internal process - over which I can have some degree of control. Having some control is not a bad thing; trying to control something or somebody over which I have no control is what is dysfunctional."
You tried to control other people so you could protect yourself emotionally. Some of you (classical co-dependent behaviour) tried to control through people-pleasing, being a chameleon, wearing a mask, dancing to other people's tunes. Some of you (classical counter-dependent behaviour - the opposite extreme) protected yourself by pretending that you didn't need other people. Either way you are living life in reaction to your childhood wounds - you are not making clear, conscious choices. (If you think your choice is to be in an abusive relationship or not to be in a relationship at all, that is not a choice - that is reacting between two extremes that are symptoms of your childhood wounds.)" -
A very important part of the process of finding some balance in life - of learning how to view yourself and how to relate to others and life more clearly - was to get clear that everything in your process relates back to you and your growth. You have to get past your co-dependent belief that you are doing something for someone else - or they you are doing something to you.
Becoming aware is what is necessary before any conscious changes can be made. It is both a beginning and an ending. It is an ending in terms of your ability to unconsciously keep replaying your old patterns. In most cases, you will replay your old patterns some more times – you will for the rest of your lives catch yourself starting to go down those old roads - but you will never be able to do it as quite as unconsciously again. It is the end of your denial on one level.
One of the trickiest challenges with co-dependence is trying to escape from the black and white thinking. Out of your co-dependence - from an emotional reaction level there are two options: blame them, blame me. It is vital to start taking the blame out of the process. You need to learn to take responsibility for your side of the street, and hold other people responsible for their side of the street.
In your dependence defence system you build up huge walls to protect yourself and then - as soon as you meet someone who could help you repeat your patterns of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, and/or deprivation - you lowered the drawbridge and invited them in. You, in your dependence, have radar systems which cause you to be attracted to, and attract to you, the people, who for you personally, are exactly the most untrustworthy (or unavailable or smothering or abusive or whatever you need to repeat your patterns) individuals - exactly the ones who will "push your buttons."
This happens because those people feel familiar. Unfortunately in childhood the people whom you trusted the most - you are the most familiar - hurt you the most. So the effect is that you keep repeating your patterns and being given the reminder that it is not safe to trust yourself or other people.
A relationship is a partnership, an alliance, not some game with winners and losers. When the interaction in a relationship becomes a power struggle about who is right and who is wrong then there are no winners.
The way the dynamic in a dysfunctional relationship works is on a come here - go away cycle. When one person is available the other tends to pull away. If the first person becomes unavailable the other comes back and pleads to be let back in. When the first becomes available again then the other eventually starts pulling away again. It happens because our relationship with self is not healed. As long as I don't love myself then there must be something wrong with someone who loves me - if someone doesn't love me then I have to prove I am worthy by winning that person back.
The people that come into our lives are teachers. They enter our lives to help us grow. Unfortunately in childhood we did not get taught that life was full of lessons to be learned - instead we were taught that if something "bad" happens it is because we are bad, we have done something wrong.
We got taught that life is a test that we can fail if we don't do it "right." So, we live life in fear.
Co-Dependence and Counter-Dependence
Attempts to control are a reaction to fear. It is what you do to try to protect yourself emotionally. Some of you (classic co-dependent behaviour) try to control through people pleasing, being a chameleon, wearing a mask, dancing to other people's tunes.
Some of you (classic counter-dependent behaviour) protect yourselves/try to be in control by pretending that you don't need other people. Either way you are living life in reaction to your childhood wounds – you are not making clear, conscious choices. (If your choice is to be in an abusive relationship or not to be in a relationship at all, that is not a choice - that is reacting between two extremes that are symptoms of your childhood wounds.)
Both classic co-dependent and classic counter-dependent behaviours are part of the condition of dependency. They are just two different extremes in the spectrum of behavioural defence systems that the ego adapts in early childhood. The ways in which you got hurt the most in childhood felt to your egos like a threat to survival, and it built up defences to protect you.
|Co-dependent |Counter-dependent |
| | |
|Come here |Go away |
| | |
|Fear of abandonment issues |Fear of being taken hostage, of being smothered |
| | |
| |Tough, strong and independent - sometimes seems abrasive, |
|People pleasing, gentle, nice & kind - sometimes seems pathetic |abusive, and cold. |
|and weak. | |
| |Uses anger as shield, has walls instead of boundaries - often |
| |overreacts then isolates in shame (feels like "bitch" / |
|Avoids conflict, can't own anger - sets self up to be victim |"bastard" etc.) |
|because of not having boundaries (feels unfairly unappreciated | |
|or shamefully unlovable). | |
| |Terrified of being emotionally vulnerable - feels life |
|Able to be emotionally vulnerable but often in manipulative way |threatening (to be "weak" "wimpy" "needy"). |
|(cries instead of expressing anger). | |
| |Is terrified of needy, clingy part of self so reacts to |
|When afraid that abandonment is happening can get needy and |perceived neediness by being cold, mean. |
|clingy - beg, grovel, abandon self completely. | |
| |Terror of intimacy causes them to be unavailable, to run from |
|Terror of intimacy causes them to pick unavailable people (don't|someone who loves them - often feel that they are incapable of|
|believe they truly deserve someone available and loving). |loving. |
| | |
|Sees setting boundaries as being controlling. |Sometimes uses setting boundaries as way of controlling. |
| | |
|Sometimes calls childish clinging love |Sometimes sees caring as being clingy |
| | |
|(passively controlling & manipulative) |(aggressively controlling & manipulative) |
While the classic co-dependent had their sense of self crushed (it is 'self' destroying to feel that love is conditional on pleasing others, living up to the expectations of others - even if your parents never raised their voices to you) in childhood to the extent that confrontation (owning anger, setting boundaries, taking the chance of hurting someone, etc.) feels life threatening, so the classic counter-dependent feels like vulnerability (intimacy, getting close to/being dependent on other people) is life threatening.
Both the classic counter-dependent and co-dependent patterns are reactive dependent traits that are out of balance and dysfunctional. You do need other people - but to allow your self worth to be determined in reaction to other people is giving power away and setting yourself up to be victims. It is very important to own that you have worth as the unique being that each of us are - not dependent on how other people react to you.
This is a very difficult process for those of you who have classic 'co-dependent' patterns of trying very hard to get other people to like you, of feeling that you are defined by how others think of you and treat you, of being people pleasers and martyrs. Classic co-dependent behaviour involves focusing completely on the other (when a co-dependent dies someone else's life passes in review.) Having no self except as defined in relationship to the other. This is dishonest and dysfunctional. It sets you up to be victims - and causes one to not only be unable to get one's needs met, but to not even be aware that it is right to have needs.
A classically co-dependent person, when asked about themselves, will reply by talking about the other. Obviously, before someone with this type of behavioural defence can experience any self-growth, they have to first start opening up to the idea that they have a self. The process of owning self is frustrating and confusing. The concept of having boundaries is foreign and bewildering. It is an ongoing process that takes years. It unfolds in stages. There is always another level of the onion to peel. So, for someone whose primary pattern is classically co-dependent, the next level of growth will always involve owning self on some deeper level. A very important part of this process is owning the right to be angry about the way other's behaviour has impacted your life - starting in childhood.
Classic counter-dependent behaviour focuses completely on the self and builds huge walls to keep others out. It is hard for those of you who exhibit classically 'counter-dependent' behaviour patterns to even consider that you may be dependent. You have lived your life trying to prove that you don't need others, that you are independent and strong. The counter-dependent is the other extreme of the spectrum. If your behaviour patterns have been primarily counter-dependent it means that you were wounded so badly in childhood that in order to survive you had to convince yourself that you don't need other people, that it is never safe to get close to other people.
Each of us has our own spectrum of behavioural defences to protect us from being hurt emotionally. We can be co-dependent in one relationship and counter-dependent in another - or we can swing from co to counter - within the same relationship. Often, someone who is primarily counter-dependent will get involved with someone who is even more counter-dependent and then will act out the co-dependent role in that particular relationship - the same can happen with two people with primarily co-dependent patterns.
Both the classic co-dependent patterns and the classic counter-dependent patterns are behavioural defences, strategies, designed to protect you from being abandoned. One tries to protect against abandonment by avoiding confrontation and pleasing the other - while the second tries to avoid abandonment by pretending we don't need anyone else. Both are dysfunctional and dishonest.
A classic co-dependent scenario is being asked where you want to eat and saying "oh, I don't care, wherever you want to" and then being angry because they take us somewhere we don't like. We think they should be able to read our mind and know we don't want to do whatever. Typically, in relationships, one partner will ask the other to do something and the person who can't say "I don't want to do that" - will agree to do it and then not do it. This will result in nagging and scolding which will cause more anger and passive-aggressive behaviour.
Each of us has our own spectrum of behavioural defences to protect us from fear of intimacy. We can be co-dependent in one relationship and counter-dependent in another - or we can swing from co to counter - within the same relationship.
********************
Deciding to Change – A New Dance
If life is a dance, then your emotions provide the music. Dancing in the dark according to rules that are dysfunctional is not much fun. Dancing through life believing that you have responsibility for the feelings and behaviours of others, doesn't allow you to relax and enjoy life very much. Believing that you have to earn love by doing the dance "right,' by being perfect, in order to reach the destination where you will get to live happily-ever-after - sets you up to be unhappy and blame yourself for being unworthy and unlovable.
You are taught that life is about destinations, and that when you get to point x - be it marriage or university degree or fame and fortune or whatever - you will live happily ever after.
That is not the way life works. You know that now, and probably threw out that fairy tale-ending stuff intellectually a long time ago. But on some emotional level you keep looking for it. You keep living life as if it is a dress rehearsal for "when your ship comes in." For when you really start to live. For when you get that relationship, or accomplishment, or money that will make you okay, that will fix you.
The way this works for humans, is that you keep dancing the dance you have known until you get consequences that are so painful that you are forced to surrender the way you have been dancing and consider doing it different. When you get to a point where you are beaten and bloody enough from banging your heads into the same wall, where you are sick and tired of being sick and tired of your consequences - then you become willing to consider changing the way you dance.
From Dance of the Wounded Souls: “In order to stop giving the toxic shame (of who I was) so much power, I had to learn to detach from my own reactive process enough to start being able to see a boundary between being and behaviour. I had to stop judging myself and other people based on behaviour. I started to learn how to observe behaviour without making judgments about myself and others. There is a huge difference between judgment in my definition and observation. It is vital for me to observe other people's behaviour in order to protect myself. That does not mean I need to make a value judgment about their being based upon their behaviour.
Judgment is saying, "that person is a jerk." Observation is saying, "that person seems to be really full of anger and it would be better for me to not be involved with them."
The term "judge” refers to making judgments about your own or other peoples’ being based on the behaviour. In other words, I did something bad therefore I am a bad person; I made a mistake therefore I am a mistake. That is what toxic shame is all about: feeling that something is wrong with your being, that you are somehow defective because you have human drives, human weaknesses, human imperfections.
Loosening Control, Letting Go
In terms of the Serenity Prayer, you need to figure out what you can change and what you cannot. You need to learn the extent of your own personal power; detach from your own reactive relationship with life and start seeing with clarity the boundaries of my power. From there you can figure out what you are responsible for - and therefore what you can change - and what you are powerless over, and therefore need to accept.
The Serenity Prayer states;
God,
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
The wisdom to know the difference is, of course, the key here. As long as you are looking outside of yourself, you are setting yourself up to fail. As long as your relationship with life is dictated by the false beliefs and definitions you may have learned in childhood, you are destined to have a difficult relationship with life.
You do not have the power to make other people be who you want them to be. You are not in control of life. You cannot dictate the outcome of situations. You can take actions in a direction to try to make something happen. You can plant seeds in the hope that they grow. But ultimately you are not in control of life events.
It is important to realize that you do have some power over your own attitudes, behaviour, and feelings. It is important to recognize that other people do not have power over your feelings unless you give it to them. It is vital to start realizing and taking responsibility for how you may be setting yourself up to be the victim because of your childhood programming.
From ‘Dance of the Wounded Souls: "There is an old joke about the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic. The psychotic truly believes that 2 + 2 = 5. The neurotic knows that it is 4 but can't stand it. That was the way I lived most of my life, I could see how life was but I couldn't stand it. I was always feeling like a victim because people and life you are not acting in the way I believed they "should" act.
I expected life to be different than it is. I thought if I was good and did it "right" then I would reach 'happily ever after.' I believed that if I was nice to people they would be nice to me. Because I grew up in a society where people you are taught that other people could control their feelings, and vice versa, I had spent most of my life trying to control the feelings of others and blaming them for my feelings”.
By having expectations you are giving power away. In order to become empowered you need to learn to own that you have choices about how you view life, about your expectations. No one can make you feel hurt or angry - that it is your expectation that causes you to generate feelings of hurt or anger. In other words, the reason you feel hurt or anger is because other people, life, or God is not doing what you want them, expect them, to do.
The journey here is about becoming honest with yourself about your expectations - so you can let go of the ones that are irrational or not useful (like, everyone is going to drive the way I want them to), and own your choices - so you can take responsibility for how you are setting yourself up to be a victim in order to change your patterns. Accept the things you cannot change - change the things you can.
If someone is emotionally abusive, and you keep expecting them to treat you in a loving respectful way - then you are the one who has the problem. You give them the power to push your buttons because you are empowering an insane expectation. You think they "should" act different, so you keep setting them up to be the bad guy, and you to be the abused victim. This is a co-dependent pattern that allows you to feel superior to others because of my self righteous indignation.
It can be quite a shock for people to realise that one of their main sources of self esteem has been to feel morally superior to the people who are abusing you. It is not bad or wrong or shameful - but it is dysfunctional.
You cannot become clear on what you are seeing or hearing if you are reacting to emotional wounds that you have not been willing or able to feel and subconscious attitudes that you have not been willing or able to look at.
Healthy Boundaries
As You Change, What Happens For Others….
Many people have a real terror of conflict – maybe because deep inside we are terrified of someone else's anger. Or because we are programmed to feel responsible for other people's feelings and have great fear of hurting others.
Confronting people means, yes, being honest with yourself. To say you didn't want to tell the other person the truth because it would hurt their feelings is co-dependent. The truth is you didn't want to tell them because you wanted to protect yourself from feeling responsible for hurting their feelings. It is not about them - it is about you.
To avoid setting boundaries because you are afraid of the other person’s anger, is a set up to be a doormat and a victim. It is deadly to your own self respect. You are probably reacting out of an inner child wound. As children you had to learn to not have boundaries in order to survive. As adults, it is your responsibility to your self to start setting boundaries in order to become empowered in your life.
You not only need to set them, you need to be willing to defend them. Defending your right to set boundaries means knowing you do not have to justify or explain. The chances are the other person will react defensively, take your boundary personally, and push for an explanation. You do not owe them an explanation. One of the reasons you may have learned to fear confrontation, was because of how unpleasant power struggles over who is right and who is wrong can be.
Defending your right to set boundaries means learning (a gradual, stumbling process) to stand up for yourself and say: “No! I do not have to explain myself to you.” (This of course, also applies to your feelings. You do not have to justify how you feel to anyone.)
People come into your lives to help you learn about yourself. The people who will feel hurt when you say no to them, are people who are helping you get in touch with dysfunctional beliefs about being responsible for other people's feelings. They are helping you get in touch with some inner child wounds, and practice letting go of unhealthy guilt.
People who are bulldozers, whose anger you are afraid of, are teachers that force you to learn to stand up for yourself. Without them you would never have to learn how to set and defend boundaries.
These types of confrontations are opportunities for growth. The more you grow the more you have a choice to avoid these confrontations by being honest with yourself so that you can employ the strategy that works best. What works best - to help you keep from expending your time and energy on people that you choose not to invest your self in - is to set a boundary and be direct up front.
It takes a great deal of courage to start standing up for yourself. To start saying no straight out instead of making excuses and vague promises that you do not intend to keep.
From Dance of the Wounded Soul: “I had very powerful patterns of avoiding conflict. Those arose out of the traumatic effect my fathers raging had on me, and the emotional incest from my mother that caused me to feel responsible for the feelings of others.
“I had a great ability to intellectually rationalise away the need to stand up for myself. There you have multiple ways to rationalise why the other person was acting that way - or why it wouldn't do any good to stand up for myself. The first instance was masked as unhealthy co-dependent "compassion" - which wasn't really about them at all, but was about protecting me. And the second was about manipulation - about what strategy would best protect me, get me what I wanted.
“There was a stage in my process where I had to let go of trying to figure it out intellectually, let go of strategy, let go of trying to be discerning - and just make the first priority stopping the emotional and verbal abuse. I needed to make protecting myself the first priority. That meant that I shared my feelings anytime someone said something to me that felt abusive. That meant that I reacted out of unresolved grief and anger from the past in my reactions to people. That often meant I had to go back and make amends later.
It was an important phase in my process. I went from having no honest boundaries - to throwing up boundaries and spewing my feelings everywhere with everyone - and then was able to move through that stage to a point where I had more choices.
It may be dysfunctional to share your feelings with your boss or a parent - but it might be a necessary part of owning yourself to do just that. The more you heal the more discernment you can practice in where, when, and to whom you are emotionally honest.
This is one of those places where it is important to be able to recognise that any guilt feelings that might arise, and cause you to feel you have to explain, are most likely unhealthy guilt – co-dependent reactions to being programmed to feel responsible for other people's feelings.
There are many people out there whose co-dependent defence system falls into what I describe in my book as bulldozers. They will push and push and push. They will demand explanations.
You do not owe them an explanation. With bulldozers it is often necessary to get down right rude with them before they will hear you. Anyone who pushes against a boundary you set is obviously someone that you may want to choose not to be around. If someone gets pushy, then you can say something like: "I don't want to see you again because you don't respect the boundary that I just set."
Boundaries Are There To Protect
"Boundaries define limits, mark off dividing lines. The purpose of a boundary is to make clear separations between different turf, different territory. . . .”
The journey you are on teaches you how to take down the walls and protect yourself in healthy ways - by learning what healthy boundaries are, how to set them, and how to defend them. It is teaching you to be discerning in your choices, to ask for what you need, and to be assertive and loving in meeting your own needs. (Of course many of you have to first get used to the revolutionary idea that it is all right for you to have needs.)
The purpose of having boundaries is to protect and take care of yourself. You need to be able to tell other people when they are acting in ways that are not acceptable to you. A first step is starting to know that you have a right to protect and defend yourself. That you have not only the right, but the duty, to take responsibility for how you allow others to treat you.
Sometimes on this journey you may find yourself lashing out and being abusive. When that happens you can make amends for how you expressed yourself - you never have to apologise for having the feelings. You cannot go from repressing your feelings and being emotionally dishonest to communicating perfectly in one step. Communicating in an appropriate way is something you learn gradually - and something you will never do perfectly every time.
You set a boundary to define your territory, to protect your space - physical, emotional, mental, sexual, spiritual, financial, etc. You set the boundary because it is what you need to do for your self, to protect and take care of your self. You set it knowing that the other person may not be able or willing to change their behaviour - and that you are prepared to take whatever action you need to take if that proves to be the case. That action may include cutting that person out of your life completely.
You may be scared of setting boundaries because the inner child may be afraid of: hurting other people; having other people be angry at me; being abandoned; losing the relationship. Ultimately, these fears come to other people, ie. people will go away if I say no, or set a boundary with them.
You must become willing to take that risk. You have to decide that you have enough worth to stand up for yourself even if people do go away. Some people may still when you set a boundary. But you may also be amazed to see that some of the people that you set a boundary with start to treat you with more respect. They are able to hear you and value you enough to change their behaviour.
With boundaries, as in every area of the healing process, change starts with awareness. You have to hear about boundaries, and start learning the concept before you can even realize that you have poor one, if any. You have to start getting some glimmer of an idea of what boundaries are, and how to set them, in order to understand how hard they might be for you - and how absolutely vital to learning to accept and love yourself.
In terms of boundaries between countries, these dividing lines are arbitrary and mostly man made according to who won the last war - although sometimes natural boundaries such as rivers are a factor in drawing the boundary lines. Likewise, boundaries between states, counties, those defining property lines - are primarily arbitrary and man made.
Similarly within you there are natural boundaries that are part of the way life works - that are aligned with the reality of the rules that govern human dynamics - and personal boundaries.
The purpose of setting boundaries is to take care of your self. Being forced to learn how to set boundaries is a vital part of learning to own your self, of learning to respect yourself, of learning to love yourself. If you never have to set a boundary, then you will never get in touch with who you really are - will never escape the enmeshment of dependence and learn to define yourself as separate in a healthy way.
From ‘Dance of the Wounded Souls’: “When I first encountered the concept of boundaries, I thought of them as lines that I would draw in the sand - and if you stepped across them I would shoot you (figuratively speaking.) (I had this image of some place like the Alamo - from a movie I guess - where a sword was used to draw a line in the sand, and then those that you are going to stay and fight to the death stepped across it.) I thought that boundaries had to be rigid and final and somehow kind of fatal”.
Some boundaries are rigid - and need to be. Boundaries such as: "It is not OK to hit me, ever." "It is not acceptable to call me certain names." "It is not acceptable to cheat on me."
No one deserves to be treated abusively. No one deserves to be lied to and betrayed.
Everybody deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. If you do not respect yourself, if you do not start awakening to your right to be treated with respect and dignity (and your responsibility in creating that in your life) - then you will be more comfortable being involved with people who abuse you than with people who treat you in loving ways. Often if you do not respect yourself, you will end up exhibiting abusive behaviour towards people who do not abuse you. On some level in your co-dependence, you are more comfortable with being abused (because it is what you have always known) than being treated in a loving way.
How To Set A Boundary
Learning to set boundaries is vital to learning to love your self, and to communicating to others that you have worth.
There are basically three parts to a boundary. The first two are setting the boundary - the third is what you will do to defend that boundary.
If you - a description of the behaviour you find unacceptable (again being as descriptive as possible.)
I will - a description of what action you will take to protect and take care of your self in the event the other person violates the boundary.
If you continue this behaviour - a description of what steps you will take to protect the boundary that you have set.
One very drastic example (in the case of someone who is just learning about boundaries and has been physically abused in the past) would be:
“If you ever hit me, I will call the police and press charges - and I will leave this relationship. If you continue to threaten me, I will get a restraining order and prepare to defend myself in whatever manner is necessary”.
It is not always necessary or appropriate to share the third part of this formula with the other person when setting a boundary - the first two steps are the actual setting of the boundary. The third part is something you need to know for yourself, so that you know what action you can take if the other person violates the boundary. If you set a boundary and expect the other person to abide by it automatically - then you are setting yourself up to be a victim of your expectation.
It is not enough to set boundaries - it is necessary to be willing to do whatever it takes to enforce them. You need to be willing to go to any length, do whatever it takes to protect yourself. This is something that can be really upsetting when you first start learning how to set boundaries. It takes great courage to build yourself up to a point where you are willing to set a boundary. It is tempting to think that the huge thing you have done to set a boundary should be enough. Then to see that some people just ignored the boundaries you just set, may seem terribly unfair.
Consequences
It is vital to set consequences that you are willing to enforce. If you are setting boundaries in a relationship, and you are not yet at a point where you are ready to leave the relationship - then don't say that you will leave. You can say that you will start considering all of your options including leaving - but do not state that you will do something that you are not ready yet to do. To set boundaries and not enforce them just gives the other person an excuse to continue in the same old behaviour.
Some examples of consequences:
If you verbally abuse me by calling me names, I will confront you about your behaviour and share my feelings.
If you continue that behaviour I will leave the room and ask you to leave.
If you keep repeating this behaviour I will start considering all of my options, including leaving this relationship.
If you break your plans with me by not showing up or by calling me at the last minute to tell me that you had something else come up, I will confront your behaviour and share my feelings.
If you repeat that behaviour, I will consider it to mean that you do not value or deserve my friendship - and I will have no contact with you for a month.
Since behaviour patterns are quite ingrained in all of us, it is important to allow the other person some wiggle room to make a change in behaviour - unless the behaviour is really intolerable. To go from one extreme to the other is a reaction to a reaction - and is co-dependent. There are choices in-between which are sometimes hard for you to see if you are reacting. To go from tolerating verbally abusive behaviour to leaving a relationship in one step is swinging between extremes. It is helpful to set boundaries that allow for some gradual change.
Some more examples:
When I ask you what is wrong and you say "Never mind," and then slam cabinet doors and rattle pots and pans and generally seem to be silently raging about something, I feel angry, frustrated, irritated, hopeless, as if you are unwilling to communicate with me, as if I am supposed to read your mind.
I want you to communicate with me and help me to understand if I have done something that upsets you.
If something is bothering you and you will not tell me what it is, I will confront you about your behaviour and share my feelings.
If you continue that behaviour, I will confront your behaviour, share my feelings, and insist that you go to counselling together.
If you keep repeating this behaviour I will start considering all of my options, including leaving this relationship.
The consequences you set down for behaviour you find unacceptable should be realistic - in that, the change that you are asking for is something that is within the others power (rather they are willing to take that responsibility is another thing altogether) - and enforceable, something that you are willing to do.
It is also important to set consequences that impact the other person more than you. Often when people are first learning how to set boundaries, they do not think it through far enough. They set boundaries that impact themselves as much or more than the other person. For example, a single parent with a teenager who needs to get consequences for coming home late, or bad grades, or whatever, may be tempted to say something like "If you miss your curfew again, you will be grounded for a month." The reality of grounding a teenager for a month is that it often means the parent is also grounded for a month. If taking away driving privileges means you will have to drive them to school - maybe you want to choose some other consequence.
Choices
Setting a boundary is not making a threat - it is communicating clearly what the consequences will be if the other person continues to treat you in an unacceptable manner. It is a consequence of the other person’s behaviour.
Setting boundaries is not a more sophisticated way of manipulation - although some people will say they are setting boundaries, when in fact they are attempting to manipulate. The difference between setting a boundary in a healthy way and manipulating is: when you set a boundary you let go of the outcome.
You want the other person to change their behaviour. You hope they will. But you need to own all of your choices in order to empower yourself to take responsibility for your lives and stop setting yourself up to be a victim. One of your choices is to remove yourself from relationship with the person. You can leave a marriage. You can end a friendship. You can leave a job. You do not have to have any contact with your family of origin. It is vitally important to own all of your choices.
If you do not own that you have a choice to leave an abusive relationship - then you are not making a choice to stay in the relationship. Any time you do not own your choices, you are empowering victimisation. You may then blame the other person, and/or blame yourself. It is a vital part of the process of learning to love yourself to own all of your choices.
It is essential to own that you have choices in order to escape the extremes of co-dependent suffering victim martyr role - or the other extreme, which is being abusive in order to try to make others do it "right" (that is, do what you want them to.) Both, the people who appear to be victims and the people that appear to be abusers, are coming from a victim place in terms of blaming others for their behaviour. "I wouldn't have to hit you if you didn't talk to me that way" is a victim statement. Both victim and perpetrator are coming from a victim perspective, blaming their behaviours on others - or on themselves, "I can't help it, that is just how I am."
Remember you always have a choice. You may not like your choice but you have one. In life you often don't like your choices because you don't know what the outcome is going to be and you are terrified of doing it 'wrong.'
Even with life events that occur in a way that you seemingly don't have a choice over (being laid off work, the car breaking down, a flood, etc.) you still have a choice over how you respond to those events. You can choose to see things that feel like, and seem to be, tragic as opportunities for growth. You can choose to focus the half of the glass that is full and be grateful for it or to focus the half that is empty and be the victim of it. You have a choice about where you focus your minds.
To help to realise you have choices, try taking the have to’s out of your vocabulary. As long as you are reacting to life unconsciously you do not have choices. In consciousness you always have a choice. You do not "have to" do anything.
Until you own that you have a choice, you haven't made one. In other words, if you do not believe that you have a choice to leave your job, or relationship, then you have not made a choice to stay in it. You can only truly commit yourself to something if you are consciously choosing to do it.
This includes the area that is probably the single hardest job in your society today, the area that it is almost impossible not to feel trapped in some of the time - being a single parent. A single parent has the choice of giving their children up for adoption, or abandoning them. That is a choice! If a single parent believes that he or she has no choice, then they will feel trapped and resentful and will end up taking it out on their children.
You always have a choice. The choices may seem to be awful - but in reality, allowing yourself to buy into the illusion that you are trapped will have worse consequences in the long run. It may seem ridiculous to suggest that a parent can abandon or give a child up for adoption - but owning your choices no matter how outrageous a step in owning responsibility for being the creator in your life. If you are blaming and being the victim you will never be happy.
Healthy Relationships
Interdependence
Dependence (co-dependence and counter-dependence) is about giving away power over our self-esteem. . . . . .interdependence is about making allies, forming partnerships. A very different quality of relationship.
It is about forming connections with other people. And the way to healthy interdependence is to be able to see things clearly - to see people, situations, life dynamics and most of all ourselves clearly. You therefore to continue to work on your childhood programming, or what you learned as a child, so you can begin to see yourselves and life more clearly.
The more you can start owning (and liking, if not accepting) the truth of who you really are and integrating it into your relationship with yourself, the more you can enjoy this human experience that you are having. Then you can start learning how to be interdependent - how to give power away in conscious, healthy ways because your self-worth is no longer dependent on outside sources.
Interdependence means that you can give someone else some power over your welfare and your feelings.
Anytime you care about somebody or something you give away some power over your feelings. It is impossible to love without giving away some power. When you choose to love someone (or thing - a pet, a car, anything) you are giving them the power to make you happy – you cannot do that without also giving them the power to hurt you or cause you to feel angry or scared.
In order to live we all need to be interdependent. We cannot participate in life without giving away some power over our feelings and our welfare. This is not just about people. If you put money in a bank you are giving some power over your feelings and welfare to that bank. If you have a car you have a dependence on it and will have feelings if it something happens to it. If you live in society you have to be interdependent to some extent and give some power away. The key is to be conscious in your choices and own responsibility for the consequences.
The problems of dependence cause us to keep repeating patterns that are familiar. So you pick untrustworthy people to trust, undependable people to depend on, unavailable people to love. By healing our emotional wounds and changing the problem patterns you can start to practice discernment in your choices so that you can change your patterns and learn to trust yourselves.
As we develop healthy self-esteem based on knowing, accepting and loving ourselves we can consciously take the risk of loving, of being interdependent, without buying into the belief that the behaviour of others determines your self-worth. You will have feelings – you will get hurt, you will be scared, you will get angry - because those feelings are an unavoidable part of life. Feelings are a part of the human experience - they cannot be avoided. And trying to avoid them only causes you to miss out on the joy and love and happiness that can also be a part of the human experience.
Emotionally Honest Communication
Communicating with honesty means acting on one's feeling base. This does not mean hurting others or acting out one's hurt. This means communicating without blaming. What is needed is to stop saying things like: "you make me so angry"; "you hurt me"; "you make me crazy"; "how could you do that to me after all I have done for you"; etc. These are the very types of messages you may have got in childhood that has so warped your perspective on your own emotional process.
From ‘Dance of Wounded Souls’: "I grew up believing that I had the power to make my father angry and to break my mother's heart. I thought that I was supposed to be perfect, and that if I was not, I was causing the people I loved great pain. I grew up believing that I had power over other peoples’ feelings - and they had power over mine". It is very important to learn to communicate about how another person's behaviour is affecting us - without making “blame you" type of statements.
There is a simple formula to help you do this. It is:
When you . . . . . I feel . . . . . I want . . . .
ie. “Since I am powerless over you, I will take this action to protect myself if you behave in this way”.
The first three parts of the formula are a very important part of taking responsibility for your self - an important step in learning to define yourself as separate in a healthy way.
When you . . . . .
The "When you . . ." statement is a description of behaviour. It is important to actually describe the behaviour. To say to another person: when you get angry; when you shame me; or such statements - is too general, not specific enough. These types of general statements do not really describe the behaviour - they are your interpretations of the behaviour. A major facet of dependence is assuming, interpreting, mind reading, and fortune telling. You may think you know the intentions and motives of others. You may assume that they are conscious of their behaviour and will know what you are talking about.
It is vital to communicate in a direct and honest manner, stop interpreting, and describe the behaviour rather than your interpretation and assumptions about what the behaviour means. For example:
▪ "When your face gets red and your voice gets louder and your hands clench into fists" - is specific and descriptive. It does not assume - rather it describes the behaviour that appears to us to indicate anger.
▪ "When you look at me with a frown on your face and your eye brows slightly raised and give a loud sigh" - is a description of behaviour that causes us to react with guilt and shame.
Usually the other person has no idea what their behaviour looks like. Parents may try to control the behaviour of their children with fear, guilt, and shame because that is how they were brought up. Your reactions are due to emotional buttons, triggers, that possibly your parents behaviour toward you installed in you.
Usually, when you first confront such behaviour in a healthy way, the other people will profess innocence and ignorance of what you are talking about. But, by describing the behaviour, you will be planting seeds of consciousness in them that may eventually cause them to get more conscious of the sound of their own voice, or their sighs. Describing behaviour is an important step towards making it possible for the other person to get past their toxic shame so that they can start seeing a boundary between being and behaviour.
You, of course, are powerless over them - over whether they get it, understand what you are doing. But in learning to communicate in a healthy way, without blame and shame, we are maximising the possibility of communication.
I feel . . . . .
This is the part of the formula where you can start learning to express your emotions in a healthy and honest way. This is a vital part of the process of owning your emotions. It is best to use primary feeling words when expressing the "I feel . . . ." part of this formula - but it is also OK to use words that describe the messages you feel are inherent in their behaviours. For example,
▪ "When your voice gets louder and your face gets red and you clench your fists, I feel scared, intimidated, unsafe. I feel like you are going to hit me".
▪ "When I try to talk to you while you are watching television and I have to say your name 3 or 4 times before you respond, I feel angry, hurt, discounted, unimportant, insignificant, invisible, like I am being punished. It feels like you do not want to communicate with me".
It is important to state your feelings out loud, and to precede the feeling with "I feel." When we say "I am angry, I'm hurt, etc." you are stating that the feeling is who you are. Emotions do not define you, they are a form of internal communication to help understand yourself. They are a vital part of your being - as a component of the whole.
By saying it this way you are owning the feeling. It is important to do this for yourselves. By stating the feeling out loud you are affirming that you have a right to feelings. You are affirming it to yourself - and taking responsibility for owning yourself and your reality. That the other person hears you is not as important as hearing yourself and understanding that you have a right to your feelings. It is vitally important to own your own voice. To own your right to speak up for yourself.
As you get farther along in the process you can start being more discerning in your communication techniques. For example, if one was hit as a child, then a raised voice is a trigger to the child's fear of being hit. For the little child it was life threatening when a giant adult raged. In your adult relationship, you may feel very confident that your significant other (or boss or whatever) would not hit you - but when you are triggered, you react out of the emotional wounds of the child, out of the child's emotional reality. It does affect us.
So then you might say something like:
▪ "When your voice gets louder and your face gets red and you clench your fists . . . I feel scared and hurt. I react out of the 5 year old in me who got hit when my father raged. I react to a loud voice by feeling like I am going to be hit".
Often someone from a loud expressive family will get involved with someone from a very emotionally repressive family. Then the first person will not think anything of being loud - while the second will be curious about it but also get upset by it. The only way to work through the patterns from your childhood is to be able to communicate with each other so that you can start becoming conscious of your behaviours and how they affect others.
I want . . . .
Again it is important not to be too general with what you want. Saying something like: "I want to know I am important to you. I want to know you love me", is not specific enough. Describe the kind of behaviours that would give you the message that you want from the other person.
▪ "I want you to answer me when I talk to you. I want you to tell me you love me - and show me with funny little gifts and cards and making plans on your own for a special date for just the two of us. I want you to ask me how my day went and really listen to my answer" etc.
You also have responsibility for how you may react emotionally to the other person. You have responsibility for separating out grief and rage caused by wounds from the past that the other person is triggering, from the part of your reaction that is about them now.
You may need to go back to that person and say something like these examples:
"I want to make amends to you for how intensely I expressed my feelings to you. What you said to me was inappropriate and abusive - and was not acceptable to me, but the intensity of my reaction was caused by the fact that you triggered an old wound from my past. What it has shown is that I must get in touch with the old wound that needs some more attention and healing - but also know that saying things like that is not OK. I will not allow you to talk to me like that", or
▪ "I want to make amends to you for reacting out of a victim place. Your behaviour was unacceptable to me, and I had a right to be hurt - but I reacted by blaming you for my feelings and that is something which I am learning to stop doing. So, I am sorry my reaction came from such a black and white perspective because it was not helpful in communicating with you about why your behaviour bothered me".
These are very general examples, and in actual practice it is best to use the guidelines above, that is: describe the behaviour specifically rather than your interpretation of the behaviour - both their behaviour and your own. For example,
▪ "I am sorry I called you a ____ (profane name) when you told that joke about ____. I felt hurt, discounted, put down, violated, angry, and shamed. I found what you said offensive and unacceptable - but it was not appropriate for me to use that kind of language in expressing myself".
Honesty…..Plus Safety
You need to strive for emotional honesty with yourself and for yourself - because being honest with yourself is what works best to help you see yourself and life most clearly. It is the most loving thing to do for yourself.
It is also important for you to learn to practice discernment in relationship when being honest with other people. It is almost always the best policy, the strategy that works best in the long run, to be direct and honest with others. That does not necessarily mean emotionally honest. And it does not necessarily mean you need to tell them the whole truth, be honest on all levels. Part of having good boundaries for you includes not offering opinions to, or being emotionally honest with, people who do not want to hear it.
It is important to have boundaries in terms of how you view other people. If you have one or two people in you life that you feel that you can truly communicate with and be emotionally honest with on all levels, that is an incredible abundance. But that is rare, which is sad, but it is a reality for many.
It can be very helpful to accept that people are where they are at - and that it is OK. It is important to let go of old patterns of say, sacrificing yourself in the now for the potential of the future. It is possible to get to a point where one sees who a person really is, and understand their potential - which on your deepest level of honesty usually means their potential to be an asset in your life - but need to accept that they are perfectly where they are supposed to be in their lives.
You need to accept that in order not to buy into the illusion that they are doing something to you – so that you are not the victim of their life choices, of their inability to be who you want them to be now.
This can be especially important in terms of letting go of expecting family of origin to change. Does this sound familiar? "They are not who I want them to be, they don't understand me and can't see me". It isn't personal - they are just dancing with their tunes and following their path. It is not helpful to judge someone else's path. Letting go - especially in terms of letting go of the myth of family = perfect understanding. This is a necessary component in being able to have an honest, but discerning relationship with family.
In terms of friends, there are going to be people in your life, who you can share certain things with - but not other things. Some people you may be able to relate to on certain levels, or about certain issues. To expect that you can be emotionally honest with everyone in your life in a way that works (is safe, is heard, is understood) is an unrealistic expectation in such a society.
‘Safe’ means being emotionally honest; it's about what will work best. Before people do this work, often they are giving a lot of power to old wounds and patterns, so they may feel devastated to have someone judge and shame them. Then, safe referred to danger, to people who would judge and shame them. It also meant about people who would try to fix them. Trying to fix someone else is not support, it is co-dependence.
When someone starts trying to rescue another it imparts a judgment on where they are at - it means they are not comfortable so they are going to try to change the other person to make themselves comfortable.
Once you assume a healthier stance with more capacity to be balanced and see life with some clarity - other people and life events will have less power to effect you. The better you have become at letting go, the shorter the periods of time that you are giving others the power to rock your 'emotional boat'.
The term safe may then be transformed into meaning something like: safe from wasting time and energy trying to communicate with someone who can not hear. To get into an argument, a power struggle over right and wrong, with someone who doesn't speak your language is dysfunctional – is silly really!
Discernment
You are never going to meet someone who doesn't have some red flags. Everyone you meet is going to be someone who is a ‘teacher’ of some kind. That’s part of the attraction. By paying attention, it is possible to choose whether you want to explore your connection to them further, or it be an opportunity to set a boundary with yourself about where to expend your time and energy. If you discern that you do not feel comfortable with seeing this person again, you can be direct and honest with them - without necessarily being emotionally honest.
For example:
▪ You don’t have to say: You scare me because it appears that you are not really hearing what I am saying to you, that you are unable to be conscious and present. (This would almost certainly engender a defensive reaction from the other person and lead to more time and energy expended)
▪ You do not have to lie to them either: I am so busy this week. Maybe later in the month. (This sets you up to keep putting them off.)
▪ You can say something like: Sorry, but I am very busy these days and just do not have time to hang out.
So, you tell a little fib by saying you are sorry when you probably aren't - and you do not tell the whole truth which is: I choose not to hang out with someone unless I see the possibility of a healthy relationship with them, or sense a strong connection that I feel a need to explore.
And then you do not have to explain. You do not have to explain yourself to anyone unless you choose to. You have a right to make choices without having to justify them or defend yourself.
Pay Attention
Another purpose of being emotionally honest with another person is to develop emotional intimacy with that person. If the other person is not capable of emotional honesty, then you are setting yourself up in having unrealistic expectations.
When you first meet someone you do not have any data to base a discerning decision upon. You gather data by paying attention. It’s this ability, to be in the moment and pay attention, that improves as healthy boundaries and inner calm develops. People give signs and signals about themselves right from first contact with them. The most loving thing you can do for yourself, and the most functional behaviour, is to be present and pay attention, and never lose this ability, never give in to bias, prejudice.
So, you observe. You pay attention not just to what they are saying, but also to their body language, their eye contact, the feelings you get in your gut while interacting with them.
Negotiate, Speak Up
Negotiating with others is actioning your new boundaries and emotionally honest communication. By taking the risk of setting boundaries you get the wonderful gift of getting what you want - some of the time. One has to let go of the outcome and learn to accept the situation however it unfolds.
You will come to the realisation that anyone who is a friend is someone you can communicate with - and be able to negotiate boundaries with. The vast majority of boundaries are in fact a negotiation rather than a rigid line in the sand. Adults need to negotiate boundaries between themselves. This is very true in romantic relationships - and is the standard for all relationships.
What you can be striving for is healthy inter-dependent relationships. Here is what you are willing to do, and here is what you need from them. We all want a romantic relationship with a partner who will share our journey with us. In order to make that possible it is necessary to communicate, share feelings, and negotiate agreements about behaviour. By negotiating such boundaries, you are communicating with another person. You are telling them who you are and what you need. It is much more effective to do that directly and honestly than to expect them to read your mind - and then punish them when they cannot.
Often it is little things that seem inconsequential that it is most important to set boundaries and negotiate about: irritating little habits or mannerisms of another person. These irritating little things will grow into huge monsters unless you learn to communicate and negotiate. When you ignore your feelings you build up resentments. Resentments are victim feelings - the feeling that somebody is doing something to you. If you don't speak up and take the risk of sharing how you feel, you will end up blowing up and/or being passive aggressive - and damaging the relationship.
Lose the Extremes
The more you start to respect and love yourself, the more you start automatically and spontaneously owning your right to speak up and set boundaries. Often when you are breaking out of the old patterns, jumping out of the old ruts, you will swing to the other extreme. That doesn't mean you are going to stay there. It means you are doing a paradigm shift in your relationship with self and others. It means you have broken through to a different way of doing things.
People in relationships, especially new romantic relationships will often go from one extreme to another: they will never have another romantic relationship; or they love their new partner so much they will move in together and be fully immersed in the relationship.
These are a watered down, less powerful version of the choices you probably learned in childhood from your role models - either completely unavailable or completely enmeshed.
Relationship thinking often tends toward the extremes within the spectrum of what is possible. It feels easier to completely let go of the idea of having a relationship or to think in terms of what it is going to be like when you are living together (no wonder people get jealous as their ideals aren’t met!) Compare this to thinking in terms of getting to know someone gradually. Kind of like, either pretend the water isn't there, or dive into the deep end without looking first to see what may be just under the surface.
It is healthier to gradually ease yourself into the shallow water. One of the reasons this would be healthy is that when you look at the water you may get in touch with grief about being alone: the possible pain and loneliness from childhood, deprived of your emotional life. It is likely that it is relatively easy now to separate out childhood feelings of loneliness - and they do not any longer have a life threatening feeling of desperation to them.
But deprivation has also existed in your adult life - of love, companionship, affection, touch, sexual fulfilment, etc. - because of the patterns caused by fear of intimacy. So the grief around those deprivation issues may still have some power because the deprivation is still happening.
The healthier you get, the more emotional healing you do, the less extreme your emotional reaction / response spectrum will be. The growth process works kind of like a pendulum swinging. The less you buy into the toxic emotions of loneliness, shame or guilt, the less extreme the swings of the pendulum become. The arc of your emotional pendulum becomes gentler, and you can return to emotional balance much quicker and easier.
But you don't get to stay in the balance position. Life is always rocking your boat - setting your emotional pendulum to swinging. By not taking life events and other peoples’ behaviour so seriously and personally, you learn to not give so much power over your emotions to outside influences and events. Your emotional swings stay on a much evener keel and you can experience a much gentler emotional spectrum in your day-to-day relationship with life.
But it is still a spectrum, and as such involves swings between extremes. Those extremes are less powerful versions of the wildly divergent extremes you may have once got caught up in. Awareness is possible of the area between the black and the white extremes, to be aware of the 2 through 9 options.
Progress not Perfection
It is important to look at your journey from the perspective of the progress you have made rather than trying to do it perfectly. In making progress you have needed to breakthrough to new ways of doing things. You need to explore new territory and give yourself permission to take care of yourself in whatever way is necessary. That sometimes involves swinging to the other extreme so that you end up having to make amends for how you expressed yourself. It is important to celebrate your progress and not shame and judge yourself for any mess that the way you breakthrough may entail.
An example is the story of a Social Worker who was very good at doing her job. In the role she was playing at work she could be fierce and have strong boundaries. In her personal life however, she gave herself no permission to have any boundaries at all. Her therapist’s homework assignment was for her was to tell someone to F___ off!
Sometimes you need to crash through with something out of character. She was appalled and horrified at the thought of saying something like that to someone. It was not even conceivable to her because it was so contrary to the self definition she had adapted in childhood.
Making change and growing is about expanding your consciousness, to give yourself permission to act in ways you would never consider. It took her about 3 months before she completed the homework - and when she did, she said it to the biggest cop in town at a professional gathering. She was horrified that she had done it. She had finally stood up for herself spontaneously. Now that she had done it, there would be the need to go back and make amends for how she expressed herself - but that it was a wonderful breakthrough that she had defended herself.
This was a breakthrough in the sense that she had started to respect herself enough to be willing to go to any length to defend herself. She spontaneously set a boundary and communicated that another person’s behaviour was not acceptable to her.
In making change you may be deciding to go from unconscious-like workaholism, or exercise, or food, or whatever, to a greater consciousness; but it won’t happen overnight. This healing journey is a long gradual process. You will still need to go unconscious sometimes. There are times when it is not safe to be vulnerable and emotionally honest. Growth is a dance that celebrates progress, not one that achieves perfection.
The process is a gradual transition from using your old tool box to using the new tools. The old tools - the ways you used to go unconsciously so you could survive - are not "bad" or "wrong." They are life savers – necessary once upon a time.
You adopted the old tools because they were the best choices that you had available to you at the time. You adopted them in response to intuitive impulses that you were right on. Those impulses were: "protect myself, nurture myself." It is the nature of the defence system of dependence, in which the ways you learned to protect and nurture yourself are self-destructive in the long run.
The shaming of your self for the behaviours that you adopted to protect and nurture yourself needs to end. At the same time as you are transitioning to behaviours that are less self-destructive, be kind to your self in making the progress.
If you have an image of what completely healthy behaviour is, and you will not allow yourself to accept and love yourself until you get there, then you are setting conditions under which you decide when you will become lovable. You are still buying into a concept of conditional love. You are still trying to earn, and become worthy of not only self-love. Further, that small child inside of you is still trying to earn your parents' love and validation.
Rather, begin saying "Oh, isn't it sad that I am still doing that? I think I will try to learn some ways that I can change it."
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