Relationshipscentral

Misery Loves Company

2009-10-28T16:38:00.002Z

On the theme of containment, I’ve been thinking how misery can be a habit – a life long habit. If you were born into, and lived with, depression, that’s what you will be used to. Misery became familiar to you. Joy, being unfamiliar, will be more threatening. It is unknown and you are less likely to trust it. That's why fear comes along with excitement. You don't know how to contain your excitement.

“Change is always for the worse,” someone said to me recently. What a negative attitude! This was a person who shunned change, never grew and reached her eighties with a whole lot of unfulfilled potential and regrets. Have a look at your negativity. What do you feel more comfortable with? What have you got used to?

If your family was miserable they would not have been able to cope with a healthy, joyful, vivacious, spontaneous and powerful child. They could have been miserable for any number of reasons, depression, bereavement, general unhappiness with their situation. Their negativity could be understandable, but the effect on you, the child, was devastating. You grew up believing your happiness would inconvenience other people. You probably learned to keep quiet, dumb yourself down, minimise your power. You became limited by the limitations of your environment. You will have grown up being less than who you really are and can be – not fulfilling your potential. Children are ingenious at adapting to their environment. Think how you have adapted to your early environment and how you still use those same coping mechanisms habitually, even though you no longer need to. Think about how you coped with the limitations of your early environment. What have you adapted to and what do you put up with now that is less than you could really have.

Containment

2009-10-27T19:20:00.002Z

If you weren’t held as a child, you won’t know how to hold yourself now. If your emotions and your physical energy were not contained, you will feel overwhelmed by them, even now. If you were not allowed, or it wasn’t safe, for you to express love and joy, anger and fear, as a child, you will not know how to contain and express these emotions appropriately now. Consequently, you will not be able to feel, contain and express the full extent of your power and potential. You will have grown up stunted and underachieving in so many ways – and fearful.

If you did not have the opportunity to experience the full extent of your emotions and energy, as a child, you would have imagined all sorts of things; that your power was destructive, to yourself and others; that your rage could kill; even that you might suffer punishment and retribution if you dared to be happy. That’s why you feel fear when you feel excited now. Probably nobody ever explained to you why things were the way they were, why your environment felt limiting or restrictive; and you probably blamed yourself for that too, and even do now. You probably thought there was something wrong with you. Nor were you taught how to contain your own energy and emotions without necessarily acting out on them; how to get what you wanted without emoting, by articulating; and, most importantly, how to delay gratification and make choices from probably limited possibilities. All of this would add to your sense of not being OK.

In this way you may have gown up being afraid to fully feel, to be fully alive, to live your life fully and spontaneously. You may have a nagging doubt that there is more but not know how to reach it. I’ll write some more specifically on how to contain various emotions and what choices you have now that you didn’t have as a child.

I’m Back

2009-10-26T17:50:00.000Z

Sorry folks, I’ve been away for a long time doing some personal research. I’m back, armed with some more ideas to share with you.

Attack and Blame

2009-05-15T17:09:00.000+01:00

Twice this week somebody, who wanted something from me, has rung up and asked, ‘How are you?’ Then, when I was telling them, they didn’t seem to be listening. Eventually they attacked me. ‘You didn’t ask how I was.’ They hadn’t given me a chance. One said she felt ‘crap’ but refused to discuss it. In both cases I felt attacked. I also had a call from a friend whose partner is going through a rough time. Her complaint – he keeps attacking and blaming her.

So what happens?

This is narcissistic rage: the rage of a baby. An adult would say what they wanted, why they are calling. A baby can’t articulate. If they can’t ask for what you want or create it as an appropriate response to their crying, they rage. It may not be safe for the baby to express this rage, so they turn it inwards and feel attacked by their own feelings. These become paranoid fantasies because a child lives in a world of fantasy. When you grow up, you carry this unexpressed rage with you. You feel attacked and you attack.

Narcissistic behaviour lacks empathy and therefore compassion. So asking someone how they are doesn’t mean you can empathise, or that you really want to know. All you want is relief from your own pain and frustration. And if you don’t get this, you attack. You blame the other person. If your cries were not heard and responded to appropriately, when you were a baby, then you were not contained. It is hard now for you to contain your own emotions because you still feel like that baby. You have not grown up and learned to manage pain and frustration. You have not learned to respect time, to wait. For a baby, time is endless and they cannot wait. As an adult you know that change comes slowly, over time. Nothing lasts for ever. You learn this from experience, if you are patient.

Challenges and Control

2009-05-07T12:18:00.000+01:00

If only you could plan your days, life, wake up in the morning and it would go just that way. If only. You live with the illusion that you can control your life. You can’t. There are too many external influences, and also unconscious internal influences, for you to be able to control them all.

However, you can take control of your life, as it presents itself to you. You can accept life’s challenges, accept every day and everything that comes to you, as a challenge and respond to it. Or you can react against it.

If you respond, you will learn and grow. Your potential will be stretched. This is constructive. If you react, rage against what you cannot control or change, you regress, become a helpless victim. You do not learn or grow. This is destructive, especially to yourself.

You have a choice to accept life’s challenges, on a daily basis, and work with them. You have a choice to use your resources and stretch yourself. This also means talking risks, feeling the fear and not always getting it right.

Rejection

2009-05-07T12:02:00.002+01:00

This is a painful one. Probably the most painful experience I know. That’s why you avoid it and deny it. You set up all sorts of defences to pretend it hasn’t happened.

Behaviour can be rejected as undesirable, inappropriate. When this happens to you as a child, and depending how it happens, when you have offered that behaviour with love, you feel like all of you is being rejected. Because we are all born to love, it’s hard to separate that love from your ‘self’. It’s who you are. If you don’t know why your love isn’t received, or your behaviour isn’t appropriate, if you’re not told, you lose your sense of that self. After all, children can be awkward, naive. So you blame yourself. You believe you are intrinsically flawed. We are all born to love, albeit in different ways.

The love of a child is so delicate; it needs to be handled with care. Children are easily hurt and rejected – by the insensitive. If you don’t know how much you were hurt as a child, how much you felt rejected, you will go on to hurt others in relationships. You may damage young and vulnerable lives, still in the process of developing, as you were damaged. The same applies to relationships. These also need to develop and grow in a healthy way.

Rejection, including shaming, causes deep pain that is hard to face and therefore hard to heal. Children who have been rejected clamour for love as adults, often from rejecting people and especially in codependent relationships. (Don’t forget that withdrawing, counter-dependency, is also a form of codependency. If you are proud and aloof, you are likely to have been rejected too. You reject other people by not being emotionally available now). Children who have been rejected grow up learning to reject themselves, and to reject others, not letting them in. They then feel lost and empty and turn to codependency and other addictions as adults to fill themselves up. This doesn’t heal the pain or fill the emptiness.

Change

2009-04-20T11:06:00.001+01:00

Sorry I haven’t been around for a while. I’ve been in retreat, going through a period of intense personal transformation – and change.

What occurs to me is how paradoxical it is that strategies that saved our lives and our sanity as children, so ingeniously devised, have exactly the opposite effect when we are adults.

What worked in your family, the coping mechanisms you adopted then, will work against you now you are not living in that family; they will not get your adult needs met in a functional way. Those coping mechanisms, being dysfunctional behaviours, will only work in dysfunctional relationships, which means there will always be a price to pay.

So the process of change, of getting your realistic needs realistically met now, requires examining the dysfunctional methods you learned, used and assumed as a child and transforming them into their opposites, turning them on their heads and exchanging them for functional strategies that work in the present and are appropriate for you as a capable and independent adult, not as a helpless and dependent child.

Healing the Planet

2009-01-05T22:12:00.000Z

What’s this got to do with relationships? Firstly, to heal the planet, we all need to heal ourselves. Otherwise we will go on being driven by the same old motives and practising the same old strategies that got us to where we are today. First and foremost is greed, which is an offshoot of fear and insecurity. Greed is the belief there isn’t enough to go round. It’s also an attempt to substitute acquisitions, belongings, and the illusion of security, control and power they bring, for love.

There is enough love to go round, if you change your self-defeating behaviours; ie confront your fears.

So you need to start by healing your relationship with yourself. This will heal your relationships with others. And relationships are so important if we are to heal the planet because, as we let go of greed, we will need each other to cooperate and collaborate. We will need joint resources, joint ventures, partnerships, social and working groups and communities. We will need to find our common ground as human beings. This may be our only way to survive.

So it’s essential we heal ourselves and improve our relationships. It’s important that we ditch behaviour that works against us and learn how to make healthy, functional relationships. These relationships could save our lives or at least make them more manageable in a future that is currently unpredictable.

Positive Thinking

2009-01-05T16:33:00.001Z

Negative thinking is a symptom of fear. It also breeds fear and leads to a downward spiral. You can choose to see the glass as half empty or half full. You can choose to dwell on your troubles or count your blessings – with gratitude. You can choose to see setbacks as challenges and to rise to meet them, knowing you will grow through them. You have choices.

So maybe 2009 could be your year for turning around negative thinking. With the recession setting in, bringing about so many changes, this year will be a year of challenges. You can choose to see these challenges as gifts, bonuses, opportunities for change, which is inevitable anyway.

Positive thinking leads you to embrace change. It allows change to happen. Obstacles in your path are gifts. You can choose to approach those obstacles with fear – or with love, as friends and teachers. You can thank them for being there so you can learn from them.

Part of this positive thinking is to look fear in the face and see it for what it is – one side of the picture. Caution is fine but fear is debilitating. Try to see the positive side of your fears. It’s better if you admit these fears in the first place though. If you try to pretend they don’t exist, you won’t have the opportunity to turn them into something positive. Denial will rob you of the opportunity for understanding and growth.

Christmas Message

2008-12-21T17:02:00.001Z

Christmas is a time for relationships, with yourself and others. Socially, it is a time for sharing with family and friends. And, for some, it can be lonely and spent alone. Others may feel lonely, even if they are in the company of family and friends.

For many, Christmas is also a time of consumption and consumerism – for attempting to fill up the emptiness inside in a way that is meaningless, so perpetuates feelings of emptiness.

Christmas can be a time for choices, for not doing what you don’t want to do, for choosing what you do and who you want to do it with. It can be a time of solitude, retreat, being with yourself; a time for meditation, going inwards, taking stock. You can choose.

This is a good time for examining expectations; yours of others and others’ of you. It is also a good time for asking yourself what Christmas means to you and celebrating it, or not, appropriately, in a way that is true to you, whatever others choose to do.

Maybe Christmas is a time for serenity.

Fear

2008-12-20T11:40:00.001Z

I wrote about God, good and love. Fear is the opposite of, the absence of, love – and therefore absence of meaning. When you are afraid you are separated not only from love, but also from connection with your self, your truth, your reality. This is ungrounding and therefore frightening in itself. It is fear that shuts love out – and then your feel fearful without that love.

You learn to fear as a child when you are undermined by negativity: judgements, criticisms, jealousy, guilt, humiliation and rejection – all abusive. When what you experience as good, as love, as all children naturally do, is negated, then your self is negated and you are separated from your truth, which is goodness and love. You believe you are bad and experience the world around you as bad and therefore frightening.

When your self is negated, you cease to be. You cannot make sense of or find meaning in your existence. This is known as existential fear. It is important to know this fear is inherited. It is not your own truth. It may have been passed down through generations, through fearful parenting. You may have been born in fear, traumatised by frightening experience in the womb and the birth process, but this can be healed through positive parenting. Negative parenting does not allow this to happen.

It is also important to know that, unless you confront this fear, you will pass it on, to your children and in your relationships, through a process called projection. This becomes self-defeating because you eventually create what you fear most – fear itself: insecurity, negativity, dissatisfaction, disappointment and bitterness. If you don’t address this bitterness, you attack other people with it and perpetuate the cycle of fear.

Emptiness and Meaning

2008-12-19T23:54:00.001Z

This follows from what I just said about God. If you have no meaning in you life, you feel empty. You try to fill yourself up with all sorts of things: eating, shopping, drugs, other people. I believe we need to fill ourselves up from within.

What does this mean? It means filling yourself up with love, self love, God’s love if you like, your own bit of that love – divinity. This is the meaning of your life.

We talk about children being full of themselves. That is their natural state. You need to be full of yourself, full of love for yourself, full of the love that is your birthright. You need to know the meaning of your life, which is love. Then you will not feel empty and your life will be full with meaning.

Without that love, with that emptiness, you feel anxious and fearful. You are facing a void. You are full of longing and sadness, of a sense of loss, and you don’t even know what you are longing for. Without meaning in your life, you don’t feel safe. You are not grounded or centred in your self. You have no inner peace. And you are in danger of looking to others to comfort the pain of your longing and to fill you up, to give you meaning, which no one can do for you. You are headed for dissatisfaction in your relationships.

Some Thought on God

2008-12-19T23:53:00.000Z

I am a spiritual but not a religious person, nor a Christian, but God is a word that has meaning for me. For me, God means good. God means love. I believe in God, not as an entity, but as a concept, a manifestation of love; and I believe in love.

I used to fight for love. That’s strange, because love is free. I also used to look for love in other people, not only wanting them to love me, but also wanting them to let me love them, and often they didn’t. If you don’t feel loveable, if you don’t love yourself, then no amount of love will get in. You might accept adoration, but that won’t FEEL like love. You will go on craving.

So all healthy relationships start with loving yourself, letting God in, letting yourself in. For we all have a spark of divinity in us and when we accept and love our own divinity, we will be able to relate with the divinity in others.

Feedback

2008-11-10T20:11:00.002Z

Hey! I kow you're all out there, reading my blog. I would sure like some feedback sometimes. Do let me know what you think.

Codependency

2008-11-10T18:41:00.002Z

Codependency is in fact dependency, which is an early stage of psychological development. Codependent means immature. Dependence implies a state of helplessness and inability to take responsibility for yourself or make choices. Codependents believe they are helpless and avoid taking responsibility for themselves or making decisions. They try to live their lives through other people, paradoxically, often trying to take responsibility for them.

Codependents have no sense of self, so they try to get their identity through someone else. They lack purpose. The other person becomes their purpose. In this way they vicariously get their needs met.

If you have grown up without a sense of self, you will most likely be codependent. You will not have matured beyond dependence. You may USE other people, substances, behaviours to avoid the pain and the emptiness you feel.

Or you may attempt to hide your feelings of inadequacy by being what I call pseudo-independent – aloof, superior and claiming not to need anybody. This is known as counterdependence. In fact, you can’t be counterdependent unless you have someone dependent on you – so you are not truly independent, which is the next stage of development; you NEED the other person to enable you, to support the way you disguise your own dependency. But it is dependency none the less because you have not grown out of it yet.

Resentment

2008-11-09T23:09:00.000Z

Resentment is like onions. It repeats. It lies in the gut and stagnates. This stagnation causes stasis; it stops you moving forward. You are holding on to undigested feelings related to events form the past. This is poor emotional hygiene. You carry resentment around as a grudge. But you don’t do anything about it. It shows in your body language. Resentment keeps you impotent, although it may give you a false sense of power – something bitter to hold on to.

Because resentment, unexpressed anger, is toxic, it is stored in your body. It makes you sick, often overweight because toxins are stored in fat, and toxic emotions create toxic chemicals in the blood. At the least your functioning and relating is less than optimum. You carry resentment from when you were too young or too afraid to be able to articulate anger. You grow up with the habit of not speaking up. Resentment stored in the gut affects digestion, assimilation of nutrients and fat accumulation. Hence fat in that area is the most difficult to shift.

If you are carrying resentment, you grew up with the habit of not articulating or communicating, even though you can. When you articulate your anger and resentment you can convert it into creative action, understanding and acceptance. Held resentment poisons relationships.

Boundaries

2008-10-20T20:33:00.001+01:00

Boundaries are not barriers. They protect. They do not defend. If boundaries were defences, you would constantly be at war. A boundary is like a semi-permeable membrane. It keeps out what you don’t want but lets in what you do. Barriers block everything – they let nothing in and nothing out. You get no nourishment and you cannot share anything.

Making a boundary is a loving decision. It lets other people know where they stand with you. Conversely, not making a boundary is unkind, to yourself and others. ‘No’ is a boundary and also a complete sentence.

If you feel angry, it’s time to make a boundary, to say where you stand, what you want and what you don’t. Expressing anger is making a boundary and you have a right to do that.

You state your limitations when you make a boundary. It is helpful to others to know where your limits are. Limits are not restrictions. Healthy boundaries are flexible; they are there for your safety and the safety of others. Boundaries are your choice, based on judgement and discrimination; you have a right to make them.

You use boundaries to contain, not to control; and to separate and define yourself. You use them to maintain your integrity. They are an act of discipline.

Rage and Anger

2008-10-19T20:10:00.001+01:00

When I hear the expression anger management, I get angry, because this is in fact rage management. Anger and rage are not the same. Anger is clear and clean and assertive. Rage is impotent. It is a reaction against the pain of helplessness. Rage is a very early emotion. It is a temper tantrum. But you carry it through into adult life, believing you are helpless when you are not and then behaving accordingly.

Because of its impotence, rage in ineffective. It doesn’t get resolved. It explodes, loud and hot and uncontrolled – or it implodes, turns inwards and becomes self destructive. Anger is cool and calm and constructive. Rage is inarticulate because it is pre-verbal, but anger can be expressed in meaningful and effective words. That is why rage is self-perpetuating, continuous, circular, because you are not heard and not taken seriously; you do not take yourself seriously or say what you want.

Rage can be converted into anger if you direct it constructively. Just as a child having a tantrum can calmly be asked what it is they want; in other words what they feel helpless about, so you can ask yourself what you feel helpless about, what you want, and then ask for it or find ways to get it for yourself.

You are never as helpless as you believe you are. You are far more potent when you identify the pain you are raging AGAINST and turn it into anger ABOUT and then articulate that anger, say what your needs are. Then you have the power to resolve it. And it works.

Sharing Emotions

2008-10-17T11:44:00.001+01:00

Sharing emotions is an act of love. Even sharing anger is loving. Conversely, holding back what you are feeling is mean, miserly and unkind in the end.

The ideal in loving relationships is heart to heart communication. If anger is in your heart, then share it. Anger is clear and clean – and I don’t mean rage here. To express anger is to clear the air. Holding onto anger leads to bad feeling. It doesn’t give the other person the opportunity to know where they stand with you or to make amends. It also makes them feel guilty without knowing what they have done wrong.

They will feel your hostility because your anger will ferment and stagnate into resentment. This is unsettling. Resentment is unhealthy in relationships and needs to be aired – without blame.

If you love someone close to you, it’s very likely you would tell them. Then why not tell them if you are angry. This makes a clear boundary. Boundaries make for healthy and functional relationships. So, if you want your relationship to work, get your anger off your chest. It’s magical and transformative.

A Life of Your Own

2008-09-24T08:23:00.001+01:00

If you do not have a sense of self, you cannot have a life. There is no self to live that life. Therefore you try to live your life through someone else. This is the other symptom of codependent relationships.

That is why it is important to gain a sense of self which is authentic and true to who you are. If you don’t know who you are, how can you know what kind of life will suit you? How will you find your path? And how can you make an honest and feasible relationship?

So, you cannot have a life without a self, or a self without a life for that self to live. And you cannot find either of those in someone else. However, when you have a self and a life, you will be able to share them with someone else, with others, who also have a self and a life. This is the basis of healthy, functioning relationships.

Loss of Self – Sense of Self

2008-09-24T08:17:00.001+01:00

In codependent relationships you USE the other person to give you a sense of self. Without them you feel you cease to exist; you lose your identity and grieve for your lost self. You might use your job, role, or any behaviours or even substances to give you a sense of self; you use them as props and feel lost when you lose them.

Once you had a sense of self, but you lost it when the circumstances you were born into and the people around you didn’t acknowledge, recognize and mirror that self.

In relationships you search for others to mirror you. They never get it exactly right. As an adult, you can choose your own environment and the people with whom you wish to surround yourself. You can align your life with your self and live your truth. You can grieve your original loss of self and reclaim that self now.

Sensitivity

2008-08-26T09:28:00.001+01:00

We live in a generally insensitive world.

To cope with insensitivity, you desensitise yourself. Then you become insensitive too. You forget and, in doing this, you cut yourself off from a wealth of experiences. You deny your feelings if they don’t fit in; or if they are inconvenient for yourself or other people. For fear of attack, you hide your sensitivity, which is also your vulnerability, because you haven’t learned how to protect it, how to put boundaries around it.

In doing this you become aloof, with false pride, a mask of invulnerability and coping. You find many masks to hide behind. But these masks are a lie. They are not who you truly are. You are depriving yourself of a wealth of genuine and authentic soul experience.

It is only when you allow yourself to be vulnerable, with honesty, that you can regain and reclaim your sensitivity, which allows you to experience life fully, for good or bad, or both – and to be real.

Insecurity and Freedom

2008-08-19T01:43:00.000+01:00

Children who don’t feel safe in their environment don’t play easily. They tend to cling to their carers and are afraid to explore. It’s like this with adults who are insecure. They tend to stay close to home and stick to what is familiar. They don’t explore, have adventures or try anything new. They are also less creative.

If you are insecure you will ‘use’ dependencies, especially in relationships, to give you security, but these dependencies also trap and imprison you. Insecurity reduces your freedom. You feel tied to what you are dependent on; you don’t feel relaxed enough to move on. You don’t grow.

However, the more you can take responsibility for yourself, the more you can grow up, out of dependency, the more secure you will feel and the more freedom you will have. Freedom comes from taking responsibility.

Privacy, Secrecy and Boundaries

2008-08-19T01:28:00.000+01:00

There is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is about making boundaries; secrecy creates barriers – and therefore reduces both intimacy and relating. Privacy is healthy. We all need it. There is a saying that we are only as sick as our secrets. Secrets are less likely to be healthy. They are also a burden to carry.

Privacy is about respecting our own and other people’s space; about not intruding or infringing boundaries.

Secrecy is a kind of withholding, a holding back, as opposed to sharing. It also implies guilt and shame. There is a qualitative difference between keeping something private and keeping it secret, especially if there is a withholding of information, because you need information in order to make decisions.

Emotions – Love and Fear

2008-08-13T08:08:00.001+01:00

There are two basic emotions, love and fear. All other emotions stem from these. It’s hard for love to exist where there is fear because fear causes hostility – fight, flight or paralysis, all of which prevent open heart to heart to heart communication and intimate relating.

You could say that love is positive and fear is negative, although I don’t believe any emotions are negative. I consider all emotions valid and worthy of attention because they give you information. What’s important is how you interpret that information. That’s why you need intellect, so you can think before you act.

Back to love and fear. So much fear is based on distorted, invalid, obsolete assumptions, on parental or learned attitudes and early conditioning. So it’s important to ask yourself, ‘What if?’ What if you turn your fear around and examine its opposite, love, each time you feel it? You could call this positive thinking.

What would life be like is the world WAS a safe place, with love in it? Think about it. With love in it, the world would be safer. After all, it is fear that is dangerous and causes wars. How about this thought – what would the world be like if we had no option but to love? Fear is destructive.