Fear……Muahahaaaaaaa

Well it IS almost Halloween!  

 

 

 

Are you aware that you make choices out of fear and worry? OK, are you aware of how many choices you make out of fear and worry?

Some choices that are based in fear and worry are about money, competition, relationships, children, being the best at whatever it is you do….the list goes on and on. You might say, “Well those aren’t bad things.” In fact, our world is based on avoiding the “bad” things of life, as if it were possible to never have “bad” things happen, if we do certain things to avoid them. Our expectations are goals and images we create in our imagination about what life looks like if you could avoid the “bad” things. This is part of the denial of our minds, since there is no way to use an expectation to keep “bad” things from happening.

I was listening to a podcast earlier in the week with Dr. Wayne Dyer.  http://www.tombarnardpodcast.com/dr-wayne-dyer/?fb_action_ids=4730489988254&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

He was addressing the struggles of a young person who had graduated and could not find work. She said to Dr. Dyer, “I did everything I was supposed to do. I’ve been a good student, volunteered, studied hard, and worked. I don’t understand why I can’t get a job.” He shared how he believes that she needed to change her perception of herself before she would be able to step out of her own way. She needed to change her paradigm. Her expectations are stuck in a box and as long as she is in the box, she would not see an alternate solution or path her career happiness.

Her frustration is clearly understandable. She had been raised to believe that taking action would help her avoid a “bad” thing: in this case, not getting a good job.  Well, she couldn’t predict a recession. Her expectations are not matching up to reality. Clients often say, “Well, I did what I was supposed to do.  I don’t get why I have to talk about my childhood to fix my marriage?” Or, “I don’t understand why we can’t just talk about things?” Somehow, our perception of what should happen, if we have done what we believe to be enough, should somehow make our expectations become real, so we can avoid the “bad” stuff. So we stop, become stuck, and can’t understand why we are where we are……hmmmmm.

If you believe your expectations, you are believing your own myths. Your expectations need to be based in reality. The reality is we cannot and do not control much of anything. You were told as a small child not to cross the road without looking both ways for fear of getting hit! You don’t want to get hit, but there is a possibility you might get hit, so even if you look both ways, getting hit could happen. Just because you don’t expect to get hit, doesn’t mean there’s a guarantee you’ll be safe. So, why do we get stuck in fear and worry when we perceive a fear? 

The fear of being judged, not included, avoided, abandoned, shamed, ridiculed, unloved, unaccepted, or worse, to not exist, are all standard human fears. Heightened anxiety and deep sadness around fear is what brings people into therapy. This is especially true for those on the verge of divorce or separation. One husband says, “I want her back. Tell me what to do.” This husband is painfully aware of his fear of being abandoned (divorced or separated from his wife) but he doesn’t know that this emotional response is about him and not about his wife. His experience is something separate from his relationship. He is making unhealthy decisions based on his perceived fear of being left alone. This is not helping his wife feel safe or loved in the relationship. Another couple is struggling with affair recovery. The affair occurred with someone he met in a common place of entertainment. His wife is now having strong feelings about the establishment and cannot fathom her husband being in the same building as the ”other woman.” Her fear of abandonment, rejection, and pain are about her experiences, not about whether or not he can be trusted. Her fear will not dictate whether or not he will or will not cheat again. But her fear is real and palpable. The increased anxiety influences her ability to be rationale or logical. In this case, she has too much pain to see beyond her fears. So her husband is essentially asking his wife to move from a place that she is not ready to move from, not yet.

 Good people make choices based in fear everyday. Some of those choices result in affairs, addictions, raging, shaming, emotional cut-off, and other unhealthy interactions. What do you do with your fear? How are you able to use it in a more healthy way? You could use your fear to learn more about yourself.

Ask yourself some questions:

1. Ask yourself what it is your fearful of and why
2. Ask yourself if it is truly as threatening as it seems
3. Ask yourself where the fear is coming from
4. Is this something you can change
5. Is this fear something that will help you move forward or make changes
6. Is this fear something that keeps you trapped in your current paradigm
7. Why is this fear so important
8. Does this fear interrupt my life
9. Can I move forward even if my fear comes true
10. Does this fear keep you focused on others instead of yourself

Recovery for moving from being a fear based decision maker takes years, but is well worth the journey. Choosing to love someone for who they are and the gift that they are in your life is much more fulfilling than being afraid of being alone. Being a parent who can accept your child for their flaws is more loving than shaming them for their shortcomings. Do you wish you were less of an anxiety or fear-based decision maker?

“In the beginning…there was Space!”

 

 

 This week has been heavy with abandonment, neediness, and despair. I often feel hopeful for many clients who are able to deeply process their pain, understand and accept their realities….but this week was heavy. Endeavoring in the task to help people tear down and rebuild their relationships is a challenge. Approaching marital issues, couples, and individuals requires respect for where they are in the process, knowing they will need change. Before changes can happen, there is a need to shatter false hope and false expectations once we understand what is going wrong, to understand what’s getting in the way. 

 

Beginning the recovery process takes a leap of faith. When couples start counseling, faith is in limited supply. There is so much intensity and neediness in each person, that emotions run high and out of control at times. Some things to remember when entering counseling is (1) you are unable to make healthy changes on your own, (2) the issues you are experiencing in your marriage are outside of your control, (3) the negativity has run you into hopelessness and helplessness, (4) the issues are bigger than both of you. This is just the beginning. There is hope once you begin marriage counseling, but it takes several months before healthy changes become natural in you and in your partner and this requires work.

The process will bring about uncomfortable feelings that don’t feel good. That is supposed to happen. Addressing issues that aren’t being talked about or aren’t even known to each person in the relationship is precisely why there are issues in the first place. Trying to make changes and expecting them to feel happy or good is unrealistic. Sometimes clients can become frustrated or disappointed that certain behavioral tools don’t work early on in the process. Behavioral tools do not work because the issue is inside the person, so “doing” an activity isn’t going to change how you feel. In fact, it can irritate an already tense and painful situation, when it doesn’t work.    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Couples need different suggestions for different issues. In some relationships people are too close…not in a healthy way, but in an enmeshed way. This can build abandonment feelings for each person if there is too much closeness. Self-abandonment is like losing your passion, drive, uniqueness for the sake of someone else. In this case, space is needed. Some couples are too distant, living separate lives, unaware of the lack of intimacy that exists between them. This is too much dependency on self, flawed independence, and may require uncomfortable closeness and an understanding of how this is the baseline in the relationship.

Let’s get back to the needing space for those couples who are enmeshed. The reason couples come to counseling is to stay together in a solid relationship for the long haul. That goal may not seem possible at the time, but with therapy, couples can become more secure within themselves, providing the relationship more security as well. Sometimes space is needed to be able to gain clarity, to reduce reactivity, anger, unhealthy reactions, and just some breathing space. Space can be actually physically separating, which could be scary for some people. But depending on how angry you are, separation could be exactly what you’re looking for; the ability to take time for yourself to gain clarity. Space can also be time taken to think before speaking, before deciding, before reacting to your feelings. Creating space is about slowing down life and your internal processes. Creating space can trigger abandonment, fear, shame, jealousy, insecurity, and other vulnerabilities in yourself and in your partner. These are the challenging times in therapy but are also the most rewarding for long-term, emotional health. Good emotional health benefits the individual and the relationship. Being in an unhappy marriage, before recovery, is like being in the eye of the storm. You can’t see, because there is too much going on right in front

of you and its all moving too fast to manage.

Creating space is a tricky move, especially when reactivity is high in the relationship. Being counter-intuitive, behaving in new ways, and thinking in new ways is scary, unpredictable, and represents more unknowns. It’s the best thing you can do for yourself. Learn new hope, new faith, and new trust…..

Build the space and the relationship will come.        

“He cheated, Why do I have to do therapy!?!?”

 

After an affair, it’s hard to imagine that hope, healing, and trust could exist in any way in your relationship.  From a recovery perspective, the reality of the state of the marriage is different from the way you, as the significant other who was cheated on, see it. I have a bright, brilliant, put together couple who come in to heal their marital wounds from an affair every week. Each week is particular painful for the wife, we’ll call her Jenny.  She expresses her anger in outbursts in each session, but not until several minutes have passed. Her composure at the beginning of each does not reflect her deep pain and hurt about the affair. Her husband, we’ll call him Bill, is often surprised at her reactions, because in their private life, Jenny either wants to be with Bill, all the time, or emotionally cuts-off.

Her reactions are normal, understandable, and valid for what she has been through. The confusion she experiences is so chaotic, because she was in love with her husband before, while and after he cheated. She was unaware of how disconnected he was emotionally, how he was pulling away, how he was making a choice to be dishonest, seek comfort elsewhere, and remain lost as to how to handle himself in the marriage.  Jill was in the mind-set that they were “okay.” So when she begins her sessions as a couple, she is surprised at how much work she must do for herself even though HE had the affair.

Her husband, Bill, remains apologetic, remorseful, and has cut all ties to the affair per his wife’s requests. So why is it that in every session, she is the one doing so much work and not him?

It’s easy to assume that he is not working and she is working too much, and it’s not fair…however, this is not an emotionally mature perspective. What happened in this marriage is that Bill “broke open,” with an affair, what the hidden issues have been in the marriage. He comes from a broken place and so does Jenny. Jenny has many emotional issues and intimacy disconnect just like Bill and how they have been managing these issues in their marriage has been growing over the years. There was no other way this marriage was going to get into recovery, until something woke them up from the unhealthy habits.

Jenny and Bob still love one another, through the anger, through the hurt, through the betrayal, and know they are working on being in this grey place, where there are no guarantees and no assurances. But they both work, honestly, openly, and come together to marriage counseling to rediscover their inner child, rediscover how to communicate, and rediscover how to love each other and themselves, as individuals. They had each been self-abandoning, spinning in their daily lives, disconnected from intimacy. That’s why everyone involved must work on their individual issues. Jenny and Bill have a good chance for a loving marriage, because they are both willing to be humble and broken, to do the emotional work. Recovery is not about shaming the cheater, worrying about keeping score, being defensive, or figuring out what is fair. All is fair in marriage and in real life, that’s why it’s called real life.

Some steps you can take to begin your recovery after finding out about infidelity: 

(1) read “Surviving an Affair”

(2) connect with your partner, be honest about your feelings

(3) make an appointment for marital counseling

(4) commit to counseling, this is not something you want to manage alone

(5) begin building bridges for hope, trust, and love in counseling.

(6) do NOT enmesh for fear of being abandoned, this is a false sense of security

Since the issues are within your marriage, you’ll need guidance to address these issues.  You’ll need tools and different perspectives, outside of yourselves, to assess emotional barriers and to make healthy changes.  

Affairs, Cheaters, and Lies

What do you do after an affair? You are devastated, your spouse has cheated, he says he’s confused and doesn’t know what he wants. You feel more devastated. “What does he mean he doesn’t know what he wants and why is he hurting me this way!?!? This is my worst nightmare!”

A couple, who I’ll call Dave and Susan, are struggling through the first few weeks of surviving an affair. Susan is devastated and says that she never thought her husband would be a person who would cheat. Susan saw her husband as a good person, someone who is honest and able to handle their children, work, and life with integrity. Once she found out about the affair, her world fell apart. She didn’t know what to trust and worst of all she couldn’t trust herself. She and Dave have been working hard to recover from this painful event every week, by coming into Family Tree Counseling, discussing their pain with me. What has happened is two-fold. First, they both believed in the marriage myth, that if they behave in loving ways, they will be happy. The second thing is that they forgot who they really are as individuals. The marriage myth is believing that marriage, being married, or being in love, is easy, doesn’t hurt, and is built to make you happy. These are many of the marital myths people believe in before getting married and continue to hold onto for years.

 

Once married, people often say that the other person has changed, that the person is not same as before they got married. The truth is no one is changing, they are revealing more and more of who they are, how they feel and respond to the world, and how they were raised as children. They are behaving more as the individual person, based on their past life before you met as a couple. All the ways Dave and Susan learned to handle stress, lack of intimacy, pain, suffering, and loss over their childhood is showing up in their married lives. Susan has perfectionist tendencies, anxiety, abandonment, and shame while Dave is a lost little boy looking for affirmation, approval, and acceptance. As the marriage has ripened over time, Susan’s anxiety has influenced Dave’s feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and shame. When the affair presented itself, Dave found a tool to numb out the pain he felt in the marriage. Though Susan saw him as an honest person, Dave was able to lie, be deceptive, and withhold love. This drove Susan to dig into his life to discover that he had been having an affair.

 

Having an affair happen to you doesn’t mean the marriage has to end or that the marriage should continue…it just means it’s been a while since you looked at yourself and need to do a lot of soul-searching work to make changes so this kind of betrayal can become a learning moment in both your lives!

 

What do they do now? They each have to work on protecting their relationship by using boundaries to create safety for both of them from the outside world, to build trust inside their marriage, and work on their family of origin issues so they can have a stronger marriage. A marriage that is fulfilling and not based in insecurities. They work every week to make behavioral and cognitive changes and learn new tools to have real intimacy. Now they have real hope!

Courage to face the Fear

Using courage to face your fears means understanding that you don’t or won’t feel safe in painful situations with your significant other. That doesn’t mean that it’s healthy to keep running away from the interaction, punish the person you feel hurt you, or believe that people are incapable of understanding you. In order to learn about yourself and about how you experience emotional pain, it is necessary to remain and exist within the conversation. It means facing your fears about not being heard, feeling abandoned, and feeling betrayed by the person who triggers your pain with courage.

The cycle you are re-creating is actually the re-enactment of the way your mother or father interacted with you or your family members. If they used cut-off, shutting down, shaming, or yelling, during conflicted times, then you will re-enact these types of behaviors that influences your family members in a similar way. The abandonment feelings created in those scenarios are painful and you can’t manage your abandonment or fear of engulfment by avoiding your partner or by punishing your partner. The way your parents taught you to maintain or push away closeness is the way you will manage your intimacy with your partner. It’s the sharpest tool in the emotional shed that you choose to use because you become afraid and you know very well how you will feel and it’s not pleasant.  

 

 

 

You can’t heal your abandonment if you continue to numb, pain kill, disconnect, or use punishment and retribution on the person who triggers your pain. Emotional resolution and recovery of abandonment can be the gift that comes by facing your feelings knowing you are fearful, yet continue to remain connected with yourself. If you self-abandon by shutting down or cutting off, you won’t know what you need or how to reach resolution for your abandonment.

“Bullying, Gossiping, and the Devil’s Triangle”

Do you know someone who uses humor, gossiping, or backstabbing to address their inner anger towards someone else? Gossiping, judging, getting someone else to be angry with you towards a third-party is part of what is called “Triangulating” in the recovery world.

Triangling is when a conflict is being avoided between person A and B, but person A feels upset and does not address the conflict with person B. Person A doesn’t feel motivated or comfortable to talk it over with person B, so person A discusses it with person C. Now person C is carrying anger or irritation for person B, but person B has no idea why person C or person A is upset with them. Now the circle of conflict and discomfort has grown among more than two people. The relationship between person B and C is now negatively impacted without B’s understanding or knowledge.

Person A may feel some relief for the short-term, but will continue to struggle with person B until the issue is addressed. This behavior is indicative of intimacy issues. By avoiding conflict, person A does not have to be intimate and honest with themselves about their feelings about themselves or the other person. Person A can avoid the uncomfortableness of an honest conversation, which is part of intimacy.

So why does a person choose this behavior? It stems from being insecure or not trusting your inner self. Attempting to make someone else feel your anger can stem from shame,  abandonment, co-dependency and a childhood family systems model that says that conflict is not safe.

 

 

 

This is unhealthy for person A and B, not to mention person C. Person A

is self-abandoning by not learning to resolve the conflict directly with the source of their anger or frustration. This is how we learn about ourselves, so when person A does not use this opportunity to address the issue directly, person A does not understand themselves and their reactions. Person B also does not have an opportunity to learn from the issue or become aware of the issue. Person C becomes the “middle man” and is incorrectly inserted into the relationship between person A and B. The relationship between friends and family in this type of triangle can become strained over time and self-implode.

Triangling is also unhealthy as it allows for person A to not be responsible for their reactions to a given situation. The focus on the outside world for comfort can be self-abandoning and continues the cycle for person A of being unable to trust their judgements.  This can lead to relationships ending, affairs, and other intimacy issues of avoidance and cut-off.  This is not a skill to be used in any relationship. Address your issues!

Come into Marriage Counseling at Family Tree Counseling, serving the Indianapolis area, to learn how to stop sabotaging your relationship.  

The Godfather and Abandonment

 

 

 

 

Last week, I wrote about the Godfather and the parallels of his life of addiction and real people’s addictions, such as addictions that clients often suffer from who seek therapy. The addiction is not the only issue to address in someone’s life. Addictions point to deeper, underlying issues within a person and influences families and loved ones. The person who is suffering from addiction can still be intelligent, highly functioning, financially successful, and gain approval from peers.  A person does not have to lose everything to understand that they are suffering from an addiction or an addictive personality. Losing everything that matters to a person is simply part of the final stages of an addiction once it has taken over. Noticing the addiction at this time is very late in the game. Having denial about masking or pain killing real feelings such as abandonment, shame, guilt, and other emotional struggles allows the addictive behavior ro run out of control.

Once an addiction is unraveled, understood, and accepted, the process of understanding the feelings that trigger the need to pain kill can be seen and felt more clearly. The type of addiction, the details and frequency are critical to understanding yourself. Abandonment, shame, and guilt can create a cycle that feels unending, helpless, and hopeless. When the Godfather abandons his needs for real love that he feels for his girlfriend and trades this for approval from his father and his family, he does so out of guilt and shame. A client recently began unraveling his addiction to approval from other people and more poignantly, of other women. In last week’s blog, I shared the Godfather’s family influences that pushed him further into addiction. As he grew further and further away from his own identity, essentially abandoning himself, by abandoning his needs, his new life provided opportunities for him to latch onto activities that recreated his pain and fed his pain killing activities. Similarly, my client recreated a life that mimics his childhood, even though he consciously knew he never wanted some of those events to be repeated. But the little boy in him, that feels hurt by the losses he felt as a child is all too familiar with seeking out relationships that are empty and void of love and affirmation, feeding the beast even more into a cycle of shame and abandonment.

There is a scene in the Godfather during a family dinner, where the Don (Marlon Brando) and all his sons are eating together. The youngest son, Al Pacino, has no interest in getting into the family business. He had fallen in love with a girl, was disgusted by his father’s behavior and saw himself as different from his brothers. However, his conscious desire to have something different in life, different from a mafia family, wasn’t big enough to overcome his childhood woundings. Something begins to chip away at his ability to self-differentiate, his ability to choose to be himself, true to his needs and his gifts, to be different.  Each time he felt pressure from his family, such as the time he gets a call from his family to join them for a holiday. He ditches the family holiday to instead spend time with his girlfriend. This comes back to haunt him as he hears about his father’s illness and he is triggered by shame, guilt, and remorse for being so distant from the family, especially from his father. It is in these moments that he begins saying things to himself that pull him away from his own needs. Needs that are healthy and self-differentiating and he instead chooses to become closer to his family through guilt and shame. His desires are not based in a healthy honesty about himself and his experiences, they are built on a foundation of shame and abandonment. He learned this type of abandonment and shame from his father, played by Marlon Brando, who watches his mother be killed by a Don mafia leader in Italy. The revenge and power his father needs is built-in from the his real feelings of loss of power and abandonment of his family. His triggers were based in his young boyhood.

 

 

The sins of the father were certainly passed down, generationaly, in this family even if the events were never discussed or shared with the children. Guilt, shame, powerlessness, and severe abandonment are the triggers that drove the Don to  become such a power-hungry person. The addictions they both shared as the Godfather and the Don, were all a cover for losing family members and growing up without real intimacy. 

After his father passes away, we see the Godfather making different choices. There is a sudden change in character. He can no longer feel intimate with his wife, the woman he fell in love with, the woman he married. He changes his path in life to include everything his father wanted from him, instead of being his own person. Eventually, his life spirals out of control with affairs, power, and corruption. He loses his wife, his unborn child, and most of all, he loses himself. This is what abandonment, shame, and guilt can create and destroy in a marriage and in a family.

Sex Addiction and the GodFather: Part I

The movie, “The Godfather” is chalk full of family systems theory. What issue did the GodFather NOT suffer from! He seriously was void of a father figure that was accepting, caring, supportive, and nurturing. His mother was unavailable, too passive and too co-dependent to address the  her husband’s corruption and enormous ego. The Godfather’s  parents did not model a secure and loving marriage. Marriage was not about being real, intimate connections, and belonging. The Godfather’s father, the Don, was all about what soothed his lost little boy pain. He chose to gain vengeance against the man who killed his mother and brother. With so much loss, the head of the family was addicted to their lost little boys on the inside….addicts to greed, power, women, money, anything that could feed the moment. With the loss of a brother, mother, and loss of love and affection, and security, each man learned to feed their vengeance in the moment so they wouldn’t have to be real, and feel who they were becoming. The first Don became and identified with the event that changed his life forever; the death of his mother. This family has severe abandonment! Sexual addictions, affairs, pain killing, numbing, is what the first Don modeled for his son, the Godfather. He learned from his father, and he played out what he learned because that’s who he was naturally, even though in his youth he had every intention to be nothing like his father. There was other more powerful model than what he was taught by his family, by his brothers, and by his father. What he knew or wished for himself wasn’t strong or powerful enough for the challenging moments….This is why being in an intimate relationship with others parallels a painful childhood.

A client of mine recently began to unravel his sexual addiction to pornography. He could relate to the cycle of self-sabotage, shame, guilt, and self-abandonment that has continued in his life. He feels helpless to change as he watches his wife suffer from emotional disconnect. The Don and the Godfather continued to believe that their lives had no other way to continue other than with a heart for vengeance based in anger and resentment. If the Godfather and the Don had come to marriage counseling, their lives could have been less painful! Please continue reading next week for the best Indianapolis Marriage counseling the Godfather could have received at Family Tree Counseling! 

“You Are Controlling!”

Control isn’t about typical jealousy you see  in a “lifetime”movie. It’s  being over productive, doing pre-emptively what others are able to do. 

 

Being controlling doesn’t mean you try to control others in a direct way. It means not being able to trust others. Like not feeling you can trust that you’ll be heard, cared for, loved, known, get your needs met, etc. Being controlling comes from an internal anxiety that developed in childhood and solidified itself in adulthood.  It’s the constant worry about yourself and others, that dominates how you care for the people you love. It’s the opposite of self-differentiation.

 

Do you tend to task yourself with the care of other people’s responsibilities if you feel like they won’t do it? Do you say to yourself “well it won’t get done so I have to.” Do you say “well if I don’t do it all hell will break loose.” Then you’re being controlling to manage your anxiety. Soon passive aggressive anger is sure to rear its ugly head.

 

 

Controlling can look like a kind gesture or sound like a helpful suggestion. But you know you’re doing it to alter the outcome of a particular circumstance. What’s unhealthy is the opportunity that is lost for the other person to feel consequences, discomfort, pain, and eventually learn about themselves. Acting out the controlling behavior removes the opportunity for the controlling person to feel their anxiety and learn from it. 

 

Come in and talk to me to find out why your friends and family tell you to stop being so controlling!

Jealousy……But Why?

Why does negativity stick? Why, when something negative crosses your path, do you feel upset and why does it linger? It seems too often that people define themselves based on the negative things that happened in their lives and on a daily basis. The positive things just roll off their backs and are forgotten. It should really be the other way around! Self-worth is not based on what has happened to you, unless you have decided to base your self-worth on those events. So then why do certain events or people seem so negative anyway?? This is part of jealousy!

Recently a couple seeking marriage counseling sat down and started listing their grievances. The husband was having a tough time understanding why his wife felt so much jealousy towards other people in their lives. In twenty-five years of marriage, he has felt helpless to do anything to change her perspective and has been unsuccessful in stopping her constant concern about comparing herself to others. They often argue after leaving social functions. He says he never sees the conflict coming, that everything seems to be going well of an evening until the ride home or the next day, when his wife will complain to him that she had a terrible time. She would complain about not being able to talk as much as he did to people, or say that her husband didn’t take as many pictures of her as he did of family members. Either way, she said she would feel slighted and needed him to step up and defend her or make sure she was taken care of instead of allowing these “negative” things to happen. Needless to say, the husband is feeling pretty worn out and resentful after all these years and confused about what to do.   

What he doesn’t understand is that his rescuing of his wife’s issues has enabled her to remain stuck and trapped in the negative story she tells to herself. She isn’t able to process her pain and understand herself when her enabler steps in and rescues her from her negative feelings. She has been able to continue seeing herself as less than other people.  What story do you tell yourself and others about you? Do you feel like you have to explain yourself or defend yourself when you meet people? Do you feel shame, guilt, or anxiety around others? Are you constantly worried about being accepted or liked? Do you mask your anxiety with humor or being overly generous with yourself to be kind to others? Do you feel like you bend and reshape yourself to make other people happy? Maybe it’s because you aren’t being positive about yourself and that’s about your shame. If you feel like you are not being true to who you are when you interact with others, then you are not giving yourself permission to be yourself. This creates abandonment feelings and experiences.

If you spent much of your childhood feeling like your parents didn’t approve of you, if you rebelled against everything, or if you just felt invisible, then you could be feeling shame and abandonment when you are around other people. This client is experiencing childhood shame and abandonment, re-enacting her issues constantly in her family and at social functions. Her negative concept of herself is based on her childhood experiences and there isn’t enough her husband can do to alleviate that for her. She has to address her inability to feel love and acceptance as her issue and not make it about other people or the outside world. She is being a prisoner to her negativity about herself. She struggles to remember the love and support she has around her when she goes through these moments. When this continues for twenty-five years and everyone around her is tired of feeling like they walk on eggshells all the time, its time for wife to start looking into what this lack of trust and shame is about instead of bandaging it with other people.

Her issues are based on unresolved childhood relationships and experiences. She focused on the painful situations because they caused her pain and discomfort as a little girl.  The negativity sticks because this is her belief about herself and its been there a long time. What experiences dictate your self-worth? It’s important to know because these will eventually dictate your outcomes in life. Where do you invest your time? Are you constantly beating up on yourself and telling people all the things you do wrong or downplay your gifts in an effort to make other people like you? Do you try hard to be more competent so other people like you?  What you divulge to others says a lot about what you believe about yourself. You could be drawing more negativity to yourself without your realization. You could be stirring chaos in your life by causing chaos in your marriage and in your interpersonal relationships if you feel chaotic and don’t trust yourself on the inside.

Where does all this internal conflict come from? It comes from your belief about yourself. It comes from a core belief system that you installed the moment you decided that you were not good enough to be yourself because of something that happened or something someone said to you. This is stinkin’ thinkin’ and will continue to draw negativity and the opposite of what you desire out of your life. You are the one who has decided that this is your story. You have decided that there is a profound negative statement about your self-worth. 

If this is happening to you, then you need to get into recovery.