At some point in your life, you will run into a situation where you need someone to change and that someone won’t change. What you will be facing is absolute unworkability in the other person. You will feel like you are up against a wall and also completely stuck.
The way to know whether someone will not change is that they are demonstrating the same behavioral pattern, no matter what. No matter how many conversations you have about it. No matter how many different approaches you have taken to try to get them to change. No matter it being reflected to them that they are being unworkable and by doing so, are creating an impossible situation. And no matter them being fully aware of the consequences they will face if they continue to demonstrate that behavioral pattern. With a few exceptions that involve a person literally not being able to change something, even if they want to, another great way of telling whether they will not change is how much they demonstrate with their behavior and actions that they want to change. How much initiative, energy and effort they are putting into it, without you feeling like you have to try to force them to do it.
If someone won’t change, you have to accept it. Accepting it is the hardest part of all. We often completely burn ourselves out by the point we become willing to swallow as hard a truth as accepting that something won’t change. But once you do that, you get out of that painful canyon between who they are and who you want them to be. You stop fighting a losing battle against reality. The focus changes from trying to control their behavior to trying to manage your own wellbeing in the most conscious way possible. You switch to finding a way to make it so that your happiness does not depend on their progress or change. You shift the locus of control to yourself. By giving up on them changing, you drop your expectations, disappointment and constant frustration. And from there, you have two options.
1. Make a change to yourself.
2. Make an executive decision in alignment with your wellbeing based on the fact that they will not change.
Within these two options, there are usually many options. Let me explain, starting with making a change to yourself. I want you to imagine that when you hit up against something totally unworkable, you are hitting up against solid rock. You can’t get it to move, change, shift or anything. So, the only way forward is for you to move, change or shift. But you’ve got to do this consciously. Many people who do this subconsciously simply do this by finding a dysfunctional adaptive strategy. For example, say that a woman is in a relationship with a man who will not stop his alcoholic behaviors. She may change herself by going into denial. This adaptation allows her to be able to move forward in the marriage and be with him.
But on the conscious side, there are many things you could choose to change that relate to yourself. Making a change to yourself could mean changing your perspective about the situation. It could mean changing the core adaptive beliefs that led you to the situation or are keeping you in the situation. It could mean recognizing what the situation is triggering in you, so as to embark on a personal healing process relative to those wounds. It could mean setting firm boundaries and actually following through on them when they are ignored. It could mean changing one or more of your patterns that reinforces the very thing in them that you want them to change. It could mean changing your behavior in some way. Doing something different in the relationship etc. This process of changing yourself will in and of itself lead to you making choices and taking actions in the situation at hand.
There are also probably many executive decisions you could choose from based on the fact that they will not change. When you do this, it is less like transforming yourself in some way in response to unchangeability on the outside. Instead, it is more like unchangeability meeting unchangeability and recognizing that incompatibility and making a decision according to that reality. The different executive decisions you could make obviously depend on the exact situation you are in.
Here is an example. Remy is in a relationship with Yuto. Yuto often acts unreliable. He tends to overpromise and under-deliver. One of his common patterns is to say he will help with chores or be home for dinner, but he "forgets” or gets distracted and doesn’t follow through on his word. Remy nags. He leaves sticky notes to get Yuto to remember. He gives Yuto the silent treatment when he doesn’t do what he says he is going to do. They have gotten into so many fights over this during the year they’ve been living together. Remy has threatened the relationship many times over this. And Remy spends a lot of time venting to friends about how unreliable Yuto is and how much of a child he is. Nothing changes.
Now, Remy realizes he is up against a wall. He spends some time really facing the reality that Yuto may never change. He is deeply present to his own vulnerability that surfaces when he faces what scares him if this were true. Eventually, he accepts that Yuto is not going to change this behavior. He is putting no energy into changing it at all, despite him knowing how much damage it causes and knowing the consequences. So, Remy realizes he has two options. 1. Change himself in some way. 2. Make an executive decision based on the fact that Yuto will not change. The decision he is tempted to make is to end the relationship. He doesn’t want to make that executive decision yet. So, he decides to focus on changing his expectations and his actions, so as to protect himself from the constant hope-disappointment cycle. He stops expecting that Yuto will follow through. He does not want to do everything for the both of them as if Yuko was a child, so Remy decides that he is no longer going to rely on Yuto for critical tasks. He will do those himself or he will bring in a friend or hire someone reliable to do them. But with not so critical tasks, Remy decides that if Yuto is late for something, like dinner, he is going to go out on the town and spend time with someone else and leave Yuto to the consequence of loneliness, rather than staying condemned to it himself. He sets the firm boundary that if Yuto is not going to be there for the relationship, he is not going to be there for the two of them. Remy feels that what he does get out of the relationship with Yuto is worth the reality that he is functionally alone in the relationship. Now that the fighting has stopped, things have improved. They are living parallel lives under the same roof often. But that space does not really bother Remy.
Yuto’s past partner, Hideki found himself at this same impasse with Yuto. When he hit this impasse, and accepted that Yuto would not change and be reliable, he had to face the reality that he was not facing by trying to get Yuto to change. The reality that he felt completely alone in the relationship and actually was in many ways. They may have had incredible sex and great quality time together when they were together, but he could not rely on Yuto at all. He was fundamentally unsupported in the relationship. Hideki spent most of his time in his youth feeling completely alone. He did not experience this kind of forced independence as a kind of space to be in peace and free in the relationship. Rather, he experienced it as a fundamental deprivation of his deepest needs for connection, partnership, support and togetherness. By looking deeply at his own wounding from his childhood, he realized that to settle for a partner who could not be relied on, he would be abandoning himself. He didn’t want to stay with the hurting, which is what staying with Yuto would be for him. So, he made the executive decision to expand his support system by finding other social outlets than Yuto. He also made the executive decision to move out and get an apartment that was closer to his work, so it wasn’t such an unsupported hassle to get there. And eventually, he met someone new. He then ended the partnership with Yuto.
If you are struggling with a situation where you need someone to change, but they aren’t changing, you may benefit by also watching three of my videos. The first is: How To Deal With Unworkability. The second is: Consciously Choose your Consequences. And the third is: The Real Reason Why People Don’t Change.
It is hell when someone won’t change because it means the problem (the reason you need them to change) is not being owned by them and therefore, it no longer belongs to the relationship. Instead, it is solely in your lap. This is why it doesn’t feel like a relationship anymore when someone in a relationship is being unworkable in some way. But the time does come when the hell of accepting the reality that a person won’t change is better than the hell of fighting against it. Better than the hell of the powerlessness and pain of keeping your wellbeing linked to them changing in some way. And you never know… for some people, consciously choosing to change themselves, or making an executive decision for their own wellbeing, is exactly what leads them to end the relationship. But for others, choosing to change themselves or making an executive decision for their own wellbeing is exactly what smooths out the problems in their relationship.
Do you ever find yourself wondering why people who do so much good have such bad things happen to them? Do you ever wonder why “bad” people seem to get away unscathed? Do you ever wonder what you must have done that was bad and wrong enough to deserve what is happening to you? Do you find yourself using the idea of past life karma to justify some of the things (both good and bad) that people experience? If so, whether you know it or not, you believe that this universe operates according to deserving. And it doesn’t.
This truth is: This universe does not operate according to deserving. The very concept of deserving is a human concept that people have projected out onto the greater universe. What does this mean? It means that the idea of deserving was first created and then accepted by people rather than deserving being a truth that inherently exists at a more objective universal level. Deserving is a highly subjective mental concept that is specifically a social construct. Human beings are a highly social species. And the concept of deserving served them socially. Well… better said, it is a concept that both does and doesn’t serve humanity.
Let’s start at the layer of the universe at large. This universe operates according to certain laws or principals that apply to everything equally. For example, cause and effect. Every action within a system triggers a consequence, which influences the larger system. And the universe operates as a collection of interrelated systems. This universe also operates according to the law of alignment. Basically, all systems in the universe must maintain a state of alignment in order to function optimally. Any part of any system must ensure that it does not go out of alignment with any other part within the larger systems it is a part of. This is the mechanism through which universal harmony and integrity is maintained. This universe also operates according to the law of mirroring. Basically, this universe operates like a giant, mirror. This way, the universe can experience itself. Within this principle, all forces and energies in the universe are interconnected by a universal feedback loop. Feedback loops ensure that systems continuously adapt and evolve. They guarantee universal expansion.
But what does this mean for you at a practical, human level? Well… There are physical laws that apply to everything at a physical level, regardless of any concept of morality. For example, the gravity weighs you down and the sun shines on you with the same intensity whether you are a serial killer or a humanitarian. The law of cause and effect is experienced by you independently of morality, punishment or reward. For example, shyness does not reflect on a person’s badness or goodness at all. But behaving in a shy way, may make other people feel rejected by you, which may cause them to exclude you from social gatherings, leading to you experiencing social isolation.
Any time the parts within you, whether they be physical aspects of you or mental aspects of you or anything else, go out of alignment, you experience that discordance. The same is true if you go out of alignment with any system you are a part of. For example, if your gut microbiome goes out of balance, it disrupts your brain, potentially causing brain fog, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance or constant hypervigilance. Or for example, if one part of you wants a relationship, but another part of you thinks relationships are a one-way ticket to loss of freedom, you will experience things like a loss of internal peace, turmoil in your relationships and/or loneliness. Or for example, if you take actions to deplete the soil on the planet upon which you live, you will experience famine.
You experience the law of mirroring when you come into the same time and space with people, places, things and circumstances that are a vibrational match to you. The fact that they are a match to you, is not a judgement on your character. It is not an evaluation of goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness. For example, say at some point in your youth, you developed the adaptive belief of “I’m not valuable.” And say you came up with this adaptive belief to preserve your relationship with your family who did not act in loving ways. Because of this, you are a vibrational match to people who reflect this belief. People who will not value you. And say that a person comes into your life who behaves as if you are not valued by them, you may fight to become someone that this other person values, rather than recognizing and uprooting this belief and moving on to find someone who does actually value you. Yes, if you lie, you are making yourself a match to people who lie. But not because the universe has decided you deserve it. It is because in a far more neutral fashion, that fits with the universal laws. And almost everyone has had the experience where they wake up in a bad mood and suddenly, everything goes wrong. They spill the coffee on themselves, they end up late to work, some crisis kicks off at work, they don’t have time for lunch, they get in a fender bender, they come home to a sick kid. There is nothing deserved about this kind of unwanted cascade. It is simply the universe responding to or reflecting energy and alignment. It is as impartial as making a certain sound and it echoing back. These laws lay the framework for the evolution of consciousness.
You are getting constant systemic feedback by this universe. You are not getting rewards or punishments doled out by a higher power. What all this means is: No, the cow did not get slaughtered because the cow deserved it. No, the billionaire is not wiping his butt with hundred-dollar bills because he deserved it. No, the little girl did not get raped because she deserved it. No, the person who has a successful marriage does not have it because they deserve it any more than the person who can’t seem to get a relationship no matter what they do deserves it. No, two drunk people decide to drive and one hits a pedestrian, the one who hit the pedestrian did not end up in this position because they deserved it, while the other one got home safely because they deserved it. No, you do not deserve everything that can go wrong to go wrong on a given day. The belief that you do not deserve or that you are not worthy is a real problem because it causes you to think, decide, say and do things (or fail to do things) which have detrimental effects. This belief also pulls you out of alignment. This belief also reverberates back as experiences that make you feel undeserving and unworthy. For this reason, it can benefit a person to believe in their own worthiness and deserving. But it is an even higher level of consciousness to graduate past the concept of deserving in and of itself.
When it comes to the topic of deserving, it is critical to understand the difference between causality and morality. This is easier said than done because we must un-learn what we have learned at the deepest cognitive level. Why must we separate causality and morality? Because to understand this universe, we must separate the WHY something happened from the idea about whether what happened is right or fair. Because in this universe, these two are not a married pair, as much as we want them to be. When we have opinions about whether or not someone deserves something, we are concerned with whether the outcome is justified based on the person’s character or intent. If it isn’t justified, we decide it is unfair. This is the layer of morality that we enmesh with causality.
We want things to be simple and one-dimensional. A part of us wants it to be as simple as: Fill in the blank happened to a person because they deserved it. But the WHY of something happening is far more complex. And the WHY of something happening is independent of whether we add the judgement of deserving or non-deserving to it.
I’ll give you just one tiny example. Say that a person’s partner leaves them. The truth could be that their partner left them because they have developed an anti-social behavior that makes having a relationship with them painful. We may apply a filter of deserving to this example and say they deserved to be left, but underneath this human filter is a rather impersonal reality of cause and effect. The truth could alternatively be that they are a high value person with a partner who is insecure about themselves and who can’t feel self-esteem around them, so the partner could have left because being with someone else makes them feel less inadequate by comparison. If this is the case, you run into the reality that there is no form of ‘input” that justified the “output” in that what happened does not reflect a judgment on the individual that fits with the outcome. So, we feel it is undeserved and unfair. You see this everywhere in the world. It is why people who believe the universe operates according to deserving struggle to make sense of bad things happening. You know that a kitten being stuffed in an oven by an abusive owner does not reflect that the universe has decided that the kitten was bad or wrong and that is why it was burned badly. You know it isn’t that the kitten deserved it. On top of this, in this universe, one outcome may have a collection of several contributing causations, not just one.
Deserving is also not an element of divine orchestration. This life experience is a cosmic dance between you and the rest of the universe which you are a part of. In terms of universal orchestration, the universe is moving energy where it needs to go to keep the "whole" aligned and also evolving. And what you individually think, believe, desire, decide, say and do is a part of this picture. You are a part of this universe the same way that a drop of ocean water is part of the ocean. At that level, it is bizarre to think the thought that you either deserve or don’t deserve something from yourself. We tend to project the relationship we have with our authority figures out into the universe at large. We make the universe or God a substitute mommy or daddy so that even when we grow into adulthood, we can still have a parent. Thinking that divine orchestration happens according to deserving makes people feel safer and more in control of their life experience. People are even willing to blame victims for the things they suffer to maintain this illusion. People tell themselves that if a person deserves good things, this universe will make sure to protect and reward them by bringing them good things and good experiences. And that if a person deserves bad things, this universe will make sure to punish them by bringing them bad things and bad experiences.
So, if the universe does not operate according to deserving, where did deserving come into the picture? The short answer is, it is a human concept that functions as a fundamental social tool. Here is a short list of some of the purposes that the concept of deserving served:
People decided on punishment and reward as the foundation of socialization. THE tool for behavioral modification. Deserving serves as the moral justification for both punishment or reward.
It creates reciprocity. A pro-social behavior. The idea of deserving creates the idea that a person’s pro-social behaviors will eventually lead to fair returns or good things happening to them.
It causes people to accept the system itself as well as those in power within the system. Believing that people's social positions are deserved stabilizes society by reducing friction and resentment toward those in power. It makes people far more likely to comply with laws and mandates.
Believing that "good things happen to good people" motivates individuals to act in ways that benefit others.
Believing that “bad things happen to bad people” motivates people to act in ways that benefit others. Basically, all you’ve got to do is to get a person to see something as bad and they will not want to do it because they will fear that this will line them up with deserving a bad thing to happen to them.
Deserving helps people to govern limited resources. People live in a world where certain resources can be limited. For example: Limited food, limited time, limited attention. Within this system, people need a kind of logic to decide upon distribution of these resources; one that feels "fair" so the group doesn't blow up with conflict. For example, we decide that the innocent child without means deserves an organ transplant more than an old man who can pay for it. Or we decide that a person who works more hours deserves more money than the person who works less. Or we decide that the person who deserves the attention, when there is only so much to go around, is the one with the most important information. But human beings argue incessantly over which metric of deserving should be used to govern their resources. This is why debates over things like welfare or immigration tend to be so emotional. They aren't just about money or land; they are about our human created rules of fairness. Our human created concept of deserving.
Deservingness makes people believe they can get rewards based off of their merits. Things like talent or good character traits or effort. Social systems that are based off of this are sometimes called meritocracies. Societies use meritocracy to maximize utility. Distributing income and jobs based on merit incentivizes hard work and ensures that resources go to those who will best utilize them. The promise of moving up the social ladder based on individual merit encourages members of all social classes focus their efforts into the existing system rather than seeking to overthrow it.
Deserving creates a sense of psychological safety in a very, very real way. Deserving creates a sense of order as opposed to chaos. Deserving implies fairness. People feel psychologically safe in a system of fairness. The reality is that there are a great many elements of human society that are unfair. But this fact doesn’t cause as much suffering and uprising if people believe it to be fair. For example, those in disadvantageous positions accept their position with more ease and have hope for future reward based off of merit. Deserving gives people a sense of control and predictability, even in situations where there isn’t much of either. The concept of deserving introduces a sense of certainty. People find the idea of a universe that feels random in that bad things happen to people who are good and do good absolutely terrifying. If bad things only happen to people who "deserve" them, we feel safe as long as we "act right” and in this way, we feel we can have control over what happens to us. If you just do and be what is good and avoid doing and being what is bad, you can be certain of the outcome.
Religions came into the picture and transformed deserving from a subjective human created concept to serve the structure and stability of society into cosmic law. Religion became the absolute most successful tool for social control because it moved the judge from a human courtroom to a divine one. A divine court room with an authority that is omnipresent, omniscient, incorruptible and that cannot be accessed. You cannot argue with it, you cannot kill it. You cannot hide from it. You cannot run away from or escape it. It is immune to failure or flaw. It is a categorical absolute authority. That which can never be risen up against or overthrown. I cannot stress to you how much this changed the face of the human world. When people believe that the authority figure, the one who judges and the one who doles out both punishment and reward, is this all powerful, all knowing, parental figure, they are always being watched. They must begin to police their own behavior. They are likely to follow rules, even when no one else is around.
Resentment, the perception of unfairness is one of the biggest threats to social order. Religions came in and relieved this by promising that justice is merely delayed! This encouraged those who were oppressed to endure their current situation rather than overthrowing the system, as they were told that the "Ultimate Judge" will balance the scales in the end. It acts as an inbuilt pressure valve within society. By linking human laws to divine "deservingness," leaders made their rules feel objective and eternal rather than just made up by a person who decided to take the power. And if a king says he was appointed by God, then breaking the king's law means a punishment far worse than any king could deliver. And breaking his law isn't just a crime, it’s a sin. When bad things happen to good people (natural disasters, disease), it threatens the social fabric because it makes life seem meaningless. It threatens the concept of deserving. Religions preserved the concept of deserving even when reality looked completely random or incredibly unfair. For example, it promised people that God’s ways are mysterious; there is a plan you cannot see. But that you will understand why you 'deserved' this trial, the good reason it happened, when you reach the afterlife. This kept people invested in the moral system even when the system was not working for them.
Religion attached eternal consequences to human behavior. This made it so that "deservingness" was no longer just about what you get now, it is about what you get forever. They introduced cosmic justification for unequal resource distribution. For example, the Eastern concept of Karma, provided the perfect justification for unfairness and inequality by suggesting that everyone is exactly where they "deserve" to be based on whatever they did in a past life. Or for example, the idea of a celestial realm for the dead (like heaven) provides the perfect incentive for good behavior. Or by promising things like the "meek shall inherit the earth" or that justice will be served in the afterlife, religion encouraged people to accept unfair conditions now because they will "deserve" a reward later. Religion literally became the instruction manual for deserving. By moving the judge of deserving away from the human realm and projected in out into the sky, humanity created a system of deservingness that never has to be proven in the physical world. A psychological mechanism so strong that people will hold onto this despite any proof to the opposite. This makes deserving an incredibly stable way to keep billions of people following the same set of "human" rules.
When each and every one of us is born into human society, we are socialized. Deserving is the mechanism through which we are socialized when we are most impressionable. Because this is the way our authority figures, such as parents and teachers make our world operate, we adopt this belief in deserving and decide this is how the world operates. Our parents use punishment and reward and they tie the concept of deserving to the punishment and reward that they dole out. If they are religious, they teach us that this deserving-based system is part of cosmic law as well. Even if our parents are not religious, they have been raised in societies that were for thousands of years and these religious concepts have been woven into the fabric of society. Woven into their perceptions of the world… The ones they pass on to us. So, what is the bottom line? We are literally programmed with the cognitive filter of deserving and it is deserving through which we perceive the world. Regardless of the fact that this universe does not operate according to deserving. And people do not have to believe in deserving in order to be motivated to behave in a moral way. In fact, the concept of deserving impedes our moral development as a species. But I’ll save that for another day.
Conflict is one of those things that most people fear. And when it happens, getting things back into alignment is definitely an art form. So, today, I’m going to give you a hack for conflict. One that will help you to avoid conflict in the first place as well as help you to resolve conflict if it occurs.
Conflict is really about someone (potentially both people) being negatively impacted in some way. In this context, what we mean by impacted is, affected. For example, say that you are married and you spend a chunk of money in the joint savings account. The impact of this may be that your spouse loses a sense of security and control, so they start to feel unsafe, like they can’t trust you (the very person who they should trust most), which can then make them feel alone. And they may end up set back because they were working towards a financial goal. Impact, which is implicated in any conflict (or would be conflict) can happen at any level, physical, emotional, mental, energetic.
If we want to resolve conflict, we need to figure out the way that a person was impacted and directly address and resolve that impact. There is almost always a vulnerability wherever a person is impacted and because of this, people tend to not put the impact directly on the table. Instead, they tend to just get into an endless argument about the surface elements of the conflict at hand, when the impact (the thing we are really stuck on) is something everyone is dancing around and alluding to. You will only make headway when you figure out how the other person was impacted and you directly caretake that impact.
When we are in a conflict, especially when there is pain involved, we tend to slip into a head space where we go into self-preservation mode. We become concerned only with our own pain and our own best interests. We stop caring what is going on for the other person. It may feel like we do not have the bandwidth to care. And potentially even more than that, we may feel like we actually want them to hurt. This is the single biggest barrier to recognizing the impact as well as caretaking it. For the sake of the outcome we want, which is to resolve the conflict, we need to hold our own pain and the ways we are impacted, but to the side for a moment, while we take our awareness over to the other person, so as to perceive their pain and how they were impacted.
To give you an example of what I mean, Zach has a coworker named Vihaan. Zach is an IT developer. He wants to release a new system feature on some software the company owns. Vihaan is an operations engineer. He reviews the code and refuses to merge it with the existing software because he says it introduces dependencies that might compromise system security. They have been arguing for days over this and the situation has escalated to their boss. Zach is now accusing Vihaan of blocking innovation. And Vihaan is now telling his boss that he can’t work with Zach because he is reckless and irresponsible and is a company liability. When Zach really takes time to figure out the impact on Vihaan, he sees that it is Vihaan’s job to make sure the server uptime is as high as possible. His job is dependent on system stability. And it is his responsibility to make sure that no update causes a crash. Vihaan is terrified that his responsibility, reputation, integrity and job are on the line. If a system crash did occur, it would actually be blamed on Vihaan, not Zach. Zach sees that these are the things that need to be resolved in order to move forward. So, Zach says to Vihaan “I get that if something goes wrong with this, that it is your head that will roll. If I were in your position, that would freak me out and seem really unfair. And you’re damn good at what you do, I would never want it to seem otherwise to this company. Zach then suggests that he can input an automated rollback script so that if the system fails, it reverts instantly. And that if they release it over the weekend, he will stay on call, shouldering the responsibility with Vihaan. And that they can do a soft launch, which is only visible to a very small percentage of users. Zach also involves their boss in the discussion and suggestions, making sure to paint Vihaan in a good light, in that he really has the security and stability of the system as his utmost concern, rather than to paint the picture that Vihaan is a blocker who is against company best interests. All of this caretaking of the impact, softens Vihaan. And Vihaan agrees to the soft launch. Becoming aware that all that was happening is a clash of incentives between them (Zach in his job being rewarded for change and Vihaan in his job being rewarded for stability), it did not feel personal anymore. They actually had a good time together over the weekend where they had to monitor the release. And really getting to know Vihaan’s motives and ways of thinking have made Zach’s interactions with every operations expert more successful. This has made Zach even more valuable to the company.
The best-case scenario is that both people in a conflict are really recognizing the impact on the other and are proactively caretaking and resolving that impact. In our example above, Vihaan could have done this instead of Zach or as well as Zach. But any time you want to take the power into your hands to resolve a conflict, recognize the impact on the other party and caretake/resolve that impact.
Zeroing in on impact can also help us to avoid conflict all together. This is all about getting out ahead of situations so as to minimize (or better yet, to eliminate) the potential impact. For this to work, you need to pre-anticipate what the impact could or would be on the other person. As an added benefit, doing this builds trust like nothing else does. You can consider this an exercise in proactive empathy and proactive compassion.
For example, Raveena is a sales rep at a construction firm and she just landed a huge client for the company. This client is super ambitious and wants their project complete in three months. It is very tempting to simply sign the contract. After all, this is great for Raveena. She gets one hell of a commission. But she is someone who stays aware of and caretakes the impact on others. She knows that if she signs the contract as it is, the project manager, Bill and his entire crew will be immediately in trouble. They would have to work 80-hour weeks minimum and skip all weekends and holidays to meet the project deadline. She starts to take proactive action to buffer and protect Bill and his crew. She goes back to the client armed with proof about construction quality in general and sells them on the idea of quality. Explaining that a five-month window is what would ensure that the highest quality building and safety standards are met. The sells this as a benefit to the client, rather than a setback or delay. She also meets with Bill and asks him “what is the one thing that usually causes your crew to fall apart on a tight schedule? Bill says “permit delays”. So, Raveena adds a clause to the contract that says the timeline only starts after the permits are approved, so that Bill does not suffer on account of something totally out of his control. Because Raveena caretook the impact, she prevented Bill being in pain, she prevented a conflict with Bill. She prevented burn out, turn over, quality risks and safety risks. And she protected the company from the potential of losing the client due to missed deadlines.
To caretake the impact, the skill to develop is to see the other side. To step into their perspective and shoes so to speak, so you can understand their current reality. You need to consider things like: What are the consequences for or on them? How might this make them feel? What might happen to them? What are they trying to protect? What is the hardest part for them? What need do they have that is being threatened? What are they afraid of? What constraints are they facing? Who else in their life is impacted and how? What message will my words, behavior or actions send to them? What do they value most? What could this mess up for them? Etc.
A game that you can play is the “and then what?” game. This helps you to see the downstream consequences or domino effect for someone else. To play this game, start with the thing that would initially impact a person and ask “and then what?”, meaning how would that negatively affect them? And to that answer, ask “and then what?”. You will get another answer. And to that answer, ask “and then what?”. Keep doing this until you have a full picture of impacts. For example: Say you are running late and you decide to leave your dishes in the sink. You want to figure out the impact on your partner, who you live with. You ask “And then what?” the answer is: My partner will come home after a day at work, wanting to decompress. And they find the mess I left and won’t be able to. “And then what?” They will have to make the decision about whether to wash the dishes or not. This is pressure I am adding to their plate. “And then what?” They feel resentment because I have given them a chore, rather than acted like an ally to their decompression. “And then what?” We are at odds. This is something I hate, but that’s about me… the impact on them is that they don’t feel like they have a partner who is an ally. Rather, they feel like they have a partner who behaves in ways that oppose their wellbeing. And this will make them feel more alone in the world and burdened. “And then what?” This does damage to the connection between us. You could keep going if you want, but you see pretty quickly what the impacts are and what impacts you need to directly prevent and/or caretake.
Don’t be afraid to ask the other person (and/or other people around them) questions as well so as to be able to accurately ascertain the impact. You can do this with impact that has happened, or even better, you can do this pre-emptively to ascertain would be impact. Human beings in general do not operate in the world in a way where they caretake their impact on others. Whether that is another person in their life or whether it is another species in their environment. This is what the cruelty in the human world is really about. People behaving as if they don’t care about their impact on that which is “other”. Getting more personal, some of us grew up in households where our parents did not really consider the impact on us. They did not consider the impact of the things they said or didn’t say to us. Their behaviors. The things they decided. The things they did or didn’t do. It was as if all that mattered was themselves. This kind of interpersonal experience teaches us that we are out for ourselves and we do not learn to attune to impact in general. We operate in a way that is oblivious to the impact on others. And, ironically, even though we move through the world in a self-centered way, we are not attuned to the true impact of things on ourselves either. The skill of attuning to impact is something that we need to develop now, in our adult life. But it is my promise that impact awareness will transform your experience in any and all of the relationships in your life. It will transform your experience of the world.
We live in a society that is completely fixated on romantic partnership. A primary binary relationship. As a result, people the world over are being gaslit and it is time this came to an end.
Sometimes, relationships fall apart and end. Sometimes our relationship with a primary romantic partner falls apart and ends, sometimes our relationship with a colleague or business partner falls apart and ends. Sometimes our relationship with a family member falls apart and ends. Sometimes our relationship with a friend falls apart and ends. And when this happens, it can impact us greatly. But we will not be able to caretake and remedy this impact if we do not recognize the impact in the first place. And it is hard to do this if we are living in a society that minimizes or does not even recognize impact. And today, it’s time to recognize the impact of a friendship falling apart and ending. A “friendship breakup”.
So many people are walking around deeply damaged by a friendship breakup, but they aren’t really getting anywhere. They are not getting met by a society that really gets the impact of this. Instead, they are met by a society that trivializes, downplays and dismissed it. They are getting met by a society that thinks that everything outside of a primary romantic partnership doesn’t or shouldn’t really matter all that much. In truth, modern society doesn’t recognize the full impact of a romantic partnership ending either. But still, in current modern society, primary romantic partnership is placed on the top of the totem pole of relationship hierarchy. Unlike romantic partnership breakups, where there are recognized rituals and scripts around it, there are none for friendship breakups. Because so many people have internalized this mentality towards friendships, they don’t know what is going on with themselves. They tell themselves that it shouldn’t be as much of a big deal as it obviously is. Or they slip into shame because they decide that something must be wrong with them for being so impacted. And if you are one of these people who is suffering from a friendship breakup, no matter if that breakup happened recently or a long time ago, you need to know this:
Just because modern society trivializes friendships does not make modern society correct. A person’s most meaningful or most important relationship may in fact be with a friend. Or multiple. In fact, this is the case for a great many more people than most people realize.
Even if you do have a primary partnership and feel like a breakup with this person would be the most damaging and devastating to you, this does not mean that human beings are about binary relationship. The reality is that you are a person and as a person, you are a social species. A species that is designed to exist in groups. This means, you most likely have multiple relationships. You most likely have multiple friends. And each one of these relationships plays a very significant role in your life. Each is meaningful. Each matters deeply. Each meets unique needs. When one of these relationships falls apart and or ends, it has the real potential to hurt like hell, to hurl us into grief, to alter us, even to traumatize us and be deeply damaging.
No two people are the same. Because of this, no two relationships are the same. Every person and every relationship is like its own unique flavor. Its own unique experience. And you have lost that unique flavor and experience that came with it. No person and no relationship is directly replaceable because of this. And deep down, you know this is true. It is true that there are so many people who have incredible things to offer. And several people on earth would be able to meet your relational needs. And there are so many people you are yet to meet that you will cherish. And you may even potentially have a far better relationship with other people than you did with that person. But none of this negates the fact that you lost something uniquely precious, something that cannot be replicated.
People often experience deeper levels of trust in friendships than they do in romantic partnerships. Trust is one of the most important things in this universe to our life experience. When we lose a person we trust, the world becomes a far scarier and more unstable place.
Loss of a friendship can be superbly re-traumatizing. People who have gone through attachment wounds in their childhood experience a re-activation of these unhealed wounds. But, beyond this, it can be a real repeat of that trauma when a friendship falls apart and ends. So, rather than the friendship being a thing that heals that early relational wound, it may just compound it.
Friendships are a resource for us. They provide us with things. They meet our needs. When a friendship ends, suddenly, we are cut off from those things we got from the relationship. This can throw us into the experience of lack and starvation for those things.
Long term friends have been with you through everything. Most likely through several romantic partnerships. Through significant life events. Through your changes and development. They are woven into your own life story. Losing them is like losing the one who knows. It is like losing a part of your own history.
Friendships tend to be our support in life. What we fall back on when things go wrong, including if our primary romantic relationship fails. When friendship fails, we lose this support. We lose the safety net we have in life.
Biological science has very interesting things to say about the impact of the loss of friendship. You should look deeper into this if you want to learn more. For example, friendships (as opposed to romantic partnerships) are specifically wired into the part of your brain that processes identity. So, the loss of a friendship impacts your sense of who you are. And when you lose a person who validates your memory, memories become less real. When you lose a friend, you go into biological crisis mode, just like you would a primary partnership. Several neurochemicals go through a crash which causes intense symptoms to occur. And you perceive it as a threat to your survival and wellbeing, which launches you into fight or flight mode. When you lose a friend, your brain enters this high alert state, making you more sensitive to social cues in general, which is a defensive mechanism to prevent further rejection. This makes other relationships harder to feel secure in. Social rejection and loss also activate the same areas of your brain that process physical pain. At this level, the brain does not distinguish between a broken heart and a physical injury. And, as if all this weren’t bad enough, the loss of any significant relationship can cause genetic changes that are not good.
Losing someone who is still alive, but who is no longer in your life (whether this is a partner or a friend) creates a very specific kind of trauma. A nebulous, unresolved grief. It throws you into a cognitive dissonance state. Because the person is still alive, society does not validate your pain and provides minimal support. There tends to be a lack of closure in these situations that causes the brain to obsessively ruminate, replaying every detail, trying to solve the situation or prevent it from ever happening again. Your brain stays in a state of searching and yearning indefinitely because there is no closure and you see they still exist, so the brain tends to refuse to let go of the hope for reconciliation or the desperate need to prevent what happened from ever happening again, which keeps you from moving on. Rumination creates serious anxiety. Also, when we believe a person will always be there, which we often do when it comes to our friendships, if the relationship ends before the person dies, it shatters your sense of reality, forcing a painful and disorienting reconstruction of your estimation of reality as well as your own identity.
Friends play a serious role in our lives; they are woven into the tapestry of our lives and the way we live our life. For example, you may have learned: If I have news to share, I share it with Seth. Or if I am afraid, I call Seth. Or lemons remind me of Seth. When a friendship falls apart and/or ends, suddenly, we run into a painful wall. If we have news to share, we have to stop ourselves from calling Seth and we feel a hit of negative emotion. If we are afraid, we want to call Seth, but we know he is no longer our person we can go to, so we are afraid and have to look around for someone else to call, maybe someone we trust less. We see lemons and instead of feeling the love between us and Seth, the pain of the rupture is revived. This is a profoundly painful and disorienting experience. It changes the way you experience day to day life.
There are for sure more things to highlight than what I have shared today, but the important thing is that you stop being gaslit and stop gaslighting yourself about this. A friendship falling apart and ending can be a really big deal. If we see and accept this, we can create a culture around the loss of friendship that is actually in reality and that is actually supportive. And, we can proactively do the things in our life that bring about healing and even resolve.
In today’s world, money is the main method people use to get the things that they want and need. Because of this, we tend to immediately jump to the conclusion that the reason we aren’t getting what we want, is that we have a financial issue, in other words that our problem is directly related to money and our relationship with money itself. But what if I told you that your financial issues may not have anything to do with finances or money. What if instead, it had to do with your relationship to the thing that you want?
Do me a favor and think about the thing that you want or need. The thing that you think you need money to get. Now take money out of the middle, so you are face to face (in a raw way) with the thing that you want. What is the pain about? How do you feel towards this thing emotionally? What painful thoughts arise? It is in these painful thoughts and feelings that you can recognize what within you is oppositional to the having of the thing you want.
So that you can grasp this concept, I’ll give you two examples.
Kevin has been trying desperately to work his butt off at a job so he can climb the ladder of success and set himself up in life. No matter how hard he works, things keep happening that prevent this from happening. He wants to have an income high enough to be able to buy a house and a good car and to be able to provide for himself and a partner. Why does he want this? Because Kevin really, really wants a woman in his life as a life partner. He has identified finances as the necessary way to get this. Upon hearing the idea that maybe his financial blockages are not about finances, but rather about his relationship to the thing he wants, he mentally takes finances out of the middle so he is face to face with his relationship to the thing he wants, which is a female partner. And immediately, his heart sinks. He feels despair and doom. He hears the thoughts “no woman wants to be with a guy that doesn’t have his life together” and “no woman is going to want to be with me”. Beneath all of this is that Kevin feels the thing he wants will not want him. What this points to is that beneath all of this, is terrible self-esteem. What is blocking Kevin’s abundance is not finances or blockages about money. It is his belief that he is undesirable as a person. And so, resolving this will do far more regarding Kevin’s abundance than focusing on finances or his mentality around finances ever will.
Carmen has recently been putting a lot of time into watching financial experts talk about money and investment strategy. She wants wealth. When she thinks about it, what she really wants wealth for is a sense of freedom and personal power. She cannot stand it when she is forced to put up with things that don’t feel good, just because she doesn’t have the money. She hates that feeling of powerlessness within human society and powerlessness to having the experiences she wants. She also loves that sense of freedom where you can do whatever you want, go wherever you want, get whatever you want. When Carmen takes money out of the position of being the middle man and is forced to face her relationship to freedom and her relationship to personal power, suddenly, so many oppositional patterns become obvious. 1. Her identity is completely wrapped up in being part of the Mexican American culture, financial struggle and powerlessness is part of her cultural identity. Suddenly, she is afraid having freedom and power (and money for that matter) would change her identity in scary ways. 2. She realizes that her primary protection strategy is to act small and helpless. This makes people step in and protect her and help her. It disarms them. She realizes that having power makes her feel unsafe, because power causes people to see you as a threat and treat you like one. 3. She realizes that personal freedom feels sinful and morally dangerous because she was raised catholic and was indoctrinated with the belief that one should place God before their own self-interest, even if that means suffering. 4. She realizes that as much as she is desperate for it, freedom makes her feel like she has no safety net in life. Total freedom means that she is solely responsible for her life. Both for the getting of what she wants and for the failures and mistakes she makes. This feels like pressure and she has observed herself going back to the security, yet constraint, of making other people responsible for her. It is as if she needs an authority figure to feel safe in the world. What is blocking Carmen’s abundance is not finances or blockages about money. It is her relationship to personal power and freedom. And so, resolving this will do far more for her abundance than focusing on finances or her financial blockages ever will.
You might just notice by doing this that you are so stuck on finances as being the “only” way that the thing you want or need can come to you, that even though you see finances as the way to get what you want, you actually see finances as the barrier. As the oppositional force to getting what you want. So, on a subconscious and energetic level, you see finances as the bad guy and are in fact pushing against it. This mentality is a pretty serious financial blockage in and of itself.
The best place to start when it comes to taking money as the middle man out of the equation, is to sit (as if in meditation) and bring the image or idea of what you want into your conscious awareness. And just observe your reaction. Pay close attention to your physical, emotional and mental reaction when you first just think about the thing that you want. And second, when you think about already having the thing you want. When any negative emotions or uncomfortable sensations arise, see if you can identify them. And see if you can identify any negative thoughts associated with them.
Some things you can consider when examining your direct relationship to what you want, the thing you think you need money to get are:
*Looking back at the last three times that you were close to getting this thing that you want. Can you identify any patterns regarding what you think prevented you from really getting it? Keep in mind that if the same external obstacle shows up, it can often point to an internal defense mechanism that is masquerading as bad luck.
*If you were to watch yourself and your life from the outside, as if watching a movie character in a movie, what would you say is preventing THEM from getting what they want? Also, what would you say about their relationship to what they want?
*What was your relationship with this thing you want in childhood?
*What attitude did your parents, other authority figure, maybe even siblings and peers have towards this thing you want? What is their relationship to it themselves? And what is their relationship to you having it?
*What attitude did your culture of origin have to the thing you want and have to you having the thing that you want?
*Are there any traumas you have experienced related to this thing you want and do those experiences feel unresolved?
*Are you using this thing you want to try to get away from something? If you wanted this thing so you never felt a certain way ever again, what might this point to you desperately trying to avoid?
*Answer the question: The thing I am afraid I would have to become to get (fill in the blank with what you want) is…
*What attitude do the people you currently spend time with or does the culture you currently live in have towards this thing that you want?
*If money can’t be the answer and you were to ask yourself the question: Why don’t I already have this thing that I want? What answer immediately and spontaneously comes up?
*If you were to ask yourself the question: What is this thing that I want’s relationship to me? What answer immediately and spontaneously comes up?
*How might having this thing that you want change your identity?
*When you ask yourself the question: What bad thing will happen as a result of getting (fill in the blank with what you want), what answer immediately and spontaneously comes up?
*If you had the thing that you want, what would be the biggest risk?
*Complete this sentence: If I had (fill in the blank with what you want), the price I would have to pay for it is…
*If you knew you didn’t have this thing you want because you didn’t deserve it, what would be the reason you don’t deserve it? And what would you have to do in order to deserve it?
* When you think about getting the thing that you want, do you run up against any feelings or thoughts regarding your own capability or competence?
* Complete this sentence: If I stopped struggling for the thing I want, I would have to face…
*When you watch every single thing that you do over the course of the entire day and over the course of a week, how much of the things you do directly serve the getting of the specific thing you want? And when you examine what you get out of doing each thing that you do, can you identify something you are subconsciously far more committed to than the thing you say you want?
This may take some reflection, some soul searching, some being with uncomfortable emotions and some deep inner questioning, but improving your relationship directly with the thing you want tends to do more for unblocking financial blockages, more for your abundance overall and more for the getting of what you want than focusing on money ever will. Despite it being the financial blockage that almost no one talks about.
In this era of self-development coaching and new age spirituality, there are a lot of experts telling people that it is important to take 100% responsibility. This concept of 100% responsibility is very, very popular now. The thing is, it is a problematic philosophy. Let’s unpack why as well as what to do instead.
Responsibility has several definitions. From the opportunity or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization, to the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something, to the state or fact of having control over someone, to the state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something, to a moral obligation to behave correctly towards or in respect of someone or something. This of course makes it very hard to have a conversation about responsibility.
What people tend to be concerned with when they teach you that it is critical to take 100% responsibility, is personal power. It is framed as a tool for personal empowerment. But, when this philosophy is treated as a rigid absolute, as a universal and non-negotiable law that applies (and must be followed) in all circumstances (regardless of context, nuance or conflicting evidence) it is out of reality and even dangerous. Let’s look at how:
Treating self-empowerment tools, like radical responsibility, as a rigid absolute can pull us right out of reality. So that you understand what I mean, let’s look at the roughly 17 million people killed in the Nazi holocaust. Does it seem correct to you to go up to them when they are in the horrible situation of sitting there about to be executed and tell them “Look, it’s really important that you realize you are 100% responsible for where you are today and it is really important that you take 100% responsibility. You are here today because of your choices yesterday and you will be where you are tomorrow because of your choices today!” It terrifies people to accept the reality that we can and do effect other people and that other people can and do effect us. Even if you recognize pre-incarnation factors as well as the law of mirroring (often called the law of attraction) there is a reality that many people do not want to accept; you are not the sole operant power. You live in a system of constant co-creation. You are looking to find personal empowerment relative to your part in that cosmic symphony. You are not the literal author of every single thing that occurs. Even when you accept the higher dimensional truth that everything is you, in the time-space reality you occupy, reality is a partnership, not a solo dance. It is a paradox. One truth does not negate the other. There is an intersection between you being the architect of your life experience and the other forces, both physical and nonphysical that are also at work. You do not exist in a vacuum. Your reality is a dance between you and a larger, complex system that you are a part of. Many philosophies, including the philosophy of 100% responsibility (and you create your own reality with it), can offer extreme utility for personal growth. But this doesn’t mean that they are an objectively accurate description of reality.
Many non-physical beings who teach humanity do not care for truth in and of itself. They have a specific aim and purpose. And teaching humans to view life through the lens of extreme personal empowerment, such as “you create your own reality” and radical responsibility along with it, shifts a person from being a reactive organism to being a proactive, self-reflecting producer of life experience. It helps them overcome states of powerlessness by re-writing painful narratives into empowering ones. It switches them to an internal locus of control. Causing them to focus all of their energy where they have the most influence, which is their own choices and perceptions. In other words, it very much serves a purpose for people to start thinking this way.
This philosophy of taking 100% responsibility is rooted in the absolute terror of powerlessness. It is a power-hungry philosophy that is in fact a state of avoidance. A major idea behind take 100% responsibility is that whenever you recognize what someone else did to cause a situation you are in (blame them), any time you see yourself as a victim, make someone else responsible or try to hold someone else accountable, you are surrendering your power, abilities, and life to the power of something or someone else outside of you. That you are saying that they have control over you and that you are powerless. So, by taking 100% responsibility, you are taking your power back. This is a very appealing philosophy for people who were hurt by others in the past and who never ever want to feel that powerlessness again. And this philosophy becomes part of their hyper-independence trauma response. A coping mechanism. This terror and trauma is why they hold onto it so rigidly.
This philosophy is a slippery slope to self-blame. Many people who adhere to the take 100% responsibility philosophy consistently monitor every life experience for how they caused it. This can easily lead to internalizing everything that happens. And this converts very easily into self-blame, shame, rumination and serious self- criticism. An extreme negative spiral.
This philosophy causes anxiety and burnout. Specifically, hyper-responsibility burnout. It encourages you to take everything onto your own shoulders, which no person can actually do. And so, it is a dead end. It leads people to believing they must control everything in order to avoid pain and that it is shameful or a personal failure to rely on others, both of which leads you to burnout. Most people who say that it is important to take 100% responsibility assert that you have to take hold of the fact that where you are today is because of the choices you made before, and where you will be tomorrow is because of the choices you make today. This creates the need for perfectionism regarding choices if one wants to avoid calamity, which increases stress. It can easily lead to you trying to control something that you can’t actually control. And this makes you stay in chronic stress. When you decide you must fix a situation because you are a person who takes 100 percent responsibility in a situation that cannot be fixed by you alone, you will enter the state of fight or flight. Rather than empowering, the take 100% responsibility mentality will be disempowering. Burnout is a horrible experience. The name does not do it justice.
It is a recipe for disaster in relationships and can very easily blind you and bind you to dysfunctional relationships. Taking 100% responsibility in a relationship will mean you taking responsibility for both your part and the other person’s part of what should be a two-person tango. It will burn you out. It is absolutely unsustainable. You will enable under-responsibility in other people. You will become an irresponsible people magnet. People will gravitate towards taking less and less until everything is on you, but you won’t notice until it is too late. You will struggle with vulnerability in your relationships. The Intimacy and vulnerability necessary to form deep connections with others requires mutual reliance, which the 100% responsibility philosophy tends to prevent.
And if you are in a dysfunctional or abusive dynamic, taking 100% responsibility can enable dysfunction as well as abuse. It can even become a tool that the other person uses to abuse you. You make yourself the problem and the one to blame, and so do they. Even when the issue is something they are doing or not doing. For example: It often leads to the “I am the one to blame for and responsible for my partner lying to me” dynamic. It can also very easily lead to boundary erosion, whereby you are only focused on your reaction rather than on setting consequences for another person’s behaviors. Adhering to this philosophy can easily put you in the scapegoat role in social dynamics. Overall, this philosophy is a one-way ticket to relationship hell.
The 100% responsibility philosophy is part of the problem with our world today. In today’s world, reciprocal social bonds are being corroded as the world becomes more and more individualized. Humans are turning from a “we take care of each other” society into an “everyone is responsible for themselves and their own wellbeing” society. The take 100% responsibility attitude shifts the blame and burden of systems failures (things that are not ok and that are not within a person’s individual control) onto the individual. The take 100% responsibility philosophy feeds this world-wide social problem and enables it. It is making this human world a crueler place to be.
Self-empowerment is great. For this reason and many others, responsibility tools are great. In its purest form, what responsibility is, is taking positive ownership over something, such as yourself and your life experience. This is a highly engaged and empowered state of being. But if we are interested in awakening, we need to look at the full picture of reality, not just use the part that makes us feel empowered to negate the part that doesn’t. The full picture of causation does not involve just us. Regardless of whether your soul chose this specific life and even a specific set of negative conditions, it is still true that this life experience is a co-creation. You affect others and others effect you. To not get that is to be profoundly and willfully out of reality. This is why a far, far better and more awakened practice when it comes to responsibility is to see what is yours and what is not yours. And this, can be a long list in any given situation. Doing this will allow you to see your role in the big and often very complex picture of causation. It is also a different and better practice to use in order to “mine” this life experience for how you can take ownership and where and in what ways you do have power in any given situation. It is very black or white thinking to assert that people either take 100% responsibility or they are in victim mentality. You don’t have to go out of reality to ask yourself questions like:
What choices did I make that got me here?
What can I do differently next time?
What steps do I need to take to move past this?
What can I learn from this?
How can I react differently?
What should I be doing differently?
How can I shift to an internal locus of control?
Don’t let the philosophy of 100% responsibility lead you down a road that takes you into distress and out of reality. Start asking yourself instead: What is mine and what is theirs?
Words have meaning. It would be lovely if every word meant the same thing to all people. But one of the scariest parts of communication is that two people can be using the same word, but that word has different meaning to each of them. There are so many words for which this can be the case. But today, we’re going to talk about family.
Family is one of these words that we assume means the same thing to all people, but that actually means different things to different people. So that you can grasp this concept, think of family as being a title and underneath it, is a box and inside that box are all the things that are implied in your concept of family. All of the embedded assumptions and expectations that go along with the concept of family for you. Think about what would be inside of that box.
For example: Timothy did this exercise and this is some of what was inside of his box: Unconditional Love (in that we always have deep affection for each other and vale and accept each other, no matter what drives us nuts about each other or the bad things we do). Always being able to stay with them (never being homeless), belonging in that I always belong with them and they always belong with me. The sharing of knowledge. They support me and vice versa during adversity and never leave me to deal with things myself. They are a soft place to land, providing safety and comfort when I am in distress. The young taking care of elders as they get older. We live in close proximity to each other and live life together. Security on the physical level in that family provides for each other and wealth and resources are shared with each other. Loyalty in that no one acts against any other person in favor of themselves. It means child support in that the children are the whole family’s obligation and if someone doesn’t have the capacity to care for a child that is blood related, someone else in the family must and will. We always do what is best for the whole family. We maintain each other’s and the family’s reputation with how we behave. There were a lot more, but you get the point.
Miranda did this exercise with Timothy and was shocked to find out that there were things in both of their boxes that were the same, there were also things inside of her box that were not in his box, there were things in his box that were not in hers. And most shocking, there were things in both of their boxes that served as a point of contention between them. For example, always being able to stay with each other (never being homeless) was also in her box. So was love. Only Miranda’s definition of love in this respect was: Utmost felt and demonstrated care for each other’s wellbeing. Miranda did not have taking care of elders in her box. And there were two super important things in her box that Timothy did not have in his. One being, we support what each member of the family has decided is best for them individually. The other being equal consideration in that each member is thoughtful of each other member’s best interests and needs and what the impact of any decision would be on them.
By doing this exercise, Miranda immediately saw points of contention between herself and Timothy as well as understood why Timothy’s family has so many issues with her and so often gives her speeches about family. Timothy’s family and Timothy with them, believe that family should come before personal interests. This is not the same value system Miranda holds. In her family, personal interests come first. Also, proximity has nothing to do with family for Miranda whereas it does for Timothy and his family. On top of this, self-sacrifice for the good of other family members is seen as being critical and as strengthening family for Timothy. Miranda’s definition of family is exactly the opposite. That people would never expect you to sacrifice for their good. Now that Timothy and Miranda have done this exercise, they can be far more conscious about family. They can question themselves about that drop down list of what family implies. They can have the direct and conscious conversations about the individual things in each of their drop-down lists of what family implies.
One of the biggest problems with family meaning different things to different people is that if someone does not act according to what is in that box of embedded assumptions, it will feel like they are not acting like family and so they will cease to feel like family to you. There are many consequences that can come to everyone involved as the result of this. Also, so many of us who are looking for a sense of family are looking for some specific things that are in our box of embedded assumptions about family. But we are actually looking for those things in the wrong places because even though a person may say they see us as family and offer us family, their family box may not even include the thing we are looking to get from family. We see family as our answer to what we lack, when we have to get so much more specific than that.
So, rather than assume that everyone means the same thing when they say family and rather than walking around with an unconscious bag of unquestioned embedded assumptions about family, take a look at what assumptions are built into your concept of family. Examine each one and deeply question it. Are they the same as what is in the box of family for other people in your life? If not, in what ways does that show up as a point of contention? If you are looking for a sense of family, get more specific. By looking at your list of embedded assumptions, what is it that you are actually wanting and needing? And is going for family the best way to get those things you want and need?
Looking directly at what family means (at your drop-down list of embedded assumptions and expectations) can go a long way towards directly resolving a lack of alignment between you and other people. It can also go a long way towards you identifying your actual needs and going directly for them, rather than making family your “so that”. The way that you think you are guaranteed to get something else that you want and need. So, what does family mean to you?
Are you someone with a lot of empathy and compassion? If so, you might just have a blind spot, one that will leave you totally bewildered in relationships and in human society at large. One that can cause you a lot of pain and a lot of wasted energy.
If you are a compassionate and/or sympathetic and or empathic person, you have a deep ability to understand and share other people’s feelings. You may even feel them so deeply, you feel them as your own. You probably feel and show sympathy and concern for others. The thing is, people tend to assume that other people are the same or are similar to us, this is often called the false consensus effect and the assumed similarity bias. People are prone to projecting themselves onto others. People are often stuck in their own perspective and have a really hard time perceiving other people’s perspective. And this goes even further when it comes to empathy and compassion.
People tend to assume empathy and compassion in others because it allows them to trust and form relationships in which they can feel connected and safe. They assume empathy and compassion because of social norms and ideas of goodness. It is accepted that people value goodness and that goodness implies understanding the way someone else feels and with this understanding, they will do what is good for others. So, it is assumed that people in general do understand the feelings of others and that if they understand the feelings of others, they will act with care. People also assume empathy and compassion because of the expectations we hold that other people are motivated to alleviate distress. When witnessing suffering, it is assumed that a person’s mirror neurons will cause an automatic, reflexive identification that will cause them to feel the urge to act to alleviate that suffering. Reciprocal altruism was a part of the evolution of our species. In many ways, an evolutionary progression. We are wired to think others will care because mutual care and mutual aid is a foundational element of what makes us human.
Because of this assumption, in relationships, we appeal to other people’s compassion and empathy all the time. Our partner does something to hurt us and we spend six hours trying to get them to get how much they hurt us and why, subconsciously hoping that they will learn never to do that to us again and to take some other loving action towards us. We get pulled over by the cop and we tell him a story about having a medical emergency, hoping he’ll feel sorry for us and let us go without a ticket. We do something bad to someone and we come up with excuses to defend ourself, excuses which make them see us as the victim, so they will forgive us and not cause us pain.
Ready for what is hiding in your blind spot? Some people do not feel other people’s emotions, do not experience empathy, cannot put themselves in other people’s shoes, and do don’t experience compassion. But what’s worse than this is that even if people have the ability to subjectively perceive and share someone else’s feelings and experience, it does not necessarily translate to compassion. For some people, there is a “snip” between empathetic abilities and compassion. A detachment. Basically, them being able to perceive and understand the feelings of others does not necessarily translate to compassion, which is them being concerned enough to act in the person’s best interests or to treat them with care. This is a chilling reality to contend with.
Some people learn the adaptive skill of not tuning into the way you feel emotionally as a self-protective measure. But instead, also as a self-protective measure, tuning into you mentally. They can go into your perspective and mentally imagine how you might feel and what you might think. They can mentally attune, so as to be able to endear themselves to others and manipulate them. This helps them stay safe and get their needs met socially.
There are many people who have cognitive empathy in that they can tune into your feelings and understand your personal experience so as to exploit, control and harm you. They can do so without feeling the same feelings that you feel. Undercover cops use this skill to get the intel they need to convict someone. Con artists use this skill when they are pulling off the perfect con. Unethical politicians use this skill when they are trying to win the vote or get civilian support for their agendas. Codependents learn how to use this skill to get their own needs met. People who have coped with the relational pain in their life by learning to manipulate others, use this skill to be better at manipulating. There are many people who use this skill of cognitive empathy purely to gain information or gain trust or influence, so as to better suit their own egocentric aims.
The biggest problem in my opinion is that when we talk about people who lack empathy, sympathy or compassion, we picture a monster. We don’t picture the rather normal people who make up the vast majority of those with whom we will have the experience of being treated with no compassion or care, despite our pain. Every day people who get stuck in their own perspective. Or who feel so much pain themselves, they decide they can’t care for our pain. Or who refuse to really see and accept and feel how much they are hurting us because it damages a self-concept they are determined to preserve. We certainly don’t picture the person who gaslights us with compassion by saying “I will not be like everyone else who just up and left you”, when if you think back about that statement, it is not about you suffering, it is about not being willing to take an action that will decrease their own self-concept. We don’t picture the person who proves that when they feel it is us or them, they are willing to throw us under the bus. We don’t picture the people or who start out by feeling empathy, but it doesn’t matter because something gets in the way of them being compassionate, showing love and acting in our best interests. We certainly don’t picture the person with self-centered empathy. The person who focuses on how their own emotions mirror yours and who therefore ends up feeling so bad for themselves that you are suffering.
Think again about yourself trying in every way possible to explain and show and prove to another person how and why you are suffering, in the hopes of appealing to their care. In the hopes of getting that breakthrough of them getting the pain you are in and this causing a breakthrough of compassion. And this causing them to behave in a different way towards you. And that never happening. So, you become convinced that they just don’t get it, and if they only will get it, if you can only succeed at getting them to get it, it will happen. This is a sobering and terrifying experience. If you realized that in this moment, you are assuming empathy and assuming that compassion will come as a result of them feeling empathy, how might this change what you are doing?
A person may truly not get how you feel and what your experience is and if they did, things would change. But you may need to consider that a person who was acting from a place of empathy and compassion, would not have been able to do what they did in the first place.
So, if you recognize yourself trying to appeal to someone’s compassion, consider the following:
Are they actually trying to understand you and your pain and experience and perspective? Are they acting like they are concerned with their impact on you? Are they asking questions and initiating this attempt to “get it” and to work through it, so both you and they feel good again? Are they actively listening? Or is all the effort one sided? If they aren’t putting in any effort to “get you” or make things better, they are probably stuck in self-interest and are not going to act with care or compassion.
If you have showed them and explained to them your pain and your experience, does it create any responsiveness? Do they stare blankly? Do they actively try to find a solution and suggest ones or do they passive aggressively keep things the same? Does it lead to them taking actions and offering solutions? People who actually have compassion and actually care, will show it in their actions. People who have the capacity to understand other people’s emotions and experience, but for whom there is a snip between this and compassion, will gaslight you with words. Their words will suggest care. Their actions will not. There will be a mismatch between their caring words and their uncaring actions. People without compassion use manipulative language. All this tells you how connected they are to your experience and the degree of care they have for your experience. This will show you whether they have any empathy or compassion. Or whether they have a snip between empathy and compassion or whether something is in the way of their care and compassion. If you want to, you can put the pressure on them by telling them… “I have to assume at this point that you understand how I feel and you get what is causing me pain. But that you don’t care that I am suffering. So, I need you to explain to me either why you don’t care or what is in the way of you doing what is necessary to alleviate the pain I’m in (i.e. demonstrating care, compassion and love).”
If you realize that you are with someone who currently either does not feel empathy or someone for whom empathy is not going to convert to compassion and care, STOP trying to appeal to their compassion. Stop trying to make them see how they have hurt you or are hurting you. Stop trying to get them to care about you. You can’t make that happen. You are currently with someone who is in the camp of their own best interests. And who is willing to play a zero-sum game. So, the only way to be safe is to appeal to their best interests and practical benefits of what you are hoping they will do if they did feel empathy or compassion. Also shift towards making them aware of how they lose by doing whatever they are doing that they currently think is in their own best interests to do.
As people, to master relationships, to make this human society one that we all want to be in and want to leave for our children, we really must develop empathy, sympathy and compassion. But so many people have not grown up in environments where they experienced empathy and compassion, instead they learned they must vie for themselves against others. They learned how to play a zero-sum game and have normalized and accepted that this is just the way of the world. In a world where people are not conscious and are not engaging in conscious relationships, it is a mistake to assume empathy and compassion. And it is wise to realize that most people are far more motivated by what is in their own best interests, by their own wants and needs and by what is hurting them than they are motivated by your wants, needs, best interests and pain.
Humor can be a very powerful medicine. It is one that we don’t use enough in the spiritual/ self-help/personal growth world. So today, I’m going to share an exercise with you that makes use of the medicine of humor. I’m also going to explain to you the benefits of this exercise called: The Comic Letter to the Younger Self.
Humor can be used as an avoidance strategy and as a coping mechanism. It can also do incredible things for us. Humor causes multiple physiological reactions that reduce stress, anxiety, tension and resistance. It boosts your immunity. It causes you to shift your perspective, seeing even dire situations in a less threatening light. It interrupts negative fixation and negative thought loops. It reduces tension during conflicts. It deepens connection with others and the list goes on.
When it comes to the story of our lives, so many of us have a narrative that is very, very serious. We take life very seriously. The more traumatic things we have experienced, the worse this gets. Our narrative of the experiences we have had in our lives and the things we have done can cause us to feel very bad about our lives and about ourselves. We get stuck in worry loops and rumination. We feel like doing the wrong thing will have serious consequences, so we get into analysis paralysis. We overthink both the past (mining it for regrets) and we overthink the future (searching it for threats). All of this actually disables us from seeing things objectively and prioritizing what really matters because we feel like everything is of extremely dire importance and we can afford no mistakes. When we introduce levity to our perspective about our life experience, all this changes. This has a positive effect on us physically, mentally and emotionally. This is medicine that many people need.
To do this exercise, you are going to write a letter to your childhood self, telling them about the life that is to come between wherever they are at their age (pick an age), and where you are now (at this age). But you are going to do so in a comic and humorous way. It is ok if some of the humor is over a child’s head, the goal is to be funny enough that any adult listening would laugh out loud. When you are writing this letter, remember that the goal is to put a funny slant, a hilarious re-frame and a positive light on everything and anything. Consider things like this:
Do you have anything funny to say to them about what happens with their dream career or what they thought that they would do when they grow up?
Do you have anything to explain to them about modern tech and what life will be like with it vs. what is going on with it at their time?
What could you say about diet and exercise?
Can you narrate a time you failed miserably as if it were part of a stand up comedy routine?
Can you tell them about bad things or challenges that are to come, in a way that makes them comedic?
Can you humorously highlight the positive outcomes, however small, of the flaws, bad choices, mistakes and wrong turns you took? All those silver linings?
Do you have any funny advice to give them regarding the pains or challenges they will face?
Do you have any advice to give them that might have seemed like bad advice at the time, but proved over time to be good advice?
Can you describe to them things you’ve learned over the course of your life with a comic slant?
Are there any fashion choices or haircuts or styles that they will have forced on them or that they will try themselves that won’t go well or will go out of style?
Have your successes led to anything unexpectedly bad that you can make light of?
Do you have a funny way of framing the direction you chose to take in life and why?
Do you have any funny information for them about the way you dealt with either successes or failures you experienced?
Do you have anything funny or positively re-framed about the people they will meet, significant relationships?
Can you describe your grown-up body and what is going on with it to them in a way that would make them happy or in a way that is super funny?
Can you describe your grown up habits to them in a way that is funny?
Are there any stories to tell them about the people they know that would cause a laugh or cause them to feel better about what is happening at the time where they are?
Is there anything funny or weird that your younger self was afraid of, that you either grow out of or don’t grow out of?
Do you have any fears now that your childhood self would find funny or weird?
Do you have any funny warnings to give them?
Do you have anything to tell them about what changes from childhood to adulthood in a funny way?
Is there anything you hated at that age or considered a form of punishment that you love today and consider a luxury?
Is there anything funny to tell them about the reality of what you do with your money now that you can “buy whatever you want?”
Is there anything about you or your life now that would make them laugh out loud?
Do you have any funny nuggets of wisdom for your childhood self?
Keep in mind that if you notice yourself writing humorous things in a way where there is a painful undertone to it, this means you want your pain to be seen. Essentially, a part of you is in resistance to this exercise because it feels like pain that you need addressed is being whitewashed or bypassed. So, it may be a beneficial thing if this happens, to sit down in meditation and reflect on what pain you want to have be seen. Another way to identify this is to think about what pain you think isn’t being seen or wouldn’t be seen if you really made this a funny life narrative letter.
So that you can understand this exercise, here is an example letter:
Dear Younger Self,
Wow. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster. One you would not even imagine. So let me paint you a picture.
You know how Mom and Dad basically made education the center of your entire life? All the summers you spent inside studying and the FOMO you experienced. All the time, money, pressure, and expectations poured into your education. The late nights finishing calculus homework. The advanced classes you took just to ace the SATs and ACTs test to get into the best college. Well… forget all of that. Because one day, in the middle of a random architecture class in college, you decide to drop out of school entirely. Mom’s worst nightmare. But the good thing is— you making that decision broke her free in other ways. She starts taking life less seriously, starts taking dance classes, she starts dreaming about what she could potentially experience in life. And so do you.
That’s when we actually start to find our way. Slowly. Messily. But we do. We find more and more of who we actually are. We experience real purpose and meaning—the kind you couldn’t have even dreamed up. It involves a lot less calculus than you and everyone else thought. Instead, it involves navigating people… which turns out to be far more complex than calculus ever was. Thankfully, our childhood prepared us perfectly for that kind of complexity.
Along the way, we make a lot of mistakes, even though we’re always hoping we’ll finally get things right and be done with the mess. But here’s the best advice I could give you - forget perfect. Life is messy and it never really “cleans up,” no matter how much you think you’re about to get there.
Also, remember the time you were terrified you were of speaking in front of the class? How your voice trembled and your hands were shaking holding your note cards? How much speaking scared you so much so you rarely spoke to people when you were even younger? Well… now part of your job involves speaking in front of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people. And weirdly, that’s one of the least scary things about our life now. You know what is still kind of scary thought? The dark. And you know what I still find even more terrifying? Horror movies - you still could not pay me to electively sit through one.
You know what else is funny? Remember how Mom and Dad were obsessed with getting you to eat vegetables, because you basically only ate meat? Well… we’re vegan now. Vegetables are your favorite food. And they couldn’t get us to eat meat even if they tried. We even became an animal rights activist.
You’re probably wondering what is so great about being an adult huh? Well, we can technically eat whatever food we want. So if you had to guess what we’d be eating, what would you say? Tons of candy? Ice cream? Bread? Mac and cheese? Hate to break it to you, but… we don’t eat those things anymore. Because now they make us feel sick. Our taste buds still love them, but lots has changed since that one time we ate all our Halloween candy in a single day.
Oh, and remember how some kids at school would fall off the swings when you walked past and said it was because you paralyzed them with “the paralyzing stare” you had? Well it turns out part of this stare of ours is down to our sharp perceptiveness. A quality we were able to turn into something that can be used actually help people - to see their pains and patterns so clearly that you help them navigate their way through it.
Life is weird. You’d think that 27 years into life I’d feel grown up by now. But what I’ve learned is that no one ever feels like they really do grow up. We all feel like we’re fumbling around like fetuses for a lot of it. And in the moments we don’t feel that way, life usually finds a way to put us back into the fetal position anyways.
You wouldn’t believe the things we worry about now. We still worry about what people think of us—so much so that we sometimes dream about relationships we had when we were 12. But now those worries are coupled with some adult upgrades like taxes, visas, legal paperwork, and emails.
Oh—and you know how obsessed you were with Ariel from The Little Mermaid? Well… you kind of ended up like her and gave up our voice long long ago. So the most important advice I can give you… don’t do what they do in the movies! It’s called a fairy tale for a reason!
The magic doesn’t end there, though. What if I told you love at first sight actually happened to us? You met the love of your life. But… like I said—don’t listen to the movies. Relationships don’t go the way they seem like in the films. Life, relationships, and people are far more complicated than that. Love doesn’t mean things turn out perfectly, and it definitely doesn’t mean it’s easy. But I would still say that loving has still been worth the tosses and turns.
Being an adult is weird. We can stay up as long as we want now, but most of us can’t wait for bedtime. We can eat whatever we want but now choose to eat healthy because the wrong food with make our stomachs hurt. There’s no official moment you really become an adult. And no manual for it either. One day you’re just end up doing very adult things. But one thing remains true throughout it all which is we are human. And to be human is a whole ball of wax that we keep trying to figure out - we’ll see if we ever do.
Love,
Tristen (You)
Making light of your life experience helps you to put things into perspective and view problems through a new lens, highlighting the absurdities of negative thought patterns rather than being overwhelmed by them. Reinterpreting your life in this way can drastically improve your life satisfaction. It allows you to step back from your problems, making things feel less difficult and less personal and less overwhelming. This playful acknowledgement of your own mistakes and flaws, disarms perfectionism, lowers anxiety and makes self-acceptance easier. Finding humor in hard things builds resilience in a healthy way. The internal lightening and laughter this exercise can cause, creates a cathartic release on a physical and emotional level, which helps your nervous system come out of fight or flight mode. Sharing these humorous personal anecdotes creates relatability with other people and this fosters connection. So try out this cognitive reframing exercise for yourself and if you really want to have a laugh and connect, do it together with a group.
There are time periods throughout history when humanity collectively loses its mind. Not all epidemics are physical. Some are psychological. These are epidemics of the mind. During these mental epidemics, people lose rationality. They lose coherence. They do not base their perceptions off of evidence. They become profoundly dysfunctional. They lose all alignment with reality. And they do so without realizing it. The standards of sanity are then re-set to align with the new insanity and just like that, collective insanity becomes the new sanity. We are currently in one such time period. And a big element of this specific epidemic is: Independence Sickness. But what does that mean?
Everywhere you look, you will see that in today’s world, people believe wholeheartedly in the virtue and rightness of independence. It has become the new definition of what it is to be a healthy and empowered individual. So many spiritual and self-development teachers that teach that the goal is to be “whole in and of yourself” to the point where you do not need anything or anyone outside of you. So many therapists that tell people that to heal is to learn to be alone, to rely on yourself and to meet your own needs. So many parents that raise children specifically so that they can go off on their own into the world and stand on their own two feet. So many political ideologies that shift the responsibility for wellbeing to the individual.
We have completely lost touch with the truth and reality that human beings are a social species. Humans thrive in groups and are relationally dependent. Yes, even into their adult lives, because no matter how old a human being is, he or she still has relational dependency needs. These are needs that as a human being, you A. Cannot give yourself. Or B. Even if you can give them to yourself too, that does not remove the need get them from others. In order to thrive and be healthy on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level, you need these dependency needs to be met. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Dependency Needs (The thing That No One Will Accept That They Have.
We have failed to question why we are becoming more and more and more separated from each other. Why we have gone from living tribally to living in multigenerational households to living in single family homes to now many people living alone in an apartment. Unless we happen to be a historian, we do not remember that the move from nomadic foraging to permanent agriculture changed human societies from larger mobile kinship groups to blood and marriage related family units anchored to a single plot of land. Unless we happen to be a historian, we do not remember that it was the industrial revolution that moved jobs to factories and to offices in cities, breaking the connection between the home and the workplace. Also breaking the connection between people and the land. We forget that this caused younger generations to move to urban centers in search of wage labor where the new social structure became the setting up of independent households whereas before this, communities lived and worked together and depended on one another. The home was also the center of work and large extended families and communities were that collective workforce.
There is a complicated picture here to be seen because on one side, you have a young man chasing economic opportunity rendering him no longer dependent on inheritance, chasing personal freedom and autonomy. But on the other side, you have companies that are eager to fuel this divide between work and home, so they have more productive employees. You have mortgage companies that are eager to give out more mortgages and this can’t happen unless more individuals split off and set up their own households. You have governments eager for many reasons for urbanization to occur and to set up things like public institutions, making things like school and caretaking which were household roles, a government role. Also, eager to set up pension plans and social security, channeling worker funds into government managed funds. All of this moving the people’s dependency on their community over to dependency on the government and the systems the government creates. You have marketing campaigns and media strategies being designed to influence the way people think so that this shift occurs in favor of individualism. And with all of this, cultural attitudes shifted. Especially in Western societies, they shifted towards independence and self-reliance. Being able to have your own home and making it on your own was now a measure of adulthood and success. It was now tied to your sense of esteem and personal power.
The reason people shifted from foraging tribes to agricultural societies, which is what created the shift to multigenerational household, is forced adaptation. Early farming was far more labor intensive and less healthy than foraging. It was only when the nomadic lifestyle became unsustainable due to a combination of factors that human beings make the shift. Things like climate fluctuations, resource depletion and the necessity of populations moving to certain resource rich areas and becoming more sedentary there, causing the birthrate to increase, which then led to it becoming too overcrowded for foraging. They experienced a “population trap” whereby due to the reality of how much square mileage is necessary to support one person, the size of land could not support the growing population through hunting and gathering alone. Farming provides more food per acre, and they could have more “control” over the guarantee of food. They were not limited by what nature organically provided. And even though individuals within a farming group were less healthy due to poor diet and disease than their foraging counterparts, they could support so many more people than foraging bands. Their sheer numbers allowed them to organize into groups capable of out-competing and displacing remaining foraging tribes. Suddenly, farming was a necessity for any group to be able to survive amongst other farming groups. Foragers saw resources as communal. Agriculture necessitated the concept of private property.
Let’s fast forward. The big shadow lurking behind people going in this direction of separation and independence in the post agricultural world is relational pain. The distress we experience in our relationships. And this is still the shadow lurking behind the world’s current obsession with independence. Everyone falls somewhere on this scale of experiencing relational pain. All you have to do in order to relate to the pain that made people vote for independence and separation with it, is to imagine what it would be like to move back in with your parents or grandparents. To be totally financially dependent on them and dependent on what they own. In these multigenerational households, there tends to be experiences all the way from social friction to severe relational trauma. People find the constant presence of this relational friction and these uncomfortable and painful interpersonal dynamics stressful. And if you are in a dysfunctional family system, traumatizing. And we don’t feel like this relational distress is limited to our families. We experience it with ‘other people’ in general. De-communalizing our lives makes it so we do not have to live in that social friction. We are not powerless to the whims of authorities, such as elders. We do not have to be observed and disturbed by others. We can create psychological, emotional and physical room where there is no pressure to be any specific way for others, which causes us to relax and feel relief.
Throughout time, in response to these pains, so many philosophies and social movements have arisen, such as The Enlightenment, including Kantian Autonomy and Classical Liberalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. Transcendentalism and Existentialism of the 19th century. Modern individualism of the 20th century. And here we are today. An era ruled by Neo Liberalism, Liquid Citizenship, Self-Help, Radical Self-Optimization and New Age Spirituality. Independence is now a value that sits atop a pedestal for people in the modern world, especially the modern Western world. And it is such a sacred cow so to speak, that people are missing the following awareness:
There is no such thing as independence. At the most basic level, we are dependent on so many things. You are dependent on oxygen, water, sunlight, foods. You are dependent on the microbiome, such as the bacteria and fungi that are essential for you to be alive. You are dependent on the ecosystem. You are dependent on your dependency needs such as social connection and physical touch.
And let’s go further, in today’s world, we live in the illusion of independence despite being more dependent than we ever were before. How could this be true and yet, people don’t see this? Because the modern belief in independence rests on our ability to live alone, make money, work remotely and not depend on our community and our parents and partners. But this is only possible because of an underlying dependency on the system. A highly complex web of infrastructure that people do not recognize.
It used to be that we were dependent on what nature provided. Now, almost all people have lost the knowledge and skills to be able to live off the land. Instead, we are dependent on financial institutions. We are dependent on farmers growing food, transport services getting the food to the stores near us that sell us the food. The same is true of all goods we need to thrive. The clothes we wear, the cars we drive. We are dependent on internet connectivity. We are dependent on resources like oil and electricity. And all the people and processes that make them available to us. We are dependent on the government for all kinds of things such as the infrastructure that enables us to live daily life, emergency services, and public utilities. A person feels independent when they go to the bank and deposit money in their own account and use that money to buy their own apartment. But they miss that in doing this, they are dependent on the entire financial system, on the bank, on the mortgage company. A person feels independent when they are able to follow GPS to wherever they want to go. But they miss that in doing so, they are dependent on the GPS system to work. That they have outsources the basic survival skill of navigation. Unlike our ancestors who, even if they had a specialty, were generalists, in that they had many skills and knew how to find food, build shelters, navigate etc. Most of us are specialists. We develop and trade one skill for everything we need. If the need for our one skill becomes obsolete, our entire means of survival is obsolete. We are living in a profound state of dependency that no one sees, until it fails. This makes us uniquely vulnerable and uniquely ignorant. We can go around convinced we are independent and encouraging everyone else to be independent too, and totally miss that we are in fact totally dependent. We’ve simply shifted what we are dependent on. We have shifted from a kind of partial social dependence to total systemic dependence.
We miss the fact that the price we are paying for this independence obsession is not only being in reality, it is also human connection and safety. We are becoming more and more and more separate from one another. When this happens, we become more and more unwell because we have relational dependency needs. And we are far more powerless. The less connected we are, the more vulnerable we are to being controlled by those that control the system upon which we depend. The more dependent we are on those who create and run and control the system. And the more powerless we are to stop them if they go out of alignment and against our best interests.
The reality is that dependency scares the crap out of people. Dependency has become a dirty word. Why does dependency scare us so badly? Because it makes us feel powerless to things external to us. And what people are the most terrified of is being powerless to other people. We wouldn’t fear this unless we had bad experiences with depending on others.
If we did not receive our dependency needs adequately from our significant relationships in our early life; and even worse, if we were harmed by those who we depended on to meet our dependency needs, we become desperate to not be dependent on others. We create and adopt and latch on to social and spiritual ideologies that promote the idea that we do not need things from other people. That everything we need, we can get from within. We find ways to feel the least dependent on others as we possibly can, even if that means buying into an illusion. It makes a great many people (who experienced dependency as opening them up to stress if not harm) feel empowered to think that they can meet all of their needs themselves. To believe they can be unaffected by others.
The issue at the heart of this is not dependency, even though dependence has become the scapegoat. The issue is how truly bad people are at relationships. At practicing the basic concept of I see your wellbeing as indivisible from my own and so, I can’t go against your best interests just to suit my own. People are so bad at creating truly loving, supportive, feel-good relationships that humanity as a whole has decided that it is safer to depend on the system than on your family, community and partner. That it is better to depend on an impersonal, massive network of people you will never meet (because the system is not a living entity. The system is created, maintained and governed by people). As if they for some reason, are more likely to act in your best interests. And we have branded this shift “personal empowerment”. The reality check is that you are far, far more dependent on other people than people were ever dependent on people before. But because you don’t see them or interact directly with them every day, you can feel independent. And at the same time as we have become more dependent than ever before, we have lost our “we”.
The modern-day obsession with Independence has led to social calamity. A loss of connection and belonging. Our community bonds are corroding. There are less and less people volunteering and putting their energy into their communities. People feel so much pressure to do it all themselves that they are under constant pressure to do more than one person is capable of doing, leading to burnout. People don’t seek support out of shame, nor are they supported when they do seek out help. People are not exposing system failures because individuals are blamed for problems instead. People are going away from the mutual vulnerability required for deep emotional connection because relying on anyone emotionally and co-regulating, which is our very nature, is now treated as a form of personal failure. People are behaving more and more narcissistically, like an island unto themselves, further reinforcing the experience that people cannot be trusted, which further reinforces the obsession with independence. And low and behold, we are living in a true loneliness epidemic.
Our social ties are being snipped. They are being snipped and we are not really doing anything to prevent it. Instead, we are joining in and are snipping our social ties for ourselves. And we are using all kinds of philosophies and ideologies to support the doing of this. And with it, we are losing more and more of the much-needed things that we get from tribe and community. The positive payoffs of living together and depending on those people we live with. We can’t build a WE when everything is about ME. So, we are lonely. And we are vulnerable. This independence sickness has led to a state of hyper individualism. But we are fighting for that loneliness, for that vulnerability and also, for the illusion.
Interdependence is the reality of the existence we lead. And within this reality, Individual autonomy and social cohesion do not need to be mutually exclusive. The way forward is not independence. It is the mastery of relationship. Interdependence is the truth of relationship. We need each other and we depend on each other. And, at the same time there is a you and there is a me in a relationship. This means autonomy and self-empowerment is also a part of the picture of a positive relationship. Conscious interdependence is the is the way of the future.
People can wrap their head around the idea that big moments matter in a relationship. Whether your partner or friend is there for you when you are in a life crisis. Whether your dad is sitting in the audience when you graduate. Whether your sister comes to the funeral. Whether that person stays with you when you’re in the hospital. Whether they bring a gift to the wedding. Whether you show up the way they need you to show up in these big moments in life. And these big moments do matter in a relationship; obviously. But something most people don’t get is that a good or bad relationship is built and defined by all the micro moments.
For the sake of this conversation, it will help you to think of there being a macrocosmic level and a microcosmic level to a relationship. The macrocosmic level is the overall picture of the relationship, the whole complex structure and overview of it. And this picture of the relationship seems defined by the bigger moments in the relationship. The microcosmic level is the miniature characteristics of that much larger overall picture of the relationship. And it is made up of those every day interactions. In a relationship, we are interacting. In some relationships, we are interacting on a daily basis and throughout the day. In these day-to-day interactions, even within the big events that may be happening, we experience micro moments of interaction. Many of them in a given time period. For example, we may have an hour together before we go to work in the morning. During that time period, we have micro- moments of interaction. Things like waking up in the same bed. Having a conversation. Taking care of our personal hygiene in the same bathroom. Getting dressed. Making food. Getting kids ready. Parting for the day. And it is actually these micro-moments that like building blocks, create the bigger picture of the relationship.
These micro moments teach you the things about each other that will determine how you each will feel in the relationship. They influence what you each will decide and how you will behave in the relationship. They will determine the outcome of the relationship itself. Using our previous example. When we are waking up in the same bed, will the person roll over to kiss me and establish connection, or will they immediately get out of bed and go about their day? If I roll over to kiss them, will I be pushed away or will I be positively responded to? When we are having a conversation, does the person really listen to how I feel and act responsive to my pain or do they just defend themselves against me? Do they talk or do they go silent and leave me hanging there waiting for something… anything. When we are getting dressed for work, do they complement me or criticize me? Do they do loving things, like notice that I need a towel and hand one to me? When food needs to be made, do they just assume the responsibility is mine and leave me to do it myself or do they take the responsibility to do it or do they communicate about it with me in a way that I feel considered? When I make a bid for connection, do they respond to that bid or do they ignore it? When we are getting the kids ready, are they setting unrealistic expectations, micromanaging and getting angry at them or are they lovingly guiding the kids to do things themselves in a way that is realistic to their age? Are they really taking positive ownership of the kids or are they unfairly leaving me to do it all myself despite the fact that I have to go to work too, just like they do? When we part for the day, are they already mentally and emotionally at work and therefore not present when they say goodbye to me, or are they really present when they hug and kiss me goodbye, reassuring me of when I can expect us to physically come back together? If we were in a relationship rupture that wasn’t yet repaired, but we have to go to work, do they storm off or do they verbally acknowledge that they know that it is not good that we have to go to work before the rupture is repaired and that it is a priority for it to be repaired? Do they give me a time that we can resume a discussion to create that repair, as well as a reassurance about the relationship despite the rupture?
It is the micro moments of everyday life and the micro moments that make up the big moments in life that teach you things like: Is this person here for me, or will I be left alone when I need them? Is this person reliable? Can I trust them? Will they take the pressure and responsibility or is all the pressure and responsibility on me? Do they appreciate my presence? Will they take in and receive what I am offering or will I be rejected? Will my honesty be welcomed or do they expect me to keep sweet? Will they change the behaviors that are causing me pain or expect me to put up with pain? Does this person have empathy? Can I be vulnerable or do I need to keep my guard up? Will they be intimate with me or do they want to keep me at an arm’s length? Will they try to find a win-win or can I expect them to play a zero-sum game? Do they love me? And gain, this is in things as little as how you pass someone their cup of coffee. The tone of voice you use when you pick up the phone. How long it takes for you to respond to a text. The way you respond to their bids etc.
Patterns emerge in these micro moments that teach our brain what we can expect. Our brain processes the information we gain about the other person, about the relationship and about how we feel with this other person. We derive meaning out of each little micro-moment interaction. And we respond according to this information. The way we behave in the relationship is a direct reaction to the information we are gaining from these micro-moments. The fate of a relationship is primarily determined by these micro moments.
What does this mean? It means that each little moment is an opportunity to send the right message about who you are, what they can expect from you and what you want the relationship to be. Each little moment is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship or weaken it. To have a good relationship, you need to be intentional about the way you conduct yourself in these little moments. When you do this, over time being intentional in these micro moments will become a habit. Every micro moment is an opportunity to make the relationship better, stronger, better, stronger, more secure, safer, warmer, more loving etc. What this means is that when it comes to a relationship, each micro-moment matters.
Decide how you want the other person to feel with you. Decide what experience you want them to have in the relationship. Decide what message you want to send them about who you are. Decide what message you want to send to them about what they should and can expect from you. Decide upon a vision for the relationship to hold yourself accountable to. And with this in mind, make sure your words, decisions, behaviors and actions are in alignment with this in each little moment. Make sure they serve to strengthen the relationship.
No person in a relationship can afford to have a lax attitude or to be careless, lazy or complacent in the micro-moments of interaction in the relationship. Because each little micro-moment is a building block of the overall picture of the relationship itself.
In the famous story of Peter Pan, Peter Pan was a boy who never grew up. Now fast forward to today. In today’s world, you call a man a Peter Pan when in his life in general, he both avoids things and does not embody things that are synonymous with adulthood. For example, he avoids adult responsibilities. He procrastinates. He usually has poor work ethic. He focuses excessively on fun and freedom to the detriment of long-term planning and responsibility. He isn’t reliable, breaking his word and dropping things he has signed up to. He displays an immaturity emotionally. He doesn’t commit. He is not accountable, doesn’t hold himself to standards and blames others for what he does. He treats partners like parental figures. He holds onto dreams, often unrealistic ones while putting minimal effort into achieving them. He doesn’t manage money well. You get the point. Many people have correctly observed that the amount of Peter Pan men out there has risen exponentially. And a lot of people want to know why. This is why there are so many Peter Pan men in the world today:
Men in general have zero template for what it means to be a man and for how to be a man. This is very different to how it was in the past. People really, really underestimate the effect that the women’s right’s movement had on society. And people really, really don’t appreciate the downsides that came with it because they are so focused on the good things that came with it. The women’s right’s movement set out to gain rights for women. But the way this movement went about it was to treat men and masculinity as the bad guy. To strip men of their power. And to demolish gender roles and gender expectations. Parents who were aligned to the movement sought to feminize boys and masculinize girls. And all this led to a gender crisis. Which led to an identity crisis in both men and women; as well as no more template for the growth path from boyhood to manhood and girlhood to womanhood. In the past, there was a template for what it means to be a man, why you as a boy should want to and aspire to become a man, what is expected of you as a man, precisely how you as a boy can become a man. What the world wants from you and what will get you esteem. Boys got this template not only from their own families, especially fathers, but also from mentors and from society at large. Well, that template was burned at the stake and nothing was put in its place. There is no path.
This goes hand in hand with the reality that as a human race, over time, we have lost more and more of our rites of passage. Rites of passage are crucial for both boys and girls, but let’s talk about boys. For boys, rites of passage serve as a structured system of guidance through the transition from boyhood to manhood. And this has waned and waned progressively over time. When our species was tribal, this is most of history by the way, young boys were part of a tribe of other men who were offering them the template and guidance for what it meant to become a man. They were teaching them discipline, putting them through ceremonies, giving them challenges, putting them through tests, all so that a boy could become worthy of being considered a man. Worthy of having women, children and the community at large in their care. As we were divorced from tribal living, this system was replaced by strict societal ideas of what it is to be a man. Firm ideas of how a man could gain societal esteem. And vocational trades that fathers passed down to sons. And then this system was replaced by things like dads doing sports with their sons and organizations like boy scouts. All of these systems that encouraged boys to develop and grow into men are a thing of the past. Now, they have been replaced by television, gaming, automation, passively watching sports and other quality time activities. It is not possible to divorce boys from a structured growth path towards an esteemed, socially responsible role and an understanding of themselves that develops through this template and think that boys are just gonna turn into wonderfully developed men.
So why is it important to have a template? Because you can think of having a template as being the opposite of aimless wandering and guessing. Having this template is to have structured guidance about what it means to be an adult man, why you as a boy should want to and aspire to become a man, what is expected of you as a man and precisely how you as a boy can become a man. It defines your adult roles. It builds your identity. It fosters responsibility in you. It instills cultural values into you. It helps you to understand your place and purpose in the world. It connects you to your heritage. It provides public recognition for a boy’s growth, giving him a sense of both value and significance within society and the list goes on.
In line with the last point, there is no longer esteem in being a man. To be honest, there isn’t much esteem in being an adult (growing older) either. For human beings, there needs to be a payoff for the things they do. There needs to be a motivating factor. In the past, it was a good thing to be a man. Being a man was a source of pride and societal esteem. But now a days, it isn’t seen as something to be proud of. In fact, masculinity has been demonized. No one knows anymore what it does mean or should mean to be a man. And many boys have been pumped full of so much negative messaging around manhood that it isn’t something they would aspire to. What is the motivating factor now a days for being or becoming a man? And let’s go beyond that. What is the motivating factor now a days for being an adult? Society values and glamorizes youth. It isn’t like the track that young people were sold for how to create a good future (college – job – relationship - house) actually works anymore. For so many people, adult life just seems like a one-way ticket to misery. Life as an adult in today’s world just feels way too hard. A land full of too much complexity and too many mixed messages. And no reliable pathway for a positive future. We will be talking more about this a bit later. Why be responsible, why work hard, why commit to things, why hold yourself accountable to standards, why have other people rely on you, why pour your time and energy into something if you think none of that will lead you to anything good? This is how many young people, including young men feel in today’s world.
There are realities about becoming a man in today’s world that men in the past did not have to contend with. Realities that contribute to a delayed adulthood. On top of the absence of a template for developing from a boy into a man, men in today’s world are facing the following: There is serious job instability in today’s world. Far fewer clear paths for career progression and technological changes that make the career landscape very daunting. We are in a cost-of-living crisis. The cost of living has consistently and vastly outpaced wage growth. Because young people must spend so much on basic living expenses, there is little to no capacity to save or invest. These young people are being actively encouraged to take on student debt as if it is just a normal thing to take on debt before even entering the work force. And despite the fact that there is no guarantee that they will get a job that will pay it off. And no one is warning them that by taking on debt, there are consequences, things like hidden costs of the loan itself, impact on their credit scores, constrained career choices such as having to take a job they hate just because the job pays enough to pay off their loan, the mental and emotional stress of having debt, being disqualified from certain jobs because they have debt that effected their credit score. It potentially preventing them from being able to do things like get specific phone plans or getting any other loan, like a car loan or a home mortgage. And the very serious consequences of loan default.
College tuition rates have left young men crippled with debt, compromising their ability to reach other adult milestones. And again, circling back to our previous conversation about incentives, all these realities about the world today have made it so many young people, including young men, feel as if adulthood is a trap rather than a rewarding path of progress. A never-ending hustle and grind that burns you out. With no end in sight, just to maintain yourself. There is a growing sentiment amongst the younger generations that the game in society is rigged against the younger generations, making the entire structure of adulthood in the modern world a deceptive financial trap for those in power (older generations, governments, financial institutions, companies etc) who set up the game. And guess what? They are right.
Modern society has gotten more and more and more and more complex. So, what it takes to be a functioning adult today is far, far more than it used to be. Your grandfather’s taxes were not this difficult to do. He didn’t have to worry about managing a credit card, much less several. He never had a cell phone plan. He didn’t have to worry about having a home internet service. He didn’t have to make sure that he had updated tech and that he constantly stayed on top of updates to that tech. He was not dealing with so much information and so much conflicting information on every subject under the sun. He did not have to manage misinformation like adults need to today. He was not living in a constant media barrage of negative news. There was no social media that provided an “always on” perfect image of everyone else’s life that is completely not real and made him feel like he was a failure because his life didn’t look like that. Artificial intelligence didn’t exist. He didn’t have five million passwords or have to worry about a thousand different scams or privacy settings or identity theft. He wasn’t expected to worry about conscious consumption and sustainability. He didn’t have to check his e-mails. He didn’t have to protect himself against the online algorithms and selling methods that are addictive and designed to keep a person hooked on the screen. He didn’t have to worry that the things he posted online in high school would jeopardize him getting a job years later. He didn’t have to manage the double life of a physical life and an online life and presence. His life didn’t require so many subscriptions. He was not living in a world where you need a college degree to be able to compete for a job in the workplace and yet, to get that degree costs so much that he had to decide to go into debt before ever earning a wage. He didn’t need insurance for everything under the sun. The healthcare landscape is so much more complex than it was for him. He relied on the system for retirement. Today, for most people, saving for retirement is entirely up to them. He didn’t come into adulthood in a gig economy. The current economy requires a far higher degree of financial know-how than he ever faced. In his generation, things were set up for a boy to turn into a man. Now, the system is set up in a way that stunts development and keeps young people trapped.
All of these realities and complexities have made that it so many young men are staying with their parents for far longer than they did in the past. But staying at home none the less can obviously prevent a man from developing the life skills that are synonymous with adulthood. It often prevents young men from reaching a level of security that makes them feel able to take on things like owning a home, committing to long term partnership, children etc.
The complexity and difficulty of all this creates a vicious cycle where when men are facing all this pressure and stress and anxiety about how to make it work out there in the world, as well as the low self-esteem they feel in their capacity to do it, they get overwhelmed by it and try to escape out from under all the pressure and anxiety by just avoiding it all together. They check out of it all by retreating to activities that are care free, by relying on others, be keeping relationships casual, by not committing to things, by not making solid plans.
Parenting styles that stunt growth have become a trend with increasing intensity since the 1980s. Over time, parenting has changed in some really good ways. It is really great that we aren’t saying things like “children ought to be seen and not heard” anymore. And spanking isn’t so societally accepted anymore. And strict, hierarchical parenting that does not recognize the child as his or her own person has trended in the direction of parenting that is more flexible and accommodative of the child’s thoughts and feelings. The thing is, to the negative side, there has been a real uptick in overprotective, “helicopter” parenting” as well as permissive parenting. These styles of parenting have become far more prevalent since the “stranger-danger” panic in the late 1980s and early 1990s (created by a media craze involving several high-profile cases). This panic made it so that over time, parents became way more hands on with kids and free play really disappeared. When parents are overprotective, they prevent the child from developing autonomy and life skills that are necessary for adulthood. They prevent the child from experiencing the things that help them to develop confidence in themselves. When parents are permissive, they do not teach a child about consequences. They prevent the child from learning about cause and effect in a tangible way. This teaches a child that they can do anything they want without there being any consequences.
On top of this, in most households, both parents work. Because of this, many children are being raised by caregivers and teachers outside of the home. These external adult figures are not necessarily giving the child the necessary guidance for adulthood. And when modern parents who both work a job come home, they tend to prioritize quality time activity over teaching the child practical skill building. Older generations really did prioritize teaching practical life skills and character building. And this has changed.
On top of this, some men have had traumatizing experiences in their childhoods that caused developmental trauma. This stunts a boy’s growth. It can even cause him to develop adaptive strategies that prevent the behaviors and choices and actions associated with adulthood. Perhaps the most common trauma that contributes to this is enmeshment trauma, such as emotional incest. This is when a parent flips the parent-child role and relies on the child to meet their emotional and relational needs. And guess what? If you look at society during the time many of the Peter Pan men were children, what you find is that society was shifting big time to a dual income household. Also, there was a huge increase in divorce rates. Many boys were growing up in homes where the polarity was flipped between their moms and dads. This is a recipe for disaster because trying to work and be a mother and being in a polarity flipped relationship puts a lot more stress on moms. These women were burnt out and had a role overload as they increasingly found themselves having to “be it all and do it all”. Due to lack of time and also exhaustion, these women did not put energy into building an adult support network for themselves, so they were living in a void of support. Due to constantly having to balance work life and home life and also many of them suddenly being in polarity flipped dynamics, they were not getting their needs met by their partners. So, many of these moms unconsciously leaned heavily on their sons for emotional support and companionship to cope with their own loneliness, emotional neglect, conflicts with their husbands and stress.
In this dynamic, the child is prevented from growing up in ways that would hinder the parent’s need for the child. And at the same time, the child is under the pressure to take on a grown-up role they are not ready for at all. The child adopts an adult role prematurely, missing the need to just be a kid and develop into being an adult. The parent’s needs take precedence over the child’s needs. The child’s feelings, thoughts, preferences, needs etc. are bulldozed over, so the child does not develop a healthy sense of self. They learn that their value is about pleasing the parent, which hinders their capacity to develop an identity, build self-esteem and make decisions for themselves. The overwhelming, not age-appropriate task of managing the parent’s needs and emotional wellbeing builds an association between responsibility (especially in relationship) and overwhelming pressure and engulfment. So, they often gravitate towards getting to have the childhood they missed, but as an adult. This means not taking on responsibilities. Not committing in relationships. Not knowing how to regulate their emotions. Having no solid understanding of themselves. And because the emphasis was on them existing to meet the parent’s needs rather than developing the skills to become an autonomous adult, the parent prevented them from finding their wings so to speak. So adult life feels over their head.
With the absence of this template for how a boy becomes a man within society, boys and young men are lost and are looking out there for male role models. And so many of the male role models are horribly poor ones. Most of them TV characters and pop culture or social media icons. Many of which espouse and model the very traits that keep a man in Peter Pan mode. Think dating coaches that teach men the art of the pick-up and get laid game. Think tech moguls who teach men that rules and consequence don’t apply to them if they have enough money and power. Think the get rich quick gurus, who teach the prioritization of superficial gains and overnight success with no effort in. Think sports icons and misogynistic influencers that promote the emulation of a toxic male persona complete with narcissistic self-focus, control of and domination over women, emotional manipulation, brand name obsession, the accumulation of power for power sake, and absolute freedom with no limits. Think television characters that portray father figures as either the frightening aggressor (think Darth Vader, Tywin Lannister, Tony Soprano, Thanos) or the incompetent, pathetic fool (think Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, Phil Dunphy, Stu Pickles). The rise of technological existence has created a loss of in-person, community life. This has isolated men deeply. It has made it harder for men to gain role models, receive guidance from mentors and even peers. Harder for them to engage in the active, not passive things that cause a boy to develop into a man. And harder for them to form deep and supportive connections.
Women have progressively gone more and more into the masculine polarity and also into the eternal mother role with men. This includes with their own sons. They have developed more and more self-protective independence, sending men the message “we don’t need you and therefore don’t value you”. And in their relationship with men, more and more women have taken the power position in the relationship. They’ve taken on the leadership role. They have taken on all the responsibilities, all the decision making, all the planning and are attached to control as a method of self-preservation. And in doing this, have prevented men from having to step up. Women are currently acting as a preventative force to men becoming empowered, developing confidence, building self-trust, being self-reliant, being responsible and from needing to master every element of masculine containment. Basically, women have inadvertently become an enabling force to the Peter Pan dynamic. The very thing that hurts them.
So, there it is, now you have a thorough understanding of the major factors that have caused such a rise recently in the prevalence of Peter Pans.
We live in the dark ages when it comes to emotion. We have been taught to do things like suppress, deny, ignore, numb out to and bulldoze through our emotion. So, it isn’t a surprise that most people have no idea what is going on with themselves emotionally. Here is an exercise which will help with this.
Most people are far more aware of the physical than they are the emotional. And so, they are far more apt to register what is really happening when it is physical rather than emotional. I’ll give you an example: One dynamic that you will see in certain relationships is that person A will say or do something emotionally harmful to Person B. Person B has an intense reaction to this. Person A does not understand this intense reaction and therefore makes person B the problem for having the reaction. People on the outside also don’t get what is going on, so the person who is so obviously emotionally dysregulated, person B, is seen as the dysfunctional one. The one who needs psychological help. Well, let’s look at this dynamic through a physical lens. Person A hits Person B in the leg. Person B’s leg breaks. Person B has an intense reaction to this. Person A does not understand this intense reaction and therefore makes person B the problem for having the reaction. People on the outside also don’t get what is going on, so the person who is so obviously upset and dysregulated, person B is seen as the dysfunctional one. The one who needs psychological help. Now you and everyone can see how incredibly abusive this is.
We treat the emotional aspect of existence with an extreme level of disregard. This is a huge problem when it is the emotional layer that is the heart of our existence here on earth. Also, if physical things mattered most, no one who lost a relationship would stop eating and drinking and neglect their personal hygiene. No one who is physically well or who was wealthy would commit suicide. No person whose physical wellbeing was all covered for would obsessively go for more and more and more. And we do not understand that the emotional feeds into the physical. Every physical ailment has an emotional root. It is so important to be aware of what is going on at the emotional level. It’s not possible to properly respond to something that you are not even aware of. It is also not possible to properly respond when you don’t get what is really happening.
So, a trick you can use to really ‘get’ what is going on emotionally, is to physicalize the emotional. There are two ways you can do this:
Move your body so that the physical reflects what is happening emotionally (i.e. is the same as what is happening emotionally).
Think up a physical version or analogy of what is occurring emotionally.
To give you an idea of what it looks like to move your body so that the physical reflects what is happening emotionally, here are three examples:
Tom and Meg are in a relationship. They are not feeling very close and secure in their relationship at the moment. They are lying in bed together and Meg is upset. She is saying that he isn’t really there for her or with her and that she feels alone. Tom is getting frustrated. He tells her “Oh my god, I’m right here. We are in bed together. We are talking. How can you be alone when I’m right here?” In this case, what is happening physically is acting as a gaslight for what is happening emotionally. So, they decide to do this exercise of physicalizing what is going on emotionally. They both turn their attention inward to notice how they are feeling. And they then use their body to act it out. The goal being to make it so that what is happening physically most closely reflects what is happening emotionally. So, Tom immediately notices the drive to be doing something else, and to go away from other people, including Meg. He also notices that he feels exhausted. So, he walks to the other side of the room and lays down, facing the door and fiddles with the door stopper. Meg notices that she is feeling desperate and starved. So, when she really feels what it would look like for her body to mirror what is happening emotionally, she gets down on the floor too. She gets into a groveling, pleading, deep bow position and starts clawing at the carpet between her and Tom with alternat hand strokes, as if trying to pull him to her or herself to him. This is what is actually happening in their relationship. Very different than two people whose relationship is good and who are just lying in bed together after a long day. From this awareness of this reality, now Tom and Meg can actually address what is happening, both with themselves, and with their relationship with each other.
Next example: Jan is one of those guys who has a hard time with emotion. He has been taught his whole life to bulldoze through it. He has a stoic disposition. But he’s decided to develop himself in this area. As an exercise, he has decided to “physicalize” his emotions, so he has more awareness of what is going on. So, one day, after a fight with a coworker, he decides to do this. He isn’t very consciously aware of how to label what is going on with him yet. But he lets the feeling that is occurring in him take over his body, and he lets his body move to reflect it. When he does this, he realizes his body won’t move at all. He is completely frozen. So, he lets his whole body physicalize this and goes totally stiff and doesn’t move. He recognizes this as a freeze fear response. This helps him to realize that he is afraid. This shocks Jan. If you had talked to him fifteen minutes ago, he would have fully denied that he’s afraid and looked at you like you had a head injury if you’d asked him if he was. So, Jan stayed present in this frozen state until he started to feel the fear that was underneath the freeze seeping through.
At a certain point, it didn’t feel like the truth of what was happening was still that he is frozen solid. So, he let his body move to continue to reflect what was happening. And where his body ended up was face down, in a fetal position ball. And he kept seeing images of himself being whipped with a flail. This really helped Jan to see that conflict actually terrifies him. It activates the feeling that he is a small boy, unable to escape the wrath of his father’s anger. With this awareness, he was able to caretake this boy aspect of him. And also come into the awareness that he is now an adult and he is not in that situation anymore. And to see that his colleague’s anger is really a protection for fear. So, in their next interaction, Jan just cut to the chase and asked his co-worker to tell him what he was afraid would happen. When Jan responded to his co-worker’s fears, his coworker was immediately less emotionally charged. And this ability to de-escalate someone was very empowering to Jan.
Next example: Brecka learned that her best friend was coming to visit. When she hung up the phone, Brecka noticed herself thinking of all of the ways that this visit may not happen. She felt like a ball of energy inside. She walked calmly to the kitchen and started wiping down the counter. Brecka decided this discrepancy between what was going on externally vs. internally was kind of tormenting. She was very confused about what was going on with her. So, she decided to do this physicalizing exercise. When she did this, she started bouncing and hopping around like a kid who had just been told they were going to Disneyland. She also noticed that this made her feel very vulnerable. That there was a part of her in opposition to this. So, she decided to physicalize both. She allowed the other aspect of her, the one that was opposed to the excitement, to take over her body and when this happened and she let her body move accordingly, she ended up slumped over in a cross-legged position, propping her head up with her hand. A position that mirrored disappointment. Brecka became totally aware that she was SO excited (an emotion she doesn’t allow herself to admit she has). And at the same time, she is terrified of disappointment and has trauma around disappointment and beliefs that come from those experiences that need to be resolved.
Obviously, I have to say that if you are doing this exercise of physicalizing emotion, you don’t want to haul off and hit someone or start harming yourself in some way. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t all kinds of ways to act out those kinds of emotions in a way that doesn’t harm yourself or others. That is the creative part of this process.
One final note on this. Because we tend to not take emotional pain seriously, I have even had people use body art makeup and even images of physical things to physicalize the way they feel emotionally on their body. For example, I was working with a couple once and one of them felt like the other was just not seeing the reality of the state they were in. So, I gave him this option. He used body paint to make the representation of a huge gaping wound right over his heart. And printed out photos that represented how he feels emotionally. He printed out an image of a person who is emaciated in a concentration camp, a person dying in a hospital bed, again emaciated. And a starved wolf who was locked in a cage. Needless to say, this really woke both him and his partner up to not only the level of emotional pain he is in, but also to exactly what the pain is. The pain of feeling emotionally starved and like his heart is ripped out and also trapped in that deep state of lack.
Now, to give you an idea of what it looks like to think up a physical version or analogy of what is occurring emotionally, here are a couple of examples:
Jyoti is best friends with Ananya. They really like each other. And they get along awesomely when they are alone. But this thing happens where they go out in public where things just don’t feel the same. There is a kind of tension between them. And neither of them feels like the other is an ally. This confuses them both. Jyoti imagines what this feeling state between them, this emotional dynamic, would look like if it were really happening in an overt physical way. What she sees is the image of herself in a gym with Ananya. Both of them are dressed in the clothes that they think look best on them. Their hair is perfectly done and so is their makeup, as if they were going to the Oscars. And they are both obnoxiously trying to gain the attention of the men in the gym. As well as sabotaging each other. For example, she sees Ananya go over to stand right in front of a guy on a treadmill and do a butt emphasis workout. And she sees herself going over and pulling Ananya’s hair and kicking her over, making her look stupid and then flirting with the guy instead. And then she sees Ananya running over and yelling “You think you like her, but when she tried to get into Stanford, she was waitlisted.” This exercise helps Jyoti to see that what is happening is a two-sided competitive dynamic. It is as if they are grasping to be seen as the one that is most valuable as a person and is therefore most desirable, even to the detriment of each other. Because of this awareness, Jyoti talks to Ananya about it. And they both decide they need to face their self-worth issues and they come up with a solution that makes the relationship safer when they are in public.
Next example: Remington is in a work situation that is causing him a lot of pain. He is struggling to explain to his therapist how he feels. He closes his eyes and internally asks to see a physical image that represents how he feels. He sees an image of a drowning sailor that is out at sea in a turbulent storm. His neck is caught in the rigging and he is being pulled down into the deep. Based off of this physicalized image, he becomes aware that he perceives the work situation to be a full-blown crisis. That he feels a sense of foreboding doom and that in the crisis, he feels like he is in a fight for his survival, but that he is helpless and powerless in it. And that he is being prevented from getting to any sense of improvement by forces external to him. He and his therapist pick apart every bit of the image to see what it reveals about how he feels and what stories he is telling himself about the situation.
Physicalizing emotions can really help you to become aware of what is happening at an emotional level within you, within your relationships and within any situation that you find yourself in out there in the world. It can also help you to take what is happening at an emotional level seriously. And knowing what is actually happening informs the fitting or pertinent way to deal with yourself, with your relationships and with the situations you are in. so go ahead and put this tool in your tool basket.
Have you been feeling lately like your life is dragging you into situations that cause you shame? Are you grappling with difficult and painful experiences? If so, there is actually a reason for this. The universe has been trying to get you to re-own your dis-owned needs.
This universe pushes people towards re-owning their un-met needs in general. It does so because this brings a person into a state of alignment, it is a key element of a person’s personal growth and it gets their personal expansion going again. But this pushing people towards re-owning their dis-owned needs thing has reached a whole other level lately. Currently, the universe has got people in a pressure cooker. People have been so profoundly unresponsive to the pain, pressure and signs that they are out of alignment. As well as so unresponsive to the universal promptings to get back into alignment. When you are out of alignment in some way, you are lining up with what is not true to who you are, not in line with your wellbeing, not what is truly right for you, and not what you truly value and truly desire. Your energy will be going there. To unwanted things. And so, more and more of that will manifest in your lived experience. A worsening and worsening will naturally occur. And currently, due to people’s non-responsiveness, the universe is enhancing this worsening with a pressure cooker dynamic, intensifying discomfort and negative effects of misalignment, so that you can’t ignore it or cope with it anymore. It is doing so in order to snap people back into alignment. The universe is snapping people into alignment and into their rightful place by making misalignment too painful to maintain. This process is not just happening at a personal level, it is also happening at a more macrocosmic level, with humanity and the world itself. This is why you are currently seeing such an amplification of what was and what is out of alignment within humanity and within the world. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Why The Pressure Cooker?
Why is it necessary to re-own your disowned needs?
If you do not own your needs, you will not have a happy life. You will be living in an out of alignment state, in painful opposition to yourself and this out of alignment state will progress, as all things do, leading to serious negative consequences. A painful and even unsustainable life experience.
Needs are not something you can actually just suppress, deny and ignore. If you do not own your needs, especially those you disown the most, you will actually try to get those needs met in subconscious, manipulative ways. Subconscious meaning you will not even see that you are trying to get them met. And this whole thing opens you up to demonic entities. In fact, desperate and suppressed needs are what lies at the heart of these ultimately detrimental nonphysical relationships. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Do Demons Exist?
Personal expansion, which serves universal expansion, depends on you going towards your needs and desires. This is what necessitates personal growth and positive personal change. When you are not doing this, you are effectively impeding your own personal expansion. Kind of like creating a bottleneck for your own progress. It turns you, as a part of this universe, into a stuck point within the greater universe.
When you are not owning your needs, you cause pain to other people, places and things. It isn’t like you can go out of alignment and not negatively affect others. You will harm them with the things you think, say, decide and do. You will harm them with what you fail to say, and do. When it comes to disowned needs, this harm tends to be very serious too.
When we are young, many of us learn that certain needs we have are acceptable and certain needs are unacceptable. They are bad and wrong. We learn that in order to stay safe and to stay aligned with the people upon whom our life depends, we must suppress, deny and disown those needs that are unacceptable. We must push them (and the parts of us that need them) away from ourselves. This is actually the origin of self-hate. It is also the origin of shame. When we feel that something about us is bad and wrong and therefore will cause us to be pushed away by others and meet with negative consequences, and we push that part away from ourselves, we are internally triangulating against ourselves in order to be close to others. Shame is the affective reaction that happens when we do this. The thing is, any time we come close to seeing that need within us or are pushed closer to it, we feel this shame because our initial impulse is to push it away, just like we did when we were younger. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Difference Between Being Shamed and Feeling Shame. I also have an entire chapter on shame in my book: The Anatomy of Loneliness.
So, what needs to happen? What needs to happen is you need to re-own your dis-owned needs. How do you do this? You recognize your dis-owned needs. Here are some suggestions for how to recognize your disowned needs…
Disowned needs show up in pain points in your life. Especially the ones that hurt the most. So, rather than trying to cope with the pain in your life or avoid it, you need to do a deep dive into your pain. You’ve got to be brave enough to admit to what you are in pain about. What you are looking to do, is to mine the pain for the needs that are there. For example, if you feel the sensation of deep, visceral envy, you can really do some introspection to figure out what situation is causing that feeling. Say it is watching a friend of yours always be the center of attention. This points to the fact that you want attention. But to any need you find, ask these questions: Why do I want that? If I had that thing, what would it give me? To find an even deeper need. Using our example, you may discover that you want attention because it would make you feel important. So, what you want is importance. But then to this, you can again ask the questions: Why do I want that? If I had that thing, what would it give me? Using our example, maybe the answer is: A sense of value. You can keep going like this, until you feel like you have reached the end of the line. The root need under it all. Pain is the primary way that we can recognize the un-met needs that are the most necessary to re-own at this red-hot moment. The ones that are part of the universal pressure cooker dynamic. So, it is really important to explore the pain you feel in the situation that is causing you the most pain in your life right now.
You can also recognize disowned needs in the strong reactions you have to other people, especially negative judgements about them and their traits. Any time you have a strong positive reaction, ask yourself “What do I Love about this person? What about what I love about them do I wish I had?” For example, say that you just adore Taylor Swift and react powerfully positive every time you see her. You might realize that you love that she can express so freely. This reveals that a disowned need of yours is to be free to express yourself. And any time you have a negative rection to someone, list the things you hate about them and ask yourself “How would my life improve if I took a homeopathic dose of these things?” This reveals the need you have. For example, imagine you have a person in your life that you judge as selfish. If you took a homeopathic dose of selfishness, how would your life improve? Maybe the answer is: I would be able to set boundaries to keep myself safe. Safety would be the need. You can then explore exactly what kind of safety you need and from what.
You can also recognize disowned needs in any resentments you may have. Resentment is essentially feelings of unfairness, injustice or mistreatment. One of the reasons that resentment lingers like it does is because underneath the surface feelings are needs you are desperate for. To get to the bottom of it, you need to mine the experience that caused you to feel resentful for the needs that are there. For example, say that a woman resents her partner because he comes home and doesn’t help with the kids. If she asks herself why this is unfair or cruel, the answer may be: Watching the kids is a hard job too, it’s not like I ever get a break. She may see that she wants a break. What would the break she needs look like? Maybe it would look like someone else watching the kids, so she can do some self-care stuff, like go to the gym and do her nails and get her hair cut and colored. In this, she may see that her need is self-care. Something she feels is selfish to need.
You can also recognize your disowned needs in what you desire that you are afraid of. What do you want that you are afraid to want? Part of this is recognizing what you won’t let yourself have. Notice where you force yourself to do things, things you “should do”. And with each of these things, ask yourself: What am I secretly craving instead? For example: I should go to college to get a sensible degree. What are you secretly craving instead? Maybe the answer is: To travel. Or for example, maybe you are forcing yourself to clean the house. But when you ask: What am I secretly craving instead? The answer may be rest!
You can also recognize your dis-owned needs in what you have been trying change that isn’t currently changing or that has never worked to change. When you think about what you have been desperate to change about yourself, but it hasn’t worked, there is usually a desperately disowned need in the mix. The “problem” behavior is often a strategy that your system uses to meet the need. For example, say you have been passive your whole life. You may stay passive so that you never have to face the fear of trying and failing. But if you ask what the perceived consequence of failing is, it may be being judged negatively and pushed away by others. When you ask what need you have that being judged and pushed away prevents, it may be: Closeness.
You can also recognize your disowned needs in what you feel you need to woefully let go of for some purpose (especially if you did this or are doing this and things are not getting better). There are actually needs on both sides of this equation. What might you have woefully let go of or what may you currently be trying to let go of that fills you with sorrow to let go of? And why are you letting go of it? What needs might you be throwing out with the bathwater? What might you be sacrificing that you can’t actually sacrifice and feel good in life at the same time? For example, say that a person realized they are woefully letting go of time with horses to pursue their career. They may realize that the need behind making this choice is: Purpose. So, this is a need. But they may also realize that in spending time with horses, they feel this incredible bond and total awe. They may realize that being with horses is actually a need. That life feels empty without them.
You can also recognize your dis-owned needs in what need you feel is impossible to have met. When it feels impossible to meet a need you have and everything in your life is reflecting that you won’t get it met and can’t get it met, you tend to try to un-need the need in order to be in less pain. You become convinced you must dis-own the need you feel most powerless to meet. These needs are usually more obvious and available to the conscious mind. What is it you want deeply, but feels impossible? Just because a need feels impossible, doesn’t mean you should or can give it up. And if you try to dis-own it, it will lead to consequences. Another way to get here is to ask yourself: As a child, what did I want and need, that I had to give up on wanting and needing because it was impossible to get. These are likely still deeply suppressed needs within you, maybe even needs that are hiding under your denial of needing them.
You can also identify disowned needs in all the things that you learned were not acceptable in your childhood. These are things your family reacted poorly to. This may take the form of things that caused you joy, such as “I used to be delighted by doing things together, but I was taught that needing quality time from them was a burden. Quality time was my need”. It could take the form of traits you exhibited. Such as “I was very sensitive as a child. And this was constantly scoffed at. What I needed because I was so sensitive was for the adults in my life to be attuned to what I need and to put me in an environment and in situations that were soothing. The need may be: People who are attuned and responsive and a soothing environment. Thinking back on your childhood, what about you garnered negative reactions from others, especially your parents, teachers and even peers? How did you need to adapt in your childhood? What needed to go away in order for you to do that? Ask yourself: What deep needs are revealed in the picture of my story of childhood adaptation?
You can also recognize your dis-owned needs by deep diving into your shame. We love to avoid shame and do anything to try to get it to just go away as fast as possible, because it is a super painful to experience. There are needs on both sides of shame. We triangulate against ourselves to get a need met, usually to the detriment of another need that we actually do need and can’t actually sacrifice. For example, say that a person feels so much shame around having homosexual tendencies. On one side, they are pushing this aspect of themselves away to get the needs met of connection and belonging and confluence with other people. But at the same time, they are pushing away a need for a sexual/romantic relationship with someone of their own sex. And within this need, they are pushing away potentially many relational needs. A good way to become aware of these needs is this: When you feel shame, examine what about yourself you are ashamed about/in rejection of. By rejecting this aspect, what need gets met? By not rejecting it, what need doesn’t get met? And to the opposite, if you were to accept that this would never change about you and you could not get rid of it, and instead, you had to hear out what it needed, what would this aspect of you need?
Once you have discovered the disowned need, what you need to do is to reverse the shame. The way that shame is reversed, is by re-owning the aspect of you that you are ashamed of i.e. pushing away and in rejection of. What does it mean to take ownership over something? To own something is for it to belong to you or with you. And because you have decided it belongs to you or with you, you are responsible for its wellbeing. A sense of ownership is what causes us to take care of the thing we feel that sense of ownership towards. We are committed to it. It makes that thing or that person’s best interests indivisible from our own best interests. It makes it so our commitment is to find a win-win scenario, which is the basis of trust. A sense of ownership is a divine responsibility. When you take ownership of a part of you, its needs matter greatly to you. By re-owning this part of you, you start to integrate it into the rest of your system in ways that benefit the entire system, and by doing so, you can align with a life that is far more in alignment for you. A life that feels joyful to you.
This goes hand in hand with reversing shame… In order to re-own a disowned need, you must work directly with any resistance you have to that need. Directly address anything in the way of meeting the need. This may mean changing beliefs you have that are oppositional to the thing you need. It may mean working directly with any part of you that is in direct opposition to the meeting of that need or to the aspect of you that has that need. It means changing behaviors that oppose the need. For this reason, it would be a good idea to watch my video titled: Parts Work, What is Parts work and How to do Parts Work. This means it is time for some deep diving into what is on the other side of your needs, opposing and preventing them. And guess what? Within these aspects of you, are other needs. Most people are in fact in a needs conflict when they have deeply dis-owned needs. But the good news for most people is that a lot of this is down to flaws in perception, rather than the impossibility of getting seemingly opposed needs met.
The next thing you need to do, is to meet the need directly. Obviously, what this looks like is going to depend on the specific need. When you have seemingly conflicting needs, it is about finding a configuration that allows for them both to be met. For many people, this will require changes to be made to the life they are living. And in some cases, drastic overhauls. For example, say that you discovered that the deeply suppressed need you have is to be in your feminine energy and to have a life that is conducive to this. But the life you currently lead is not conducive to this at all. The task at hand is how to overhaul your life in a way that is conducive to your femininity. To choose relationships that are conducive to your femininity. Now imagine that you find that the need that seemingly opposes your femininity is your purpose. The task at hand is to find a different, femininity conducive way to carry out your purpose. This doesn’t mean that your life will have no contrast. Contrast comes with everything. There is positive and negative in everything. It doesn’t mean that it will only ever feel good. You simply can’t choose a contrast that requires you to disown a need you have. It wont even work if you try to do it. It is so important to become aware of your needs and to find direct ways to meet your needs. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Meet your Needs.
People are in an internal war. On the one hand, they would do anything to get specific needs met and are going about it in all kinds of subconscious ways. And at the very same time, they would do anything to get those same specific needs to go away. They are designing a life to be able to cope with not having what they need and to avoid the shame and the powerlessness inherent in needing that thing. The vast majority of people are currently living their lives in denial of their needs and this has got to end. And so, the universe is putting you in painful and difficult situations right now, and it is pinning you in your shame, so that you become aware of your needs. Those needs that you have suppressed, denied, rejected and disowned. An unbelievably big part of the picture of getting out of the pain you are currently in, and getting back into alignment with the universe itself, is to recognize your disowned needs, to re-own them and to change your life accordingly.
Thoughts shape our very existence. They have the capacity to enhance and build or deplete and destroy our life experience. And because they are so much a part of our everyday experience, we don’t tend to think about them in an objective way. Because of this, many truths about thoughts in and of themselves elude us. Including the truth that I am about to share with you today. What I am going to offer you today is a revelation regarding thoughts, one that has the capacity to transform your life experience completely.
First, I’ll give you the truth and then, I’ll explain it in depth so that you fully understand it. Here it is: Thoughts, especially beliefs, in and of themselves are part of the picture of adaptive strategy. Basically, beliefs can be and often are an adaptive strategy in and of themselves. And the letting go of the thought, is dependent upon the strategy being seen and the decision that the need for that strategy is no longer there. Ok, let me explain.
Each and every one of us experiences trauma in our lifetime. A simple definition of trauma is distress without resolve. What should stick out to you about this definition of trauma is that this could mean anything from a toddler who is having chronic experiences where he is prevented from crawling to the things that he wants, to touch to that one time in kindergarten when your teacher shamed you Infront of the class, all the way to a woman being beaten and brutally raped while jogging in the park. Trauma is something that happens in all demographics, across all societal classes, to people of any age, race, class, religion or sex. There are so many types of trauma that a person can experience. Everyone has trauma. Everyone has experienced distress in their lifetime that is unresolved. The problem is, because people are normalized to the idea of people in general (including themselves ) experiencing distress in life, trauma flies under the radar in the vast majority of people’s lives.
When we experience distress, most especially distress that we can’t find a way to resolve, we adapt to it. We create adaptations. An adaptation is a specific alteration that you make mentally, emotionally or physically so that you can manage something that is causing you distress. Each and every one of us adapts to our surroundings. This begins when we are children. We adapt to our parent’s personalities, beliefs, wants and needs, likes and dislikes. We adapt to our culture. We adapt to the language we are taught to speak. We adapt to the schools we are educated in. We adapt to the peers we play with and are bullied by. We adapt to society at large. We adapt to traumatic situations we find ourselves in. And this list just keeps going on and on. We adapt so as to keep ourself safe and give ourselves the highest chance of meeting our needs and succeeding at whatever it is we have our sights on, consciously or subconsciously. If we didn’t adapt, we would be in real trouble in many ways. So, adaptation is a survival strategy, if not at times a strategy we use in order to thrive.
The big problem with the adaptations we make to things, most especially to traumatic and dysfunctional environments, is that those adaptations can and do absolutely destroy our life. They form and forge us to fit into those things we adapt to. This includes traumatic and dysfunctional environments. And so, we start to only make sense in those environments and only feel a sense of personal power in those environments. We feel like a fish out of water in different, even far more functional and healthy environments and relationships. And when we really, really want something different, these adaptations work against us. They act as resistant forces to the very thing we want and need. And so, we feel trapped in suffering. Trapped with our trauma on repeat in our lives. Our adaptations often set us on a trajectory of negative impacts and effects, taking our life in a direction that we would never want to go, if we were conscious of it. Basically, they doom us to creating something we don’t actually want to create. The problem is, we aren’t conscious of it. So here is a truth: If you want a different experience, you need to change the adaptive patterns within YOU that are lining you up with that experience.
So how does all this relate to thoughts? When we experience something distressing or downright traumatic, we don’t just live through it and shake it off and go on our merry way. Instead, we create a thought and essentially form it into a belief, or several, in response to it. And this in turn changes everything. Beliefs shape our existence. They change the way we see the world. They change what we say, the behavior we exhibit, our personalities, the choices we make and the actions we take or don’t take. They change our direction in life. Because we experience thoughts as rather automatic, responsive and usually subconscious, we don’t relate to thoughts and beliefs as something that we, ourselves can make and with intention. This is especially true of what we often call “negative thoughts/beliefs”. We don’t see them as a part of the picture of adaptive strategy. When they absolutely are.
You may have been hanging around psychology, personal growth, self-help and new age spiritual circles long enough to be familiar with the truth that there can be a positive emotional payoff for holding a negative belief. Well, consider this the kindergarten version of recognizing beliefs in and of themselves as adaptive strategies. But let’s graduate, shall we? When a person experiences something distressing, they form an adaptive belief that helps them in the situation in some way. It diminishes the distress in some way. This belief acts as an answer to a need. There is a need for this belief for some reason. It is really hard to see why a super painful, negative belief might be an answer to a need and therefore might help a person to manage the situation, but I assure you, the why exists. That negative belief serves some purpose. Never forget that people are more than capable of choosing between two terrible things. This is important to remember because when it comes to beliefs, this means that we often come up with explanations for things in the form of beliefs that are superbly painful, simply to save ourselves from something we find even more painful. But, when we do this, we set ourselves on a path heading in a whole different direction in life. One that ultimately leads us to the experience of future pain.
In order to change this, and in order to truly heal the distress from the traumas we have experienced, we need to find the adaptive belief that we formed. We need to fully understand the why behind the formation of that thought. The self-preserving purpose it serves. This includes the need it seeks to meet and the pain it seeks to quell. We need to recognize that the need for that belief is no longer there. The belief is no longer a strategy that makes sense for us to use. This then causes us to pull our energy out of the belief, which causes the belief to dissipate. This allows new, healing truths about the distressing situation to flood into our conscious awareness. It also allows us to replace it with a different, conscious belief.
So that you understand this in principle, here is an example. Brianna found herself in repeat situations where her mother was exasperated with her. Brianna felt like she could do nothing to prevent her mother getting upset and then upset again, and then upset again at her. When her mother would get upset at Brianna, she would look at her with a facial expression of utmost disapproval, act the victim to her, shame her, criticize her, withdraw from her, act appalled at Brianna, as if she should know better, insinuate that she did not relate to Brianna at all and direct Brianna’s father to confront Brianna. She also frequently would catch Brianna doing something and say “my god, sometimes I swear you were switched at birth.” This experience felt profoundly othering and like constant attack. Brianna was drowning in confusion. She could not figure out why she was being treated like this by her mother. She could find no reliable way to please her mother so the attacks would stop, nor did she manage to find a way to endear herself to her mother enough to be treated like she was her own. She was drowning in the painful, dizzying, vertigo-like onslaught of the experience. So, she formed a belief: I am an imposter. Essentially that she isn’t actually her mother’s daughter. That she was implanted there, so her mother would think that she was her daughter, but really, she isn’t.
Brianna related a lot to stories like the Ugly Duckling and Stella Luna. When her biology teacher taught her about starling birds, she related to that too. And when she got interested in spirituality and someone taught her about star seeds, she was convinced she was one of them. The belief “I am an imposter” hurt like hell. But it made the situation she was in, no longer confusing. It made her mom feel safer. It allowed her to believe that even though she did not belong in her family, out there somewhere was a family where she did belong. It also helped her to cope through superiority, by imagining that she was better than the family that was rejecting her. That they were muggles or that whatever family she had before she was switched at birth was a more powerful, better, richer family. Like all children, she made her mother’s behavior about herself and thus, this belief about herself, rather than seeing the truth about her mother.
The problem is, with this belief, she also unintentionally ruined her life. She just “took” the abuse, telling herself that any mother who had lost her true child and had a false child put in its place would reject the false child. And this, only enabled her parents in their dysfunction. She started identifying with being different to them and thus, separating and distancing herself from them more and more, only fueling all of their feelings of estrangement from each other, making her experience further “othering” within her family. Because this belief makes a person feel alone in the world, and believe themselves to be alone in the world, the world felt cold to her. The tissues of her body started armoring. Inherent in the idea of imposter-ism, is the idea that you are deceiving or did deceive someone, which makes you relate to yourself as bad. She felt guilt for existing. Because she slipped into the vibrational range of being “other”, she was also rejected and “othered” by her peers. The negative effects and impacts of this belief could go on forever. She has spent her entire life “othered” in the world. To the degree that she tried to commit suicide.
Brianna isn’t consciously aware of this process that was taking place within her. She simply remembers never fitting in with her family and her obsession with stories like The Ugly
Duckling and Stella Luna. But, in order for Brianna to end this pattern and subsequent life experience within her life, she has to identify this adaptive belief she carries: I am an imposter. She has to see the strategy inherent in this belief. Essentially the self-preserving purpose it serves. The pain it is designed to quell and the specific need she had for it. Essentially, everything I just explained. She also has to recognize the negative effects and impacts that operating from that belief had on her life. From there she has to recognize that the need for it is no longer there. It no longer serves her and is no longer a strategy that makes sense to maintain.
By pulling her energy out of this belief, she would see more truths about her mother. Truths like: Her mother is actually mentally ill and did not get through her own trauma enough to actually be a true mother to Brianna. On an emotional level, her mother was covered in wounds and so, nothing could prevent those cuts and bruises from being touched. Because of this, trying to avoid getting in trouble was like walking on broken glass. She would see truths like her father also wasn’t an actual father to her, and instead only cared about his own personal peace, and that meant pleasing her mother. So, he did whatever it took to placate her and in doing so, failed to be a true father. From here, she could consider: In the place of where that old belief was, what positive belief is actually true instead? One that is in alignment with what I actually want to experience? And with that new belief, her entire reality will begin to shift. Different thoughts, different words, different choices, different personality, different behaviors, different actions. A change in her direction in life. A completely different life experience.
This realization is one of the key components of coming into the actualization of yourself as a conscious creator. And I mean a conscious creator, even in the womb, even as a child. So much of what we end up creating before we begin to engage with thought and belief in a conscious way, is what we intended to create on a more objective, life-purpose level. This includes the terrible stuff in our life experience. But on another level, they are things we would never, ever intended to create for ourselves or anyone else for that matter. Sometimes not even for our worst enemy.
Any belief you find yourself gravitating towards or thinking, may just be an adaptation you are fixing to use in the distress you are currently in. And any belief that you developed in childhood, may just be an adaptation you used to manage the distress in your childhood. Seeing the strategy inherent in these beliefs will make it so you can’t put your full belief in them. Seeing the negative impacts and ripple effects of them, will make it so you don’t take yourself down a road to creating a life experience you don’t want to live into, or continue to live into. And this will allow you to use beliefs in a far more conscious way. One that actually brings about the life experience that you are longing for.
One of the biggest things that stands in the way of you and the things you want, is the perception of unworthiness. In other words, you not feeling worthy of what you want. And people spend so much time and effort trying to change this by trying to find ways to believe in their own worthiness or prove to themselves that they are worthy, often to no avail. This begs the question, why isn’t it working? The answer is, because unworthiness is actually benefitting them in some way. And unless they understand how, they will make no headway with regards to believing in their own worthiness. Today, let’s look at how your belief in your own unworthiness can serve as a self-preservation strategy, especially a strategy to preserve your relationships. And then, let’s look at how knowing this, can actually make you believe you are worthy.
To illustrate this point before it is officially made, let’s meet Jaren. Jaren’s business partner swindled him, which led to a business collapse that forced him to sell his house in order to put that capital into the company to save it. This caused huge issues in his marriage, which ultimately led to his wife leaving him, but pulling all the money out of their joint account first. Jaren has been struggling with money. Underpinning his struggle to make money is his feeling that he does not deserve to be wealthy. More than that, he doesn’t deserve to be surrounded in opulence, to have nice things, to feel free to have and do what he wants and to have people supporting his road to success. Jaren has been working on this underlying unworthiness for a while now. He’s done core belief work, he’s been doing affirmations, he has seen a therapist, he did a session with a hypnotherapist, he did past life regression therapy and he leaves subliminal abundance harmonics on when he sleeps at night. But none of this is working for Jaren because all he is consciously aware of is how dedicated he is to being wealthy and as a result, how dedicated he is to feeling worthy.
Jaren grew up in a home with a disengaged father who was absorbed in his hobby, which was hunting. And a mother who obsessively clipped coupons. She was always after the deal and would not spend money on anything new or full priced. All of Jaren’s clothes and toys came from a second-hand donation store. When he wanted or needed anything, his dad wouldn’t lift a finger and his mom would always get him the cheapest version of it, never the best. At 12 years old, he was expected to work to get the things he wanted. So, he ran a lemonade stand and mowed neighbor’s lawns and mucked horse stalls for a local barn for some money. A couple of times, when Jaren did something that his mother wasn’t happy with, like not returning home from school like he had agreed to, in order to watch his younger brother, or forgetting to do his chores, she would punitively charge him money for it and suddenly, all of what he had saved up for was gone.
Jaren does not have a good relationship with his parents. He talks to them every now and then, and goes to their house for a bit on Thanksgiving and Christmas. But Jaren does not consciously experience himself as being close to them. What Jaren isn’t aware of, is this: The way he maintains closeness with and loyalty to his parents, is with the belief that he is not worthy of the things he needs and wants. How does this work? As a child, our parents are the god of our world. We are totally dependent on them. And we are desperate for a sense of closeness, love, safety, confluence and alignment with them. Well, if Jaren does deserve to be treated lovingly, to be supported in his desires and needs, to be surrounded in opulence, to have nice things, to feel free to have and do what he wants, to have people who will put effort towards giving him the skills and resources necessary for him to get what he wants and also to provide him with as much of what he needs and wants as possible, and if he does deserve the best. What does that say about his parents and their relationship with Jaren? What does it mean? And more importantly, does it spell closeness, love, safety, confluence and alignment with them? No. Jaren would come to the following conclusion. If he deserves all these things, then his parents are unwilling to put effort into him, they are antagonistic towards his goals and dreams, they do not perceive him as valuable, his father could care less if he has kids, his mom is dedicated to making sure he does not think highly of himself, she is also emotionally and financially abusive, so he isn’t safe with them and he is all alone, despite having a family. This is too threatening to Jaren’s psyche. So, how does Jaren restore this sense of closeness, love, safety, confluence and alignment with them? By telling himself that he does not deserve it. A thought that is now operating in his subconscious, still preserving the relationship with his parents, regardless of the fact that on a conscious level, he would not tell you that he is deeply connected to his parents at all.
So many of the things that set Jaren up for all this crap in his adult life are the result of this belief. First and foremost, this belief puts him outside of the vibrational range of the experience of having what he needs and wants. But second, it causes him to behave in ways that guarantee he will not have the things he needs and wants. Just think about it. If deep down, Jaren believes he does not deserve to be surrounded in opulence, to have nice things, to feel free to have and do what he wants and to have people supporting his road to success, then how does he think? How does he behave? What choices does he make? What actions does he take or fail to take? Just to give you a few examples of thousands, just like his mother, he also can’t bring himself to shop at any other store but the discount store. He chooses paths to making money that require maximum effort on his personal part. He tells himself that he won’t get deals he wants before he goes in for the pitch and as a result, his pitches come across really insecure. He identifies with the people and places that are poor, so that is where he spends most of his time. He gets into relationships with women when they have been damaged and from a rescuer pattern because he doesn’t believe he deserves to have the women he really likes. But they are with him in order to be rescued, not because they adore him as a person and are compatible to him. So, they leave him.
Ok, so here is the take away for you. People, being an intensely social species (even if they spend a great deal of energy trying to deny it) preserve their relationships by telling themselves that they are not worthy of what is in their best interests (this includes what they want and need). People run the risk of doing this with anyone they are desperate for closeness, love, safety confluence and alignment with. And this is especially a thing that people do to preserve their relationship with their family of origin. And it is even more something that people do if they were raised in families and cultures that revolve around the idea of life operating according to deserving in and of itself. This is basically the idea that you have to do something or have and show qualities that qualify you as worthy of some reward. Or to the opposite, that you do something or have and show qualities that qualify you as worthy of punishment. So, you bring unwanted things upon yourself. This is the basis of many religions. The problem is, the ideology of deserving can cover all manner of sins so to speak. For example, all you need to do in order to get someone to get on a rat wheel of doing what serves you, is to make the other person believe they don’t deserve what they want from you yet.. nope not yet… nope not yet… try harder… Give a crumb, better yet, create an intermittent reinforcement pattern. And all someone needs to do to justify their abusive behavior or to continue to not have to step up or put energy into in a relationship, is to convince the other person (maybe even themselves) that they don’t deserve it.
And to go one layer deeper, people use deserving and underserving to maintain a sense of empowerment in order to blunt the experience of being victimized. Especially feelings like being powerless and hopeless and in despair. Anyone who has worked with survivors of severe abuse, like the complex trauma of living in an incestuous home or domestic violence or sex trafficking will tell you that the hardest thing of all to get survivors to let go of, is the idea that they deserved it in some way. It’s something their psyche holds onto like a child clutching onto a teddy bear, while watching a horror film in the middle of a hurricane. Why? Because if they believe they deserve it, they can feel some sense of empowerment. Deserving it means you have a hand in something. It means maybe you have a bit of power in the situation because you had a role in bringing something about. And this means maybe you have some power regarding it not happening. What would happen and what would need to be faced and felt if you didn’t? And to the opposite of this, just like in our example with Jaren, you don’t have to face all the horrors of what it would mean if it happened and you didn’t deserve it. Worse, if what you deserved was all the things you were desperate for instead of what happened.
Many people have linked the idea of law of attraction with deserving. And just like that, your spiritual beliefs are serving your belief that you don’t deserve something that you want or you deserve something you are experiencing that is unwanted. As if the law of attraction is just the latest tool for some force that is keeping tabs on us to judge us, and then delivering us our experiences as either some sort of punishment or reward. The reality is that the law of mirroring (what many people call the law of attraction) is not about deserving. It is far more impartial than this human socialization concept of reward and punishment. What if the things you are experiencing are not happening because you deserve it or don’t deserve it. At the same time, what if the things you are experiencing definitely change if you believe you deserve it or don’t deserve it? Why? Because beliefs dictate all subsequent thoughts, words, behaviors, choices and actions. And because the belief either way radiates out as a specific energy signature that attracts people, places, things, circumstances and situations that match that energy signature. It is a very neutral design. You can think of it just like an input-output of a computer program. It is simply mirrored back to us. The problem is, what is being reflected back to us, is not always obvious. But the most important point is that “unwanted manifestations” are not any sort of punishment for something you did wrong or something you deserved because shame on you, you were thinking 'negative' thoughts. The word 'attract' can have this negative connotation of ‘you brought it on yourself’ or ‘you had it coming’ and so you deserve it. The idea of manifestations in a person’s life being some sort of punishment or reward, especially a punishment or reward for your mindset or state of alignment, is one of the biggest fallacies in the spiritual field.
Also, a person’s vibration is the compilation of so, so many things. People greatly oversimplify it. It is far more complicated than thinking positive thoughts manifests positive experiences and thinking negative thoughts manifests negative experiences. The reality is, worthiness has nothing to do with anything. And this scares us. You can see this in situations where any of us would clearly judge a person as bad and therefore not worthy of the abundance they have or that they deserve something bad to happen to them for what they did and yet, no such thing happens to them. You can clearly see this in situations where any of us would clearly say that a person is good and therefore worthy of wonderful things happening to them, and yet, bad things happen to them. And so, life is not based on deserving, even though human society has introduced this concept and has made a great many things about it. You could be a very good person and have a horrible back story of neglect and as a result, believe that you are alone and can’t rely on people and as result, end up in a situation where everyone abandons you. And you aren’t bad or doing something wrong for holding onto that belief. Nor is what is happening, a punishment for something you may have done in your childhood or in a past life. You may suffer and sacrifice in all kinds of ways, believing that it will lead to a reward (especially if you are doing so to be good) only to find that all this lines you up with is more circumstances that require sacrifice and suffering constantly to get to an ever-receding horizon line. It is also important to remember that the role that something you want is playing in your life, may not be the role it is playing in someone else’s life. So, we may assume pleasure or pain or desire or aversion where it would exist for us, but does not necessarily exist for them.
Back to the main point of this episode. Unworthiness acts like a cover for a negative loyalty pattern with the people you care about. It can easily cover over the fact that someone in your life did not act in a way that is in alignment with what you are worthy of, because it served them not to for some reason. Keep in mind that this could be happening right now in present time with someone in your life. Be brave enough to imagine that you were and are worthy of whatever it is you need and want, and then ask yourself the question: If this were true, what would it mean about this person or that person and our relationship (especially in your childhood, but also today). This will cause you to withdraw your investment out of the relationship preservation strategy of unworthiness. And from there, it will be far easier to change your belief in your own worthiness. You will be able to sense that you deserve what you have and want. But this is still to operate within the idea of worth and deserving. If you want to take it one step further, you can dispose of your idea of worth and deserving and with it, your idea of punishment and reward. Just be aware that for most humans alive today, this paradigm is so deeply engrained that there will be several layers of it to recon with.
Ultimately, believing in your own unworthiness as a strategy to maintain your relationship with someone, lines you up with the opposite of your needs and desires, as well as a bad relationship. Which is why now is the time to let go of that belief.
When it comes to financial success and abundance, it comes up over and over again that people “just want to win the lottery”. There is nothing wrong with loving the idea of a boat load of money just dropping in your lap without a huge investment of money and effort. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who would say no to that. But if it is abundance that you want and if you care about financial success, the lottery is a terrible approach. Let’s look at the reasons why wanting to win the lottery is an idea that is better to let go of.
Most people who buy a lottery ticket are investing in a dream of something that deep down, they feel is totally unreachable. Something important to understand about money is that our attitudes towards it are totally shaped by our own life experience, not by objective truths about money. What seems nuts to do financially to one person, seems perfectly rational to another person based off of what they themselves have experienced. This is why a person who is in a higher income bracket, looking at probabilities, would see a person buying a lottery ticket as insane. Whereas, if you are someone in a low-income bracket, it seems perfectly rational to do. If you are like so many of the people who really want to win the lottery, you live paycheck to paycheck. All prospects for making more money look and feel totally out of reach. Prospects like getting paid more, being able to invest, being able to save money, being able to having nice things, traveling anywhere, being able to afford healthcare, being able to send your kids to college etc. You feel like you can’t get the things you want. So, holding a lottery ticket in your hands feels like the only time in your life that you actually have a chance at getting the things that you want in life. Things that most of the people who teach about finances take completely for granted. By buying a lottery ticket, you are buying a dream. By the way, this is a big reason why people persist with buying lottery tickets even when they are broke, no matter how much of a bad idea it is objectively.
The underlying vibration for the vast majority of people who buy lottery tickets is: The things I want are totally out of reach, so the only way they can come to me is by luck… Total helpless, powerlessness. The problem is, in a universe governed by the law of mirroring, if this is the underlying vibration with which you play the lottery, all you get is more helpless powerlessness relative to money and ultimately relative to the things you want.
Another very upsetting reality is that lottery operators prey on people who are in this helpless, powerless financially vulnerable position. In many countries, the lottery can be seen as a tax on the people who are most vulnerable and with no financial education. It is a big tax opportunity for governments as well. Take the US Alone, where lottery wins are considered taxable income. And no sales tax for ticket sales doesn’t matter because taxation happens internally rather than at the register. The government has already taken its cut because part of every ticket price goes directly to the state. You could argue all day about whether it is a good idea or a bad idea for the government to do this, but the reality is the same. Lotteries are a way that some governments feed federal funds and also raise state funds. And this sets up a very complicated dynamic between the government and its citizens that can turn predatory or exploitative of negative human psychology. Governments really need to consider that you can’t say that the government is truly for the people if it is encouraging poor financial stewardship amongst its citizens.
Another group of people who really just want to win the lottery, want the things they want, but not in exchange for time, energy or action put in on their part. If you fall into this camp, chances are, the idea of putting these things in, in order to get money, feels like more effort and struggle. Feels like more suffering. The things you have done in your life, you felt pain doing. Everything has been a “do this thing I feel pain doing, so that I can have something”. But the odds were always stacked against you in that if you wanted anything, not only were you forced to do something you hated doing for it, the person in the power position in this scenario, also made it incredibly hard for you to do; if not impossible. Instilling the idea that you don’t deserve anything and that’s why you have to toil for it.
And if you had to work your butt off for the thing that you wanted at something you hated doing, you lost the desire for the thing you wanted. Say that you wanted a game, so you could experience fun. But you had to work hard the whole summer for it. That was tons of no fun to get a bit of fun. So, it isn’t actually a win. The lottery is a mirror of this experience, where the odds are once again stacked against you. This whole dynamic has caused real pain for you. It has also caused you to feel like it needs to be true that you deserve a windfall for having struggled. After all, if you don’t get it, it would mean they were right about you, that you don’t deserve it and that would mean that you are not worthy. So, the entitlement people observe in you, the feeling like it’s got to be true that you deserve it without putting in any real time, energy or action, is actually you looking for a healing experience. It is you looking for proof that you are worthy and that the universe is benevolent in being for you, rather than against you. This idea offers you extreme relief from a painful life.
In line with this, if you have been abused in the past, you may slip into holding the attitude that the world owes you in order to compensate for the pain you suffered. This can lead to you boycotting putting in energy or action towards getting the things you want because having to do so, despite all you suffered, seems completely unfair. Like more cruelty.
This mentality, despite having real cause, is out of alignment. It makes it so your thoughts, words and actions are out of alignment with your desires. They are oppositional forces to what you want. And the lottery isn’t what you want. What you want is feel good relationships where people are powerfully for you and value you. The obsession with wanting to win the lottery is an avoidance of acknowledging how poorly you were treated by others. It is the trauma of people who should be a support, being an antagonistic force instead. Trauma of your worth and value not being seen or reflected back to you. And because of how the lottery is designed, the lottery is just a repeat of the very trauma that caused this mentality in you. It is a system where the odds are stacked against you, which is not a system to engage in anymore.
In your case, the lottery win is not really about finances. And the lottery win is not actually what you want. It’s an indirect way of trying to get validation of your worth and proof that something, anything is on your side, rather than against you, which is a relationship with people problem. It is a relationship with people problem that you are attempting to heal with the lottery and it is a relationship with people problem projected out onto the universe at large. If you recognize yourself in all this, it is also important to learn that you can actually get the things you want through means you enjoy and that are easy for you
Some people who want to win the lottery feel real lack self-esteem. They do not believe in their ability to achieve their financial goals/the things they want. If you fall into this camp, you believe the only way to get what you want, is for it to be given to you by forces outside you. There is lack of drive to put in energy, time or action because you do not believe it will amount to anything. This mentality is also out of alignment. And in terms of both personal and universal expansion, it would be counter to the best interests of you or this universe for the universe to play into this belief. The lottery would be a confirmation that you are incapable, rather than a beneficial experience for you. If this is you, working directly on self-esteem, especially related to your capability and value is a faster and better way to get to financial abundance.
Fantasy and dreaming often serves as an escape. It is not true that all dreaming and fantasizing is manifesting. That all focus on what you want in the future is energy being lent to that becoming reality. We can use fantasy and dreaming to resist and push against what is. As a coping mechanism. A form of denial and escapism. When this is the case, we are dissociating from reality. And so, we cannot bring energy like abundance into reality. Fantasy creates a separation between the fantasy world and the real world. This is not good when it comes to manifestation. The dreaming which is such a key component of wanting to win the lottery, is a passive state of imagining a different world, so as to escape the pain of current reality without taking action steps to change one’s circumstances. It can be compared to getting totally lost in a movie. If you use dreaming about the lottery is a coping mechanism, you take little to no action to change your circumstances. Maybe you do this because you believe you cannot change your circumstances. This is a belief that needs to be worked with directly. Manifestation involves both decision making and inspired action, not visualization alone. If your behaviors, choices and actions are not in alignment with the things you are wanting, you are out of alignment with what you are wanting. Manifestation is an intentional and active process. Not a dissociative process. True manifestation requires you to remain present to and acknowledge your preset reality, not only your desired reality.
The lottery is gambling. Gambling can be a fun game to play on occasion. But at the end of the day, gambling is a terrible way to make money. The odds are always stacked against you. Gambling is rigged against you in that the expected value is negative. Lotteries profit over this tiny mathematical advantage. When multiplied over millions of players, it equals big profit for them. And gambling is a psychological trap in so many ways. Gambling can be an addictive process. It ensnares you into losing money by making it seem like you will win soon. For every winner, there are countless losers funding that jackpot and you will never hear about them, because highlighting the winners makes you feel like it can happen to you. Repeat after me, gambling is entertainment, not investment. And what makes the lottery worse than other gambling games is that it is a pure chance game, meaning that no matter what you do, your choices do not affect the outcome. Every spin or draw is independent and random. And there is no strategy that changes the house edge. I.e., The mathematical advantage that the lottery operator has over the person buying the lottery ticket in any given game.
Your chances of winning are so much more abysmally small than most people realize. Just how small? Well, in a given year, you have a 1 in 186,978 chance of getting injured or dying from a lightning strike. Compare that to the lottery, say Powerball. Your odds of getting a jackpot in a Powerball drawing are one in 292.2 million. To put this into perspective, if the prize was to give away a new home to just one person in the six most populous states in the United States, the likelihood of winning would be more than twice as high as for the top Powerball prize. Something else you need to know is that if one ticket has a 1 in a 100 million chance of winning, every ticket you buy has the same 1 in 100 million chance of winning, whether you buy one or ten. You do not get any closer to winning after every near miss. If you want a way to make money, the lottery is like a closed door, rather than an open one. It’s like fixating on walking down a road to a dead end.
Sometimes the truth is not pleasant. Sometimes seeking relief from the unbearable reality that you are facing in life by engaging in fantasy about the future seems like the best way out of pain. Hope can be a comfort we use when all sense of empowerment is lost. But fantasy used to avoid and escape what is, is a tool of resistance rather than a tool of empowerment. It is far more empowering when it comes to abundance for you to stop waiting for or betting on luck. Of course, I know that if you are drowning in a reality where you feel hopeless about money and have all the proof in the world to back up that feeling of hopelessness, to be told to take the matter of abundance into your own two hands and start creating it, feels like cruelty. Feels like someone watching you drown in mud and telling you to get yourself out with your own two hands, like they do not relate in any way to how ridiculously, impossibly hard it is. The thing is, I do know. I do know how hard it is, when you were never financially educated and when you are buried in negative beliefs about money and when you have a mountain of painful experiences with money haunting you and when you can’t seem to get out of the hole no matter what you do. And it is important for you to feel more empowered than this about money. And one step towards that empowerment is financial education. And part of that education today is to understand why the lottery is not financial empowerment.
Any discussion that involves sex or gender or polarity is very difficult to have in today’s world. Our perspectives are muddied by misinformation. They are muddied by traditional cultural archetypes and gender associations. They are muddied by the trauma inherent in the collective human story of sex and gender across history. They are also muddied by our own personal traumas that involve sex and gender. There is so much pain and fear involved. And seeing as how these discussions relate to everyone, absolutely everyone has skin in the game.
If you have spent any time in new age spiritual circles, you have probably heard people say that each and every person has both feminine and masculine within them. And that what is healthy (the ideal state of being) is when their masculine and feminine energies are balanced. This argument is often used to shoot down the idea that women need to be in their feminine and men need to be in their masculine in order to be in a state of alignment and have a healthy relationship with one another. Today, I’m going to present an alternative perspective. One that is sure to ruffle some feathers. But, let’s strap on our seat belts and get going.
The argument that each and every person has both feminine and masculine within them, and that the goal is for your masculine and feminine energies to be balanced, rests on the recognition of duality in this universe. That part of the picture of creation itself is the existence of masculine and feminine. And that you can divide all things into the camp of masculine or feminine. These philosophies tend to be especially focused on qualities. For example, you could divide traits like assertiveness, direction, stability, strength and action into the masculine camp and things like receptivity, intuition, nurturing, wisdom and creativity into the feminine camp. This philosophy goes further to assert that if you possess too much of any one polarity, you end up in the shadow of that polarity. So, in order to be healthy and in alignment, you must try to achieve balance. To cultivate both your feminine side and your masculine side.
Well, the truth is far bigger than people like to make it when they argue that you have both masculine and feminine within you. What is true at one level is that you have the universe within you. You are a fractal of the greater universe. And given that this is the case, all things are within you. This includes masculinity and femininity. But this also includes every other possible thing in existence. What is true at one level is oneness, non-duality. And at the same time, what is true at one level is duality. In this time space reality, you made the choice to play in and experience duality. You made a choice to experience through the perspective of a physical human. And as a specific sex, gender or polarity. This is true even if a person doesn’t fit the typical male or female categories because they represent a variation of the two polarities. This was not an accident. You knew that doing so would best serve your personal expansion and with it, universal consciousness and expansion. In the same way that you made a decision to be human, you made a decision to polarize. You came here to be a unique expression of that picture of polarity. You did this because you knew it would serve this specific incarnation. You did not do this in error. It is not something you came here to transcend yourself out of or to correct.
Most people come into this life as a specific polarity in order to master something within the camp of femininity or masculinity. And in alignment with their life purpose, the embodiment they chose allows them to embody and express something (or a great many things) within the camp of masculine or feminine. To be truly conscious, we must be able to hold both the reality of oneness and dualism. Both the realities of identification and disidentification. We came to play in both. And contrary to the currently popular view, there is lots of personal and spiritual growth in the experience of dualism, including conscious polarity.
The belief that every person has both feminine and masculine within them. And that the ideal state of being, is when their masculine and feminine energies are balanced, can put a person severely out of alignment with their thought form as well as their temporal embodiment. The concept of you exists before the physical body does. When a stream of consciousness is projecting itself forth into a physical manifestation of a human, it first creates a thought form. This thought form will fit into the polarity of either feminine or masculine or rarely, represent some variation of the two polarities, with the conditions for the physical body then usually following suit. As you can see in my wording, there are some rare exceptions. A person’s pre-birth intention determines the polarity they choose. All people did not come to this life to transcend polarity. Rather, for most people, fully embodying their unique natural, authentic expression of the polarity they chose is to be in a state of alignment with their life purpose and thus their thought form and thus their physical embodiment.
Now let’s look at the body. A human being is not a frog or a clownfish or a banana slug. A human body does not change its polarity in the same way that the bodies of certain other species do. Human sex chromosomes lack plasticity. This was a decision made far before the human species existed. Basically, physical polarity is not as flexible as many people would wish it were. If the human body was, no person would need to get a hormonal or surgical sex change.
And so, here is the first major fundamental crack in the argument that every person has both feminine and masculine within them. And that the ideal state of being, is when their masculine and feminine energies are perfectly balanced. To make this claim and for it to hold water so to speak, you need to divorce energy from the body entirely. Meaning the body and its polarity is just some independent entity that has nothing to do with the psyche nor a person’s energy. You cannot do this. Period the end. It isn’t how this universe works. There is a profound interconnectedness between these aspects of you. And what happens on one level, affects the other. Your physical incarnation is an extension or condensing of the energetic dimensions of you. If what was true was that you are a perfect balance of masculine and feminine, people’s bodies would be naturally intersex or would have no sex at all. You would see a plasticity. If this plasticity existed, men could simply develop the capacity to give birth by developing their feminine side. You don’t embody everything all at once in this one incarnation. If you did, and your incarnation was a direct reflection of the highest dimensional truth, you would have no issue turning into a tree, much less turning into a woman or man or erasing sex and gender all together.
Though everyone falls somewhere on the scale of polarity (and we are talking about originally, not about adaptive strategies that change the picture of a person’s gender and polarity), what you will see as a general rule, is that a woman’s wellbeing mentally, emotionally and physically will start to decline when her life experience requires her to consistently bring forth and be in the masculine polarity. It is not compatible with the female embodiment. And a man’s wellbeing mentally, emotionally and physically will start to decline when his life experience requires him to consistently bring forth and be in the feminine polarity. It is not compatible with the male embodiment.
For the argument to hold water, you need to either divorce the body from the energetic dimensions of a person entirely, or you must claim that a person being born female or male means they have an excess of one or the other energy (something not good) and thus, must overcompensate for that by females cultivating their masculinity or males cultivating their femininity. Play out that idea both personally and globally. Also, recognize the inherent resistance to your own embodiment in this idea.
It is at this point that I need to insert a little history lesson. So many of our current ideas about spirituality and awakening are a Hodge podge collection of different philosophies coming from the Eastern world. Philosophies that people in the spiritual world unfortunately tend to regard as perfect doctrine. It is a trend for the philosophies of the Eastern world to divorce the body from spirit. So many of them are resistant to the body rather than integrative of the body. Many of them see all forms as empty of inherent existence… The body itself and all identifications, including sex and gender as a delusion. The goal of many of them is to disidentify from the body and transcend the body. This is deeply problematic.
The traditions that influenced current Western spirituality the very most were Taoist, Buddhist and Yogic traditions. Well, what most people don’t know is that Taoist and Yogic tradition completely disagreed about the classification of the core principle of masculinity and femininity. In Taoism, the feminine, yin is associated with the void, darkness and the potential from which movement arises, where the masculine, yang, is the active, pushing force of creation and light. Whereas in Yogic philosophy, the masculine, Shiva represents pure, unchanging consciousness and stillness (the silent witness). And the feminine, Shakti is seen as the activating power. The kinetic, creative energy that makes everything move and manifest. And many Buddhist traditions consider compassion, one of the traits that people believe to be uncontestably feminine, to be masculine instead. So, it isn’t like there is this one truth that all Eastern philosophies agree about.
Many people who support the idea that people have both masculine and feminine within them and that the ideal is to bring them into a state of perfect balance, love to point to the concept of Yin and Yang. But they do not understand that in ancient China, where this concept originates from, it was believed that a child being born a male or female was due to the dominance in either yin or yang energy at the time of conception. And that this obviously made the child either yin or yang dominant. An imbalance. Yet, they believed this specific imbalance to be a normal, healthy state of being that is essential to the balance of human relationships, human society, the earth and the universe itself. The Chinese view did not moralize or pathologize natural differences in the same way that we do in the Western world today. Rather, they believed in the functional harmony and correlation of all natural phenomena, including sex differences.
Beyond the Eastern world influence, this popular perspective was very much shaped by the modern psychologist Carl Jung. And guess what? Jung spent decades studying Eastern thought. His thoughts were influenced by Yogic philosophy, Hinduism and the I Ching of Taoism. He explicitly used the concept of Shiva and Shakti as well as Yin and Yang when he asserted that every man has an unconscious and repressed female side (Anima). And every woman has an unconscious and repressed male side (Animus). And that psychological completeness required integration of the two. He treated biological sex as merely a biological fact that contributed to a person’s persona, creating a kind of one-sidedness, which the psyche then seeks to correct. And that the ideal state is a kind of inner bi-genderism. And Jung really did not understand how much his own classifications of energies and qualities were influenced by the cultural attitudes and rigid gender roles and associations of his day. Gender roles which did not reflect the truth about femininity and masculinity.
With so many of the qualities that we sort into the camp of masculine or feminine, there is a conscious expression of that quality. And there is an unconscious expression of that same quality. For example, courage. Courage in its conscious form can inspire others. It can allow you to overcome fear, to achieve goals, to build confidence. In its shadow form, it can draw you over and over again, even unnecessarily into dangerous situations, it can lead you to burnout if you’re always facing challenges and are living in stress, it bulldozes past good judgment in that it can push you to take on a negative consequence that would have been best to avoid.
Trying to succeed in life by figuring out what qualities fit into the masculine camp and what qualities fit into the feminine camp and then trying to achieve some balance by practicing the perfect proportion of each, is an abstract and impossible task. A far better approach to life is to simply commit to being conscious relative to any quality you encounter internal to you or external to you. And to think in terms of antidotes. To be conscious relative to a quality means to see it fully, including both its potential benefit and its potential detriment. It is to ensure to the best of your ability that you are operating from the beneficial expression of that quality, rather than the detrimental expression of that quality. Using our example, this means becoming aware of the full truth about courage and making sure to use it to inspire others, to help you to overcome fear, to achieve your goals and to build your confidence rather than to draw you unnecessarily into dangerous situations, lead you into burnout and constant stress and bulldoze past good judgment.
If you are thinking in terms of antidotes, rather than thinking about what is male and what is female, think of the potentially detrimental aspect of any quality as having an antidote. Something that can counteract the negative effect of that quality. Keep in mind, this isn’t always a quality’s logical opposite. For example, if you take courage, the antidote to the potential detrimental effects of its shadow expression may be something like wisdom or self-kindness. And you develop that alongside courage or as an antidote to the courage you already have.
When people argue against conscious polarity and for the philosophy that we have been discussing today, they often argue that the goal is to be whole in and of yourself. Not be dependent on anyone outside yourself for your needs or a sense of “completeness”. For many people, the idea of lacking anything that would put them in the position to need another person, makes them feel too vulnerable. And so, they would rather find a spiritual justification for being an island unto themselves. They like the idea of making themselves a complete, self-sustaining, independent island so that the relationships they have with other people can be between two complete, self-sustaining, independent islands.
People in general are so relationally traumatized that they do not like the idea of achieving a state of harmony and wellbeing in life through any external means. It makes our wellbeing dependent on something outside of us. And we are not brave enough to admit to this inherent vulnerability. We can see it in other species, but not our own. We can barely handle this truth when it comes to air, food, water and our basic relational needs. So, we’d rather tell ourselves spiritual stories that make us feel more empowered and independent and therefore safe. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Dependency Needs, The Thing That No One Will Accept They Have.
So many people that align with this philosophy are traumatized specifically regarding gender. Most especially, the gender associated with their biological sex. And this argument serves as a counter reaction to it. Also, as an avoidance strategy of that trauma. For example, a person who felt no freedom in identity or ability to be authentic because they grew up with the pain of constantly being told who they should be and how they should be based on what gender they are, may adopt this idea because it allows them to avoid all sense of restriction. Or for example, a woman may have been consistently suppressed and prevented from all kinds of things based on being a “girl”. So, this philosophy allows her to fight back at that and assert that she isn’t wrong for those behaviors or those ways of being or those career ambitions and to let her authenticity out. Or for example, a man who grew up with a great deal of shame about being a man, may adopt this idea that he and all men within society need to develop their feminine side, because it serves as a path to moral redemption because he feels guilt for what his forefathers did as well as for even being a man. And it also serves as a way of canvassing his own goodness, setting himself apart in people’s eyes from the men who came before him. Or for example, a woman may be in a lot of pain about the fact that human society requires her to be so masculine in order to thrive within its current structure. She may adopt this belief because she can tell herself that the pain that she feels is just a natural growing pain and even a healthy one, because she is developing her masculine side. And she can feel safer within society when she does not recognize society as antagonistic to her wellbeing. Or for example, a person may have experienced tons of pain in relationships with the opposite sex in general. This belief allows them to justify staying safe by not actually needing them. With this belief, you can feel empowered to be able to be an island unto yourself, tell yourself that you have no need for and no dependence on the thing that hurt you. And not have to face the pain and terror inherent in the interconnection and interdependence that comes with life, much less being in a specific polarity and that implying that their sense of wellbeing is dependent in any way on the presence and contributions of the opposite polarity.
Humanity needs to wake up about something. And that is that sex, gender, polarity, gender roles and gender norms were not and are not in and of themselves the problem. The actual problem is human cruelty. Not to argue for or against gender roles, what if I told you that there are plenty of species within our vast universe that have the equivalent of gender roles and gender norms where there is no pain experienced as a result of this, because the highest commitment is to the wellbeing of each member within the society. And this means that society is set up to prevent the suffering of any member of society and be immediately responsive to any individual who is being caused pain, not just force them to put up with it. I’ll give you an example of what I mean if this principal were applied here on earth. No woman would ever have found herself in a situation where she was not provided for and yet, was prevented from earning an income on account of being a woman. Nor that she must leave an infant to go back to work immediately because a woman must function like a man in the work place. No man would ever have been systematically separated from his own emotions to serve government aim, like men were from the eighteenth century through the industrial revolution and on through the 20th century. Indoctrinated with the idea that this is natural and good and must happen because he is a man. If an individual were to not fit into the norm in some way, then there would be a flexibility around their specific unique circumstance. Not an ostracization or an expectation that they suppress themselves so as to fit into a box they clearly don’t fit into. Exceptions to every rule are recognized.
As long as we are scapegoating sex and gender and gender roles and gender norms and polarity, we will fail to recognize the real problem that needs to be solved, which is human cruelty. People play zero sum games against each other. They do not prioritize taking care of each other’s wellbeing and best interests. They cause each other to suffer and they tolerate suffering. And human beings have used sex and gender to carry out this cruelty. They run just as much a risk today of using ideals of bi-genderism or genderless-ness to carry out cruelty.
This philosophy we have been discussing today has an incredible way of preventing people from actually facing their own pain and traumas relative to sex, gender, polarity and even their pain within current human society. This belief is used to cover all manner of shadows. People would do better to take this idea about people having both polarities within them. And to ask themselves “If this were not true at all, what would that mean for me and why would that be so bad?” And to then begin to resolve all of what this question reveals.
Continuing on with the philosophy of being whole in and of yourself. Not being dependent on anyone outside yourself for your needs or a sense of completeness. People put this idea forward as a more spiritual state of being. And at the very same time, they often support the idea that it is important to transcend the ego. What they don’t see is how egoic their philosophy is. It is to draw a line of pure separation between self and other so as to engage purely in and with the self. If they were truly in alignment with the highest spiritual principals, they would not draw such a line. They would not discriminate against an external integration between feminine and masculine, in favor of an internal integration between the masculine and feminine. And so, they could see that conscious polarity within relationship is in fact a path to awakening.
The belief that each and every person has both feminine and masculine within them and that what is right is for a person’s masculine and feminine energies to be balanced, enables us to continue to maintain a society that is not conducive to the wellbeing of individuals within either polarity or within any variation of the two polarities. It prevents us from creating a society that is actually configured correctly and that accommodates for the unique needs and unique strengths and unique picture of wellbeing of both men and women as well as those individuals who represent a variation of either. Why? Because it forces us to see women and men and all people in general as the same. It paints a picture that both men and women can and should be able to thrive in any setting and situation, provided they simply draw forth their masculine or feminine energies. And this, is simply not reality. Trying to achieve a sense of equality in the human rights sense of the term by trying to establish sameness, is a huge mistake. One that is destroying the fabric of male-female relationships within society as we speak. When you try to get rid of polarity by trying to get everyone on earth to be either bigender or a-gender, you start to see a total breakdown in the wellbeing of people as well as a total breakdown of male-female relationships. And this ripples out and negatively affects every other element of society.
In a society where sex and gender have been used against the best interests of people for thousands of years, gender norms do not necessarily reflect the truth of masculinity or femininity. Nor do they necessarily reflect the truth of healthy polarity. Humanity is at the very beginning of weeding through all of this mess. But a great many people are currently walking down the very tempting road of using thoughts like this one that we have been talking about today, to bypass this mess rather than to weed through it.
At face value, it’s really hard to believe that when you have something that you really, really need and really, really want, the very thing that may be getting in the way of you getting what you want, is you. It seems totally counter intuitive. But the reality is that we all have ways that we prevent ourselves from getting the very thing that we want.
Let’s look at the number one way that we get in the way of what we need and want most is: Our protector personas. For most of you reading this, it isn’t going to make automatic sense, so let me explain. People adjust and modify themselves according to the environment they find themselves in, as well as the other people around them. This begins when we are children. We adapt to our parent’s personalities, beliefs, wants and needs, likes and dislikes. We adapt to our culture. We adapt to the language we are taught to speak. We adapt to the schools we are educated in. We adapt to the peers we end up with. We adapt to society at large. And we especially adapt to traumatic situations we may find ourselves in.
A simple definition of trauma is distress without resolve. What should stick out to you about this definition of trauma is that this could mean anything from an infant being weaned to chronic experiences where you end up feeling like your worth to others is only about the quality of your performance all the way to a veteran watching comrades being blown up by landmines at war to complex sex abuse and trafficking. Trauma is something that happens in all demographics, across all societal classes, to people of any age, race, class, religion or sex. There are so many types of trauma that a person can experience. Everyone has trauma. Everyone has experienced distress in their lifetime that is unresolved. Everyone has made adaptations to their personality as a result of experiencing trauma. When we experience trauma, we split our own consciousness. It is an act of self-preservation. When we experience trauma, we create a split between the vulnerable self and the self that coped with that vulnerability so as to self-preserve in that specific situation. We identify with the parts of ourselves that coped to self-preserve. These aspects protected us. They allowed us to stay as far away from our vulnerability as possible. For example, imagine that a child experiences a blindsiding abandonment. One that they didn’t understand. In that moment, the child may dis-identify with the aspect of themselves that is confused and terrified and powerless and that doesn’t understand why. And to the opposite, develop an adaptation of figuring everything out and knowing everything they can about human behavior. This child believes that if he just knew everything about human behavior, he would not be blindsided anymore by people behaving in painful ways and that he can even prevent such things from happening. This protector has developed to give him greater sense of control in his relationships with others. Maybe this person goes on to be a counselor or a psychiatrist. This protector persona is the part of him that he is going to identify with.
Or, to give you another example, let’s say that a little girl grows up with a disengaged father. And as a result, she is not protected. She will feel exposed and without social care and afraid and starved for safety. She may adapt by creating a persona that can fend for itself. She may adapt by developing a protector self that is domineering and independent and scrappy and that can rise to any occasion.
Every person alive has protector personas. And they represent an adaptive strategy to the exact and specific unsafety that we faced as a result of our unique life experience. They may be the thing that helped us to adapt to our life experience and survive those traumas. But there comes a point when they inhibit us. They prevent us from getting the very things we are the most desperate for. And they prevent our personal expansion. This is especially true of our primary protector persona. Our primary way of staying safe.
So that you understand this, I’m going to give you three examples. First, meet Julian. By the time that Julian was a teenager, he realized that there was nothing he could do to get the people around him to feel good. His home was always a cess pool of conflict and his mother was chronically depressed. His powerlessness to making things better emotionally, led him to figuring out a way to escape from his own emotions as well as everyone else’s… Positive focus. Julian developed an adaptive strategy of only looking at the bright side. He crafted a Pollyanna self that was not interested in any negativity of any kind. The problem is, now Julian is in his 40s. And he is desperate to find a compatible partner and have kids. He’s always wanted a family of his own. According to Julian, the last three women that Julian has been in a relationships with, all just reached this point where they started having issues and kind of lost it and then just eventually left him. One even cheated with a friend of his. He doesn’t get why this keeps happening. The thing is, if you talk to all three women, you find out fast that they all couldn’t take the relationship anymore because they felt so alone and so judged in the relationship. Why did they feel this way? Because Julian’s toxic positivity protector persona, made it so that any time they shared their true feelings, they were dismissed and even shamed for having those feelings and thinking the way they think. They started to feel like there was no space in the relationship for emotions or truth because Julian made it very clear that there was only one acceptable thing: Positivity. They started to feel guilt and shame for having negative feelings. On top of this, Julian turned into a gas lighter without knowing it. Whenever something bad happened, he would simply negate that something bad was happening and reframe it. This caused two of the women to doubt their own sanity and seek out a psychologist. On top of this, because Julian would not take any negative feedback seriously, he would not change any of the things that these women needed adjusted in the relationship. He was fundamentally unresponsive. Julian is in a place where his primary protector persona is the very thing standing in the way of his deepest desire in life.
Now meet Nayeli. Nayeli was raised in Compton, Los Angles, an area plagued with poverty and gang violence. Nayeli’s never knew her dad and her mom was a meth addict. Nayeli really had to fend for herself. She developed the adaptive strategy of becoming masculine. She started to emulate the men who had the most power in her culture. The thing is, those were gang members. She started dressing in masculine clothes, acting tough and displaying a hard, rigid, aggressive body language; as well as a threatening manner of talking. She took every responsibility on her own shoulders, so as to avoid further calamity. She identified with a part of herself who could handle life on the streets. The thing is, Nayeli is desperate, and I mean desperate for caretaking. She is desperate to be able to experience what some other girls she sees at school have experienced. To feel safe and protected in a way where she can be feminine and soft and playful. Like she was once, when she was very, very young. She often mocks these girly girls. But underneath that is an extreme jealousy of what they have that she doesn’t. The thing is, the way her protector persona behaves, she is a magnet for men who like a woman who can fend for herself, so they don’t have to take any responsibility for her. On top of this, because she takes responsibility for everything, she doesn’t even register when people are putting pressure on her that isn’t hers to carry. So, she ends up carrying all the weight for everyone in her life, at home and at work. Because she signals that she is masculine, the very men who adore feminine women and would absolutely caretake a woman, don’t have any interest in Nayeli. They are put off by her. And she does not make any of the choices that a feminine woman would make that would put her in a different position. A position to have the very experience that she wants. She would have to make choices that send the message that she wants what she wants. Not choices that send the message: Get away from me, I can take care of myself.
Last, let’s meet Miles. Miles was raised by a mother and in a society that really embraced the women’s rights movement. One tiny problem with this is that Mile’s mother hates men. So, she took great care to raise her son up to be the exact opposite of any man that hurt her or that hurt women throughout history. She especially felt threatened by a man having any power. Miles adapted to his environment by becoming the epitome of a “nice boy”. He developed a protector persona that was super compliant, and always ready to please. One that is quiet and controlled. One that looks for leadership and is willing to follow. A persona that comes across as very weak, so as to disarm those around him. Miles needs and wants to make something of himself. And he is at a place where he has an opportunity to start a business with a friend of his. He’s never been more excited about something in his life. But, to be a success at this new venture and to make something of himself, he needs to be taken seriously. He needs to be able to lead a team. He needs to be able to talk in a commanding enough way that investors are willing to invest and clients are willing to buy. This, isn’t happening. Let’s fast forward. Miles clams up whenever he needs to talk. He lets other people take over. He looks for leadership, instead of taking the lead and so his team does not respect him as a leader. He doesn’t set boundaries or play hard ball, so he lets contractors get away with terrible things and agrees to contracts he should never agree to. His friend, who is his business partner is feeling like he is going to need to somehow get Miles out of the business because Miles’s behavior is a liability and he just isn’t able to be in a leadership position. Now, Miles’s protector persona is the very thing sabotaging the very thing he wants most.
Because our protector personas are the thing standing in the way of what we want most, and are therefore standing in the way of both personal and universal expansion, our protector personas will be broken one way or another. This is especially true now, in this universal pressure cooker dynamic that we are currently in. We will be snapped. Our protector personas will not work for us anymore. But seeing as how they are the thing that we are using to protect ourselves, this process of losing our protector personas is a deeply difficult and terrifying process. We will be forced to face the very things we are the most terrified of. We will be forced to be re-united with the vulnerable aspects of ourselves that were hiding behind those protectors all along. Parts of ourselves that we lost touch with and even awareness of long ago.
What we can do is to get out ahead of this process. We can start to recognize the ways that we keep ourself safe or “successful”. And start to see how these behaviors that are associated with our adaptive strategy, are in fact opposing what we need and want most. One exercise that you can use to do this is to identify a trauma that you have experienced in your life. This should be an experience that didn’t feel good that happened in your life where you felt distress and where there was really never any resolve to what happened. This could be something you judge as really big and/or something that you judge as small. It could be a one time event, or a chronic experience. Next to the trauma, you’re write down what you made that experience mean. What beliefs did you develop as a result of it? What decisions might you have made as a result of it?
And next to each one of those answers, you are going to write down what changed about you and your life as a result of that experience. Did your personality change in any way? Did your behavior change in any way? Did you change what you did every day? Did you adopt any coping mechanisms? See if you can identify the adaptive strategy you adopted and therefore identify a protector persona.
And next to that, you are going to write down how the thoughts, decisions, behaviors and actions associated with that protector persona could be getting in the way of what you want. You could do this with any adverse experience you had that you can identify. The more experiences you do this exercise with, the better.
Without rejecting or condemning this aspect of you (it is after all trying to keep you safe in the best way it knows how), consciously work to change your perspective that this persona and its behaviors are keeping you safe and guaranteeing you success in life. And consciously start making different decisions and practice different behaviors and take different actions. Things that are more in-alignment with what you are needing and wanting.
If you would like to work directly with any protector personas, or call forth any aspect of you that may be more aligned as an internal resource for getting what you need and want, you can do so using parts work. If you’d like to learn about parts work, you can watch my video titled: What is Parts Work And How To Do Parts Work. Also, it may really benefit you to understand these protector personas of yours better by watching another video of mine titled: There is No Such Thing as Self Sabotage.
By consciously integrating the protector personas that are getting in the way of what you need and want, you will begin to align with what you need and want more and more. And when all of you is aligned with what you truly want, it tends to become your lived experience.
When it comes to abundance in general (and for most people, making money is a big part of this) beliefs are a very big deal. Why are they such a big deal? Not only do they have a major effect on your overall vibration, beliefs also dictate behavior. So, if you have beliefs that are oppositional to abundance, you will behave in ways that are oppositional to abundance. And so, it is really important to identify and change these beliefs. In today’s episode, I’m going to teach you how to do exactly this.
The very best way to identify the beliefs that block abundance is to use desires. As people, we are constantly wanting. This is a subconscious process that for lack of a better way of putting it, happens through you as a result of your life experience. Any point of resistance that you hit regarding the thing that you want, points to an abundance limiting belief. For example, if a person realizes: I want an ice-cream. Immediately, they may hit limit, limit, prevention, block to getting ice-cream. Limits such as the thought that they will have to get in the car to go get one from a store and they don’t have a car at the moment and they don’t want to go ride a bike all the way. Or blocks like “I shouldn’t be eating an ice cream, I’m too fat anyway and the ice-cream will just make me fatter”. Or the feeling that they don’t have the money for it. If you look at any of these points of resistance that arise regarding the thing that you want, you can start to do a kind of easter egg hunt for the beliefs that are inherent within that resistance.
If what has presented itself is not a negative belief in and of itself straight off the bat, try to see if you can recognize the belief or multiple beliefs hidden within it. Like an easter egg hiding in the grass. Only, not a feel good one. So that you get this idea, let’s look again at the ice cream example. Let’s say the block that the person hit with wanting the ice cream was: I will have to get in the car to go get one from a store and I don’t have a car at the moment and I don’t want to go ride a bike all the way. This person might notice that their mentality towards getting the ice cream that it is too hard to get. Or it isn’t worth the effort. The belief hiding in this may be: The things I want are too hard to get. Or, the things I want are not worth the effort. And these beliefs, as you could see could drastically influence their behavior and drastically oppose their abundance. Or for example, if the resistance you hit was: I shouldn’t be eating an ice cream, I’m too fat anyway and the ice-cream will just make me fatter. You could notice that there is a feeling that the things you want are bad for you and that they are going to lead to worse consequences. If you really ask yourself, do I feel this way about the things I want in general? And you might recognize the belief: If I allow myself to experience something that makes me happy, bad things happen as a result. Or, say that you ran into the feeling that you don’t have the money for it. You could see that you see money as the limiting factor regarding your desires. This means you have a painful relationship with money. There may be several beliefs this points to, such as: I can’t get what I want without money, money limits my ability to have what I want, money is painful, I am cursed when it comes to money, money does not come easy for me etc.
Any question you could ever ask yourself regarding WHY you don’t have the things you want or don’t have money, also point to these beliefs that are limiting your abundance. For example: Imagine that you want to have lots of money. If you consider: Why don’t I have lots of money, you might say: “There are no opportunities for me like there are for other people”. This is a belief in and of itself. Or let’s say that you notice yourself feeling like it is really unfair that other people have opportunities, even when they don’t deserve them. This points to the belief that you have to deserve anything you get. And maybe the reason you think that the other people who have opportunities, don’t deserve them because they are not good people. This points to the belief that good people should be rewarded with money. This points to the belief “money is something that is rewarded by something else”, like a higher power. This line of thinking also begs the question: Why do other people have wealth, regardless of whether they are good people or not, and I don’t? This might uproot the belief: I am being abused by the universe. All of these beliefs are oppositional to abundance.
Another thing to look at is any “yes, but…” counter arguments in your own mind regarding the things you want. The “yes, but…” counter arguments are usually beliefs in disguise. For example, say you identify that you want to live in a specific neighborhood that feels more affluent. You are likely to be thinking of all the arguments FOR it. But to each of these arguments, comes a counter argument. So, say the argument was “the crime rate is going to be way lower.” But to this, you notice the counter argument: Yes, but I’m going to be stressed out trying to afford it. The belief you identify may be: A wealthy neighborhood is out of my reach. Or affluence is out of my reach. Or the things I want are out of my reach.
Another thing you can look at is any justifications that you use for not already having what you want or for not pursuing what you want. For example, say that you want to own your own company. If you consider why you are not in that position already, you may realize that you stayed in a stable job because you had financial security. This may lead you to recognize the beliefs: I am only safe if I work for someone else. Or the people in my life will leave me if I don’t provide financial security. Or financial security matters more than pursuing my dreams. Or I am not capable of making a business a success.
Another thing to look at is any painful or traumatic experience you had regarding something that you wanted. Perhaps it was a chronic painful experience related to you wanting or getting things in general. And with each event, ask yourself, what belief was generated in me as a result of going through this experience? For example, say that you were desperate for a kitten, but the day you got the kitten, your brother let it out the door and it got run over by a car. You may realize that because of this, you developed the belief: Anything I want, will be taken away. Or what I want is not meant to be mine. Or the universe is against me.
Or say that when you were young, you were taken to a toy store to look at things. But because your parents wouldn’t let you get anything, you developed the belief: I can’t have what I want and I am powerless to getting what I want.
So, here is what you do:
Identify a belief. And with any belief you identify, you then:
Ask yourself: Can I be 100% sure that this is true?
Ask yourself what thoughts you think, what you feel, what decisions you make, how do you behave and what actions do you take or don’t take when you believe this thought?
Identify the emotional payoff that you get as a result of holding onto the old belief. Essentially, what is the positive trade off that you get from holding onto the original belief?
Turn the belief around to yourself and to its opposite, for example: I am being abused by the universe becomes: I am being abused by me. And I am being loved by the universe. And come up with 4 items of proof that these opposite thoughts are true.
Come up with alternative evidence to destroy the emotional payoff that you identified.
Identify a beneficial belief you would rather have instead of this detrimental one, a belief that aligns with abundance rather than opposes it.
Come up with alternative evidence to destroy the original belief as well as proof that backs up your new chosen belief so that you develop a belief in it instead.
As you can probably see, most people have a collection of beliefs that are acting as an oppositional force to their abundance. You don’t have to panic that until you clear up all of them, you will see no improvement. That isn’t how this works. Rather, each individual one that you work directly with, will allow more abundance into your life experience. It will shock you to experience just how much of a positive impact changing these beliefs that limit and block your abundance will have on your life experience.
We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.
