If you’ve been watching videos and interviews or attending my workshops, you have probably heard mention of The Completion Process. But you may not have a solid idea about exactly what it is and what it is for. If this is the case, this video is for you.
Simply put, The Completion Process is a process which helps you to resolve and heal from trauma. If we distill it down to its essence, The Completion Process is a process where you deliberately use a trigger to go back to an unresolved trauma that is at the root of that trigger, so as to consciously re-experience it, reverse the process of dissociation and fragmentation, resolve the distress that is still unresolved, and gain massive awareness about yourself that can then translate to positive changes in your daily life. But wait a minute here if you feel like this doesn’t apply to you, because most people have no idea that they have experienced trauma. And yet the reality is, all people have experienced some kind of trauma.
So, we need to take a fresh, new look at trauma. First of all, what is trauma? 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 experienced distress in their lifetime that is unresolved. Everyone has made adaptations to their personality as a result of experiencing trauma. And everyone’s current, adult life was influenced by the traumas they experienced in childhood. And it is in fact these events that lie at the root of the vast majority of the problems we face and things we struggle with in our adult lives. I’m going to say this again because it’s so important to understand. The root of the various issues you are facing in your adult life (things you have no idea have anything to do with past traumas that you have experienced) is trauma.
Here is a very small list of what can be caused by unresolved trauma. Stuckness, sexual issues, indecisiveness, addictions, financial blockages, loneliness, lack of purpose, fear of failure, the feeling of not being good enough, social anxieties, numbness, chronic stress and overwhelm, shame and guilt, patterns of self-sabotage, mental illnesses, anxiety, powerlessness, control issues, physical health ailments, identity crisis, perfectionism, codependency, fear of intimacy, burnout, trouble setting boundaries, eating disorders, all kinds of relationship problems in any type of relationship, PTSD, chronic dissatisfaction in life and so much more.
Trauma changes the course of our lives. When a trauma happens, we experience distress. We make that painful thing that we have experienced mean something. And that in turn alters the way we think, the choices we make and the things we do. People are often totally unaware of just how much the traumas they have experienced influenced the course of their lives.
Now, let’s go a little deeper. As I mentioned in the beginning of this video, The Completion Process uses a trigger as a doorway to resolving the trauma that is linked to it. A trigger is anything that causes you to recall or bring to the surface any element of a traumatic memory from your past. It can be a word, a tone of voice, a smell, a sensation, a face, a place, or any situation or thing. You might not consciously know what is causing you to suddenly feel sick, hurt, anxious, or uneasy, but your subconscious mind knows.
In this way, a trigger is a reminder of a previous trauma and it is a signal to address the issue. Despite the fact that triggers are often very unpleasant, triggers are not actually negative. Rather, they are an invitation for you to resolve what is unresolved within you. They are an invitation to re-integrate fractured parts of yourself back into your being. And become whole again.
When memory surfaces as the result of a trigger, it doesn’t necessarily come back all at once in one, neat and coherent chunk. This is because memory is often stored in a fragmented way. The sights associated with a memory can be stored separately from the sounds associated with a memory or the feelings associated with a memory. What this means is, a trigger may cause only the feeling associated with a memory to surface. When this happens, a person is experiencing memory recall, but only the felt aspect of memory recall. For example, imagine that a woman is at a mall and she walks through an aisle where she suddenly smells the same cologne that the man who molested her when she was young wore during the assault. She might not even consciously realize that she has smelled the smell or that it reminds her specifically of this experience. She might suddenly feel a sense of doom, her heart might start pounding. She might feel totally isolated regardless of there being so many other people in the room. And she might feel a panic attack coming on. Because she has not consciously put two and two together, the experience she is having doesn’t make sense in the context of her environment. The smell of the deodorant was a trigger and we may now say that she is triggered.
The Completion Process can, in general, be divided into steps. However, it is meant to flow as one continuous process.
Here is an overview of the steps:
1.When you experience a trigger, you are going to turn your attention inward and place all of your attention on that feeling, with unconditional presence. Essentially, you will be doing a practice of Emotional Experiencing.
2. You are going to invite the memory attached to the trigger to surface.
3. You are going to choose with your free will to re-experience the memory (in 1st person perspective if possible), opening up to the full sensory experience of it with curiosity and accepting what happened exactly as it was, without changing anything. And you are going to validate the feeling/experience contained within that memory.
4. The process is going to switch from an active witnessing experience to an active visualization process and you are going to bring your adult self into the memory. You can choose to either experience this from the perspective of your adult self, or the perspective of your child-self within the scene. Or, you may choose to switch back and forth.
5.The adult is going to provide some resolve for the child regarding the traumatic experience within this memory. One of the most important aspects of this, is for the adult self to validate the child self’s emotions and experience.
6. Once some relief is felt, you are going to speed up the healing process by calling back any other potential aspects of yourself that may have fractured off from you in this traumatic experience.
7.You are then going to meet the child's/children’s (plural) needs within the scene of the memory. This step is designed to bring resolve to the distress being experienced within the memory.
8. Once you have met the child’s needs, you are going to give child the choice to stay within the now altered memory, making sure that the child’s reason for wanting to stay is actually in alignment with resolve for the child. Or you are going to take the child to your Safe Haven.
9. If the child chose to go to the Safe Haven, you are going to bring child to the Safe Haven and deactivate the memory.
10. You are then going to create purification and healing for the child (or children) to create clearing and distance from the past.
11. You are then going to meet the child's needs and create more resolve for the traumatic experience they are now out of and away from, but this time, within the context of the Safe Haven.
12. Once the child is in that state of improvement, you are going to provide the option for the child to stay in the Safe Haven, or to merge with you in the here and now. Either option is perfectly fine. And given the answer, you are going to do whatever brings about a sense of completion regarding the experience.
From that experience of completion regarding the resolve of that traumatic experience, you are going to return to conscious perspective in the here and now, just like you would if you were coming out of a meditation.
And based off of what you experienced and became aware of, you are going to decide upon how to practically and tangibly implement that resolve or improvement in your day-to-day life in the here and now. The Completion Process leads you to the unresolved experience so that you can consciously create that resolve. When we resolve distress, rather than cope with it, we are able to weave the negative experience into the fabric of who we are in a way that it benefits us. We are no longer plagued by painful negative emotion about it. We are able to live in the present moment, without it feeling like we keep getting dragged back to the painful memory of an experience. Essentially, what happened in the past no longer controls the way you feel or behave in the present. This doesn’t mean that we feel good about it or thankful it happened. Rather, it will no longer feel like a “live wound” that hurts when pressed or that you are still struggling with. Instead, it will feel like an inactive scar.
One thing to be aware of is that The Completion Process is not a trite mental exercise. It is a very, very deep healing process. And it changes your life. In the hours, days, weeks, and months that follow, it will cause you to make different choices, do different things, attract different people and not have the same reactions you had before. Healing is very different from pain relief. The vast majority of people find their way to spirituality and self-help through pain. This means they are in a state of distress. When people are in pain/distress they want two things, they want to heal (which is actual resolution for the problem itself) and they want immediate relief from the pain. But these two things can often be like two roads diverging in opposing directions. You are familiar with anesthetics, otherwise known as painkillers such as Novocain or Morphine. The benefits of anesthetics go without saying. But there is a downside to them if they are used in the wrong situations or the wrong ways. Pain exists for a reason. Pain is always the indication that something needs to be paid attention to, done or changed so a person can come back into alignment with wellbeing. For example, the pain of touching a hot stove is calling you to remove your hand. If you could not feel the pain, you would leave your hand on the stove and burn it completely. The Completion Process is not designed to just make things feel better. It is designed to create radical healing change. And that process does not always feel good.
Let me give you an example, so that you know what I mean. Let’s imagine that a woman decides to start using The Completion Process. The reality is that in her childhood, she lived in a dysfunctional home where she was treated like a doll rather than a child. Let’s imagine that her mother dressed her in whatever she wanted her to wear, only met her needs when she decided it was ok to have those needs, expected her to have the interests she wanted her to have, refused to recognize any boundaries and ignored her completely when she behaved anything less than sweet. This little girl had to abandon her sense of self to conform to her mother. She learned that this was the way to stay safe and have any chance at getting her needs met. Now fast forward. This woman, having adapted to her trauma, has chosen a life for herself that is a direct byproduct of those adaptations. The husband she chose. The life focus she chose. The friends she has. The way she dresses. Where she lives.
When she starts using The Completion Process, not only does she have to really see the reality of what was not ok about her childhood, and feel that pain deeply in her being, it isn’t like she is going to come out of the process and feel amazing towards the life she is living. Imagine that she chose to marry a man who, just like her mother, expects her to be a doll, nothing more than what he wants and expects her to be, it is unlikely that she will come out of The Completion Process and suddenly feel better in her particular marriage. It is more likely that she suddenly isn’t ok with the things she used to act like she was ok with. She will want change in her marriage. And how will her husband react to that? There is a real potential that he will react badly to that. And so, marital conflict will ensue. She has after all presented herself as one thing, only to begin changing into someone else, maybe someone he would not have wanted to marry in the first place. So, this means potentially even a divorce. When she is going through a process like that as a result of healing, it doesn’t feel good. It may feel necessary. But necessary things don’t always feel “good”. It will be an improvement, but it sure may not feel like that when you are in the middle of it. Because of this, it can sometimes feel like The Completion Process makes things worse in order to make them better. A person should not do The Completion Process if they are unwilling to making real, tangible changes to their life based on whatever their individual process reveals.
Another thing to be aware of is that people are often blindsided when they expect their families to be “on board” with their healing, only to find their own family opposing their healing. Families tend to be VERY resistant to The Completion Process as well as to me, as the creator of this process. And this is why… Family Systems are held together by patterns of interaction. These patterns of interaction keep them intact the way they are. And family systems are VERY resistant to change. What The Completion Process does, is to change these patterns. For example, imagine that a family has a pattern of the specific narrative “we are super close”. But then, a person goes through The Completion Process and faces the reality that no one in the family line has any emotional closeness at all. They get together on holidays, where they take group photos and give each other opportunities and resources, but no one really knows anyone else on a deeper, emotional level. When they try to bring up the idea that no one in the family is actually close, and suggest changing things to have deeper emotional connection, many members of the family (if not all) are likely to fight the idea and try to keep things the way they are; as well as to ardently defend that the way it is, is right and the new idea is wrong and bad. Or for example, imagine that a pattern a person has is doing what gets them approval in their family. They may do The Completion Process and realize they are totally without passion regarding what they are doing for a living and that they can’t keep living for the approval of others, no matter the other costs to themselves. They may quit their job, thereby breaking the pattern of behaving in a way to please the family rather than themselves. And this, is likely to trigger a full family system crisis. Certain family members are likely to see themselves as victims and treat that person as their villain. Some may make threats of withdrawal of support. Others are likely to blame The Completion Process itself for messing with the person’s mind. Others will start sending you slander about me. When you change, it forces any system that you are a part of to change too, most especially social systems, like families and friend groups etc. You can very easily find yourself in the position of the scapegoat when you are changing yourself, changing the way you interact with others and especially when you are trying to enroll any other people into a change. This doesn’t mean “don’t do it”. It means, be very smart about it and don’t simply expect a positive, supportive reaction. If you do get a supportive reaction and a willingness to change along with you, consider yourself part of the real blessed rarity.
When you can't resolve and integrate the experiences you have been through in your life, through no fault of your own, part of you remains frozen in time, effecting your entire life. And you deserve to live a life that is free from this effect. And so, I have created the Completion Process, so that you have a tool to bring about this healing so you can experience not only internal peace, but also fulfillment. If you are interested in learning more about this process as well as how to do it and if you are interested in trying it out for yourself, you have some options.
The first option is to do it through the E-course. I designed this e-course to really hold your hand and lead you through all the knowledge and different exercises as well as doing the process itself. If you like this option, you can find The Completion Process Course on my website at: tealswan.com
The second option is to be led through the process by a certified practitioner of the process. For years, I have been training people around the world to facilitate this process and having someone to do this with you, may feel like the support you need. If you like this option, you can visit: thecompletionprocess.com
And the third option is to read the book I wrote about it. This book is quite literally titled: The Completion Process. You can find it anywhere books are sold.
The Completion Process has transformed my own life. It has transformed the lives of millions of people around the world. And it can completely transform your life for the better.
Every person has experienced some kind of trauma in their life. But when people experience trauma, the vast majority of people cope with it. Coping is very different from healing. But these coping mechanisms give people the illusion that they are ok. This is compounded by the fact that society itself not only condones and supports coping, but also has a real blindness to trauma. The result is that we live in a society full of people who are traumatized, but whom don’t see that they have experienced trauma. A society full of people who need healing, but who don’t know that they need healing. Let’s take an in depth look at the main reasons why most people don’t see and recognize their traumas and in this same vein, why they don’t know they need healing.
Let’s start with why people don’t see or recognize their traumas. It may seem strange that we don’t see or recognize our traumas, given that traumas are such a stand out part of our lives. But there are several key reasons why this is the case.
This first big issue begins with the faulty definition people have of trauma. When most people think of trauma, they are thinking only of the things they judge as really big. Things like being sex trafficked or experiencing a high-speed car accident in which you lost someone you love. But the reality is, trauma is any situation that causes you distress, which is not resolved. This means that trauma is not only these things we judge as big and classically associate with the word trauma. It is also things like a baby being weaned and having no way to know why he was suddenly cut off from his source of contact comfort, nourishment and abundance. It is the chronic experiences over the course of a person’s childhood where they were made to feel they don’t fit in and are not welcome. It is the pattern of a person not having their individuality and authenticity recognized because they were expected to be exactly what their parents wanted them to be. It is the loss of the family cat. It is the emotional intimacy that was never given. It is every experience where we went into distress and that distress was never resolved, we simply adapted to it. Most people have no conscious awareness of the dramatic effect that every trauma had on their life, including the ones that they judge as “little” or don’t even recognize as traumatic. When a trauma happens, we make that painful thing that we have experienced mean something. And that in turn alters the way we think, the choices we make and the things we do; our very life.
Normalization. There is a reason why in cultures which practiced ritual sacrifice, no one was mortified at the sight of a person being killed in a ritual ceremony. There is a reason that no one thought anything was out of order when in the 11th century, no one used forks because they were seen as blasphemous. There is a reason that no one thought anything of a pregnant woman smoking and drinking alcohol in the 1950s. The reason for all this is that it was “normal”. Human beings tend to acclimatize to, and then accept, whatever situation we find ourselves in. This is even more true when we are children. Whatever we experience as common in our environment, becomes our idea of normal. What is normal? Normal is whatever conforms to a standard, is usual, typical or expected. The thing is, normal is not a measure of health. This is why the famous quote by Krishnamurti “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” is so important. Normal can become a blinder through which we see the world. It can be a way of staying in denial, remaining unconscious and never being able to heal or progress. Many of the things that had a profound negative or even positive effect on you, you may not even recognize because you saw them as “normal”. If you see something as normal, it will not stand out to you as anything of interest or anything notable. You may completely overlook it.
But this tendency can go much further than the human tendency to not realize that something is out of alignment when it is ‘the norm’. It can in fact serve as a negative coping mechanism. When we normalize something, we can avoid the pain that might be involved with seeing something as not right and not good. For example, imagine that in our childhood it was common and typical for both parents to be away from home all day working. Because it was normal, we don’t see the emotional neglect we suffered. By normalizing it, we don’t see that emotional neglect had a profound effect on our psyche. For example, we don’t see how it has led to the pattern of selecting unavailable partners as an adult and ending up so depressed and lonely that we are on psychiatric meds. Because it was ‘normal’, we don’t see how unhealthy our societal structure is, so we do nothing to change it. We don’t have to see that our parents hurt us, so we don’t have to acknowledge any rupture between ourselves and them. We can follow in their footsteps, thus validating what they did with us (which establishes closeness). But the problem is, the effect is still there. We just can’t attribute it to a cause, much less the correct cause.
In this same vein, something that goes hand in hand with normalization is minimization. To minimize something is to downplay the significance of it. When you use minimization against yourself, it is a form of self-deception. You do it to avoid acknowledging and dealing with negative emotions and painful beliefs associated with them by reducing the severity and negative impact and importance of the events that gave rise to those emotions and beliefs. You also do it to avoid interpersonal conflict. It allows us to rationalize and justify and negate. When it comes to normalization, our favorite way to minimize is through comparisons. Things like “I went through the usual stuff… unlike those other kids who came from alcoholic homes or those kids in other countries working in sweat shops”.
Normalization makes the process of becoming aware of, acknowledging and changing a pattern impossible. There is an expectation that if something is normal, if ‘everyone is doing it’ or if ‘that’s just the way things are done’ then it must be right or good. This tendency to equate what is normal with what is good or right can be very, very dangerous. There is also an expectation that if something is normal, it will not have a negative effect on someone. Just because something is normal does not make it right or good. And just because something was or is the norm, does not mean the negative impact of it somehow doesn’t exist. The things you experienced absolutely effected the trajectory of your life regardless of whether they were common practice or normal or not. The things you would at face value write off as insignificant can be the very traumas that are ruining your life today.
We learn to frame things in our own awareness the way that other people tell us we should or demonstrate that we should. If other people don’t say that what we are experiencing is trauma and don’t behave as if what we are experiencing is trauma; and even worse if they outright invalidate that what we are experiencing is traumatic, we tend to adopt their way of seeing it. This can range all the way from a person adopting the constant narrative of “We have the best family” and therefore tuning out any experiences that are incongruent with that narrative. All the way to full blown gaslighting and mind control abuse. We’ve already talked about normalization. Well, normalization can also be used as a social control tactic that a person uses to desensitize another person to something that might cause distress in order to get them to accept it or agree to it. This is how the normalization of deviance can come about. It might be tempting to think that normalization as a control tactic is something only sociopaths or deviants or abusers use with victims. It isn’t. In fact, parents love to use this tactic to justify their own behavior. Many people confront their parents about certain things that occurred, only to hear their parents retort, “Every parent did that. In fact, you got it so much better than most kids”. When we experience something as a trauma, but the way someone else behaves invalidates that estimation, it causes us to doubt our estimation of reality. And many of us cope by simply adopting whatever external narrative is demonstrated to us. This is why you will hear so many people who grew up with their distress being met with the response “well, that’s just the way it is!” be the ones to respond to their own distress and other people’s with “that’s just the way it is!”
It can be scary to acknowledge trauma because of what acknowledging trauma can mean for us and for our lives. We live in a world where needing healing is still stigmatized. Society still puts pressure on everyone to be put together if not perfect. It is tragic, but for most people, seeing themselves as someone who needs healing means acknowledging that they are not perfect. They are not put together. They are not good or right. This makes people feel bad about themselves, fear other people’s judgement and feel like they are exposing themselves as weak and inferior. People also hate feeling powerless. And to admit that we need to heal means admitting we can be hurt by something or someone else and that we were.
On top of this, most of us build the stability of our lives on a narrative and on beliefs about ourselves, other people and about the world. Acknowledging trauma can completely destroy that narrative as well as those beliefs, throwing us into the feeling of unsafety and instability. Of course, it can easily be argued that if a person’s narratives were not built on something real, the stability they perceived was actually false. We may have to face and accept things that are so painful and scary that we doubt our ability to do so. Denying trauma can be a powerful way to put distance between yourself and an overwhelming experience. Thus, an attempt to avoid a reality collapse or system overload.
Acknowledging trauma can also disrupt our relationships. For example, if we acknowledge trauma that occurred within our family of origin, we may find ourselves running right into the experience that family systems are very resistant to change. We may end up being ostracized by our own family, having a really hard time having a normal Christmas dinner with everyone. We can face a whole host of social consequences as a result of acknowledging trauma. Or, we may go down the road of acknowledging trauma only to discover as a result of that process that the current relationships we have are not actually authentic to us or good for us. And so, we may face a deep sense of aloneness and also fear that our entire social sphere must change. And this is extremely difficult for a social species, which human beings are. We are terrified of losing connection and coherence with the people in our lives.
Acknowledging trauma has an uncanny way of changing things about our life. If we start to heal our trauma, it goes without saying that those things that stem from our trauma, will also change. And people are terrified of and therefore very resistant to change.
Memory of traumatic experiences are often suppressed. The subconscious mind takes over control of anything that interferes with the conscious mind. But there are times when the subconscious mind takes over things for the sake of survival, and this mechanism that benefits us in the short-term can harm us immensely in the long-term. For example, if your parents got a divorced when you were young, you might have suppressed the memory of hiding under the porch listening to them scream and throw things at each other, leading to one of your parents being gone in the morning, as well suppressed the memory of having decided at that minute that it’s dangerous to love anyone because you’ll lose them. If the pain you felt about this matter interfered with your life enough, the subconscious mind might own that memory and belief. You would then have no conscious awareness of your original experience and the belief associated with it. You would simply observe that the minute you get too close or intimate with someone, you pull away and end the relationship. As a grown person, you’re only aware of the symptom; the root cause of that symptom remains deeply buried in your subconscious mind. In this way, your subconscious mind takes over your thoughts and emotions, and when situations are extreme, it can take over entire memories that are a threat to your conscious mind.
This is especially true when children grow up with attachment figures who are harmful to them. The cognitive dissonance associated with “living with the monster” is so great that you actually could not go on living in the atmosphere of that much terror. So, by suppressing the memory of the abuse, you maintain your attachment to the adult who is harming you and thus ensure your survival. All this being said, the mechanism of suppression when it comes to memories, is a big reason that we don’t see or recognize our traumas.
A lot of traumas are about what isn’t there, rather than what is there. When we think of traumas, we think of bad things happening. We rarely ever think of things not happening that we needed to have happen. We rarely think about things like unmet needs, trauma that involves what wasn’t done, rather than what was done. But trauma that involves what isn’t there, rather than what is, accounts for so much trauma in today’s world. It’s the understanding that you didn’t get. It’s the protection that wasn’t provided. It’s the presence and togetherness that you didn’t experience, so you were alone. It’s the way you were not valued. It’s the unseen dysfunctional social dynamics that caused you to suffer as a child. This is often why you may have no memory of anything that could cause you to be so “not ok”. And may even tell yourself that you must be mentally ill. If a person has never experienced something, they don’t even know what they are missing. This is especially the case when it comes to emotional neglect. And a person can have everything they would ever need on a physical level. They could be born to the richest family on earth and be completely neglected, deprived, abused and damaged on an emotional level. People have a hard time imagining that what isn’t there could be a huge source of trauma. But it works the same way that it does on the physical. If you take a little sapling tree and deprive it of enough sunlight, fail to give it adequate water and put it in poor soil, what you will see detrimental changes happen to it and it will die, all because of what wasn’t there. The same is true for people. But there are a great many factors that determine whether a physical human will thrive or not than just food and water and shelter. And without those things, a person will be traumatized and will fail to thrive.
People’s coping mechanisms mask the need for healing. This is easy to see with classic coping mechanisms. For example, if a person uses denial to cope, they will walk around quite functional but in a state of denial. But this denial will mask the reality of what has happened from their own mind and from onlookers. Or for example, say that a person uses workaholism to cope. If this person lives in a society that values career success, this person can simply absorb themselves in work, which will feel better than confronting the feelings that they escape through work. And no one will notice this dysfunction. Rather, they will commend this person for it.
Coping mechanism and adaptations mask the need for healing even better when they are related to personality. People create adaptations to their personality to cope with trauma. These adaptations are designed to make a person safer. As a result, they give people the impression of improvement. People mistake this for healing. When it is not healing. For example, let’s imagine that a trauma a little girl experienced was the trauma of her femininity being rejected because her parents wanted a boy. She may cope with this by becoming a tom boy. Dressing in boy clothes, playing with boy’s toys and playing sports, acting strong. Basically, acting like a boy. We can’t say that this is healing. What would be healing is for her femininity to be embraced. Instead, her tom boy behavior is a coping mechanism she adopted to deal with the distress of her femininity being rejected. But coping in this way will give her the sensation of improvement and decrease the pain a bit because she is likely to get a better reaction from her parents by trying to become more like what they wanted her to be. This little girl is also going to identify as a tom boy. We confuse ourselves with our coping mechanisms and adaptive behavior. This girl is likely to grow up seeing herself as masculine. She won’t see a need to heal from it because she will think that how she is, is just a reflection of who she really is… when who she really is, is much different. In this same vein, people really think that their coping mechanisms and adaptations work for them, even when they don’t. We see no need to change or heal what we think is working for us. Think of the boy who grew up in a society that values independence and shames people for dependence. In order to avoid the social consequences, he may become hyper-independent. He will think this independence is a good thing and go on to profess the importance of independence and shame other people for dependency. He sees no need to heal from this trauma around dependency because he thinks hyper-independence is a good thing. And he lives in a society that taught him this and therefore agrees. There is no need to heal what a person thinks is good and is right and is working for them.
People, as well as society at large confuse healthy with functioning. Most people don’t see the need to heal if they are able to function. Ie: Able to maintain a job, able to be in social environments and act normal, able to complete tasks, able to maintain self-care routines etc. The reality is, there is plenty of dysfunction that is still considered functional. And there are plenty of people who are able to function, who are deeply traumatized and who need healing very, very badly. We cannot and should not use functionality as the barometer for whether someone is ok or not. We should never use functionality as the barometer for whether someone is mentally and emotionally healthy. We should never use functionality as the barometer for whether a person needs healing or not. Alas, people do and society does.
I shouldn’t have to tell you this but to generalize, people are really, really unaware and really, really unconscious. Most people have not dedicated themselves to the path of awakening, awareness, self-awareness, seeking truth and seeing reality. It just isn’t a priority for them. As a result, they tend to be closed minded. They don’t really think through things. They don’t stop to consider cause and effect, much less ripple effects. They stay stuck in their subjective perspective to the degree that they don’t consciously observe things, including themselves and consciously analyze things. They don’t question enough nor do they question deeply enough. A lot of people prioritize feeling good over knowing the truth. Many people don’t expose themselves to different thoughts, different experiences and ways of doing things, which would put the things they have normalized into question. And even when someone does commit themselves to the path of awakening and awareness, it is a path of progression. It is a skill that one hones over time. Anyone on the path of awareness can tell you there is so much they become aware that they were ignorant to, no matter how many years they have been at it. But when a person is not dedicated to awareness, there is so much dysfunction and so much pain that is not even seen. There is so much that a person is totally ignorant to.
It's time to de-stigmatize healing. Especially given that all people need it and given that unwanted experiences (including traumas) provide the fertile ground for personal expansion and are therefore part of every person’s life. And hopefully now you understand why most people don’t know they need healing, even though they do… they really, really do.
With ever increasing intensity and in response to single events that are happening around the globe, people are talking about there being a risk of a third world war. In English, we would say that it is almost like humanity is collectively holding its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for the day that world war is actually declared. But the reality is very different than what people currently understand. The reality is that the world is already at war. And the vast majority of people don’t even know it. But that raises the question, how could it be that a person doesn’t know they are in a war? Today, I’m going to explain this to you so that it all makes sense. And hopefully, this will clarify a lot of what is happening for you.
If I ask you to give me some images of what war looks like, you would immediately think of cannons being shot, people hacking through each other with swords, bombs being dropped, people being run through with bayonets, people being abducted and separated from each other, buildings being blown up by air strikes and grenades, people being shot at point blank or people being tortured in concentration camps. What does all of this have in common? You would be thinking of physical violence. What you have not accounted for is the fact that you and everyone else living today have come from centuries and centuries of war looking one way. And that way, is physical violence. But that does not mean that physical violence is the way that war must look or always has, and always will look. This bias is to be expected. To give you an example that will illustrate what I mean, people associated having light in the dark with fire for thousands of years. They could not have conceptualized of light in the dark looking like electricity. Until that is suddenly what it looked like.
In order to really wrap your head around this, I ask you to do a mental exercise. At its root, war is really a conflict. Politicians and organizations and citizens decide that entering into that conflict, despite the potential negative consequences of conflict, is worth it for this reason or that reason. And everyone who joins the conflict is operating from their motivating reason. Another way of putting this is to say that conflicts are initiated with the aim of achieving a favorable outcome or achieving some desired state of affairs. When it comes to war, this favorable outcome or those desired state of affairs are in opposition to someone else’s perceived best interests. And when it comes to war, where this goes is that both parties arm themselves against the other. This is a fancy way of saying that they use tools to increase their power to bring about their own perceived best interests. Think weapons.
So, for this exercise, put aside your resistance to war and instead, try to think like someone who has decided war is necessary. If it helps, you can pick someone you know about who is in power today and that you think would be likely to get into a war. From there, pretend to think like them. Most especially, think about what your motivations for war may be. With that in mind, think of the best strategies to attain your aim in this day and age. And most especially, think about what the best weapons might be in this day and age. Feel free to pause this video and think about it, before you continue.
Hopefully where this exercise brought you is that there are far better tactics and weapons in this day and age than marching at each other in a phalanx formation with swords in our hands or dropping atom bombs or invading an area with tanks. In fact, these physically violent strategies and weapons are just one of the tools that you have in your tool basket. You definitely want to keep that tool in case using that tool turns out to be the best move at some point in the game. But you know that this is not really a smart way of doing war. There are far smarter ways of doing war. Such better strategies and far more effective tools. So, let’s look at some of the weapons that are being used in the war of this new day and age. And I assure you, this is only a small list of the possible tools.
You have cyber-attacks where you disrupt critical infrastructure and hack into information that damns the other side. You have disinformation campaigns where you stir up public fear and spread lies to sway public opinion and undermine the citizens trust in some way that supports your aim. You have the creation of public crises and pinning it on someone else and then acting as the savior for the very thing you created, so that the people are terrified and give their trust and loyalty and power to you in a way where you can go do something the people would normally object to, but now support. You have economic sanctions which puts extreme economic pressure on the other side to try to get them to comply. You have the limiting and blocking of travel. You have flooding the public with mixed messages and conflicting information so that you put the people in a state of cognitive dissonance which makes them anxious, disoriented and confused. You can then exploit that to polarize them or give them a way to resolve that dissonance that serves your aim. You have the cunning use of AI. You have election interference and tampering with election results. You have political subversion where you undermine a government or politician’s legal status, trustworthiness, authority, stability or legitimacy so as to overthrow them in a covert way. After all, subversion is a far less risky tactic than all out revolution. You have supporting crypto currency and conversely, taking down crypto currency. You have distraction, so you can use information platforms to get everyone to pay attention to one thing, so you can do something they would object to, without their notice. You have forcing compliance from social media platforms. You have satellites and the myriad of ways you might be able to use them. You have threatening, infiltrating, strong arming, purchasing, bribing and corrupting the press. You have biological weaponry, famine and deprivation of specific resources, which you can make look like a natural event and so people can’t attribute the casualties or consequences to you. You have influencing and bribing and threatening people who influence government decisions, laws and the public, such as politicians and celebrities. You have the creation of and fueling of ideological divides. You have the inflaming of patriotism. You have murder and assassination of prominent figures that oppose you. You have deportation of anyone who does not align with your goals. You have making everyone dependent on what you provide so you can withhold or give them their need and by doing so, have total control over them. You have covert war where you use espionage, psychological operations to influence the state of a target population, conceal people’s identities, deny responsibility and use covert operations and tactics. You have inciting nationalism. You have the bribing and use of terrorist organizations to conduct operations that serve your aim, but that are hard to attribute or respond to directly. And don’t forget, you also have traditional military tactics. Again, this list is super limited for all the different strategies one might use in today’s world to fight a war.
And don’t forget that having the public KNOW that a war is happening, is only one potential strategic move to take in a war. It really benefitted leaders in a day and age where they needed numbers to physically overpower the adversary. They needed men to enlist and engage in physical violence. And war used to be an excellent opportunity for a man to gain social esteem and do the right thing. People do not see war as the right thing anymore. War’s reputation is ruined. And so it does not have the support it once did. Nor does anyone who engages in it. So, it may just be a better strategy today to not tell people. Even to gaslight them about it. To go to extreme lengths to paint a different picture for the public. It may also be a better strategy to fuel an ideological war against men and masculinity, so there are no men to rise up and fight against you.
People across the world are waiting on the edge of their seats for a formal declaration of war. Or for physically violent conflict to escalate to the point where someone in a position of authority (be it a president or politician or military professional or the press) to put that label on it and tells them it is happening. People do not understand the nature of a silent war. Nor do many people understand that formal declarations like this do not necessarily mark the beginning of a war, even when they are made. The true nature of the beginning of a specific war is often something that becomes obvious only when looking back on the whole thing to find defining events and how those events created chain reactions. Basically, the picture often comes into view, only in retrospect.
The war of today’s world is one that looks on the surface like a disorienting, confusing mess of every tool there is for any party involved in this war to gain power. But what it really is, is a very sophisticated use of a myriad of psychological, emotional, physical and social weapons and tactics that are being used by all the many parties involved in this war. Basically, this war will keep taking on different forms to suit whatever the goal is at any given specific time. And so much of this war is also happening behind the curtain so to speak. This means, physical violence (yes, this means the dropping of a single bomb) will only happen if that is the best tool and strategy for someone involved to achieve their aim at a specific time and in a specific situation. Rather than every country being embroiled in outright physical violence, at this time, it looks like eruptions of the physical violence form of war in certain isolated areas. As if that is the only place that war is happening and between those two parties within the larger world. When in fact, these conflicts are proxy wars.
Because this is the case, and the things being done in this multiplayer chess match are changing so often and so fast, navigating the world in a time like this; knowing what to do and what not to do is really, really hard. People who have been through wars past have definitely faced certain elements of this war before. But not others! And so, we really haven’t faced a situation like this before. Which means, there is no rule-book for it. I do not say this to make you feel powerless or scare you, even though this is probably what knowing this makes you feel. I say this so you will take pressure off of yourself to know perfectly what to do in the landscape of today’s world and to stop feeling like something is wrong with you for not knowing what to do. The confusion and even decision paralysis you are experiencing is a completely normal response to what is happening. And you will find that knowing the bigger picture of what is going on, will help with both.
It is so important to know that the war of today not looking like it once did, is not down to humanity evolving beyond physical violence. It is a serious lack of conscious awareness, if not basic intelligence to think that physical violence is the worst form that war can take. The war of today is simply far more sophisticated and effective than it once was. And many of the tactics being used are far more abusive.
One of the saddest parts of this modern type of warfare is that people do not understand why they feel the way they feel. We all know that wartime is horrible to experience. It takes a serious toll on people. But when people know the world is at war and they understand what is going on, the things they are experiencing and the ways they are feeling makes sense to them. In this war, so many of the symptoms of war are there. Just to give you some examples of this: Many people have lost a sense of hope for the future and many believe they cannot attain what they want in the future. This has led to a mass issue with not being able to plan for the future. Many people feel that something is “off”. Many people are feeling dread, numbness or a sense of unreality. Many people are succumbing to “us” and “them” thinking, becoming increasingly nationalistic. People are suffering from intensified digital surveillance and censorship under the explanation of it being in the name of national security and public health. Fear of governments and people in positions of authority is rampant. Many people are suffering from financial inflation. A lot of people at the age to start families are deciding not to bring a baby into the world at this time. Supply chains are being disrupted. People are under so much stress; it is hard for them to believe that anyone made life work before. Many people feel like danger is everywhere and the world feels increasingly dystopian. On top of this more and more people are openly talking about apocalypse, collapse or dystopia. Many people are stockpiling, buying land and talking about living off the grid, if not actively moving off the grid. People feel they can’t handle all the bad things happening in the news. Protests are escalating around the world. The police forces are being militarized. Many people feel they are losing their rights. Many people are fleeing their homes and home countries or are thinking about it. Many people are afraid of speaking out or feel they are fighting for freedom of speech. Laws are changing drastically and this is justified as being temporary and for public safety. Global tensions are becoming local ones. And local ones are becoming global ones. People are dealing with rampant propaganda as well as conflicting and radical content daily. Food, energy and money is being weaponized. There are radical movements cropping up all over the place. People fear that being who they are could make them an enemy of the state. For example, being this religion or that religion, this political persuasion or that political persuasion, this race or that race, this sexual orientation or that sexual orientation. If you look deep into each of these littler, isolated wars going on, you find they are all in fact, interconnected. And these interconnected crises are breaking down the boundaries between local and global conflict, essentially drawing nations and alliances into a broader struggle for dominance and survival. People are having to navigate the constantly changing landscape of geopolitical flux… which county is an adversary or ally to which other country, which person in power is an ally or enemy to which other person in power. They are having to face all the various impacts this flux and back and forth has on their lives. Some countries are speaking about imposing mandatory serving time for citizens in the military. For a lot of citizens, everything feels harder and more expensive. People are exhausted, overwhelmed and nothing feels safe. Being tossed and turned in this global conflict, they don’t know who or what to believe anymore.
It is so important to remember that one person’s experience during wartime, is very different than another’s. For example, the experience of someone living as a Jew in Poland in 1939 during WW2 was very different than the experience of someone living as a Buddhist in Bhutan in 1939 during WW2. Hell, the experience of a tall, blonde and blue eyed German living in the countryside near Bamberg Germany in 1939 was very different than the experience of a tall, blonde and blue eyed German living in Munich, Germany in 1939. This is still true today. So, to see what is going on in the world, we need to be able to look beyond our own limited personal experience.
The things people are experiencing and the way they are feeling are consistent with wartime. But as far as they know, no war is happening. So, their reality doesn’t make sense to them. And so, people start to think something is wrong with them for thinking how they are thinking and feeling how they feel. And it is my hope that because you know all of this information, after today, you will no longer feel this way.
Unconditional love is one of those things that is deeply valued within human society. It is held up as the epitome of love. And because so many of us have felt the pain of only being loved if we are a certain way or if we do certain things (essentially if we meet certain conditions), so many of us are looking for someone to unconditionally love us. And so many of us are expecting ourselves to be unconditionally loving. Unconditional love seems like such a great thing, it is hard to fathom how it could ever be bad. But it can. Let me explain how.
The first problem with unconditional love arises with the messiness around the concept of love in general. In the English language, we have this one word, love, to represent all kinds of different things. This means when we talk about love, we might be thinking that we are talking about the same thing when we are actually talking about different things.
To love something, in the truest sense of the word, is to take something as a part of yourself. To understand this more in depth, you can watch my video titled: What is Love. When you do this, you expand so that yourself and another person are like two parts within you. You don’t abandon the part that is yourself for the sake of the part of you that is the other person. It is simply that now, the best interests of both parts within you (yourself and them) are your concern. You have an intrinsic motive to want to meet both of their needs and resolve both of their pain. But this means that compatibility and incompatibility now matters to you immensely. You cannot feel good meeting one’s needs at the expense of the other. And therefore, to truly love, you must recognize conditions for wellbeing that exist for both parts within the relationship instead of deny them.
When most people use the word love however, they don’t mean that they take someone as a part of themself. They mean to be held in a positive light. Essentially, they mean to value, like, appreciate, care about and feel deep affection for the other person. Most people are looking to be valued, liked, appreciated, felt affection for and cared about to the degree that they can have some kind of security in their relationship with that person. Most especially, security that the person who loves them will stay committed in a relationship with them. And usually committed to a specific kind of relationship. What all this boils down to is that when people say that they want unconditional love, what they really mean is that they want an unconditional relationship.
The desire to be held in a positive light unconditionally. And the desire for an unconditional relationship (what we are calling unconditional love) is where this idea of unconditional love can very easily turn into anything but love. And here is how:
It can cause us to slip into narcissistic, zero-sum game behavior in relationships. Rather than trying to find win-win scenarios, we may do things that are solely for our own best interests and against theirs. This automatically puts them in a lose-lose where they either give up their best interests (lose) or play a zero-sum game in return (go for a win). This makes a relationship a template for abuse or a war zone.
It can completely destroy the energy exchange element of a relationship, making the relationship a one-way relationship. When we want unconditional love, we can end up wanting to get things from the other person without any expectation of giving things. This can lead to parasitic and vampiristic relationship dynamics. Relationships that are only beneficial for us, not them. We can put the other person in a desert in the relationship metaphorically speaking and drain them completely.
It can cause us to flip on people in relationships and on top of this, expect there to be no consequences for doing so. Wanting unconditional love can lead us to enter into a relationship with a person where the conditions for them being happy in the relationship, positive towards us and committed to the relationship are clear and we have agreed to them, only to change our mind and with it, the agreement. When we do this, we end up changing the agreement to something that is not actually in alignment with the other person’s best interests. But we will expect them to be happy, positive towards us and stay committed in the relationship anyway. By doing this, we flip on them. But we expect no negative consequences for doing so.
It can lead to us subconsciously expecting the other person to have no boundaries. If we are looking for unconditional love, another person having boundaries for what is right vs. wrong for themselves and for what they want and need and for how they are treated, can make us feel like the other person has conditions for staying with us. We may only feel loved and only feel secure in a relationship when the other person doesn’t have boundaries or when we can cross any boundary without consequences in a relationship. This is very unhealthy. This can progress all the way to full blown abuse. Expecting the other person to value, like, appreciate, feel affection for and stay committed to a relationship with us, even if we treat them horribly.
It can very easily get us into the “no matter what” pattern in relationships. Essentially, we may want to be accepted, included, wanted, valued, appreciated, have our needs met and have security in the relationship no matter what we do or don’t do. No matter who we are or aren’t. No matter what happens or doesn’t happen. And no matter how we stay the same or change. To learn more about this pattern, you can watch my video titled: The No Matter What Pattern in Relationships. Unfortunately, humanity is still at a point where “no matter what” is seen as a good thing in relationships. In fact, this is how a lot of people accomplish longevity in their relationships. Which is something they should not be celebrating if longevity is reached through dysfunctional means. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Longevity is Not Necessarily a Measure of Success or Health in a Relationship.
We can easily abuse our relationships with others by not caretaking them or the relationship at all. By neglecting them. Basically, we look to create a relationship where there is no pressure on us at all and there are no expectations imposed on us by the other person and we do not need to consider and caretake the other person’s wellbeing or best interests or feelings at all. We get into a relationship, but make them fully responsible for their own wellbeing. This is like signing up to be half of a tango team, but asserting that you will do your own dance and they must do their own dance. But expecting the other person to be fine with that. This is to want the benefits of having a relationship and to be able to keep it, without actually needing to put any energy into it.
We can make the relationship 100% the other person’s responsibility, essentially giving them 100 percent of a job built for two. When we want unconditional love, we often want to be able to let go of all responsibility in the relationship. We want to be able to do or not do, be or not be. So, for the relationship to work, it is all on the other person to make it work, despite us.
We can start to hold serious double standards. There will always be double standards in relationships. What is important, is that both people in a relationship agree to them. But when it comes to wanting unconditional love, we tend to have double standards that are super dysfunctional and that the other person is not actually ok with, but we expect them to be ok with.
We can get into relationships with people who are incompatible to us, only to dupe them. We sell them on one thing and then try to get the other person who (due to their incompatibility) is guaranteed to not want something about us, to change their mind and want it instead. And if they don’t, we make them the bad guy for it.
We can fall into a pattern of no growth. When we want unconditional love, we often want to change nothing about ourselves, even if changing something is really in our best interests as well as in the best interests of others as well as in the best interests of the relationship… Even if something about us is hurting us or hurting others. So, we make everything and everyone stuck in dysfunction.
We may even fall into the pattern of expecting other people to suffer so that we can feel loved. When we have a deep need to feel loved unconditionally, we may actually feel better about our relationship and feel more loved, the more pain someone is willing to go through in the relationship with us. To understand this in a more in-depth way, you can watch my video titled: The ‘Suffer So I Can Feel Loved’ Relationship Dynamic.
And with each one of these things, if we are on the receiving end of them, expecting ourself to be unconditionally loving can lead us to being in a dysfunctional and even abusive relationship. We have fallen into serious dysfunction when we expect ourselves to put up with any of these behaviors; and worse than that, to stay positive, appreciative, valuing, affectionate and committed towards the other person and towards the relationship despite these behaviors. It is all too common when we hold ourselves to the standard of unconditional love, that even though it is the other person who is being deeply unloving in the relationship, it is us who will be called unloving for not putting up with the behavior and for having conditions for being positive and for being in the relationship. And the tragedy is, we may actually fall into believing this.
When it comes to relationships, unconditionality is a myth. If you would like to dive deeper into this subject, you can watch my video titled: The Truth and The Myth of Unconditional Love. There are conditions in every relationship. When we point to the relationship that a parent has with a child as an example of unconditional love, all we are doing is pointing to the relationship that often has the least conditions placed upon it. Meaning a parent often has the least number of conditions for a child in order to hold them in positive regard and be committed to a relationship with them.
Seeing the danger of what we are calling “unconditional love” (which is really just unconditional positive regard and unconditional commitment to a relationship) can cause you to stop looking for it and instead to set your sights on what conditions actually feel good to you and which ones don’t in a relationship. It may be beneficial to ask yourself: Do I really expect the other person to hold me in unconditional positive regard and be unconditionally committed in the relationship if I do (fill in the blank). Could I hold them in unconditional positive regard and be unconditionally committed in the relationship if they did the same thing?
The reality is that everyone has different conditions for their relationships and most people have different conditions for each one of the different types of relationships in their life.
What you want is the person whose conditions, you actually feel good about and who actually feels good about your conditions… A relationship where you can feel safe with the conditions.
This means, if you want unconditional love, there are certain conditions which you are not ok with in a relationship. You need to clearly define what conditions you are not ok with so that you can find someone who does not have those specific conditions.
Just remember that the expectation of unconditionality can lead you down a very, very dark road in relationships.
Covid rocked the world. For so many people on earth, life was just going along as usual and then suddenly, there was crisis. Suddenly, life changed. Suddenly, there were lockdowns and mask mandates, travel was restricted and blocked, businesses and employers and employees struggled to change policy and many businesses collapsed, social distancing was imposed and people were separated and isolated, there were interpersonal conflicts all over the place, there were vaccine mandates, people were put through experiences where they felt they had no choice when it comes to their own bodies, people were dying, there was censorship going on, people were flooded with conflicting information and the list goes on and on. The human world slipped into extreme distress. People were consumed by uncertainty, confusion, fear and loneliness as they lost a sense of control over their life experience. Glad we are over all of that right? I mean it’s been five years after all. Life has pretty much gotten back to normal. Hasn’t it? Well, the answer is no. In fact, this is one of the biggest gaslights that is happening in human society the world over. Society and human experience with it, is not back to normal after Covid. So, allow me to un-gaslight you.
There is no “after Covid”. Unless a person is warned about the possibility of something bad happening, they become aware of the possibility of it by experiencing it first-hand. For example, unless you are warned about sharks in the water, you become aware of the possibility of shark attack by seeing one or experiencing one yourself. From that day forward, you know it is possible and so, you are living with a negative potential. This makes swimming a different experience. A worse one. For almost everyone, what happened in “Covid Times” was not something they could have ever imagined to be possible. It never crossed their minds. But now that everyone has experienced it, everyone knows it CAN happen. And so, the fear of it or anything like it happening again, is something people are living with now. You can consider this the foundations of a collective societal case of PTSD. This makes living in the world a different experience. A worse one.
There was something happening underneath the Covid crisis. That something was a massive power grab. Covid was used as a tool and politicized in a power game that has been going on, but that most people didn’t actually perceive until Covid. You can think of this power game like a massive, unfortunately very real game of Risk. The world has fallen under the control of select individuals (and the corporations they control) who are obsessed with power for power’s sake and who do not actually have the best interest of “others” (such as the people of the world) in their mind or their heart. This has created a kind of modern power struggle that we only believed to be “in the past”. And they are playing a very strategic and dangerous game with each other and with citizens. It is as confusing a game as the power games that go on in any royal court. These games include both covert and overt tactics. And part of this game is that you are being told that everything is back to normal and everything is moving forward towards more freedom, towards new innovation, towards technology that will revolutionize the world, etc. That the horrors of the past, things like whole groups of people being targeted for hate and dictatorships and wars, are something we all learned from. And so, they are a thing of the past. But we didn’t learn from them. The reality is that we are headed towards repeating history and towards re-creating the nightmares we thought could never happen again. Most people can feel this reality. They can feel this power game being played over their heads. They can feel that things are not ok at all. They are feeling the danger everywhere. They have simply succumbed to normalcy bias. And it doesn’t matter whether Covid is not the current thing being used in this game anymore. This power struggle is not only still going on, it is heating up. We are in a time where uncertainty as to what the world will look like politically in the future is at an absolute all time high. So, the world doesn’t feel “good again”.
It doesn’t matter whether you were a supporter of government control during the crisis or whether you were not. Either way, it is undeniable that during the Covid Crisis, much of the world got its first taste of what government control looks and feels like. What people found out very fast is that the government along with any other authorities, can simply decide something, which you are at the mercy of; regardless of whether you think it is in your best interests or not. SO many people felt what it feels like for an authority, such as a government, to play a zero-sum game against them. This made people feel that control, freedom and having a say is an illusion. Even the people who think their government should have been stricter so as to keep people safer felt negatively at the mercy of their government. And so, the divide between the people and authority figures, especially the divide between the people and their governments cannot be overstated. During Covid times, the collective lost trust for authorities and lost trust in the government. The tension and distress of living under a government you don’t trust and feel can be against your best interests, instead of for your best interests, is serious distress to live with.
Covid caused people to slip into perceived powerlessness. A state where people feel they don’t have control over their life experience, most especially bad things happening to them. And this has caused both fear and a kind of apathy in many people. Many people feel there isn’t really a point to putting a lot of effort into trying to attain what they want or to build things up in their life, if it can all just be taken away without a fight. This perceived powerlessness has happened for many reasons. One of these reasons is that people were blindsided by the whole thing. Another reason is that many people felt that they had no control over a microscopic organism harming or killing them. Another reason is the many control measures that governments took and forced businesses and individuals to take as well as the many super painful consequences that came from that. It is a very painful state of being to live life feeling like you have no control over it.
People lost their trust. So many people in the world now have no trust for anything. I’ve already explained how Covid caused a loss of trust for the government. But that isn’t the only thing they lost trust in. Covid caused people to lose their trust in the media, doctors, businesses, schools, friends, family, neighbors, their own bodies and the universe or what many people call God. The Covid crisis was a crisis of feeling like you could rely on nothing to act in your best interests. That trust never came back. The result is that humanity is in a deep state of distrust.
Because of all of these points I have mentioned previously, Covid caused humanity to slip into more extreme protector personalities. We all have aspects of ourselves, you could call them sides to our personality or parts of our personality that are in charge of keeping us safe. We adapt to the specific unsafety’s of our life by developing these aspects of ourselves. But our protector personalities are out for one thing: Our own safety and our own best interests. Because of this and because of the way they show up in the world, they create more unsafety for others. This brings about a kind of spiral whereby one person’s protector personality causes the protector personality of another person to come up. When a big unsafety happens, like the Covid Crisis, this process is amplified big time. And pretty soon, we are living in a deeply inflamed world where everyone is trying to protect themselves from everything and everyone else. Since Covid, people are really stuck in their protector personas and the world has become a much harsher, colder, more painful and more narcissistic place to be.
Covid caused people to slip deeply into uncertainty. Uncertainty is a really painful thing for the human system. The crisis itself came with so much uncertainty. Not knowing what was right or wrong to do, not knowing if you had the correct information, not knowing how long lockdowns would last, not knowing if people would be ok or not, live or die. Not knowing how things would turn out. Not knowing if you would see people you were separated from again. Not knowing if you had job security. Not knowing if there would ever be an end to the crisis. Not knowing if life would return to normal or never would be normal again. The Covid crisis made tomorrow totally uncertain. This has made it so that people feel no control over the future and as if they cannot plan for the future. And now that humanity has had an experience like this, it has taught humanity that they can always be blindsided by something bad. This makes the future feel uncertain, and in a really bad way. People are deep in the angst of this uncertainty. Very few people feel certain that the future will be good. Living with this kind of uncertainty (and even for many people doom) about the future, is tormenting. People in today’s world are coping with this psychological/emotional pain in lots of detrimental ways.
Major effects to the economy. People often don’t realize just how much of a bomb Covid was to the economy. It has been largely devastating to global economics. There has been recession, unemployment and inflation. Some people’s financial lives, especially if they worked in an industry that was directly affected by Covid measures, were totally destroyed. Economic recovery, much less economic growth, is in fact proving very difficult to attain.
Covid really warped people’s sense of time. During the crisis itself, people experienced it like people often experience a trauma, as one big blurr. This was compounded by the fact that many of the things that cause a person to be able to track and relate to time, things like routines or changes or clocking into and out of a job or celebrating holidays were suddenly gone. This was compounded by how surreal everything felt to people as life as they knew it suddenly changed. A surrealness that isn’t totally gone. Covid disoriented people. It messed with every different way that humans relate to time. And warping of time means trouble with memory as well. And people are still experiencing this.
Covid did not bring people closer. It ruptured human connection and relationships. Human beings are a relationally dependent species. Humans have dependency needs. If you want to learn more about this, watch my video titled: Dependency Needs, The thing That No One Will Accept That They Have. The Covid Crisis absolutely wreaked havoc to people because of this. From all the interpersonal conflict it caused to loss of relationships all together to social separation to quarantine to social distancing to fearing proximity with one another. It made people deeply lonely. It made people feel detached and disconnected. It made people fear each other. It decreased social support. It effected the way people enter into relationships with each other. It has negatively affected the way that children have developed socially. It has normalized people to interacting via technology. Covid was socially traumatizing. It made relationships worse and it made people worse at relationships. And people now have to integrate and heal from that trauma. We need to find a way to come back together. And because of all this trauma, people are in a far worse state of mental health. You see increased rates of anxiety, depression, stress, PTSD, suicidality and other forms of emotional distress in the world today.
Covid also worsened equality by increasing the many divides that existed in terms of gender, labor market, health care access, economics and race.
In this same vein, Covid contributed to a pushback on globalization. In essence, it created a conscious and unconscious swing towards nationalism. It has caused countries (both governments and citizens) to go in the direction of erecting barriers and separations between themselves and others. Things like multilateralism, exchange of trade goods, travel, exchange of ideas between people and immigration are under a progressive crack down. And this is changing the human experience on earth in many really negative ways.
As with anything, in a world of contrast, where positives come from negatives and negatives come from positives, there are positives that have generated from the Covid Crisis. This could be its own separate discussion. And some individuals experienced positives changes in their lives as well. But if you are feeling like things went south in 2020 and haven’t gotten back to normal, stop wondering if you are crazy. You aren’t crazy. You’re just living in today’s major gaslight.
For thousands of years, a woman’s role in society was largely defined by her domestic and reproductive functions. There are always exceptions to any rule, but for the most part, women have played the supportive role to other people in their lives and they have been defined by their role in other people’s lives. Their relationship with other people, whether it was with their family of origin or with their husbands or with their children, was about supporting them. This support could take on many forms, such as caregiving, nurturing, enabling, helping other people in need of help, cooking, cleaning, sewing, raising children to be functional and successful, healing, assisting their husbands in their endeavors etc.
Fast forward to today. Times have changed. You can’t just erase thousands of years’ worth of conditioning about this being a woman’s role. You can’t just erase thousands of years’ worth of conditioning that a woman is and should be caretaking, nurturing, helpful, collaborative, receptive, passive, gentle, service oriented, vulnerable, sensitive, caring, submissive and supportive. This is still a bias people have towards women. And yet, society has also changed. Most especially with the woman’s rights movement. The women’s rights movement changed a lot for the better regarding women’s lives. But the women’s right’s movement didn’t only usher in good things for women. There were some real unexpected downsides that came along with it. One of them being that it brought women into a dire lose-lose situation. The women’s rights movement cast a light on the “traditional” roles for a woman within society as being nothing more than the byproduct of patriarchal oppression… As evidence of a woman being seen as less than and therefore not equal to men. And from this place of being seen as inferior, women who were part of the movement fought to gain equality by being able to be what men could be and by being able to do what men could do. Gradually, as a result of this social movement, society began to shift what is valued in women as well as the idea of what role they should have. In much of the world, especially the western world, women are now expected to become independent and educated and enter the workforce in a career and gain personal success.
The lose-lose situation is that now, women are subconsciously expected to do and be both. Both the support giver who is nurturing and gentle and helpful and who does the domestic tasks, including bearing and raising children. And the success oriented, career driven go getter who is strong and assertive and independent and competitive and a financial provider. To simplify this, we could say that the women’s rights movement ushered in a gender crisis in both men and women. But women were suddenly expected to be both a man and a woman at the same time. To be all the roles and therefore all things to all people. In reality, a woman cannot be stretched so thin as to be able to do this. But, if a woman chooses to be either, she is damned either way.
A woman is damned if she chooses to be success oriented and career driven in today’s society which was built by men, for men. If you want to learn a bit more about this, you can watch my video titled: Why Successful Women Struggle To Find Love. But for the sake of this conversation, let’s look at how a woman is damned the other way.
There are a great many women whom at their very core, are caretaking, nurturing, helpful, service oriented, collaborative, receptive, gentle, vulnerable, sensitive, caring and most of all, supportive. In alignment with this, these women would be naturally called to roles within society that are supportive ones. Their soul calling and personal expansion would lead to them thriving in positions that would be seen as more traditional female roles. Including roles as “housewives” and/or mothers. They may be far more fulfilled supporting another person’s endeavors, such as their husband’s career success for example. They may thrive in a relationship arrangement where they do not hold the financial pressure. These women are an absolute blessing to a society, regardless of whether their role within a society that is based off of marriage and nuclear family looks more like being a house wife and or stay at home mom. Or whether in a society that is structured differently, it would look like being a caregiver and nurturer who offers help and support to the rest of the social group in whatever way is needed at the time.
But women who naturally fall into this category, are not valued in today’s society. Sure, again and again in experiments and studies, these qualities in a woman cause people to perceive her as more likeable. But just because they find her likable, doesn’t mean that they respect her. In fact, the opposite is true. This is how she is seen in today’s modern society: She is not fulfilling her true potential. She is oppressed into a position of inferiority. She is going against women’s rights and is therefore against other women and for patriarchy. She is a pawn to the far right politically. That she will end up in a domestic abuse situation. She showcasing that she and women in general are incapable. Essentially, she is not seen as a truly valuable member of society.
The women’s rights movement, threw men into a lose-lose scenario too. As a result, it has created serious friction between men and women. In some cases, out of spite and in some cases because boys have now been indoctrinated and raised within a polarity flipped society, the vast majority of men, especially in the western world, have jumped on the bandwagon of expecting a woman to do and be everything. Many men look down on a woman who “doesn’t have something going for herself”. Of course, this means, a woman whose authentic calling quite literally is about supporting others. Many men are now looking for a woman who will pull her own weight financially and who is driven for personal success in some way. It is far harder in today’s world for a woman who falls into the category of being a natural supporter, to find a relationship that works for her. She is looked down on. And as a result of this, in order to be valued within society, feels she has to go against her true authentic nature.
So many women are suffering and suffering badly because they do fit with the more traditional roles that women held over the last centuries. But now, they can’t be valued in those roles. They are made to feel bad and wrong about themselves. And they end up going against their own personal nature. Nor can they find men who want to enter into relationship dynamics that enable them to be in those roles. Men are suffering because of this because so many men need this kind of support, but they are afraid to admit it to themselves or other people, because it is seen as so wrong and bad to want from a woman. And they find it hard to find women who want to do it. Children are suffering greatly because of this as well.
Basically, the supportive woman is now stigmatized. This conundrum that supportive women are put in will only change when we change a great many things. First and foremost, we need to change our attitude towards women who exhibit these character traits that are synonymous with support. We need to deeply recognize their value and by doing so, enable them to be in the positions and roles that suit them best. We have to stop making people, especially men, bad and wrong for needing and wanting a woman in their lives to fill this role. We need to stop politicizing people’s lives, including the lives of women who are choosing what people are calling traditional wife roles. And we need to open our minds up to possibilities. If you look back over time, there were many roles within any kingdom or society and many different roles that offered a man or a woman esteem. There are so many different expressions of masculinity and femininity. What is important is that we find our authentic expression and whatever role fits in with that. It is critical that society supports exactly that, rather than spending its time trying to cram people into boxes. Something that was recognized back when the feminist movement was started is that not every woman is born for her expression to fit into the current model or to be in the role that we expect her to be in. But guess what, this is as true today, with our current model, as it was with the 1950s housewife model. And it is going to be much harder for women to break this current limited paradigm and all the pain it causes if the rest of us won’t break it both with and for them.
Human beings are a very relationally dependent species. Our capacity to survive and thrive is dependent on our relationships. This is a beautiful thing because it could make us masters of interdependence and symbiosis. But to the opposite, it can open the door for some serious dysfunction. As people, we have a whole lot of patterns in our relationships that are dysfunctional and detrimental. And one of the most common dysfunctional and detrimental patterns is negative loyalty. A negative loyalty pattern can take on many, many forms. But the function is the same: It is a belief and/or behavior that keeps you aligned with, in confluence with, experiencing closeness with and allied to another person (most especially our early caregivers, such as our parents); but that is detrimental to your wellbeing and best interests. I have never met a single person that doesn’t have at least one negative loyalty pattern. For this reason, let’s take a deep dive into negative loyalty patterns. To do this, we are going to meet three people.
Peter grew up in a household with two parents who both used the cut down for control pattern with Peter. With this pattern, a parent cuts their child down to size (which means to humble them by deflating their sense of self-worth, potential, power, value or importance) so as to keep their self-esteem low enough that the child will continue seeking to earn the experience of being valued, approved of, validated and their greatness being seen, by the parent. The parent lays out what it will take to gain those things, which is doing what they want the child to do for the sake of their own wants and needs. They will tell the child and tell themselves that the child doing those things, is for their own good. When really, it is their way of keeping the child on the hook and getting the child to do what suits them. If you want to learn more about this pattern, you can watch my video that is titled: The Cut Down For Control Parenting Pattern. Because of this tactic that Peter’s parents used, Peter felt bad about himself. He felt as if he was never good enough. But the reality is that thinking highly of himself and having confidence and listening to his own inner compass would have been a huge problem for his parents. It would have guaranteed that he would experience conflict, be disapproved of and pushed away by the very people upon whom his life depended. In order to stay aligned with his parents, have a chance at approval, be close to them and avoid being at odds with them, he had to align with the idea that he wasn’t good enough, had little value, couldn’t trust himself and needed to defer to them to know what to do.
As an adult, Peter maintains this view of himself. He holds tight to the identification with parts of himself that are convinced they “can’t” and as a result, he doesn’t really apply himself to doing even simple things that he could easily do. As a result, it is guaranteed he will fail and then, like a self-fulfilling loop, his low self-esteem is justified. Anytime someone tries to improve his self-esteem, he fights them, as if to prove how bad he is. People around Peter are starting to feel like he wants his self-esteem to be deflated. They are not wrong. Peter is maintaining this view of himself and all the sabotaging behaviors that come with it, so as to keep proving to himself that he is not that great. The reason for this is that Peter is maintaining a negative loyalty pattern with his parents. It has been many years since he even lived in the same country as them. And yet, he is still doing everything to stay aligned with his parents. By maintaining this negative self-image and also the behaviors that reinforce it, he is able to stay close to them. He is keeping himself safe, because he learned that to think differently than this about himself was to invite painful experiences from the people around him. And, he is keeping himself away from the painful reality that he was mistreated by his parents so they could satisfy their own best interests. He is staying allied to his parents by thinking low of himself and keeping himself low.
Raquel, who is now 27, has been doing competitive fencing since she was eleven years old. Raquel has been seriously enmeshed with her mother for her whole life. But she doesn’t know that her relationship with her mother is unhealthy. Raquel would tell you that her mother is her very best friend; the only person who is really there for her. The reality is that Raquel’s mother completely controls her existence. She has made Raquel totally dependent on her in every way, including financially. Sure, they have this very “special” relationship. That is the payoff for enmeshment after all. But Raquel’s mother triangulates her against any other person who comes into her life, isolating her in very cunning ways. She plays the victim to Raquel, so as to ensure that guilt will make her cater to her needs, even going so far as to cry about needing Raquel to do things with her all the time, rather than anyone else, because her focus on Raquel and her sports growing up is what made her loose her husband (Raquel’s father). She decides everything for Raquel, including her preferences, to the point where Raquel is unsure who she really is. Her mother hired a new coach because the last three were not getting Raquel any results. This coach, like the last three have identified that a key problem in Raquel’s game is that when she has the opportunity to go in for the kill shot, she doesn’t take it. Also, if she sees that the opponent is not ok emotionally, she throws the match; despite being far better. This coach has identified that the big cause of this, is that Raquel’s mother is very invested in her being a good girl. Especially being nice and sweet. Raquel wants to be able to be aggressive in her matches. In fact, her coach can tell this is her true nature. But she will not let herself go there. Especially when her mother is watching, which is almost all the time. And as a result, she is unable to truly become a top name in the sport. Raquel will not go there because being aggressive and not nice and sweet means being out of confluence with her mother. This is so threatening for Raquel that she falls apart whenever her coach tries to work on her being more aggressive. She especially develops random injuries that prevent her from play any time she is more aggressive. Raquel keeps herself nice and sweet and meek to be in a state of allegiance with her mother. And she defends her mother, keeping herself stuck in an unhealthy dynamic, rather than taking a real look at any dysfunction that may be present in the relationship. Her mother fired the new coach by the way. Raquel will never actually succeed at fencing at a higher level because of this negative loyalty pattern.
Jabari comes from the ghetto. A neighborhood with a serious crime rate, high levels of unemployment, terrible schools, limited access to resources and where everyone lives in poverty. His family, just like every other family he knew, was all too aware that their terrible life experience owed a lot of itself to the discriminatory practices of the Jim Crowe era. While they suffered from all that poverty entailed, poverty was also something that united them. They saw the rich white man as the enemy and as the oppressor. Jabari really hated being poor. He wanted a bigger life. But he hid anything he did to try to become better and more from his family. Jabari had a real aptitude for math, so much so that a teacher took a real interest in him and in his chance to get into a prestigious engineering school. Jabari would be the first person in his family to ever go to college. Under the arm of this teacher, in order to align with better opportunities, Jabari started dressing differently. When he turned 18, he started attending toastmasters club and improving the way he spoke. And when he applied to the engineering school with several letters of recommendation, he got accepted. The problem is, all of this made Jabari feel really, really uncomfortable. Almost like he didn’t belong with these upper-class people, who had lived a totally different life than he had. People who liked different food and different activities and different music. Jabari came under fire from his entire family and all of his friends, especially his best friend. A constant barrage of teasing, mocking and “who do you think you are?” Digs about him thinking he is better than everyone else. And lectures about how he is acting like the oppressor. His older brother even took to responding to any request that Jabari made to anyone with “yes’m master”. The ostracization and sense of non-belonging was all too much to bear for Jabari emotionally. He passed the deadline for responding to his college acceptance letter. When he was confronted by his teacher about why he was throwing his life away, he angrily defended “That isn’t me. That’s just who you want me to be!” He started dressing like he used to dress again. He started hanging out with his friends in dangerous parts of town. He took a minimum wage job working at an airport with his best friend. Jabari sabotaged his entire future, his potential and his deep desires to stay allied with ‘his people’. To stay aligned with and in coherence with his family and friends and culture, whose identity was firmly rooted in something they all professed to hate… being poor.
These are just three examples of negative loyalty patterns. As I said in the beginning, loyalty patterns can take on any form. There are ancestral loyalty patterns. Many physical ailments are loyalty patterns. You even see this in dogs (another socially dependent species) when they develop ailments that mirror their owner’s ailments. What keeps a scapegoat a scapegoat well into their adult years, is in fact negative loyalty. What unites all of these forms that negative loyalty can take is that at their root, these are things that do not benefit a person, but that keep a person in a state of allegiance to and confluence with someone that matters a great deal to them. Most especially, a parent.
Something that is important to know, is that a negative loyalty pattern transcends childhood. And it transcends death. A person often maintains a negative loyalty pattern to someone else far after that person has already died.
To Identify negative loyalty patterns, it is smart that when you identify any detrimental pattern whatsoever within yourself, you ask: If this belief or behavior were keeping me aligned with, in agreement with, close to, safe with, out of conflict with, or loyal to someone… who would it be keeping me aligned to, close to, safe with, loyal to or out of conflict with? And then: How would this belief or behavior work to keep me aligned with, in agreement with, close to, safe with, out of conflict with, or loyal to this person? For example, if you have a pattern of letting go of your needs and wants in a relationship, you may realize that this keeps you feeling close to and out of conflict with your partner. You may then realize that letting go of your wants and needs enables you to conform to your partner and make them want to stay with you because your life will revolve around their wants and needs. And that this prevents you from ever risking getting into a conflict and ever risking being rejected. So, ultimately it is a way of preventing the loss of the relationship. You may also realize that you learned to do this initially with your mother because there were big consequences for having wants and needs in that relationship. So, not only are you trying to maintain your alignment with your partner, you are also maintaining your alignment with your mother with this behavior.
Another approach you can take is to take the detrimental pattern and imagine changing it for the better and ask yourself: Who would have a problem with me now? What would happen and why? For example, if you have a pattern of self-criticism, imagine praising yourself. You may then realize that the person who would have an issue with this, is your father. That doing so would immediately invite his beratement. You may then realize that he wanted to maintain power over you in order to feel in control and on top in his relationship with you. And that he could not do that if he felt you were “too big for your britches”.
Negative loyalty patterns very often fit into the category of self-sabotage behaviors. Only there is no such thing as true self-sabotage because all self-sabotage behaviors (no matter how extreme they are, including negative loyalty patterns) ultimately serve a self-preserving/self-protecting function. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: There Is No Such Thing As Self Sabotage.
It is only by looking consciously and directly at what we are doing that we are in the position to make a choice as to whether to continue with our current way of demonstrating our loyalty to someone. In other words, when we look directly at the fact that we are maintaining a detrimental belief or continuing a detrimental behavior so that we can stay in allegiance and confluence with a specific person (or group of people). And when we see that doing so keeps us from seeing more of the reality of them and more of the reality of our relationship with them. We can then make a truly conscious choice about whether to choose to maintain this way of being loyal to them, no matter the consequences of doing so. Or whether, we are going to choose to adopt a new belief and new behavior, despite the consequences we may face by doing so. With this in mind, it may help you to watch my video titled: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences.
It is tempting to tell ourselves the story that we are maintaining a negative loyalty pattern out of love or because someone loves us. But it is not love to want someone to do something detrimental to themselves so we can feel loved. Nor is it love to maintain our own, as well as another person’s dysfunction, so as to prove our loyalty to them. For this reason, with any negative loyalty pattern, you can also ask yourself: How is this not actually serving them and their highest and best interests? Negative loyalty patterns prevent our progress as individuals. They prevent our progress as a society and they prevent our progress as a species. So, be part of the change today by identifying your negative loyalty patterns. And choose another way to show your loyalty to those who you love and to those who love you, and/or that you wished loved you.
Everyone wants a driving intention, a reason for living. Having this gives people meaning, a sense of direction and a feeling of having a defined place to belong in this world. Because of this, people so badly want to find their purpose. And yet, at the very same time, so many people struggle to find their purpose. It begs the question: Why is it that finding your purpose can be so hard? In this video, I’m going to outline the major factors that can make finding your purpose so hard. The cool thing is, knowing about these factors, can actually bring you closer to your purpose.
People have a very rigid and fixed idea about what a person’s purpose must look like. Basically, we love to try to cram it into a box. For example, most people see purpose as being a job or career. So, when they are looking for purpose, they are strictly looking for what job they came to this life to do. Or for example, people might see purpose as being of service to others in some way. So, they are strictly looking for what service they can contribute to other people or to the world in some way. The thing is, purpose is far less structured than this. It is simply about having a reason to exist which gives you meaning and a sense of direction. This could be anything that brings this driving intention into life for you specifically.
Many people don’t know what is really important to them. A person’s purpose does not exist outside of the context of their values, desires, interests and passions. Even pre-birth intentions, which play a big role in a person’s purpose, come through in a person’s values, desires, interests and passions; like an artery flowing through a person’s intrinsic motive. But we often lose touch with our values. Why does this happen? The biggest culprit is our need for confluence with other people. We are a social species that depend on each other to survive and thrive. And when we are young, we are socialized. This process of socialization teaches us what others in our social group think is right and wrong, good and bad. Our parents, caregivers, teachers and peers pushed us in the direction of what they think our values, interests and passions should be. And in order to feel secure and get our needs met with others, we allow ourself to blow off course of our own north star so to speak, so as to find confluence with other people. We align with their values, desires, interests, passions and sense of what is important. By doing so, we lose touch with these very things within us that would lead us to our purpose. To know your purpose, you must know yourself.
Defining your purpose may just require you to come up against other people and society at large. This is uncomfortable if not scary and painful. What fulfills you, what you value, what you are passionate about and what you desire may go against the people in your family, culture and society. It may go against things like what they value, how they define success, what they expect from you, what they find interesting, what they deem as important and what they think is right to value. This can make you feel bad and wrong for the very things that point you to your purpose. This makes it harder for you to become aware of, admit to and choose to follow your path of personal fulfillment, and therefor harder to define your purpose.
The marionette effect. People often conceptualize of themselves as a marionette doll or a chess piece being played by the universe at large. With this mentality, they see their purpose as being whatever the universe’s purpose was for them. The only thing is, they don’t know what it was. So, they are lost, looking outside of themselves, either up to God or externally to other people whom they think might know about them what they don’t know about themselves. They want to be told what their purpose is. This is especially true of spiritual people. It is also especially true of people who were conditioned not to trust themselves and instead, trust the guidance of authority figures. The thing is, purpose is something that is intrinsic. Not something you extrinsically agree to. And even the bigger, universal picture of your purpose comes through this intrinsic sense of your values, desires, interests and passions. A person who felt intrinsically that they valued learning and therefore spent their whole life learning this and that would be far deeper in their purpose than someone who was convinced by some authority figure that their purpose was to devote themselves to higher learning and the education system.
People think about what their purpose could be all day without being willing to get their hands dirty and acting so to speak. People find their purpose by trying new things. Experimenting with different opportunities and choices and paths. When a person actively engages with new experiences, they are SO much more likely to quickly define their passions and skills and talents and interests and desires and therefore, their purpose. You can’t think your way into purpose. You have to act your way into it. The thing is, people are very averse to doing this. People don’t like the unknown and the uncertain. They can get themselves very stuck waiting for some kind of sense of correctness rather than trying things.
People’s idea of purpose is entangled in the human ego’s need for worth, value and significance. For this reason, people are on the search for their purpose to be something BIG. This is not to say that your purpose isn’t something you would judge as very big. Maybe it is. But when we are fixated on our purpose being something big, we are more focused on purpose as a kind of trophy. In other words, we are looking for it to be proof of our own worth and value. This makes our quest for purpose an indirect quest for self-esteem, not actually a quest for purpose. On top of this, the fixation on bigness can be yet another “box” that we decide purpose has to fit in. It is also to apply a very human perceptual filter regarding what is important and significant over the objective perspective of the universe at large. All of this can leave us searching externally for what will give us the most self-esteem, rather than what aligns deeply with our values, desires, interests and passions.
People think purpose cannot change, but it can. People have a very one-dimensional idea of purpose. It is true that some people come to this earth with a very defined purpose for their existence and because of this, their intrinsic intentions, values, desires and passions will stay fixed on a certain thing. For example, a person may come to this earth with the intention of being a person who advocates for the oceans. They may have an immediate interest in ocean life as a child, take a job as a marine biologist, live their whole life by the sea and that is what they are all about until they die. However, this is not the case for a lot of people. A person’s pre-birth intention can be so many unlimited things. And the nature of life is ever changing. Over the course of a person’s life, due to the ever-changing experiences they are having, they may change their sense of what matters most and what is most important to them. This changes the picture of their values, desires, intentions, what they find meaningful, their interests and their passions. This will change their direction in life and their priorities. It will change everything.
A person’s purpose can change over the course of their life. In fact, some people chose specifically for this to be the case before coming into this life. Also, sometimes a person finds purpose in one thing and then the next and then the next. And that entire chain of purposes is merely leading them to deeper and deeper layers of their purpose. A good example is, a person may feel a deep sense of purpose in being a professional athlete. And this may lead them to developing a program for athletes, which feels like even deeper purpose. And this may lead them to developing a nutrition program, which may be even deeper purpose. And they may decide to stop working with athletics and open a holistic nutrition business, which may feel like the purpose that every other purpose led them to. Or, a person may feel a deep sense of purpose in being a nurse and then at a certain point, feel like their values and passions are all swinging in the direction of being a grandparent. And so, their purpose has shifted to being a grandparent. When we feel our purpose is only one thing and that it must be something so unquestionable and so solid that it never changes, we fail to follow the breadcrumbs of our passions, values, interests and desires.
Paralysis and lostness caused by searching for “the perfect” purpose. Hidden behind this behavior is the fear of failure and getting it wrong. Many people imagine how having a purpose should feel… Like that major AHA moment that they have found their absolute and perfect purpose. They’ve gotten it right. But a sense of purpose does not show up like this. Needing to get it right causes people to go into over analysis constantly searching for this AHA feeling, which they will not get. And so, this causes mental exhaustion as well as doubt. This coupled with the terror of failing or getting it wrong, leads to decision and action paralysis. This is very different than the actual feeling of purpose, which is about a sense of intention and meaning and reason in what you are putting your energy into because it is aligned with your values.
We often overlook what pours forth from us naturally. Purpose is a lot about what we offer and give naturally. It is inherent in our skills and talents. What feels so natural and good for us to give, that we would do it even if we didn’t get anything in return for it, like money. We take these things for granted because they are usually something that comes easy to us. Here is an example of what I mean: A man who worked in the financial services had a serious talent for sales. He found himself gravitating more and more towards helping new employees learn how to sell. It took him forever to realize that he had a real gift to offer in something that was truly easy for him, communication. He finally realized that he felt most fulfilled when he was teaching people about effective communication. That was the part he enjoyed about his work, not the status of working for the company he worked for, not the sales itself and not the money managing. Communicating and teaching people to communicate effectively was his true calling, and it was staring him in the face the whole time.
People are unwilling for the defining of their purpose to be a process and a journey, which is what it is. One of the most valuable things you can ever accept about purpose, is that defining your purpose is a journey of following bread crumbs. And those bread crumbs do not stop until the day you die. What will happen is that you will define your values, desires, interests skills, talents, passions and sense of what is most important to you. You will make decisions and look for and take opportunities that are in alignment with those things. And doing so will lead to a life experience. That life experience will further define your values, desires, interests, passions, skills, talents and sense of what is most important to you. At which point, you will make new, different decisions. And that will lead to a different life experience. And so on and so forth until the day you die. Your purpose will keep evolving. This is true when your purpose seems to shift entirely from one thing to the other. For example, from committing yourself entirely to medicine only to find even deeper purpose dedicating your time and energy to your relationships or fashion. This is also true if someone commits to an overarching purpose. For example, say that someone has found their purpose in journalism. This may lead to them becoming a journalist. And this may further define their purpose as being opinion journalism. And this may lead to them further defining their purpose as being a blogger on the topic of politics. In order to define your purpose, you are going to need to follow the bread crumbs. It isn’t a magical moment of clarity that just happens. It is a knowing of your driving intention and reason for living that comes to you as a result of continuing to make decisions and taking actions according to your values, desires, interests, passions, skills, talents and sense of what is most important to you.
Defining your purpose is not about seeking or being delivered some magical hidden treasure in life, which is how many people view purpose. Instead, it is the result of grappling with your identity. It is the result of grappling with your fears, your aversions, your needs, your preferences, your desires, your choices, you skills, your opportunities, your intrinsic motives, your talents, your values, what you care about and what truly matters most to you. It is also the result of grappling with everything that stands in the way of defining your values, desires, interests, skills, talents and passions. Purpose is something that you define and create and come to the awareness of. It is not something that you “find”.
Low self-esteem wreaks havoc in anyone’s life. It is easy to see the connection between low self-esteem and things like never putting yourself out there and not taking chances and feeling overall depressed in life. But it is harder for people to see the connection between low self-esteem and relationship problems. But the connection is strong indeed. And here is how:
When your self-esteem is low, you are insecure in your relationships and because of this you make your relationships insecure. Why? Because you do not see your own value and therefore, you do not see what the other person is getting out of being with you. We all know that a person will only stay in a relationship with us if they value us. Therefore, if we perceive we have low value, we are convinced we are going to be abandoned. This makes building up a secure bond in a relationship very hard. We become hypersensitive to anything that could indicate we might be left. We adopt self-protective behaviors in the relationship and the ways that we start behaving unnecessarily sabotage the relationship. Self-protective behaviors like unnecessarily ending relationships before the other person does it to us, withdrawing emotionally, avoiding exposing any vulnerability in the relationship, withholding affection, withholding praise, negative criticism, shutting down, stonewalling, over reaction to little things that are not really a threat, avoiding commitment, avoiding conflict, creating unhealthy dependencies on us, lying, manipulation, gaslighting, becoming hyper controlling, extreme jealousy, cheating, isolating the other person from others and the list goes on and on. Basically, your own insecurity makes you behave in ways that make the relationship insecure if not impossible.
We can slip into the covert depreciation pattern. The covert depreciation pattern is a toxic protection mechanism. It is a projection of how we feel about ourselves, out onto the world. Simply put, the Covert Depreciation Pattern is when low self-esteem causes a person to devalue everything else, including other people. When we feel bad about ourselves, recognizing the value of other things, most especially the value of other people, causes us to feel even worse about ourselves in comparison. And so, we go to work subconsciously or consciously depreciating everything around us, so that we can feel better about ourselves. This pattern shows up in two forms: The first from is: Because a person feels bad about themselves, they find active ways to devalue, diminish, cut down to size, disqualify, reduce, misprize, negate, disparage, discredit, minimize, put down and deflate something or someone in order to feel better about themselves and their own value. The second form is: Because a person feels bad about themselves, they depreciate the things they come into contact with, by virtue of association with themselves. Essentially, if anything is associated with them, they can’t think highly of it anymore. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Covert Depreciation Pattern. This SUCKS for anyone to be in a relationship with.
Low self-esteem creates an inferiority complex that demolishes relationship. We may constantly see ourselves as beneath or smaller than other people. When we do this, we start to lack confidence in our own decisions or abilities. This lack of confidence can cause us to not even step into the relationships that we really want and need and that would benefit us. We essentially unnecessarily disqualify ourself from the very relationships that we are desperate for. This lack of confidence can cause us to stop making decisions for ourselves and rather defer to others to tell us what to do. This means you stop leading and directing your own life. Instead, you follow other people’s lead. The problem is, a lot of the people who are very happy to tell you want to do, do not actually know what is in your best interests. Rather, they are deeply connected to only their own best interests, which they are projecting onto you. So, this puts you in the position to be used as a puppet to bring about what they want for themselves. On top of this, by losing confidence in your own decisions and abilities and therefore not bringing them into your relationships, you create narcissistic relationships unnecessarily. You’re making it so there is no “you” to be in a relationship with. So, you are creating a relationship of one… the other person only. So people will feel alone with all the pressure when they are in a relationship with us.
Having low self-esteem often causes you to be inauthentic and dishonest in relationships. If you feel you have no value, you don’t want to put yourself out there, including to other people. Rather, you may choose to erect a façade which you know they will value, accept and approve of. This makes you fake in relationships. It is a form of duping. You can’t dupe other people and have relationships go well. SO many issues come as a result of being inauthentic and dishonest. Here is just a small list of what I mean: Being inauthentic and dishonest ensures that you will never be valued or loved for who you really are. It will make it so you can never find true belonging. Other people cannot and should not trust you if you are doing this; so, it is an antithesis to trust in a relationship. You will end up dissatisfied in every relationship because it will not feel like you can have yourself and be in relationship at the same time. And this will create a kind of unnecessary poisoned water dynamic whereby you are desperate for relationship, but relationship puts you in pain. If you reveal your true self in the relationships you formed through a façade, you are in for serious conflict and potentially un-repairable relationship rupture. When you get into a relationship on a false premise, you are setting yourself up to be rejected once you reveal you are someone different than you sold yourself to be. Thus, creating a manifest destiny scenario for yourself regarding the belief that you are not going to be valued for who you are. And those relationships you got into with a façade and dishonesty are very likely to end. If you are inauthentic, you cannot make the correct choices regarding who to be with in life and because of this you guarantee that you will cultivate incompatible relationships. Incompatible relationships are absolute misery.
You will really struggle to communicate your own needs and bring your own needs into the relationship. In order to end up with poor self-esteem, we grew up in childhood environments that made us feel like we had little to no value to others. These environments made US bad and wrong. This means, we were rejected for what was true about us. Our feelings, thoughts, preferences, aversions and most of all, our needs. It isn’t like this association changes when we grow into an adult. We still feel we will be rejected for these things. This causes us to not reveal how we are feeling when we are in relationships and not be honest about what we truly think. It also causes us to suppress, deny and disown our needs. When we feel bad about ourselves, we feel ashamed of our needs. We cannot conceptualize of the idea that someone would want to meet them and might even get something themselves out of doing so. And so, we keep them away from the other person and the relationship. There is no way to create an actual relationship this way. A relationship is a dance between two beings and a big part of that dance is needs. Also, just because we deny and withhold needs, doesn’t mean they are not there. They will come up in subconscious ways. You are likely to become extremely manipulative because manipulation happens when we don’t feel we can meet a need directly, so our subconscious goes to work getting that need met indirectly. Not having needs met will cause resentments and dissatisfaction with the relationship. It will also cause unresolved conflict because a big part of resolving a conflict is identifying what is needed by both parties. Unresolved conflict that keeps coming up again and again wears down a relationship to the breaking point.
You may spend your whole time in relationships overcompensating. You can think of overcompensation as being the behavior of taking excessive measures and going to extreme lengths to try to keep other people interested in being in a relationship with you, because you feel you must do this to overcompensate for your lack of value. This can manifest in many ways. For example, it can manifest as abandoning your own needs so as to focus only and entirely on your partners needs and on meeting them. It can manifest as trying to become beyond excellent at one skill you know people desire or value and essentially peacocking with this. It can manifest as doing everything you can do to please others and do what they want to do. It can manifest as perfectionism. It can manifest as showering others in gifts and other expensive experiences so as to compensate for the inadequacy you feel. It can manifest as letting go of every other relationship in your life for a partnership. If you recognize this behavior in yourself, you may want to watch one of my videos titled: The Dancing Monkey Pattern in Relationships.
Constant seeking of reassurance and validation within the relationship. When we have low self-esteem, we are like a bottomless pit for reassurance and validation. We become totally dependent on the other person to behave a certain way towards us so that we can feel good about ourselves. The reason being that when we feel bad about ourselves, it taints us. Other people’s positivity towards us is entering the constantly poisoned water of our self-concept. Because of this (coupled with the fact that it makes us feel bad to tell the other person this is the reason behind our need for reassurance and so, we are unlikely to do so) it will start to feel to others like no amount of reassurance or validation is ever effective. It can make them feel constantly questioned or doubted or like they are not being good enough in the relationship and are not doing the right thing in the relationship. All of this can make the other person start to feel like they are pouring energy into a cup with holes in it. This wears a person down and can cause the relationship to feel strained and even futile. Like no amount of energy they put into making the relationship secure ever works.
Jealousy and isolation of the other person. When we have low self-esteem, we have jealousy issues. We tend to feel a kind of resentful enviousness towards others that have what we want or that we think pose a threat to us losing what we value. At its root, jealousy is really a fear of losing something that we value. This fear makes us really anxious and suspicious and defensive and distrustful and hypervigilant and covetous and negatively protective. It makes other people who we perceive to have more value than we do, a potential threat to us losing the person we treasure. And this can cause us to become unnecessarily oppositional to other people, as well as to isolate the person we treasure from others. This isolation can take the form of discouraging them from being in contact with others, monitoring their communication with others and tampering with it, intentionally creating a sense of isolation from others in the person, causing insecurities in the person so they will isolate themselves from others, triangulating the person we treasure against other people, creating emotional consequences for them when they engage with others and even in extreme situations, physically preventing them from seeing other people.
Conflict avoidance. When we have low self-esteem, we feel we are always on such shaky ground in relationships, because people have so little incentive to be with us, that we cannot afford to have a conflict. We feel so much terror when conflict arises, we find it intolerable. We feel we are always on the brink of abandonment. The problem is, conflict is a necessary part of a relationship. It is also the only way to make it better and stronger. Conflict forces two beings to re-configure things so as to construct a stronger and better relationship. It forces two beings to consciously create a state of symbiosis. Two people cannot learn how to dance together in life without conflict. When we avoid conflict, we do not actually bring up issues to resolve them and so they never get resolved. Instead, the pain and fear and other negative emotions just keep building up and building up. This unresolved stuff in the relationship puts tension and pressure on the relationship and the relationship starts to crack. Also, it makes it impossible to resolve issues when they are small, which guarantees they will grow into huge issues (especially trust breaches) which will create the kind of big ruptures that are very hard to repair, if not impossible.
Having low self-esteem can cause you to isolate and push away relationships entirely. When we feel like we have no value, we anticipate that relationships will be a painful reminder of our inadequacies and that we will be abandoned. In order to avoid that pain, and to be more in control of the pain we experience, rather than being at the mercy of experiencing someone else doing it to us, we withhold ourselves from relationships completely. We reject others before they ever get the chance to reject us. We isolate ourselves. This way, we are in control of our own loneliness. We keep ourselves in the pain of deprivation, which many people feel is better than having someone we deeply need and then being rejected by them and losing them.
Low self-esteem causes us to stay in and maintain unhealthy relationships. When we feel bad about ourselves, we don’t feel worthy of being treated well. Nor do we feel we can be with people who are high value people. We believe they will reject us, so we are safer with dysfunctional and undesirable people. This means, we are likely to put up with really bad treatment from others. We will cling to dysfunctional and abusive individuals. We may tell ourselves that the person we have is as good as it can get for us and that no one else will want us. We may get into relationships with people who reinforce our negative self-concept. We won’t set boundaries that need to be set. We settle for less. We both create and stay on the receiving end of very painful relationships. When we do this, we may not put the energy into making these relationships healthy and instead, be a contributing factor to a cycle of dysfunction. Or, we may put in all the effort to a relationship that is actually futile. Or we may have an uncommitted person on the other side of the relationship and take 100 percent of the responsibility for the relationship working rather than end the relationship when we need to.
Changing your self-concept for the better is a critical part of building a life that is worth living. And it is an essential part of creating the relationships you want to have in this life, which should now be obvious given that you now understand the incredible impact that low self-esteem has on relationships.
Trust is the sacred core of a relationship. It is the most important thing to build up and to preserve in a relationship. It is to be treated like a sacred treasure. When trust is compromised as a part of a rupture in a relationship, it is hard to repair the rupture. Not necessarily impossible, but hard. When trust is damaged in a relationship, that trust must be rebuilt diligently and persistently.
To trust someone is to feel as if you can rely on them to act in your best interests. A big part of this in human relationships is about relying on others to capitalize on your best interests, meaning that you can rely on it being in their best interests to act in your best interests. A person’s best interests are the things that are beneficial, right and good for them. And this is unique to every individual person. In a relationship, it is really important to get to know the other person so as to deeply understand them, so you have a picture of what their unique best interests are. This way, you can behave in a way that creates trust and preserves it. This being said, especially in the beginning of a relationship, we may not execute this perfectly all of the time. There may be times when we don’t act in a way that is aligned with the other person’s best interests and so, we will need to repair trust with that person.
It is important to understand that trust breaches really exist on a kind of sliding scale that depends on the best interests of a specific person. And it is definitely much harder and sometimes impossible to repair big ones. For example, say that a woman cares about her privacy. And say that she is at a party with her boyfriend and he reveals something to the group that she considers to be private. She then loses trust in him. But this is likely to be a trust breach he can repair. But say that this woman cares a lot about her cat and so she is very clear that no one can let the cat sneak out the front door. But he is not diligent about this and so the cat gets out and gets hit by a car. This will be a much harder trust breach for him to repair. But this whole sliding scale may be different for a woman who works for the FBI. If her job and safety depended on privacy and her boyfriend revealed something about her to a group of people, this may be a very difficult rupture to repair, if not impossible because her boyfriend has revealed himself to be a liability in a very serious way to her best interests. In fact, the cat scenario for this other woman may be a smaller trust breach. Best interests are unique to each person and this is one reason that compatibility is such an important part of a relationship. What is in one person’s best interests, may not be in another person’s best interests. One person may easily be able to accommodate your best interests. And another may not be able to do so without comprising their own best interests.
The first thing you need to understand about a trust breach in any relationship is that unlike other kinds of ruptures, you cannot repair it right away. This is what makes a trust issue a particular kind of hell for both parties. Relationship rupture is painful and it creates insecurity and distance in a relationship. It also enflames protector personalities. You can’t “feel good” if you have a relationship rupture. But when trust has been compromised, you need to prove yourself to be trust worthy. You need to earn back or build back that trust. And a promise to do so is not usually going to work. The person whose best interests were acted against in a specific way, will need to see that their interests will be acted for in that specific way. For example, if trust was compromised in a monogamous relationship because a woman flirted with and began affectionately touching another man, trust would need to be re-built over time with her proving in scenarios where other men are around that she will not flirt with them or be physically affectionate with them. And until this happens, the distrust will be there, like an open wound in the relationship. If she again proves that she cannot be trusted with other men, this wound will get bigger. If she manages to prove she can be trusted with other men, this wound will begin to close and heal and trust will be re-established.
If you have created a trust breach in a relationship, it will take diligent energy and effort to re-establish trust. And this really sucks. It is hard to accept that you have a task ahead of you now and the reality is that you can’t make yourself or the other person feel good right away. This rupture, and the pain and fear it causes cannot be un-done. Like a wound, it will heal and that pain and fear will diminish only by proving yourself to be someone they can trust in whatever specific way instead. All the more reason to avoid losing another person’s trust above all other things in a relationship. With that said, here is what to do to re-build trust.
Become very clear about what their best interests were and specifically how you acted against their best interests. Accept that this rupture (being a trust rupture) is like a wound that now must heal and can only heal by you proving to the other person that they can rely on you to act in their best interests. Commit to this diligent repair process. Commit to proving yourself to be someone they can trust. The very best way to do this, is to demonstrate over and over that you will do the opposite of what you did this time. When you do this, you are essentially saying “I see what hurt you, because I care about your best interests, I will not do it again… Let me show you that I will not do it again”. For example, if the trust breach was about breaking your word, demonstrate over and over that you will not break your word. Demonstrate this by not breaking your word on anything, no matter how big or small.
If the trust breach involves changing something you find difficult to change right away, then the trust must be built by proving your dedication to doing so. For example, let’s say that you lost trust because of flying into a blinding rage where you hurt the other person. But you know that this is a problem for you in general because you struggle with rage. You can’t promise that you won’t fly into a rage. In fact, doing so and then flying into a rage, further destroys trust. But you can say that you are going to commit to dealing with your temper. And this may look like going to see a therapist weekly and reading books or watching videos on anger and rage. And committing to an exercise regime that makes you feel more emotionally healthy. And creating a new protocol for dealing with your emotions when they arise etc. If the person sees that you are dedicated to their best interests by seeing the effort you are purring towards something that is in their best interests, they are likely to begin rebuilding trust in you. But you cannot be passive about this demonstration. All this said, the reality is, unless you can be relied on to act in their best interests in a specific way, they should not trust you in that way. For example, if you are someone who talks badly about people behind their back, you should not be trusted to not talk badly about people behind their back. I have to say this because of how many people want to be trusted in a certain area despite not being trustworthy in that certain area.
Communicate all this to the other person. Communicate a clear understanding of what you did and why it was not in their best interests. The trust breach must be acknowledged, as well as the pain and fear it caused. There will be no repair to a trust breach without empathy. You will need to be able to communicate the why behind you doing what you did to damage their trust. This is not the same as making excuses or justifying yourself. It is simply a necessary thing to be able to clearly explain to them why you did what you did. This also helps to ensure that the other person isn’t coming to their own terrible conclusions and making things mean something that they don’t mean. And you cannot say “I don’t know.” If you don’t know why you did what you did, the other person can have no confidence that you have enough control of the root issue behind the behavior so as to be able to trust that the same thing won’t happen again. Communicate a desire to and commitment to acting in their best interests. You must communicate to them a deep level of caring about what is beneficial, right and good for them. And communicate your commitment to doing the opposite of what you did going forward. Tell them what they can specifically expect from you that will help them to re-build trust in you. This is likely to be the opposite behavior from the behavior that caused the trust breach. And then, follow through. Take full responsibility for rectifying the situation and be consistent and reliable and dedicated in your demonstration that you can be relied on to act in their best interests. If you do not diligently follow through on your commitment to re-build the trust in this way, you will have destroyed trust even further than you compromised it in the first place.
In the case that a trust breach reveals an incompatibility (meaning there is no way to act in their best interests in a certain way without compromising your own), you’ve got to put this reality on the table in a way that demonstrates that you care about their best interests. Basically, in this case, you build trust by enrolling them in a kind of problem-solving mode where you both put your energy towards finding a win-win. This may mean re-configuring the relationship and it may mean changes have to be made that are not pleasant or preferred for either party, but they are in the highest and best interests of both people. And then, those changes that accommodate for the best interests of both people, must be carried out. This isn’t the ideal situation. But never the less, it will build trust because it is still an overt demonstration of this: I do care about your best interests and want to be an ally and advocate for them. So, when I become aware that your best interests are in conflict with mine, I won’t just play a zero-sum game. I will lend my energy to figuring out the highest and best scenario that is in alignment with what is beneficial, right and good for you and me. For example, let’s say that two friends live together. One of them is a musician and the other is in college. Let’s say that the musician wakes up late at night to record a new song that popped into his head at 3 am. He wakes up his roommate, who just so happens to be trying to get enough sleep for his law school admissions test and he knew his roommate had this important test before hand. This damages trust in the relationship. But let’s say that the musician realizes that he can’t revolve his creative cycles around the best interests of his friend in these college years. To build back trust, the musician would need to prove himself to be an ally and advocate for his friend’s best interests by recognizing this incompatibility and perhaps the solution the two come to is that they no longer live together. But he may show his dedication to the friendship by finding a great person to sublet and making an effort to spend quality time together when his friend is not in classes.
Prioritize what fosters feelings of togetherness, closeness, connection and emotional intimacy. A trust breach by definition harms the security in a relationship. When relationship security is damaged, there is less tolerance for space in a relationship and feel-good connection needs to be re-established. This means the priority should be spending time together, speaking their love language, reconnecting on an emotional level, maybe also a physical level (depending on the kind of relationship it is). Basically, you want to ask yourself: Aside from building back their trust in me, what can I do that will feed the relationship and make it feel better? What love language can I speak to them that will be most effective? What quality time might we spend together? What experiences might we share? What conversation might we have? It is not a time to go along with business as usual. For example, you don’t want to create a trust breach with your girlfriend and decide to go out for a boys night anyway. You’ve got to demonstrate that the other person and your relationship with them really matters to you.
When it comes to trust breaches, the biggest enemy is: Patterns. Patterns in this context meaning trust compromising behaviors that happen over and over again. For example, if you withdraw when someone needs you, this can cause a loss of trust. If this is something you do again and again, especially no matter how many times it is brought up as an issue, you are demonstrating the pattern that you will withdraw and therefore cannot be trusted to be there when the other person needs you. The mind is wired to recognized patterns. And this is smart. If you eat a plant and get sick not once, but two times, even more three times, it is a pattern. It is smart to avoid that plant. If you demonstrate a trust compromising pattern, it is smart for someone not to trust you in that area. And once a pattern is established, it is even harder to re-establish trust. It will not do anything to simply do differently “next time”. You will need to demonstrate a full change in pattern and for an undefined period of time for the person to trust that the pattern has changed.
The truth about trust is, you need to earn trust. Trustworthiness is yours to demonstrate. The vulnerability in a relationship is that the other person has to be willing to allow you to do that. Sometimes this means putting themselves in vulnerable positions to let you build that trust. But unless you can be relied on to act in someone else’s best interests in a specific way, they should not trust you in that way. Trust is one of those things that may take a long time to build up and a long time to get back, despite the fact that it can be lost in an absolute instant. But, with commitment and the willingness to demonstrate that commitment, trust can be re-built.
Everyone wants something. But just because a person wants something doesn’t mean that they go for it. Not going for what you want leads to a life of dissatisfaction. A life experience that is less than what is possible to live. And desire is a big part of what is meant to give you direction in life. So, not going for what you want means you will float through life, directionless. For that reason, today we are going to talk about how to go for what you want.
For the sake of this conversation, we are going to start from the place of you knowing what it is that you want. But this being said, you need to make sure that you have properly pinpointed what you want. Some people think they know what they want, but really they are focused on wanting a certain thing because they are convinced that is the venue through which they will get something else. Therefore, what is really happening is that they are displaying a lack of flexibility regarding the HOW of getting what they want. For this reason, to identify what you really want, take what you think you want and ask yourself “what would getting that give me?”. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. Let’s say that there is a man who thinks “I want to be in a romantic relationship with Rachel.” If he asks himself “What would being in a romantic relationship with Rachel give me?” the answer may be: I will get unconditional love and nurturing. It is unconditional love and nurturing that he wants. He is simply convinced that Rachel is how to get what he wants. So, his desire isn’t actually Rachel. On top of this, in order for Rachel to be a good way to go for what he wants, he needs to actually be sure this is the case. For example, she may not want to provide unconditional love or nurturing to a romantic partner. Or, let’s imagine that the reason he was convinced she will be a good venue to fulfill these desires, is because she is a therapist who he has seen behave very unconditional and nurturing with the people she is working with. But imagine that Rachel is only able to be unconditional and consistently nurturing in her profession, because unlike with a partner, her personal life is not negatively impacted by her client’s patterns and behaviors. And so, she can be there for them without getting furious at them or afraid of them no matter what they do or don’t do and not hold them to any standard of behavior. In essence, the security in the relationship with her clients can be relatively unconditional. This is not the case with a partner.
All this being said, let’s imagine that you have identified what it is that you want. Here is how to go for what you want.
Resolve the resistance you have to going for what you want. If a person has not gone for what they want, that is because they have a part of themselves or many that are opposing doing so. If you do not resolve this resistance and find alignment between the parts of yourself, going for what you want will be like driving with the parking brake on. This means, identify your resistance to going for what you want and start to work with that resistance in a way that the resistance goes away. One of the best ways to deal with this kind of resistance, is through parts work. If you want to learn about how to do that, you can watch my video titled: Parts Work (What Is Parts Work and How To Do It). Remember that resistance is not only about a part of you wanting something and a part of you not wanting something, it is about oppositional force. So, say you wanted to be a surgeon. A part of you that doesn’t think highly enough of you to apply to a prestigious medical school would be considered an oppositional force. In the process of you going for what you want, you may encounter and need to resolve many layers of resistance! Also, keep in mind that when it comes to the things we want the most, but have not attained yet, one of the main reasons for this is because in order to go for what we want, we have to be willing to feel like a bad guy. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: How Self Concept Gets In The Way of your Deepest Need.
Stir up and strengthen the vibrational frequency of what you are wanting. This is actually already happening at a subconscious level. But it definitely gets stronger with deliberate focus. Become clear about what you want and about why what you want is calling you. Put yourself in the mental space of what you want in a way that specifically enhances the feeling state of what you want. For example, let’s say that you have identified that what you want is to be financially free. Let’s say that the specifics of wanting that, is because you want to feel a specific flavor of freedom. Deliberately think any thought that causes you to feel that flavor of freedom and keep thinking thoughts that amplify it and amplify it and amplify it. People like to use visualization for this. So, if seeing, sensing and feeling yourself standing on the railing of a massive yacht causes this feeling state within you, making this mental image as detailed as possible, so as to feel the feeling flavor as intensely as possible, is what to do. You want to maintain this for as long as you can do so intensely. For most people, this is only a matter of minutes. It’s best if you do this every day. What this does, is it sets in motion the manifestation of what it is that you are wanting. You could say that it starts to create a kind of blue print that calls the people, places, opportunities and things into place. This vibrational priming also gives rise to inspired action, in other words, actions that will be the most effective to bring about what you want in the physical.
Commit to it. To commit to something is to put your energy into it. When your energy is in something, so are your words and choices and actions. If you are not committed to what you want, what you want will not come to fruition because your energy is not actually invested in that thing. We are given the opportunity to commit and re-commit every time we encounter a choice on the path to what we want. We have to keep making the choice for what we want and the choice that is aligned with what we want. This creates discipline and diligent persistence. For example, if we want to get fit, we must commit to doing so. This way, we will make choices and take actions that will bring fitness about. We can’t say we are committed to getting fit if we are confronted with the choice to eat Cheetos or not and we do it. When we do this, we are demonstrating a subconscious commitment to something else other than fitness.
Look for and seize opportunities. You have to actively look for opportunities. And when opportunities present themselves that seem to be in alignment with what you want, first make sure they are actually in alignment with what you want. If not, turn them down. If yes, then act on the opportunity. Many people let opportunities pass them by and don’t act on them. To go for what you want, you need to act on them. Even if an opportunity is only a stepping stone towards what you want.
Be willing to be afraid and uncomfortable. It would benefit you to work up this emotional muscle. The comfort zone is not where going for what you want lives. Going for what you want will take bravery. You can work on this fear and discomfort directly, because they are aspects of resistance. But at the end of the day, you will have to be willing to be brave. You must act on opportunities and take risks in order to go for what you want. In this same vein, you’ve got to be a person who is willing to let go of what does not work for you, and also a person who is willing to let go of what IS working for you in order to get what you want. Neither of which are comfortable. For example, imagine that you want to be a professional singer. You may need to let go of living in a rural area. This may be something that really isn’t working for you. But let’s say that you really love being near your family. This may be something that is working for you. The reality is, to be a professional singer, you may need to let go of being near your family.
Act on inspired action. When you really want something, you will start to have inspiration to do certain things. They will come as deep urgings. These ideas of things to do will be ones that fill you with energy. They will make you feel moved from the inside, lit up, enthusiastic and motivated. They will compel you to act. When this wave hits you, take the inspired action immediately. You can think of this like being a spiritual surfer who is catching a wave and riding that universal current to shore. Only in this analogy, shore is the manifestation of what you want. The people who get what they want the fastest, are the ones who act the quickest on inspiration. Even if that inspiration comes at 3:00 at night.
When you have your sights set on the goal, (ie: what you want), break down the steps between where you are now and having what you want. From there, just start acting on the step in front of you, and then the next and then the next, rather than being overwhelmed by the whole staircase. Remember, the actual steps on this staircase may be different than you imagined them to be. But you need to start from the idea you have. For example, if I know I want to move to a foreign country, I may first identify the steps as being: Call an immigration lawyer. Find the right visa. Apply for that visa. Decide what I am keeping and not keeping and donate what I’m not keeping. Sublet my apartment etc. But let’s say that during this process, I find out that I need to apply for a different visa, I can adjust and make that one of the new smaller steps. It was a step I was unaware of before. But, once I am aware of it, it simply becomes part of the unique staircase of going for what I want. Every day, just take the next step and the next step and the next step.
Learn from the people who are already where you want to be and who have what you want to have. And in this same vein, ask for what you want and get help. You do not have to go for what you want alone. No one ever got to where they are by their own energy alone. There is a saying that the way you will actually become successful will never be the way you think. This is another way of saying that you need to be flexible regarding the HOW of getting what you want. Also, the way one person gets what they want is likely to be totally different than the way another person gets what they want. Always stay open to alternatives and other possibilities. However, people who already have what you want often doll out golden advice for getting what you want and this information is really, really helpful. On top of this, it may sound obvious, but you have to ask for what you want. Not only from the universe, but also from other people. You would be shocked at how quickly you can get what you want, simply by asking for it from others. On top of this, find other people who are willing to invest their energy into what you want because doing so brings about something that they want. As they say: Rome was not built by one pair of hands alone. You may be able to find overt help from people who simply want to help you. But, by far the most powerful relationships with regards to getting what you want come about when you set up a situation where your gain is somehow also their gain. Make sure the people you are spending your time with are not oppositional to what you want. You want to spend time with people who are a yes towards what you want.
Be persistent. Persistence is absolutely necessary if you want to go for what you want. Be the kind of person who isn’t dissuaded from what they want. To use a metaphor: Be the person who goes in the back door, when he or she is denied entry in the front door. Be the person who tries a different approach and a different approach and a different approach. Be the person who is willing to get a thousand no’s before they get a yes. Keep going at it.
If you know what you want, go get after it. Don’t keep telling yourself that you have tomorrow and the next day and the next day to do it. All you have is today. So, make the most of it. And the way you make the most of it, is by dedicating your energy, your thoughts, words, choices and actions to what is most important to you. To what you really, really value and to really, really want.
Whether we are the one on the receiving end of harm or we are the one causing harm, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of using our intentions or someone else’s intentions to try to minimize the perceived impact of the harm that is done. And contrary to what it seems like, doing so can be very damaging, which is why today, I’m going to explain this behavior in depth and explain why you should steer clear of it.
In general, intention matters. One of the most important things to become consciously aware of is the WHY behind whatever you are doing. Most people are simply not consciously aware of the WHY behind what they are doing, even though their WHY accounts for a very big portion of the energy behind their action. Everything you decide and say and do serves a purpose. The purpose behind your decisions and behind what you say and behind your actions is critical to become aware of.
But neither neutral nor positive intention negates the damage that is done or the pain that is caused to someone. Never the less, people act as if it does. You will hear things like this all the time: “oh, he or she didn’t really mean it”. Or “they didn’t do it consciously.” Or “they meant well”. Or “they did it because they thought it was the best for me.” Or “they didn’t do it on purpose”. Or “they did the best they could”. etc.
The reason that we feel the need to negate and minimize the negative impact something had by pointing to intention is multi fold.
We hope that by pointing to our positive intention, we are establishing ourselves as an ally rather than an adversary, which we hope will repair the rupture between ourselves and the other person and as a result, we can be and feel socially safe as well as maintain a sense of confluence and connection.
We can use it as a strategy to avoid looking at the damage caused because we are afraid of looking directly at it. We fear that doing so will lead to some kind of consequence we are unwilling to experience.
We feel doing so will allow us to maintain relationships with and remain close to the people who have harmed us, whereas we worry that looking directly at it would compromise those relationships in some way.
We cannot see ourselves as bad or wrong. This is the ultimate threat to our self-concept. And so, we must establish a neutral or positive intention in order to feel good about ourselves.
We don’t want to put energy into creating repair and righting wrongs. So, it is easier to simply try to cancel out the damage done by pointing to the intentions behind it.
We like to point to intention when we are trying to defend someone who is being accused of having caused damage (ie. done something bad or wrong). And we may have all kinds of reasons for doing this.
We like to point to intention when we are trying to justify the things we or other people say and do.
Neither neutral, nor positive intention cancels out or takes away the damage that is done. For example, if a parent is so inconsistent and unpredictable that they are unable to create a secure relationship with their child, regardless of whether the parent was intentionally not there for the child when the child needed them, or was inconsistent due to subconscious patterns and struggles within themselves. Neither changes the fact that the child is now an adult with an attachment problem who now needs therapy and who is struggling in their adult relationships badly. Or for example, if a person shot someone else to death, regardless of whether the person shot someone intentionally or whether it was an accident, the person is still dead and massive negative impact to everyone who loved that person still occurred.
So, what does intention change, if it doesn’t negate the impact or the damage done? That is perhaps the most important question you can ask yourself. In each situation, you’ve got to get into the habit of really questioning what you think this intention vs. that intention would or should change? This is the only real way to decipher if the way we are siting intention is healthy or not.
Knowing the intention behind someone’s words or actions changes the meaning we assign to an experience and our interpretation of it. Both are important things. Both can make us feel better or worse about the things that have happened and therefore, change the kind of impact they have on us. This is undeniable. For example, knowing that a person lied to us because they were so terrified of losing the relationship with us by telling us the truth vs. knowing that a person lied to us because they wanted to manipulate us into doing what they want definitely changes the way we feel about that situation and that person and even ourselves. But we can use intention in a shadowy way. We can use it to stay unconscious and dysfunctional.
Using intention to try to minimize or negate impact is resistance to acknowledging the impact. And refusing to deeply acknowledge impact, is an avoidance mechanism that can get us into big trouble. If we do not look at reality, and impact is a big part of the reality of a situation, we cannot respond to what is real. We will be acting out of reality and we will be unable to create healing for ourselves. When we use intention to negate impact, we can easily betray ourselves by defending the person who harmed us against our own pain. In this same vein, we can easily start to defend the person who caused harm against the person who has been harmed.
So that you can understand this better, meet Jane. Jane comes from a status-oriented family that really emphasized being the best. They sent Jane away to a boarding school when she was nine years old so she could be on track to be a professional tennis star. This was a huge trauma. Regardless of acting like she was on board with the decision (because she was so desperate for her parent’s approval), the reality is that she was far too young to be without her family. The reality is that there was no one truly caretaking her and none of her emotional needs were met. Being there, she learned to suppress emotions. She became attached to places rather than people. She developed a cut throat competitive edge and not just on the court, but in all areas of life. She felt so utterly unwanted by her father and so worthless at a subconscious level, that she developed an obsession with needing to be daddy’s little girl, but in her romantic relationships with men. She would exclusively date men who were at least 20 years older than she was and who were very cold, dismissive and demeaning men, like her father. She ends up feeling demeaned and not good enough and discarded in every one of her relationships. And every time she gets into a new relationship, she moves to live with the new man and throws away all of her friends. So, she ends up alone. She has an eating disorder, which she uses to try to cope with the emotional components of this whole dynamic.
The problem is, Jane refuses to acknowledge the damage done. She loves to maintain the story in her own head that her parents sent her to boarding school to help her pursue her own dreams. She tells people that her parents had no way of knowing that she would be so unhappy being sent away, after all, they thought they were setting her up in life. She says “it wasn’t that my dad didn’t love me, it’s that due to his parents, he never knew how to love and so, his way of showing me love was with money and opportunities.”
When Jane does this, what she is doing is avoiding. She is avoiding looking at the reality of the damage her parents did to her and the lasting impacts of that damage. She is trying to make her own pain go away by negating it with the idea of her parents having good intentions for what they did. She is also afraid that she will harbor negative feelings towards them, which will put a further distance between her and them, when their closeness (especially her father’s) is the thing she is most desperate for in this world. Jane is also betraying herself by defending the people who harmed her against her own pain. And she is also gaslighting herself, hoping that if she doesn’t perceive harm being done, she won’t feel the effects. In all of this, she can never hope to heal from the experience. She will never actually recognize what has happened and what needs to be done about it so as to experience a genuine improvement. She will never become aware of the full scope of her patterns, so she won’t be able to change them. She will also never become aware of what dysfunction needs to change in her relationship with her parents. Instead, she will stay an accessory to the family dysfunction.
Intentions matter. But in the context of this conversation, they don’t matter more than impact and it is the impact that must be addressed. Positive intent does not trump everything. Good intention doesn’t minimize or erase the impact of what you do. And this is why they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In order to get what you want; you have to give up what is no longer working for you. For example, say that what you want is to succeed as an entrepreneur. And say that you have a pattern of not commitment to things, based off of a fear of failing at them. The pattern of not committing to things, based off of the fear of failure is something that is preventing you from what you want. It is something that is not working for you. And so, you are going to have to give that up. To give up what clearly does not serve you in order to get what you want is hard. But what is even harder is to give up what IS working for you, in order to get what you want. And this is something that each and every person inevitably has to do. The question is: What are you and what aren’t you willing to give up in order to have what you want?
To give you some idea of what I mean by having to give up what is working for you in order to get what you want, here are three examples. Jeremy, who is from USA is madly in love with a woman named Isadora from Brazil. Jeremy has an incredible job and ambitions to climb to the top of the corporate ladder within the company he works for. He loves his job and it took him years to do what it took to be hired to work for such a prestigious company. Jeremy’s job is something that is working for him. Jeremy wants a lifelong partnership of deep intimacy and to live life together with someone even more. He wants to marry Isadora. But Isadora has a child. Because of this, she cannot leave Brazil. No matter how much effort Jeremy has put into trying to find a win-win scenario, the truth is, if he wants a lifelong partnership with Isadora, he is going to have to give up the job he loves.
Reyka survived a childhood of neglect and abuse by fending for herself. She figured out in every situation, how to take control so as to act in her own best interests. Most especially to do whatever it took to get away from painful situations. She has become financially successful because of this. And she has gotten herself out of many truly bad situations with this adaptive strategy. Reyka wants to be in a relationship with a man who she can rely on and depend on. A man who takes care of her and protects her, so that she can live out the rest of her life in her femininity. She wants this worse than anything in the world. In order to have this, Reyka must give up the behavior of fending for herself. This is the one thing she finds the most difficult to do. Why? Because even though fending for herself is an oppositional force to what she is wanting, it is also something that is working for her in several ways. It is giving her a sense of empowerment in life. It keeps her from being disappointed. And most of all, it is giving her a sense of safety. She knows that at the end of the day, she can get away from whatever situation she finds herself in and whatever person is causing her harm and rely on herself to act in her own best interests. So, she never actually has to feel or be at their mercy. This protects her from abuse. That is a big thing to give up.
Martina is fresh out of college and has a dream to see the world. She is considering taking a job working for a cruise ship company. The problem is, Martina is so, so close to her family. She cannot imagine not being with her family for Sunday dinners or on holidays or missing significant events. She loves the house she grew up in. She feels a deep sense of security living with her parents and knowing that they and the rest of the family always have each other’s backs. And so, there will never be a day that she isn’t bailed out of trouble. This situation she is living in with her family is something that is working for Martina. The problem is, in order to see the world, she will have to give up being in close proximity to her family.
It is easier to give up what isn’t working for you in order to go for what you want than it is to give up what IS working for you in order to get what you want. In fact, it is so hard to give up what IS working (what is positive and valuable and going right) that we can become completely stuck relative to getting what we want. We can prove to be totally unwilling to do what it takes to get what we want because of it. This is one reason why to generalize, wealthier people are often far more stuck relative to doing what it takes to get what they want. They usually have a life that boasts more things that are really working for them and that they are thus, very attached to and very unwilling to let go of. We can be stuck on a merry go round for years, trying to find any answer for getting what we want that does not involve giving up what is working for us, when giving that something of value up, is the very thing that stands in the way of what we want.
At the end of the day, a critical truth to accept is that in order to get what you want, you will be asked to give up something that is positive, valuable, going right and thus, is working for you. The question is: What is it? And are you willing to do it?
Unworkability is one of the most obnoxious things to come up against. By definition, it is like hitting a psychological brick wall. But there is a hack for dealing with unworkability, whether you encounter it within yourself or within another person. First, let’s define unworkability as something being completely rigid in the way it is. It is the ultimate form of resistance. To give you just a few examples, someone can have a completely rigid political or religious belief and be totally unwilling to entertain the idea of examining or changing it. Or a person may have a pattern of breaking their word and no matter how much of a problem they consciously know it is, and no matter how many consequences they run into because of it, they keep on breaking their word. Or, a person makes a decision, such as moving to another country and absolutely nothing and no one will cause them to reconsider. Unworkability implies that change is impossible. If you want to learn even more about Unworkability, you can watch my video titled: How To Deal With Unworkability.
But here is THE hack for dealing with unworkability: Find and address the specific pain that is being avoided by keeping the unworkability. Hiding behind any unworkability is deep, and I mean deep pain. Part of that deep pain, will be deep fear. The unworkability serves a person by functioning as a shield. The person is convinced, either consciously or subconsciously that the unworkability keeps them safe from harm. Something both painful and terrifying. But ironically, it is that exact pain as well as the fears inherent in it, which need to be directly taken care of. For example, hiding underneath someone’s unworkable pattern of breaking their word may be the hell of putting all of their energy into someone (ie committing) and being traumatized as a result of it. Therefore, breaking their word keeps them from the horrors they are sure they will face if they truly commit. Or for example, hiding underneath someone’s inability to lose weight no matter what they do may be the pain of never being allowed to have any boundaries without facing violation and with this, the terror of exposure. Therefore, fat has become their way of hiding within themselves, insulating themselves from others and buffering themselves against the world. Or for example, hiding underneath someone’s rigid political belief that all immigrants should be deported, may be the extreme pain of unfairness and prevented access to resources. Maybe the fear that he or she cannot get sufficient healthcare for themselves and their loved ones because the healthcare system is flooded with immigrants instead.
Whatever the case may be, it is critical to identify what pain and with it, what fear is being avoided by keeping whatever unworkability is presenting. The key from there to making that unworkability workable, is to find new and different ways to mitigate that pain as well as new and different strategies for circumventing the things that are feared. For example, if a person was traumatized by being trapped under someone else’s control because they committed to that person, and this is presenting as the unworkable pattern of breaking their word, the trauma of that experience must be compassionately seen, heard, felt and understood. And from there, different and more effective strategies for how to ensure that no one will control them against their best interests must be identified and adopted.
By identifying and lovingly working with the pain and fear hiding underneath the shield of unworkability, what is hard becomes soft. What is immovable becomes movable. What needs tending is finally tended to. And what is unworkable becomes workable.
It doesn’t take me to tell you that society values different things in woman and men and that the things they value in each, are ranked. And it is absolutely a reality that the thing human society values the most in men, is wealth. People want men to be providers first and foremost. We may not like that fact. We may think it should be different. We may argue that wealth corrupts. We may argue that woman can make their own money now, and so it is less important for a man to be the earner. You may argue that for you there are other more important things than for a man to be wealthy. But all of this resistance is not going to get us anywhere because it is a refusal to accept that this is still the way things are. It is still a reality that in the world today, the most valued thing in a man, is wealth.
What does all this mean? It means that when a man is wealthy, people see value in him. He has a thing of power. He is esteemed within society. And so, people assume that he has it all and that he is happy. Or at least he should be. All the focus and attention in society is placed on why it is so hard to be a man who does not have money. That is a story that has been told over and over again. You already know that story. But you don’t know the other one. Because of this, for the sake of awareness, today I’m going to outline for you why it is so hard to be a wealthy man.
Wealth is a trigger to the egos of other people. Similar to beauty and fame. It activates the human ego. When the ego is triggered, it creates zero sum games, whereby it does not consider the other person’s best interests. As a result, wealthy men are taught systematically that they cannot trust others. People so often play zero sum games with them. ALL of the negative manifestations of the human ego are amplified in those who come into contact with a wealthy man. Here are just some examples: Greed, exploitation, manipulation, lying, negative use, parasitic dynamics, power games and struggles, negative ambition, jealousy, resentment, envy, negative competition, projection, blame, criticism, judgment, bragging, the fight for superiority, and betrayal. Because of this, wealthy men see a side to people that other people don’t see. And not a good one. Wealth really reveals the worst in other people.
You live a life of exploitation. Because almost every single person thinks they can personally benefit somehow from your money and subsequently your power and from being associated with you, their relationship with you becomes about what they can get from you and how they can use you or their association with you. You become a means to an end for people. You will be used unfairly and associated with for their advantage. People will constantly try to get money out of you. In fact, you will start to feel like you are just one big opportunity object in other people’s reality that they use to gain an advantage for themselves. And there is yet another layer to the exploitation. People will exploit your vulnerabilities, things such as weaknesses and needs and pains in order to be able to secure a relationship with you, so that they can use you for their advantage. This means to live as a wealthy man is to live with constant distrust. And even in some cases, paranoia.
Wealth can be a real barrier to connection. It can be an intensely isolating thing. By becoming a wealthy man, you drastically decrease your odds of finding people who are compatible to you. Including a partner. You also decrease your odds of finding people who love you in that they take you as a part of themselves and are concerned for your best interests. Because so many people want a man with money in their lives, they are unconcerned with whether they are compatible to you or not in other, very important ways. It turns into an everyone wants me, but no one wants me dynamic. So, you’re essentially looking for a needle in a haystack. On top of this, because so many people think they can gain an advantage from being in a relationship with you, your relationships will be very transactional only (albeit not consciously transactional). And the other pillar of relationships, which is love, may be missing entirely. Wealthy men tend to feeling like caring about the other person will be a one- way deal. And this spells really serious relationship pain. This is very serious because relationships are the heart of life. You cannot have a good life and have painful relationships, no matter how much money you have. This is the main reason why wealthy men end up miserable despite “having everything”. Being a wealthy man is an intensely isolating experience full of painful and fragile connections. They are not seen. They are lonely, surrounded by others who are vying to be with them.
In this same vein, it is very hard for wealthy men to feel any security in terms of relationships. Deep down, wealthy men feel that their security in a relationship is based on them having wealth and not only that, continuing to up the ante. People acclimatize to what they have. And this makes it so a wealthy man feels the need to keep providing more and more, better and better; lest the person lose interest and go for someone who has more and can provide even better. When security in a relationship is based on what and how much they do for someone else financially, it feels really scary and the relationship security feels fragile. Deep down they tend to wonder, what is valuable about me beyond what I do and have? But they feel there is no real point to answering the question because it wouldn’t really matter because all anyone really values, is what they do and what they have. It’s at this point that they succumb to the split of on the one hand, accepting this reality because “I guess this is how the world is… I would do better to just accept it is the only way I can get anyone to want me.” And flaunt their wealth. Or, to hide their wealth so they can test if people care. Both is painful. Both is a constant state of distrust and insecurity. Just like there is a constant pressure for a beautiful woman to maintain her beauty, there is a constant pressure for a wealthy man to maintain a certain lifestyle and even, to keep upping that lifestyle. This is a lot of pressure. And it is pressure that makes relationships feel really insecure.
It is very hard for wealthy men to develop a deep sense of who they are beyond what they do as well as security in terms of self-esteem. Because of the reflection they keep getting, their identity revolves around what they do and what they have. And their self-esteem becomes about money and the skills with which they get that money. Because of this, there tends to be a real confusion about who they really are, if you took the making of money out of the equation of their lives. It begs the question, who am I beyond what I do and what I have? Wealthy men tend to be dependent on the wealth they have for esteem. Loving what they get from it. While at the same time, hating it. It’s a love hate relationship. Because of all this, there is terror about losing money. And also, the sense that there can never be enough of it. There is always someone else with more wealth. They feel they must keep making more and becoming more and more wealthy. They can’t relax into anything they have. They keep having to up the ante to compensate for the emptiness they feel. Quite unexpectedly, this means that those who are wealthy, obsess over money. This emptiness is created because no one sees, feels, hears or understands them. And they are never encouraged to see, feel, hear or understand themselves. Wealthy men tend to live in a void regarding intimacy, especially emotional intimacy. This difficulty with regards to developing a sense of who they are beyond what they do and have, makes wealthy men especially prone to mid-life crisis.
When relationships go south and people realize they may lose the “resource” of you, they tend to play a mad zero-sum game to try to get the most out of you that they possibly can. They try to suck you dry. They try to take you for as much as you’re worth. It is very hard for a wealthy man to not end up with an enemy when friendships or work relationships go south and even harder for them to maintain a friendly relationship with someone they were romantically involved with because of this dynamic. Relationship rupture, regardless of what type of relationship it is, is very dangerous for a wealthy man.
Wealthy men are consistently fed the mixed message that on the one hand, they are the answer to people’s dreams and desires. That they are valuable and wanted and needed and esteemed. And on the other hand, that they are the problem and that they are what is wrong with the world. That they are what is making people suffer. Many wealthy men feel guilt and even philanthropic panic when they see the financial struggles of others. Especially so when it is held over their head.
People have a negative association with wealthy men, despite it being the most valued thing in a male. They associate being a wealthy man with being an ass hole. A narcissistic one at that. They also assume you are unreachable, not human, not deep and materialistic. Facing this social judgement is not a recipe for a feel-good life.
Privacy issues. Wealth attracts attention and makes you significant to the public. This makes privacy difficult to protect. It makes you a target for the press and a target for public slaughter by anyone who feels slighted by you.
Your heart hurts consistently due to the entitlement in other people. People feel entitled to your money when you have a lot of it. When you are a wealthy man, people have expectations that you will pay for everything all the time and that you will do the things that will benefit them financially. It is treated as an obligation. You’re set up in a lose-lose because of this because it doesn’t feel good to simply go along with this expectation. But, if you don’t, you’re seen and treated as a bad guy. And people have all kinds of justifications for this. From believing that wealthy people gained money through advantages not available to everyone to believing their wealth makes them better able to contribute to believing that with increased wealthy comes increased responsibility for those who don’t have wealth and more. People believe that this expectation is fair. But is it fair?
The risk of law suits, scams, fraud and swindlers. To be a wealthy man is to be a resource that people can take advantage of. This makes everything a potential lawsuit. This puts you at risk for scams. This makes you a target for fraud. If people think they can get money out of you, many are simply looking for the opportunity to claim they are a victim to you, so that they can get money out of you. They think that because you are rich, nothing they do to you can harm you. After all, what’s a hundred thousand to a man who has millions. And a wealthy man who is not constantly on guard about this, is in real danger. So, a wealthy man will have to be on guard almost always.
Life complexity. The life of a wealthy man tends to be incredibly complex and stressful. People would think the opposite. But this is because they have no real feeling for the reality of wealth. I’m going to put you into the perspective of a wealthy man in this regard. Say I have to figure out what to do with the money I have. This means I need to weed through what is and isn’t right to do. I need to hire experts to tell me what the best thing to do is, but they don’t agree. So what do I do? Accountants must be hired. I bought a house. I had to hide my identity or they would research me and wouldn’t take my offer. Now, I have to take care of a house. Only, I can’t. I’m too busy. So, now I need to hire a house manager, who will in turn hire more people. Now I have a house staff. Now I’m responsible for this staff. I decided to buy a business, that business must be staffed. I have no one to manage this business at the moment, so I have to fill in. Now I’m responsible for a staff. Oh wait, I never knew that if one of my staff claimed they were made to worked two extra hours, even though I never told her to do that, she could turn me into the authorities and make me pay double. Now I need a lawyer. I invested in a company. I need to attend board meetings. I’m not sure this company is headed in the right direction. Now I need to have a handful of meetings about it, and maybe even call a board meeting. Damn the only time they can meet is right over the holidays. This is gonna cause a huge conflict with my family. Maybe I should put your money in an off shore account. Wait, maybe this will mean I am in trouble for tax fraud. Now I need to hire tax experts. I have no time to read up on tax law. One expert is coming over to the house in an hour, Wait, I need to brief the security guard about that. I needed to hire one of those because last week by the way because someone attempted to kidnap my daughter for ransom. How did my life get so complicated? You get the picture.
Aimlessness. Many wealthy men, especially those who have retired, or those who were born into money, suffer from a real sense of empty, lost, meaningless, aimlessness. The usual motivator for people to work hard and achieve goals and go in a certain direction is gone. There can be a real lack of purpose and drive. Intrinsic motive can be very hard to find for many wealthy men. And this creates a kind of lostness. It does not feel good for anyone in life to move through the world with no clear north star.
The pain of a wealthy man is not acknowledged. Society has no interest in hearing about the pains and sorrows of wealthy men. Their pains attract scorn. Their pain is treated like the tears of the king. People suffer a lot. And wealthy men are no exception. They suffer a lot. But people believe that wealthy men are too blessed to be hurt. So, their pain is never seen, heard, felt or acknowledged.
Becoming aware means perceiving the full reality of things. And people are not perceiving the full reality of what it is to be a wealthy man. As if being a wealthy man means they have nothing to cry about. The pain of wealthy men is usually completely unseen. But hopefully now, you can see it.
Sexuality is a pandora’s box. Most people assume that it is only a small sliver of the pie of a person’s overall life. But it isn’t. And sexuality is far, far more than the act of intercourse. Everyone has a unique sexuality. And each person’s unique sexuality is a direct reflection of their deepest traumas and deepest desires. And I’m not just talking about desires in the bedroom. I’m talking desires in their life in general. Today, I’m going to explain the most important thing to understand about sexuality as well as help you to start decoding your own sexuality so as to deeper understand yourself.
Sexual energy is creative energy. This is why sexual energy is what literally brings forth new life. And we all know this at a deep, visceral level. So, it isn’t hard to conceptualize of the fact that subconsciously, your sexuality would be connected to what you want to manifest in your life. What you want to create for yourself. In fact, your sexuality is most closely linked to what you are the most desperate to create and experience. These tend to be the things we felt the most powerless to creating and experiencing in our life. In fact, no matter how much we deny, suppress and disown these needs and desires, they will stay connected to our sexuality. The thing is, our most desperate desires, come from our deepest traumas. This is why working on sexuality is no superficial undertaking. Rather, it will bring you face to face with your deepest core wounds and confront you with the reality and vulnerability of what you need most in life. And once you become aware of these elements (so as to consciously get on board with bringing about what you want) you will be confronted with everything that is in the way of that. Sexuality can absolutely be a path to awakening.
The key to decoding what your sexuality says about your deepest traumas and deepest desires, is contained within the emotional component of your sexuality. In other words, what you get out of the specific sexual experience that gets you going. Everyone has a “thing” sexually. We can call this a fetish. But some people’s “thing” isn’t what society would traditionally call a fetish. This is why, unless you have a traditional fetish, it is often so hard for people to answer the question: What is your fetish?
The fact that sexuality is connected to your deepest traumas and therefore deepest life desires, means that sexuality is one of the biggest “tells” of compatibility and incompatibility in a relationship. If you want to understand this deeper, you can watch my video titled: The Hidden Truth About Your Sexuality.
The place to start with this process is to try to pin point what your “thing” is sexually. Consider these questions:
What makes you the most sexually aroused?
What really turns you on?
A good amount of people find what really turns them on at a very young age, which is why it’s a good idea to think back to the first time you ever found yourself uncontrollably aroused as well. What was it that aroused you?
Did you have any masturbation patterns in your youth, if so, what were you thinking about or looking at or doing?
What thoughts trigger the most arousal in you?
If you watch porn, what type of porn do you keep going back to that gets you the most overwhelmingly aroused?
Are there any interpersonal social dynamics that you find particularly arousing?
What would your ideal sexual experience be?
Examine your past, what was the best sexual experience you ever had and what made them so good? Also, what is the worst sexual experience you ever had and what made it so bad?
If you were to describe sex to an outer space alien down to the most minute details, but you had to explain to them how to make it the most erotic experience possible, what would you tell them to do? How would you describe your own likes and dislikes to them?
If you were to write an erotic fiction depicting the sexiest interaction possible, what would it be?
So you can see some examples, I’ll pull from some of the people I have worked with over the years…
A person might say “I feel embarrassed about it, but at the end of the day, I just can’t get over the idea of being with multiple women in bed. This is what I have to think about in order to be able to masturbate.” Or “I watch porn where people are totally inebriated and even unconscious and someone is fucking them.” Or “I like when the candles are lit and there is soft music playing and we spend a long time just softly stroking each other and kissing and then we spend hours slowly making love to each other, feeling all the sensations of each other’s bodies and we feel so emotionally connected that it is like we are merging.” Or “I like to be tied up, like completely and totally immobilized. In fact, I used to fantasize as a kid that a spider caught me in its web and tied me up and mated with me against my will.” Or “I love to role play that I am younger than I am and am a virgin and an older man is teaching me how to do it.”
I don’t care how weird or perverted or dark or wrong you judge your answers to be. If you want to understand yourself, you have to be honest with yourself. Once you have this answer, you then want to go on to really deeply dissect what it is about your “thing” sexually that turns you on so much. You have to put yourself in the place of imagining that your “thing” is happening. As in, you’re doing it right now. You’re going to slow down and start to really question what it is that you find so pleasurable about it.
How does each element of it make you feel?
What is it that you love so much about the way it makes you feel?
What do you get out of it?
What about it do you find irresistible?
What about it makes you feel better than you normally feel in day-to-day life?
For example, if we take the person who said “I watch porn where people are totally inebriated and even unconscious and someone is fucking them.” And they do a deep dive to un-pack it, they may discover “I love that the person can’t say no. This makes me feel totally and completely received and like they can’t not take me in. They can’t argue or put up a fight. They go limp, which gives me total control. I get to decide what to do and do whatever I want that feels good to me and I decide when it’s over. They have a higher pain tolerance, which gives me more freedom to not have to restrict myself. Also, they have no inhibition either, they feel no shame. The other person’s shame, and also my shame inhibits me and I don’t like it. It’s carnal and this means I can act on my urges, rather than being restricted by my mind.
From there, you can look to what traumas in your life sit at the opposite side of the spectrum emotionally from the answers you gave. This, is your core trauma in this life.
Using our previous example, of the man whose fetish is inebriated people, he easily pin points how he felt the opposite of these things he gets out of the sexual experience that arouses him most. And also, how he is still in some measure of residual pain now in his current life. He would say: “In my childhood, my mother was super, super controlling and prevented me from letting myself out. I was expected to be totally inhibited. I had to listen to other people, but was never allowed to express myself. I was never received. Every single thing I wanted, my parents said ‘NO’ to. As if I existed for other people’s pleasure only. I am so, so tired of being told ‘NO’. I was not allowed to take action or control, I was expected to do what I was told and behave. Behave, behave, behave. I had to be a good boy, well beyond the age where I became a man. The idea of being able to control someone else carries a feeling of revenge, which makes me feel empowered.
And from there, try to recognize the ways that you prevent yourself from getting those desires and needs. Basically, oppositional forces to what you are looking to get from your sexual “thing”.
Using our example, the man may say:
In my life right now, I have been working to get more empowered, but at the end of the day, I still feel controlled by my family, which is controlled by my mother. I feel inhibited. I watch myself being passive in situations where I need to take action. I don’t express myself. I feel any person I’m in a relationship with has the upper hand. I’m frustrated because my sexuality reveals that I am not satisfied in my life and it really points to what I am needing in my life in general. I can see that I want to feel uninhibited and yet, I restrict myself in almost every situation, even ones where it is totally unnecessary to do so. I choose partnerships with controlling women, when what I really want and need is a woman who is not controlling and I’d even go further and say, a woman who wants to be on the opposite end of the spectrum, like a lifestyle submissive.
It's important to note that a person’s sexuality may be multi-dimensional rather than one-dimensional. For example, multiple things may get them super aroused. When this is the case, you want to identify each “thing” of yours and then unpack each one.
So that you can understand this even better, I’ll read you another example from someone who did this exercise… “I’m drawn to the dynamic of power and resistance—where control meets surrender in an intense, thrilling way. Some of the most memorable experiences I’ve had were when my partner and I played with non-consensual dynamics. There’s something electric about being taken without hesitation and without foreplay, feeling hands around my throat, and seeing the raw energy of it all reflected in mirrors surrounding us.
When I look deeper into this and the reasons why I loved this dynamic, what I like about it is that I feel completely wanted to the degree that it is not a question and to the degree that I don’t get a choice. Not even my no can dissuade him. It is the opposite of passive which makes me feel like this man would fight to be with me. Looking at this, I can see that in my childhood I felt really unwanted by the people around me who I wish wanted me. My dad was really passive and would watch TV all day and not pay much attention to me. He would make threats of leaving. A man fighting to not be separate from me, not being able to live without me, feels healing to the trauma of having a passive and rejecting father. Doing this has made me aware that I need people in my life that really want me. I need a partner because in partnership, there is an intensity to the feeling of being wanted. You’re wanted that a person commits to being with me specifically, making the bond feel deeper and stronger than other forms of relationships. I need and want a partner who really wants to be with me and who fights our togetherness.
Seeing that this is what I want, I see how I am in the way of what I want because I normalize people feeling blasé about me. In fact, I keep relationships where they don’t feel super passionately about being a part of my life. That sends the wrong signals to people. I also prevent the thing I want because I keep being the one to pull other people in relationships. I pull on them to show up emotionally and physically because I feel like if I don’t, they won’t show up for me.”
When you un-pack your sexual “things”, you will discover what it is that you are the most desperate to feel and what it is that you’re the most desperate to experience in relationships and what it is that you are the most desperate to manifest in your life. You will be put in touch with your needs as well as your path to healing. This is one reason why sexuality is such a powerful part of healing. If you want to understand this deeper, you can watch my video titled: Healthy Sexuality Vs. Healing Sexuality. But, once you discover these emotional roots behind your sexuality, they need not be limited to the bedroom. You can then take your desires out of the bedroom and find conscious ways to meet these needs and fulfill these desires into your everyday life, as well as to dissolve the oppositional forces to it. For example, the man who had the fetish for inebriated people saw that one of the needs underneath it was to feel a sense of inhibition. He can deliberately seek out ways to be less inhibited in his life, such as to take an acting class or to act on impulses to be spontaneous or to do an expression process or attend an ecstatic dance event or to practice verbal expression or to learn a martial art or get a sexual partner who enjoys receiving another person’s full uninhibited behavior in the bedroom. He can start to do shadow work with the aspect of him that keeps him inhibited. Decoding your sexuality can really help you to custom design your life. And the reality is, if your sexuality is connected to it, it must be consciously incorporated into your life in order for you to have a fulfilling life. And in order for you to be in alignment with your personal expansion.
Planetary retrogrades are one of the most feared astrological events, which is not good given the fact that they happen a lot. People do not understand retrogrades in general and this lack of understanding is compounded by heaps and heaps of misinformation out there about the various retrogrades from so-called experts. And that is why today, I’m going to explain to you what is really happening during a planetary retrograde and what to do about it.
Technically speaking, a planetary retrograde is an optical illusion that happens when a planet appears to be moving backwards from earth’s perspective. A planet appears to move backwards when earth passes a slower moving planet or is passed by a faster moving one. And the length of a retrograde varies greatly based on the specific retrograde that is occurring. Does a retrograde have an energetic effect, despite the fact that it is in essence, an illusion? The answer is yes. Planetary energies absolutely have a big influence on us and this includes retrogrades.
The reason that people fear retrogrades so much is because they are seen as (and to be quite honest, often feel like) oppositional forces. For example, when a retrograde is occurring in Mercury (the planet of communication and travel) communication breakdowns and travel disruptions tend to occur. If you really need to get somewhere or if you are in a relationship and can only avoid conflict with good communication, it can feel like the universe is manipulating the planets against you. Basically, most people have an association with retrogrades wreaking absolute havoc in their lives. And there are a lot of “experts” out there who have littered the human mental field with things that cause people to fear retrogrades. A lot of things that are quite frankly not true. Things like: Never start a new relationship during a Venus retrograde. Or a Mercury retrograde is a terrible time to start projects and make sure you do not invest in anything or sign any contracts. Or you can expect aggression and conflict during Mars retrograde. Or never make a big decision during any retrograde or you’ll regret it once the planet goes direct. There are so many of these warnings and cautions thrown around, it can feel like in order to be ok in life you’ve got to run (and perfectly execute) some kind of cosmic Ninja Warrior obstacle course, which let’s face it, no one will be able to do. On top of this, very few people are an expert in astrology and most people in the world have no clue what is happening with the stars, so what is the average joe to do? The answer is: Don’t fear retrogrades. Instead, grab the bull by the horns and get in the driver’s seat with each one by understanding what is happening energetically when a retrograde occurs. It is one hell of a time to level up.
A retrograde is the medicine of retrospective. It sucks your awareness back to what needs to be seen and consciously decided upon. Retrogrades force you to look back, re-visit, review, re-evaluate, re-do, resolve the unresolved, let go of what must be let go of, end what needs to end, start what needs to start, revive what must be revived and finish any unfinished business related to the themes that are governed by the planet that is in retrograde. They are life spring cleaning events. But when this spring cleaning process is being forced on us, even if it is FOR us, it often feels like the past is rearing its head again or like unwanted things are surfacing or like pain is being dredged up or like we are taking a step backwards.
It might be helpful to think of the analogy of yourself carrying all kinds of things from the past with you while you walk the path of expansion. Some of these things are really beneficial to you and some of these things are really not. These things are in a backpack and while you know some of what is in your backpack, you have forgotten some of the contents of that backpack as well. A retrograde forces the contents out of the backpack and into your awareness. You are meant to look directly at what surfaces, consciously evaluate it and decide with your free will what to do with it, just like you would if you were spring cleaning your life. A retrograde is a very specific kind of planetary medicine, not an oppositional force. And remember, not all things that are ‘of the past’ are things which are detrimental and must be let go of. There is gold there too which will be brought to your attention too during a retrograde; so that you can re-own it. Another way to make it very simple is to say that a retrograde offers a do-over. The question is, with the medicine of retrospect, what would you do differently if you were given the opportunity of a do-over? In line with this, a retrograde is a fabulous time to deal with regrets. To contemplate what you are regretting and figure out how you want to change things based on whatever you are regretting.
To generalize, when a retrograde involves us on earth passing a slower planet, we are especially being asked to leave things behind. And when it involves a planet moving faster than us on earth, we are especially being asked to catch up to our expansion. Both are meant to move stagnant energy. Both are meant to bring us into greater alignment. Both are meant to clear what is preventing our progress. It’s just that one energy is particularly propelling. It calls you to speed up. And puts great pressure on what from the past is acting like an anchor, preventing your forward movement. While the other is particularly purgative. It calls you to slow down, if not stop, so as to reflect and re-evaluate. It puts great pressure on things from the past that are out of alignment, weighing you down and holding you out of the vibrational range of what you want and need most.
Remember that a retrograde is specific to the planetary energy that is in retrograde. So, let’s say that Venus is in retrograde. Venus relates to the energy of love and relationships. This means a Venus retrograde will bring retrospective in the sector of love and relationships. You will be made aware of the baggage you are carrying relative to love and relationships. And spring cleaning will be forced in this sector. You will get a do-over in that sector. So, let’s look at Gavin. Let’s say that Venus goes retrograde in that it is going faster than earth. This will put pressure on Gavin to speed up in the area of relationships. This will put pressure on what is anchoring him and preventing his movement forward in the area of relationships. Let’s say that Gavin is wanting a deep and committed romantic relationship. But let’s say that he is totally unaware that years ago, he decided to protect himself from getting hurt in relationships by rejecting people and pushing them away before they have a chance to reject him and push him away. During this retrograde, Gavin is lying in bed with his girlfriend and she confronts him about why he has been dragging his feet about finding them an apartment to move into together. His fears of getting even more attached and committed, only to find himself getting rejected and abandoned are what have been preventing him from doing this. He has not been caretaking this fear and the emotional traumas underneath it. So, he slips right back into his protection pattern and tells her “I don’t know, maybe I’m just not ready for that step yet. I don’t know if what I really want is the whole escalator of relationships… move in, get married, have kids etc.” Needless to say, this causes a massive rupture in Gavin’s relationship. What the retrograde is doing, is forcing retrospection. It is putting great pressure on what from the past is acting like an anchor, preventing his forward movement, which just so happens to be his trauma of being rejected and pushed away as well as the adaptation he made to that, which was to reject and push others away first. It is inviting Gavin to spring clean himself and his life relative to love and relationships. It is giving him a do-over as if the universe is saying: “Gavin… Are we gonna do the same thing again by pushing people away before they push us away? Or are we gonna see that this pattern destroys relationships and goes against the exact thing you want and make a different choice this time?
It is a misnomer that a retrograde is a bad time to start something new. Such as a new relationship or a new project or a new decision. The reason being that retrogrades are really about shaking things up and changing patterns so that you can come into alignment with the help of the medicine of retrospective. So, let’s say that a person is in a chronic pattern of apathy. The retrograde is likely to put a spotlight on this pattern of apathy. And so, it would absolutely serve a person to do shadow work and to make a new, big, bold move during the retrograde that is in alignment with being active rather than passive. Or, let’s say that a retrograde makes a person aware that they keep having one-night stands because they are terrified of losing someone that they are committed to, so they’d rather not be committed. But imagine that this person desperately wants a deep, lifelong relationship deep down. A retrograde would be a perfect time for a do-over where this time, rather than continue with one night stands, they commit to a new relationship with one person and start building a partnership.
The best energy to meet a retrograde with is active engagement. Rather than being passive with the attitude of it happening TO you, meet it head on and get on top of it instead. This means, understand the themes and life sectors that the specific retrograde applies to so you are open and responsive to what arises. And when it does, because you know what is happening, actively engage by asking yourself what needs to be seen and consciously decided upon. Look back, re-visit, review, re-evaluate, re-do, resolve the unresolved, let go of what must be let go of, end what needs to end, start what needs to start, revive what must be revived and finish any unfinished business related to the themes that are governed by the planet that is in retrograde. Treat this like an opportunity for a do-over or spring-cleaning process.
The medicine of retrospective is SO profound. You have heard the saying: Hindsight is 20/20. This saying means that a situation is easier to see and understand in hindsight, when you are looking back on it, as opposed to when you are in the confusion and lack of clarity that often occurs in the moment when you are in the midst of a situation. Retrospection affords us the opportunity to become aware and to make conscious choices that keep us in alignment with continuous improvement. A retrograde causes serious movement. After all, sometimes pulling something back, moves them forward even faster.
When we cope with something, we engage in a specific procedure, process or technique, which helps us to adapt to a stressor. Adapt is the key word here. Why? When we adapt to something, we change ourselves so as to be able to live with something the way it is. We don’t change what is. Our coping mechanisms are what keeps things the way they are. Our coping mechanisms are what prevents us from making changes to what is. And this goes for the microcosm of our individual lives as well as the macrocosm of human society and the world that we are co-creating. And the coping mechanism that prevents change in both the micro and macrocosm in the most extreme way, is when we cope by becoming the same as the stressor that we are facing… In other words, the same as what harmed us.
So that you can understand this better, I’m going to give you some examples. Let’s begin with Sophie. Sophie had parents who used the things they did for her and her brother as leverage to control Sophie. Everything had strings attached. For example, in order to get her to do the things they wanted, they would hold it over her head that they fed her and put a roof over her head and paid for things like dance lessons. This manipulation and control was a consistent stressor. And Sophie adapted to it. She adapted to it by becoming exactly like her parents without realizing it. Fearing that she would be controlled, she would make sure to have the upper hand in relationships and do things for them such as pay for meals and help them when they were in need, so she could make sure they were in debt to her; not the other way around. She developed the feeling that relationships in general were an invitation to be taken advantage of, so she was very vigilant of things and became stingy and withholding of her love. When she felt like she was being taken advantage of (or needed something from someone) she would hold the things she did for them over their head. She did not admit to her conditions for doing things for others to herself, much less to other people. So many people around Sophie feel like it isn’t safe to receive anything from her because it will only come back to bite them later.
When Richard was five, his parents were struggling so much, they sent him to live with his grandparents. The problem is, his grandfather was dictatorial and abusive. Richard was degraded and whenever he upset his grandfather, he was in for a serious beating. Richard felt he could do nothing to change the stressful situation, so he adapted to that stressor. Richard decided very early on that any weakness was going to get him in trouble. He decided that it was dangerous for anyone to have more power than he had. And that power is about overt intimidation. As a result, he decided to make himself as hard and invulnerable as possible. He stayed safe in the world by bullying and intimidating other people. He became obsessed with having power over other people and accruing all the things that would give him the most power possible. Status, money, physical prowess, powerful character traits. He became abusive. He would degrade other people and even took to beating his wife.
For a more macrocosmic example, people have proven for so many thousands of years to be bad at caretaking each other’s best interests. Society is not a loving, safe place for people. As a result, sensitivity is seen as a liability. It is seen as a weakness that is borderline pitiable and that guarantees the world will eat you up. Because of this, so many of us adapt to this stressor by toughening up and making sure our kids to toughen up. We become insensitive. We adopt protector personas that are good at preserving our own best interests despite other people. But by becoming insensitive and hard and guarded and slipping into protector personas, we guarantee that this Society continues to stay an unloving, unsafe place for people.
We coped with cruelty by becoming cruel. We coped with being controlled by becoming controlling. We coped with abandonment by being the one to abandon. We coped with manipulation by becoming manipulative. We coped with weakness by becoming weak ourselves. We coped with ideologies by adopting those same ideologies and living our life according to them. One of the things that we all inevitably become aware of on the path of awakening, is all of the many ways in which we became the very same as the thing that harmed us. All the ways that we, ourselves adapted to situations that needed to change, and as a result of adapting in that way, ensured that those situations would never, ever change.
The ways that you coped by becoming the same as the thing that harmed you, will be revealed to you on this path of self-development that you have embarked on. But one of the ways you can speed up this process is to make a list of the painful, scary or stressful things you have experienced in your life. These should be experiences that happened in your life where you felt distress. These could be things you judge as really big and/or things you judge as small. Next to each one, you’re going to write down a second list detailing what you made each experience mean. What beliefs did you develop as a result of it? What decisions might you have made as a result of it? And then, next to each one of those answers, you are going to write down a third list detailing 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? And looking at these, you are going to see if you can recognize ways that you became the same as what harmed you. And ways you adapted that doomed you to a self-fulfilling prophecy, where what you decided to do, brought about the very thing that you wanted to avoid. (Show example).
If we want the elements of our life to change, we need to recognize the ways we are preventing it, by having coped with the problem by becoming part of the problem. If we want to the world to change, we need to recognize the ways we are preventing that change by coping with the world by becoming part of the problem rather than becoming the antidote. Doing so, takes an incredible amount of bravery. After all, we coped in these ways because we thought doing so would keep us safe. And this means, letting go of these coping mechanisms will make us have to not only face our pain and our fear, but choose to lean into them. But by leaning into them, we can change the world.
When the heart center of our consciousness is not open, when it is contracted or walled off or closed, we suffer. Closing our heart is a self-protective reaction. We do it to protect ourself from pain. It happens in response to fear and to pain. It makes it so we are shielded and therefore less permeable. And yet, like most self-protective measures we take, we pay a heavy price for it. Moving through the world with a closed heart is torture for so many reasons. It blocks love. It causes us to be lonely and isolated rather than connected. It dulls our senses to this world and so it feels like we are not really taking in life. It makes it so energy cannot flow to or from us and because of this, it causes toxic build up and depletion. It causes mental, emotional and physical ailments. It prevents us from expressing our full potential. It makes us defensive, judgmental and cynical. It sabotages our relationships. It causes us to lose our zest in life. It causes us to lose touch with our emotional guidance system and therefore, to become out of alignment and lost in life. And this list goes on and on. Opening your heart is a real challenge when you are facing the threat of hurt. And at the same time, it is the key to living a life that is worth living. It is also so very often the way out of pain.
At the very center of a closed heart, we find the opposite vibration from love. We find separation. The why behind this state of separation is fear. When we fear something in order to protect ourself from it, we push it away from us. We wall ourselves off from it. This is the opposite of opening ourself to something and including it by taking it in. And it is the fear that is causing the heart to close that must be addressed. Therefore, the first thing to do in order to open your heart, is to become conscious of what you are trying to protect yourself from. What you are afraid of. What the hurt is about. From there, your job is to tend to that fear and tend to that hurt. When you tend to fear and hurt (which is the vulnerability beneath it all that the closed heart is trying to protect) your heart will naturally and automatically open again. And the way you tend to the fear or hurt depends entirely upon what the fear or hurt is. That fear and/or hurt must be caretaken. That resistance must be consciously dissolved.
With that in mind as the absolute root of resolving a closed heart… the choice to recognize, acknowledge, expose and directly consciously caretake the vulnerability that the closedness is trying to protect… Here is a list of things you can do to open your heart.
Be willing to feel and develop your “feeling muscle”. Underneath the closing of your heart, is an unwillingness to feel emotions that do not feel good. And maybe even an unwillingness to feel emotions that do feel good because we may have learned that these feel-good emotions lead to feel bad ones. It is completely understandable why you would not want to feel things like fear or shame or embarrassment or grief or disappointment. But the more willing we are to feel, the more open our heart will remain, regardless of what other people do and regardless of what happens in our life. Basically, we feel absolutely terrible sometimes, but without paying the heavy price that comes with closing our heart to try to not feel absolutely terrible. The more time you spend really feeling emotions as they arise in the moment, no matter how uncomfortable they are in the body, the more your feeling muscle will build. A good exercise for this, is the emotional experiencing process. You can learn how to do this by watching my video titled: How To Do The Emotional Experiencing Process. Lean into emotions rather than away from them.
Be willing to be vulnerable. What we are essentially saying to the universe and to others when we close our heart is: I am unwilling to be vulnerable. Even when the reality is, we are vulnerable and there is nothing that we can do about it. The antidote to this is to look inwards so as to recognize and admit to our vulnerability. And then, to put it on the table. To do this, we need to be honest with ourself about things within ourself that cause us to not feel good. Especially things that cause us to feel weak, bad about ourselves, powerless, afraid, insecure, embarrassed, emotional, at the mercy of others, feeble, sensitive, susceptible, little, exposed, pathetic, and at risk of being harmed. From there, we need to practice exposing our vulnerability to others. This means revealing the thoughts and feelings, needs and personal truths and maybe even physical things like attributes or actions that cause us to feel vulnerable. This will be very, very uncomfortable. But you will develop a comfort with this discomfort over time and it will become easier and easier. This willingness to be vulnerable is easier to cultivate when you see that the ways you protect yourself do not really work for you. They only bring harm to you in other ways, usually even worse ways. The more done you are with your own ways of protecting yourself, the more willing you will be to be afraid and even risk harm. And this, in turn will make you more willing to be vulnerable. And this, will mean an open heart.
Do parts work to directly access the aspects of your own being that are engaged in this closed heart dynamic. The parts you want to work with are: The part of you that is closing your heart. And the part of you that you are protecting by closing your heart. To learn how to do this, you can watch my video titled: Parts Work (What is Parts Work and How To Do It).
Step back from believing what you think. When our heart closes, we are triggered. Our thoughts and emotions are so strong and convincing, we have the tendency to believe them. When we are triggered, we do not perceive the situation at hand, nor the people in it clearly. We are seeing the situation and seeing them through the lens of our own trauma. When it comes to trauma, the brain goes out of whack regarding pattern recognition. It recognizes patterns as being the same, even when they are not. Think of a return veteran from war. A firecracker goes off and they may duck for cover immediately, thinking it is a bomb going off. Their brain recognizes the two things as the same, because it is designed to recognize patterns. But it happens to be wrong. Trauma makes our pattern recognition center flawed. We need to know this and associate the feeling of being triggered with the awareness that we may be wrong about what we are perceiving. From here, we need to stop defending ourself and instead take a step back so as to get curious so as to sort through what is and what isn’t the reality of the person, place, situation and things that we are reacting to. We need to start questioning. Our mentality should be: What is true? What is real? Maybe, just maybe, whatever has caused you to close your heart, is not actually as big of a threat as you think it is.
Consciously Open Your Heart Chakra. This is a practice in and of itself that contains several methods. For this reason, after you watch this video, it would benefit you to watch my video that is quite literally titled: How To Open Your Heart Chakra. You may also benefit by doing a meditation I have designed that is very effective at opening the heart. You can learn how to do this meditation by watching my video titled: Connecting With and Healing Your Heart (Heart Meditation).
Consciously put energy into understanding and consciously culture empathy. The vast majority of the time when we close our hearts, we are doing so in reaction to something or someone else. When we do this, we enter a kind of narcissistic bubble whereby we become absorbed by our own perspective and our own fear and pain. A good way out of this, is to shift your attention towards really deeply trying to understand the other person and/or the situation. Most especially we can consciously put energy into understanding the fear and the pain of the other. Doing so, naturally causes us to open up towards them and also to feel empathy and compassion. If we want to consciously develop empathy, we must look for how we relate to their fear or their pain. If you want to dive into this deeper, watch my video titled: Compassion (And How To Cultivate Compassion).
Do a deliberate appreciative notice exercise. The frequency of gratitude and appreciation is a heart opening one. The key to this one, is to make sure you are not doing it as a way of negating the parts of you that are afraid or hurt. Instead, think of it like a deliberate tonic. Any exercise will do. But one of the easiest exercises is to challenge yourself to simply write a list of anything positive. Anything you like, anything good that happened, anything you appreciate or anything you feel grateful for, any thought that makes you feel better. Though any appreciative focus is a heart opener, it is especially effective if you do this list relative to whatever is closing your heart. For example, if this is a relationship with a specific person, you could do the list about that relationship and that person. When our heart is closed, we are in a state of resistance. This exercise is one that will dissolve that resistance.
Practice kindness deliberately. Kindness opens the heart. It starts an out flow of energy from us towards others. And this opens the channels of our being that receive as well. We can demonstrate kindness in any way. Random acts of kindness is a good practice when we are doing this. There are countless lists on line of suggestions for random acts of kindness. Opportunities to demonstrate kindness arise all the time. Notice and take those opportunities. What would it look like to be loving?
When we encounter pain or fear, we have the choice to close or to open. At the end of the day, you will arrive at a point where you truly understand deep in your soul that to live with a closed heart is literally an unsustainable state of being. You will not be able to do it anymore. And when this happens, you will choose to open, even when you are hurt and even when you are afraid. After all, keeping your heart open has very little to do with other people. It has to do with the type of life experience you want to have. It has to do with choosing to be in a state of being that guarantees your life experience will be fulfilling.
When we are born into human society, we commence the process of socialization. As a part of this process, we learn a great deal about what needs are seen as acceptable by those around us and therefore will be met and which needs are seen as unacceptable by those around us and therefore will not be met. Not only that, we learn we should not have those needs. This leads us into a world of pain. A world where we suppress, deny and disown many of our deep needs. And it sets us up to eventually have to be willing to be bad and feel socially unsafe in order to get our needs met. Let’s do a deep dive on this so you can see the main reason it has been so hard to meet your deepest need and what you have to be willing to do about it.
Because we are raised relationally dependent in a society in which our survival depends upon each other and has for thousands of years, the only way for our self to survive is if we are in the good favor of the rest of the social group. The rest of the social group, beginning with our parents when we were young, have to approve of us. They only approve of us if we are “good”. That is if we are being in a way and doing things in a way that is deemed good by the specific individuals around us. There is no real clear distinction amongst humans between doing bad and being bad. Therefore, the single most important thing to the human ego or sense of self is to believe itself to be good.
Your sense of what badness and goodness is, is primarily determined by the social group and specific family that you grew up in. Obviously, this is different from culture to culture and family to family. One culture may consider sexuality a virtue and the other may consider it a sin. One family may consider self-centeredness to be a necessary part of success and servitude to be a weakness. Another family may consider self-centeredness to be an offense worthy of condemnation and servitude to be the ultimate positive character trait. You will spend your life trying to become anything that you associate with goodness and trying to see that in yourself. You will spend your life trying to avoid the things you associate with badness and your mind will actively avoid seeing these traits in yourself. They will become subconscious. You will sup-press, deny and disown them so you can believe yourself to be good. And needs are a big part of this.
We all have needs. However, the process of socialization teaches us that only some of these needs are ok to have. If you grow up in a family that believes that goodness is about giving up your personal goals to be there as a helper to whoever is in need, your need for personal achievement will be seen as bad and wrong. And you will be in a struggle both for and against that need within yourself. Or for example, if you were raised in a society that prides itself on stoicism and is really cold and aloof, the need for warmth and affection will be seen as bad and wrong. Going for that need will make you feel like a bad person or like you are wrong. As a result, you will be in a struggle both for and against that need within yourself. And to go for that need will put you in the position to have to willingly choose to be a bad and wrong person. And this will threaten your sense of social cohesion, which will threaten your sense of survival.
The bottom line is, to go for a need that does not fit in with what the society around you sees as good and right, will make you feel like crap about yourself. And it will threaten your sense of survival. You know… just that. The real kicker is that a need does not go away just because someone or everyone thinks it is bad to have. It also doesn’t just go away if you think it is bad and wrong to need it. You can suppress, deny, oppose and disown it. But it isn’t going to go anywhere. On top of this, the needs we do this to in order to maintain a positive self-concept and to have that sense of cohesion and confluence with the group, become bigger because we are depriving them. It works the same if we have a need for water and we suppress, deny, oppose and disown that need. Our need for water will only intensify and become a desperate need.
Our deepest needs are often the result of trauma we have experienced. And a big part of what creates trauma in general are needs that were not met in a certain experience. Keep in mind that the experience may be the whole of your childhood. For example, we could have experienced a trauma where we were bullied badly. And the deep unmet need is to be defended. Or, we could have gone our whole childhood without our need for autonomy being met. When this is the case, what we need in order to heal, is to have that need met. Your deepest need is almost always the result of trauma. Keep in mind that the deprivation of needs is a trauma in and of itself. And it is almost always one of those no-no needs within your specific social environment… A need that makes you a bad or wrong person if you need it, therefore it causes you to feel bad about yourself. And it threatens your cohesion and confluence with other people. And due to the way the people around you (as well as you yourself) will go against that need, the deprivation of that need grows to the degree that the need becomes very, very, very big. You become desperate for it. While at the same time, opposing it. This makes for one of the most tormenting and biggest internal wars there can be in an internal system.
So that you can get a picture of this, here is an example: Dawn was raised in the United States by two parents who are very liberal in their ideology. They are old enough to have been part of the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The empowerment of women is a deep value and was a really big part of the way they raised dawn. They raised her to be independent, strong, assertive, confident and to believe that she could do anything boys could do and better. Dawn’s mother is the dominant one in the household and she often describes her father as being a minion to her mother’s whims. More like a little boy with a mother, than a man with a wife. Dawn was raised with the ideology that a woman does not need a man. Because of this dynamic, Dawn lacked the experience of masculine ownership. With masculine ownership (the kind that would naturally come from a father relative to his daughter) comes a great many needs. Things like protection and containment and security and caretaking and reassurance and adoration. Dawn lacked all of these needs because she had no masculine ownership in her life. And not only was this traumatizing in and of itself, several traumas went on to happen because of the lack of it. Dawn was raised to believe that to need masculine ownership is pathetic, girly, incompetent, weak, a set up for a man to harm a woman, chosen powerlessness and an affront to the entire women’s rights movement… therefore, a siding with the perpetrator of every woman throughout history that has ever been harmed or oppressed by a man. Just that! Dawns need for masculine ownership has only grown and grown over the years. She is in an internal war where she keeps looking for masculine ownership from men she dates. But at the same time, she fights against her own need for it in many ways. All of this is happening on a subconscious level. For example, she doesn’t ask a man to reassure her when she is afraid. She simply keeps it to herself, muscles up and bulldozes the fear. She lets the men in her life dictate whether they will open doors for her or carry heavy things for her. If they don’t do it, she just does it herself. She follows Instagram pages of couples who have the kind of relationship where the woman gets to be in her femininity and feels extreme envy as she flips through the stories and images. She continues pursuing a high-pressure career as a doctor, (which due to her social upbringing, makes her feel good about herself) regardless of the fact that every day, she feels an amplification of the pain that came as a result of having no masculine ownership. She is shielded. The tissues of her body feel like iron. She has to muscle up every day and be assertive as hell. She struggles with her monthly cycle. There is no space for her femininity. And as a result, she is breaking apart and heading towards a nervous breakdown.
For Dawn to go for this deep need for masculine ownership would threaten her self concept. It would make her feel bad about herself. It would make her feel pathetic, girly, incompetent, weak, set up for a man to harm her, like she is choosing powerlessness and is against the entire women’s rights movement… therefore, like she is siding with the perpetrator of every woman throughout history that has ever been harmed or oppressed by a man. It would also cause her to feel afraid of the social consequences of going for that need, given that her social group believes this need is wrong and bad. But what is Dawn going to do? Is she going to stay stuck in this nightmare forever, with this deepest need becoming more and more desperate?
Self-Concept is what really stands in the way of your deepest need! To get out of this nightmare, you need to acknowledge what your deepest need is. Ideally, you need to do this with all of your needs. But for the sake of this conversation, let’s use your deepest need as a template. Acknowledging this need will make you feel like crap about yourself. And it will make you afraid of social consequences. By getting that need met, you are up against all of your training which the process of socialization has put in place. You need to really question the badness and wrongness of that need. This questioning process is the thing that will lower the red tape around that need and is likely to decrease the feeling that you are a bad person for having that need at least a little bit. You need to release some of that resistance that the part of you that is against that need has. It can be a really good idea to do parts work with the aspect of you that has the need and the aspect of you that is against you having that need. To learn more about how to do this, you can watch my video titled: Parts Work (What Is Parts Work and How to Do It). You need to find people who approve of the need that you have and who will advocate for it and potentially even people who will meet it, if the need is a relational one. And ultimately, you need to make the decision to get that need met… To be an advocate for it and in a direct way. Even if doing so threatens your self-concept. And even if it means a lack of cohesion and confluence with some people in your life.
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