People the world over are completely confused about compromise. They don’t know when they should compromise and when they shouldn’t compromise in a relationship. They want to know where that line is between it being ok to compromise and it being not ok to compromise. And being this confused about compromise causes people to dive head first into dysfunction in their lives; most especially in their relationships. For this reason, I’m going to clear up this confusion for you. I’m going to break down the concept of compromise and help you to define when you should and shouldn’t compromise in your relationships.
To compromise is to settle a dispute/conflict or reach agreement/alignment by way of mutual concession. And remember that to concede is to yield, give up or give away something you value.
The problem with conversations about compromise is that when people use the word compromise, they are often talking about two different things. One person sees compromise as being about the big things that really matter. So, they are talking about those things. When people say that compromise is important and they hold this definition of compromise, it is just another way of saying “it’s important to give up what is important to you sometimes and take some pain for the sake of the relationship.”
Another person sees compromise as the small stuff. Stuff that doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t represent something the person deeply values. So, they are talking about those things. When people say that compromise is important and they hold this definition of compromise, it’s is just another way of saying “It’s important to let the other person have their way when something matters less to you than it does to them.”
Compromise is by definition to yield, give up or give away something you value. If you value something, it is important to you. It is a big thing. And it matters. Otherwise, you couldn’t really call it a compromise.
The real problem is that we have one word, compromise, to describe two different things. And this is why it is so hard to figure out where the line should be relative to when you should and when you shouldn’t compromise. Because of this, the first thing you should do, is to make the two different things, two different words. The first word being compromise. Which we have already defined. And the second word being workability. When something is workable, it is flexible, negotiable, pliable and adaptable. It can be influenced, molded or changed so that it produces the desired effect or the desired results. When a person is being workable, they are settling a dispute/conflict or reaching agreement/alignment by way of flexibility by adaptability. By finding a win-win. Or by letting the other person have their way because doing so does not conflict with something they deeply value.
I’m going to make a bold statement here. For a relationship to be harmonious, mutually pleasing and successful, we need to be workable. We will find ourselves changing certain things, adapting to certain things and developing flexibility in certain ways. But contrary to popular advice, you must never compromise. The truth is, you can’t actually do it, even if you think you can. A person can’t give up something that they truly value (and thus that really matters to them) without experiencing pain that eventually causes personal decline and disharmony in the relationship. It is ironic that when we say that someone or something is compromised, we mean that it has become vulnerable, weakened or is functioning less effectively, because that is exactly what happens when we compromise. At the heart of compromise is the idea of giving yourself up in some way. Whether it is your standards or your beliefs or your needs or your desires or your convictions or your truths or what is right for you or what is important to you etc. And when you do this, not only do you compromise yourself in ways that are detrimental to your wellbeing, you will not stay on good terms with the person you do this for.
Compromise is a form of self-sacrifice. A basic definition of self-sacrifice is the giving up of one’s own best interests for the sake of someone or something else’s. But this is where we run into a problem right here. It is not actually possible to give up your own best interests. People only think it is. Therefore, there is actually no such thing as self-sacrifice. And self-sacrifice is an inherently narcissistic act. To learn more about this rather provocative claim, watch my video titled: Self Sacrifice, The Most Self-Centered Thing in the World. Compromise is about settling for less and accepting something that doesn’t fully satisfy one or either person.
A compromise feels bad because compromise insinuates that you don’t want to do it. When people compromise, even if it takes years to surface, it will lead to things like using it against them later, resentment, dissatisfaction in the relationship, passive aggressive behavior, unmet needs, manipulation, physical illness, mental illness, constant emotional tension in the relationship and the whole host of unhealthy coping mechanisms people employ to deal with that, tit for tat or give and take mentality in relationships, disappointment, missed opportunities for personal growth, fatigue and lack of energy/vitality, emotional blackmail, behaving in inconsistent ways, loss of integrity, loss of a sense of self and healthy identity, a breakdown of communication, loss of important relationships and people in our life, the feeling of lostness in life, dissatisfaction with one’s life, the feeling of being undervalued, low self-esteem, feeling empty, loss of passion, loss of self-respect, loss of authenticity, egoic superiority that comes with seeing oneself as the better person, failure to reach the full potential of your relationships and of your life, victim control dramas, lack of intimacy in a relationship and the feeling of being alone in a relationship, losing sight of what is important and all the pain that comes with incompatibility. Compromise is often just a way to avoid conflict or reach a quick resolution, rather than addressing the deeper issues at hand. So, it acts as a big smokescreen for incompatibilities that two people do not want to face. On top of this, you will find that most relationships that are based on compromise, end up being one-sided in that as if a relationship of tit for tat or give and take wasn’t bad enough, there is no give and take. More often than not, one partner ends up being the sole collaborator in the relationship by constantly being the one to compromise.
Workability, is not about giving up something important to you. It implies feeling good about a decision that is being made. It is about finding a solution that meets both your needs and desires as well as the other person’s needs and desires. As opposed to compromise, it is when both partners work together towards a common goal or solution while taking into account each other’s needs and desires. It’s about finding a way that both people’s needs and goals can be met without having to give up something important to them. Workability is based on open communication, mutual respect, and a willingness to work together to find solutions that are satisfactory to both people. And to do this, you may need to be flexible and adaptable and even change in ways that don’t feel like you are sacrificing part of yourself. Workability should be about the smaller things. But beware, small is determined by how important it is or isn’t to you specifically. By whether it causes pain or not. And what is small to one person, may be very big to another.
I know I said in the beginning of this video that I was going to tell you when you should and shouldn’t compromise. But the truth is, the reason why no one can tell you when you should be workable and when you shouldn’t (because it is compromise) is because there are no SHOULDS when it comes to workability and therefore compromise. It’s based on one person’s boundaries versus another’s. I’ll give you an example, a person who is an outdoor enthusiast might be in a relationship with someone who prefers indoor activities to outdoor activities. This person might be able to be workable about that. They may be able to decrease the amount of time they spend doing outdoor activities and also do it alone, so that they are spending their time with their partner doing indoor activities. Or they may find a win-win by doing an outdoor activity on one day of the weekend and an indoor activity on the other. But another person in the exact same scenario may find that doing outdoor activities and having a partner who wants to do it with them is so important that they cannot be flexible on that, without compromising themselves. And so, this person cannot be workable about it, because that would be compromise.
To give you another example, it may be no big deal for one person to attend church on Sundays, or even to let their partner and children do so without them. They could be workable about that. But for another person, say someone who has trauma with religion or who has very strong beliefs against religion, they would not be able to do this without it being a compromise.
To give you another example, one person would not care if their partner entirely got their way on how to decorate the house. After all, aesthetics doesn’t really matter to them. So, they could be workable enough to just let their partner decorate the house however they wanted. But another person might feel like they were living in someone else’s house if this happened. And since the feeling of proprietorship is so important to them, they could not be as workable about it and would have to do something like co-decorate or agree upon places each of them gets to decorate on their own.
To use a metaphor, some things about us and about our life are unworkable, like solid steel. And need to be for the sake of our wellbeing. And other things are workable, like modeling clay. And need to be for the sake of our wellbeing. And because every person is different and every person’s values and therefore priorities are different, no one can set a hard fast rule for all people on what should or shouldn’t be like steel or like modeling clay. When people argue that they can, all they are really doing is trying to get you to agree to their core values (what is important to them).
When two people stand by what is genuinely important to them, what is flushed to the surface is areas of workability and areas of incompatibility. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Incompatibility, a Harsh Reality in Relationships.
But when it comes to facing your personal priorities and values, what is really hard to face is the shame around it. We are taught that some priorities and values are good and right and others are bad and wrong. If we feel we have sacrificed, we often feel that we have given something up because we could not choose that thing we gave up or prioritize that thing we gave up and feel good about ourselves at the same time. We have to face our shame about choosing what we are giving up or have given up instead. If you want to dive deeper into this topic of compromise, I suggest you watch two of my videos. The first titled: Why You Should Never Make Compromises in a Relationship. And the second is titled: Do You Base Your Relationships on Compromise or Compatibility?
No matter how workable you are and how well you avoid compromising, you are likely to find yourself in situations in relationships where there is unworkability on the other side of the relationship equation. When this happens, you will need to consciously choose your consequences. What I mean by this is: We may be faced with having to choose for something we really want, but at a cost. For example, we may be in a relationship where the person we love gets into a serious injury. This is a situation that we would never have chosen and that does not align with our desires. But we might decide that loyalty is super important to us and so is maintaining the connection we have to the person we care about. That is something we value and want. And as a result, we may decide to take care of them. Doing so is likely to come with difficulty and pain. So, making that choice comes with certain consequences, both positive and negative. And we would have to decide if we can choose those consequences. You need to be willing to decide that (fill in the blank) is worth the consequence or potential consequence. If it is, you are still acting in alignment with your values, and so it can’t be called compromise. And when you do this, you can only be empowered by facing, accepting and dealing with the consequence that you have chosen. The question is: Is the cost something that you can live with, because of what it gets you, without that causing you to feel like you have compromised yourself and without it causing disharmony in the relationship? If you would like to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences.
Be workable all you can in a relationship, but do not compromise. When you don’t know whether you can be workable about something or when something is going to take you into the territory of compromise, ask yourself whether doing so would cause you to feel resentful. Whether you would expect something in return. Whether you could feel good and right about it long term or whether it will eat at you. Whether it feels like you’re giving something very important to you up or away. Whether you will use it against them later. Whether you are settling for less or are lowering your standards. Whether it would be in alignment with a way you want to change and grow or not. Whether you would be happy with your own child or whoever you love the most in your life making the same decision or doing the same thing? Whether you are being true to yourself and your beliefs or not. Whether you can maintain self-respect or not. Whether you feel safe or not. Whether it compromises your integrity or not. Whether this is simply to establish confluence and avoid conflict, making it a way of avoiding deeper incompatibilities. Whether it will ultimately make you feel less close and aligned with the other person over time. Whether you would be giving up one of your needs. Whether you would have to cope with it and in what ways. Whether it would cost you a relationship with someone important in your life. Whether it would make you dissatisfied with your life and life choices. And whether you are only doing it to feel like a good person or the better person. You need to know your why behind what you are deciding or doing.
Compromise and workability are two very different things. Compromise undermines your values. It corrodes your life. It ruins relationships. Workability preserves your values. It enhances your life. And it strengthens relationships.
One of the most important keys to a fulfilling life, is to live according to your top values. The people who are the most in-alignment with themselves are the people who do exactly this. But in this universe, there are upsides to every downside and downsides to every upside. Baked into every value, is a positive and a negative potential. And this means, a person’s deepest value can become their greatest weakness. In fact, it can become their very downfall.
What is a value? It is what you consider from your honest, authentic core to be most important. This includes what, deep inside your heart, you really want and need. This includes how you want to be in the world relative to others and to yourself. This includes what you want to do and how you want to go about doing it. You have values relative to every sector of your life. You have values relative to work, values relative to friendships, values relative to marriage, values relative to parenting, values relative to personal growth, values relative to spirituality, values relative to leisure and the list goes on and on.
When the things we do and the way we behave in the world towards others and towards ourselves match our values, we experience alignment. Whether you consciously know what your values are or not, you have them. And like most people, you are most likely spending your time vacillating between subconsciously acting according to your top values and subconsciously acting according to what you have been led to believe should be your top values instead. Living according to your actual values is the north star of your life. For this reason, you would benefit by watching my video titled: The Secret to A Happy Life. But today, we are going to go one step further and talk about the potential pitfall of any value.
Every value, comes with a potential downfall and because of this, any value can become your greatest weakness. To give you a couple of examples, let’s imagine that a person’s top value is achievement. That can lead someone to incredible levels of personal growth and self-development and incredible levels of success. But the value of achievement can also lead to a person pouring so much energy into only one aspect of their life that they experience a failure in another aspect of their life. Or it can lead to people around them feeling like nothing is ever good enough. Or it can lead to a person constantly being dissatisfied and therefore, stressed and never enjoying their life, which has serious implications for their health. Or it can lead to a person’s entire identity and self-worth being only about what they accomplish and so any lull in accomplishment can become a downward spiral, to the point of burnout, depression and even suicide. Or it can lead to a person being blind to being taken advantage of by being made promises of greatness.
Or to give you another example, let’s imagine that person’s top value is service. This can lead to a person having a deep sense of their purpose for being and having a felt sense of both contribution and belonging within the world. And it can lead to thriving relationships in which they are deeply valued by the people they come into contact with. And it can lead to them doing greatly needed work in the world that improves lives. But the value of service can also lead to a blindness around one’s own needs and desires, which can make someone very lost in life. Or it can lead to a blinding attachment to one’s own goodness and therefore moral superiority. Or it can lead to a person getting into relationships that are one-sided and completely depleting. Or it can lead to unnecessary self-sacrifice and martyrdom.
Without insinuating that dark is bad and wrong, for the sake of your understanding, let’s say that any value can have a dark side. And that any value can become an open door to a person being taken advantage of; if not outright deceived. A prominent lawyer that I know personally, loves to say that “every person’s got a con with their name written on it.” In his career, he has found that many people like to think they can’t be deceived. But every person can be deceived and in fact, there is a perfect con out there for every person on this earth. And what I will tell you, is that that perfect con will always involve your top values. It is also important to know, if you didn’t catch it in the previous examples, that each value might have several potential upsides and several potential downsides. By holding a specific value, we might fall into none, one or several of these pitfalls that come along with it.
So that you can understand this even better, let’s look at the example of Peter. When it comes to relationships, Peter’s top value is loyalty. This value has made it so that Peter has very strong bonds with his friends and family. No one around him fears abandonment. As a result, he has lots of social support. He gets to experience the gift of being trusted by others. The women in his life feel safe in relationships with him because his loyalty bends him towards protective behaviors. And he is cherished by the people in his life. Peter has a brother named Darius. Darius has a gambling problem. Over the years, Peter has fallen into the pattern of bailing Darius out financially over and over again, no matter the cost to himself. Recently, this has gotten so severe that Darius showed up on his doorstep beaten up. As it turns out, he had borrowed money from a shady loan shark to gamble and lost it all. Darius’s apartment had already been vandalized as a consequence. And he had been threatened that if he didn’t pay the money by a certain time that his girlfriend would be kidnapped. And so, what did Peter do? He took out a second mortgage on his house to cover his debts. Peter’s loyalty has made it so he is now acting as an enabler to his brother’s addiction. And Peter’s loyalty has made it so that he holds an allegiance to a person that is consistently detrimental to him. And believe me, he is suffering the consequences and has been for years.
Living according to your values is a must if you want to live a fulfilling life. For this reason, it would greatly benefit you to become consciously aware of your values and to start living according to them. If you’re curious to go deeper with this specifically, I created a deck that you may want to check out called The Inner Compass Deck to help you do exactly that. Then, ideally, with each one of your core values, challenge yourself to list the potential dark sides, downsides and pitfalls that could come with that value. Challenge yourself to recognize where you might already be falling into a pitfall related to any top value you hold. And decide how you are going to ‘course correct’.
It isn’t about de-valuing whatever it is that you value. It’s about becoming as aware as possible of the potential dark sides, downsides and pitfalls that could come with any value that you hold, so as to ensure that you don’t fall into them and to course correct if you do.
One of the most common complaints from women the world over is that they want to be in their feminine energy, but they are in a situation that makes it impossible to do so. For example, they don’t have any man in their life providing a masculine container, or they are in a relationship with a man who has flipped the polarity dynamics in the relationship or they are in an unsafe or high-pressure environment, or they were so traumatized or even masculinized as a child that they can’t seem to get out of their own masculine shield or they may be in a career that absolutely requires masculine characteristics. Seeing as how this is such a hard and painful experience for a woman, today I’m going to share with you a simple hack for getting into your feminine energy, no matter what situation you may find yourself in.
Once upon a time, I did a video titled: What Every Man Needs to Know About Women. In that video, I explained that while fear is something that everyone experiences, fear plays a different role in the lives of men and women. For most woman, fear is the baseline experience of her life, whether she is consciously aware of it or not. Women respond differently to fear than men do. And when a woman is either unsafe, or perceives herself to be, what tends to happen is that she responds to that by putting up a masculine shield. She will begin armoring. There are some characteristics of feminine energy that are very hard to bring forward in these kinds of scenarios. Things like softness, gentleness, sensitivity, kindness, tenderness, supportiveness, openness, expression of emotions, receptivity and nurturing. In most unsafe or high-pressure situations, these traits make you vulnerable. And so, they get hidden deep beneath a masculine shield. Essentially, a woman brings forth masculine qualities (including shadow masculine qualities) to keep herself safe. Things like warrior energy, strength, assertiveness, bravery, hyper responsibility, initiation, drive for success, action, independence, leadership, aggression, hardness or harshness, dominance and control. Another way of looking at this, is that she brings forth protector behaviors that keep her safer. But this is not a state that is conducive to health in the female system. This armoring pulls a woman out of alignment. If it is maintained over long periods of time, it causes sickness in her mental body, emotional body and physical body. It causes her to suffer on all levels.
It's worth mentioning that the women who you will see bring forth traits like softness, openness, receptivity and nurturing when they feel unsafe, grew up in and/or are currently in very specific environments… Ones in which she is safer when she exhibits those traits. For example, she may have grown up in a society where females were punished for any kind of empowered behavior and who were only safe (and whose needs were only met) when they behaved in weak ways that were not a threat to the men around them. Or for example, a woman might be super nurturing and affectionate with a man when she feels unsafe, as a way of controlling his behavior in whatever way she wants to control it. Or a woman might behave in soft and receptive ways because she has learned that this is what will motivate someone to step up and protect her. We have the tendency, when we think of protector personalities, to only think of masculine protectors. The reality is, a person is going to put forth whatever specific traits kept them safe, or whatever specific traits they THINK will keep them safe. Whether that trait is more feminine, or more masculine. But it is far more common that it is the masculine traits that a person will bring forth in the face of the unsafety they encounter here on earth and most especially in human society because this current society we live in, was made by men and for men.
Where a great many feminine traits function best, is within a masculine container. To conceptualize of masculine containment, imagine that in a relationship, a man is a clam shell and a woman is a pearl inside that clam shell. This masculine clam shell is creating a safe, nourishing space in which the female can exist or occur. It enables a woman to be soft, open, receptive and to grow. If you imagine removing that masculine shell, the female immediately contracts, goes rigid and into a state of defense. It is a coping mechanism rather than a natural feel-good state of being. She is forced to compensate for the lack of that masculine shell by becoming masculine herself. And this causes a ‘flip’ in polarity. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Containment, what a Woman Needs from a Man in a Relationship.
In a tribal setting, which is the social structure that is natural for our species, there are many men who are providing this containment for each woman. And so, it would be rare for a woman to find herself in a position where she lacked containment. Alas, since our species became agrarian, there has been progressively less and less containment for women. And in today’s modern world, it is an absolute crisis. Today, whether we are men or women, we are desperately under resourced. We are also not made for the ever-present stressors that cause us to feel unsafe today for extended periods of time. In other words, we were biologically designed to deal with the stress of being chased by a predator, or a fight breaking out. But not being stuck in a distressing relationship pattern day after day or the chronic presence of cyber bullying or workplace stress from 9 to 5. And this has led to a modern reality where so many women around the world are in a chronic state of unsafety. And as a result, are becoming increasingly more and more masculinized.
The ideal situation is that every woman can find a life and relationships in which she feels safe. This will naturally bring forth these cherished feminine qualities, including those that are on the vulnerability spectrum. But the reality of today is that many women are not in this situation and are desperately in pain because they want to be in their feminine energy, but they feel like they can’t because they are not in a situation that is conducive to it. And this, feels like a very powerless space to be, because being able to be in your feminine essence feels like it is totally dependent on the external world and other people. And let’s be honest, they seem to be doing their very best to make it impossible. But today, I want to offer you a hack for being in your feminine energy, something that is not dependent on you being in a safe situation or on you having a man to provide containment.
The hack is this… There are many traits that are feminine that do not depend on being in a low pressure, safe situation or on having masculine containment. Therefore, instead of trying to bring forth the feminine traits that fall on the vulnerable spectrum for you, bring forth the ones that don’t. Softness might be something that you can’t bring forth, but flexibility on the other hand is a quality of the feminine, and it is something that you can embody no matter how safe or unsafe you might be; because it is a feminine quality that can keep you safer in a great many situations. Or for example, your body, which is currently armored, might feel like solid steel. You may not be able to bring forth openness or receptivity. But water is an element of the feminine. And there is nothing weak about water. Just look what water can do on this earth. And so, you can focus on bringing forth the many qualities of water and practice seeing your body as water rather than steel. Or for example, you may not be able to bring forth nurturing energy or behavior. But offering your intuition or wisdom might be something that causes you no pain to bring forth, no matter the situation you find yourself in. Or for example, you may not be able to bring forth the quality of caretaking. But devotion or dedication is something that is not dependent on being in a safe environment or having containment. Or for example, you may not be able to go with the flow of how your feel. But you may be able to do a spontaneous movement exercise. Or you might not be able to bring forth cooperation or collaboration. But you may be able to bring forth effective verbalization and communication. Or you may not be able to bring forth sensitivity. But you may be able to bring forth creativity.
That there is the femininity hack. Look at what aspect of femininity you feel like you can’t bring forth in general in your life and look for periods of time, settings and/or situations where you might be able to. And even more than that, look for aspects of femininity that you CAN bring forward even if there is no man in your life providing containment and even when you are in a high pressure or unsafe situation, and intentionally do so. I’m going to say it again. There are feminine qualities that are in no way vulnerable and also are in no way weak. And leaning into these qualities, will help you to be in your feminine essence, no matter what situation you find yourself in.
In honor of Día de Los Muertos, it seems pertinent to talk about death. After all, death is a part of life. This is true no matter how much we may not want to accept it. In times past, we had an easier time accepting it, because it was a part of everyday life. In today’s age, death has become sequestered away. It has become taboo and so has talking about it, which is a tragedy because death is something that each and every one of us will face. One day, as people, we are going to have to accept that you do not have to dread death in order to value life.
We have to take talking about death out of the box of taboo. The taboo around talking about death, which is especially prevalent in the Western Cultures of the world, harms people greatly. Society has created all kinds of cultural adaptations that are designed to keep people from being conscious of their mortality. The discourse around death reflects the attitude that death is bad and wrong and serves to perpetuate the idea that it is the worst thing that can happen and is therefore something to dread. As a result, many people are in a state of ‘death denial’. And this death denial contributes to a greater sense of wrongness, shock and pain when death suddenly does inevitably enter one’s life experience. In the modern era, due to our attitudes towards death, we have a very dysfunctional and ever worsening relationship with death, which is a natural part of life.
Part of this taboo surrounding death puts spiritual teachers, such as myself, in a rather difficult position. The taboo surrounding death suggests that the collective belief is that death is in and of itself bad and wrong and so is talking about it. If death is bad and wrong, that means that we are all inevitably headed towards a bad and wrong fate in the future. And this increases our fear of death as well as our fear of the future. It creates resistance. This extreme resistance to death can make the transition that is the process of death, one of deep suffering. It can also make the pain we experience when we lose someone to death, much more painful. It is rather ironic that the taboo around death is thought to benefit people, but it actually serves to make the experience of death more painful for people.
You’ll notice that our judgement of badness and wrongness is often less about death in and of itself, than it is about the circumstances of a death. For example, if a very old person dies, we tend to think that death is ok. We say things like “it was time.” But if a person who is not old dies, we think it is not supposed to happen and is therefore wrong. If a person dies saving another person’s life or serving their country in a war, that death is seen as honorable and therefore not wrong. If someone is murdered, that death is seen as bad and wrong. But if a soldier kills an enemy, that murder is seen as good. If someone murders other people, that person’s death is often seen as a good thing. After all, many people still celebrate the death penalty and many more of us still celebrate when the bad guy dies in a movie. The Samurai practiced seppuku. In this practice, it was considered honorable to commit suicide as opposed to falling into the hands of the enemy. Most of the Western World today views suicide as morally bad and wrong. But none the less, a debate currently rages on regarding physician assisted suicide, which is legal in certain countries. Even the debate around abortion is a debate around death. What all this means is that even today, given the right circumstance, many people believe that death is in fact good.
What I am doing by showcasing this confusion and mass mixed message we keep giving and getting about death, is trying to help you become conscious of humanity’s complicated attitude towards death, especially based on circumstances. It is important to notice your own relationship to the circumstances of death and how they influence your perspective of rightness, goodness, wrongness and badness relative to death itself.
The taboo around death also means that those of us who see the danger in death remaining taboo (and who are thus brave enough to talk about death), end up being demonized and expected to send some pretty mixed messages to the public. For example, we are told that it is ok to help someone who is dying of a terminal illness by explaining to them that they will experience it as relief, that it is ok to let go and that there is nothing to be afraid of. We are told that it is ok to tell someone who has lost a loved one that their loved one is at peace and is not suffering and that their loved one is not ‘gone’ in the spiritual sense. Thus, making death ok.
However, when we talk publicly about death, if we talk in any other way than to give the impression that we see death in and of itself as bad and wrong, period the end, we are at risk of being accused of being pro-death and thus, even worse, pro suicide. This could not be further from the truth. Take me for example, I do not glorify death. Instead, like every spiritual teacher who has come before me, I see the universal value inherent in life. I also see the universal value inherent in death. But this truth doesn’t matter because people have decided that death has no value and is bad and wrong. And that anyone who says otherwise, is a threat. I find this heart breaking because this way of thinking will harm them immensely when the time comes that death enters their own life experience. For this reason, I think it is important to ask yourself: What do you think about death? Is death bad and wrong? Should talking about death be taboo? What is the benefit and what is the harm inherent in death being taboo?
On top of this, you have the difficulty of talking to people about the reality of why death happens when it does; and trying to convey that reality in a way that does not make people feel guilty or at fault for a death happening.
So, now that I’ve said all that, let’s have a real conversation about death. The first thing that is important to know is that death is experienced so differently from one dimension to the next. For example, from many of the higher dimensions, there is no such thing as death. There is no ended-ness. There is only recycling of consciousness and energy. There is also a much different perception of time. One lifetime occurs like a blink of an eye. One lifetime is only a very small snap shot of existence. Like walking into and out of a movie theatre. Of course, we all know that the experience of death in the physical, facing death ourselves or having someone we love die, is quite different than that. Most people absolutely do experience a life as all there is, and as lasting a long period of time. We experience death as an end and as a deep loss.
Death is very similar to slipping into a dream. So is coming into life. You will close your perceptual awareness to one reality and open it to the next. I want you to recall that in a dream, you’re so attached to what is occurring, as if it is the only reality. But then you wake up and it suddenly isn’t all of who you are and isn’t as important because the truth of you is so much different, bigger and more. Death, first and foremost is a transitioning. It is a drastic change in perspective.
When you die, the stream of consciousness that is feeding and continually creating your thought form (the idea of you that exists separate from your physical embodiment) as well as your physical body, will withdraw. First from the physical form. When it does this, the body (no longer fed by a stream of consciousness) will begin to dissipate. It will de-manifest. We experience this on the physical plane as decomposition. It will also withdraw from the thought form which is your identity. And that too, will dissipate. It will withdraw all the way back to collective consciousness. It essentially goes through a process of dis-identification. You become part of “oneness” again. You lose a sense of separateness. This is experienced, in terms of felt perception, as returning back to love.
This process of dissipation of a thought form, just like the dissipation of the body, is not immediate. Which is why the ‘ghost’ of someone sometimes still has enough energy in it to influence things in the physical dimension. We call this a haunting. This is especially true if the thought form is “charged” with energy due to a sudden death or unfinished business with someone in the physical plane. Most of the entities that we call ghosts are these dissipating thought forms. They are not being fed by a stream of consciousness, so they must draw energy to maintain themselves from somewhere else, such as other people’s focus on them or electric currents or energy generating minerals etc.
The first form of manifestation into the physical dimension is light. For this reason, when beings de-manifest from the physical dimension and reverse this process of manifestation, they will experience this “light” in death. When a being goes towards and into the light, they are reversing the process of manifestation.
The process of re-incarnation for most beings is a mix of determinism and free will. It is not very different than your choices in your waking life. You are in essence “choosing” things in life, but there are so many unconscious factors that determine the choices you make. And so, they aren’t really conscious choices. On top of this, the law of mirroring (often called the law of attraction) applies to the process of re-incarnation. For example, you may subconsciously be acting with only yourself in mind. And this may cause you to choose a certain life that you believe will benefit you on a conscious level, while also deterministically lining up with a life where the environment is ‘every man for himself’. This is one reason why the process of awakening, awareness and becoming conscious in your life is important as it applies to your successive incarnations. People looking to master enlightenment step out of determinism and into a position of free will and conscious choice relative to their incarnations. Soon, even incarnating at all into a separate identity within the collective consciousness that we call “God or Source” is in and of itself, a choice.
For death to happen, it must actually be a choice. In fact, no matter how badly the body is damaged, the consciousness (nonphysical perspective) must still choose to withdraw from the physical. It often does. But sometimes, this is why ‘miracles’ relative to near death experiences happen. And it is also often the spiritual reason why people slip into comas instead of die. Essentially, their temporal and non-temporal aspects do not yet agree upon death or coming back into life.
Do not worry for someone who has died. They are not suffering. They experience themselves as being closer to you than they were in their separate physical forms. All the concern should be for those left behind… Those who in their separate physical forms, are feeling separate from the one they love. Those who are experiencing loss and grief.
To understand death, you must above all understand that death is the ultimate change. Death is not ended-ness. Death is drastic change. It occurs when no further expansion can take place without changing perspectives and forms. There are many variables that add up to making it so that the only way further expansion can happen is through death. But the sad reality is that people have a huge power relative to making that be the case or not.
As it applies to humans, both individuals and social systems (such as family, culture and society), create stuck-ness that can lead to death. For example, so many people tend to cope with what is and encourage others to cope with what is instead of to change what is. The problem is that one of the main purposes of life is expansion. It is an exercise in collective consciousness (what many call Source or God) knowing itself. If this expansion does not occur within an individual and within a system because the pressures to change are met with adaptive coping mechanisms, the people’s thoughts, words and actions will continue to keep things that are not supposed to be as is, as is. And that stuck-ness invites death. The person who dies, then expands through shifting perspectives and forms. And that person’s death serves as pressure put on the other people in the social system to start expanding again by making changes to their life.
For example, imagine a family that is dysfunctional. That dysfunction prevents all members from lining up with what is truly highest and best for them. For example, say a mother continues to be codependent to a dictatorial father. He is enabled in his dysfunction, which is preventing his expansion. She thwarts her own progression by virtue of being too afraid to lose the marriage. They both distract themselves from this pain by hyper-identifying with their son and by forcing him to live the life that they want for him. By doing so they train him to prevent his own life purpose and cope with the pain of doing so. If this state of being (which goes against the progression of all members of the family) is maintained, this son could become a match to death. The Universe is not against him or the family when this death occurs. Instead, death became the only open door for him to experience the expansion that the variables of his life were opposing. And his parents no longer have him to focus on, so as to avoid their own dysfunction. His tragic death calls them to question everything about their lives. The universal hope is that this questioning will lead to them getting back on track with their own personal expansion. Death of any perspective is not beneficial to the universe when expansion is still being served through that perspective.
And the sad truth, especially when it comes to suicide, is that so many people believe themselves to be stuck and believe that no improvement or progression or expansion can take place in their life, when the reality is quite the opposite. They are simply suffering from the severe limitations of their individual perspective.
To generalize, the universe itself does not want beings to die. There is too much value in them being alive. If there wasn’t, no being would come into existence with their instincts and biology wired for survival. It is in the best interests of the universe at large for a being to stay in their current form, as long as expansion and enhancement is actually occurring through that perspective… As long as the reason for life to exist in the first place is being actualized through that perspective. The value in death is really all about the value of drastic change, especially in terms of a drastic change of perspective. And the truth, whether you are aware of it or not, is that it is in your hands to continue to create that expansion forward.
Having said all of this, when death happens around you, it is absolutely a calling to re-examine your life. It is a calling of your life and of life itself into question. And you would be very wise to let it be that and to get on board with this powerful objective process of re-evaluating everything.
One of the most life enriching things that you can do is to live with your mortality in mind. What so many people who have had a near death experience or who have overcome suicidality or who have grappled with a terminal illness will tell you is that the facing of death brings an invaluable gift for life. What they will tell you is that people should face death (this essential feature of life) in order to live a more rich, meaningful and authentic life. It is all too easy to get sucked into the drama of temporal day-to-day life. It is all too easy to behave as if life will last forever. It is all too easy to lose track of what really matters in the grand scheme of things. Facing death and living with the awareness that you will die one day, can break you free from the way that you have been sucked into the small picture of your temporal life. It has the power to re-connect you with the bigger picture of your life here on earth.
Facing death will cause you to ask questions like: How will I feel about this thing that I am doing after I am dead? How will I feel about having spent my time on earth in this way after I am dead? When I am dead, will this thing matter? Am I really living? What does it mean to really, truly live? Will I choose from today on to really truly live? Will I choose to live like every moment of my life matters? What does it mean to make the most of my time here on earth? Am I making the most of my time here on earth? What would I do differently so as to make the most of my time here on earth? If I accepted that I am going to die one day, and so the goal of life cannot simply be to stay safe, so as to survive, what might I be brave enough to do differently? Contrary to popular opinion, thinking about life within the context of death will cause you to make drastically different decisions and to live both fully and bravely.
We must know that even if, at a more objective level of reality, death is just a change in perspective, it is quite a different experience here in our temporal forms. We should not be invalidating our physical life experience and perceptions with higher dimensional awareness, like so many people seem to do. One does not negate the other. This means we need to hold BOTH the reality of loss and of no loss. Death and no death. Don’t expect or allow your awareness of the bigger picture of death to negate the physical life experience of death. Let that awareness ‘caretake’ your pain, not invalidate it. And see death for what it is… the ultimate change. It is my deepest hope that this awareness will help you to live the fullest, most meaningful and most joyful life possible.
Compatibility is so important in relationships. When two things are compatible, their co-existence is beneficial and ads to the wellbeing of each of them. But there is one element of compatibility that is the most important thing to consider if you want your relationships to feel good and that is workability or lack thereof.
Compatibility is when two things are able to exist or occur together in a state of harmony and without conflict. Compatibility is about creating the right arrangements with people and putting people in the right place in your life according to their boundaries (their personal feelings, thoughts, desires, needs, behavior, truths etc) and your boundaries (your personal feelings, thoughts, desires, needs, behavior, truths etc). But the most important element of compatibility is workability or lack thereof. Another way of saying this is that the most important part of assessing compatibility is to figure out what is and isn’t workable.
Let’s define workable in the context of this conversation. When something is workable, it is flexible, negotiable, pliable and adaptable. It can be influenced, molded or changed so that it produces the desired effect or the desired results. For a relationship to be harmonious, mutually pleasing and successful, we are likely to find ourselves changing certain things, adapting to certain things and developing flexibility in certain ways. For example, we may get into a relationship with a person who love sports and as a result, we may end up spending a lot of time watching sports when we didn’t before. Or, we may be in a relationship with someone who gets a job in another country. And as a result, we may end up moving to another country when we would never have moved to that place if we were not in that relationship. Or, we may find ourselves in a relationship with someone who is very emotionally volatile. And as a result, we may have to change our relationship to emotions and learn how to effectively regulate someone else.
But a relationship can only be harmonious, mutually pleasing and successful if we know what is truly workable for us and if we know what is truly unworkable for us. And it can only be harmonious, mutually pleasing and successful if by knowing this, we don’t delude ourselves or other people into thinking that we are workable where we actually are not. To use a metaphor, some things about us and about our life are unworkable, like solid steel. And need to be for the sake of our wellbeing and other things are workable, like modeling clay. And need to be for the sake of our wellbeing.
So that you can understand this better, here are some examples. A doctor has chosen a specific specialty that requires her to be on call. This is creating disharmony because her partner can’t plan anything that involves her and does not like the feeling of her being able to be called away at any moment. For this specific doctor, this is an area of unworkability. There is no flexibility or changeability relative to this thing in her life. So, the adaptability must be on the other side. But if needing a partner to be reliably present happens to be an area of unworkability for the other person, then there is genuine incompatibility.
A person has strong beliefs about veganism and animal activism. He starts to date a woman who is new to the whole idea. She feels unable to just go off of all animal products cold turkey, but expresses an interest in trying vegetarianism. So, there is workability relative to this thing. For this man, he feels that he can tolerate eggs and yogurt being in the fridge, as long as there is no meat in the fridge. Which means that for him, there is also workability relative to this thing.
A person loves climbing. They met someone on vacation that is not what you would call “outdoorsy”. This starts to be a problem because they never seem to want to do the same things. The relationship seems to be pulling this person away from what they love doing most in the world. A very strong desire is born within this person for a partner they can be with doing the thing they love the very most. Someone who is also a climbing enthusiast. They realize that it isn’t workable for them to have a partner who is not intrinsically invested in climbing too.
Because all people are different, one person might exhibit workability relative to something where as another person can’t be workable relative to that same thing. For example, imagine that your career demands that you move around to different cities. One person might be able to be workable relative to that. But someone else might have a family and friend group that they are so close to and have no interest in leaving, that they could not be workable relative to that.
Keep in mind that workability and lack thereof doesn’t only apply to romantic partnerships. It applies to other relationships as well, such as friendships and work relationships and family relationships etc.
When we have to assess what is and is not workable for us, we begin to wander into the territory of compromise in relationships. The problem with conversations about compromise boils down to two things. The first is that people currently see compromise as an indisputably crucial part of relationships. And the second being that when two people are using the word compromise, they are often talking about two different things.
To compromise is to settle a dispute/conflict or reach agreement or alignment by way of mutual concession. Remember that to concede is to yield, give up or give away something you value. Keep in mind that when some people are using the word compromise, they mean it how I just described it, in that they see compromise as being about the big things that really matter. When people say that compromise is important and they hold this definition of compromise, it’s is just another way of saying “it’s important to give up what is important to you sometimes and take some pain for the sake of the relationship.”
But when other people use the world compromise, they mean the small stuff. Stuff that doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t represent something the person deeply values. Such as a person who has a preference to eat at a certain restaurant, but who concedes to eat somewhere else because the other person wants to eat there. Or a person who may not have a super strong conviction to any religion, joining a religion for the sake of their partner. When people say that compromise is important and they hold this definition of compromise, it’s is just another way of saying “it’s important to be workable where you can be workable”. Does it make sense now, why we get confused when we talk about compatibility?
One of the least popular videos that I ever did, was a video on the importance of not compromising in relationships. Every time my team posts a quote from that video, it ignites an online flame war. Why did I make such a bold claim, because a person can’t give up something that they value, and thus that really matters to them, without experiencing pain that eventually causes disharmony in the relationship. So, when you are assessing what is and isn’t workable, you have to assess what you truly value and what is truly important to you. And no one can tell you what is or isn’t important to you. Nor can they tell you what should and shouldn’t be important to you. None the less, so many fights in relationships (especially fights about compromise) are about what a person thinks should and shouldn’t be important. So, if you’d like to see that controversial video, as well as another good one on the topic of compromise in relationships, the first is titled: Why You Should Never Make Compromises in a Relationship. And the second is titled: Do You Base Your Relationships on Compromise or Compatibility?
Unfortunately, you may discover more about what is and is not workable specifically by being in a relationship that makes you aware of it. But knowing what is and what is not workable about you (such as things about yourself, your life, your values, your preferences, your aversions, your desires etc). is the most important part of assessing compatibility. Because these areas of unworkability are what causes extreme disharmony in a relationship and they are what breaks a relationship apart. Finding compatibility in these areas of unworkability is your best shot at having a relationship that is harmonious, mutually pleasing and successful.
In every relationship, there is an energy exchange that occurs between the people involved. Sometimes the people in the relationship are conscious of this energy exchange and sometimes they aren’t, even though it is nevertheless happening. We can divide these energy exchanges into two different types of energy exchange. And knowing the difference between the two, as well as which kind of energy exchange you want, is a critical part of establishing a feel-good relationship. For this reason, in this article, I’m going to explain what energy exchange is, define the two different types of energy exchange and explain why this understanding is so important when it comes to creating a mutually fulfilling relationship.
Despite the fact that energy exchange is an element of literally every relationship, people tend to get uncomfortable when we start to talk about the energy exchange element of a relationship. The reason being that energy exchange is a kind of transaction and we are in a time period where transaction in any relationship (other than a work relationship) is seen as bad and wrong. When most people hear about transaction in a relationship, they make the automatic assumption that there is no love, no actual mutual caring and no actual valuing of the other taking place in that relationship. They assume it is a purely self-centered relationship, where one person is simply using the other; or where they are both using each other.
Energy exchange and love are two totally different aspects of a relationship. To love something is to take it as a part of you. Love naturally gives rise to experiences like compassion, closeness, understanding, empathy, caring and appreciation. When we love something, we cannot hurt it or act against its best interests without hurting ourselves. A person can have a purely transactional relationship. But ideally, a relationship will have both a love element and an energy exchange element. And ideally, both people are consciously aware of what the energy exchange is in their relationship. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Be Consciously Transactional. Why Every Relationship Is Transactional.
Energy exchange essentially means that each person receives something and each person provides something for the other. What makes an energy exchange a good one, is if each person gets something that is valued. And value, especially with regards to what we value most, is based on what that person needs and wants. A person has to need and want something to truly value it. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Value Realization (A Realization That Can Completely Change Your Self Worth).
The two different types of energy exchange in relationship are:
People give and therefore receive the SAME thing from each other
People give and therefore receive DIFFERENT things from each other
This seems straight forward, but so that you can wrap your head around this, I’ll give you some examples of each. Some examples of people giving and receiving the same thing in a relationship are: Both people give each other the same kind of support for their individual goals, such as encouragement, being present for important moments, reassurance and helping them in whatever way they can to reach their individual goals. Or both people provide each other physical affection. Or both people give each other a sense of belonging. Or both people offer each other guidance. Or both people offer emotional regulation to each other when the other is upset. Or both people share the same tasks that need to be done around the house. Etc.
Some examples of people giving and receiving different things in a relationship are: One person does one task around the house, and the other person does another. One person provides finances and the other provides nurturing. One person provides stability and the other provides adventure. One person provides a high degree of emotional intimacy and communication, the other provides physical competency and new experiences. One provides purpose and the other provides dedication to their personal successes etc.
It is important to identify in what ways you want to experience giving and receiving the same things in a relationship and in what ways, you might feel more satisfied by giving and receiving different things in a relationship. Most people are fixated on the kind of energy exchange in a relationship where people give and receive the same things from each other. In fact, many people don’t see that there is any other way to have a relationship. Most people believe that fairness and reciprocation in relationships depends on there being no double standards. Another way of putting this is that most people believe that fairness and reciprocation in relationships is dependent upon giving exactly what you want to receive in a relationship; the energy exchange being the same. But this isn’t true. We are not all the same, we have different needs and each and every one of us has different experiences and strengths and vulnerabilities. And because of this, we offer different resources. This means that in any relationship, a person might be able to offer much more or much less than the other can, of any one resource. This can very easily give rise to the sensation of unfairness in a relationship. On top of this, a lot of people are in positions in their life where they can’t offer the same thing they want or need. It is very important to know (especially in this day and age where society is swinging towards the idea that equality means sameness) that it is ok for an energy exchange to be about totally different things in a relationship, provided that both people agree to that energy exchange and find it mutually nourishing.
So much of the time when a relationship turns south, or a person decides to end a relationship or change it, it doesn’t mean anything about your inherent value or about whether you are lovable or about whether the other person loves you, cares about you or sees the positive in you. It is simply about a break down that is happening on the level of energy exchange in the relationship. Their needs are simply not being met.
Identifying what you want and need from a relationship, what you can and can’t offer in a relationship and recognizing these two different types of energy exchange will greatly help you to assess compatibility in any relationship. It will also help you to establish that wonderful feeling of being in a relationship that is truly valuable to you. But a relationship where it is not only you doing the valuing, because you are deeply valued and you feel that you are deeply valued by the other person too.
In case you hadn’t noticed, something is happening in the universe. Maybe you’ve been noticing that life is feeling more difficult than ever. Maybe you’ve been feeling like you’re being pushed to the edge in an emotional pressure cooker. Or maybe you’ve been feeling like your attempts to create the life you want are proving futile, as you find yourself in the very situations you were desperate to experience the opposite of. There is a reason for all of this!
Let’s start out by jumping right to the punchline. What is happening in the universe right now is that each and every person is being forced to face the very thing that they have spent their life avoiding, running from and using coping mechanisms to get out of.
So that you can wrap your head around this, I’ll give you some examples: The person who has been avoiding stepping into their power for as long as they can remember is likely to find themselves in a situation where that is the only way forward. A person who was traumatized by aloneness, will find themselves back in that aloneness and being forced to feel it and explore it and understand it to the degree that they are no longer running from it. A person who has spent their life trying to run from failure through successes, will see everything they try to do fall apart until their relationship with failure changes for the better. A person who is in avoidance of responsibility will find themselves in a situation where they cannot avoid responsibility, no matter how hard they try, so they will find themselves choosing it for the first time. You get the point.
The very thing we are the most afraid of, we are being forced to confront to the degree that we are no longer walking the earth in fear and resistance to it. The reason this is happening is both microcosmic and macrocosmic. On a microcosmic level, when a person is desperate to get away from something, the various beliefs they form, behaviors they employ and actions they end up taking to get themselves away from it, bring about terrible results. Often ones that bring them in the opposite direction from what they want and thus, create intense suffering. And as a result, this desperate avoidance acts as an oppositional force to a person’s personal expansion. Avoidance gets in the way of a person’s wellbeing and what a person needs and wants.
On a macrocosmic level, when all the people of earth are stuck in this pattern of avoidance, and they can band together when they agree upon something that is to be avoided, the various beliefs they form, behaviors that they employ and actions they take, bring about terrible results that create suffering for the world. Avoidance gets in the way of the world’s wellbeing and what the world needs and wants.
On paper, this all sounds straightforward. But on a practical level (and for some more than others) this is so difficult, if not unthinkable, that no words do it justice. I’ll give you just one example of this playing out on someone’s life. Cassidy grew up in a rough culture, where vulnerability of any kind was seen as a weakness and weakness had no place. Vulnerability was the road to incredible suffering and exploitation. It just made having to fend for herself worse. So, Cassidy has been avoiding vulnerability all her life. To put it mildly, she had to “man up” from the time she was three. But she has been wanting someone to fend for her all her life. That is her missing need. To avoid vulnerability, Cassidy has become uber competent, strong willed, harsh, hyper responsible, competitive, focused on achievement, domineering, intense, opinionated, charismatic and she’s developed serious grit. But because of this, no one wants to take care of her. In fact, she attracts the exact opposite. She attracts men who prove to be weak and who want her to protect them and take responsibility for them and encourage them and coach them out of their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, like the father these men never had.
The very thing that Cassidy wants and the very thing that would be in alignment with her wellbeing is being prevented by the thoughts, behaviors and actions that she is engaged in, in order to avoid vulnerability. And the suffering is really racking up. So now, the universe is forcing her into her vulnerability. She is now in a situation where a forest fire burned down her home and the riding school she had built. Her third husband had an emotional breakdown because of the trauma of the experience and left her to man up and deal with the damage herself, while he was out of commission and even to help him deal with his breakdown. And this caused her to lose respect for him and also for them to grow apart because there was no one there for her in her darkest time. So now, they are on the verge of divorce. Her best friend just moved to another state. And now, she started feeling sick and was just informed that she needs to have bowel surgery.
Cassidy is being literally forced into the very thing that she has spent her life disowning and resisting and denying and rejecting and trying to avoid… Her vulnerability. The solution to this, is for her to stop doing what she has been doing all her life, which is trying to get out of it. Trying to re-establish her power. Instead, she needs to recognize, sit with, re-own and integrate her vulnerability. The feelings of being unable to control life into working out the way she wants it to. The parts of her that are lost and that don’t have any of the answers and are confused. The needs she feels ashamed of, because they make her feel weak, such as the need for guidance and the need for reassurance and the need for comfort. And she needs to explore the discomfort she feels when someone else is in charge or is in the top position. Ironically, doing this, rather than avoiding her vulnerability, will cause her to be able to have that relationship that she wants, where a man is truly fending for her.
When we are desperate to avoid something, our whole life becomes about avoiding that thing. For example, if we are desperate to avoid the feeling of not belonging, we might adopt a codependent relational style. We might put on a fake personality to establish a sense of sameness with our friends and dupe them in the process. We might get addicted to alcohol to numb the pain of inauthenticity. We might choose to enter a group and do whatever is needed so that we can feel that we are wanted, rather than to do what we are actually good at and actually enjoy doing. We might thwart our own successes, if they threaten our social connections. We might marry someone one week after we meet them and end up suffering in an incompatible marriage. We might suppress our own truths and desires and needs, if they even remotely threaten to differ from those of the people around us. And the list goes on and on.
Our lives become an absolute mess because of the beliefs we form, behaviors we employ and actions we end up taking to get ourselves away from whatever it is that we are desperate to avoid, because it is what we are the most afraid of and it is the thing we don’t want to experience the very most. The solution is to consciously get on board with ending this avoidance pattern and to choose to face and integrate the very thing you’ve been avoiding.
Universally, time has run out for humanity to change patterns on our own terms and at our own pace. What we are a match to on a microcosmic level as individuals and on a macrocosmic level as humanity, is the universal timer running out and the universal pressure cooker being turned WAY up, so change is literally forced. Kind of a do or die situation. We are being cornered so we can’t keep running from what we were trying to avoid. Where it literally won’t work to keep coping to get out of the acknowledgement and experience of what we are trying to avoid. Given that this is what is going on in the universe right now, we are likely to find ourselves in the very situation we have spent our lives trying to avoid. No one will be exempt from being put directly into what we are so desperate NOT to experience. Many of you reading this have already ended up in that very situation.
The good news is that the solution to what is happening right now in the universe, is to figure out what you are trying desperately to avoid. And to stop avoiding that thing. Because ironically, the thing you want the most will only be actualized as a result of doing so.
If you struggle with anger, you most likely look around the world at all the people who seem to be able to not get angry and feel extreme envy and also feel like something must be wrong with you. You probably don’t understand your own anger or what to do about it. And to make matters worse, other people don’t either. They simply expect you not to be angry, or at the very least, not to show it. And quite frankly, the vast majority of advice out there about what to do to manage your anger is bad advice.
When you struggle with anger, relationships can feel impossible. It feels like the other person does something or fails to do something and that thing they did or failed to do causes you pain or is a threat in some way. But you know (because society has made you very aware that anger is wrong) that you are expected to immediately down-regulate yourself and not get angry at them. Not only does this seem impossible, it seems totally unfair and wrong because it is a flipped dynamic. They did something potentially harmful to you and yet you are the problem if you get angry about it. As a result, you may want to work on your “anger issues”, but at the same time, doing so feels like self-betrayal because it feels like all you are doing, is playing into this flipped dynamic. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can learn to regulate anger without playing into this flipped dynamic. And to do this, you need to understand the difference between the people who don’t struggle with anger, and the people who do.
Anger is an emotion that every person has. It is a part of any healthy emotional system. So, people who don’t struggle with anger do feel anger. But when they do, they don’t turn against it immediately. Nor do they act on it immediately. They see that the emotion would not be happening if it were not for a very important reason. They seek to understand their own anger. They let themselves feel it and hear the personal truths behind it. And then, they take empowered actions according to what they have come to understand from their anger.
This process is one that a person learns in their very early toddler years when they need to be emotionally regulated by their parents. But let’s face it, a lot of people had parents that failed to emotionally regulate them. In fact, a lot of people had parents that even dis-regulated them chronically. These parents had a real problem with their child’s anger. As a result, when their child got angry, they turned against the child’s anger. These kinds of parents don’t see the anger as valid or existing for an important reason. They shame the child for their anger. They don’t spend time trying to figure out why the child is angry and what is making the child feel powerless to something that the child feels is harmful to him or her. And they do not help the child to take empowered actions accordingly, to help the child feel empowered to change what is causing them pain or fear. As a result, the child’s anger escalates rather than de-escalates. And as a result, the child learns that they are powerless and that other people are unworkable. The world and especially relationships are a very dangerous, painful place where they either have to surrender their best interests completely and put up with being caused harm, or stick by their own best interests and fight like hell.
People who struggle with anger, internalize this process of faulty regulation or dis regulation. They don’t do any of the same things that a person who doesn’t struggle with anger does. If you struggle with anger, you have an aspect of you that is the internalization of your parents that immediately turns against your own anger the minute you feel it. You may be aggressively displaying anger and aggressively defending your right to be angry. But deep down, you are actually invalidating it and pushing against it. It is like an immediate internal tug of war is occurring. You don’t actually get that your anger is happening for an important reason. You don’t let yourself really feel it and hear your personal truths that are behind it. You perceive yourself to be powerless and you perceive the situation to be unworkable. And so, you don’t decide upon empowered actions to take about the situation. And so, you stay angry.
The root of anger is perceived powerlessness. And there is no greater powerlessness than perceived unworkability. Therefore, powerlessness and unworkability is what anger is really about. If you perceive something to be causing you pain or threatening to cause you pain on an emotional, mental or physical level, you need to change the situation so you can feel good again. If you believed that could happen and knew how to do it, you would feel empowered and so, you wouldn’t get angry. But if you perceive whatever is causing you that pain or posing that threat to be unworkable, you feel immediately powerless. When I say unworkable, what I mean is that something is so un-changeable that any attempt to get it to change has been or will be unsuccessful. And as a result, you feel powerless and stuck in pain. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Anger Hack – What To Do When You’re Upset.
You will most likely hear people say that the root of anger is hurt and fear. And because hurt and fear so often give rise to anger, it often benefits people to look for the hurt and fear underneath their anger. But there is something deeper than that, which is infinitely more beneficial to recognize. Here it is… When people feel fear or feel hurt, they often feel powerless regarding whatever they fear or however they were hurt. The anger is in fact a response to that perceived powerlessness. Your anger comes in to try to rescue you from that powerlessness. In this way, your anger is a protector. It exists as a last-ditch effort to try to restore some sense of empowerment within you.
And it is here that I am going to call out a huge pattern amongst chronically angry people. Chronically angry people fail to take empowered steps within their relationships to enforce their boundaries and limits. They do not create any consequences for the people in their life who violate boundaries and behave in unworkable ways, especially those who do not hold themselves accountable and who don’t respond to being held accountable. Most especially people who passive aggressively do so. Instead, the only consequence they impose is that they get angrier.
So that you can grasp how all this fits together, here is an example: Tom has a man who works on his farm as a farm manager of sorts named James. James chronically breaks his word and is intermittent regarding the completion of his tasks. Tom does not feel like James can be relied on. And as a result, Tom never feels like the farm is taken care of. This causes Tom harm because it adds pressure and stress to his life because Tom has way too many responsibilities already and he can never truly let go of the responsibility of the farm because he can’t trust that James really has it. Tom feels totally powerless regarding the situation. He can’t seem to get James to change his behavior. And he feels like James is totally unworkable because for two years now, Tom has been confronting him on his behavior and has gotten absolutely furious at him again and again and has made several threats.
Today, James broke his word again about taking the twine off of the hay bales before putting it into the goat pen. And Tom yet again found the goats eating the twine and had to deal with it himself. Tom is furious. But the minute he gets furious, this internal part of him that thinks anger is not ok, turns against his anger and so inside him, there is an internal war. Tom doesn’t sit down to really feel his anger and to hear the personal truth behind it. The personal truth that he needs a person to take responsibility for the farm and one that he can trust. The personal truth that a person breaking their word and not completing tasks cannot be in that position in his life. Tom doesn’t then think of empowered ways to enforce that personal boundary of his. Things like docking James’s pay. Or looking for a new farm manager. Or requiring him to go to a course on personal accountability if he wants to keep working at the farm. Instead, Tom simply reacts to James’s unworkability and to his own perceived powerlessness with rage.
Tom yet again seeks out James, who is unloading chicken feed from a truck and starts yelling at him and insulting him. Tom is red in the face and is restraining himself from punching James. He is convinced that James will be moved by his distress and anger to the degree where he won’t do it again. But James won’t do this. He actually subconsciously gets something out of breaking his word and dropping his responsibilities… Not feeling alone. When Tom does the tasks that James drops, he feels like they are in it together, which was always a need of his in life. On top of this, he gets sympathy from other people and is seen as the good guy regarding what a rage monster his boss, Tom is. They will be locked in this cycle forever because of the things James gets out of being unworkable and because of the way that Tom deals with his anger.
The really good news is that if you struggle with anger, there are concrete steps you can take to regulate your anger.
Do parts work with the part of you that turns against and invalidates your anger. This part of you is a protector personality that will make the process of regulating and working with your anger impossible. This part is most likely the internalization of one or both of your parents regarding how they dealt with your anger when you were young. The goal here is to understand this aspect of you fully and to get this part of you to see that its current strategy is not working. The goal of it seeing this is so that it is willing to re-purpose itself to something that allows you to integrate your anger rather than push it away, and work with your anger so as to gain empowerment. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Parts Work (What is Parts Work and How To Do It). Alternatively, you can go to www.completionprocess.com and select a practitioner who facilitates parts work to help you work with this part of yourself.
When you feel angry, remind yourself that a person does not feel anger for no reason. This means you are feeling it for an important reason. And decide that you want to understand your anger.
Close your eyes and feel your anger. Feel the sensations that are occurring inside your body, no matter how uncomfortable they are. This gets easier over time, the more muscle you develop for tolerating intense feelings and sensations.
Start to question your anger. When did it start? What happened?
Identify what made you feel threatened, what it made you afraid of and/or what made you feel hurt. If we are angry, it means we feel as if we have been threatened. You need to ask yourself “what do I feel so threatened by?” Once you figure out what it is that you feel threatened by, you need to ask yourself “why do I feel so threatened by that thing?” And once you have answered that questions, you need to ask yourself “what about that hurt me so bad?” “What am I really afraid of in this situation?” And “What need do I have in this situation that is not getting met?” If we feel threatened, we feel vulnerable. The question is to what?
Identify what about the situation that made you so angry made you feel powerless. Your anger always reveals what in life you feel dis-empowered about. But because anger is such an unconscious process, people almost never directly name and work with whatever they feel powerless about so as to empower themselves more relative to whatever feels powerless.
Ask yourself, what in this situation do I feel is totally unworkable? Name it directly. Anger directly reveals those areas where empowerment needs to come back into your life, as long as you are willing to see the unworkability that your anger is trying to call your attention to directly, so as to strategize how to make it workable instead. In other words, your empowerment is about facing your disempowerment. You will find that just the awareness of the disempowerment that is hiding underneath your anger, will take the edge off the anger.
From there, all your energy should go towards consciously figuring out what to do about what you feel powerless about and what to do about that unworkability you perceive, so that you can make a choice and take an action that is empowering. First of all, are you really powerless? What power do you have in the situation? Is whatever you perceive to be unworkable really unworkable? Maybe you can tell whoever is involved in the situation what you feel is totally unworkable, so that you draw their attention to it, so that they can problem solve that unworkability with you. What might you try to do so that the situation that feels unworkable is workable instead? And only if it is truly unworkable, you can ask yourself: if I accepted that unworkability, and swallowed that it would never change, what could I do then?
Take empowered action. This empowered action should be anything that causes you to feel more empowered and therefore, better. It could be anything. It could be deliberately working with your mind and perception, such as changing a belief. It could be a specific communication that needs to take place with someone. It could be an action that looks like self-care. It could be following through on enforcing a boundary that has been violated with a consequence. It could be changing up your life in some way. It could be re-negotiating a relationship agreement. The empowering action will directly relate to the specific situation you feel mad about.
Anger is a self-preservation impulse. It is a reaction to try to restore a sense of empowerment. In order to be able to work with our anger in a way where people will look at us and say we can control our anger; we need to turn that impulse reaction to restore empowerment into a conscious process instead.
There are a few patterns within people and within relationships that lead to a person flipping, that is to suddenly change to the opposite. When you find yourself in this scenario, it is especially painful, disorienting and confusing. For this reason, today, I’m going to reveal one of the most common patterns that causes a person to flip in a relationship. And I’m going to reveal why this pattern spells drastic change for your relationship, no matter what.
It is tempting to think that the majority of relationships are functional and that dysfunctional relationships are the rarity. But the reverse is actually true. Most relationships between people on earth today fall somewhere on the scale of dysfunction. And the vast majority of the dysfunction in relationships is about how to be in relationships with other people and their best interests, while maintaining a sense of our self and our personal best interests. In dysfunctional family systems, we learn that we cannot trust other people to truly act in our best interests. We have to vie for our own best interests and create adaptations to that family system so that we can feel as safe as possible and so that we can have as much control as possible over getting our own needs met. There are so many different strategies that children learn to employ in order to do this.
Before a child selects these various strategies, they are faced with a choice. 1. They can go through the front door and fight the other members of the family system for their own best interests. Or 2. They can go through the backdoor and manipulate the other members of the family system for their own best interests. And it is here that people develop the relationship strategy of narcissism or codependency. The truth about narcissism and codependency is that they are not personality disorders. They are adaptive relationship strategies. If you want to learn more about this, watch my video titled: The Truth About Narcissism and Codependency.
People who develop the relationship adaptation style of codependency decide at a subconscious level that because no one is really concerned for their welfare, benefit and best interests, the best way to survive is to get their own needs met by sacrificing parts of themselves so as to conform to other people’s interests and creating an attuned emotional contract with them, whereby their own needs are manipulatively met in exchange for doing so. You will hear pretty much everywhere that codependents place a lower priority on their own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others. This is not true. It only looks like that on the outside. The reality is that the preoccupation with the needs of others is their method for getting their own needs met.
This codependent relational adaptation carries on into adulthood. And it is this relational adaptation that causes them to flip in relationships. The Codependent Flip Pattern is when someone enters into a relationship and creates a false sense of confluence with that person, even if doing so requires things like sacrificing parts of themselves, suppressing personal truths and saying “yes” to what is actually a “no” for them; because they believe that doing so promises to meet their needs. They have all kinds of subconscious (or conscious but unexpressed) expectations. But when their strategy doesn’t work to actually get their needs met, the truth comes out. They drop their strategy. They essentially dupe the other person. The fact that certain things were a sacrifice and certain things were not actually true or a yes for them, comes out. They then begin to flip to a narcissistic style of relating to the other person because they have no frame of reference for any other style of relating. And what’s more than that, they now expect the other person to do for them, what they did for the other person in the beginning. To sacrifice for their best interests, to say “yes” to what is a “no” for them and to suppress parts of themselves. Essentially, to reverse the dynamic by becoming codependent to them.
So that you can understand this pattern better, here is an example. Bruce has a codependent relational style. He fell in love with a very beautiful woman named Brynn. Bruce was awestruck by Brynn and he saw Brynn as the ticket to the self-esteem he lacked and as a perfect way to feel a sense of belonging and power and emotional closeness and physical intimacy. Brynn preferred him to be with her all the time, so he quit his job to work with her in her company. Brynn had very particular music tastes, so he just let her control the music they listened to. Brynn wanted to buy a house and didn’t trust any man enough to want his name on the mortgage. So, Bruce said yes to paying rent and living with her in her house. Brynn wanted dogs, so Bruce not only said he wanted them too, he surprised her with a puppy. Brynn felt she had met a true friend. Someone who was such a kindred soul, he could be family. But the reality is that Bruce was simply creating a sense of confluence and was only pleasing Brynn with his own subconscious needs in mind. Specifically, Bruce expected Brynn to become his partner on a romantic and sexual level. He expected her to publicly introduce him as her boyfriend. He expected her to eventually make him part owner in her company. Bruce has duped Brynn.
Brynn would go on dates with other men. She would quickly set people straight if they assumed she and Bruce were together as a couple. And one day, she explained that she wanted to transition him out of his role within the company, so someone even more qualified than them both could take it over; to make the company expand. All of this insulted Bruce. And gradually, Bruce started to realize that everything he had given himself up for, wasn’t going to happen. Now, he felt resentful and full of rage. Rather than seeing that he is accountable for saying yes to what was really a no. And to sacrificing what he was not actually ok sacrificing. And for misleading Brynn to think they were compatible where they actually weren’t etc. Bruce decided that Brynn was using him all along. That she only cared about herself. And that he needed to do what was best for him.
So, out of the blue, Bruce flipped. He told Brynn that he expected a portion of her company, for all the years of dedication he had shown to the business. He told her that he thought it was wrong that she owned a house that he had been paying rent to, when he could have had his own house and been paying down the mortgage on his own asset, rather than hers. He started blasting the music that he loved, but Brynn hated. And he started dropping his responsibilities for the puppy, as a passive aggressive way of asserting the truth that he only said yes to the dogs because of wanting to please her. And when she got upset about it, rather than to immediately give into his zero-sum game demands by sacrificing her best interests for his best interests, saying “yes” to what is a “no” for her and suppressing parts of herself (because in Bruce’s mind, that would be the good and right thing to do), Bruce went on a triangulation tour. He told every person they mutually knew that Brynn was a complete narcissist who had taken him for granted and wronged him and had prevented him from his own success for years. Bruce was convinced that by flipping, he was becoming empowered and he was healing. But what had really happened, is he had swung the pendulum and he had slipped into the Codependent Flip Pattern. To learn more about the pendulum swing pattern, you can watch my video titled: What Is The Pendulum Swing in Healing? Bruce and Brynn ended their relationship after years and years of being the closest people in each other’s lives, as enemies.
When people find themselves confronted with this pattern, they feel completely bamboozled. The reason being that at first, they don’t understand why the person has suddenly changed, usually into the opposite of what they were. And after they understand the why, they feel bamboozled because what they thought was true about the other person and therefore what they thought they could depend on, was actually false. This pattern causes history to be re-written. Including the narrative about who the person they were in a relationship with is or isn’t.
The personal truth underneath this pattern is: “I did all this for you, even though I led you to believe I was getting something out of it and even though I said it was a yes for me… It wasn’t. Now, I’m dropping the act. And because I did all that for you, it’s your turn to do X for me.”
The Codependency Flip Pattern is a form of entrapment in a relationship. It is to coerce someone into an energy exchange that they may never have said yes to if they were presented with the exchange directly. It is to give up the self, with the hidden expectation to get something undisclosed back. And when the other person figures it out, it’s too late for them to say no. In fact, if they say no, there are consequences.
The reason that people with a codependent relational style do this, is because they have learned that they cannot have themselves and have other people too. So, they must give themselves up in order to get. They feel they can’t put themselves and their needs on the table, and so they must not do so. And instead, entrap the other person into meeting their needs or manipulate the other person in order to get their needs met.
The very unfortunate truth is that because the Codependent Flip Pattern involves inauthenticity from the get go, the relationship is changing no matter what you do. It is never going back to what it was. What it was, wasn’t real. This is very hard to accept if you are on the other side of this pattern, most especially because people with a codependent relational style have become so good at perceiving other people’s needs, that they put up an act that is so wanted and needed by you, that it will feel like letting go of the very thing you were always desperately looking for. But having had it, was an illusion.
Codependency in and of itself, is an extremely painful relational strategy. And the Codependent Flip Pattern is one of the most painful patterns that someone can experience in a relationship. It is a pattern that destroys trust in a way that drastically effects a person’s belief in their own ability to discern, as well as their trust regarding all future relationships. If you notice that you fall to the codependent side of the spectrum, it’s important to know that the only reliable way to not fall into this pattern, is to get into a relationship with the actual truth of who you are. To say no when something is a no for you. To not sacrifice what is important to you. To not feign compatibility where there is incompatibility and to master the practice of win-wins in a relationship. It sounds so easy, but the reality is that this will not be easy because it is the opposite of the way you learned to engage in relationships and for good reason.
If you realize that you have fallen into this pattern, the way out of it, is to admit that you fell into this pattern and to take radical accountability for it. Often, this means taking responsibility for cleaning up the emotional and even practical mess that was created by falling into this pattern. It is bad enough for the other person to have been duped. They don’t deserve to be made the bad guy on top of it, because you feel like you lost yourself in the relationship and because your unexpressed needs weren’t met. The next step is to let go of your unexpressed expectations. They will never be met, because you never gave the other person the chance to consciously agree to them. And from there, if the other person wants to associate with you, rather than end the relationship all together, you need to re-negotiate a new kind of relationship from the ground up. I mean completely from scratch, based on what is real and based on the actual points of compatibility between you and them.
I’m going to say it again, the hardest thing to accept about the Codependent Flip Pattern is that what you thought was true for the other person, wasn’t actually true for them. And the relationship you thought you had with them; you didn’t actually have. And because of this, the relationship you have with them, is changing no matter what. You are starting over from scratch with getting to know who they really are and with a totally different relationship.
One of the most common things that people ask me is “What is my purpose?” Today, I want to explain some things that you might not know about purpose and offer you 8 questions that you can ask yourself that will help you to find your purpose.
There is a reason, usually many in fact, for why you incarnated into this life as a human and as the person that you are. This reason accounts for why you came to those specific parents and to that specific place and why you came when you did and the entire story of your astrology etc. So many things were set into motion by this pre-birth intention. A pre-birth intention reflects something that was important to your non-physical consciousness.
We have the tendency of “careerizing” the idea of purpose. Not everyone’s life purpose was about some job they were meant to do here, some career they were meant to have. Or some grand act they were meant to carry out. Some beings incarnate only for a very short time into the womb and then withdraw their consciousness. So, if you can imagine that there can be purpose even in an incarnation like that, you can imagine how complicated the picture of pre-birth intention and life purpose is. And how simple a life purpose can be.
When most people talk about life purpose, they think of it in terms of trying to figure out and live up to some pre-determined grand master plan for what they are meant to do on this planet. They feel it is their cosmic mission to find out the cosmic significance of their life, the purpose for their existence and to live it out. And this is the wrong way to go about doing it.
The right way to go about doing it is to find out what is important to you. And live according to what is important to you. Because nested within what is important to you, is that pre-birth intention. To feel good in life, you do have to be in-alignment with your pre-birth intention, to be in alignment with your prebirth intention, you must be doing what is important to you. You could say that your pre-birth intention is reflected through that feeling of living according to what is important to you in this life. And sometimes in life, what is important to you changes. When this is the case, you are still on the path of that pre-birth intention. You are often simply taking the next step on the path of it.
To feel like you are living your purpose, you need to ask yourself: What can I do with my time that is important? Some of the things we do in life are not important. And some of the things we do in life are important. They have meaning. They matter. They cause us a sense of fulfillment. To have that sense of having purpose in life, you need to do those things, whatever they are. And what is important for each person, is different and unique. What’s more, no one else can tell you what is or isn’t, should or shouldn’t be important to you.
Now that you understand this, here are 8 Questions that you can ask yourself in order to find your purpose.
If I were literally forced to be active in that I had to go spend every minute of my time, except for sleep doing something, or there would be a consequence, what would I occupy myself with that matters to me? Make sure your answer to this question isn’t something that serves as an escape from life for you, like scrolling Instagram might be for some of you. Or playing video games might be for some of you. Or reading books might be for some of you. Or slot machines might be for some of you. And when you get your answer, look at WHY that is your answer and WHAT you find so enthralling about that thing. This question can show us what activity we might choose above all the others.
If money or time or current responsibilities were not an issue at all, what would I like to do with my life, more than anything else in the world? We are often kept away from an awareness of what our true passions are by the feeling that we don’t have enough money or that we don’t have enough time or that some responsibility we have will not allow for it. But because of this, we are full of resistance to the very things that make our life worth living. And the very things that hold the most passion for us and the very things that are most important to us.
If I knew I was going to die in 2 years, what would I do with those two years? Viewing your life from the perspective of death is incredibly valuable. Death shows you the value of your life. Most people live their lives like they have all the time in the world and so, they don’t make the most out of their lives. Suddenly, if we have very limited time to make the most of our life, we prioritize what is most important to us. We do the things that are the most important to us. Our true values rise to the surface. And we have more willingness to be urgent and active about living according to them. This question serves as a window into what is most important to you about your existence. In a roundabout way, it shines a light on what you want your legacy to be. And this has a way of putting you back into alignment with your pre-birth intention quickly. Values are essentially what is most important to you. And so, figuring out your values is such a crucial part of finding a sense of purpose. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Secret to a Happy Life.
What makes me forget time and basic necessities? When we are in our purpose, we are so in the present moment, that minutes turn to hours and hours turn into days without us noticing how much time has gone by. We become so immersed, that we forget things outside of it, like other things going on in our life or going to the bathroom or needing to eat or drink. So, answering this question, is a good way of finding out what truly puts us in the flow state where we are in alignment with our purpose.
What negatives can I say yes to? People have a totally unrealistic expectation that when they find their purpose, they will know because it will feel good. The truth is not so simple. Just look at someone like Martin Luther King. He and the rest of us can agree that he was living his purpose. But did it feel like Joy? Not a lot of the time. Some things did. But a lot didn’t. Would he have rather just avoided conflict and become a preacher, or focused on playing billiards where he could have felt a lot more ease? It is important to follow your joy, because that sensation of joy is an indication that you are doing what you love. It’s very valuable to follow your joy. What you love doing is in alignment with your purpose in some way, otherwise you couldn’t face the challenges on the path of your purpose. For example, Martin Luther King loved to communicate. To speak and write. He felt joy doing it. But for many people, on the path of purpose there is something that is stronger than joy. And that is a sense of importance. When you have that, even when the road gets really hard or you face serious pain on the path of your purpose, thinking about just changing course and doing what would feel better rather than facing all those painful elements feels wrong, because you lose that sense of doing what is most important to you.
This means, you need to know what negative things you can consciously choose, no matter how much they suck, in order to do what is important to you. To give you an example, someone who has decided it is important to be a professional skier, has to be able to say yes to the risk of injury and vicious competition and difficult travel and politics of sponsorship. Someone who decides it is important to be a full-time mother has to be able to say yes to being in the vulnerable position of her partner being the one to provide and control financial security and dealing with throw up and potty training and focusing the vast majority of her time and energy on other people’s desires, needs and success. Depending on their situation, someone who decides it is important to spend their life traveling and exploring new places and cultures may have to deal with being judged as irresponsible by other people, the feeling of not having the cozy stability that comes with a ‘home’, their naivety getting them into dangerous situations because they are foreign. Or living out of a suitcase or backpack and as a result, not being able to build up any assets in life. Your ability to stick with what matters most to you and what you care about is determined by your willingness to face and deal with the negatives that come with it. The reality is, everything sucks some of the time. And expecting the right thing to feel different, is out of reality. Believe it or not, accepting this can be liberating if you let it be. To understand more about this, watch two of my videos. The first tiled: Want to Succeed? What Pain Will You Say Yes To. And the second titled: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences.
What problem in the world would I pick to start solving? This isn’t to say that every person’s purpose is about a world problem they are meant to solve. But you will find that this question will point to values that are more important to you than your own personal pleasure and satisfaction. And these are the things where you will have what it takes to face the negatives inherent in what is most important to you. It will also point you in the direction of the feeling of making a difference, which is an important part of life fulfillment.
What did I love to do when I was a child? When we are children, we often instinctively gravitate towards living in alignment with our pre-birth intention. We are not yet fully socialized and the process of socialization often pulls us away from our joy and innate calling. Children are masters of play, which means they do things for the sheer joy of doing them. Not because they earn money for doing it or because they get some other reward for it. Their intrinsic motive has not yet been compromised. There are hints as to someone’s purpose in their childhood aptitudes, affinities and behaviors. Behaviors that are not a strategy to get something else they want. So that you can understand this, I’ll give you an example. Mark is an architect. He feels this is his purpose. When he looks back at his childhood, he realizes that he loved Legos more than anything in the world. He was a natural planner and wanted everything planned out before doing it. He loved geometry. He never stopped asking why things were built the way they were built and remembers that a friend of his had a house with a fake window on the outside and it used to absolutely perturb him. When something is important to us, it involves passion. And that passion can often be rediscovered by revisiting the activities you loved and aptitudes you had as a child. Another variation of this question that can provide insight is: What about your adult life, would make your child self-cry? The things that would make your child self-cry are an indication of places in your life that you have sacrificed your passion, joy and potentially what is fundamentally important to you at a soul level. Areas where you can get back on track. There is a fabulous movie called The Kid starring Bruce Willis and Spencer Breslin that you should watch, not only because it is an awesome movie, but also in order to understand this whole concept.
What gift do I have to give to this world? We very often make a mistake when we are searching for our life purpose because we look for what we are supposed to do or to have in this world when, in fact, our purpose comes instead in the form of what we are supposed to give to this world. Giving this gift should not feel as if you are losing anything or becoming depleted by doing so. To the opposite, it should instead feel as if you are gaining more by giving it. It should be something that you love giving. It is a gift to the world when an athlete performs a great jump shop during a basketball game. Their gift to share with the world might be the expression called playing basketball. It is a gift to the world when a writer releases a new book. For the novelist, their gift to share with the world is the expression called writing a book. For the professor their gift to share with the world is the expression called teaching. For the chef, their gift to share with the world is the expression called cooking. If someone is really organized and loves to help other people organize, their gift might be organization. If someone is really inventive, invention (maybe even a specific invention) might be what they are meant to give the world. What can you offer, that you love to offer? If you are completely stumped, you can ask the people in your life to tell you what they get from you or from being around you. You just might start to see some themes! Contribution is a human need. And no being incarnates without there being some place they fit into within the picture of contributing to this world. And it is through admitting to the gift we have to give that we discover how we fit into this picture of contribution.
Answering these questions is the way to answer the question that everyone is really asking when they want to find their purpose… What should I do with myself? Just remember, stop looking for your purpose by trying to figure out what the universe thinks is most important for you to be doing with your life. You will discover that the feeling of cosmic significance that you have been looking for by trying to find your life purpose, happens to you somewhere on the path of living according to what is truly important to you.
You have probably heard the quote “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” It is one of the most loved and most common quotes that you will hear in society today. In fact, whenever a person is doing something like limiting themselves or is succumbing to the fear of doing something they want to do or is de-prioritizing their own success or is not exercising their talents or is evading the responsibilities that come with their purpose etc. it is common to hear them say “I think I just fear my own power”. Unfortunately, you will also hear “experts” back this up and tell people that the reason they are sabotaging their potential is because they are afraid of their own power. The consequence of all of this is that society is now sick with the illusion that it is possible for a person to fear their own power. It isn’t. The reality is that people don’t fear their own power. People need to break free from the illusion that it is possible to “fear your own power” and understand what is really happening when it seems like people are afraid of their own power. Because as a result, they will be headed in the direction of actual empowerment.
What is power? Power is the inherent capacity to create, direct, influence or do something so as to bring about what you want. No one is afraid of creating, directing, influencing and bringing about what they want. People are afraid of the exact opposite. They are afraid of being unable to do so, and thus, experiencing what they don’t want to experience.
There are many reasons that a person could think that creating, directing, influencing or doing something to bring about what they want might lead to an unwanted experience. To give you just a few examples, a person might have been taught that actually going for what they want, causes them to be rejected by others and end up alone. Or that demonstrating their abilities and talents might invite jealousy and therefore conflict. Or that influence is bad and wrong and so, if they exert their capacity to influence others, they are bad and wrong and have to face the many consequences that come to those who are bad and wrong.
When a person does this, it means that they don’t actually believe they have power. They believe that something else with more power can come in at any moment and respond to their attempt to create, direct, influence or do something to bring about what they want by creating an unwanted experience for them. In other words, a consequence for doing so.
Conversely, a person might be attached to the benefits and perks that they get by not directly creating, directing, influencing or doing something to bring about what they want. This could be called shadow power because a person is in fact bringing about what they want by demonstrating behaviors that seem to suggest that they are not going for what they want. For example, a person might want to feel a sense of belonging and they might find a way to get that by letting someone else get their way all the time. Or a person might want safety and so they might find a way to get that sense of safety by refusing to display abilities that would threaten the people around them. Or a person might want people to support them and do things for them, and so they deliberately behave as if they are incompetent and incapable, so people will underestimate them and will do that for them.
When a person does this, they let go of power to gain power. This is a covert power move. And it is done as a method of manipulating the people who they believe have more power than they do, so they can still get what they want despite that other person. A person is not afraid of their capacity to bring about what they want. They are not afraid of their power. A person is afraid of experiencing something that they don’t want as a result of their capacity to bring about what they want being seen.
So that you can understand this better, I’ll give you an example. Maggie is thinking about selling her breads at a local farmers market because she is sick of earning minimum wage at a job she doesn’t like. To do this, Maggie has to step into her power. She has to step into her power by acknowledging that her bread is not only good, it is good enough to charge people for. And by believing in herself enough to commit to taking a financial risk. And by going directly for the life she really wants, which is to be able to bake full time. And she has to demonstrate her excellence to others. Maggie has been putting off taking action forever. She has been acting incredibly insecure and has been seeing a therapist regarding how much confidence she lacks to make the move. Her well-meaning therapist says “You know what, I don’t think you’re afraid that you will fail. I think you’re afraid you might succeed. I think what you’re really afraid of, is your power!”
Maggie resonates with that idea. It makes her feel immediate relief. Why? Because it allows her to avoid looking at her actual issue. Also, because no one is actually afraid of their power, the minute she hears that her power is what she is afraid of, she connects to how not afraid of that she actually is. She sees that as irrational and almost silly. So, she believes her problem is really more of a non-issue. It actually makes her feel good about herself because it is an affirmation that she is powerful, rather than a true recognition of the real problem.
The real problem is that Maggie gets a lot out of playing herself down. And Maggie is terrified that if she stops playing herself down, which she will have to do in order to go for what she wants, she will immediately find herself disliked and being treated as a threat and even being ostracized by the other people in her social group. Maggie grew up learning about the virtues of humility. And she grew up seeing that the clear way to have closeness with others, was to make them feel good about themselves, by minimizing herself. This has been her social strategy for as long as she can remember. Demonstrating her lack of confidence helps her to both avoid the thing she fears and gain the thing she wants. Maggie is not afraid of her power. Maggie is afraid of being treated as a threat and of being disliked or being ostracized from her community. And this is something she feels she has no power to prevent, if she aligns with her own capacity to create what she wants regarding her new bread selling aspiration. So, deep down, she feels powerless. If her therapist thinks that Maggie is afraid of her own power, he will do drastically different things with her, completely ineffective things, than he will do if he understands that what she is afraid of, is being treated as a threat and of being disliked and of being ostracized from her community. And if he will especially do different things if he understands that she feels powerless to prevent this or to bring about a different social experience.
To drill this in further, I want you to imagine that flowers are a good thing. All people in fact want flowers. But a certain person experienced a bee sting when they went to smell a flower on several occasions. They may form an association between flowers and bee stings. But they are not afraid of the flower. They avoid the flower because what they are afraid of, is a bee sting. Using our example, saying that people are afraid of power is like saying that people are afraid of flowers. And keeping up this illusion, makes it so that people will never look directly at the thing they are actually afraid of and will never work through that actual fear. And will thus, never be empowered.
The reality is that when people say that what they are afraid of, is power, power is being scapegoated and is serving as a smokescreen for what a person is really afraid of and is really trying to avoid. And the actual way to step into your power, is to directly face and resolve your fear of that thing.
When we are children, we come into a specific environment and are thus socialized in a specific way, so as to conform to that environment and the people in it. But we come in with specific needs. And those needs change over time. Currently, parenting is all over the map with regards to a child’s needs. Some parents do an absolutely terrible job of meeting their child’s needs. Some parents do a good job of meeting their child’s needs. And there are all shades of grey in between. Most adults that are raising and socializing their children today, only recognize and honor SOME needs that the child has and not others. But it is important to know that the further away the structure of human society gets from tribe, the less children’s needs can be met, because people are too under resourced themselves to meet the needs of a child. And two people, much less one, cannot meet all the needs that a child has.
Going back to the process of socialization, to varying degrees, a child learns that certain needs they have are not ok to have and will not be met. To conform to the environment they are born into, they must suppress, deny and disown those certain needs. The problem is, you can’t actually do that. A need will not be denied. All that will happen is that it will become subconscious and you will start to find unconscious ways to meet that need in round-about ways. And find creative ways to force other people to meet the need, even if it is against their best interests.
And this is the current human condition… I can’t admit to this need, so I have to get it in a roundabout way, and entrap others into meeting this need, even if it is against their best interests to do so. Currently, people are operating at a subconscious level and are running around doing this with each other day in and day out. And they are constantly causing conflicts in their relationships because of this.
So that you can grasp this concept, here is a tiny sprinkling of examples.
A woman needs the feeling of support, so she plays the victim.
A person needs to feel secure and thinks that the way they will get it, is if their partner stops doing a certain thing. So, every time their partner does it, this person gives them the silent treatment.
A man needs a sense of brotherhood and belonging. So, he joins a gang.
A woman needs a feeling of love, friendship and validation, so she has a child.
A person needs a positive self-concept, so they get into a relationship with someone dysfunctional and enter the cycle of unhealthy enabling.
A person needs to fit in and get a sense of inclusion, so they let go of their identity and mimic a certain group of people.
A person needs approval and alignment with their family, so they follow in the footsteps of their parents, despite it being in the opposite direction of their passion and purpose.
A person helps a friend because they need a sense of esteem through appreciation.
A person needs significance, so they befriend someone popular.
A person who is alcoholic, needs a sense of family. So, they never recover and never leave rehab because they find this sense of family with the people there.
Let’s go one step deeper. Because they can’t admit to the need they have, they can’t go for their need in a direct way. So, instead, they try to find a situation where they can sneakily get that need met by becoming what another person wants. They advertise to be what that person needs and wants with this unexpressed expectation that the exchange will be their need (that they aren’t even consciously aware of) being met. But because the transaction isn’t overtly expressed and agreed to, that need rarely does get met. And when they don’t get that need met, all hell breaks loose. They suddenly flip. They either flip against the person. Or they simply turn into what they really are, rather than what they advertised themselves to be. In other words, they suddenly aren’t what they advertised to be and suddenly don’t meet the need they advertised that they could meet. And from there, having already entered into the incompatible situation and already created arrangements and attachments that are not easy to untangle from without consequences, they start to create situations that force the person to meet their covert need. And just like that, the cycle of never-ending conflict ensues.
To give you a concrete example of this, Alex needs a relationship where he feels totally free to pursue his own free time and fun. He meets Teagan and in Teagan, he sees a hyper responsible single mother and career woman, who is competent and independent. Alex senses that what Teagan needs is a man to come into her life and provide for her, so not all the responsibility is on her. So, he starts to shower her with gifts and provide for her and hire people to do things to take responsibility off of her plate. He does this with the unexpressed expectation that getting into a relationship with such a stand-alone woman will finally make it so that he can be in a relationship where he can pursue his own free time and fun and where she will make it possible for him to come and go as he pleases. But this is not an expressed transaction. And this is not what Teagan actually needs. She needs a man to come into her life and really live life with her, shouldering responsibilities and being present and reliable every day because he doesn’t want to be anywhere else. Soon, Alex realizes that his need is never going to be met by Teagan. And so, he stops showering her with gifts and he quits his job instead of continuing to provide for her, making her the principal earner for the household. He convinces her to move herself and her child with him to another city which just so happens to be near a great surfing site, so he can surf all the time. And he drops his responsibilities, especially to be present with her, in favor of whatever adventure calls at the time. By doing this, he forces her into the position where like it or not, Alex’s need of being in a relationship where he is pursuing his own free time and fun, is being met in the shadow. Needless to say, Teagan was duped. Their needs are actually in conflict. And their relationship devolves into constant conflicts, until it ends.
This Covert Need Pattern is solved by one very simple thing: Acknowledging your needs and finding direct ways to meet them. Direct ways that are compatible to others, because they are a win-win.
To figure out the need you have, you have to figure out your why. You need to sit down and figure out the WHY behind what you are thinking, saying and doing. What are you getting or what are you wanting to get out of what you are doing? To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Secret to Self-Awareness - Become Aware of The Why.
What makes acknowledging needs hard, is that we often have a great deal of shame about the needs we don’t want to acknowledge. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Self Concept, the Enemy of Awakening. The key to avoiding the absolute pain fest that will inevitably happen as a result of the Covert Need Pattern, is to see that the pain of facing the shame you feel about the need you have, is actually far less for yourself and everyone else that would be involved than the alternative. And to face that fear and lean into the pain of the personal truth of that need.
Humanity needs to get out of this pattern and quickly. The life we actually want and the relationships we actually want (because they are actually compatible to us) are on the other side of being brave enough to acknowledging our needs and find direct, win-win ways to meet them.
Each and every one of us has strategies for getting what we want and need. You might be aware of some of these strategies you employ, but totally unaware of others. Not being aware of your strategies and even worse, failing to realize that you are even in a strategy, is a recipe for suffering. It is also a recipe for losing touch with your authenticity. It is so important to become aware of your strategies, and to consciously decide what to do about your strategies once you recognize them. Having this awareness will bring you closer to a fulfilling and authentic life.
As people, we are very strategic creatures. We do what we do for a reason. This woman wears a push up bra because if men find her attractive, she stands more of a chance of being wanted by a man and as a result, fended for. That woman gets a degree so that she can get the credibility she so badly craves. This man behaves in a very agreeable way because if he can create the feeling of social confluence, he will have a place to belong and people to belong with. That man gets a tattoo of tear drops on his face, because he believes that if other men see it, and know it means that he has killed another man, they will feel dominated and be intimidated by him and therefore, he will be safer. This child dedicates all his time and energy to baseball because doing so is the only way he has found to get his father to engage with him and feel that sense of closeness he so desperately wants in that relationship. That child rebels because she thinks doing so will grant her the freedom and autonomy she has been deprived of by her parent’s strict rules and limits. In fact, our very personalities are often a strategy in and of themselves. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Why Your Personality is Fake (Distortion).
There is nothing innately wrong with strategy. It is a part of life on earth. But just like anything else, there are shadows that can come with being strategic. To name a few, we tend to be very subconscious about our strategies. It’s rare that we sit down and have a real ponder about what strategy to consciously employ in order to get what we want and avoid what we don’t want. Instead, it’s like these strategies simply deterministically and subconsciously happen. We also adopt them from the people we are around and the culture we are a part of. And so, we are not in the position of conscious choice about those strategies. And so, they have more control over us than we have over them. Also, because we are so subconscious about our strategies, we may not actually be employing the best strategy or even an effective strategy for what we want and need. For example, a woman discovers that what she wants deep in her heart is to be loved by a man. But she might discover that her method for being loved by a man is to co-dependently assume all of his interests and preferences so that they suddenly become her own. She might realize that by doing this, the man does not really love her. He loves the woman who she acts like she is; a carbon copy of himself. And that this behavior keeps leading her into relationships with narcissistic men. Thus, the very behavior that she thought at a subconscious level would get her what she wants so desperately, is the very behavior preventing what she wants.
On top of this, we adopt these strategies so subconsciously and often so young, that we mistake them for who we are. And as a result, we lose touch with our authenticity. To give you an example of what I mean, a little girl who grows up with a feminist mother, might become a tom boy, not because she is authentically a tom boy. But because she authentically wants to be approved of by her mother and needs to please her mother so as to not be shamed. So, she might annex anything “girly” about herself as a strategy for accomplishing that aim. She has sacrificed one aspect of her authenticity in favor of another. After all, making sure that we consciously act according to what we want is only one part of authenticity. It is only part of what is genuine about us. It is all too easy for our strategies to make us a deeply inauthentic and even a deeply dishonest, deeply strategic person. To learn more about this you can watch my video titled: Do You Want to Be Honest, or Do You Want to Be Strategic?
On top of this, people can feel when we are being strategic. The energy of a person doing something because doing that thing gets them something they want or need, is always there, like an undercurrent. This makes people very nervous, which is understandable because in many situations, this disguised motive ends up hurting people. And because of this, strategy can be what destroys relationships. For example, a person may pay for the bill as a strategy for forcing loyalty, putting the other person in a kind of alliance debt to them. Or a person may be two faced as a strategy to take advantage of two parties that are opposed, so they can enjoy some personal benefit as a result.
To avoid all of the potential pain of strategies, you need to recognize your strategy and decide consciously what to do about it. To recognize your strategy, you start from the presupposition that everything you do, is a strategy. And you ask yourself this question relative to anything you do: If (fill in the blank) where a strategy, what would (the thing you filled in the blank with) be designed to get me or to achieve? For example, you might ask yourself “If wearing spiritual clothing were a strategy, what would wearing spiritual clothing be designed to give me or to achieve?” or for example, you might ask “If maintaining a relationship with this person I dread were a strategy, what would maintaining a relationship with this person I dread be designed to give me or to achieve?”
In the case of the first example, where wearing spiritual clothing was the strategy, the answer might be something like “to get other people to recognize my spiritual authority” or “to advertise to other link minded and spiritual people, so that they will come up to me and I don’t have to try to initiate talking to other people first.” Or “to feel good throughout the day, rather than uncomfortable”. OR “to feel superior to the idiotic consumer driven normies, and make a statement about how wrong their lifestyle is.”
In the case of the second example, where maintaining a relationship with a person they dread is the strategy, the answer might be something like “to avoid conflict so that I can feel a sense of security”. Or “to be able to stay affiliated with them, so I can experience the benefits of their status.” Or “to be able to control them into not turning against me.” Or “to avoid the potential that I might be thwarting my own expansion because my dread of them might just be about something I suppressed, rather than something bad about them. And if that turns out to be the case, getting rid of them is pointless because I’ll just end up with a carbon copy of this person, but as another person in the future.”
When you are doing this exercise, try hard not to justify the thing you are doing. And try hard not to simply pick a reason that makes your ego comfortable. Justification and picking a self-concept preserving answer is common when you feel ashamed of your strategy or the reason behind why you are employing a specific strategy. You will know that you are justifying something when your answer is a kind of “defense” where your goal is to prove that the reason you are doing that thing is right or good. Justification of what you are doing and picking a self-concept preserving answer, will pull you in the opposite direction of self-awareness.
Once you have your answer, you are now in the position of conscious choice. You can never again not know why you are doing what you are doing. And you have the choice to:
Continue with that strategy, but this time, consciously.
Drop that strategy and pick a different, better or more effective strategy to accomplish what you want and need.
To make that choice, you need to look at the benefits and consequences of either choice. And you need to ask yourself how authentic or inauthentic either choice is. No one can tell you what is right vs. wrong to choose and there are likely to be both positive and negative consequences that will come as the result of choosing either. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences.
Here is an example of this process. Roy realizes that he spends a good amount of his time accumulating things and doing things to increase his perceived status. He wears designer clothing. He collects very valuable watches. He leases a luxurious car. He attends events where he is sure to meet people with a high status so he can make those contacts. All of these strategies he employs are designed to gain status because he feels that status gives him prestige he so badly craves, especially since he felt so humiliated, disrespected, disregarded and unimportant growing up as a kid. Prestige feels like the antidote to his trauma. He feels ashamed that so much of what he does is to try to escape from these deep-seated feelings. He looks at the benefits and consequences of continuing with this strategy. And he decides that he will forever be on a hamster wheel of trying to gain more and more prestige if he continues. But he genuinely loves the lifestyle that status affords him. So, he makes a few conscious decisions. The first is to get off the hamster wheel of running away from feeling worthless and chasing prestige and instead, to go to therapy to face those unresolved traumas that drove him to chase prestige in the first place. The second is to keep wearing designer clothing for now because he loves the feeling of people looking at him with that look of admiration and wonder about who he is and what he does. The third is to start looking for something to dedicate his time and energy to that he can really be proud of, something that he feels makes it so he deserves respect and admiration, rather than just status itself, which when he looks at it, he feels is quite empty. He decided he doesn’t want to have prestige just because of the car he drives or clothes he wears or people he is associated with. He wants to feel like he has prestige because he is doing something that is worthy of respect and admiration. Because he makes this decision, he starts to pour his energy and his real estate credentials into converting abandoned malls into eco-communities.
When you are deciding what to do about your strategy that you have now become aware of, spend time meditating and questioning and talking with people about the positives and negatives of continuing that strategy, as well as what alternative choices and behaviors there might be.
Because so much of our life on earth is spent trying to get what we want and need, as well as avoiding what we really don’t want to experience, we spend the vast majority of our time in strategy. But that strategy will lead to suffering and blatant inauthenticity if it is not something that we are fully conscious of. So, what is your strategy?
Today, I’m going to reveal to you one of the most painful and insidious patterns that a human being can fall into. It is a pattern that can lie at the root of a person’s suffering in their life. And this pattern, is the pattern of using suffering as a substitute boundary. Before you get afraid that this is going to be just one more article where an expert tells you that you are somehow attached to your pain or are causing your own pain or that you have the power to be happy, no matter what is happening to you or in your life, I need you to know that this article is not going to be one of those articles. And I ask you to come along with me as I un-pack this pattern for you step by step.
Let’s start from the beginning. Unfortunately, some of us came into families where our caregivers, such as parents, are only truly focused on their own best interests. And thus, are not in an actual relationship with us. When I say this, I need you to be very careful not to fall into the gaslight of parents who seem to be focused on the best interests of their children, but are in fact not actually. Some of these caregivers are very covert in that it seems like they are so dedicated to their children, after all, their identity is wrapped up in just how for their children’s best interests they are and just how self-sacrificing for their children they are. But somehow, their child or even all their children are not happy at all, especially in their relationship with that parent. Keep in mind that those two things do not add up. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Self Sacrifice, The Most Self-Centered Thing in The World.
Caregivers like this fail to perceive their child. This is because they are relating to their child through their own projections. They make their mind up about what is going on with their child, regardless of whether it is true or not. They make their child the problem to avoid looking at their own dysfunction. They play zero sum games, rather than find win-win scenarios. And they have no intention of changing something that doesn’t suit them to change, no matter how much it is hurting their child. Their child’s happiness is not truly a part of their happiness, no matter what they might say. Because they cannot truly perceive their pain or their pleasure. They can only perceive their own. Because of this, it will seem like they have a very high tolerance for their child’s pain. After all, they watched their child indicate their distress, but changed nothing about what was causing that distress, if it somehow went against their own perceived best interests in the moment. And yet, they still expected their child to be happy. Maybe they even took to gaslighting by saying things like “You have no reason to be unhappy”. Or “You have so many things to be happy about”. Or “All I want is for you to be happy.”
So, here we have a caregiver that is either doing things that are causing distress to their child or are failing to do things, which is causing distress to their child. But instead of respond to that feedback, they tell themselves alternative, self-esteem affirming stories about why their child is in distress. And they expect their child to be happy anyway. In fact, they require this from their child in order to not perceive their child as the enemy to their own happiness. This is a very dangerous situation for a child to find themselves in. And now, the child is in a bind… Act happy and their parent, the god of their world, is safer to them. But by doing so, they betray themself. Or, continue to indicate the reality, which is their unhappiness, and by doing so, don’t betray themself, but accept the dire consequences.
In all of this, what is important to see is that in a situation like this, when the child asserts boundaries for themselves against what is harmful for them and for the limits they have, those boundaries are instantly dishonored, if they are even seen and acknowledged in the first place. There is no way out of the distress. They are expected to put up with whatever is harming them, and worse than that, to be happy anyway and despite any of it.
For many people who encountered this kind of childhood, boundaries and limits were pointless because you couldn’t run away and you couldn’t get anyone to recognize or honor your boundaries and limits, so as to change things so you were not suffering anymore. You were literally trapped in a torture chamber. Keep in mind that a torture chamber can be very, very gilded.
And because of this, you let go of your boundaries and got a substitute one. You found a way to stand by yourself and for yourself in a different way. That way, was to refuse to be happy. To maintain a resistance to feeling good, even if you so badly wanted to. Why? Because if the people who hurt you, expected you to be happy no matter what they were doing to you, then you being happy no matter what they were doing to you, is exactly what they want. It means they got away with everything they did with no consequences. For those of you who experienced this, you began to associate happiness is self-betrayal. And so, your substitute boundary, became suffering. And it’s not like you had to invent your suffering, you were and are genuinely suffering. On the one hand, you are desperate to be happy. And on the other hand, becoming happy, especially saying you are happy, feels like kissing the foot that kicked you. For you, the old saying, “happiness is the best form of revenge”, is total bullshit. Because for the abusers you were dealing with, you being happy, no matter what they did or failed to do, is exactly what they wanted. That would in fact be their win. To use a common expression, that would be them getting away Scot free.
When we fall into this pattern, we tend to hate life. We try to improve our life desperately, while being unable to. Why are we unable to? Because we lack all the boundaries that a person would normally have in life. Especially regarding other people. And so, we end up in a position that is a total NO for us. When we should put the pressure back on someone, we take it. When we need to hold someone to their agreements, we let them change them. When we need to say no to something, we say yes. Where we have a limit, we push ourselves past it. When we should leave, we don’t leave. We fall right back into this pattern of extreme pain tolerance. We yell about our unhappiness and get angry and cry without giving people any actual consequences beyond that for the things they are doing or are failing to do. In fact, our only boundary is: I will suffer when you do this. I will refuse to be happy when you do this. You still allow it to happen, but you absolutely will not be happy about it. Of course, this substitute boundary is very ineffective with the people who are not connected to and therefore moved by your pain, only their own pain. And your suffering might just be worth whatever they are getting out of doing or not doing something.
And guess what? They won’t be moved by your pain. The reason for this is that without knowing it, with this substitute boundary, you are walking around as a literal tractor beam for people who, just like your parents, are only truly focused on their own best interests. And thus, are not in an actual relationship with you. People who, at a conscious or subconscious level, want to be in a relationship with someone who will be unconditional with them. A person who they can do whatever to you or fail to do whatever to you, and know that there will be no consequences. After all, the message you are sending out into the universe is: I will stay in that pain. I just won’t be happy about it. You are a literal tractor beam for people who only have relationships through a narcissistic and codependent (covertly narcissistic) relational schema. You will line up with people whose definition of love is for you to suffer for them. To learn more about this, watch my video titled: The Suffer So I Can Feel Loved Relationship Dynamic.
So that you can understand this pattern better, I’m going to give you an example. Thea had a mother who caused her distress in many, many ways. Her mother refused to consistently respond to her distress cues even as an infant. She treated Thea like a doll in that instead of responding to Thea’s cues, she decided what Thea did and did not need and when (according to her own want to meet those needs or not). She was obsessed with Thea learning to play alone and develop independence far too early. Whenever Thea got into a needs conflict with her mother, her mother would shame her by saying, “what are you, a princess?” She kept Thea in a house which was up a canyon, nowhere near other children because that was the lifestyle she preferred. This made it so that Thea had no friends. She only did things for Thea that she decided should make Thea happy. When they didn’t, she decided something was wrong with Thea. Thea’s indication that she was an unhappy child, damaged her mother’s self-concept. So, she saw Thea as the source of her own suffering. Thea came to the conclusion as a toddler that no matter what she did, she could never make her life feel good, so she would suffer forever.
But her mother felt distressed by Thea’s unhappiness. And so, she needed Thea to be happy, so she could feel good. So, instead of changing any of her own behavior that was causing Thea to suffer and instead of changing the conditions that were making Thea suffer, she simply expected Thea to be happy. She decided that her daughter had a good life, despite the reflection that Thea was giving to her. And she reminded Thea of how many kids around the world have so much more to be unhappy about and kept stuffing the idea that she was an ungrateful child down her throat. When Thea would complain, she would call her negative. When Thea was upset, she would shame her for not focusing on the beautiful sunset or on some other thing her mother appreciated. When things took a turn for the worst, Thea’s mother started dragging her to therapists to fix whatever was wrong with her child, because it could not possibly be that her behavior with Thea or the life she had created for Thea was in fact wrong for Thea.
Subconsciously, Thea developed a negative association with happiness. It was clear that her mother wanted to be able to do or fail to do anything, and for Thea to be happy anyway. Well, Thea could not be happy anyway. And Thea would not indicate to her mother that she could be. She decided that to be happy was to betray herself. Instead of betraying herself, because every boundary and limit was dishonored by her mother, she stood by herself by pledging that she would not ever indicate to her mother or to other people, that she was happy. And this caused her to never truly be able to go in the direction of her happiness.
Fast forward several years into Thea’s adulthood. She has been married and divorced multiple times. In each one of her primary relationships, things start out good. But then, the man starts crossing her boundaries and pushing her limits. All Thea does, is get upset. And then get angry. And then get really, really angry. She does not enforce her boundaries. Because of this, the man ends up continuing to do what is not in her best interests, until Thea is so far past a limit, that her mental and emotional health starts to dissolve and the relationship becomes fully abusive. The man is being abusive because no matter how much something hurts Thea, he will not change it, and expects her to be happy anyway. And Thea is being abusive because during arguments, she screams and belittles and name calls and makes threats and throws things at her partner. Eventually, the abuse becomes so intolerable that the relationship ends.
Looking at her last partner, he came into her life promising to really be there for her as someone she could rely on. But he started breaking his word. The first time he broke his word, Thea should have set a very firm boundary about it by telling him that this was not something she would tolerate. She actually did this. The second time he did this, Thea should have enforced her boundary with something like making him responsible for repairing the consequences that breaking his word created. Or creating a consequence that relates directly to what he specifically broke his word about, such as, if he broke his word about taking her on a date, and she needed quality time, she might go to spend time with a friend instead of spending time with him, and let him know that she was doing so, because he failed to keep his word about the quality time that he promised her. And after this trust breach, he would need to demonstrate that he was intent on re-building that trust somehow, such as putting extra effort into creating quality time, making it up to her somehow and proving he can show the opposite behavior. If he broke his word again, Thea should have escalated the consequences. She should have pushed the pause button on moving forward in the relationship. She should have escalated to something like relationship therapy. Or started looking for other resources for the things he broke his word about. And/or getting trusted people who support their relationship to intervene etc.
Thea did not do this. Instead, she got madder and madder each time and argued about how not ok it is. And eventually found herself in an abusive relationship. She was in a relationship where she could not trust her partner because he constantly broke his word. And where she verbally abuses him when he does it. Thea’s last partner got something out of breaking his word. What it was, was the feeling of no pressure. He was a parentified child and even though he came into the relationship saying he would be reliable, because this is the only way he knew how to have relationships, was to be for his partner what he was for his mother. But it is not what he actually wanted. What he wanted was to be in a relationship which would allow him all the freedom of the childhood he missed. And that lack of pressure, meant more to him than Thea’s happiness did. It served him when he would break his word and feel the freedom of doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. It would especially serve him when he would drop responsibilities he has signed up for, and she would take over that responsibility. It was healing for him, even if it was destroying Thea. Thea fell right back into this pattern from her childhood, where the person in her life expects her to be happy, no matter what they do or fail to do. And she resorted to her old substitute boundary. She was not happy. No one could be in that situation. But she also decided she would not go in the direction of her happiness, because to do so, would be to betray herself and give him exactly what he wanted. She didn’t even see enforcing her boundaries and limits in a tangible way as an option.
If you recognize this pattern in yourself, it is tempting to think that you just have to accept that to be happy, you have to care more about your happiness than you do about the people who hurt you getting off Scott free. But this is just you falling back into the same pattern. It’s not about that.
Overcoming this pattern is about seeing that you will never have a happy life, your life will always be suffering and you will always hate life if you fail to acknowledge your own boundaries and limits and fail to assert them. You need to assert them when things are very small… Far, far before you ever hit your limit for something. When you feel yourself heading in that unwanted direction in any small way. People need to feel and know that they don’t just get to do anything or fail to do anything with you. There will be consequences for doing so or for failing to do so.
Overcoming this pattern is about realizing that happiness is not ever in spite of something, it is always because of something. The more we gravitate towards what feels good and right to us, while setting very firm boundaries regarding what doesn’t, the happier our life will become. And you can enforce your boundaries and limits as well as create consequences for people who refuse to honor those, without sacrificing your happiness. This is not to say that you can be happy no matter what is happening to you. This is ridiculous. It is to say that you can go in the direction of your happiness and resource positive things and positive moments, in whatever small way, without that being a self-betrayal. It is not worth being in pain, to prevent the people who harmed you the satisfaction of being able to do whatever they wanted to you without getting at the very least, a negative reflection. And it is not even particularly effective, when what you could do instead, is to make it so that there are actually consequences for what people do or fail to do with you. After all, you don’t deserve to suffer forever, on top of all the suffering that was already done to you. The time has come to stop betraying yourself in one way simply to prevent betraying yourself in another way. Disconnect the concept of happiness from the feeling betraying yourself. So that you can enforce the boundaries that will allow you to have a life you don’t hate. A life that you will actually enjoy.
Lately, especially within the newer generations, polyamory is becoming a much more common practice… A much more common relationship structure. What is polyamory? Literally translated, polyamory means “many love”. Most of the time, this implies having intentional, intimate emotional and/or romantic and/or sexual relationships with more than one partner at the same time. This being the case, all relationships in the individuals’ life are technically “open”. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Truth About Polyamory.
There are many forms of polyamory. And each one of these forms comes with its own unique set up upsides and downsides. But in this article, we are going to look at some of the main upsides and downsides, gifts and challenges of polyamory in general.
First, let’s start with the downsides or challenges of polyamory.
Polyamory does not get you away from relationship dysfunction. No matter what relationship arrangement you are engaged in, you’re still dealing with people. This means, you’ll still be dealing with things like incompatibility and with people’s relationship opposing patterns.
You cannot un-do thousands of years’ worth of programming for monogamous relationships, and therefore the issues that programming creates, when trying to live a polyamorous lifestyle. To give you just two examples, we have been completely programmed into our self-esteem being about being chosen by someone to be their one and only. This makes it so that even when we choose a polyamorous lifestyle, we will experience a self-esteem dip when someone chooses more than just us. And we have been programmed to believe that we only have security in a relationship when we are someone’s only sexual partner. Exclusivity is currently what we base our security on. Exclusivity is what people often derive a sense of significance and specialness from. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Why you Need to Separate Security From Sexuality in Relationships. The very structure of monogamy is what we have built our relationship security on. So, even when you choose a polyamorous lifestyle, you will experience deep insecurity. Being polyamorous means working on every single layer of programming, so as to feel good and secure in a structure that we have been programmed to believe is completely insecure and even bad and wrong. This means, polyamory implies constant self-work. And the reality is that this social programming for monogamy can make polyamory so hard and so painful, that it is easier and even preferable for people to simply go back into the monogamous structure of relationship. Something we are now re-wired for and a structure we understand.
We live in a mono - normative world. Society doesn’t immediately change with the times. Human society is currently based on monogamous relationship. Monogamy is assumed. Choosing multiple partners is still seen as immoral. And this mono normative mentality creates tons of pain. There can be real consequences for deciding to live a polyamorous lifestyle. Things like conflict, pain and loss of relationships with people and groups who do not support it. Being treated like a threat. Being legally unprotected. Being unable to legally marry more than one partner. Non monogamy being considered adultery in many places, regardless of whether it is consensual or not, which can come with very serious ramifications. People not recognizing or acknowledging the significance of a breakup or a death you experience with a partner because “you have other partners.” Home denials and evictions and other home related issues because houses and housing laws are built around the nuclear family. Getting fired or experiencing career challenges. Custody battles. Being unable to bring more than one partner or spouse to social functions and events. Risking your social status. Medical discrimination. Being denied access to partners in hospital settings. No longer seeing yourself represented in culture. And all of this can create a sense of being separated from society, not belonging, being unsafe, being alone with no one to turn to; and other people being against you.
It increases the complexity in your relationship life. It is an intense lifestyle that can become very time consuming. There is nothing simple about polyamory. The things you would do with one person to make one relationship work, you need to do with several people. You are juggling multiple people and their feelings and needs. Being polyamorous comes with community drama. Most polyamorous dynamics are full of gossip and complex relational behaviors. It can increase the potential for conflict. On top of this, one element of complexity that is often overlooked, is that in most polyamorous arrangements, everyone in a polycule is in some kind of relationship with each other. This means, you can’t just break up with a partner and go your separate ways. They have a close relationship with everyone else. So, you will be around them and see them, whether you like it or not. And setting a boundary not to, puts everyone else in the middle and in a difficult situation. Complexity can either be life enriching or crushing pressure depending on the many different factors of your life. If you want the benefits of polyamory, it will come with the downsides of drama and complexity.
The polyamory community is full of amazing people who are masters of relationship. It is also full of people who are superbly relationally dysfunctional and who use non-monogamy as a way to be able to live their dysfunctionality, rather than to change it. For example, people who want to take zero responsibility for another person’s needs and feelings, gravitate towards a polyamorous lifestyle because they feel they can have relationships without being relied on. And people with an avoidant attachment style gravitate towards a polyamorous lifestyle because they can more easily avoid feelings of enmeshment. And people for whom sex is an addiction gravitate towards a polyamorous lifestyle because they have a potentially endless supply. Etc.
Jealousy and insecurity are serious issues in polyamorous relationships. Some of this is due to what we make things mean because of our monogamous programming, rather than what it inherently does mean. But the reality is that you will be confronting enhanced issues of jealousy and enhanced issues of relationship insecurity in polyamorous relationships. The normal go to solutions to for creating security and decreasing jealousy in relationships apply only to monogamous relationships, and by definition oppose the practice of polyamory. Because currently, instead of relying on the quality of the relationship itself and the conduct of the other person for a sense of security, people rely on the structure of monogamy itself to be what gives security and helps people avoid jealousy.
The potential of preventing growth and improvement. When we commit to one person, we have the potential to prevent growth and keep each other stuck by simply adapting to and finding ways to cope with the other person’s behavior, so as to maintain the relationship, no matter how dysfunctional it is. But it can work the other way as well. We also have the potential to grow and become more and to evolve and improve together, because the relationship requires that we do so. If we just bounce out on someone the minute things get hard, that path of growth and change does not occur. Even if we aren’t bouncing out, and are instead simply adding other people, we may be preventing that growth by doing so. For example, in a monogamous relationship, if one person is emotionally unavailable, they may need to work to become emotionally available, something that greatly benefits their life and causes the relationships to become deeper. But if you simply add an additional partner, who is emotionally available, that growth and depth in the relationship may never occur.
A serious lack of assistance for relationship problems. For poly people, there is a shortage if not an absence of role models. There are hardly any relationship therapists that are trained to deal with poly relationships and so most traditional relationship advice does not apply. Almost every book that offers solutions for relationships is about monogamous relationships only. And the likelihood of getting shamed and discouraged from your polyamorous lifestyle when you do seek help, is high. There will be a feeling of being the first to face a problem and of having to piece things together to solve the problem on your own. There are no guard rails for polyamorous relationships.
Depending on the type of polyamory that you are engaging in, sexually transmitted infection is an increased risk. As is dealing with the fact that your sexual choices impact many people, not just one. And every person involved will have their own opinions and boundaries about this. Making it complicated.
It’s very easy to get stuck only socializing with your polycule. There is only so much time and with multiple partners, each person needs some of that time. You can easily feel maxed out socially with solely your polycule. With the complexity as well, it is all too easy to find yourself only spending time with those people, and not expanding your social sphere. And this can also mean you end up with no monogamous people in your social network.
If the polyamorous arrangement isn’t a closed loop dynamic, it is easy for energy and resources and value to be added to a person or to a relationship and to have it not come back in a beneficial energy exchange, but rather for that energy and those resources and that value to be given to someone else. For example, a person might pour themselves into really being there for one of their partners, only to have that person pour their energy into being there not for them, but for another one of their partners. This can easily create a self-serving set up where a person just takes. It can also create a set up where the energy exchange element of a relationship goes way, causing a resource and energy bleed. And in a lack of good energy exchange, ultimately the relationship dissolves.
And now let’s look at some of the main upsides or gifts of Polyamory.
Polyamory is a more natural relational style for a physical human. But the structure of society has been set up completely around monogamy and the nuclear family. And people have been intensely programmed for that new structure. People born into society simply assume that society was set up this way because this is what is natural for people. But really, their wires have been crossed and this causes what is natural, to feel unnatural. When we switched from a foraging lifestyle to an agrarian lifestyle and property ownership became the most important thing, the structure of society changed and with it, our relationship practices. We are now completely programmed against polyamory. And you can’t just un-do this programming overnight. This programming makes what is natural, feel bad to a person. But programming aside, when a being lives in-alignment with what is natural to them, their wellbeing increases.
More resources. Added support. People in today’s world are severely under-resourced. They have become more and more separated from each other and have gotten further away from the tribal structure/community structure which is natural to them. The problem with this is that one person cannot reliably provide all the needs that you have from other people. One person cannot offer us all the resources that multiple people, or tribe once offered to us. When you include more people in your life, naturally you have more resources. More people to solve a problem. More people to help out. More people to meet any one specific need you might have. More of a guarantee of availability. Access to and support from people with varied skills. You end up more satiated, less having to fend for yourself and in many ways more secure regarding your needs being met.
Polyamory affords much more freedom. The restrictions that monogamous relationships require a person to comply to, no longer reign supreme. And there is room for creative arrangements that accommodate for each person’s unique personality and needs and desires and strengths and weaknesses.
The pressure on each person in the relationship goes down and there is more space for potential incompatibilities as well as bad days. This goes hand in hand with the last point. In a monogamous relationship arrangement, quite often, a person’s one partner becomes their only source of security and their only source from which to get their needs met. This means, if there are any relationship ruptures of any kind with that one person, or if that person becomes ill or dies, suddenly, we lose all our sense of security in life. And we are suddenly starved of our needs. Most of us live our lives in red-zone level insecurity because of this. We are under-resourced and many of us are chronically anxious in our relationships and in the world. We become desperate and furious with our partner when he or she can’t reliably be there for us in the exact way we need them to be. This means, we put A LOT of pressure on our monogamous partner. When a person has multiple partners, this red zone panic tends to go down, because they are experiencing more abundance relative to their needs being met and thus feel more secure in that way. And there is much less pressure on the people in their life because of it. More room for bad days to happen, without it compromising the relationship. Much more room for finding truly creative arrangements that accommodate for incompatibilities that would make a monogamous relationship arrangement impossible.
Polyamory is an absolute recipe for personal growth. Having multiple partners will force the exposure of your shadows, blind spots and relationship baggage. It will force you to become good at communicating. It will force you to become aware. It will force you to master relationship skills. It will force you to define yourself. It is an aggressive path of growth and self-development.
The potential for an enhanced sense of security in life and in relationships. We have discussed how polyamory threatens security. But it can work the other way as well. Think of how much more secure you would feel in life if you felt like you had a secure attachment to multiple people rather than just one. And if you felt like there were many people committed to being there for you when you need them, rather than just one. To get a felt perception of this, imagine that you were a child growing up in a tribe, and try to feel the security of knowing that if this person wasn’t providing a sense of deep understanding, someone else was. Or if that person wasn’t providing protection, someone else was. And if multiple people were there to provide the same thing, you would simply feel more of an abundance of that thing, and therefore less and less insecurity about it. Though polyamory challenges our sense of stability and security, it also has the potential to make us much more stable and more secure.
People can be truly accepted and appreciated for what they are, rather than end up in pain because of what they are not. In monogamous relationships, all the focus is on finding Mr. or Mrs. right, someone who checks all the boxes. There is great pressure to get a person to change to be what you want them to be. A great many people would be fabulous partners in one way and terrible partners in another, causing a person looking for a monogamous partner to have to write them off. But with polyamory, you can be with one person who is a fabulous partner in one way and another that is fabulous in a different way. This opens the door for opportunity to enjoy someone because of what they are, rather than to suffer because of what they are not. It also prevents all people involved from falling into the trap of trying to be something that they aren’t. And from that all too common negative self-esteem spiral that happens when you are not what someone wants or needs you to be.
Dynamic relationships that do not become stuck or stale. To generalize, in polyamorous relationships, people are consistently re-appraising their relationship. And people are much more honest with each other. They are consistently working on things to make their relationships better. There is less coping going on and more proactive action to make changes in the relationship. Things do not fester, unresolved the way they do in monogamous relationships.
Way less assumptions. Way more clear agreements. In monogamous relationships, people assume. They assume that they are on the same page with their partner and that they have the same vision as their partner and the same rules and boundaries and ideas of what is ok and not ok and what should happen as their partner does. This usually results in disaster. In polyamorous relationships, rather than assuming, there is a lot of communication to get on the same page and lots of negotiating to establish clear and mutually agreed upon guidelines and boundaries, so that all people involved can co-exist in a mutually pleasing way.
Relationships that are based off of expanded love and inclusion. It is actually unhealthy that people’s definition of love revolves around excluding others. And it is not true that love is a finite resource to divide up rather than one that can grow and grow. Polyamorous relationships don’t operate according to the mentality of exclusion or scarcity around love and caring. In polyamorous relationships, love is not treated as a zero-sum resource.
Expanded opportunities. Each relationship, especially each partnership, is a kind of opportunity for new and different things. Things like new and different resources. New and different things to learn. New and different experiences etc. In monogamous relationships, people limit and cut off those opportunities for the sake of their primary relationship. A Polyamorous lifestyle makes it so you can take many more opportunities. Opportunities that may prove incredible for all people involved, not only you.
It would be a wonderful thing if polyamory did not come with contrast. Alas, contrast is a fundamental part of this time space reality. This means monogamy comes with gifts and challenges. And polyamory comes with gifts and challenges. And so, it is important to look directly at that contrast, so that you can choose what is truly right for you.
In this life, when patterns are not changed, such as when traumas are not resolved or when a person repeats a certain behavior due to lack of awareness, or when a person maintains a certain belief etc. Those patterns not only become stronger and are therefore magnified, they repeat. This is true across time and this doesn’t just apply to individuals. This applies to the universe at large, to the world at large, to species, to races, to societies, to family lines etc. There is an up-side to this and a downside to this. The downside is that this can turn life into a true hell spiral. You can experience something acutely painful and then, not change the pattern, so it repeats again in some way. And when it does, it has the potential to strengthen your beliefs, words and actions, thus feeding into the pattern more rather than changing it; making it repeat again, only worse. And this vicious cycle can keep happening, causing a person to become worse and worse. Often it can feel like it is happening to you, like a cruel curse, especially when you can’t work out what to think, say and do differently to change the pattern, so it doesn’t repeat again. And the reality is, even when you do make changes, sometimes there are multiple changes that need to take place for there to be a full pattern change rather than a partial one. So, it can feel like the pattern keeps repeating, despite all our efforts to make the pattern change.
The upside to this, is that when a negative pattern repeats, this is an opportunity for awareness. It is also an offering to think, say and do differently, so as to change the pattern and have a different, improved experience; so as to consciously create your preferred future. You can think of it as the universe offering you a built-in structure for awakening, expansion and healing into your life experience.
When we are committed to awakening, to becoming fully conscious and then to consciously creating our life experience or heal, a great deal of our focus goes to recognizing these patterns in life that are repeating and consciously making changes, so that the patterns change for the better; so that life experience is improved. This means, if you are on the path of spiritual awakening, the path of self-development, or the path of healing, you are most likely putting a great deal of effort into recognizing how the past and the now are the same.
Recognizing how the past and the now are the same, is very important. Part of the problem in this life is that people fail to recognize how the past and the now are the same, and therefore fail to see patterns repeating and therefore fail to see where things are headed. But what is often overlooked is that it is also very important to see how the past and now are NOT the same. Seeing the difference between then and now, is what will allow you to actually see your progress, perceive your empowerment, resource improvement and not become re-traumatized by the feeling that no matter what you do, you are re-experiencing and will re-experience something painful and unwanted. Maybe even something painful enough that you feel you literally can’t go through it again.
So that you can understand what I mean, here is an example. Madeline is one of those people who is very dedicated to awareness work. She is great at recognizing patterns that are repeating. She is amazing at seeing how the past is the same as the now. Some years ago, she realized that her boyfriends all end up intermittently emotionally disconnecting from her, leaving her alone in life. And she realized that this is a pattern repetition (or a mirror as it is often called) that began with her father, who was intermittently emotionally disconnected from her and flip flopped violently between being engaged and disengaged. This pattern has put Madeline in absolute hell. Just like before when she was a child, she feels like she is totally powerless to the other person’s disconnection. Just like before, she is in danger because a disconnected person can’t see or feel her enough to do what is right for her rather than what is wrong for her. Just like before, she is emotionally alone and is filled with that skin crawly feeling of being alone and unsafe, even when the other person is in the room, because it is just a body there with her, no actual presence. Just like before, the intermittent pattern started with something emotionally shocking happening to the other person in their life that she could not control, so just like before, there was nothing she could do to prevent it and now she feels doomed to be emotionally abandoned, no matter how hard she works to create closeness with the other person.
Madeline is especially frustrated because she has been working on this pattern over the course of multiple relationships. She has been doing soul retrieval work on it. She has been doing parts work to integrate split aspects of her consciousness that pertain to it. She has been identifying red flags in men that might indicate that they can emotionally disconnect, so she chooses emotionally present partners instead. She has been leaving relationships when a man disconnects and puts no effort into re-connecting, rather than staying and incessantly pulling them to be connected again. Essentially she is no longer stepping into the pattern of taking full responsibility for the connection for the both of them. She has been seeing a somatic therapist to get help healing her insecure attachment anxiety. And at this point, Madeline feels like no matter what she has done or will do, she is powerless. Her childhood nightmare is happening all over again, and will continue to happen. And no amount of effort that she puts into preventing it, will actually work. So, she is being swallowed up by doom.
Madeline has done one part of awareness work, but not the other. She has become aware of how the patterns are the same and how they are repeating. She sees what is the same about then and now. But she has not yet become aware of how the patterns are different and how they have changed. She does not yet see the difference between then and now.
When Madeline does this part of awareness work, she becomes aware that the pattern is actually improving. It is repeating, but in a different way than before, which means that she is simply in a different layer or aspect of healing and of changing the pattern. And that in that, is the promise of it getting better. Here are some of the things that she realizes when she does this part of the awareness work: Madeline realizes that what is different is that she was a child then, and she is an adult now. Why that is important is that before, she literally was entirely at her father’s mercy. Her mother was not in the picture, nor was any extended family. She had no other resources as a child. As an adult, she can go out and find other resources. If one man is choosing to be disconnected, she can decide with her free will to either stay there waiting for him to reconnect again, or simply withdraw her focus from him and go find a different person who is choosing to be connected. Madeline sees that her current boyfriend knows he is disconnected, despite not doing anything about it. He is acknowledging it, which is different than her father and different from any other man that came after her father, but before him. Madeline sees that when she was a child and her father disconnected, she was literally all alone emotionally. Now, she has a best friend who she sees every day and who is completely there with her, so she is not all alone. Madeline sees that she no longer feels it is her fault that the man in her life disconnected, which was the problem for years. So, the pain of self-blame is no longer part of the equation. She sees that this time, she is in relationship counseling and she is not alone to deal with her boyfriend’s disconnection. Their therapist is on top of it and is taking pressure off of Madeline by being the one to confront him on it and help him to change what he is doing. This is something she desperately needed when she was a child and was all alone with the pressure of trying to get her adult father to come back to her emotionally, so it is actually a healing experience she hasn’t been resourcing. Madeline realizes a great many other things. But you get the point. That heavy doom she was feeling, lifts enough for her to perceive her progress and to feel less re-traumatized by the current form of repeat she is in. In fact, realizing the difference between then and now, IS a crucial part of Madeline coming out of her PTSD state, and experiencing the pattern change so as to experience healing.
Your assignment, is to take whatever repeat experience you have recognized that you are having, and to consciously look for the differences between that experience then and this experience now. Write down as many as you can. The more, the better. If you want to involve other people in this exercise, feel free to do so. Because other people are less identified, they can often see our patterns, including pattern changes, clearer than we can. Some examples of things to consider might be how the current person involved is different than the original person the pattern started with, or even from other people in the past that have been a part of this repeat pattern. What different or more or better resources you have available to you now, this includes people. What smaller healing experiences you might be getting within the larger painful pattern. The potentials that exist now that were not even possibilities before. What knowledge do you have now, compared to before. What is different about your surroundings and environment than it was before. What the people who are players in the current pattern repeat are doing that is different than what those that were part of it before did. What you can do right now in this situation compared to what you could do before. What is going right in your life, that may not have been going right before when the pattern occurred. What you are doing in this current situation that is better or more empowered than what you did in the past etc.
When it comes to awareness work, it is important to see the full picture, not just part of it. And remember that the purpose of doing this is not to use one to negate the other. It is important to see how things are the same, how they are on repeat. And it is important to see how things are different, how they have changed. You might just find this to be the antidote to the perception of powerlessness or doom that you have been looking for.
There is a very popular idea being passed around in the field of psychology/self-help/spirituality. And that idea is that you can’t abandon an adult. Essentially, the idea behind this concept is that abandonment can only happen to a child because only a child is dependent on someone for their needs whereas an adult has resources available to them. And an adult can’t abandon another adult since one adult is not responsible for another adult, each are responsible for themselves. Therefore, all that is possible, is for an adult to have their prior abandonment trauma triggered by the actions of someone else. Basically, the idea is that it is only possible to abandon something if it cannot take care of itself.
There is so much wrong with this concept, so let’s pull it apart piece by piece.
To abandon means to drop or give up completely on something, such as a course of action, a goal, a responsibility you took, a practice, a commitment you made, an agreement you entered into or a relationship you decided to engage in etc. A person may choose to abandon anything they choose to commit their energy to, including their relationship with another person or something they are providing for the other person. And a person can cease anything they started. When we use the word abandonment in the context of this conversation, we usually mean that someone has dropped and given up their commitment to stay with someone else, support them, provide something for them, look after them, be there for them or fulfill their agreements or responsibilities relative to that other person in some way. And it is possible to do all of these things to another person, regardless of their age.
To give you some examples of adult abandonment, a person who enters into a primary partnership with someone else, only to find themselves in a situation where the partner has distanced themselves, is not communicating, is ignoring bids for connection, is consistently prioritizing other things and is in their own world under the same roof, has emotionally abandoned their partner.
If two people enter into an agreement that they will live their life together under the same roof, and they provide physical and/or emotional needs for each other, but one leaves the other to go live somewhere else and stop providing those needs, without finding a mutually beneficial arrangement to accommodate for needed change, one of those friends has abandoned the other.
Two people commit to a joint venture. They have committed to being “in it together” and to serving as resources for that venture. One of the people changes their mind and un-commits to that venture, and to being “in it together” with the other person, even if only in a different way. This person has left the other person to do it alone. Thus, they have abandoned their commitment to the other person as well as to the venture itself. If you don’t think this can be serious, just look back to history and think about the consequences of desertion when it comes to war.
Straight out the gate, the biggest issue with this concept is that it does not recognize developmental trauma at all. And instead, draws an arbitrary line in the sand where childhood ends and adulthood begins. Certain traumas affect people’s ability to actually develop into being able to exhibit what we judge as adult behavior. So, the reality is, you may not actually be dealing with an adult, even though they look like one. And a person simply having the self-awareness that they are an adult, does not make it so that developmental issues cease to exist. Developmental trauma leads to both 1. The behavior of regressing and having a complete breakdown on a mental, physical and emotional level which you could say is not a very adult behavior and 2. The behavior of someone abandoning someone else, rather than looking for a mutually beneficial arrangement which accommodates for changes in life, which is also not an adult behavior. Neither behavior would occur in a developmentally healthy adult. Therefore, any discission about abandonment between two fully developed adults, is purely hypothetical. What a person needs to overcome developmental trauma, is to have the experience that would have allowed the development to happen. Therefore, a person who has abandonment trauma in their childhood needs to have the opposite experience in their adulthood. It will never, ever work to try to get them to see that they are an adult and they can function alone. This is in fact a re-traumatization. Damage that was done in relationship, can only be healed in relationship. To the opposite side, people doing the abandoning also have some missing experience they were denied in childhood and that they need in order to develop.
Society is currently creating more and more developmental issues and is then failing to recognize this. And is then taking no responsibility for the issues it is creating in people. And to make matters worse, people are in fact justifying and glorifying doing so.
The concept that it is not possible to abandon an adult, rests on the false belief that abandonment is only valid if the person who is to suffer from that abandonment, is incapable of finding alternative resources for whatever the one doing the abandoning is providing. Abandonment is happening, regardless of whether or not the person who is to suffer from that abandonment is or is not capable of finding alternative resources for whatever the one doing the abandoning is providing.
On top of this, if this argument was valid, then a child also could not be considered to have been abandoned as long as they had alternative resources. This means, when a child’s needs are met by a grandmother or by the state, you could no longer say that the child was abandoned by their mother because technically, the child had other resources available to them. Also, it begs the question what age does a child become suddenly able to find alternative resources and not dependent on others? Is it when they can forage for food? Because if this is the case, the age would be about five. After which point, they could not be considered to be abandoned. Is it when they are old enough to take over the job of regulating their own emotions? Because if this is the case, that would be around age 8 or 9. After which point, they could not be considered to be abandoned. Is it when the government has decided they can be drafted into armed forces and vote, which would be 18 in many places. After which point, they cannot be considered abandoned. Is it when a child can make their own finances, because if this is the case, children begging in the streets in india cannot be considered abandoned. And does it change the more complex a society becomes, making it so that a child can be considered abandoned at certain age in one country, but a totally different age in another country? Hopefully you are feeling that this very weak argument was created to be a logical invalidation, especially on an emotional level, for the person who is being abandoned, because someone has an agenda for that person standing on their own two feet and not depending on others. The question is: What agenda? That agenda might be something as benign as wanting the person to feel empowered and no longer dependent on others in a way that doesn’t serve them. To the opposite, the agenda might be something as adverse as not wanting to take any responsibility in a relationship.
The idea that it is not possible to abandon an adult comes from the false idea that a human adult is a solitary animal that is not dependent on one another. The reality is just the opposite. Human beings are a group species. People are a highly interdependent species. Their ability to thrive, in fact does depend on each other. Attachment to one another runs very deep and security in their relationships is extremely important to their wellbeing. Also, their relationships are not solely about use. Therefore, people do not experience each other as being exchangeable and replaceable. When a person has dropped and given up their commitment to stay with someone else, support them, look after them, be there for them or fulfill their agreements or responsibilities relative to that other person, it causes intense damage to them, regardless of their age and regardless of whether they can find someone else or other resources to replace what was lost by the abandonment occurring.
This concept fails to recognize that there are many responsibilities that one has relative to another person they have entered into relationship with. And instead, seeks to establish a policy of zero responsibility relative to other people. There is a place for a person taking responsibility for themselves. There is an empowerment to be found in taking responsibility for oneself. But we sign up for things in relationships. We sign up for being relied on for certain things. Abandonment is to drop whatever we signed up for in a relationship or signed up for by getting into a relationship. If we enter into a relationship and take no responsibility relative to that other person, we are living in a narcissistic state of being. We are not truly IN relationship. For this reason, it is very important in a relationship, to mutually agree upon what we will/can vs. wont/can’t sign up for or take responsibility for in our relationships. What we will/can vs. wont/can’t be relied on for. The way you act and the things you do and don’t do, have an intense effect on other people. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Am I Responsible for How Other People Feel?
When someone experiences any form of abandonment as an adult, they will be harmed by it. The degree to which they will suffer, does depend on whether they already have trauma from a childhood abandonment. But here is the thing, a person who is abandoned in their childhood in some way, will be a vibrational match to repeat abandonments. But when a person is abandoned as an adult, the feelings they experience are not solely because of that past experience. This concept tends to place all the responsibility and pressure on a person’s trigger from past abandonments. And/or it tends to place the responsibility and pressure on the problem being their reaction or how they feel, rather than on the person doing the injuring. In fact, many people who propagate this idea, defend the behavior of the person doing the abandoning, such as pointing out a person’s right to leave. Of course, a person has free will and can leave if they feel it is in their best interests to do so. And of course, a person cannot stay in a situation where they are experiencing abuse. But the statement ‘you can’t abandon an adult’ is a form of pulling all pressure and responsibility off of the person doing the abandoning and making the person being abandoned or neglected the problem instead. And this is a form of emotional abuse.
Inherent in this concept are two shadows. The first is the shadow of not wanting to be depended on. And the second is, not wanting to feel dependent on. This idea is very appealing to individuals who for reasons related to their own trauma in relationships, (usually from their own childhood) either 1. do not want to feel powerless to other people in any way, and whom find depending on someone to be a terrifyingly vulnerable thing. Or 2. feel enmeshed or burdened by any kind of responsibility towards others and find being depended on to be a terrifyingly vulnerable thing. The idea that it is not possible to be abandoned as an adult, helps them to avoid these feelings and validate their dysfunctional behavior in relationships.
This concept seeks to minimize the impact of abandonment. But the impact is very real and there are plenty of situations where an adult does not actually have resources or is prevented from them in some way. We don’t live in a world that is as straight forward as people are trying to make it… If you’re an adult, you have access to resources, if you’re not an adult, you don’t. Let’s imagine that a 40 year old man abandons a 40 year old woman and their 3 kids in the projects. That woman’s life is going to drastically change for the worse. And she may very well not have access to the same resources that he was providing on a physical level, emotional level or mental level. And her life and the children’s lives will all take a turn for the worse because of it. To tell this person that she has all the access to the same resources herself, because she is an adult and that this abandonment is just helping her to connect deeper to her inner resources or to God or Source, is profoundly out of touch. It is also to put even more pressure on her and add to the pain she is experiencing. You will come to find that this stance is an ideology that generates from the resourced and the privileged.
But let’s go even further, even someone who has many resources on a financial and practical level, someone who you would call “privileged”, may be impoverished and have very little access to intangible resources, especially at the emotional level. The withdrawal of these emotional resources is every bit as damaging as the loss of tangible, physical resources. If not more so. There are consequences that come as a result of any abandonment, regardless of what level that abandonment takes place on.
It is absolutely possible to cut another person off, regardless of their age, from a crucial source of sustenance that has been withdrawn. It is absolutely possible to abandon an adult. And unfortunately, in our world, may people do abandon other people. There is gold to be found in individual empowerment. But human beings are not reptiles. And human beings are not islands unto themselves, nor are they meant to be.
In human society, the most liked people, are the people who are nice. These are the people who are agreeable, polite, friendly, considerate, placid and pleasing. We like nice people because we can find confluence with them very easily and thus, we don’t experience conflict. We feel at ease and even safe around them. You could say that nice people are the people who are the best at keeping a sense of social cohesion, peace and calm.
At face value, being nice is a good thing. But there is a dark side to niceness. And that dark side, can in fact be damaging enough to make overtly mean people seem better. Now, as it applies to men, despite the fact that nice people are so liked, it didn’t used to be that men were the most valued for being nice. But this is changing. It is a rather new developing trend within society. And believe me, it is a very, very dangerous one.
What I want to expose to your awareness today, is the dark side of nice men, the ways they damage others and the implications of us continuing down this path of valuing niceness in men more and more. Keep in mind that in this episode, I’m not going to help you to understand and have empathy for the origins of nice guys, nor am I going to offer solutions for it. I am simply going to show you how nice guys kill.
We need to not confuse niceness with kindness. A person can be nice but not kind. Or a person can be kind, but not nice. The difference between nice and kind is the difference between day and night. Nice is in fact a self-centered behavior pattern where you are acting in a pleasing way so as to get people to like you and to avoid conflict. Kind is an other-oriented behavior where you demonstrate that you can act in the best interest of others. Kind people perform good deeds for others. You don’t have to be a nice person to be a kind person. In fact, a nice person, often acts against the best interests of others in favor of being liked or avoiding conflict themselves. Ok, so a nice person is self-centered and behaves narcissistically. A kind person feels empathy and acts in the best interests of others. A nice person is exhibiting weakness. A kind person is exhibiting strength. A nice person acts from self-interest and fear. A kind person acts from care and love.
A nice man is not necessarily going to act in your best interests. I’m going to say this again… A nice man is not necessarily going to act in your best interests. He is going to act in his own best interests. What he cares the most about is the perks of being liked and avoiding conflict. The reason this is so hard to see, is because we perceive nice people to be good. And the way they do the damage that they do to others, is not by being mean and bad tempered and displaying overt zero-sum game behavior. Here is an example of this. Angelica was born to a narcissistic mother that was prone to verbal abuse and a nice father. When Angelica’s mother would verbally berate her, her father would stay silent, just watching it happen. She would be sent to her room. And her father would sit with her mother in order to de-escalate her. When the waters were calm and she was allowed out of her room, her father would pretend nothing happened and go to work on a project around the house and invite Angelica to join him. The whole time, he was acting nice, but he was not acting in the best interests of his daughter or his wife. He is keeping dysfunction alive and well in his own household. He is enabling abuse; he is preventing his wife from focusing on and healing her own negative patterns that will harm her and others in life. And he has abandoned his own daughter, without actually leaving the house. He is teaching his daughter to fend for herself and that she doesn’t deserve to be positively owned or protected by him. This will set her up for a life-long relationship with men who will fail to protect her and fail to really be there for her. Men who will abandon her for their own best interests, leaving her to fend for herself, even though they are technically still in her vicinity. Nice men are very dangerous men. But no one will see it, because that danger has a mask. An agreeable, polite, friendly, considerate, placid and pleasing one. This means, the whole world is unlikely to see it and will invalidate the damage they cause.
A nice man is often an enabler in the worst sense of the word. An enabler is someone who encourages, indirectly supports, justifies and enables negative behavior in others; behavior that is harmful to others and behavior that is self-destructive. And they will do so whenever it is in their best interests to do so. They will do so whenever it gets them liked and guarantees them the perks of being liked. And they will do so whenever it allows them to avoid conflict and guarantees them that they will avoid the negative consequences of not being liked.
A nice man is inauthentic, dishonest and can even be a downright liar. Because of this, they are actively engaged in deception. They just have to keep you from knowing it! To be agreeable, polite, friendly, considerate, placid and pleasing all the time, a person has to not reveal their actual thoughts and feelings. They also have to hide anything they do that people would find displeasing or cause conflict, from view. They do not reveal any truth about themselves whenever the hiding of that truth would get them liked and guarantee them the perks of being liked. And they will not reveal a truth about themselves whenever it allows them to avoid conflict and guarantees them that they will avoid the negative consequences of not being liked. This pattern of deception that they are committed to, can even become self-deception. They may even deceive themselves and hide the truth of their thoughts and feelings and personal truths from their own awareness and or acknowledgment. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Human Hyphen Pattern. Nice men will dupe you. What you thought you were getting with them, is not actually the truth of them. And you’re not actually in a relationship with a nice guy. You don’t even know who they are.
A nice man is often two faced. How can a person be perceived as agreeable, polite, friendly, considerate, placid and pleasing if they are in in the room with two people that disagree or are opposed? They have to stay silent or find a creative way to validate each person’s perspective, but in a way that doesn’t upset the other. But if the two people happen to be in two different rooms, this is not a problem. They simply speak and act one way with one person and totally different, or even the opposite with the other. Nice guys are so good at doing this, they make the ideal double dealer or double agent. At the end of the day, you never know what is actually true about them. What they actually think, what they actually feel, what their actual opinion is, and what is really going on. So, the compatibility and confluence you experience with them, is false. And this two-faced behavior can easily become betrayal.
A nice guy will harmonize discrepancies or contradictory pieces of information about themselves by separating them into individual compartments within his own mind. He will be a highly split and fragmented individual. He will be highly compartmentalized. When you start to notice these discrepancies and contradictory things about him, you will feel like you are with someone with split personality. To learn more about fragmentation, you can watch my video titled: Fragmentation, The Worldwide Disease. A nice guy will then come up with good guy affirming stories to justify these discrepancies. To give you an example of what I mean, Jim does not want to have to check with anyone before he makes a decision to do something. But he knows that this is not ok in a marriage and part of him really wants to be married. So, he’s got his wife trapped in an intermittent reinforcement pattern. One day he makes a decision to go camping without even telling her where he is. And the next, he prompts her to make every decision for the both of them. Of course, on the day he went camping, one of his friends got into a car wreck. While he was camping, he called that friend to see if he needed any help. When he got home, he had told both himself and his wife the story that one of his friends got in a car wreck and that he needed to be there for him during the time of emergency, without needing to focus on anyone else’s needs but his friend’s. He apologized profusely, but didn’t realize that he had revised history. And didn’t bother to address the discrepancies and contradictions within himself that led to the incident.
A nice man fails to protect. This is the one that explains why the nice guy doesn’t get the girl and why people like to say that women like assholes. To protect, you can’t be nice, you have to be kind. You have to act in the best interests of someone, despite the fact that doing so puts you at odds with and causes you to be disliked by someone else. It is to step into conflict. Nice guys won’t do this. It goes against what they are wanting for themselves. Protection is one of the most important elements of masculine energy. It is one of the things that women, children, other men and indeed society at large need most from men. To understand more about this, watch three of my videos. The first titled: Why Women Like Assholes. And the second titled: What Every Man Needs to Know About Women. And the third titled: Containment, What a Woman Needs From a Man in a Relationship. What you need to get is that refusing to protect has MASSIVE consequences. And refusing to protect, is to enable the thing that is posing a threat, creating danger and causing harm and destruction.
A nice guy will neglect you. He will leave you alone and leave you to fend for yourself in many ways. And he will do so without actually leaving you. He will do so with the whole world watching and thinking what a nice and therefore good guy he is. So many of the things that a child needs from a father or a woman needs from a man or a partner needs from a partner or a friend needs from a friend, he will simply not do. And not because he can’t… Because he chooses not to. He will choose not to because doing those things don’t suit his own personal interests. For example, you may need things like security, trust, reliability, containment, safety, to feel seen, positive ownership, reassurance, consideration, loyalty, to be able to count on him, genuine intimacy, emotional availability, truth, understanding, consistency, honesty, empathy, prioritization, genuine connection, compatibility, protection and to know what is real and make decisions in the relationship based on what is real etc. But doing those things, providing those things, might put him in the position to not be liked or to line up with conflict, either with you or with someone else he is more afraid of not being liked by. And so, over time, you will end up getting that he provides none of these things. So many of the things you need a man to do in a relationship or within society, a nice guy will not do, if doing so causes him to risk not being liked, and a nice guy will not do if it means he will get into a conflict. And what you have to get is that the pain of this, is not just about needs not being met. That implies it’s only about the absence of something, or starvation. It is about that. But it’s also about the dire consequences of being neglected in those ways and therefore those needs not being met. For example, a husband who is nice may fail to provide containment for his wife. As a result, she may become anxious, hyper masculine, armored and controlling and because of it, not act in a nurturing way towards the children. Those children will grow up to perceive the world to be a dangerous place, where they can expect no warmth. And they may develop harsh protector personalities as a result, behavioral self-preservation tendencies that damage their adult relationships and also their own children. There are extreme consequences to neglect of any kind. Not doing something that is needed can be as damaging and sometimes even more damaging than doing something that is harmful.
Nice guys often flip the polarity in their relationships. And even remain in their little boy energy and mentality. This is especially visible in male-female dynamics. They gradually make it so that the female child or woman in the relationship is providing for him, the things that he should be providing for her. For example, he might make his daughter responsible for making sure that his need for security is met, by holding her responsible to encourage him. Or he might put the woman in his life in the position of providing for him. Or he might behave so passively that all the initiative and leadership must be taken by the woman in his life. Or he might behave like a child when he encounters a problem, running away from it or breaking down or saying he “can’t”, leaving the woman to solve it for the both of them. A woman cannot maintain her femininity in a relationship with a nice guy… A nice guy will do whenever gets him liked and guarantees him the perks of being liked. A nice guy will do whenever allows him to avoid conflict and gives him the biggest chance of avoiding the negative consequences of not being liked. And he is willing to do so against the best interests of any woman in his life." To maintain her femininity, she will have to distance herself from him. I also need to remind you that in general, niceness is an adaptive behavior that occurs when someone has to endear themselves to someone with more power in order to stay safe and get their needs met. Therefore, we could say that niceness is a little boy behavior, rather than a masculine behavior in general.
A nice guy is giving to get. Most of what he does, comes with strings attached. After all, he is being nice and doing nice things, because of the personal benefit he thinks he will get by doing so. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, he will find other, manipulative ways to get it. The result will be that more and more, you will find yourself totally drained to the core by him. Also confused. He is so nice, but somehow, you will feel like it is a one-way relationship.
You will most likely be put at the mercy of someone else in their life. And or in constant conflict with someone in their life, as if it is you vs. that person. You are not actually safe with a nice guy if you are the person that he is most interested in being liked by and in confluence with. It will simply seem like you are at first. When someone else becomes the person they are interested in being liked by and in confluence with, you will either be put at that mercy of that person’s best interests. Or, you will be put in a position where they scoot themselves out of their position of holding any boundaries for themselves, and instead, find yourself having to duke it out with each other or even over him. Here is an example. Ethan is a really nice guy. He has always had a very close relationship with his mother. She is his “best friend”. Ethan married a woman named Isabel. Isabel feels like she is at the mercy of Ethan’s mother’s needs and wishes. The reason being that though Ethan validates the fact that his mother is demanding and often rolls his eyes at her requests, she always ends up getting her way, despite Isabel’s best interests. Ethan’s mother is the one he is the most interested in being liked by and the most afraid to displease. So, he will require Isabel to accommodate and comply to his mother, for his sake. On more than one occasion, these conflicts of interest have escalated into conflicts between Isabel and Ethan’s mother. What Isabel needs to wake up to, is the fact that there is no Ethan’s truth in this whole matter. He is not asserting his own desires and his own boundaries with his mother or with his wife. Doing so would displease them both and cause conflicts with them both. He couldn’t be seen as a “nice guy”. Instead, he is taking himself out of the equation and is presenting their desires and their boundaries to each other, as if he were not even a factor in the equation. And he is arguing his mother’s needs, to his wife, not his own needs in the situation.
Nice guys are actually very controlling. They are covertly controlling. They want their world to run smooth. They want to avoid conflict and negativity and experience confluence and positivity. And so, they manipulate specifically to try to control the people around them. They will do so by creating consequences that ‘seem’ out of their control, but that actually are within their control. For example, imagine a man feels threatened by the presence of another man in his girlfriend’s life. He will say “I think it’s good that you have him in your life, you can’t spend all your time with only me!”. But every time this man comes around, he will shut down and withdraw. His girlfriend doesn’t even need to be conscious of it, she learns that on an energetic level, the consequence of being around the other man is her partner’s withdrawal. So, she will develop anxiety about spending time with other men, and gradually become isolated from everyone but him. He has successfully managed to control her behavior that threatens him, without her even realizing what has happened. Their controlling behavior will ultimately leave you in a place where you are responsible for the wellbeing of their self-esteem and responsible for the smoothness of their world, so that they can be there for you.
Nice guys will gravitate towards someone unlikable, fuel their unlikability and benefit by them being the unlikable one. Nice guys gravitate to unlikable people for two reasons. First, unlikable people are the external reflection of what they are suppressing, denying and disowning in themselves. Second, being near unlikable people makes them even more likable by comparison. The more disagreeable, impolite, unfriendly, inconsiderate, aggressive and displeasing someone is, the more agreeable, polite, friendly, considerate, placid and pleasing you seem, both to yourself and to others. If you are in a relationship with a nice guy, you will always be seen as the unlikable, bad and wrong one. This is a dangerous position to be in because it means they can easily scapegoat you. And people will be on their side, even if they, themselves are the problem, because people automatically assume that the nice one, is the good guy. And they know that!
On top of this, they will not only enable, but fuel the unlikable person’s behavior, keeping them unlikable because they benefit personally from it. People will see them as even more of a nice person and like them even more if they are such a saint as to maintain a relationship with a person who is so unlikable. Essentially, if you are in a relationship with a nice guy, prepare for them to be the problem, but for you to be seen as the problem instead. Prepare to the bad guy.
And don’t fall for the apologizing or the “I take ownership of what I did wrong” act. People who genuinely take responsibility, change their behavior that is problematic. Instead of actually changing problematic behavior, nice guys simply apologize and take responsibility for their actions when they are caught because they know this ends conflicts, gets them out of the pressure of being disliked and makes them get liked even more.
By signing up for a relationship with a nice guy, you will be signing up for a unique kind of toxic cycle. By definition, nice guys are suppressors. Feelings and needs are meant to be acknowledged and expressed and when they aren’t, they will find another outlet. The pressure and frustration and resentment starts to build in them. They will suppress that and never show it. They will suppress anything negative. This means their partner is being tanked. Their partner, or the people around them will feel and express whatever they don’t acknowledge and suppress. This means that the people around them will grow more and more explosive and more and more unhinged. On top of this, that internal pressure builds to the point where it leaks. It leaks as passive aggressive behavior, snarky comments, strange choices or actions that don’t seem consistent with the truths they’ve expressed, sarcasm, whining, needling and physical ailments. And it is coped with through addictive behaviors like spending sprees, alcohol or most especially, fatty, sugary, starchy comfort foods. When you respond to the tanking and leaked truths and addictive behavior with surprise and get upset or even worse, angry about it, this will reinforce their belief that their negative feelings and their truths (that would be disliked) should never be expressed. And this becomes a vicious cycle where the behaviors become worse and worse. And you will find yourself confused and frozen, not understanding what is going on, feeling like your security is dependent on solving the Rubik’s Cube of them and of your relationship alone. You will be alone, trying desperately to figure out what their truth is, what is right for them, what to do to make things better, what your part in the vicious cycle is, what they want and why they are doing what they are doing. And the worst part is, they will not tell you.
Nice guys are highly manipulative. They can’t risk conflict or being seen negatively by coming out directly with their needs. Instead, they have to manipulate other people and manipulate situations to get their needs met. And you will find yourself in situations you would never have agreed to, because of it. For example, Dwayne is a nice guy. But Dwayne does not want to be responsible for doing the dishes. So, instead of asserting his need for there to be a different solution to him doing the dishes, he loads the dishwasher with the crockery in the way of the spinning blades or pretends that he didn’t understand his partner when he was asked to do the dishes. He is forcing other people to take care of it in a manipulative way. Or for example, Oliver, who is also a nice guy, has wanted to be supported in his own personal success goals for his whole life. But he was never allowed to go for his own success. He was only ever allowed to be the support to someone else. So, he gets a job on a team designed to support a professional athlete. But slowly, he flips everything so that the entire team is supporting him. They are running errands he asks them to run, so he can be more effective at his job. They are fetching him food at lunch time, so he can be more effective at his job. They are covering for him when he makes mistakes or drops balls, so it doesn’t affect the athlete. They are supporting him emotionally, so he can be “on point” in his position. He convinces them that supporting him, is them supporting the athlete, but even though Oliver is happy finally being supported by everyone, everyone else feels confused and angry because they didn’t sign up for putting their energy towards Oliver. The energy of the team is being diverted, making the team and the athlete much less successful.
And one more I’m going to give you is that nice guys will not and do not grasp the depth and seriousness of their beliefs and their behaviors and do not actually see the damage they are doing to you. Imagine this like someone setting fire to your house, but when you scream and cry for them to stop and try to get them to understand and see what they are doing, they will not respond appropriately. They will either deflect, as if someone else or something else is the reason for it. Or they will respond as if what they are seeing that they did to you, was to shut the door too loud.
By definition, this means that they are in a different reality than the people around them, including their own partner. The depth of desperation and despair that people around them feel because of this, is quite frankly indescribable. And people often end up having to leave them because with this behavior (and so many others that I have already mentioned) they behave so incredibly unworkable. The reason that they do this, is because they are identified with being nice, and cannot rectify their knowing of themselves as being nice, with being told that they have done something bad enough to qualify as a bad guy. It is too threatening to their self-concept and to everything they need and want in their life. They pride themselves on being a good guy to the degree that they literally refuse to see the true depth and seriousness of what they have done and what they are doing. And so, no action they take to try to remedy the situation or create repair in the relationship, is taken from reality. It rarely addresses the actual problem. Because they are not in reality about what is happening and what they are doing. And because they are not in reality about the seriousness of their beliefs and behavior and the things they say and do or don’t say and don’t do, they are intensely gaslighting. And this, makes people around them not only feel alone. But alone in pain. Not only alone in pain, but alone in pain that was caused by them. Not only in alone in pain caused by them, but also as if they are losing their mind and their grip on reality.
There is a far bigger picture than the one that emerges from the picture of damage that nice guys cause in personal relationships. A bigger picture that applies to the world at large. We need kind men. This world needs kind men desperately. A kind man will act out of a deep-rooted love for his fellow living beings. He will do what is right and what is needed, and consciously choose the consequences, even to himself when necessary. Men, when they are in their masculine center, are not mean or cruel. They are kind. But the world does not need nice men. The implications of continuing down this road where niceness rather than kindness is the standard that men are held accountable to, is that we will end up with men that do not embody any of the qualities of masculinity. Desperately needed qualities. And the absence of these qualities within society will lead to drastic consequences for us all. A nice man conforms his behavior to what he believes others, especially society sees as “nice” for his own benefit and to avoid consequences to himself. This man, may just be the most dangerous man there is, because of what he will not only fail to do, but choose not to do, in a time when he is needed most. If the men of a society become agreeable, polite, friendly, considerate, placid and pleasing in the face of a threat to the wellbeing of the members of that society, what will become of the people then? And who might love to capitalize on that? The reality is that we are being systematically weakened. And we are actively participating in that process of weakening. And we will suffer the consequences of doing so.
The nice guy is not a good guy. The nice guy is a very dangerous guy. He just has a different method of destroying himself and the people around him.
We must begin this conversation with a history lesson. The natural social structure for a human being is tribe. And it is tribe that offers humans their most essential needs. It offers them a sense of safety, stability, belonging, attention, love, togetherness, protection, inclusion, contribution, presence, feeling wanted and needed and valued, participation, the formation of identity, comfort, closeness, a sense of certainty, growth, self-esteem, support for their most basic needs, such as food, water and shelter and physical affection. It offers them connection and support for their achievements, pleasure, knowledge and more. As a group species, people cannot survive and do not thrive without the sense that they are part of a tribe where people fend for each other. This is the root of security for a physical human. We lived in a tribal way for the vast majority of our history.
But when we switched from a foraging lifestyle to an agrarian lifestyle and property ownership became the most important thing, the structure of society changed. Tribe began to be systematically dissolved. As a result of these changes, paternity certainty became important within human society and the only way you could guarantee paternity certainty, was if you controlled human sexuality. Especially female sexuality. Ever increasingly, the fundamental structure of society was no longer tribe, it became the nuclear family, the foundation of which was a man’s claim over his property, which included his wife and children. Yes, women became property. In some parts of the world, they are still considered property of the men in their lives. But you must understand that they were regarded as such in the world until so recently, it should make your head spin. Just to give you a feeling for what I mean, it took until the year 1900 before every state in the US had passed a law that married women could keep their own wages and own their own property. But don’t think it changed then. In 1971, a woman could not get a credit card in her own name – it wasn’t until 1974 that a law forced credit card companies to issue cards to women without their husband’s signature. Some of your eading this may have already been born before then. It wasn't until 1973 that women could serve on juries in all 50 states. Women couldn’t decide not to have sex if their husband wanted to – spousal rape wasn’t criminalized in all 50 states until 1993. I’m going to say that again...1993. Issues like reproductive freedom and a woman's right to decide when and whether to have children were only just beginning to be openly discussed in the 1960s. In 1957, the FDA approved of the birth control pill but not for contraception, only for "severe menstrual distress." As people, we may think we have evolved beyond this, but we have not. The roots of this thinking are still embedded in our psyches, even if only in our subconscious mind.
But going back, when we made this massive shift regarding the lifestyle of our species and therefore our values, the way society was governed needed to be changed. To see the way that the governing of society changed, you must look back to the governing bodies at that time and since that time… Religions and monarchs and later governments. You must look at the indoctrination and systems of control (including punishment and reward) that they began to use to govern the people.
Humans could no longer go directly for their actual need, which is tribe. They were now indoctrinated into the idea that the only way to go for tribe (or rather all the needs that used to be satisfied by having tribe) was to get married to one person and to have children together. And suddenly, security and sexuality were undeniably forever linked. This was actually made worse when the idea of marriage ceased to be a purely strategic one, based on practicalities, and instead, became a romantic affair. Remember that the idea that marriage should be based on love is very new. But this made it so that security was not only based on sexuality, it was also based on someone falling romantically in love with us.
So, to sum this up, over the course of history, we have come to believe that a sense of security in the world, which is dependent on social and relationship security, is dependent upon us finding one person who feels romantically and sexually attracted to us and whom will grant us sexual fidelity, so that we can be sure that we will not lose that security. And THAT is now how we believe we will be able to guarantee all the things we most desperately need… a sense of safety, stability, self-esteem, belonging, attention, love, togetherness, protection, inclusion, contribution, presence, feeling wanted and needed and valued, participation, comfort, a sense of certainty, support for our most basic needs, such as food, water and shelter and physical affection. Support for our achievements, pleasure, and so much more.
Why are so many people miserable you ask? Because we are basing our sense of security on something that humans were never any good at, because it was never a natural trait of our species… sexual fidelity. Even though it’s there, you don’t even need to look at the science behind that one. Just look at the world you live in today. If something is natural for a person, they don’t have to put so much effort into controlling themselves into doing it. And most of all, governing bodies don’t have to put so much effort into indoctrinating people and controlling people into doing it.
On top of this, we are miserable because we are basing our security off of our romantic and sexual attractiveness and off of whether someone is romantically and sexually attracted to us. And just like that, sex becomes a means to an end… to the point where people have lost touch with the actual role that sexuality naturally plays in their lives. There is something much more high stakes wrapped up in it… our security in life. People don’t even know their own natural sexuality because of this. And this is a factor regarding why people are so sex obsessed. And also, why they are so obsessed with being sexually attractive. Sex now carries an un-natural kind of charge. If you don’t believe me, ponder this: If you truly belonged to and with a group of people… a tribe, and all of your needs were met. Meaning you had belonging, you had protection, you had safety, you had stability, you had attention, you had love, you had togetherness, you were included, you were valued for your contribution, you were wanted and needed, you had comfort and a sense of certainty. You had support for our most basic needs such as food, water and shelter and physical affection. You had support for our achievements. And you had people to enjoy the world with, and it wasn’t going to just go away… what role would sexuality and eros play in your life then? While you are pondering this, see if you can recognize how unfathomable it is for you that you can have security any other way. See if you can feel your core belief that anything else, other than a sole primary partner wanting to bond with you exclusively, because of their sexual and romantic attraction towards you, is not secure.
Another reason we are so miserable is that when we switched from our security being about Tribe to our security being about a sole, primary partner, we failed to realize that one person cannot reliably provide all those needs that tribe offered to us. And that if there were any relationship ruptures of any kind with that one person, or if that person became ill or died, suddenly, we lost all our security in life. Most of us live our lives in red-zone level insecurity because of this. We are under-resourced and many of us are chronically anxious in our relationships and in the world. We become desperate and furious with our partner when he or she can’t reliably provide all of these tribal needs for us. And we may try to supplement these needs we would get from tribe with things like friends or trying to stay close with our parents and siblings or by joining religious groups or by trying to find a sense of community somewhere. But in today’s world, this patch-up job we are trying to do is not working so well. In fact, it’s becoming worse and worse in an era where marriage and the nuclear family is less and less able to survive. And the more separated we become from one another due to all kinds of different modern factors. And the saddest part is, it’s been so long since people lived in the actual social structure that is in fact natural to them and that is in fact the very thing that they are missing, they don’t even know what it is that they are missing. They just feel like crap in life.
The bottom line is, people need to return to tribe. Not shadow tribe, conscious tribe! That is what people actually need. And people need to return to getting their worldly security from tribe, rather than from one person bonding to them because of the romantic and sexual attraction they feel towards them. Of course, we are much less controllable this way. So, there will be a great many governing bodies that will be against this. But what we have been doing and what we continue to do, has been and is a recipe for disaster.
Here's the thing… We need to all simultaneously wake up to this. We need to wake each other up to this and set each other free from these thousands of years’ worth of indoctrination. Why? Because this one, is a self-fulfilling loop. Here is why… If I believe that anything else, other than a sole primary partner wanting to bond with me exclusively, because of their sexual and romantic attraction towards me, is not secure, having THAT specific relationship will be my #1 priority. My commitment will be to that over the other people in my life. Over tribe. And remember that we live in a world that is currently VERY competitive regarding resources and this includes people. People feel they will get their needs met through exclusivity, rather than inclusivity. And so immediately, in order to get genuine security, they must either establish a romantic, sexual pair bond with me, or they have no actual security with me. Or they must establish their security by establishing a romantic, sexual pair bond with someone else.
When any one of us is in this pattern, we reinforce this pattern in everyone around us. We prove that security can only come in this way. We feed into it, keeping the current societal structure that doesn’t work in place. We make it so that the only hope that someone has at gaining security, is to establish a romantic, sexual pair bond. Which again, is an inherently unstable and un-natural structure for us.
And before you polyamorous people think you’re off the hook on this one, you should be aware that the vast majority of polyamorous people have simply figured out that the way to gain an improved sense of security, is to establish romantic, sexual bonds with multiple people, thus decreasing the odds that you ever have to fend for yourself and increasing your odds that those needs you would get from tribe are reliably met. Polyamorous people are still indoctrinated with this belief. Sexuality and security are still linked for the vast majority of them too. If you don’t believe me, and you consider yourself to be polyamorous, imagine that something happens to make it so that you are not perceived as sexually and romantically attractive to others or to make it so that you can’t have sex. Notice whether your sense of security goes away when you imagine this. Notice the sense of aloneness and pressure creeping in.
What you are really wanting is tribe. To re-establish a genuine sense of security in that tribe, all of us are going to have to separate sexuality from a sense of security in our relationships and from a sense of security in our life. And from there, we are going to have to go directly for tribe, and make that our genuine commitment, letting sexuality and eros naturally express from there; rather than making sexuality and eros the anchor of our security and remaining obsessed with finding someone or even multiple people to romantically and sexually pair bond with.
To put it bluntly, people are not self-aware. And people are not truly conscious. And perhaps the thing people are the most unconscious about, is the WHY behind what they are thinking, saying and doing. Most people are running around, thinking, saying and doing things instinctively and automatically; driven by their subconscious mind.
To give you some examples of what I mean, a man drives down the highway filled with road rage. He speeds down the road refusing to signal, speeding up to block merging cars out, finger flipping, yelling and swearing at anyone who he feels is in his way. He has no idea that the WHY has nothing to do with what is happening on the road. He has un-resolved pain about how powerless he feels to other people. Of course, admitting to this would be too vulnerable. But because he feels powerless to other people, anger and aggression feels like empowerment. He feels the need to dominate in order to feel safe and empowered. And this is especially possible when he doesn’t have to face a person. After all, when he and they are inside a metal object, he can “thingify” them. This is the WHY behind his road rage.
A woman sleeps with her best friend’s boyfriend. She says she is sorry. She never wanted to hurt her. She just couldn’t control herself when he came onto her. She is not looking deep enough to see that the WHY behind what she did is that she feels insecure and insignificant. These feelings are made worse when she compares herself to her friend, who is so impressive in so many ways. So, when her friend’s boyfriend came onto her, what mattered more than their friendship in that moment, was the opportunity to feel superior to her friend. If her friend’s boyfriend was choosing her over her friend, it meant he had decided she was more desirable.
A young adult has to decide between taking a gap year to go travel around Europe or going straight to college. He decides to go to college. He tells people that he made that choice because he wants to get all his required classes done as soon as possible and not waste what little money he has. But the real reason is that his parents are against him taking a gap year. He can feel that his parents will not approve of him if he does go on a gap year and they will keep getting into conflicts. One of his top values is peace. Another is family. The real WHY behind him going straight to college is that his top values would be threatened by taking a gap year in Europe.
A teen girl keeps thinking terrible things about herself. It seems like there is a voice inside her head that is always criticizing her. She is unaware that the reason this voice inside of her keeps generating these thoughts, is in fact to keep her safe. Deep down, the WHY behind these thoughts is that she is convinced that if she criticizes herself first, other people can’t beat her to it. And if she criticizes herself, she will hold herself to a standard that will guarantee that she will be liked and approved of by others, rather than disapproved of and rejected.
A man says “I would love to be friends” to a woman he knows. And proceeds to establish a friendship and hang out every day. Later, when she gets into a relationship with another man, he flips out and feels taken advantage of by her and used by her and betrayed by her. He is unaware that the WHY behind him saying that he would love to be friends is that he wanted to say whatever it took to be around her, regardless of whether it was or wasn’t true. He had the hope that over time he could change her mind about him and make her want to be his lover instead. He was sure that if he devoted all his time and effort to her, that would happen. When it didn’t, he felt like all that time and effort was for nothing. And he blamed her for how crappy that made him feel about himself.
Most people live at the surface of things, not truly questioning themselves or others. And not diving beneath what they are thinking, saying and doing to discover the WHY behind them. This is a tragedy because the WHY is the very purpose behind their action. Everything you decide and say and do serves a purpose. The question is, what is that purpose? You cannot keep your attention on the surface and ever hope to find the WHY. The WHY is deep under the surface.
Facing the WHY can be hard and it can be scary and painful and you may not like what you see about reality or about yourself. This is why so many people also subconsciously or consciously deflect or tell themselves stories or distract themselves or make excuses etc. specifically so they can avoid looking directly at the WHY. But what people don’t understand is that you will pay the price of preserving a feel-good illusion and so will the people around you. And you will pay the price of preserving a positive self-concept and so will the people around you. And it will be a price that is too high to pay. Much higher than actually looking straight at reality; looking straight at the WHY. To learn more about this, you can watch three of my videos. The first simply titled: Reality. The second titled: Why You Should Know and Accept the Truth, Even if it Hurts. And the third titled: Self Concept, The Enemy of Awakening.
Becoming aware of the WHY behind what you are thinking, saying and doing is life changing. And here are the major reasons why.
It makes you aware of your genuine motivations and genuine needs and desires. Most of us run around trying to meet our needs and reach our desires and satisfy our motivations in subconscious, sneaky, round about ways all day, every day. Our words contradict our actions and we don’t act like we are committed to what we say we are committed to. And because of this, not only are we super manipulative, we are very unsuccessful at looking directly at what we truthfully want and need. We don’t go straight for it in the most effective ways possible. Therefore, becoming aware of the WHY, makes you much less manipulative and much more effective at directly bringing about what you truly want in life.
Two people who make the same decision or say the same thing or take the same action, will have a totally different experiences and experience totally different results when the WHY behind what they are doing is different. The WHY even changes what you are a match to on a vibrational level. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The WHY Changes Everything.
Becoming aware of the WHY puts you in the position of conscious choice. When you see what your true motivation or reasoning is, you get to decide what to do with that information. It puts you in the position of genuine empowerment. Are you going to align further with that reason or motivation and go about doing so in a different way? Or are you going to change the WHY behind what you are saying and doing? Can you change it, or is it a reflection of a solid personal truth? We experience our free will, only when we become aware of the WHY.
It causes you to live according to your values. Our WHY behind what we do, reflects our values. Becoming aware of the WHY, causes us to look directly at our deepest values. And living consciously according to top values, is how people create a fulfilling life. The life they actually want to live.
Becoming aware of the real WHY is the road to becoming truly authentic. If you don’t know the WHY, you don’t know yourself. You don’t know what motivates you. You don’t know what you really want. You don’t see your needs. You don’t see your insecurities. You don’t see where you are still controlled by society and your upbringing. You don’t see your fears. You don’t see your negative patterns. You don’t see your strengths. You don’t see yourself. So, so much of the truth of you, is contained in or revealed by the WHY behind your thoughts, words and actions.
Your relationships will improve drastically. It doesn’t take me to tell you that when someone is not aware of (and is not admitting to) the real WHY behind what they are doing, it makes relationships totally unworkable. Chances are, you have been on the other side of this yourself. It preserves dysfunction. It makes painful patterns continue to no end. It makes people act like they can’t control their own behavior and like they don’t know why. It makes the relationship a zero-sum game rather than a win-win. Relationships can’t not change when the WHY is revealed. And they only ever change or end because either the WHY reveals that they would not have gotten better. Or, they actually get better because the two people are changing things according to reality.
It causes you to make the right decisions for yourself. When you see the truth of your actual WHY, it simplifies things and gives you clarity. And with this, you have a much better idea of what the right thing to decide or do is. Also, it brings clarity about different and better ways to do things.
You know what you need to work on, what your growth path or healing path is and therefore, you are more in alignment with your expansion. When you discover your why, you might find things that no longer benefit you, things like insecurities, limiting beliefs, detrimental patterns, hidden expectations etc. Self-development and figuring out your WHY are a married pair.
You will no longer be confused or in the dark about yourself. So many people, even though they live inside their own skin, are unclear about everything… Why they behave how they behave, why they made certain decisions, why they didn’t do certain things, why certain things didn’t work out in their life, what they really want, what really matters to them, why things turned out a certain way, etc. You will understand yourself and because of it, be able to be in a conscious, healthy relationship with yourself. So, self-awareness and self-love depend on finding out your WHY.
If you want to become conscious, self-aware, authentic, have successful relationships and live the life you want, the bravery you have to have, is to look directly at, and admit to the WHY behind anything you think, say and do. Rather than to tell yourself a positive self-concept inducing story about what you are thinking, saying and doing. You must commit to the practice of diving under the surface over and over again. But doing so, is your ticket to the life you have been looking for.
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