I like to consider myself a reasonably dedicated person. I make a commitment, I follow it through. There are sometimes mitigating circumstances to this. I don’t generally prefer to rely on others in my commitments, since I tend to find that others not only don’t always fulfill their commitments, but sometimes they fulfill them halfway or worse – they never intended on fulfilling the promise they made to begin with.
Energetic compensation isn’t something that I’m very good at.
I pour myself all in to everything I do, so I prefer that the people around me do that as well. I hate being disappointed and it becomes exceedingly frustrating when I feel as though I’ve done everything I possibly can and someone else has not only not done the same – but the opposite.When I feel that my effort has been disrespected, discounted or treated with disregard, it’s staggering for me. It hurts. But in particular, broken promises and lies are at the top of the list.
We operate in this life based on assumptions. That we can count on the people that tell us things, because that’s how we make our decision. And when we can’t do that – there are too many variables for potential realities and when you’re someone that’s pretty obsessed with maintaining harmony in yourself and the world around you, you can see why this could become a problem.
Whether we like it or not, we are a product of our experiences in our life and our childhood – and I’m no exception.
I’ll take you back with me, we’ll unpack it and maybe it’ll help me heal.
Picture a home. It looks like a normal middle class home – except when you go inside that’s not the case. There’s broken plates and stuff strewn everywhere.
Once again, as almost always, there’s screaming.
4 year old me is sitting up in a shelf inside my closet, trying to distract myself. This was usually accomplished by doodling on the wall with a pen. There’s not a lot I remember from my childhood before my father took his life, but that closet space is one of them. I’d climb up onto the highest shelf and into a little nook with all my stuffed animals. It was my safe place to escape from a volatile world that I had very little control over.
But in some of their particularly awful fights, there came a time when my mom would come looking for us. She’d have clothes still on the hangers in her arms and she’d tell us to get in the car.
We were leaving.
I don’t know how often this happened, but I remember it happening very distinctly.
I like control in my life.
I like to know that the people I think I can count on are going to do the things they say. Volatility scares me. But the universe wants me to grow. It wants me to elevate beyond any conditioned behavior, practice non-attachment and learn to flow. So, accordingly it has presented me with this challenge in the form of Soul Contracts.
It’s difficult for me to process the fact that I internalized some of my definition of love from those earliest moments of watching my parents interact. But I do know that the screaming always stopped when we left. That in the car, watching the streetlights pass by one by one, late at night – that there was peace.
So, maybe that’s why I bail.
I always try to take in all the possible information in a situation and I do everything I possibly can to assess that situation and avoid any sort of hurt that can come from it.
I over analyze, I over-discuss, I ask too many questions and from the get go I need to know the end game. Maybe that’s why when someone betrays me or breaks a promise, or tells a lie that I somehow missed; it makes me so upset. Because in my head I’ve done all of the diligence to conceive every possible scenario and they STILL got me.
You have to know the variables to draw the conclusion, don’t you?
Sometimes I attempt to bail because I need harmony in my life. I bail because I seek peace. The discomfort of not being able to control the way that someone impacts my feelings is sometimes too much for me. I have to leave to make the pain go away.
But maybe sitting through it is the growth spot.
Maybe allowing what is going to be, just be, even when it hurts is the way to do it.
I just don’t know how yet.
I don’t know how to allow things to just be.
I don’t know how to sit comfortably with peace.
I don’t have my closet anymore, so I have to push away the people that hurt me so I don’t have to worry about.
Or I push away the ones that are in it before they have the opportunity to blindside me.
I have to have a game plan.
I have to go within.
I have to shove myself into those tiny boxes of what I think people want so that I can avoid pain.
Slowly, though, I’m learning.
Maybe there’s another way.
Unpacking why you do the things you do is pretty critical. But change goes beyond understanding that.
For real, sustained change, you have to recondition your mind to operate differently when those situations arise.
THAT’S what I’m learning right now.
And that’s pretty fucking difficult thing.
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