Disapproval

Having others disapprove of us can be a painful experience that sticks in our mind and heart for years. If it’s a repeated experience in early childhood, it doesn’t take long for us to adopt the mental behavior of disapproving of ourselves. When we grow up and no longer have the people around who used to disapprove of us we still feel the effects because we have taken their place.

The message is that we’re not good enough. We feel rejected, unworthy, unloved. People tend to go in one of two directions from this point. The most common is people-pleasing and perfectionism. The other is to become so defensive as to be angry, aggressive, hurting and rejecting others before they get a chance to do it to you.

I took the first route. I did everything I thought would please my parents, then my employer and my husband. When it wasn’t good enough, I tried harder, pushed myself more, and even compromised my health. It was rarely enough.

Its not that the people in my life didn’t approve of me. I didn’t feel accepted or worthy because I was still listening to the old program running in my subconscious mind. I was the only one, in most cases, telling me that I wasn’t good enough. It was my own judgment that was hurting me, not anyone else’s.

A trip down memory lane gave me all the evidence I needed to see that the belief that I am not good enough was simply not true. That was all it took to begin clearing the belief and the effects of it. The best part is that now that I approve of myself, I don’t need to work for the approval of others. What a wonderful sense of freedom that brings!

Getting Permission

Who do you need permission from to be happy? It sounds like a silly question to ask an adult, but most of us are still waiting for permission to live the life we want to live. It may be that we think society won’t accept our vision or that close friends or family members might ridicule our ideas. We’re so conditioned to want to be acceptable to others that we often deny our hearts desires for the sake of approval.

When I was a child, I needed my parents’ permission for everything. One thing that made them very unhappy was spontaneous expressions of joy or love. They didn’t like children without emotional or behavioral restraint. There were certain times and places when it was ok, like showing our gratitude for gifts or showing their friends how much we loved and respected our parents. Then we had permission to be happy.

As I grew up, I needed permission from teachers, employers, and even friends. Even close friends could reject you for not behaving according to their expectations or for dreaming what they deemed ridiculous dreams. I learned to want what other people expected me to want and believe as others expected me to. The need for approval kept me seeking permission for my desires, dreams, emotions, and even happiness itself.

What I’ve learned in recent years is that not only do I not need anyone’s permission to be happy, but that I am the only one who can give me permission. No matter what anyone else says or does, I will only allow myself to be happy when I decide that its ok for me to be happy. The same is true for every other desire that my heart entertains. What I can be, do, or have is entirely up to me. No one else has the power to make me unworthy of anything or the right to judge my desires in any way. They don’t have to. I’ve been doing it myself for years.

What is it that you really want to experience but don’t? If you look within, you’ll find that only you deny what you desire. We all hold beliefs about what we’re capable of, what we desire, and what’s acceptable. It may be time to change some of them. We all deserve happiness and we all have the power to choose and claim it for ourselves. Go ahead, give yourself permission right now!

Recovering from Obligation

I am not responsible for the happiness of others. Neither are you. Its not my job to make other people happy. Its not yours either. We can’t make other people happy. We also can’t make them heal, grow, or feel any particular feelings toward us. So, why do we feel obligated to do so?

We’ve been taught that how other people feel, particularly how they feel about us, is a direct result of our behavior. That implies that we are responsible for other people’s feelings. We’ve been taught that a “good” person is considerate of others to the extent that they control their behavior so its pleasing to others. We want to be a “good person” so we feel obligated to perform in the way that others expect or demand, in a way that makes them happy.

No one on earth can fulfill such an obligation. It boggles the mind to think of all the frustration and self-judgment we’ve laid on ourselves by believing that we have to make other people happy. I know for me that it meant feeling, and proving, not good enough over and over again. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times that I have failed to make another person happy. The good news is that I don’t have to. It was never my responsibility. I was never obligated to modify my behavior to please someone else.

One of the most painful experiences I’ve had has been denying my soul’s yearning because it made someone else uncomfortable. Doing it over and over again made me feel like who I am inside, the real me, was dying, and it was all because of my mistaken belief that marriage obligated me to please my husband. The result was that neither one of us knew who I really am, and neither one of us was happy. When I finally stopped compromising my inner being for the sake of his happiness, our marriage ended but my sense of purpose began.

Not taking on the responsibility for other people’s happiness, or the obligation to please them, frees us to be more of who we are. It also releases a lot of tension in our relatinoships. The fact is that we don’t have the right to assume responsibility for anyone else’s state of mind or heart. Thoughts and feelings are a personal choice that we each make, consciously or unconsciously. To try to manipulate another’s emotions or thoughts is to violate them, even if in a subtle way. So drop the sense of obligation to behave or be a certain way to please others. Its not your job.

Resistance to Forgiveness

Forgiveness can be a tough issue, especially for those who have suffered some kind of abuse, but if we don’t forgive, we don’t heal. It’s that simple. Forgiveness is absolutely essential to our own healing, and peace.

Like many people, I made the choice to forgive but didn’t really feels the effects of it. I still had resentments and anger. I used different prayers, wrote intentions, and affirmed that I was forgiving everyone. Then I discovered what was preventing what I really wanted to achieve. Deep down, I was unwilling to forgive and let go of all the hurt.

Willingness opens doors for us to healing, peace, and a whole new way of experiencing life. If we are willing, the process of forgiveness begins. Its our choice to hold on or let go. Unfortunately, that choice is often made deep in the subconscious mind. We can change our unconscious choices, if we are willing to clear and release all the emotions that we have blocked and clung to.

The first step for me was to decide that I want to be willing, not only to forgive, but to allow the clearing process to move through me. It wasn’t as easy as you’d think. Part of me didn’t want to let go. Part of me still identified itself by the abuse I experienced and all the justifiable negative emotions that grew from it. That part of me didn’t want to let go of the very things it used to identify itself. That was the victim, the aspect of me that defines who it is and how life works by the fact that I had been abused in my past.

I don’t want to be a victim any more. I don’t want that for my identity, my sense of self. Unforgiveness keeps us in the victim role. It says that someone else did something to us, they hurt us, and its all their fault. Choosing to let go of the victim identity and choosing to forgive go hand in hand. When I decided to be willing to forgive, I also reinforced my decision not to be a victim any more.

I stated my desire to be willing to myself and to God/Source/Spirit. After a few days, I could honestly say that I AM willing to forgive. That opened the door for a lot of healing to occur. I declared my willingness to let go of all unforgiveness. Lots of memories came to mind over the next several days, each with a new look and feel to them. The emotional sting was gone. I could look at everything objectively and not feel like a victim.

If you have trouble forgiving, decide to be willing to forgive. Decide that you want to release all unwillingness. Then open to allow the healing to begin.

Remembering Jackie

My name is Jacqueline. That’s how I introduce myself, sign things, and expect to be referred to. For years, I would get absolutely irate, and insulted, when someone called me Jackie. It’s not like that any more, but I still don’t like it. It makes me feel very uncomfortable, diminished.

When I was a kid, everyone called me Jackie. It was when I divorced my first husband that I decided that I wanted to be called by my full name. It made me feel more grown up, and I was sick of being treated like a kid. I always looked much younger than I was, which didn’t help. Being called by a mature-sounding name made me feel less like an incompetent, incapable kid.

Now that I’m ready and willing to look honestly at my beliefs and programs, it’s time to address the toughest, most persistent antagonist in my consciousness. It’s time to talk to Jackie. Ick! It’s hard just to say that name! It makes my skin crawl and my solar plexus contract. I feel small, insignificant, unworthy, and just generally yucky.

If that doesn’t tell me there’s healing needed, I don’t know what would. Jackie was a weak, frightened, painfully shy girl who messed up everything, failed at everything, and was not good enough at anything. Rejected, denied, always in trouble, picked on mercilessly, unable to defend herself. Jackie was a miserable child. She didn’t want to be here, and no one else wanted her here either. That’s why I didn’t want to be her any more.

Denying and rejecting Jackie did not set me free. It imprisoned us both in the nightmare that was my childhood. Neither one of us had a chance to grow up, or to heal. Changing my name was a way of running away from the past, but it didn’t work. It never does. I tried physically running away many times, too. I’ve lost count of how many places I’ve lived. Making a fresh start always felt good in the beginning, but it never lasted. Wherever I went, I took me with me.

I’ve begun looking at the girl I was and all the feelings that I buried or denied along with her. There is far more yet to uncover than what I now see. Most of my childhood is still a blank. When I ran away from who I was I hid the past and all its emotions as deep in my subconscious as I possibly could. The road to my memories is as dark and uncertain as an abandoned mine shaft. Like the mine, I know there are treasures buried in the dark recesses of my subconscious. It’s just going to take some digging to find them.

Displaced Anger

I’ve been working for some time to discover the root cause of the feelings I have toward my daughter, that I really don’t want to have. I realized that when my daughter is mean to my son or belittles him, it activates in me the emotional reaction from all the years of my older sister and both of my brothers being mean, cruel, and insulting to me. My daughter is not nearly as rude or mean to my son as my siblings were to me, but what I react to is not what she’s doing; it’s what my siblings did to me.

When it happens, I feel hate toward her because she is the present form of my sister and brothers. I hate them through her. All the years that I tried to forgive and forget I was just burying my feelings, rejecting them, denying them, feeling guilty for them. I judged my feelings as bad and would not allow myself to accept or feel all my anger, let alone express it. Suppression stoked the fire of anger until it grew into hate. Hate is something I was told was wrong, even evil. Feeling hatred meant I was a bad person. I had to deny that I felt it in order to be Ok with myself.

I didn’t know I had this anger, this hatred, hiding within me, but it’s been haunting me for years. The more I think about it, when ever I’ve seen someone being mistreated or taken advantage of, my emotional reaction has been disproportionate to what was going on. I would immediately see the person as a helpless child who needed defending against the bully. It was me standing up for the child I was, making up for not being able to stand up for myself back then. It was an opportunity to tell my sister and brothers that they can’t treat me that way, only it wasn’t really me being mistreated and it wasn’t my siblings being mean. It was life demonstrating for me the feelings and conflict that were still going on inside me, in the hidden corners of the darkest recesses of my mind.

Its like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that I experienced when my boyfriend almost killed me. In a split second, all the memories and fear of my abusive marriage appeared in my mind as present and real. My mind and body reacted to the full onslaught of 2 years of abuse in the present moment situation with my boyfriend. It saved my life, and probably scared him enough to never lay a hand on a woman again. It’s a more dramatic example, but it’s the same thing that we do all the time. We react to present circumstances from the unresolved emotional pain of the past.

Facing the Truth

One of the toughest realizations to accept was the fact that I believe that I deserve to be punished. Its ridiculous. No one deserves to be punished. Its not a truth, but it is a belief, and I can’t change it until I accept that its there. When I first saw it in me, my reaction was anger and defensiveness. That’s a pretty good indication that I’ve struck a nerve, and a belief that is still active in me.

Louise Hay, in “You Can Heal Your Life,” discusses the subconscious belief that we deserve to be punished. She says that physical pain, including disease and even accidents, is an outer demonstration of that belief. That means that when I got hit by a car on my bicycle, I created it because I believed I deserved to be punished. I had made some pretty big mistakes and poor choices in the months before the “accident.” My mother certainly did not hesitate to point them all out to me. Maybe Louise was right and I did create the pain because deep down I was still operating on my parents’ old conditioning that if I made mistakes, I deserved to be punished.

Well, I’m not a child any more. I don’t need my parents telling me when I’ve made a mistake. I do that quite well enough on my own, and that’s the problem. My parents may not be here now, but all of their conditioning is. Their condemning voice has been replaced with my own. With all the work I’ve done on self-love, it was really hard to accept that underneath it all lay core beliefs of pure poison. I still have seen myself as a weak, failing, not good enough child, and I’ve acted toward myself as a less than loving parent.

The hardest thing about healing the past is looking at it without reliving it, yet without blocking our emotions. I’ve blocked my emotions, or denied them altogether, for my entire life. When I became willing to look at the past AND open my heart to feel, a rush of emotions poured through me. I was stunned by how much sadness had been buried inside. As the tears flowed and my heart swelled, I felt a strange sensation. It was like taking a shower on the inside. Letting my feelings flow through my heart was cleansing me, and the feelings were being released. Strangely, the sadness didn’t hurt. It actually felt good to finally let it out. It was holding it in for so long that caused pain.

Holding On, Held Back

I remember a line somewhere that said, “You have to let go of what’s in your hands to receive something new.” What we’re holding onto though, is usually not in our hands; its in our mind.

As children, we adopted beliefs and patterns of reaction to create or preserve a sense of safety. That’s natural, but what isn’t natural is continuing to live by them once we’ve grown into adulthood. Unfortunately, most of us did not have parents who knew how to teach us evolving coping skills as we grew. The result is functioning in an adult world with the fears, beliefs, and reactions of a child.

My intention is to remember the truth of who I am and live from that, letting go of all the false beliefs and unrealistic fears that have created a less than satisfactory life. I have a vision of my ideal life and the me that fits into that life, but it hasn’t manifested because I’m still functioning from old programming. That’s what I need to let go of. All those old programs are holding me back only because I am still holding onto them.

Letting go of old beliefs and programs requires that we take an honest look at what those beliefs are and where they came from. It means looking into the past. I resisted that for a long time because a lot of hurt and fear was buried there, in shadows that I ran from a long time ago. Like many people, I had to get to a point of desperate frustration before I was willing to do what I most resisted.

Willingness opened the door for me to the roots of my beliefs and limiting programs. When I set the intention to discover my limiting beliefs, I expressed willingness to see the truth. My dreams revealed some of it, but most of my insights came from working through the issues in my life that demonstrate the unwanted beliefs. It’s kind of like tracing a maze from the finish line to the start line. I found the beginning of my beliefs by starting with the end result of them.

Some of the things I’ve held onto without realizing it are disappointment, negative expectations, fear, guilt, pain … yes, pain. Even though I have a great pain avoidance program, I’ve held onto pain because it was part of my perceived identity. Who we think we are is often the biggest single obstacle to living the life we dream of. Our identity is how we define ourselves, and how we define ourselves determines how we experience life. I intend to let go of who I think I am so that I may live the truth of who I am.

Denied Emotions

Once we become willing to see the truth of our past, it's amazing what revelations come. This post is about what happened when I committed to accepting my emotions and looking at my memories objectively.

What feelings did I have as a child that I was afraid or ashamed to express?
What emotions did I feel guilty about having?
What feelings did I decide I didn’t want to feel?

Anger-I was told I didn’t have the right to feel angry, hatred-only bad people felt hate, resentment-whatever happened to us, we deserved, pleasure-physical pleasure was said to be evil & selfish, desire…..

Whoa! That’s a surprise! Desire is one of the emotions I shut down as a child. Why? I decided as a child not to want things because I couldn’t bear the constant disappointment of not getting what I wanted. Every Christmas or birthday, my mother told us to make a list of what we wanted. Then they made sure they bought things that were NOT on the list. To them, it was how they kept it a surprise. To us, it was a lesson in disappointment, in life never giving us what we really want. I decided not to desire things, or to dream. My parents smashed all my dreams and it hurt, so I just decided not to dream. I learned to make the best of what ever showed up, to settle, and tell myself I should be grateful for what I got instead of wanting something else. Not being happy with what we got brought the dreaded, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Happiness was dangerous because it felt so good and made me more bold. That boldness always got me yelled at or punished and the happiness was always destroyed one way or another. To avoid the crash when that happened, I just didn’t allow myself to get too happy.

Hope was necessary for survival, but all I hear in my head right now is, “Don’t get your hopes up.” My parents firmly planted the expectation of hopes being vain wishful thinking that would always lead to disappointment.

There are three things I realize. The first is why I was always so sad as a child. The second is that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. I used to think there must have been something wrong with me to be so depressed and fearful from a very young age. Now I see that it was a perfectly natural response to my environment. There was nothing wrong with me.

The third realization is why it’s been so difficult for me to visualize, to dream, and to set inspiring goals. The subconscious expectation of disappointment sets in motion a pain-avoidance response. I have been afraid to dream. The more strongly I’ve wanted something in my life, the stronger the expectation has been for disappointment. It is my subconscious expectations that have created my reality.

Rising from Ashes: Healing the Battered Heart

The most powerful moment in my life was when I decided to stop living as a victim and do whatever it took to heal everything in me that was creating that reality. It’s been a long road, but worth every step. Today, I am closer to the woman I was made to be than I have ever been in my life. When I look back at who I used to be, I can hardly believe it was me.

Writing my new ebook, Rising from Ashes, is something I resisted for a long time. I really didn’t want to think and write about all the awful things that happened in the past. I’m glad I did. Fresh insights and deeper understanding were byproducts of the writing. Telling my story is important because it shows my humanness, my weakness, and the process of coming into my strength.

It is my sincere hope that the processes I used to heal my heart, my past, and my life will work for others, too. While the book begins with my experiences of abuse, it is enlightening to anyone who has gone through life as a victim of circumstances, feeling anything but powerful or purposeful. None of us were created to be helpless, hopeless, or powerless. We are divine beings, here to fulfill a divine purpose. We were created magnificent, and we can live magnificent lives.

“Rising from Ashes: Healing the Battered Heart” is available right here through PayPal. You will receive your copy by email within 24 hours.

Incomplete?!

As you may have guessed from the fact that I’ve been married 3 times, I like being in a relationship. Even when my first and second marriages failed, I still believed in that happily-ever-after with the love of my life. I’ve seen it in other couples. I know it’s real, and I wanted it.

Well, I’ve been single again now for over a year. The marriage was actually over 2 years ago, and that’s when my husband started going out with his girlfriend, but I’ve been without a man in my house, my bed, or my life for a year and 4 months. I plan to keep it that way for a while, at least a few years. At this point in my life, I don’t want to be in a relationship with a man. My life is busy, full, and interesting without one.

The reason I bring this up is that people seem to think I’m supposed to be lonely and looking for the next Mr. Right. Being single for a man means he’s independent. Being single for a woman means there’s something wrong with her. Excuse me?! Ok, I’ll admit it; I used to feel like something was missing if there wasn’t a man in my life. Being in love feels wonderful and sharing my life with someone was nice. It was good to have an adult at home to talk to about grown-up things. The grown-up fringe benefits were nice, too!

I know for a long time I felt incomplete without a man because I felt incomplete. Period. It wasn’t about whether or not there was someone there. I just felt incomplete, and tried to fill the void with another person. As I’ve turned my attention within and healed myself, that’s changed. I’m a whole person regardless of who is or isn’t in my life. I like being alone now because I feel good about who I am.

A lot of woman are afraid to be alone, for a variety of reasons. We may think it’s because we can’t make it financially, or we want the emotional bond, but it more often than not comes down to feeling incomplete. Wholeness is our natural state, but we don’t feel it if we have unattended wounds. We also live in a world where women are expected to need and want a husband. It’s our role in life. We’re supposed to be a wife and mother. Socially, we’ve been trained to see that as our purpose for existing.

The truth is that women have a lot to contribute to this world beyond cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Our value reaches far beyond the home. As much as we may enjoy being in partnership with a man, we don’t need a man to be complete. God never made anything that wasn’t whole and complete.

I’m single, and I am complete.