Authenticity in Relationships

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you’re in a grocery store almost going aisle by aisle and section by section with someone else? If they’re not alone, you hear their conversations and their thought processes while selecting their foods, and you get to the checkout line almost feeling like you know them. That happened to us recently, and while I was in the checkout and Greg, my other half, was stopping to pick up some Coho salmon, the couple shopping along side us felt the need to compliment Greg on how kindly we talked to each other. He joked, “You must’ve caught us on a good day.”

When I met Greg in 1999, I was 19 and he was 24. When we went on our first date I remember being very careful about what I said to him because I only wanted him to know the facet of myself that I thought was acceptable to this man. In my mind, I had ideas of how I should be in a new relationship, and I didn’t feel like I could show him all the sides of me until we spent more time together. I couldn’t tell him things like “Oh, my dad has bi-polar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia” or “I see dead people” because I was afraid of the heaviness that would bring to a budding relationship. I didn’t want to freak him out, so I just kept most of it to myself.

Because of how sweet and chivalrous he was during the first six months of our relationship, I suspect he was also giving me what he thought I wanted. HA!

After a few years of marriage, and after immersing each other into our complete personalities, things started to get strained – mostly for me. The way we individually thought we should be didn’t resonate well with what the other person thought. My anger and resentment started to pile up, and soon we found ourselves in couple’s therapy.

Our counselor’s name was Beth Spring, and she was such a sweet, nurturing, and accepting person. She was an excellent listener, and in our first few sessions, she gave us some homework. We each received a piece of paper on which we needed to create our family tree (grandparents down), and then mark out areas of conflict. The exercise helped us deeply explore the dynamics in families and learn about relationships and roles.

I had no idea how many relationships were in my immediate family (let alone how many conflicts we had). For instance, I had a relationship with my mom, a separate way of relating to my mom and dad together, one with my sister Gina, one with my sister Annie, but a different relationship when Annie and Gina were together. Then I had one with my mom, dad, Annie and Gina. This is complex stuff!

This same complexity also applies to each member of the family. My mom’s relationship with me was different than her individual relationships with my sisters. She treated each of us differently. This is completely normal too. As the oldest, I had the most responsibilities. I was achievement oriented, and I had a lot of pressure to be great at everything I did. If you read about birth order studies, I’m a typical oldest child. Even now, I work full time, run a small consulting company, sit on a board of directors, raise three kids, and do various other things that nourish my passion for creativity – including writing. Oh, and I also practice Transcendental Meditation for 20 minutes twice a day. 🙂  Typical over achiever.

As Greg and I spent more sessions on relationship roles, I realized that Greg’s female and male role models identified in his family had exceptionally different personality traits than mine did. He acted the way he did because he learned, during his childhood, how a man or woman “should” be based on the behavior modeled by his family. The same was true for me. However, he and I were miles apart on what I should do and what he should do. We weren’t being honest and authentic, and “miles apart” is probably an understatement.

After many years of work, we realized the only way to have a successful relationship is to create our own rules and roles. In my family, it was tradition for the woman to stay home and care for the children, but because I earned more money than Greg, and we wanted one parent at home, we decided he would stay home. While I highly doubt it was a fulfilling career choice for him, he learned a lot of lessons in that experience – and so did I. Although we were openly and publically mocked by my family members about the roles we had established for ourselves, we knew that the agreements we established in our relationship were the right ones for us based on that specific time period in our lives. During those years, I also realized that my family was full of angry, judgmental fools that were more interested in trying to control our marriage while completely oblivious that they were only destroying their relationship with Greg and I as a union. The stronger we got, the more some responded with anger. It got to the point I was getting phone calls strongly suggesting that I should resort to physical violence by attacking Greg because he wasn’t taking more of an active roll in the remodel of our master bathroom. Needless to say, I don’t talk to that person anymore.

Today, I see our relationship as highly evolved and based strongly on our own spiritual growth as individuals who make a daily, conscious decision to be together. Conscious relationships focus on authenticity of the individual by forcing each person to own and manage their own baggage. These relationships are about daily, personal, spiritual growth, impersonal and non-attached love, and a commitment to being completely present in the union. Where in the past we spent most of our time in a non-harmonious relationship melody, today we only spend a few moments every couple of days living that way. It’s a better way to live because it frees the mind and spirit, it allows the full spectrum of your identity in this manifestation to be shown, and it supports the practice of unconditional love and acceptance.

Setting romantic relationships aside, the concept of conscious relationships also applies to every relationship you have with your family, friends, children, co-workers, and acquaintances. I’ve personally found that through the practice of authenticity and my desire for only conscious relationships, I’ve become closer to people who are on the same path of spiritual evolution that I am. One day, I cleaned out over 500 “friends” on Facebook knowing they weren’t really my friends. When I do have time to spend with friends, I feel like I’m engaged on a much deeper level. My friendships are significantly more fulfilling than they were before simply because I choose to be authentic and consciously committed.

Now, on the flipside, my authenticity isn’t for everyone. There are quite a few people who have told me they “hate” me. People have tried to control me by sending harassing messages and phone calls. They’ve reached out to family and friends to indirectly harass me – making the circle of chaos much larger. That’s ok that they feel that way, and I completely accept that I’m not for them. I don’t like to be around people who are full of insecurity, hatred, and all of those chaotic feelings because I’m a very sensitive empath, and I have a hard time blocking out that kind of energy. (I’m working on my will, but we’ll talk about that in another post). I personally don’t like being around people who choose to live with a need to control others but not themselves. I don’t like being around people who fester in a constant pool of anger and hatred because of the way it drains my personal physiology and how it affects the collective consciousness of a group. I’m not saying that hatred is good or bad, but I’m saying the frequency at which I resonate is disharmonious with those vibes. When I personally feel hatred, which is absolutely a feeling that I experience, it means I’m disconnected from the Spirit or Source energy from the Divine Infinite – God. That’s not right for me, just as I might not be right for you.

Another thing to remember is that YOU make yourself feel the way you do. You can’t blame anyone else for your unhappiness but yourself. While people might trigger emotions within you, know that you can choose whether or not you will let it affect you. If you are angry, it’s because YOU have chosen to feel anger as a result of something that has happened, and in the same way YOU can choose to feel acceptance. The feeling of anger is coming as a result of your own doing, so flaming that out on others, even the person who triggered you, is a sign that you don’t want to accept responsibility for your own feelings. This was a hard pill for me to swallow, because I wanted to blame Greg for my unhappiness, when really, it was me who was choosing to feel unhappy. Once I realized that I was the one in control of my emotions, feelings, and responses to that external stimuli, the better I became at communicating my emotional needs more clearly. Those communications went from being dysfunctional and chaotic to functional, constructive, and eventually healing. Sometimes we still slip into old patterns of dysfunctional chaos, but practice makes perfect.

I always urge people to be authentic. If being angry is authentic. Be angry. If being sad is authentic be sad. If being happy is authentic. Be happy. If having all these feelings every day separately and together is authentic, do that. However, in your authenticity, don’t forget to be introspective and question yourself. Don’t forget to grow. Don’t forget to evolve. If you don’t like the way you make yourself feel, then stop feeling that way. If you find yourself easily triggered to feel bad, then remove those triggers from your life or set healthy boundaries for yourself.

Ultimately, you are responsible for your life. It doesn’t serve you well to spend your energy trying to control someone else whether it’s a spouse or someone you’ve just met. Work on your authentic self while continuously striving for compassion, love and acceptance. Feel the divine Spirit that connects us all and allow your spiritual inner knowing and intelligence of your body guide you to a place where you feel better. I promise it will be time well spent. Much less exhausting too! 🙂

The Guru Girl

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get Over It

Whenever I hear my family members say or write this in response to reading one of my blogs, I realize why I write in the first place.

The line “get over it” is indicative of the environment in which I was raised – one of chronic and severe invalidation. If I had a different opinion or view of the world than my family, I was shamed and deeply criticized through invalidation. My private childhood experiences were met with erratic, inappropriate, and extreme responses. The experience of my painful emotions were completely dismissed, and I was often told to just “get over it” – just as I continue to be told today.

I actually remember one time that my 16 year old sister was so violently invalidated, that she was actually slammed into a wall by one of my aunts while my mother, grandmother, and another aunt looked on and also invalidated her after the event happened. What was the line?  OH, “I don’t want you girls to sing at my funeral.” Yep. That’s the one.

That takes me to the question I want people to really think about. What does it actually mean to get over something? How do you just get over it?

Well, in a family that constantly invalidates the feelings and emotions of others, it means bury your anger deeply, deny that it happened to you, remain angry inside, don’t talk about it to anyone, and never bring it up again. Sometimes it means you act out by drinking excessively, using drugs, or lashing out at others to the point of complete alienation.

But in order to truly get over something, you need to bring those emotions to the surface, you need to feel them, face them, analyze them, feel them some more, be vulnerable, accept your emotions, and ultimately surrender them. Maybe you’ll even blog about them to help others process their own pain.

Like food, you need to digest feelings. It’s true. Let’s examine that for a minute. When you wake up in the morning, you might feel hungry. Instead of having a light breakfast of some fresh or cooked fruit, cereal, or a broth, you might have a pile of bacon, eggs, hash browns, and pancakes. If you’re eating that pile of food before 10 a.m., your digestive fire isn’t working well enough to break apart all that food. It lies stagnant in your gut, it gets sour, and it actually starts to get rotten and toxic. This toxicity can spill into your blood stream through the tight junctions of your gut, and then create loads of inflammation in your body. Inflammation creates all kinds of diseased states in the body including cancer and chronic inflammatory conditions like MS, lupus, and other not fun stuff.

Invalidation works the same way. Let’s say you get up in the morning, and you didn’t get enough sleep the night before. On your way to the bathroom to pee (and your bladder is spilling into your kidneys), you step on a piece of Lego (besides childbirth and heart attacks, likely the most painful experience known to humans), and you buckle over in pain to soothe the foot that probably has at least a 3 inch deep hole in it. Someone shouts at you, “Man up you little bitch! It’s just a Lego! Get over it!” (If you’re a man, I just emasculated you on top of invalidating your pain. If you’re a woman, I probably just offended the hell out of you.)

Wow. That really hurts. Not only did you have to get up too early, but you’re in a state of total renal congestion, just stepped on Lego, and now someone tells you to “man up.” Seriously?

Next you rub out your foot, take your morning pee, and on your drive to work, you’re totally consumed with angry thoughts about the “man up” comment. You’re unable to be present with the drive because the thoughts are consuming your conscious awareness. Someone stops short, you slam on your breaks, and now you’re mad at the driver in front of you for being an asshole driver.

Because you know it’s really your fault for not paying attention, you take the “man up” comment and you bury it. In order for you to safely drive the car, you need to focus on the road, and that means to also control your thoughts.

Because your body is in a state where it’s unable to process those emotions, it festers – just like the big breakfast too early in the morning. Your body doesn’t like anything that festers, so it stores it in your body, and often surrounds it with fat (the way the body protects itself). If you’ve ever had a broken heart, you know that love can cause physiological changes to your heart – that’s where that distress is buried. It’s actually theorized in Eastern medicine that undigested emotions and broken hearts lead to heart disease, lung problems, and breast cancer.

If you’re carrying around too much weight try this: eat your largest meal of the day at noon when your digestive fire is at its peak and call a therapist who can help you confront and healthfully digest old emotional baggage. I’m confident you’ll see the scale move in a healthier direction.

…and because I’m such a big fan of Transcendental Meditation, I highly recommend that as well!

If you saw pictures of people in my family, you’d probably see a few things in common – obesity and chronic illness. If you read any of their posts on Facebook, listened to phone conversations, or read their emails, you might also see something in common – chronic invalidation. Some of it is actually full of nastiness and hate.

So the next time one of my family members tells me to stop writing blogs because they think I need to “get over it,” maybe I need to gently label their behavior as invalidation, suggest a diet change, and about 6 months of DBT with a good therapist. Then, I’m sure they’ll be able to get over it themselves.

In the meantime, I’ll remain being over it. It takes great strength to write these blogs in the face of familial resistance. However, people like my soul sister Amina (LOVE YOU GIRL!!) and others have found these to be therapeutic because they recognize their own experiences in mine. Sometimes we need a spark to start us on our journey, and sometimes you get to travel with a great group of people who all seek the same release from this toxic, emotional baggage.

That’s why I do this. I’ll never tell you to get over it, because it’s time someone breaks the cycle. Instead, I’ll offer this:

I’m sorry that you don’t like what I’m writing. I’m sorry if it makes you relive your own experiences that you have buried. I’m sorry if this blog triggers feelings within you of anger, resentment, or your own memories of emotional pain. I know you are a strong person and have the ability to work through those issues in a healthy, positive, and functional way. However, please know that writing this blog is my mission and my duty. It’s what I have spiritually been called to do. Please respect my boundaries as an adult even though you didn’t respect them when I was a child. Know that I’m writing out of goodness and with an open heart.

With all my love,

The Guru Girl

 

 

 

 

 

Love – Unconditionally

What’s the hardest thing anyone can ever do? Love, unconditionally.

We use the word “love” pretty loosely in our society. I love salted caramel gelato. I love her dress. I love this sunset. But all of these statements describe conditional love. Conditional love describes love of something only if it selfishly pleases me. This week I’ve heard religious people say, “we love, serve and pray for our enemies,” but go on to tell me the answer is to kill them. Well, that’s not love either. You can’t possibly be unconditionally loving your enemies if you seek to kill them. That definition of love is conditional. “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” Well, that statement is about conditional love too. When we say that, we’re basically saying, “I love you only if you act a certain way, otherwise I will hate part of you – the part that is doing something that I hate.” Why can’t we just stop at “love the sinner?” Period. The rest of that phrase is just putting a condition on your love.

There are a lot of things that I have hated in my life. I was mistreated and abused by many people throughout my life. Most of the people who abused me were supposed to love and protect me. I hated them. I hated what they did to me. I hated how I felt about myself when these things happened. Then one day my eyes opened – I realized I hated and I was hating. The fact that I was hating people and things just made me a hater too, and I was hating because people were hating me. Funny how that works, right? I was desperately lost in a cycle of hate, and I didn’t even know it.

Hate is not such a horrible thing to experience, because you don’t know what true, unconditional love is unless you know what hate is. Hate is usually caused by fear. Hate is often the result of something making you feel unsafe. It can be in a family, social, or emotional setting. You experience fear when something doesn’t resonate with what you’re programmed to believe is “good” and “right,” so when people act a different way than you want, you contract back into your corner and hate it. It scares you. For instance, when we see someone doing something we consider “bad,” we fear the consequences for ourselves, we label it as a “sin,” and then we hiss and spit in the corner. Pointing. Judging. And that makes us no better than the person who is triggering that emotion within ourselves.

But I’ve come to know and experience that acceptance and love of these things that we fear is incredibly freeing. The only person who suffers is the one who hates. That lack of love, and that paralysis of fear eats you from the inside. It destroys your ability to be the best version of yourself. If you’re spending your time pointing fingers at people and telling them all the things you hate about them and want to change – that’s not going to change them. It will, however, harden and color your own heart. You stain yourself when you do that.

Isn’t it better then, to stop judging things as good or bad? Isn’t it better to stop labeling things as “sin,” and instead realize that there are things that feel better to us than others? Once you do that, you can open your heart and learn to love people right where they are – not where you want them to be. You also come to a place of understanding why people do the things they do. Stress and trauma create a diseased mental and emotional environment, and people unconsciously make decisions to diffuse their own anger. That includes both the “judger” and the “sinner,” who are really very much the same. Those people just lack love, despite what they preach, and oftentimes they haven’t been privileged to receive unconditional love. They learned this behavior by receiving conditional love: I’ll love you if you look or act a certain way or make me look a certain way. Sometimes these people grow up in a world of violence and never experienced love at all – conditional or unconditional. Sad, right?

Under all that stress, and under all that judgement in EVERY HUMAN  lies the pure innocent state of being. It’s the state of being when we were born. The one that looks into our mother’s eyes and into her soul and loves – unconditionally. Do you remember that? Can you imagine it for a moment?

…and if you can, for a moment, think about what you hate the most, and then open your heart and love that thing or person unconditionally, your life will begin to transform. Love by understanding, empathizing, and feeling deeply. Love with wild abandon. Turn your hate into acceptance.  Accept and love things as they are.

Changing the way you love will literally change your life.  Let’s stop and contemplate that for a moment. Let’s try to be present when we start experiencing fear and hate, and during that process of understanding, let’s shine a spotlight of love – the unconditional kind – on whatever we’re wrapped up in. It’s sooooooooo hard. You’ll feel the layers of hate and fear cracking on the facade of your heart. It hurts. Your heart has been bound up with these conditional fallacies for so long. But I promise you, this practice will just continue to make you a better and better person.

…so, to wrap this up, I want to leave you with a quote from my favorite poet, Rumi:

“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”