Growing Out of Codependency

Growing Out of Codependency

Are you feeling helpless in your relationship? Do you feel dependent on others and constantly seek their approval that you have lost confidence and trust in yourself? And life feels like a journey where you give a lot but receive little in return?

This was the story for VijayaSree before she joined the Emotional Mastery Program. 

She was struggling with codependency. Understanding how relationships work and creating healthy ones was a breakthrough for her. Now she has not only transformed her life and her relationships, but she is also able to help others navigate their way in similar situations.

Let’s take a closer look at codependency and the tools we can use to grow out of it.

Codependency

Codependency is excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner. The signs of this behavior include difficulty communicating and making decisions in relationships, difficulty in identifying one’s own feelings, and having poor self-esteem from lack of trust in oneself while constantly seeking approval from others.

We all experience some form of codependency in different phases of our lives. Rather than judging this as good or bad, it is better to understand how relationships work and what tools we can use to reframe and develop healthy connections.

Understanding Relationships

Relationships are key to our well-being. When we understand how they work we are able to intentionally choose and grow them. When we don’t understand how relationships happen, how they function, and how they develop, we can easily fall into a state of trance.

Then we feel powerless, victimized, and helpless. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“I had been in toxic relationships for quite a while and it was hard for me to really get out of that pattern. There were dynamics that I could not understand. I was repeating the same mistakes again and again,” recalls VijayaShree.

Through the Emotional Mastery Program, she learned how relationships are created and how to set healthy changes in motion, allowing her to break free from destructive partnerships and develop healthy ones.

We all function differently because we have diverse mindsets, experiences, needs, and priorities. Understanding this is vital in all relationships.

“We have different versions of reality playing in our heads. Understanding this has allowed me to develop compassion towards myself, others, and all of humanity,” says VijayaSree.

She now sees reality and relationships beyond right and wrong. Making sure we are respectful of one another because we have different ways of functioning is more important to her. This awareness has allowed her to cultivate better relationships.

Once we have this understanding, we can be intentional about our relationships and set boundaries accordingly.

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Being Intentional & Setting Boundaries

Intentions direct us while boundaries safeguard us in our path of developing healthy relationships. Without intentions and boundaries, we can feel lost and powerless. 

VijayaSree learned that having clear intentions and setting boundaries were crucial in balancing the acts of giving and receiving in her relationships. “This has been a game-changer,” she says. 

“I would give everything to the other person and think I deserve very little. And this completely changed when I understood that this was just a misconception that I had about me based on life experiences when growing up,” she adds.

With clear intentions and safe boundaries, she now feels she has earned the love and respect she wants while also being able to give. 

“Before doing the Emotional Mastery course, I had a huge lack of self-esteem. I didn’t know how to respect myself. Therefore, I didn’t know how to be respected by others, and I didn’t know how to breed safe relationships.”

“And that really changed everything about how I see myself, how I feel about myself, how much I love myself now…how much I care for my own emotions and my own needs while being respected by others because I am very clear and concise about what I need, how I may need it, and to accept it as well, which was also a challenge,” she reflects.

When we understand how relationships work, become intentional, and set boundaries, we can further expand our own gift of understanding, love, and compassion to our families, communities, and beyond. 

Moving Forward

When we pull ourselves out of codependency, we experience a more compassionate and richer reality. Else, we end up living in a blurry reality where we don’t understand how relationships work and don’t have the tools to change them. 

When we understand relationships and use the right tools, our relationships blossom, and we experience growth in both giving and receiving. 

Two years after taking the Emotional Mastery Program, VijayaSree now feels a complete transformation in herself and her relationships. 

Previously she felt like she gave a lot but did not know how to ask and receive. Asking for anything would hurt her self-esteem. She felt she deserve little.

This course helped her see the misconceptions she had formed based on her past experiences. Now she is no longer tied to her past. She is now clear and concise about her needs, able to set healthy boundaries, and expresses them.

These tools and techniques have helped her develop meaningful relationships and self-esteem. In addition, she is also able to offer a helping hand to those in need.

“I am able to feel the healthy changes happening to myself and also able to help others,” she says.  

Breaking Free: Moving Beyond Our Addictive Patterns

Breaking Free: Moving Beyond Our Addictive Patterns

It’s not what happened to you as a child that makes you feel bad – it’s the loss of connection to your authentic self. Dr Gabor Maté gives a talk which mixes a pragmatic appreciation for reality with a genuine and grounded hope for recovery.

You can be addicted to just about anything – as spiritual teachers have pointed out, wanting is part of the structure of the egoic mind. An unsupportive childhood environment creates an internal emptiness, which the egoic mind tries to fill by obtaining the things it wants. But these things can never fill the void of disconnection from our authentic self.

And the culture most of us were raised in is inherently unsupportive of the needs of small children. “The very culture that we live in denies that there’s truth, makes people hungry, hurts people, leaves them isolated, therefore empty, therefore wanting satisfaction from the outside, therefore addicted, and then it creates all these products, and all these activities, and all these cultural diversions to fill the very emptiness that it creates. And then they say, ‘Selfishness is the nature of human beings.’ And there’s the complete circle of the ideology.” 47:25

With his trademark humour and personal examples, Dr Maté offers “clues” – pointers to the pathway out of addictive patterns, and back to peace.

To find out more about the pathway to emotional peace, check out the Emotional Mastery group and 1-1 coaching programs.

For instant relief from painful or intense emotions, sign up now to receive our science-based, practical Emotional First Aid course – completely free!

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Learn how to immediately interrupt disturbing thoughts and sensations, calm the nervous system, and return to normal, balanced functioning.

Your Partner Is Not Your Therapist

Your Partner Is Not Your Therapist

love-couple-young-teens-outside-moment-emotionsNobody emerges from childhood completely unscathed. Intimate relationships can be a wonderful container in which childhood wounds and sorrows come to light, are met and held with love, and release their power to cause us pain.

However, when childhood wounds are deep and serious, or when there is a trauma response, it is not reasonable to expect a partner to have the skills and emotional resilience to give us everything we need to heal. Serious wounds require serious treatment and rehabilitation.

Warning Signs of Serious Childhood Injury

How can we know whether our emotional baggage is too much for a partner to carry?

The problem for most people is that we grow up thinking that whatever we experienced as a child is normal. It can take outside input to open our eyes to the possibility that our childhood had some problems, and that we may have some unhealthy coping strategies as a result.

Here are some clues to look for, in ourselves and our close friends, family, and partners.

Relationship Anxiety

Needing constant reassurance, finding separations unbearable, anxiously watching for return text messages, intense fear of abandonment, possessiveness and jealousy, trying to control partners, especially in how close they are to other people emotionally.

aloneAvoidance or Extreme Detachment

Feeling uncomfortable, even “invaded”, when relationships become emotionally intimate, avoiding sex and intimacy, keeping emotions out of sexual relationships, pushing friends and partners away when upset, reacting to uncomfortable situations in relationships by withdrawing, or even leaving the relationship.

Unbalanced Focus on Self

While it is healthy to have a good awareness of our own wants and needs, it is important to give equal weight to the wants and needs of others, especially those who are close to us, either physically or emotionally.

If people are regularly letting you know that you are appearing selfish, or not listening to them, or not taking them into consideration enough, it is worth checking whether you have the right balance of self vs others.

This may manifest as people every now and again unfairly abandoning you for reasons you don’t understand, or getting very angry at you when you don’t think you have done anything wrong.

other focus-1600x900Unbalanced Focus on Others

Focusing on others can be a delightful gift, but not if you lose contact with yourself in the process.

Are you aware of your own needs and wants? Do you regularly express them to the people who are close to you, both physically and emotionally?

Or do people seem to take you for granted, and exhaust you with their constant needs and demands?

Are you afraid that if you don’t take care of everyone properly, their reactions will be even more unbearable than the constant low level frustration and exhaustion that you usually feel?

love addictionAddictions

We may not have an addiction to a substance like alcohol, opiates, or illegal substances, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have an addiction at all.

Any activity which causes us to get a hit of dopamine can become addictive.

Many people are addicted to more subtle “drugs”, like gambling (which includes high risk activities like day trading, commission-only sales work, and some forms of entrepreneurial activity), or sex (which can also include addiction to the dopamine highs of infatuation), computer games, or food.  

Even socially-valued activities can be addictive – there are many workaholics out there! Working out at the gym, going to church, gossiping with friends, fixing up old cars, building dollhouses or computer programs, doing crosswords, and just about any other hobby can become an addiction when we are using it to escape unpleasant emotions or avoid difficult conversations.

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These more socially acceptable addictions can combine with other items on this list, such as avoidance, zoning out, and mood swings, so watch out for combinations!

Zoning Out

Losing time, or not noticing what is happening here and now, can be a sign of trauma. This is a particular red flag if it happens during emotionally difficult conversations, but it can also be a habitual way to get through life. If our life as a child is emotionally difficult, one coping strategy is try as much as possible to “not be there” while life is happening.

It often goes together with not remembering much about childhood before the age of 6-8 years old.

Mood Swings

Some days are great – you’re on top of the world, you get a lot done (or start a lot of things), and you feel ten feet tall and bulletproof. Other days, you don’t even want to get out of bed. You curse yourself for the promises you made when you were feeling great. There is no clear cause for the great days or the terrible days.

2018-07-06 depression

And some days start out great, but then something happens – someone rejects you, or something doesn’t go to plan – and for the rest of the day you feel awful.

If the swings happen slowly – over weeks and months – you may have bipolar disorder. But if you are having wildly different moods within a single week, you don’t have bipolar disorder – you have emotional dysregulation, which is usually a result of childhood emotional neglect.

Extreme Sensitivity or Empathy

Can’t walk by a group of people without getting a “hit” of someone else’s emotions?

Find crowds and public spaces draining and exhausting?

Can’t feel happy when your partner or housemate is feeling down?

You are likely to have some childhood wounds or trauma to explore.

Generally, children focus on their own world, and tune out the adults around them until they need something. But if life was difficult, upsetting, or painful, and the adults around were the cause, some children learn to be hyperaware of the emotional state of others. It is a coping strategy, a way of at least having a few seconds of warning before the bad thing happens.

 

discontent

Yes, That’s Me (or My Partner) – Now What?

Untreated childhood wounds tend to resurface over and over until they are healed. The most common way they emerge is by having us subconsciously recreate the situation where we were wounded.

We are most likely to do this in our intimate relationships, which is what makes intimate relationships so uniquely painful.  

The number one reason that I have seen relationships end is because one or both people can no longer tolerate the pain of their childhood wounds resurfacing over and over.

This is often a tragic result, because the people concerned love one another very much, and have the potential to support one another in healing – that’s usually what attracts us, at a subconscious level.

Coaching

But navigating the interlocking childhood wounds of two people in an intimate relationship is like picking your way through a minefield – you just never know when things are going to blow  up and cause a whole new type of trauma.

It is really important that you have outside support through this process. In severe cases, one or both partners may benefit from individual psychotherapy. Often, though what people really need is a neutral third party who can let them know when they are stuck in a childhood coping strategy, rather than being present and responding to the current situation.

This is where a relationship coach can be invaluable. Not only can they provide useful strategies to improve communication, and mediate difficult conversations, they can also keep you on track with your individual healing, and your support of your partner’s healing.

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Remember – we are here to help. If you’d like personalised coaching at any time, just fill in an application form, and we will schedule a short real-time call to see whether we are right for each other.

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Why “Speak Your Truth” Is A Bad Idea

Why “Speak Your Truth” Is A Bad Idea

Hey everybody! I’m Jenny Hale and this is my truth bomb series of short videos about relationship advice that isn’t great, why it isn’t great, and where the truth actually lies.

Today I’d like to talk about the advice that you hear around the place,  especially in the new-age personal development realm – “speak your truth”.

Now intuitively, it sounds like a good idea right?

Obviously, if you’re faking things in relationship, you’re not actually being authentic, it’s not going to work.

But “speak your truth” is not necessarily leading to authenticity. I see this a lot.  I work with individuals and couples working on their relationships. I’ve worked with hundreds of people and I’ve seen this quite regularly. I’ve seen one partner giving the other partner “advice” – constructive criticism that’s not very constructive.

They’re telling their partner everything they think is wrong with them, what they’re doing wrong, how they can improve, and they justify this by saying “I’m just speaking my truth. This is just how I see it.”

Sometimes it’s wrapped in the language of non-violence, which is really interesting to see – nonviolent communication used in quite a violent way.

“When you do that I feel angry and hurt because my need for security is not being met”, and the subtext is therefore you shouldn’t do that.

So now that I’ve “spoken my truth”, now that I’ve told you how I feel, you have to change.

Or, it’s just a license to not be responsible in the way that people speak. I’ve seen people just allow themselves to go into a triggered rage state and say “I can’t stand this, this is unbearable, I’m out of this relationship, it’s over, that’s it …”

They don’t actually mean that. They don’t actually want to end the relationship, but in that moment there’s that’s how they feel. At that moment, that’s the words that spontaneously arise and pop out of their mouths. That’s the truth at that moment.

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Now you can imagine, as the partner trying to process what’s happening that’s really confusing.

“Speak your truth” works only when you’re speaking in a responsible way. When you’re speaking constructively, when you’ve thought it through, you’re very clear on what your truth actually is, when you know it’s not your childhood wounds speaking. When you know it’s not some mental construct speaking. When you’ve actually taken the time, you’ve done the meditation, you’ve gone internally, you’ve found the source of your own truth.

A lot of people who say “I’m just speaking my truth” have no idea what their truth is. They’ve never met their truth. They’ve never gone in there. They have no idea who they are, and they have no idea what’s true for them, so they say … stuff. Let’s call them mind farts. If they’re not childhood trauma, they’re mind farts.

They start “speaking their truth”, and what comes out of their mouth may be completely a hundred eighty degrees opposite to what’s actually in their heart as their truth, in their authentic self.

But until you’ve met your authentic self, connected with your authentic self, you can’t speak your truth, because you’ve got no idea what it is.

So the advice works for people who are connected with their authentic self, and who know what their deepest truth is, and can speak that.

For everybody else, whatever they speak when they’re “speaking their truth” is going to be on some level inauthentic. It’s going to be on some level a lie. It might be true in the moment because of that emotion, but it’s not really what they want for their life. It’s not really how they want to be with their partner, and so on.

A lot of relationship advice works like this. If you’ve actually done the work, and you’re connected with your authentic self, and you’re really present and together, and you have good communication skills then the advice is useful. Now, what percentage of the population is in that boat?

So you have to be very careful not to take these advices and use them as justifications for behaviour. It’s actually not constructive, and not useful.

At the end of the day what we all want to do, we’re all working on, is really coming home. Coming back to the authentic self, and being able to speak our truth for real. To be able to speak our authentic truth, to know who we are, and to know what we have to say.

What is “The Authentic Self”?

What is “The Authentic Self”?

baby authentic self

The authentic self can also be called the true self, the original being, the Self, Being, or, in more spiritual language, the Divine Self. All these terms refer to the same aspect of us – the one who was born, who existed before our brain developed enough to create a psyche, or a false self.

Different disciplines have developed different language to describe the authentic self. In transpersonal psychotherapy, the authentic self is known as the Self. Transpersonal psychotherapy helps people to access their authentic self, and use its clarifying power to adjust aspects of the psyche which are causing distress.

In spiritual traditions, the authentic self is known as the Divine within (in Abrahamic traditions), or the buddhi body or jivatman (in yogic traditions). In ontological traditions, it is known as Being.

From Authentic Self to False Self; The Universal Human Tragedy

The false self develops in recognisable stages as our brain matures. In the early stages, the foundations are laid when we develop object permanence (remembering objects exist, even when we can’t directly see or hear them) and the ability to perceive ourselves as separate from the Universe as a whole.boy authentic self

By age two, we are testing out the limits of our separate existence, and learning how to feel secure when we are not with our primary caregivers. The individual qualities of our false self are a result of our biological tendencies and the environment we inhabit. We are especially influenced by the type of physical and emotional care our parents provide.

We develop our feelings about what kind of person we are, and what kind of world we live in, based on these early, formative years. If our caregivers are unreliable, we will internalise the feeling that survival is precarious, and the world is uncaring, or even dangerous. If they respond badly to our crying when we are in need, we will develop a sense of shame. This manifests in feelings that we are not good enough, that there is something wrong with us, and we need to work hard to earn our keep. 

authentic self

Our authentic self is immune to all these environmental influences.

While our psyche is growing, layer by layer, developing limiting beliefs and storing traumas, our authentic self remains unchanged. Luminous, pure, open to the world, and deeply peaceful, the authentic self is always present, underneath our everyday psyche. Often, the authentic self is so deeply submerged that we don’t know it is there, or we don’t know where to find it.

Clinging to the False Self

suffering

When this happens, we mistakenly think that the false self is the only self we have. We believe we ARE the false self. We defend the false self as though it is really who we are. We defend the prison we have built for ourselves. We defend the container which holds all of our suffering. We defend the scars from all of our psychological wounds as though they were our heart and lungs.

When we identify with the false self, we defend the prison, instead of returning to being the one who was never imprisoned at all.

We are never so trapped as when we believe the prison walls are a part of ourselves. We are never so free as when we realise that we no longer need the protection of walls at all.