How Your Wounds Share Wisdom

Posted on by helpingsoul

Many people begin their spiritual journey focusing on all that is whole and good in their life. Gratitude for the things we value is a key to having mindful living but equally important is continually excavating the long buried wounds you’ve hidden beneath layers of a protective shell.

Oprah says, “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” She likes to think of it as this way, “When you are triggered by something, like an argument, pressure at work, money issues, or even someone cutting you off on the road, this is an opportunity to bring awareness to your feelings and how your body feels.”

How to Let Go of Pain

During triggered moments, unresolved feelings of anxiety, confusion, and frustration will rush to the surface.

Pause.

Take a deep breath.

Become still long enough to ask the question, “What is this experience here to show me, or to teach me?”

As you learn to interpret your internal responses, you’ll begin to recognize a pattern. We all have them.

The more you become familiar with that emotion, allow it to rise and unfold without resistance.

Welcome it.

Experience it in the body.

Release it.

Spiritual Disturbances

Think of these moments that trigger something inside of you as spiritual disturbances. A spirit of disturbance is a troubled heart, a stress-filled life, or a disturbed heart.

Since stress is part of most of our personal lives, either in our homes, part of our families, found in our churches, and experienced in our nation. It is slowly killing and robbing us of our daily peace of mind.

Pharmaceutical companies make a fortune off prescriptions to help reduce stress and other spiritual disturbances.  No matter how hard we try, pills can’t and won’t cure a disturbance of the heart when it is really a spiritual issue.

Spiritual disturbances lose their power the moment you stop pushing against them. The result is a constant and exhilarating sense of flow.

Perception of Time

Our perception of time changes according to our stages of awareness. This means our awareness can be a powerful agent for healing the past.

We’ve all heard the adage, “Time heals all wounds.” This is not truly accurate. Time does not heal all wounds because this implies a passive attitude; just wait long enough and time will do everything.

Attitude With Time

For this to be true, our attitude toward time has to be active, not passive. We need conscious responses, not unconscious reactions.

The negative experiences that happened yesterday or years ago linger as memory and trauma. These wounds are the main obstacles to making every moment matter.

Emotional Debt

Whenever we relive the past or anticipate a painful future, we are allowing old wounds to take on new life. Some psychologists call this emotional debt from the past.

Emotional debt can be equated to a bank. During negative experiences, when we react by just putting our head down and getting on with it, this response builds up emotional debt. Anger, hurt, stress, and grief withdrawals money out of the bank while conscious awareness, relaxation, and nourishment deposits money in the bank.

A Healing Approach to Past Pain

Things we have choice over, attitudes, beliefs, lifestyle, and self-care; allow us to consciously heal the wounds of conscious time and avoid their unwanted effects.

A healing approach to time begins with noticing your reaction in the moment. When you are in a stressful situation or are reminded of painful experiences from your past, take a few deep, long breaths, and be aware of how you feel. Notice your emotions and how your body feels. Be aware of any instinctual reactions, to retaliate, to resist or runaway.

Recognize that those responses are coming from your past hurt but your inner awareness, which notices these reactions and feelings is not hurt or limited in any way by the past.

This conscious presence is your real self. And it is the place through which you are free to choose a new response, different from your conditioned response.

Continue breathing and open yourself to an appropriate response to the situation that isn’t solely determined by your past pain.

But don’t try to respond like a saint or pretend to be indifferent. An artificial response does not heal your past hurt because it’s not coming from your present moment awareness.

As you become more familiar with the remaining connection to the conscious self during stressful situations, you become free from your conditioned reactions and heal your past.

By directing your attention to your inner awareness, you align your heart and mind to living in the present moment. When you learn to live from your timeless self, every moment of time is healing and everyday is filled with the joy of transforming yourself.

This is what is means to make every moment matter.

Centering Message

A centering thought for mediation is, “I heal my past by being in the present.”

Borderline Personality, Codependency, and Love Addiction

Posted on by helpingsoul

cycle of addiction

Borderline Personality tendencies, codependency, and love addiction are self-destructive behavioral patterns. Each personality seeks constant approval and love from others while abandoning themselves. Through people pleasing, compulsivity, and dependent patterns of behavior, a sense of self is lost. Relationship dynamics runs the extremes from idealization and domination to being controlled. The extremes create a false sense of safety, self-worth, and identity. This articles covers the characteristics of all three behavioral types and relates it to the cycle of addiction.

Everyone embraces some cycle of addiction, whether it be the way you towel off after a shower or mindlessly move through the grocery aisles. Regardless of the activity, the ritual involves unconscious thoughts, feelings and actions that repeats cyclically.

There are four parts to the cycle of addiction. The first stage is preoccupation, the second is the ritual, the third is acting out, and the fourth phase is feelings of guilt and shame.

Many dynamics of relationships exist but for the purpose of this article, codependency, borderline tendencies, and love addiction will be discussed with an emphasis of the cycle of addiction.

During the first stage, thoughts begin to preoccupy themselves with a lover. Persons consume the majority of their time and attention toward their imago. The imago is the image we place on our partner who mirrors our original caretakers. The psychological term for this is transference. The image feels right because it is familiar much like eating macaroni and cheese. Admiration for their partner is comfort food that feeds the attraction to excitement, chaos, and emotional intoxication.

The intense attraction is due to an unconscious drive to heal and resolve childhood wounds. This overwhelming state of infatuation is part of the first stage of addiction called preoccupation. During this phase, the love addict feels high (emotional intoxication) as parental fantasies to heal the abandonment, emptiness, and lack of self-worth are perceived to be met even if for a splitting moment. Thoughts and energy of their partner preoccupy all the love addict’s time. The majority of the day is conceiving ways to hold onto them and bring them closer so that they don’t abandon them.   Love addicts relinquish total control and power to their partner.   Any sense of spiritually becomes impaired as a grandiose persona transfers to their image.

Love addicts relation to family, friends, and personal care begin to change during the second phase of addiction. This stage is called ritual. Compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of their partner override any sense of independence.   Control completely transfers to other. Love addicts become dependent with learned helplessness and neediness. Trust and judgment projects on their partner and smashes their personal values and feelings. Love addicts give up control while abandoning themselves and becoming dependent on their lover to make personal decisions.   Over time love addicts’ careers, relationships, and personal care diminish.

Love addicts deny and refuse to open their eyes to the reality of their false, fantasy love. Similarly, codependents do not acknowledge their partner’s defensive wall, inability for real connection, and love themselves. Codependent relationships create enmeshment just as love addicts take on their partner’s morals and values and blur boundary lines. Relationships are viewed through unconsciously filtered fantasy. Relational dynamics continues between colossal cycles of intense passion and extreme anger. The sense of excitement in the emotional extremes is drunken in like an alcoholic drinks whiskey. The high of emotional intoxication deepens to obsessiveness that then is mistaken for authentic love.

The third period is acting out. Negative consequences of lost identity, irresponsible behavior, and diminishing life conditions are overlooked. Symptoms of loneliness, despair, and self-hatred continue in a downward spiral of intolerable circumstances. Self-worth bottoms and depression creeps in.

As the spiral continues downward, bottom hits with feelings of guilt and shame making up the fourth stage. Love addicts feel stuck as if they cannot cope on their own. Codependents feel they need their partner to survive just as a dependent child. Guilt, shame, internalized anger and resentment grow until the pain is too great, and the hurt is too much to bear. Finally, a glimmer of hope emerges, and awareness unfolds. Denial slowly lifts as light shines down on their partner’s defenses, emotional unavailability, controlling, and manipulating behavior. Further consciousness arises in financial and career sacrifices if they still have a job. Understanding of their isolation surfaces the notions of little contact if any with family and friends. It’s a rude awakening to the mess.

Shame and guilt stage causes love addicts to feel like failures, remain hopeless and lose sight of their discovery. Consequently, they fall deeper into depression. Denial sets in again to lighten the pain, and the cycle begins again.

Borderline personalities obsess again about their partner thinking they will save them from their misery. Codependents shift independence to dependence and as they stay in the relationship; prolonging the cycle of addiction.

Commonly borderline personalities, codependents, and love addicts develop from an alcoholic family or dysfunctional family who are narcissistic, unable to allow another to have an independent self, and cut-off emotionally. The personality types yearn for real connections and intimate relationships yet don’t know how and continue to play cat and mouse.

Childhood hurt and rage from parental abandonment, neglect, and emotional abuse leads to internalizing thoughts of being bad. The child splits the image of his desire internalizing it as bad and places a good internal object-image onto their caretakers.

If a child’s needs of nurture, mirroring of feelings and thoughts, and care lack, the child continues to split parts of themselves; internalizing they are bad, and their parents are good. This pattern is a defensive survival technique so that the child can tolerate the abuse in an environment where he is dependent.   As adults, a bad internalized image persists as a worthless and inadequate identity thus the perceived need to latch on to others for an identity. The wounded adult attracts partner’s who replicate their parents and place the externalized fantasy image of real parts onto their partner ultimately giving them all power and control.

Awareness of the similarity of borderline personalities, codependents, and love addicts can shed light and understanding of internal emotional drivers of behavior. New knowledge brings more choices and the more power and control for healthy, respectful, and loving thoughts, feelings, and actions. Understanding how one’s personal cycle of addiction originated can then begin to find ways to break the cycle and healing can begin. The goal is to feel whole (independent) while having the capacity to give and receive love.

Mindfulness Mediation

Posted on by helpingsoul

Sometimes it takes hardship to get to know yourself in a real way, and within a coherent framework.  I got lost in a relationship but now I am stronger, more self assured, and have improved insight.

I am proud of my new found knowledge about myself through mindfulness mediation and writing.  I have a gift now to share to other women; helping them to achieve more healthier relationships, self-respect, confidence and boundaries.

With mindfulness meditation, you can re-wiring your brain.  You can literally change and grow neural connections which support finding and creating better relationships. It is possible for your brain to become more like those who grew up knowing how to love and be loved in healthy, sustainable ways.

We are all not so fortunate to grow up with healthy, attuned attachments. Childhood attachment is the emotional bond that typically forms between infant and caregiver, usually a parent.  It stimulates brain growth, affects personality development and a lifelong ability to form stable relationships. Neuroscientists now believe that attachment is such a primal need that there are networks of neurons in the brain dedicated to it, and the process of forming lasting bonds is powered in part by the hormone oxytocin.

Even though we may not have had childhood attachment, we can re-wire our brains for better relationships.  Mindfulness mediation can help with the nine essential characteristics for healthy relationships.

1. Better management of your body’s reactions; stress and anger management.

2. Emotional resiliency; regulating your emotions and restoring an unpleasant mood back to baseline with ease and efficiency.

3. Better, more adaptable, agreeable communication.

Mindfulness meditation helps you to be a more attuned communicator and it can be contagious to loved one as well. Good communication entails listening and understanding without distortion, and responding in a way contingent upon your partners needs instead of your own inner filters and desires.

4. Response flexibility.

Mindfulness meditation improves response flexibility and creates an emotional regulator where space and time allow careful thought for a more positive mindful, conscious response instead of just crying whenever receiving criticism or blaming others and yelling when you feel ashamed.

5. Improved empathy.

Mindfulness meditation improves the ability to identify with and understand somebody else’s feelings or difficulties but without losing your awareness of your own state of mind.  It’s the ability to separate a desire to support and feel affinity with but still remaining constant in your state of mind; without their solemn mood affecting yours.

6. Improved insight (self-knowing).

Mediation practice improves self awareness within a logically and aesthetically consistent credible and harmonious whole.  Mediating and writing regularly allows us to practice our ability to notice what our brain is thinking.  An increased knowledge and capacity to tell the difference between momentary and ever-changing events, and who we really are is achieved.

7. Better modulation of fear.

Mindfulness mediation allows you to soothe your feelings and be more comfortable when you’re afraid.  You are able to regulate things which once scared you (He’s going to leave me; I’m not enough for her).  It’s important in relationships to have ready access to being able to calm yourself when you’re anxious, so that your reactions and interactions aren’t overrun by your fight-flight-freeze response.  Once you are not as reactive to emotional fear, you change your entire experience of being in an adult-to-adult relationship.

8. Enhanced intuition.

There’s actually increasing neurochemical and cellular evidence of a second brain in our viscera; internal abdominal and intestinal organs. Our viscera, and the rest of our body – our muscles, eyes, ears, skin, and so on – are telling us something. If we pay attention to the messages our body is telling us, the mindfulness practice enhances the ability to be attuned to yourself, and what you unconsciously know – what we can refer to as “intuition.”  Becoming emotionally aware and act rationally and logically in conjunction with our body enhances your ability to be in conscious relationships with yourself and with others.

9. Increased morality.

Evidence shows that when people learn to meditate and practice regularly, their perceptions of their place in the world begins to shift – something corroborated by family members. They become more broadly compassionate, more likely to act on their highest principles, and demonstrate greater interest in the social good – what can very reasonably seen as living with higher morals. It’s like having a healthier relationship with your whole community, not just the people closest to you.

Try mediating for twenty minutes and open your mind to your thoughts, feelings and emotions.  Pay attention what is consistent and what fades.  Learn about who you are and the goals you want to achieve. Spend another twenty minutes and write down what you have learned.  Keep a journal and awaken yourself to a whole new awareness and brighter self.