After the death of the mother of my partner & the mother of a friend, I ought to think: "Is this really it? Life is a Russian roulette of who gets cancer, gets sick & dies and who doesn't yet."
Until I discovered that it is not a russian roulette but that we self-destruct all the time.
Sometimes we are the killers, often we kill ourselves.
We start our life and see everything joyful as a kid. As a kid you are closer to the source of love then adults and you still seem to have this natural joy and a sense of wonder. We easily adapt in how 'to do' life. Still, many self-destructive patterns begin in childhood. Experiences such as trauma, neglect, or abuse can imprint on a person’s psyche. These early experiences might teach you that self-worth is tied to suffering or that your needs are unimportant. If someone grows up in an environment where destructive coping mechanisms, like substance abuse or unhealthy relationships, are prevalent, they might view these behaviors as normal or acceptable ways to handle stress.
As a kid you are very smart, you learn to adapt, you learn how to behave to be loved and to survive emotionally (even sometimes physically).
Many kids learn themselves not to feel or to stay quite, and store the emotions somewhere in their body to survive, or learn themselves a behavior to survive. That will be forming you later as an adult and is often the beginning of your self-destruction. It is how you think it has to be done, and we all think about it differently. It's why relationships are sometimes so hard. You both learned to survive differently.
(We shouldn't talk about what each others love language is, we should ask what they've learned themselves to survive and unlearn that with each others support. Possibly, when you've unlearned your destructive pattern your love language will change, partner choices can change, .. All in your benefit.)
Then, we are teenagers, feeling like we can handle the whole world, and that this is our playground. We revel in a sense of invincibility. Always young and wondering. Some misery, a bit dark, living on the edge. Living in some kind of teenager bubble. As if, that's how life will be forever. Yet, even as we brush against the harsh realities of life—witnessing illness and loss—we remain cocooned in a bubble of youthful bravado, believing such misfortunes cannot touch us.
But then suddenly we become that generation we thought we would never be, we are 30.
Mothers or fathers from your friends start to die. And you realise that life starts to be a real Russian roulette or a real box of chocolates “you never know what you’re going to get”. Is it not?
But we have more control then you think.
Suddenly you discover you bursted out of that invincibility bubble a while ago and you start to notice the little things more—the stress lines forming on your face, a little random panick attack, your people pleasing behaviour, the way your body aches after a long day.
You learn that the emotions we started to feel and discover when we were kids and teenagers are still inside us,(you know, from the moment you said to yourself you won't ever feel again, because it wasn't safe) they have grown and evolved, becoming an integral part of our being.
Revealing themselves in anger, panick attacks, aches, cancers, diseases, .. And we still ought to push them further away with drugs & smoking, heavy sports, work, addictions,..
Because: "That is just who I am."
And as we are busy trying to 'survive' by not to feel, we are actually killing ourselves.
Let that sink in. What a crazy contradiction, right?
Not only, or always is it killing ourselves, but we can also destroy loving relationships by unconciously sabotaging them. Because of not feeling worthy of love or believing the person will leave you eventually, so your behaviour will act like it and push them away.
Dealing with what is happening inside of us is the hardest but also the most important thing to do in this life to actually survive. Instead of doing what you have taught yourself to survive.
You realize that those emotions and traumas you’ve carried for so long aren’t just going to disappear on their own. They need to be addressed, confronted, and ultimately, healed to actually survive.
It’s a strange revelation, to acknowledge that what kept you safe for so long is either making you sick, killing you or making you toxic now.
Every one of us is going through similar struggles, dealing with our own versions of the same story. It’s a shared experience, yet deeply personal.
It’s a slow process, and it’s not linear. There are days when it feels like we’re making progress and days when it feels like we’re back at square one.
But after some healing, we can begin to see the beauty in our struggles. Every struggle is an opportunity to grow and heal and we learn to understand that vulnerability is not a weakness but a strength.
We learn to be kinder to ourselves, to celebrate the small victories, and to forgive ourselves for the setbacks. We learn to see how different love can be than what you thought it was, suddenly you stop attracting toxic people, your love language changes, you start experiencing life out of your survival (but actually killing-) mode (oh yeah, very scary in the beginning! But oh so amazing) and you learn how to rest and be with yourself. To be in your body and to feel yourself. While you heal you get the opportunity to reinvent yourself and to discover who you are and not who you became.
Life may still feel like a game of Russian roulette, with its unpredictability and challenges, triggers en setbacks on moments you'd least expect it. But we start to realize that we have more control than we thought.
By taking the time to heal and grow, we slowly stop the cycle of self-destruction. We create a new narrative, one where we are not just trying to survive by killing ourselves but by truly living.
Love,
Hanne
Booktip: "When the body says no" & "Things no one taught us about love"
PS: This behavior, we all have, often hangs together with a feeling we are addicted to. A feeling we once had and lost, and we seek it, in everything and everyone. To feel it, to live it, to merge with it. And we seek it outside of ourselves, while we have to find it within. Read my blogpost - We are all addicted to feelings.
I'm writing out my own experiences in this. My own experiences in sabotaging relationships, in triggers, in toxic behavior. There is a story coming about the impact of having/being a vanishing twin syndrome.
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