Ok, you all are going to have to bear with me on this one because this book I read was revolutionary and now I have like 2 million blog posts because it was packed with good shit. So I am going to be on this kick awhile.
Rest assured though, there will always be random shit coming intermittently.
What James Hollis is getting at in this book is that we all, no exceptions really, seek to merge, date, marry, love partners that trigger these childhood wounds of too much or not enough and thereby seek to resolve that which remains unresolved today. And from my experience, both personally and professionally, this IS what we all do...repeatedly. We can’t help it. In some weird twist of fate, we seek to reproduce the original wounds of our childhood in some sort of misguided notion that if we can reproduce them as adults we can somehow get closure on it and then move onto happily ever after.
The first major issue with this is that most of us have no idea we are doing this. For those of us who actually do see that we do it, we are held so tightly and bound so completely by this hard driving need to resolve, that we, even though we know we are doing it...again, still, we can’t stop doing it. There is some magical day in the future where the stars align and we are rewarded for all our dating and loving peril with a partner who is worthy of us and “gets” us.
Some of us, we see it but it is so ingrained in our being that we fail to see the myriad of ways this very demanding and incessant need within us makes so very many of our decisions.
And finally, we never get resolution because of how unintentional we are about all of this. We believe ourselves to be whole and complete when we are anything but and we delusionally believe that if we just find the “right” one, we will be saved. But the problem here is we are all walking around thinking the same thing...each wanting this magical other to come into our lives and resolve our shit for us forever. But that other person has the same wounds or more in depth wounds, or childhood sexual trauma over which much individual work must be done in order to ever be a suitable partner for ANYONE!
And most people don’t do it. Most people drink or gamble or do drugs or shop compulsively or overeat or undereat or exercise or whatever the fuck they can do to alleviate some of the great suffering that occurs between our ears when we live with trauma and loss and heartbreak that goes untreated for years. We become addicts. Some of us it kills with no resolution. Some of us it kills with a little resolution but not enough. And many of us just move from one bad marriage and relationship to another always believing that our salvation is coming any minute in the form of this magical other that can finally and permanently heal us. Heady stuff, very hard to let go of this idea, even though it kills many of us.
We believe not that the other person with which we are attempting to engage is wounded (as are we) but that we are at fault for the way this wounded other treats us so we become as we are treated. We are dismissed so we are dismissive worthy. We are abused, and we are worthy of that abuse. We are cheated upon and lied to and that must be because we are ourselves intrinsically flawed and again, unworthy.
I know there are people out there who do not internalize the behavior of others as an indictment of our lack of worth, but there aren’t many of us. The brave Instagram posts that demand respect and a bowing to our supreme worthiness only are manufactured and produced out of a great deal of painful experience to the contrary.
The internalization of this diminished sense of self leads us to hide out all in an effort to avoid more pain. We choose people who will repeatedly not be there for us and then become stuck in compulsive repetition because the programming is so complete and seductive that we actually get reassurance from our own misguided notions...I believe I will be let down, so I am perpetually let down and even though this sucks ass and I don’t want it, I will repeat the pattern again and again and again because there is some comfort within the confines of my pattern.
Thus the addictively painful cycle of addiction plays out once more. And our relationships become yet another addiction. And addiction, we know, are just very misguided anxiety management techniques we deploy to seek to lower our intolerance of the distress we feel in the disconnection by using some sort of symbolic, or sometimes actual, connection.
Take the lover who gets overly involved too soon. They are engaged because they believe there is more connection there than there actually is...because they WANT to believe that. They NEED to believe that. And so it becomes their reality, even when most anyone else’s observation of this “reality” would reach a different conclusion.
We are as we are treated because it satisfies this age old dilemma of worth we were stamped with in childhood. And that becomes our ever evolving reality unless and until we deal with the shit in our make up that causes us to be this way. We are as we are treated because we allow it. And then we seek it out in some sort of very sad way of attempting to eradicate it, but instead each time we do it, the issue and lack of resolution only becomes more intractable. Our strategy employed to resolve this very old conflict becomes the vehicle by which we keep ourselves perpetually stuck in maladaptive patterns that only give us yet another opportunity to remain stuck in this endless pattern that will never fail to bring us the exact same fucking thing over and over again.
It is a hard lesson to learn, and in my experience, even really see. I am as I am treated. In the best ways and all the shitty ways too. When I find myself engaged in a relationship with someone who treats me badly, repeatedly, I become a person whose worth is reduced by each slight, each failed opportunity to connect. And then the nothingness I have allowed into my life, becomes what I have. A vast ranch of nothingness that only looks like something in my own mind.
Again, still.
Fuck.
But then, if you allow the vision of “I am as I am Treated” to really sink in, you can begin again to do something different. Really different. And change the kind and type of treatment you will tolerate and accept. And that, that is a revolutionary day indeed.
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