Patternsby ~Kaeldra-1 |
If you are following my YouTube channel or my Motion and Potion Relationships, Love, and Sex blogs you know that I have had the opportunity to recognize myself as a recovering Love Addict. As I sat in my Psychology of Addiction class and we discussed what different unhealthy family dynamics may look like including the addictive family type, (addiction shows up in many ways, not just in substances), I could see my entire life layed out so clearly like a complex and interweaving pattern and I understood even more the meaning behind Neo seeing the computer code in everything when he was in the Matrix.
At first it was so exciting! I was excited to know that I recognized my unhealthy patterns and worked to break them and had gotten myself healthy, (as much as I knew how to at the time anyway, being healthy is a lifelong endeavor). I was excited to feel as though I have the opportunity for a fresh start and in understanding I was free! In seeing the ancestral pattern I knew that it would be my job to break it and teach my son the unhealthy patterns he witnessed growing up so maybe he won't have to struggle as much as so many other people do.
Over the next few weeks however I began to realize the magnitude of the responsibility I have in not only recognizing and changing patterns of behavior that have been literally ingrained in my DNA but start from scratch with a completely clean slate. I had the awareness and power to rewrite the code but realized I had never written code before!
Now for someone who has gone through Love Addiction and has inadvertently been defined by their relationships and careers try to imagine how frightening this realization is when it means that you have to reframe old patterns, create new and hopefully fresher patterns and do this all by yourself. As this pressure closed in on me my sleeping dreams became more vivid and reminded me of all of the people from my past that I would normally go to in order to work through something this daunting with which made me feel even more alone. So not only do I have to face changing multiple life time's worth of behavior patterns but I have to do it alone in order to not fall back into old behavior patterns that hurt not only me but the people I loved the most. Granted, it is an act of love for me to take this journey alone and not rely on others to carry me through it but that doesn't seem to make it less frightening.
Last night I went through my own coaching session and realized that I have not been giving myself enough credit for all the work and changes I have already made on myself and in my life. I have spent a lot of time measuring my success more on what I don't have instead of what I do have. Consciously I see and can preach about the obviousness of the problem in this but on a deeper and more unconscious level I still struggle with this. TA-DA!! A new pattern emerges!! As if I didn't already have my work cut out for me, right? I also realized that in my distraction with my own stuff I began to have a convoluted way of demonstrating how much I appreciate having a man in my life willing to work outside in the Phoenix heat from sun up to sun down building his own business and supporting us both financially. My fears of not demonstrating to him how much that means to me have only made things more challenging on our relationship, not easier and once I let go of trying to prove something to me, him, or anyone else along with my idea of what that is supposed to look like and just listened to him tell me what he wants and needs from me and accept it everything was fine. Apparently being an overachiever in a relationship isn't healthy either... Who would've thunk it?!
Thank goodness for coaching! Coaches need to be coached too! Like anyone else, we have things we need to continue to recognize, learn and grow from. It's part of practicing what we preach. No one has all the answers except YOU. That's right, we all have all the answers we need inside of us and sometimes we just need a little coaching to help dig through the crap and confusion and get straight to it. Life goes so much smoother when we give up excuses and rationalizations and just accept what we know to be true but boy oh boy is it a lot of commitment and work!
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