Freedom From Bondage

Bondage. That’s how I would describe the life I didn’t even know I was trapped in these last 33 years. Trapped in my own head, fighting with people, places and things that weren’t behaving how I thought or assumed they “should” be, and feeling the pain and distress this caused to the nth degree. 

Now, I have written about this theme before. In The Beauty of What IS, I wrote about embracing reality so one can find the good in it and live from that place. However, there is a layer underneath that nice and tidy concept, and that is the belief that “what is, should not be.” So what is that? Let’s explore. 

In digging into why I became a person who fell back on the opinions of others in order to determine how I should behave and how the world should be, I realized that it came from a place of self-protection and lack of self-trust. If things should go a certain way, and someone else even backs me up on it, and things didn’t go that way, then I could rest, justified in the hurt or anger I felt and just stew there until you hopefully noticed the error of your ways. I had this false idea that the majority is always right, and it didn’t serve me. These expectations of how things should go became a source of massive pain because when they didn’t go that way, it wrecked me.

It’s a different kind of beast to be the source of your greatest pain. To be the creator of your misery by believing things about yourself and the world that no one ever may have even said, but you inferred to be true. No one even needs to take you out, you do it for yourself. Done. Now, it is good to have a general idea of how things should go in terms of having boundaries and a sense of truth about a situation. However, it locks you in, when you become so attached to the outcome of your expectations, that you don’t know how to handle it when things don’t go that way. That was my struggle.

How you should behave, the size I should be, the friends I should have, the skills I should master, the way you should respond to my needs, the way I should have known better…

This is called PERFECTIONISM. I didn’t know that. I thought Perfectionism was when someone couldn’t complete a task without doing it flawlessly. Perhaps it is that too, but that is definitely not how it shows up in my life. I recently started  working with a Strengths Coach, Michelle Dunne, who was able to identify this thought I have that “Someone else would always do ‘it’ better.” In digging into this, I realized that belief comes from a place of feeling so disheartened about my own failures and seeming lack of ability that I had given up on myself and essentially was always living from this place of defeat.

This was my thread of Perfectionism. According to my coach, Perfectionism can be described as, “Halting upon failing to meet my own or someone else’s expectations. “ Oh. I didn’t just halt, I died. A soul death, consenting to the belief that I will NEVER have what it takes to do life the way I think it should be done, and THAT, my friends, is the vice of Sloth. “Sorrow toward a spiritual good” as Aquinas would say, and in my own behavior, it was a  sad rejection of my own unique goodness, which was ultimately a rejection God’s goodness because if I am garbage, that means God didn’t make something Good when He made me, and that is theologically impossible and a lie from the pits of Hell.

As this realization crashed over me, my first response was “What. Have. I. Done?” Whew! I had to let that initial reaction sink in.

It hurt me so much when other people didn’t see or appreciate my worth because I, in fact, could not see or appreciate my worth. I thought that people thought I was useless and unnecessary because I believed I was useless and unnecessary. It touched every single relationship that I ever formed, and I never challenged it.

The battlefield of the mind is the place where we wrestle with truth and lies, hopes and disappointments. Our machinery must be sharp if we are to come out strong on the other side. Our brain’s ability to self-protect is incredibly slick and hard to pin down. I have come to realize that my mind is an area in which I have built very weak structures, taken watchmen off-duty and become incredibly unaware of what’s coming in and what’s going out. Unaware of the way I perceive, process and interpret the world, and to err in any of those categories, cane be a source of great pain.

So, although hard things often did happen on the outside, it was my thoughts that made it unbearable. It was my thoughts that made the pain so sharp. It was the way I chose to perceive God, myself and others that contributed to my loneliness, lack of self-esteem and disconnect. 

Part of me still believes in the lie of my insignificance. Even though I know it in my head to be false, I have lived from this place of despair for so long that it feels like a poisonous thread that has sewn itself into the tapestry of my life. So this is going to take a while, but for the first time in my adult life, I know where the work needs to be done. I finally know why I so often feel unhappy.  This is amazing actually. After the initial low of the realization of the sad identity from which I’ve lived, I’ve started to feel this immense joy that I have finally found my greatest source of pain!! I finally found the muscle knot that you know in an instant is a trigger point. I can finally start to take action on the biggest lie that has ever held me back! 

God is so Good.