published in Vitality Magazine: Title: Finding the Authentic Self – November 2007

You find you are in the middle of a dissatisfying life. You are consistently feeling betrayed.   You are attracting chaos to yourself and cannot figure out why…. There are pieces of you that screaming for attention and to be healed.  The messages are louder and louder and are showing up in the form of vast self sabotaging actions. These actions are reverberating out in to your relationships at the speed of light. One relationship after another is not working out.   Life is lacking in passion.  Embitterment is beginning to become a regular state of being.  The question is now – how to heal those pieces of yourself that are dark and most certainly poised to ruin your life for good if not addressed immediately.

Any negative behaviour that is active and repetitive in one’s life is there for a good reason.  Your repetitive pattern is trying to dialogue with you. It is trying to teach you something fundamental about yourself- something that you are most probably not even aware of.  Unconsciously these behaviours are attempting to bring some sort of message and benefit to you although it is occurring in a very off kilter and twisted way.  Most repetitive negative behaviours started in childhood.  We learned during this formative time that this behaviour somehow could create a beneficial outcome. We are convinced that since this benefit occurred then, it will continue to benefit now.  And what we learn very early on tends to inform our perception for the long haul.

For example, you may have learned that a particular behaviour could bring you some sort of emotional safety, protection, love or belonging within the family dynamic.  It was the only way to survive.  Emotional manipulation, playing the victim, criticizing, abusive yelling, withdrawing, clinging, falling apart so someone will rescue you, bullying, rebelling, sarcasm, placating, people pleasing and the list goes on… These are all negative behaviours that you may have used in order to survive, negotiate and even succeed through the mine field of a dysfunctional family unit.  Tactics that once were effective in childhood will endure deep in to adult relationships left unchecked.

One client that has worked diligently on herself came in initially with habits and addictions that had more to do with relationships than with substances, yet were much more damaging to her life.  Through the course of therapy we have discovered that she has a cavernous fear that she will lose love, approval, belonging and comfort if she expresses and lives authentically.  She had no idea how to set clear boundaries with people.  She regularly permitted people, friends, lovers and family members to take advantage of her financially, sexually and with her time.  Basically she was taught and shown as a child through her parents’ behaviour toward her, that she literally had to be like a chameleon, in order to get any kind of love, affection, attention or approval from her parents.  She had to literally perform a role within her family dynamic.  She became extremely adept at ignoring her own value, needs and wants in favour of her parents’.

Her mother was very perfectionistic and at times abusive to her when she became frustrated with life.  My client learned very quickly how to intricately become whatever her mother wanted her to be, including her confidant.  She learned to soften her by tending to her needs.  She would regularity be privy to very adult content of her mother’s various affairs at a very early age. Concurrently, her father was emotionally absent and a workaholic so that the only way she could get some attention from him was to learn to speak his business language, which she did manage to do by the age of 13.  This wore her down and led her to completely abandon her own interests and her own voice as she grew up. This was her survival tactic within her family dynamic and now, also in her adult life.

As an adult she feels at the mercy of the men and the relationships in her life. She grieves her lost authentic self.   Her authentic self has gone down a rabbit hole and she cannot find her way back to it.  Deep fear of rejection compels her to perform and to deceive often.  She engages in many affairs and she battles with bouts of explosive temper tantrums that land her feeling even worse about herself.  Yet interestingly enough therapy has revealed to us that those tantrums are the only way her true self can make itself known.  She had been ignoring all other signs and messages that her core self was trying to communicate with her. The tantrums finally made her listen.  This ironically has been a gift in disguise for her they have led her want to understand herself for the first time.

What begins to facilitate the healing of these old self sabotaging behaviours is feeling safe and empathized with. For the first time she is able to feel heard and seen. A compassionate environment provides the space where she dares to reveal some truthful fragments of herself. This is especially crucial for healing that deeply hurt and deprived child within.  Therapy has brought her that. We dialogue in depth about the fact that all human beings are deserving of love and compassion no matter what they have done. We are not our actions. Blame and responsibility need to dwell on opposite sides of a spectrum.  Taking responsibility for our actions does not mean we have to crucify ourselves forever.

Deep healing begins to permeate this client as she hears and metabolizes this new perspective. She starts to get in touch with who she was before the performing begun. Her core self. She is so surprised that she can actually touch the edge of this part of herself.  It is there in everyone regardless of what has happened.   It is there, it just needs to be uncovered.  I encourage a deep looking within to find this buried truth. Therapy is not only about changing, it is about going and finding that part of our self that was there before the toxic emotions began their destruction. This is who we really are.

Eventually, a new understanding of her self begins to emerge. She gets that what she had been doing was occurring in order for her to stay safe, find love and belonging. She was just doing it all in a very skewed fashion. She begins to find some compassion for her hurt and deprived inner child as she realizes all of this. This compassion for self is vital.  When people self sabotage, abandon self, posture, cheat, lie, withdraw, and engage in addictions etc, somewhere inside they are motivated by a need for safety, protection, love, belonging or some other positive outcome. In session, we engage in deep exploration. I ask her: What is your perceived benefit to abandoning yourself in life and in your relationships.  What is that negative behaviour actually trying to do for you?

No one had ever posed this question of her.  How could there be a benefit to such destructive behaviour.   But in fact she would not be engaging in any of the negative pattern behaviours unless there was a benefit.  The true healing and metamorphosis that can happen within the therapeutic context, comes from understanding this crucial notion.  There is a perceived often unconscious benefit to negative behaviours. We must not throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.  These negative behaviours are clues for us to examine. They are messages for us to listen to.  Seeking love, safety and belonging is, in and of itself a good impetus. How ever the method to get to this positive state is what needs be looked at and replaced with a healthy way of accomplishing this.  In therapy we begin to find positive and healthy ways for this client to get what she needs. Step by step she begins her journey of making peace with her truth self. This is not an easy process, because she has no memories of feeling safe in being honest, clear or unguarded.  New Memories need to be created.

Her initial steps are simple ones but profoundly effective.  She begins for the first time to journal her feelings daily. This begins to signal to her being that she is listening for the first time to her own voice. Wow and what a voice! She discovers for the first time that she longs to explore yoga, photography and painting. All have eluded her in past. She may have taken a class or two because her boyfriend was into art but never because she had chosen it. It was so profound for me to witness this woman for the first time finding her own rhythm and her own sense of selfhood.  Eventually she left all of her destructive relationships behind. One by one, friends that once were only there to use her began to fall away from her life as she started drawing boundaries and saying no.  The void in her life began to be filled up with supportive friends and creativity as she recognized her worthiness.  She started treating herself with respect and only saying yes to those things that she truly wanted to say yes to.  A real metamorphosis had begun.  Filling her own needs was occurring for the first time in positive and healthy ways. Her sense of self-love, safety and belonging were happening without compromising her being.

If negative pattern behaviours are present in adult life, it is vital to stop and really listen and learn from them as opposed to ignoring them.  What are they trying to tell you? What are the perceived benefits to those behaviours?  The patterns can start to subside and their loud messages will calm down if you just pay close attention to the dialogue they are trying to have with your core self.