27/10/2022
I used to be terrified ask for help.
To ask for what I truly needed.
To trust others.
To really let others in.
Manifesting in the smallest needs like asking the masseuse during a massage to adjust the headrest, so my face wouldnât be squished.
To greater needs like asking for help in building my business.
To asking to be held while processing heart-wrenching grief.
I literally couldnât ask, because I didnât want to burden anyone.
So, I suffered in silence.
Alone.
Resentment towards the outer world started to fester, because yet again, âI had to do it all aloneâ & âNo one cares.â
The irony is, I wasnât allowing anyone to support me, because I wasnât reaching.
I was frozen in time.
The reach was terrifying because, to face reaching & not being met was unbearable.
Early in life, I reached & often wasnât met.
As an intelligent, self-preserving adaptative coping mechanism to avoid the pain of not being met, I stopped reaching altogether.
Brilliant, huh?
On the contrast, I used to need the people in my life to be okay, so that I could be okay.
If past partners werenât okay, I would do backbends to make sure they were okay. Because my okay-ness depending on them being okay.
My sense of worth & self used to be married to social circles & profession: what my friends thought of me, how my boss viewed me.
I would contort myself to fit into all these boxes, these versions of myself that I created in order to fit the perceived expectations of my external world.
I would shape shift, hold back & cater to who I thought others wanted me to be, to maintain connection & needed-ness.
I needed people to need me.
So I knew I had a place in their lives.
So I would never be left.
I needed to feel important in my profession, so I could feel powerful.
The truth is, I didnât feel any of this internally. I was sourcing my internal states of being solely externallyâso when the external world shifted, as it naturally does, my internal world came crashing down. It was a crisis every time this happened. SOS, state of emergency, call in the puppies & ice cream.
Which left me even more confused & in chaos as I repeated this destructive cycle for decades.
Continued in next postâŠ