For those of us who have been in a dark place we know it puts the mind in a dark space and that space sticks unless we remove the shadows.
The spaces that test us change us and also require bravery to escape falling victim to the spaces that imprint on us.
We must thank God for the test and stand up to its purpose.
Because with no tests there can be no testimony, and no grace.
The urgency is to learn from the darkness and break the cycle and to heed the warning.
Life is both long and short.
Stop the cycle of time spent on broken people who won’t commit to your well-being, greater consciousness and elevation.
Break free from the familiarity.
Stop looking for grace amongst familiar goblins.
The pursuit of happiness is righteous.
The pursuit of the familiar is settling for less than is deserved.
Stop seeing the best in people who have let you down habitually. They have their own crosses to bear and they don’t operate out of bravery.
Standing up for self is about releasing an old attraction and gravitation to familiar darkness and is instead about walking towards those who cary a light for you to follow.
Who in your life brings the light?
Are you putting your energy into people who can lift you up and illuminate your path?
Are you showing up for self and lifting yourself up through good decisions?
Insanity is doing the same things expecting a different outcome.
Do you own your journey?
Are you ready to #strikeamatch to the old you?
The Vikings landed on new shores with no plans on returning to where they came from.
They made this visual point by burning their ships to eliminate the possibility of returning to the familiar once they made shore.
They did what they had to in order to survive the islands they landed because they had no choice. Because they burned their ships.
Where you have to go mentally to heal is where you least want to go…
Into your dark forest.
That’s what shadow work is and it’s between three people only- you, little you, and God and all three must be present for it to work. That is your trinity for this work.
The places in your memory that you are avoiding and doing things to keep yourself distracted from are at the core of what hurt you. Shadow work requires you to go back there into your dark forest.
The things that hurt us early on become a core memory that a lifelong belief system develops from.
With that foundational narrative, we go on to seek relationships that will produce the same feelings, hurt, or treatment bc they were confused young memories that mistook pain, lack of affection, lack of emotional availability and neglect as a representation of how someone SHOULD show us love.
This means that in your new relationships you cannot see the truth of people because you have already created the truth of who you want them to be to reinforce the kind of “love” you are used to receiving.
To see the present moment and people clearer, you have to go into the past and understand what happened there and how it changed the course of your emotional understanding of the world around you and yourself.
To “go there” is pain, and when you start feeling uncomfortable … you are likely approaching your dark forest where the events and people that imprinted and changed you still dwell.
We have to talk about childhood to understand how we relate to people now, but understand we are just looking to unwind why we are the way we are not to blame anyone.
Our mothers and fathers and important relationships can be a reason we are the way we are and we can still choose to understand and be aware enough to not blame them for their behavior bc just like us … they have been through their own dark forest too.
In your dark forest you will find the first thing that scared you, the first thing that hurt you, and the people involved.
The way you behave because of what happened in that forest is not your problem. Your behavior is nothing more than a symptom.
The damage to your emotions is the problem. The fear that resulted and the pain that came out of the dark forest is the greatest contributor to your behavior because behavior is an expression of core feeling on self and core wounds that shaped your sense of self.
For example: if you get angry often or irritated with people it could be because whatever happened in your dark forest left you feeling like people will disappoint you anyway, and you fulfill that promise based on your core wounds by reacting with anger and pushing people away so they can’t hurt you.
Or, it could be little you had your boundaries violated too often and your self-protective instincts took over and never left, even though you grew up and had power over setting boundaries maybe you can’t set boundaries because the people you trusted never showed you how or were the first people to violate you or neglect you, etc.
Many different things can represent your dark forest, only you know what they are.
Whatever happened, the following remains true:
That which you most need to understand about yourself will be found where you least want to look. -Carl Jung
You must go back Into your dark forest so that it can stop controlling your choices, what you allow, your relationships and your life.
Valentine’s Day still dominates our workplace and schools as the February holiday.
The reality is…
Your corporate job is more likely to throw a party for Valentine’s Day than acknowledge the magnitude of what Black History’s entire Month actually represents.
The truth is…
Black History Month deserves more than trivia to commemorate the suffering and sheer will power of the millions of African American people who historically heavily influenced, and arguably continue to dominate their influence on American life and culture.
January 1, 1863 is supposed to be an emancipation date we celebrate in America as it marks the official freedom of all the slaves.
Here is what actually happened…
There was nothing tangible to celebrate for the men and women who went from being property to then being free on January 1st, 160 years ago. They were all in grave danger and if you are a descendant of one of these former slaves you come from strong and resilient people.
That is a Black History fact.
But let’s ask some questions and take a closer look…
Who was actively trying to pay the freed slaves on January 2, 1863? Their former owners?
Who would love the formerly enslaved people and treat them with dignity and respect in the South and in 1863?
Who tended to helping to heal their souls after years of cruelty in 1863?
Did freedom mean safety or employment following the emancipation?
No
That is a Black History fact.
We overlook the devastating facts when we talk about Black History Month amongst our friends and colleagues and we should not.
Black inventors and pioneers should be celebrated, not just for their inventions via games of trivia, but for the roots of the entrepreneurial spirit that was born out of necessity and out of oppression.
But what about the people who didn’t invent anything but are the only reason that my current friends could be born years later.
What about my friend’s great great grandmother who didn’t invent anything but went through literal hell for her great great granddaughter to be born 100+ years later and be successful and independent.
She matters. My friends great great grandmother matters, and she, and all of these warriors deserve remembrance and acknowledgement for enduring how it really was in America for a very long time.
That is Black History.
What do we think happened to the freed slaves in this Country when the federal government told a bunch of racist white people they couldn’t own other people?
What really happened?
What happened is hundreds of thousands of freed slaves died from starvation and murder and no one was held accountable.
That is what happened after we “freed” the people that were enslaved.
That is Black history.
Free did not mean equal and free often meant starve to death and die with no justice because though you may be free you had no rights.
No one White was accountable for hurting anyone Black for 100+ years in America.
That is Black history.
Yet in still, what we teach in schools is mostly trivia and we celebrate the emancipation.
A quarter of the four million freed slaves either died, were murdered, or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870.
That was after the emancipation.
One million+ people died after they were “freed”.
This is a genocide that occurred on American soil imposed by white American’s.
That is a Black history fact.
The survival. The treatment. The endurance of the hearts of the African Americans who survived to bring about future generations surly do not deserve to take a back seat to Valentine’s Day.
⁃ Dedicated with love to Mrs. Gertrude Williams whom I never had the personal pleasure to meet as she passed when my grandmother was young, but shaped so much of my character through her influence.
Healing and growth come from acknowledgement and acceptance.
It does not come from neglecting, compartmentalizing, abandoning, or avoiding the parts of yourself that you do not like to experience.
Your feelings are there to alert you of what is going on with you, the objective is to acknowledge them as true and also, as passing things that are not permanent states of being.
Growth is less about cultivating self-confidence than it is about enacting self-compassion.
Acknowledging emotional pain, and then letting go of the shame, blame, and guilt involved.
You are not perfect and are not designed to be and you never will be. There is no arrival at “perfect” because there is no such thing.
If you allow yourself some grace, the pressure lifts enough for your self-esteem to resurface right alongside feelings of hope.
But when you stifle the painful parts of the journey, and don’t come to terms with it, process it, and deal with it, confidence will never come.
Have you danced with the pain in your past?
What about any current pain?
Have you embraced it’s significance?
Have you given your pain any credit for your resilience?
So many of us avoid pain and discomfort out of an instinctual fear.
The problem is, your pain, your past, and your story can never become a superpower if you continue to consider it kryptonite-something you avoid at all costs.
There is power in pain. pain is not there to restrict, it is there to inform. Once informed, you get to decide how you use it.
You cannot control the pain that will come in life always, but you always can control what you do with it after you experience it.
Most notably, contained within the sentiments of pain are the building blocks of eminence strength.
At the root of your pain is also your freedom but you have to be strong enough to be vulnerable and dance with it.
The world is not going to be kind and patient with us.
We have to provide those things to ourselves.
We have to create relationships with people who make us feel safe.
We have to set boundaries with people who don’t make us feel safe.
Boundaries that set the expectation that either people will meet you where your standards of self are, or they are not a part of your space and energy.
Not out of vitriol and not with violence, but from a place of love, boundaries go up out of your love for yourself and quality of life.
Not everything is black and white, but boundaries are. When you know better about what you deserve, knowing better eventually influences you to leave some things and people alone.
Because when you continue self-sabotaging after discovering you know better, it will begin to make you emotionally and physically uncomfortable and even sick, until you rise up and shift your behavior to match your new core beliefs about yourself and life.
You start to itch for your surroundings to evolve.
Many of us are learning how to be secure people in adulthood which means that for the first time, we are figuring out what it looks like to have a stable and balanced relationship with ourselves and others without repeating old narratives that haven’t served us.
Many of us have spent time focusing on staying safe rather than being authentic to who we are and you may find it to be a panicked feeling.
Something has to give when something needs to change.
Everything around us naturally changes and we somehow are disillusioned enough by fear to think that we can somehow find a permanent state of contentment, but that’s not life.
As you experience and learn and suffer, you change. You are a living, learning creation that can adapt and make decisions that keep you in a space of love, light, and growth.
It is fear that keeps us resisting what is in our nature because feeling safe is more important than taking care of true self sometimes.
It’s not enough is the problem.
Fear will never be enough to get you to the finish line you seek. Fear doesn’t allow for enough movement to get you anywhere really.
Love is a choice and it requires you to be authentic, resilient, and brave.
How many conversations are there in your life, that never happened, because you or someone else was not willing or able to be vulnerable?
How many loves and experiences have been lost out of that very same fear?
How many situations have your senses informed you were opportunities that your trauma shut down for you with the speed of Bruce Lee’s reflex’s?
How much of that fear, that fear of being vulnerable, has anything positive to offer you?
When someone wants to work on vulnerability with me, what follows in this post is my approach, advice and heartfelt deep hope:
Vulnerability (intimacy) is something that lives in the emotional spectrum between love and fear.
So I am asking you now, as if you were in front of me:
How has fear impacted your life? Do you have regrets? What are you doing about it?
Meaning…
How can your past regrets inform you about how you will need to respond differently when the opportunity comes up again, because it will come up again.
What can you learn to do now so that when you have an opportunity to act on something, you finally do it with the intent to move through the discomfort?
These are all questions I ask patients in therapy when they tell me they want to be happy and connect with someone authentically.
When we talk about how vulnerability is either possible for people or it isn’t (currently), it seems to work in a cycle.
We disclose only things to those we trust and since we do not trust many people including our own judgment, we remain silent and vulnerability starts to feel increasingly more dangerous as we build the negative fantasy around what it means for us to be vulnerable.
This is a problem though isn’t it? Something is missing when being vulnerable is missing.
Something deeply fulfilling is missing.
Because if you never let yourself be vulnerable then you will never connect at the deepest levels to your experience here and you can feel that loss without ever having had the feeling of having it somehow.
So what can you do?
The simple but difficult answer is, you re-process WHY you are afraid in the first place, which you will find has shaped your current behavior with connection a long time ago. The good new is you can change your feelings on intimacy but/and you must be willing to revisit the wound that exists currently because there-within is the fix to the problem.
The process is literally: Feel, deal, and heal the wounds that dictate your current process for love.
Love and the first feelings of the absence of love (pain) are recorded in our memories as children and revisiting pain and having closure with it all happening to us before it was in our control is the only way you can free yourself up to truly love without a full metal jacket protecting your heart at all “costs”.
Costs.
Costs always come up in therapy as defense mechanisms (functional excuses) for not engaging in intimacy because the trauma from the past takes over. It sounds like “I know it would be great BUT…” whatever the “but” is, consider that the “cost”.
Real costs are different than “costs”.
The only Real costs are the experiences we pay for and haven’t learned anything from in order to do better for ourselves. Anything else is always an investment waiting on you to cash in.
If you are like me you have enough lessons that have shown you that you can go through things and it not break you.
Why don’t you break? Resilience.
Resilience is the perfect support system for maintaining.
Resilience can also be used with becoming vulnerable because it shows up for you when you need positive reinforcement for the act of being vulnerable.
Vulnerability is a strength because it shows both yourself and others that you can handle any outcome because authenticity is non-negotiable for secure people, making resilience a quality all vulnerable people have.
The secret is, only the secure people in this world are vulnerable and they are not vulnerable because they are secure, they got to a space of security BECAUSE they were willing to be vulnerable.
At some point you decide you are resilient enough to be vulnerable and survive any outcome that results because it’s the only way to act authentically and experience intimacy.
How to start on this journey:
#1. Get your mind right. Literally
You have to say to yourself in the mirror out loud:
“You are a product of your past, you are not defined by it, you have learned and suffered and survived. The love I should have and deserve to have, was not always shown to me as a child or as a young adult in the way I needed it. Despite that, I can depend on me and I can depend on others. I can see others as reasons AND not blame them. Being fearless with love will be my reality because I am worthy of being loved for my authentic self.”
You say this out loud because you need to hear it. You need to say it. You need to see yourself say it. You need to listen to it and embrace it.
Then…
You GO.
Go try the things that you were to scared to try while you were so worried about rejection. You have resilience to endure the outcome.
You SAY
Say the things that make your heart beat go crazy because think about what is happening by keeping that energy trapped inside you out of fear. You have the resilience to endure the outcome.
You FEEL
Open yourself up to being ok no matter what happens because you are an evolved version of you who can handle having to adjust. Resilience, remember?
You let INTIMACY happen
(instead of stopping it with your anger/staged fights/traumatic pre-programmed responses)
Intimacy is something that requires your vulnerability and the reward is the freedom to be exactly who you are because that is how you will feel when you connect with people who are also willing to be their most vulnerable selves.
The path is known. We actually know as humans how to fix our pre-programming and heal ourselves. The question is, are you willing. Are you willing to do what needs to be done to see, feel and experience the other side?
CDM Think Tank, LLC 