Journal Date: March 29, 2021
The past month I’ve had to come to terms with a lot of my basic primal defense mechanisms (I am going through a Saturn square Pluto transit right now, so it’s not surprising).
I’ve known about these defensive patterns of mine for quite a while now, and I’ve hated myself for them. It’s obvious to anyone how unhealthy and unproductive some of these reactions are.
But recently I’ve been able to slow down and take a closer look at what is happening in my body and mind as these defenses are triggered, and it’s given me a much deeper understanding of what exactly is going on and why.
And with this understanding has come so much more compassion for myself.
As crazy as some of this behavior might appear, on another level it makes perfect sense that I would have come to feel and respond in this way.
One of the major insights I had recently was around how I self-sabotage myself and why.
I had forgotten to mention this the last time I wrote, but last weekend I went to San Diego. I just booked myself a room in a nice hotel and stayed there for 3 days while I participated in an online workshop, “Reclaiming Radical Rage and Ancestral Trauma” with Dr. Jennifer Mullan.
On the second day of the workshop, we participated in what was called a “rage release ritual.”
First, we were asked to write down some of our contracts (things we had agreed to or complied with) that we wanted to let go of.
Then, during the ritual itself, we were to tear up all these old contracts in whatever way felt best to us.
Dr. Mullan encouraged us to make this tearing of old agreements an embodied practice. If we felt called to, we could speak or scream or shout “No!”, we could move on the floor as much as we needed to as we tore all our old contracts into tiny little shreds that no longer had any power over us.
These were the contracts that I wrote out to release:
- I am afraid to fail.
Then:
- I am afraid to succeed.
I had to ask myself, “Why?”
Why is that?
It doesn’t seem to make any sense…
It wasn’t long before a memory came to me. It would help show me the root of this fear and why I had felt the need to self-sabotage to survive.
It was something that had happened to me when I was 9 years old.
My mom had gone to the parent-teacher conference with my 4th grade teacher.
Mrs. Wolven had only good things to say about me that night.
“Your daughter is so sweet, so smart, so polite and well-behaved. She is a joy to have in class,” she had told my mother.
As soon as my mom got home, she proceeded to humiliate me for what had happened in their meeting.
In her eyes, it was proof of what an evil and manipulative child I really was.
She accused me of lying to her, it was obvious I was trying to fool her into having a good opinion of me that wasn’t true.
“If only she knew what you were really like!” she screamed. “You’re like the devil!”
I know that this was not an isolated incident. My mom’s rage (and perhaps hatred) of me, and my humiliation and suffering were nearly daily occurrences for me then.
I was punished for doing wrong, but nothing could match the way I was punished for doing right.
It wasn’t long before I began to associate deep pain and fear along with the pleasure of doing well, of achieving a goal, and especially with being liked or accepted by another person.
Even when I had left my mother’s house, I took this conditioned response with me.
I would feel tremendous anxiety when something would go well for me.
The terror I felt at the thought of being loved was almost too much to bear.
I never really could handle it.
The fear would build and build, and the only relief I knew was to dissipate the energy through (self) destruction.
Any time I came too close to being truly seen, accepted, or loved, I would (unconsciously) self-destruct.
I never really could handle it. The fear would build and build, and the only relief I knew was to dissipate the energy through (self) destruction.
Any time I came too close to being truly seen, accepted, or loved, I would (unconsciously) self-destruct. I would do some incredibly outrageous thing to end the anxiety that I could be loved (when all I knew was that love and chaos always went hand in hand).
I had to prevent it. What’s more, I had to end the guilt I felt for the “lies” I must have told. I couldn’t stand to think of myself as still evil and manipulative. Better to destroy it than to carry this with me on my conscience.
I’ve been hurting myself this way for so long—for nearly a lifetime. And now, I understand why.
How could it have been any other way?