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21/01/2024

Does it seem strange to think about spending time on developing a relationship with yourself?

You might think, I am always myself; why would I need to work on a relationship with myself? What would that even look like?

But it’s the most foundational relationship you have; it determines your happiness, success, and genuine connection with other people.

By getting to know yourself and valuing your inner experiences, you get better at understanding and loving others.
Lindsay C. Gibson,

20/01/2024

Why the Past Repeats Itself?
If the lack of emotional connection with emotionally immature parents is so painful, why do so many people end up in similarly frustrating relationships in adulthood?

The most primitive parts of our brain tell us that safety lies in familiarity (Bowlby 1979). We gravitate to situations we have had experience with because we know how to deal with them.

As children, we don’t recognize our parents’ limitations, because seeing our parents as immature or flawed is frightening.

Unfortunately, by denying the painful truth about our parents, we aren’t able to recognize similarly hurtful people in future relationships. Denial makes us repeat the same situation over and over because we never see it coming the next time."

Lindsay C. Gibson

19/01/2024

"Why be concerned about others, come to that, when you've outdone your own self? Set yourself a limit which you couldn't even exceed if you wanted to, and say good-bye at last to those deceptive prizes more precious to those who hope for them than to those who have won them.

If there were anything substantial in them they would sooner or later bring a sense of fullness; as it is they simply aggravate the thirst of those who swallow them."

Seneca,

19/01/2024

In enmeshment, on the other hand, two emotionally immature people seek their identity and self-completion through an intense, dependent relationship (Bowen 1978).

Through this enmeshed relationship, they create a sense of certainty, predictability, and security that relies on the reassuring
familiarity of each person playing a comfortable role for the other.

If one person tries to step out of the implicit bounds of the relationship, the other
often experiences great anxiety that’s only eased by a return to the prescribed role.

Lindsay C. Gibson

18/01/2024

HYPERAROUSAL
After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of hyerarousal, which is the first cardinal symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly.

Kardiner propsed that "the nucleus of the [traumatic] neurosis is physioneurosis." He believed that many of the symptoms observed in combat veterans of the First World War-startle reactions, hyperalertness, vigilance for the return of danger, nightmares, and psychosomatic complaints-could be understood as resulting from chronic arousal of the autonomic nervous system.

He also interpreted the irritability and explosively aggressive behavior of traumatized men as disorganized fragments of a shattered "fight or flight" response to overwhelming danger."

Judith Lewis Herman

17/01/2024

Life will happen but how you handle it will determine how well you live!

It is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it.
Seneca,

17/01/2024

They have trouble admitting mistakes and instead discount the facts and blame others. Regulating emotions is difficult for them, and they often overreact.

Once they get upset, it’s hard for them to calm down, and they expect other people to soothe them by doing what they want. They often seek comfort in intoxicants or medication.
Lindsay C. Gibson,

16/01/2024

My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life.

We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works.

No one to my mind lets humanity down quite so much as those who study philosophy as if it were a sort of commercial skill and then proceed to live in a quite different manner from the way they tell other people to live.
Seneca,

16/01/2024

We all make mistakes or hurt others at times, but if you are interested in what goes on inside other people and sense their feelings, if you are careful to nurture your relationships and take responsibility for your role in a problem, you are by definition adequately emotionally mature.
Lindsay C. Gibson

15/01/2024

Focus on your life and work on yourself

Let no one,' I say, 'who will make me no worthy return for such a loss rob me of a single day; let my mind be fixed upon itself, let it cultivate itself, let it busy itself with nothing outside, nothing that looks towards an umpire; let it love the tranquillity that is remote from public and private concern.
Seneca

15/01/2024

Trauma will have you criticising the very person you want close to you. This behaviour will push your partner away.

Trauma will have you react and sabotage relationships with people around you when what you want is to have them close.

Trauma will have you look for people who will abandon you when what you do want is someone to stay.

Trauma will have you feel undeserving of a peaceful quality life due to addiction to chaos. So, trauma will have you in knee-jerk mode.

Trauma will have you throwing toddler temper tantrums at age 30, 40, 50 or 60 out of entitlement.

Trauma will have you set in your ways and resist growth and a change of behaviour patterns.

Trauma will have you competing with anyone and everyone to prove yourself.

Trauma will have you fighting with people who do not even know you are fighting them.

Trauma will cause your unhappiness, so you focus on what a partner or other people are doing; to avoid yourself and what you are.

These people and your partner are busy focusing on their lives and tending their gardens to cultivate joy and serenity. Meanwhile, no-one is paying attention to you existentially because you have now abandoned yourself to tend to none of your business.

It is not your fault that you are unhappy, but it is now your responsibility to resolve your unhappiness. Remember, you are not only your problem but also your solution.

Time to get out of your way, and live your own life that is not copied. Go back home, and re-parent yourself. Heal your trauma and love yourself. You need it, your children need it, and the whole world relies on you to heal because the future needs it!

15/01/2024

Our sense of well-being depends to some extent on others regarding us as a You; our yearning for connection is a primal human need, minimally for a cushion for survival. Today the neural echo of that need heightens our sensitivity to the difference between It and You—and makes us feel social rejection as deeply as physical pain.
Daniel Goleman

14/01/2024

How well are you living? The shortness of life. Live well.

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is
dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed, Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

Seneca,

14/01/2024

Emotional neglect in childhood leads to a painful emotional loneliness that can have a long-term negative impact on a person’s choices regarding relationships and intimate partners.
Lindsay C. Gibson,

13/01/2024

"If you look a bit deeper, you can detect the emotional immaturity in these upstanding, responsible people.

It shows up in the way they make assumptions about other people, expecting everyone to want and value the same things they do.

Their excessive self-focus manifests as a conviction that they know what’s “good” for others.

They don’t experience self-doubt at a conscious level and prefer to pretend that everything is settled and they already have the answers.

Rather than accepting their children’s unique interests and life paths, they selectively praise and push what they want to see.

Their frequent interference in their children’s lives is legendary. In addition, their worry about getting enough done runs them like a motor. Goals take precedence over the feelings of others, including their children."

Lindsay C. Gibson

11/01/2024

Emotionally immature adults communicate feelings in this same primitive way.

As parents, when they’re distressed they upset their children and everyone around them, typically with the result that others are willing to do anything to make them feel better.

In this role reversal, the child catches the contagion of the parent’s distress and feels responsible for making the parent feel better.
Lindsay C. Gibson

10/01/2024

Bedtime Reflection

It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence
Seneca

What are your lessons for the day on choosing to respond or to detach?
Choosing to say something or to be silent?
There is a time when silence can benefit you.

What did you lose from not saying anything?

How did you feel about not giving an opinion?

10/01/2024

For survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma, it is not practical to approach each memory as a separate entity.

There are simply too many incidents, and often similar memories have blurred together. Usually, however, a few distinct and particularly meaningful incidents stand out.

Reconstruction of the trauma narrative is often based heavily upon these paradigmatic incidents, with the understanding that one episode stands for many.
Judith Lewis Herman

09/01/2024

There are five crucial gifts that come from your inner world.
Your inner stability and resilience
Your sense of wholeness and self-confidence Your capacity for intimate relationships with others
Your ability to self-protect
Your awareness of your life’s purpose
Lindsay C. Gibson

08/01/2024

Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and unruly impulses; people with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.
Daniel Goleman

08/01/2024

But only philosophy will wake us; only philosophy will shake us out of that heavy sleep. Devote yourself entirely to her. You're worthy of her, she's worthy of you-fall into each other's arms. Say a firm, plain no to every other occupation.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

In what way have you learnt how to live today?
What little steps are you taking in order to live well?

08/01/2024

Healthy and mature people certainly need help sometimes too. But they go about it differently. When they ask for help, they consider the other person’s circumstances.
Lindsay C. Gibson

07/01/2024

There is no favorable wind for the sailor who doesn’t know where to go
Seneca

Be intentional about whatever you decide to do. Know what you intend to achieve and set goals aligned to your plan of action. That's how you achieve your goals.

07/01/2024

Many survivors have such profound deficiencies in self-protection that they can barely imagine themselves in a position of agency or choice.

The idea of saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover or authority figure may be practically inconceivable.

Thus, it is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister to the needs of those who once abused them and who continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits.

Adult survivors may nurse their abusers in illness, defend them in adversity, and even, in extreme cases, continue to submit to their sexual demands.
Judith Lewis Herman

06/01/2024

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Consider the take aways from any challenging situation.

05/01/2024

Self confidence
Someone says " talk to me about this thing that is bothering me until it bothers you as much as it bothers me, otherwise you are not there for me, you are emotionally unavailable to me!"

You say , "until you are able to joyously and appreciatively create, I will love you where you are and peacefully leave you there. I am not going specific in a direction that does not feel good."

Abraham

05/01/2024

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention.

To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own.While only a small minority of survivors, usually those with the most severe abuse histories, eventually become psychiatric patients, many or even most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse.

The data on this point are beyond contention. On careful questioning, 50-60 percent of psychiatric inpatients and 40-60 percent of outpatients report childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse or both.

In one study of psychiatric emergency room patients, 70 percent had abuse histories. Thus abuse in childhood appears to be one of the main factors that lead a person to seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.

Judith Lewis Herman

04/01/2024

For it is dangerous to attach one's self to the crowd in front, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction.

It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us merely separate ourselves from the crowd, and we shall be made whole. But as it is, the populace,, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason.

And so we see the same thing happening that happens at the elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favour has shifted, the very same persons who chose the praetors wonder that those praetors were chosen."

Seneca

04/01/2024

The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition.

By ascertaining her diagnosis, she begins the process of mastery. No longer imprisoned in the wordlessness of the trauma, she discovers that there is a language for her experience. She discovers that she is not alone; others have suffered in similar ways.

She discovers further that she is not crazy; the traumatic syndromes are normal human responses to extreme circumstances.

And she discovers, finally, that she is not doomed to suffer this condition indefinitely; she can expect to recover, as others have recovered..

Judith Lewis Herman

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Part of being an aware parent is recognising that you might be more of a threat to your child's wellbeing than the strangers you warn them about. Observe how you parent. Professing love and being a present, attentive, accommodating and supportive parent are two different things. You might claim to love your child, but is your attitude, your behaviour and how you show up for yourself and your child demonstrating that you are loving parent? Does your child feel safe with you, around you or because of you?

There is no favorable wind for the sailor who doesn’t know where to go Seneca Be intentional about whatever you decide to do. Know what you intend to achieve and set goals aligned to your plan of action. That's how you achieve your goals. #stoicism #stoicreflection

2 things you need to know if you are in a relationship with someone who repeats a behaviour you are not happy with

If you get anxious because a partner isn't reaching out, texting or responding 1. My suggestion to anyone who is struggling with any aspect of life is to explore why you have the anxiety in the moment. 2. What are the exacerbating factors and root cause (for unmet needs). This helps you to self-parent. 3. Apply reframes and solutions for replacement exercises What else can you do in this moment? Alone - self-soothe, create, write, journal, exercise, play Who else can you reach out to or play with? Friends, family, colleagues, group. Who can you help out there to avoid too much focus on self. Also, be honest about the age of your relationship. In new relationships take time to get to know someone. In older relationships assess if there are issues and learn to give each other space. Detach and be in the moment, in your life and when together. Avoid pressure

We've learnt to put all our love eggs in one relationship basket - romance. Time we recognised we have other relationships. Yes, romance is the relationship where we come into being & grow up with our parents. Ideally. Yet, it is also supported by other relationships. So, in times where romance is working, nurture your other relationships. In times where romance is not happening nurture your other relationships. You're always in a relationship with something or someone. Love itself does not end. It is relationships with some people that end.

If your partner isn't giving you attention, turn inwards, turn to your circle, turn to helping others! Give yourself the love you need. Find others who reciprocate in your circle to share love with. Help others in the greater good to extend your love. Your partner's behaviour is data for you to focus on yourself not to make them do something. Trust and allow them to choose what's best for them.

8 out of 10 What you need for effective healing

"I shall pass this way but once; any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.” Etienne de Grellet

To men: Avoid using money to get a woman or to flush money to attract girls. Instead, work on your character. Work on being present Work on self-love and boundaries. Work on being emotionally available. Understand yourself and learn to regulate yourself. To women who believe a man needs to spend money on you before you can sleep with him, it doesn't matter if he spends money on you. Character and relationship skills for both and his love for you determines the quality of your relationship.

Do you keep breaking up & reconnecting? Abandonment trauma makes you go back to what's making you ill, without stepping back to reflect on what needs to be done about a relationship. A break up means there's an issue in the relationship. Wanting to go back isn't the solution. Explore whats not working in the relationship & find ways to resolve the issues. Have courage to leave & do some work to reparent the abandoned inner child. Look into they type of parents who raised you. Is it physical or emotional abandonment? Its OK to be single for a period whilst you learn tools to navigate life and relationships. It might be a challenge right now due to familiarity, but with a circle and intentionality, you can start making baby steps. Love yourself!

Whenever we are faced with a situation we initially get into victim mode. Yet, if we are to step back and view this situation from different view points, we would see the world very differently. Before bed tonight, look into one situation you're struggling with or have struggled with today. Put it down in a mental "village!" Climb on top of a mountain and look down on that village. How much else can you see besides the one perspective you have applied to this situation? Now go out there and embrace change. Use your situation to fuel growth. To do things you haven't thought of, you haven't done, you haven't believed possible. Yours is only one of many perspectives. "Proceed, then, Lucilius, and hasten, lest you yourself be compelled to learn in your old age, as is the case with me. Nay, you must hasten all the more, because for a long time you have not approached the subject, which is one that you can scarcely learn thoroughly when you are old." How much progress shall I make?" you ask. Just as much as you try to make. Why do you wait? Wisdom comes haphazard to no man. Money will come of its own accord; titles will be given to you; influence and authority will perhaps be thrust upon you; but virtue will not fall upon you by chance." Seneca #Stoicism #stoicreflection

What we need for effective healing #innerwork #consciousness #selfhealing

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk. Carl Jung #parenting

“Most people have a harder time letting themselves love than finding someone to love them.”- Bill Russell

Trauma bond. It's like a trap you can't get out of. And codependency will make you try to use the power of love to change someone. Deep down this comes from low self-esteem. We recreate patterns from childhood in relationships & they can relate to parent of opposite sex sometimes. Or either of our caregivers.

You’re picky about the car you drive, about what you wear, and what you put in your mouth… Be pickier about what you think.” – Abraham-Hicks #abrahamhicks #joedispenza #emotionalregulation

Trying to prompt a partner to heal If you have to create ultimatums or drag a partner to therapy they might feel pressured. For recovery of any sort, refrain from prompting someone to make changes. People make authentic changes if they volunteer to heal because then their healing is based on their why. It is their why that keeps them wanting to improve. It is best that you focus on your healing and create boundaries in your own life which will in essence have people decide to step up, if they wants to be with you or step away if they feel like it's a struggle to meet your standards. If you have started a healing journey and a partner starts making excuses, your next move is to do nothing about their decision. Simply let them know you trust them to do what is best for them. And mean it. That means put all your effort in your own healing and what you want in relationships. Not to prompt, remind, give ultimatums or promises. To simply prompt yourself, remind yourself of your worth and give your self ultimatums to treat yourself better.

Understand the emotional currents of your relationships

Reflect on our connectedness The universal oneness How have you shown up for the greater whole today? How can you keep up that purpose? “Nature bore us related to one another. She instilled in us a mutual love and made us compatible. Let us hold everything in common; we stem from a common source. Our fellowship is very similar to an arch of stones, which would fall apart, if they did not reciprocally support each other.” Seneca #Stoicism #stoicreflection

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