I want to be so clear here.
You are not your mom's programming or your dad's programming or your grandparents' programming or whoever else went before you and said this is the way it is or this is what we believe, and then subtly (or not so subtly) passed it on down to you to become your own.
If you know anything about our cellular level memory, you know we absorb these types of messages in our very being. Where we have no conscious memory, we have the cellular kind.
This is why our patterns of survival, the way we love, what we can't believe could possibly be true, and all our defensive behaviors that keep us walled-off from our truth, are so difficult to change.
At that deep cellular level, we've absorbed only their deep truth.
Back then, when we first learned these things, we had to go along to survive. Now, as adults making up our own minds, we don't. But the pull to go along with the comfortable and familiar will always be the strongest one.
Until we ask the one question that's always been on our mind we were only too afraid to ask.
Why?
Start there, Beautiful.
Does it serve you? Does it love you? Does it wrap its arms around you? Does it really have your best interest at heart, or is it more about a desire to control you and keep you small and scared?
See, as long as you keep doing what you've always done and don't find your line, and don't consider what was programmed into you in the name of what they called love and what you ALWAYS knew at the time but didn't dare question because you knew what the consequences would be, everything's just fine.
But is it? Is it really?
You tell me.
I don't think most of us have been fine for a very long time, and yet the very thing that wakes us up is found in the very questioning of this bigger thing. The questioning of why we sacrifice everything for everyone else's peace, while we suffer silently inside.
No more, Beautiful.
You've got a life to be lived that's calling to you from deep inside you. And if you think some mere mortal man's going to be able to do that for you, just think about what kind of programming he's bringing with him.
After all, he's only human, too.
But we put him up there on that pedestal and put so much pressure on him to save us, even as he's looking to us as the fantasy woman who's going to save him and then we wonder why it doesn't work.
And yes, he does that, no matter how tough and closed off his outer exterior makes him out to be.
That's why it doesn't work.
No one's real when you're operating from this level of programming. You can't save him if he can't first save himself, which starts by him actually looking within. And he can't rescue you if you don't first realize there was nothing you needed to be rescued from except for the belief (just like in the fairytales) that you somehow needed to be!
It's okay if this is deeper than you're ready to go, Beautiful.
Remember that line we all have? When you find it, come on back here and we'll have this conversation again.
Love,
Jane
Now it's your turn - tell me, does your programming serve you? Or is it just holding you back? Share your story below in the comments. I love meeting each and every one of you!
Wow. Great read. It explains why all this other advertising about a "hero instinct" that men don't know about seems so manipulative and distasteful.
I am very intelligent. I know I need to be with a man that is also intelligent. Not because they are "better" than other men but because it won't work out between us otherwise.
There is a lot of genius in my maternal family. My mother didn't seem able to handle that she got one of them as her first child. There was this sense of her deliberately pulling away and pushing me away as long as I can remember.
What happened to her that caused her to be so frightened? She would never say. Did she feel "less than" even though she was beautiful and brilliant? Was she badly hurt by one of the family geniuses?
I see our pattern repeated in my siblings. Two are like me and were somewhat alienated from her, and two, although very talented, were not. Guess which two my mother was close to?
So where does that leave me? This is the $100,000 question. I do often feel like an alien on my own planet. These days I laugh about it but is that ultimate healing? I can see that it is not.
I'm encouraged in that looking for a mate this late in life I don't expect these vulnerable men I am meeting to be what they're not. I genuinely enjoy them as they are. Most don't seem to feel the same way about me. Are relationships inherently this difficult or is it the frightening intensity my mother saw? In a way I'm fortunate in that the only way through this dilemna is this questioning.
Thanks for a great email.
So much here, Linda. Yes, it's in questioning the origins of all of this you discover what's yours and what was simply put on you. Sounds like you never conformed without your own resistance and I have a feeling someone for you is going to love this part of you - and be able to handle it. You're allowed to want what you want and expect nothing less than what you decide you need. No apologies needed. And no one gets to decide what that looks like for you. You're more than welcome.
Sometimes I feel this deep sense of guilt around finding a relationship. It only shows up in very subtle and tiny ways but once I felt it one time and thought maybe because my Mother always made us girls feel guilty for wanting or having a boyfriend when we were young. When I’m in a relationship I don’t feel guilty but I am 55 and single and would like to meet someone special.
You're not alone in describing this feeling of guilt around even admitting we want a relationship, Kate. I've heard this from many women who keep finding anything but someone who's actually real relationship material and there's definitely something to this and it's opposite; owning what we want and being proud of it. There's a reason we human beings long for companionship - it's in our DNA - and none of us are ever "meant" to be alone.
This really hits home...My programming Doesn’t serve me well, it’s really holding me back. I’m in my 30’s still searching for a relationship That I yearn for only to be telling myself your worth it or it doesn’t matter that you need to lose some weight and your beautiful. The constant self talks is draining 😣
If you can listen to where that self-talk first came from, Fern, it will be easier to talk back to it in your calm, confident new voice that tells yourself as an adult, you don't need to listen to it anymore.