Hiya. This post is all about solutions. Yeah, the pic is AI generated. (That hand, lol.)
Let’s begin.
So many of us grew up in families where the message was “Don’t be who you actually are because we need you to be somebody else/somebody more like us.” In response to this message we may have fashioned a false self that was more likely to be accepted.
What does your false self look like now, if you still have vestiges of that? What parts of yourself did you have to suppress to get acceptance in your family? If you were lucky, it may have meant you had to suppress interest in a certain activity - an interest in the arts, for example, because your family may not have seen it as a viable career choice.
However, if you grew up in a seriously dysfunctional environment you were taught to erase who you were and replace that self with a role that was necessary for the marriage to survive. This is how enmeshment happens.
I had to be the Identified Patient/Scapegoat. No one could know (and my parents refused to admit) that the marriage was a disaster so they abused me and I was forced into the role of the psychologically sick one so they could focus on “helping” me….
Other roles you might have had to take on are Lost Child, Mascot/Jester, Hero/Golden Child, or Enabler/Caretaker.
No matter what role you had to assume you sacrificed significant parts of your authentic self in order to survive.
And you did survive. Now comes the hard work of changing the brain wiring that says what worked then works now. I realize my Enabler role - yes, we can juggle multiple roles, yay - is not helpful in my adult life. The Lost Child role tends toward isolation, especially when I am under too much stress.
Ok, how do we heal from this? We have to find out who we were originally before we had to take on the role(s). We have to differentiate from who our parents told us we were and discover who we really are. There are six steps to this process as outlined by Relationship Systems Coach, Jerry Wise. Click twice to start and then click play, beginning at 1:57.
Practice focusing on ourselves, not others (3:21)
Practice separating our feelings from our thoughts (8:38)
Practice separating what are our feelings and our thoughts from the feelings and thoughts of others (12:48)
Practice observing how we borrow or loan functioning from others (15:25)
Practice defining our true beliefs, values and principles (19:05)
Practice defining ourselves in our significant relationships (25:20)
Yes, self -differentiation is difficult and takes daily practice. It is a process of repeated observation, evaluation and interruption of how we interact with ourselves and others. I am still very much in the middle of it still but already the rewards have been so worth it!
Let me know where you are in this process and what you have discovered in your journey. Later, gators.