SELF. CENTERED. THERAPY.

MeYou’ve lost who you might have been if the truth was told to you. If you knew AND FELT from jump that it wasn’t you who was crazy or wrong or only a face and body or not as smart or was selfish or angry “for no reason.” Who might you have been if you recognized then what you’re able to recognize now? You’d be confident, imperfect and ok with that. You’d have skipped the assholes and found someone who treated you and considered you like you deserve: with respect. Not because of what you can do for them, but because they don’t think twice about doing for you.

If you had been heard and seen and therefore appreciated earlier, you wouldn’t have to have learned these truths through crisis or pain. You would be disappointed but not crushed. Have bad hair days but not worthless or stupid or ugly or fat. You’d like and appreciate yourself. And you’d learn to love yourself properly. With dignity and have had the courage to say no and mean it. And no matter what the other person’s reaction was, you’d be more about what you’d said or done because... you would have had your feelings validated enough to FEEL what it’s like and request it from ANYONE you came into contact with.

You’d be who you are becoming sooner. You’d be you wherever you were. And the labels of .. whatever would be ridiculous for you to consider because ... they don’t know you like you know you!

You would have had a childhood to look back fondly on instead of shame and confusion. And ... you’d NEVER question if you’ll turn into your mom, because you would have been proud to.

But you didn’t have THAT mom. So she has had the child she was limited in having. To her, she had someone not quite good enough (this is how SHE feels about herself),a “disrespectful” daughter who doesn’t appreciate what she has.

The thing is , she never had that daughter, but she made you think (and therefore “feel”) as though she had. As though you were.

So trust of what people say isn’t possible for those people with mom’s like that. They can’t trust mom, so they can’t trust themselves, so they either trust no one and live alone (or for 44 years) or they trust people who are not trustworthy. People who push boundaries, people who recognize the pain of being lied to, and keep lying to them. Because they need to win no matter what. Even when they loose the thing they said they wanted. They would rattler win, than be abandoned.

That has not, has never been, and will never be you. Those “feelings” that you THOUGHT you felt, were actually thoughts. Your parents thoughts about themselves. That’s all they have known... to THINK about themselves. 😔

And you and your siblings have been the “collateral damaged” but THOUGHT you were just damaged. The reality is that your family collectively has been damaged. But they don’t have to be anymore. Not. Any. More.

ROGERSFAMILYTHERAPY.com

Learning how to be attracted to what’s healthy by rebuilding your Self one session at time.

INTIMATE relationships are the bête noire (the one thing they mostly dislike) for the person with an impaired real self, calling as they do for self-expression, self-revelation, and the ability to function independently while sharing with another human being.

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They are unable to enter into and sustain healthy relationships. For them intimacy is the ultimate stumbling block since they must enter into a state (as Webster defines it) “marked by very close association, contact, or familiarity,” engaging “one’s deepest nature.”

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This is the kind of intimacy we expect from healthy individuals who are able to reveal and share what is deepest, truest, or most real about themselves. I would define intimacy, therefore, as the capacity of two people to offer each other’s real selves affection and acknowledgment in a close, ongoing interpersonal relationship.

Sewn together & in needling, torn. A part from my me. Apart from all the you, or sew it seamed, ripped.

Not intended to be mended.

“Seamingly” broken. Therapy can provide less needling and the potential for the mental wealth to engender a non-conforming yet still mature couture. I am sure will endure (both definitions).

Thick as thieves we thread through dis-ease and all of our past being teased. Sew much thread woven through, next to and most defiantly above (at first anyway) our head!

What I am most impressed with is what does seam un- uh dressed is better as they say, ‘left unsaid. was the fact that I which can for some, lead to feeling and even making it sew that we are (or at best feel) dead.

Not so! Make it knot so! Dread! Fool.

Make it - so very Self owned that we reside back on our own thrown rather than be thrown off our path toward the unknown. As in, undoing what was. 

Don’t just hear to what I tell you. Listen with enough mindfulness that you hear what I am trying to tell you.

You don’t have to have control when you are empowered.

No one has control.

But everyone can become empowered.

In order to gain Self control

One must feel empowered.

The willingness to be more curious than critical is truly all that’s required.

Don’t become a prisoner of your past. It was a lesson, not a sentence, period.

Reactions = Emotional

Response = Behavior

Ruminating = Rethinking both without expressing.

Overthinking is Under Feeling

That’s why it’s not “Get over it,” its’s LOOK UP FROM UNDER THE FEELING AND MOVE THRU IT TO GET ON TOP OF “IT.”

Managing it empowers you.

The it: Trauma.

Trauma is too much too soon or too little for too long.

The trauma of “It.”

Identity Theft

In childhood we can experience identity theft . Caretakers who make everything about themselves only, take our sense of Self and instead of reflecting back to us, the potential for a strong Self, they establish the groundwork for Self-doubt. This is because when children show them who they are, parents take them, keep them to themselves without giving them back.

It fosters toxic dependence, establishes Self-doubt, and kick starts the child’s search to find themselves in others. As the child grows, they are only going to be attracted to dean to others who only steal the child’s sense of Self because that’s what they know.

It becomes the norm to people please, accommodate, and stay in the loop of codependency because of their first experience of intimate relationship:

Identity Theft or I.T.

So when people say “Just get over it,” what they’re saying is

Get over having your Self taken from you, and the establishing and cementing of years of not knowing that your sense of Self has been taken from you? This is the beginning of abandonment.

How does one just “get over” the abandonment of the sense of themSelves?

Caretakers take your sense of you. You feel loss of being lost, alone, no one sees you. So you belief you aren’t in there somewhere. But you’re not lost, and there’s no part of you that’s missing or empty. It’s buried

Self-Centered Care Taking is a magician’s trick. It’s raising you to BELIEVE that the real you doesn’t exist. That you’re not worthy of being mindful of. That you’re a crazy person or too sensitive when all you’re doing is trying to be YOU.

Self-Centered care taking keeps you in the dark about your Real Self. It’s mixed messages or sarcasm in childhood. It’s gaslighting and denying that you have an intuition. But it’s not your denial at first, it’s them denying you.

Without a healthier environment, relationship or experience of encouragement, you then accept their denial as yours and start to deny your Self on your own. You pick up where they left off.

And since then you’ve been trying to get your needs met from THIS point of view, crisis, insecurities and defenses (and your behaviors in response to them) have informed you of who you believe you are. This is trauma.

Too Much (situations where emotions l maturity is demanded)

Too Soon (before you are ready to fully emotionally accept what’s happened)

Too Little (natural need(s) not being met).

Too Long (the timeframe of feeling as though everything will be alright) This is different for everyone, but all children need to know sooner than later that everything is going to be ok... so that they really KNOW. FEEL and BEHAVE like they are.

So the next time someone or even you say to yourSelf, I should’ve or I should or they should JUST get over it, remember what the “It” really is! 

Consider: Ultimately this is true. We die alone. AND the journey there is the process of accepting that. There is a mourning of lost perfection. The constant reminders via reality checks. So the pleasures, the potential for joy is really only relationship. Each lesson, experience of teaching and learning, giving and receiving becomes the point along the way toward, yes, the inevitable … AND each person’s personal person: Their Selves GETS to contribute to the narrative that will influence the story, the reason for the human’s being: Why. —> Existence isn’t pointless, it’s pointed. How we interpret that point seems IS the point.

At least one win in what you’ve text to me this morning (at 9:11), seems to me to be: You have learned to trust yourself. HUGE considering the way in which you HAD to learn to do that. Parenting teaches us to trust ourselves (outside validation at first), THEN having viscerally learned this, we are better able to trust others. A balance.

Us first then them. For some of us, traumatized on the thin border of us and them, are forced to learn self trust first through outside attention or validation (too much it feels - we are “too much” ) until we gain insight through mirroring, mentoring, music (😉) to re-teach, reiterate, repair this process of excess with little access to the truth. Our worthiness is not contingent upon the outside, son! Within our Selves we learn to be our own me and then we can be whom we choose to be for the thees whom we choose to make part of our family trees.

You trusting me to help you trust you, produced in tantrum your relationships with work and love. These experiences have the potential to produce more satisfaction in relationships with others that require the you from your work and love to inform chosen family and friends who will be ENOUGH as you journey toward the inevitable. AND (to reiterate from my last text and borrow from Mr. Serling): “Every man is put on earth condemned to die. Time and method of execution unknown.” That doesn’t have to be such a painful reality. From a different angle: limitless.

Unearthing our Real Selves means systematically excavating a disorder of unworthiness, Reclaimed as we catch up to our true purpose.

. . .

When all is said and done, and we are with ourselves, on the toilet, on our death bed, or when we are the most satisfyingly still. At the core of our Selves is Self Worth.​

. . .

Some cultures have named this part of The Self, the Soul, or in many beliefs in faith, this is our Spirit. In the field of psychology this is our Sense of Agency, our personal reference point of who we are as we know ourselves to be. In the specialized subconscious focus of Depth Psychology and psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychology, this is who we really are. Our Real Self.

. . .

It’s established at birth and in what can be experienced as healthier state of personality development, is *encouraged in childhood from caregivers with a solid sense of their Self Worth. Therefore, they are better able to pass it onto us.

. . .

SELF WORTH

COMES FROM FEELING WORTHY JUST BECAUSE WE EXSIST

e.g. a child runs into a room where their caregiver is and sees in the caregiver’s eyes that they are excited to see them. All the child has done is enter the room. Their existence is validated as worthy or of value to the child’s most important people, so what has been established at birth is enhanced/encouraged/‘proven’ to the child. This especially influences the child when they are between the ages of 0-3 years.

. . .

As their Self-Worth is encouraged, a person’s emotional world and the ability to manage it in a more consistently mature way develops from there from the inside out). This person is better able to take action toward the one area of life in which emotional maturity is mandatory to its success. —>

. . .

ALL RELATIONSHIPS especially ones of intimacy

aka: letting others in on how you authentically feel about …. Anything important to you.

. . .

When we DO something well over and over again first failing & not giving up, we establish Self Esteem. MAYBE A MENTOR or at least one caretaker reinforces what this person does at a pivotal developing stage aka puberty and with Self Worth established,

. . .

SELF - ESTEEM

becomes a genuine experience and can be repeated by doing esteem-able acts. Practicing and not giving up.

. . .

. . .

The dogma of another

. . .person’s beliefs become the “feelings” about themselves. Slowly but surely, moment after moment, mom after dad after mom after me (in that order) and in order to have internal order, the worthiness of their birth fades from the center of their earth, and their intuitive sureties of how they feel about themselves becomes a specifically destructive narrative or tape or voice about how to save themselves.

. . .

Calcified as fact and believe they have it because of Self-confidence and Self-esteem. And they DO have those qualities, they’ve worked hard to achieve those strong feelings of themselves.

However, because they achieved these states of emotional satisfaction from the outside in, Self confidence then drops as it will when life throws us a curve ball and we aren’t as confident today as we were yesterday - completely natural, but without Self Worth calcified or solidified, a momentary disappointment in self confidence will start to erode the next level of self esteem.

. . .

When self esteem is hit because of a bad day, the bad day becomes a bad you. When this happens, Self worth is exposed and so if it wasn’t consistently modeled for us and/or encouraged during childhood that we are of value and important because we exist…children can emotionally tell when something isn’t quite right with someone, they just don’t have the capability yet to express it, so what gets passed on from generation to generation is poor -the result of poverty, or low -we feel beneath something better not greater than us- and bankruptcy -empty, of low value and ‘broke).

. . .

So often times, more than anyone REALLY knows, but when it’s brought to their attention -consciousness- there is a universal recognition: Having caretakers who embody “feelings” of poor self worth leave this as a legacy to their children and/or people they influence. And so for generations, because we ‘don’t know any better’ life just gets worse. Until you’re not living anymore. A zombie. Or worse. You stop living to breathe and so you stop breathing. Literal Death.

That’s another reason why paying attention to your breathing is crucial to surviving and surviving is crucial to thriving.

WITHOUT A CORE 

Sense of SELF Encouraged throughout childhood, We try to establish ourSelves by obtaining Self confidence and Self esteem through relationships with things, achievement and people who may not have earned the right to see us as our real selves.

 . . . 

Of course Self-Esteem and Self-Confidence are important, but they are action and optics oriented. Without the action -and those outside ourselves continuously validating our esteem and sustaining our confidence-providing these important (but not defining) parts of our Selves -DOES enable us to achieve, but only so far-. Why?

. . . 

Because the core hasn’t been made conscious to us do to OTHER PEOPLE’s

SELF-ISH NESS. And then our own denial of the truth:

YOU ARE ENOUGH - YOU ARE OK & WILL BE - YOU MATTER

. . . 

Healing then becomes about accepting that who did this to you was not necessarily trying to on purpose. They were victims too. But without looking at our core caretakers with a bit of a critical eye, we cannot see them as real or human. THEN we are choosing to be in a delusional life. Which really is death. And some take it literally.

BE YOU NOT THEM

Trust in me vs Trusting only Thee

Consider: Ultimately this is true. We die alone. AND the journey there is the process of accepting that. There is a mourning of lost perfection. The constant reminders via reality checks. So the pleasures, the potential for joy is really only relationship. Each lesson, experience of teaching and learning, giving and receiving becomes the point along the way toward, yes, the inevitable … AND each person’s personal person: Their Selves GETS to contribute to the narrative that will influence the story, the reason for the human’s being: Why. —> Existence isn’t pointless, it’s pointed. How we interpret that point seems IS the point.

Learning to trust our selves

------

HUGE considering the way in which you HAD to learn to do that. Parenting teaches us to trust ourselves (outside validation at first), THEN having viscerally learned this, we are better able to trust others. A balance.

--

Us first then them. For some of us, traumatized on the thin border of us and them, are forced to learn self trust first through outside attention or validation (too much it feels - we are “too much” ) until we gain insight through mirroring, mentoring, music (😉) to re-teach, reiterate, repair this process of excess with little access to the truth. Our worthiness is not contingent upon the outside, son! Within our Selves we learn to be our own me and then we can be whom we choose to be for the thees whom we choose to make part of our family trees.

--

You trusting me to help you trust you, produced in tandum your relationships with work and love. These experiences have the potential to produce more satisfaction in relationships with others that require the you from your work and love to inform chosen family and friends who will be ENOUGH as you journey toward the inevitable. AND (to reiterate from my last text and borrow from Mr. Serling): “Every man is put on earth condemned to die. Time and method of execution unknown.” That doesn’t have to be such a painful reality. From a different angle: limitless.