Addiction to Being
I often have the experience of someone showing up at one of my 5-day
Inner Bonding Intensives and presenting themselves as "all together",
or "fine."
"I'm not sure why I'm here," they state. "I really
don't know what to work on. I've been through years of therapy and to a
ton of workshops and I'm doing great. I guess I just want to see what
goes on here."
"Hummm," I think to myself. "I doubt you spent all this money just to see what goes on here. I wonder what you are hiding from?"
Jerry
is one of these people who seemingly has it all together. Jerry travels
all over the world as an executive coach. In his early 50s, he has been
divorced twice and lives alone in his expensive house. He is
financially successful, great looking, articulate, and charming. Yet
Jerry has a sense of emptiness within him.
As we explore Jerry's
childhood we discover that he was a very lonely and abused child, who
had to suppress his lonely and helpless feelings in order to survive.
He learned to suppress his feelings by staying in his head rather than
being present in his body. Now, he speaks from his mind rather than his
heart, which makes it very difficult to connect with him.
Jerry
learned, as part of his survival, to "be strong," which, to him, means
that he never allows anyone to see the unhealed wounded aspects of
himself and never allows himself to attend to his own painful feelings.
Jerry is terrified that if he opens to his feelings, the loneliness and
helplessness of his childhood will overwhelm him.
What Jerry
doesn't realize is that his feelings are not from the past. They are
current, being caused by his own self-abandonment. In other words, the
more Jerry avoids his feelings, the worse he feels, and the worse he
feels, the more he avoids his feelings, believing that he can't handle
them.
Far from having it "all together," and being addicted to
appearing "fine," Jerry is deeply caught up in another ongoing
addiction. Never having had any love from his mother, and never having
learned how to fill himself with love from Source, Jerry is addicted to
trying to get love from women. Believing himself incapable of filling
himself with love, fearful of feeling his deeper feelings and
judgmental toward all his painful feelings and unhealed aspects of
himself, women have become his source of love.
Of course,
because no woman can ever fill the empty place within him that is being
caused by his own self-abandonment, no woman has ever been the "right"
woman. Jerry goes from one beautiful woman to another, each time
thinking that this time he has found the right woman, only to discover
that he still feels empty and alone inside.
In the Intensive,
Jerry begins to accept that he is not bad or wrong for having painful
feelings, and that these feelings are being caused by his own
self-abandonment rather than by his past. He begins to accept that he
does not have to appear all together to be accepted, and that, in fact,
appearing all together pushes people away. Jerry discovers that he can
learn how to nurture himself through his feelings of loneliness and
helplessness over others. He discovers that he can tap into the
infinite Source of love that is always available to all of us and begin
to fill himself with love rather than having to be at the mercy of
women. He begins to discover the joy of filling himself with love and
sharing it with others rather than always trying to get love and
approval from others.
Jerry is deeply relieved to no longer have to have it all together.
