I’m running across so many videos out there these days about how to stand up to narcissists, or how to see manipulation when it’s happening, and how to stick up for yourself, and what to do to keep those “toxic people” out of your life, or at least your decisions. It all sounds so good; it all sounds so enticing that you’re going to have a formula to take care of these offenders, and be able to do x, y, and z to restore peace to your life.
Taking Care of the Root Causes
I just want to make sure that we’re taking care of the root causes, the reasons why we’re turning ourselves into a pretzel when we are paired up with a shame-driven person who is willing to quickly escalate or shame us back when exposed, a person who is trying to shift the blame onto us or who appears to be narcissistic. That diagnosis is around there a lot. There are a lot of shades of things in that we are all wired to see the world from our own survival-centric viewpoint. We can use these many subtle aspects for our own freedom, once we know how to harness them.
What we’re doing by making the other person appear to be the enemy is just hurting ourselves. Ultimately empowering ourselves means we get to a place where we are in solidarity with ourselves; we take care of those parts of ourselves that are being beat up from within our own minds. We end up not having these same kinds of relationships with other people–where we create win-win outcomes that change everything. And if everything doesn’t change, we find ourselves in a different relationship with those people, because the dynamics will automatically change as we, ourselves, change.
My How You’ve Changed Since I’ve Changed!
I see it all the time in relationships where it appears someone is with somebody abusive, or manipulative, or narcissistic, or toxic. Yet when they use the reflection of that in a way that is so compassionate to themselves and to the other, they find out how the whole thing is an inside job.
We find out that we are doing to ourselves and the other, in that specific moment, exactly what we thought was being done to us.
Now I know that may seem hard to hear, especially if you are in the presence of an abuser or someone who is gaslighting you. And yet there ARE subtle ways where you will be able to, without blame or shame, find what’s going on inside yourself that sets up those dynamics. How are you abusing yourself–in that specific moment–even by staying in the presence of the abuse. Not that you attracted that kind of a person to you, but that there really is this culture inside you that has it appear, because of the projections, the lens you’re looking through, that another is your persecutor when in fact you can use them as your kind teacher.
Crystal Clear
As you evolve yourself, the other and the relationship really appear to change too, or you leave or they leave. It gets very clear, crystal clear. People can’t stay in that system with the dynamics being the same anymore, when you finally know how to USE these painful reflections to help and heal up those parts of you. No one stays the same when you heal that inner critic that is seeing everyone else’s behavior through the lens of this cup of self-criticism that’s already full, which results in a portrayal of yourself as the victim and them as your persecutor.
It’s Between You and You
I know I sound like I’m oversimplifying it, and yet those videos out there that make it sound like we’re going to get to the other side by taking care of ourselves, and by simply recognizing their personality flaws. But just making the decision to set a boundary or take another prescribed step often doesn’t happen for the very same reasons you are in these dynamics to start with.
Since the whole thing is an inside job, it must be evolved from the inside out.
It can and does happen in this symmetry work. Each time you engage in it, you will find that whatever is upsetting you, whatever appears to be persecution, whatever appears to be blaming or shaming you, is absolutely holding your path to peace.
It’s not rocket science, and it’s not magic, and it doesn’t take believing any new dogma. It just takes willingness to learn these simple models for efficiently cutting through old patterns. They changed my life almost overnight, even after a lifetime of inner work and practice. That’s why I’m so passionate about paying them forward and getting quickly to the crux of things.
Change doesn’t happen without really neutralizing the thinking that’s creating the problem, and it doesn’t happen just by setting intentions or affirming over the issues or defining the issues in someone else’s behavior. Your mind needs to see through its own original fallacies in a way that gives you your own freedom. It ends up with this place of coming home to yourself, of self-solidarity, of being able to stand with, by, and for yourself. That’s not against anyone else. It really is between you and you and once you’re getting that, once you have that self-contained way of being, all your relationships change. People don’t want the responsibility of taking care of you. When you are taking care of yourself, nothing is left but to put the focus on their own journey.
Harvesting the Blame and Shame
In some ways we will continue to attract, or it will appear that we’re attracting, that gaslighting or that blaming or that shaming or that manipulation. Yet it’s almost like life is going to keep showing up that way, until we get those parts for ourselves. So we can use exactly what others are doing. We can harvest the specific way we’re experiencing it, the way we’re thinking about it, the way we’re reacting in our bodies to it, the way we’re behaving back to them, and what it is we want from them, what it is we feel we need from them, how we need for them to change what we want them to do.
Our descriptions of them is all put together in the process of finding the symmetry and using it to evolve yourself, which evolves the relationship.
It’s phenomenal, and I can’t teach it all to you here but it is set up in a lot of my videos if you stay with it. You are most welcome to come in to one of our groups, or work through some of the digital courses, or do private work with me, or just read my Spark of Self-Love e-book.
There is a system, and it’ll get you there and it doesn’t portray others as the enemy or the bad guy.
You start to become really connected, no matter what. And you do not need to stay in the presence of abuse either. So hang in there, and reach out to me. We’ve got this!
