April 30, 2020

ENERGY

The Celestine Prophesy focuses on energy. Understanding how it works in general, understanding how it interacts between people, how important it is in relationships and getting in tune with the world etc. I found the part about the dramas we play to be very interesting. There are two “coins,” so to speak, in which people choose one and favor one side. One coin is the intimidator/victim coin. On the one side is the person who uses their energy to dominate another person entirely. They summon great force and attack a person energetically/physically/emotionally/verbally. The other side of that coin is the victim. They go with the “poor me” mentality of passive-aggressively retaining their own energy in the situation by playing on sympathies. It is harder to spot these people, but they manipulate to get us to feel sorry for them and change our energy to help them. Understandably, if someone is intimidating we expect the person being intimidated to react as a victim, but a strong victim mentality is destructive in that they take no responsibility and live their lives willingly “at the mercy of others” when in fact it is simply their refusal to take control that is causing them to be in the situation they are in. The intimidator takes energy and the victim is actively blocking energy and holding it in. Oddly, the victim when energized enough can become an intimidator. It may not be their go-to but they can turn around and intimidate others when they feel the advantage.

The other coin is the interrogator/aloof dramas. The interrogator questions the other person either openly or covertly to look for holes in the other person’s thinking so they can point it out and prove them wrong. It isn’t inquisitive behavior, because they aren’t looking to learn, but a means to get energy by feeding off the other person. It is more subtle than intimidating, but it takes energy nonetheless. At the extreme, it leaves the person being interrogated feeling shamed or humiliated because the interrogator found their weakness and tore them to the core. The other side to that coin is the aloof drama. They are active avoiders but not as victims but as deflectors. They “play dumb” or place their attention elsewhere to avoid the situation altogether. They may say or do something to dodge the interrogator’s questions or freeze and claim ignorance. Instead of fighting, they flee. They also withhold information and refuse to allow the interrogator to get enough information out of them to find a flaw because they know what the interrogator is doing and refuse to be shamed. They are actively holding on to their energy to keep it from being stolen. A talented person who is aloof will go to great lengths never to be cornered and have to give up any information, they are excellent dodgers.

I am an interrogator/aloof person and my husband is an intimidator/victim. I spent my childhood in an aloof drama in order to avoid my parent’s interrogating skills. My mom is one who uses both coins actively but seems to favor playing the victim. However, my dad is an expert interrogator and very aloof. I spent the first 20 years of my life feeling shamed pretty much all the time by what I didn’t know and got good at learning to stop people from ever getting the best of me through my ignorance. My husband favors the victim side and goes into the “poor me” mode whenever I get upset with him. He is not very good at intimidating and only seems to use it with our kids. However, because he has never honed his skills he just comes across as a supreme jerk instead of masterfully using the skill to get what he wants. Whenever I become an intimidator to get something I want (like compliance from stubborn teenagers) it feels horrible and abusive to me and I don’t want to be that person. However, tearing someone to their core and shaming them doesn’t feel as wrong to me, even though the effects can be just as harmful. As I go through my own healing process, I have more compassion and empathy and although I may use my interrogation skills, it is less to shame and more to unravel information that is being withheld. As a life-long learner and interrogator, it is very important to me to have facts so it feels easy to justify asking too many questions in the name of communication. I’m not really sure where the healthy line is.

As I was reflecting on energy and how it plays back and forth between people, I was struck by the patterns of my energy in my life. Because my family growing up consisted of people with very strong energies I naturally had to defend my own from being sucked away from me. My dad wasn’t that interested in dominating me and left me alone for the most part, but my mom was an energy hoarder. Whenever she felt low she would do just about anything to gain some for herself and she was very creative in engaging in various dramas to create an energetic situation she could feed off of. I had to get very creative in bringing the drama under control so it didn’t (psychologically) kill me.

As a defense mechanism, I think I developed a pattern of matching my energy to the person I wanted to make happy so that I could feel safe. I’m going to have to explore more of that with other people and see how I do it, but I morph to fit in so as not to stand out and be a target. However, I see that I married my husband because he does not feed off the energy. He never felt the need to dominate me, and when we were younger I would interrogate him and he would just shut down. I would try to get energy through my skills and when I didn’t get it, I would become an interrogator to generate more energy, and when he didn’t budge I would have to deal with my own need. He was a rock that anchored me and helped me face my own need for drama and learn to find other, more healthy ways to deal with my needs. I appreciate that. It still isn’t healthy because we never learned to work through conflict or deal with our frustrations, but it has helped me to become more self-sufficient in my energy flow.

April 27, 2020

THE CELESTINE PROPHESY

A friend recommended a book to me called The Celestine Prophesy. The best way I can describe it so far is Divici Code meets Deepak Chopra. The author clearly believes in Energy Medicine and Mystical spirituality not tied to a particular faith. It is just what the doctor ordered. Normally, I stay pretty busy on the weekends getting caught up on cleaning or working. However, I took the opportunity this past weekend to rest and read.

One aspect of the book that I wanted to explore was the idea that we cannot grow if we don’t go back and realize the opportunities our parents gave us in shaping us for our destinies. Even if those circumstances felt bad, or we wallowed in self-pity at the poor fate of our being born into the families we were, we need to look for the connections and how it has intentionally shaped us to be where we are. I have done something similar in the past, but it is good to get it out in the open.

My father is a very stable and hardworking person. I remember he was always busy either working or going away on weekends for the National Gaurd. He was respected and a leader in the positions he held. He seemed to be trapped in middle-income life and struggled with his financial decisions, and never seemed to get ahead. However, because of his diligence in being a hard-worker, their house is paid for and he has a nice pension. He was agnostic, never really telling me what he believed other than it didn’t hurt to have faith because even if you’re wrong you’ve been happy and if there really is a God and you don’t believe you have something to lose. However, he never seemed to have much interest in discovering anything out about what happens after you die.

As a father, he was aloof and disinterested. He didn’t really feel compelled to be a part of the lives of his kids. He did seem to directly compete with my brother on things and seemed to resent when my brother was better at something than him. He would ignore things for a long time, and then finally explode and yell. However, he wasn’t physically harmful in any way, he seemed to leave all discipline to my mother.

It is interesting as I write this I see so much of how my life was limited by my upbringing by my father. It seems like I lived under the dome he built. I have kept my life small and not aimed for more than middle-income life. I have made decisions that have set us back financially. I married a man that is aloof and disinterested in his kids and ignores things until he explodes.

My mother is strong and determined. She was never really interested in working but always had some kind of side job that she could spend the money on her own pleasures. She was feisty and not someone you crossed. There are so many bad things I could say about my mother and how she hurt me as a child, but the important things are that she taught me to be a mediator. She could not understand other people, even a little, and would look to me as a kind of counselor. I became good at observing and trying to figure things out because she appeared to not have the ability to figure much out herself. She was good with numbers, and had decent problem-solving skills to get what she wanted, but was so oblivious to people.

She became a Christian when I was 9 and went from being aimless to having a very direct purpose in life. She has been obsessed with reading the Bible and writing in her journal and teaching others about what she knows. She is also very uninterested in anything that challenges her beliefs to the point of knock-down-drag-out fights if you suggest anything she believes may not be true. It defines her now. However, she has developed great faith. She has almost a child-like faith in that she finds great parking spaces and seems to have a bubble around her when driving, and she is a terrible driver.

What I feel I have received from my mother is stubborn determination. Once I decide something, I don’t look back. I fight for what I believe I should and I will completely reinvent my life to get what I feel I should. That led me to take our first child and move to another state so that we could raise our family on one income, which we did. I then picked up our 3 kids and moved back to Colorado so they could have more opportunities as they got older, as the small town we lived in was a recipe for teen-pregnancy and alcoholism. I homeschooled. . . enough said. I built a business around working from home so I could fulfill my duties as a mom and make money for our family.

The theme of my adult life is “should”. I have looked at what I believed needed to be done and I did it, regardless of whether it is what I wanted or felt good to me. I ignored my own intuition and made my road map off of expectations for what makes a mom a good mom, or evading being thought of as “bad” by those whose opinions matter to me. That is not something my parents did. I know my mom sacrificed so that we could have things, but she would not have picked up the household and moved to benefit the kids. My dad would never have allowed her if she wanted to. She made sure my brother got special schooling and I got braces etc. so it’s not like they were not working for our good. I just went overboard to make my home more child-centered.

At some point in the last couple of years, mostly since I started tapping into my intuition and actually asking my body and internal self what I really wanted have I stopped striving for the “shoulds”. Outside of moving my family across town so my kids could go to better schools (yes I’m relentless), I have been really working toward not worrying about making anyone else happy. That has sent me on a two-year frozen period where I’m not really sure what I want because I’ve always been led by shoulds. My intuition isn’t giving me a lot of lead on what comes next so I feel stuck and trapped, really. I can see that my life before was marked by dissatisfaction. I was always moving toward a goal and it has been hard because I have not determined a goal to work toward in the past year. I am hoping to go through the exercises of the book will help me find that goal.

April 28,2020

THE CELESTINE PROPHESY

What have I learned about my past? How is it paving my future?

As a child, I felt very alone. My parents didn’t know how to connect with people, nor did they understand how to love other people. Don’t get me wrong, they felt love, but as I grow in my own life I see that love really is 1 Corinthians 13. It isn’t selfish, it isn’t needy, it doesn’t demand that it be right and others wrong. I believe that my parent’s inability to allow themselves to be wrong gave me the gift of allowing myself to be wrong. My whole life I have asked the question, why? Instead of camping on what was comfortable and safe, from a mental perspective, I always challenged myself. I explored and I learned and I always tried to make myself better. I did so because in my family I was last in the pecking order and there were a lot of big egos ahead of me in line for filling. Each person in my family denigrated and belittled those under them so that they could feel strong and good about themselves. I had no one to do that with. I received the brunt of my mother and my brother’s ego trips, but I had to learn to protect my ego. I went inward. I went to fantasy and released my frustrations through playing out events in my mind to their logical conclusion and then learning from the mistakes of my characters instead of making them myself. If I made any mistakes, it was sure to be wildly criticized and my shame would be enormous, so I learned to walk the fine line of not allowing for mistakes.

I can thank my parents for my determination to learn to be a better person because they were so set in their ways. I saw the conflict that it caused, that they refused to appreciate each other, and keep conflict at a minimum. Unfortunately, in my marriage I have not learned to have conflict, only to avoid it. I married a man that is incapable of communicating anything that makes him feel uncomfortable so in the early years I yelled and vented and said things that I regretted and ended up apologizing for my behavior and the argument was over. Never mind we never settled anything and he never really contributed. I always just thought he was the wiser one not engaging and embarrassing himself like I did. It never occurred to me in the beginning that he simply could not think when his mind was flooded with shame.

My adult life has been driven to answer those “why” questions. At first, I was dedicated to learning about God. As I had children I was obsessed with solving the “What does God want from us?” question. My mortality and the fear of losing them prompted me to make sure I was still on the right path, has the answers, and was not wrong. My need for being right was not to use it against anyone, but simply to make sure no one could make me feel ashamed for not knowing something that was available and true. This took me into my homeschooling years where I studied the Bible to its core. Why was my motivating question. Not just why, but how do I make this practical enough that I can apply it to my life and the lives around me? I suppose being married to a simple man and homeschooling helped me develop skills to explain things in a way that broke it down to the basics. Instead of the philosophical meanderings of so many that make sense to so few, my super power is deconstructing the complex and making sure it still holds up. Something that is true will continue to be true at all levels, not just one.

In addition to asking questions about God, I deep dove into understanding people and human nature. All of this was done outside of any profession or academia. I read a bunch of books to try to understand my childhood, who my parents were, and why they were the way they were, personality types, and why some people “clicked” and some didn’t. I had shelves full of information on my inner-child, boundaries, the Enneagram, and how to be a better me on many different levels. I came away with more questions than anything and the more I dug the more I realized that there isn’t really a right way to live. There is no way to be perfect, and that in striving for perfection I not only make myself miserable I become someone no one really likes because I lose the quirkiness of being unique. Perfect isn’t any fun and doesn’t play well with others. Believe me, that rocked my world and sent me into depression. What had I been working for all my life then?