Hi Chelle!

It’s really fantastic that you’ve made such a change from a people pleaser to someone who follows their own heart. I really admire that!

You wrote that you need to “fix” your people pleasing behavior. First off, you do not need to fix anything, you are already perfect underneath all of the junk that the rest of the world has heaped on to you. Your true self is simply waiting to be revealed.

Second, you have absolutely no control over the cycles of life so whether you “fix” yourself or not is irrelevant, what will happen will happen no matter what. Troubles and challenges will never stop coming your way, you cannot change that. What you can change is how you react to these challenges. Positive thinking and a commitment to inner growth will help you greatly. So, maybe you lost the thing you really wanted today but I have no doubt the situation will rise again in the future and that gives you some time to reflect on what lessons this current situation has taught you. If you do that instead of feeling ashamed and hopeless, you’ll find that when you are faced with the same crossroads again, you’ll be better able to handle it than you were the last time. Don’t fight the cycles of life, it is wasted energy that could be put to better use.

So to sum that very long paragraph up: You want to know what direction to take at your crossroads? None. Sit down and listen very carefully to your heart, think back on what lessons you have learned, and be totally brutally honest with yourself about what you want ( that is the most important part!).

You might find that the answer you are looking for is already there in your heart just waiting for you to ask a different question.

Good luck,

-M

Dear Chelle629:

You are welcome. Maybe it will help you if you give the details of those consequences, some of the details anyway so to explore more of what you can learn from and how to move forward specifically. When you are personally involved in your situation- and you are, of course- the strong emotions create a fog in the air-of-thinking, a fog I may not have and therefore, I (and others) may be able to see clearly something that is blurred to you

anita

Dear chelle629:

You mentioned being “brutally honest” with yourself twice. This is your quest, to see yourself as you are and to see others as they are and figure your way from there. Am I correct?

You will surely need to be gentle with yourself on this quest because the truth is often unpleasant and often enough, painful. Yet being blind to the truth only protects our awareness of it. The truth is there nonetheless, exacting its price for ignoring it.

We instinctively withdraw from pain and so, when the truth is painful, we withdraw from seeing it. You wrote: “however much we try to understand and communicate with each other, something is just not right – I can’t explain – it’s a feeling I guess.” I believe you are referring to your husband.

“Something is just not right”- you know it but your awareness of what it is that is wrong, the awareness is limited. You “can’t explain” because your eyes, figuratively, are closed. You don’t want to see what is painful to see.

What is painful to see, I don’t know. I would suggest the painful part is what you saw when you were a child- what made you close your eyes then. One of your parents was distressed and you believed then that it was your job to fix him or her. Your safety was dependent on that mission then.

Your thoughts?

anita

Dear chelle629:

Will read your post tomorrow morning with a refreshed brain. If you read this before I post again, can you tell me more about your relationships with your parents when you were a child, and now?

anita

Dear chelle629:

It is right there: “I don’t feel connected to them”- to your parents. This is your last line.

Unfortunately, you were never connected to your parents. There was the strong need in you to be connected to them, unfortunately they did not make that connection possible.

What you needed as a child was for your parents to allow that connection so that you could learn, for example, you lost a favorite toy. You look sad, you act sad, you cry. Then your parent notices you, hears your crying, sees the sadness and anger in your face and he or she sits down with you, calms you down, hushes you gently. The he or she says to you: You are sad. You lost your toy. You very much liked this toy and now it is gone. And you feel so sad.” And then the parent hugs you, comforts you.

If something like that happened, you would have learned: oh, this is Sadness. I feel sad when I lose something important to me. And you learn that when you feel sad, you can be comforted. You learn it is okay to feel sad, and that sadness does not snowball into something terrible, too much to endure. There is that sadness and then there is comfort.

When you don’t have at least one parent to do that and you lose your toy, feel sad, you don’t know what is happening: you make your own conclusions that fit your still forming brain, your age and lack of experience. You figure Sad is a terrible thing. It means there is something wrong with me. It is too much to endure. Etc.

Just like you needed as a child to be taught words to fit objects: like this is a Table. This is a Chair. You also needed words for what you felt. Without those words and without empathy from a parent, you lived in a vacuum.

So now you ask “how to listen to my heart”- the title of your thread. How to listen to a heart that grew up in a vacuum, disconnected?

When you mentioned your marriage, you wrote “this marriage thing” and when you mentioned loving your husband, you wrote: “I love my husband and all that”- this indicates to me a separation, that vacuum I am referring to. Emotional experience/ relationships seem alien, a “thing” and “that”- removed from you.

Back to your question, the title of your thread: you bring your heart to your experiences, to your interactions, closest to 100%, best you can (not 70%). You gently incorporate your heart and your rational parts, make connections between the two, pathways. Your marriage- discover what is in it, what it is. Approach it as if you see it, as if you experience it for the first time. Start from the beginning.

Start from your heart and build from there instead of starting from the rational, the dry rational and getting lost in endless thinking and analyzing.

Start as if you were a five year old.

anita

Dear Michelle:

By “start as if I was five years old” I didn’t mean act like a child would: that would be irresponsible in professional settings and most social settings. What I meant is to look at things as if you are seeing them for the first time. The concept was introduced to me in psychotherapy as having a “beginner’s mind”-

The things you were not taught- learn them now, from the beginning, abandoning many assumptions. For example, what you know about sadness. You learned that it is a terrible, terrible experience and needs to be avoided, maybe at any cost. Unlearn this, over time, and examine sadness with a Beginner’s Mind.

How terrible is sadness? Did it kill you? Made you chronically ill or injured? Did you survive it? When you feel it, does it last forever or does it lessen with time.. is it a permanent thing or passing, like the weather? What to do when sad: obsess on finding a rational solution or switch away from thinking…?

As far as relationships, how to do relationships, also: unlearn previous learning and examine from a Beginner’s Mind: what is happening? What am I feeing?

Further therapy can help, one with a strong Mindfulness focus. Practice will help- you can learn only through practice, not through thinking alone. Got to have the practice to provide you the material to work with so to re-learn. (If you try to solve relationships issues without existing relationships/ interactions, you are still in that vacuum I referred to).

anita