"We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal. We are taught to repress and distort our emotional process. We are trained to be emotionally dishonest when we are children."

"When the role model of what a man is does not allow a man to cry or express fear, when the role model for what a woman is does not allow a woman to be angry or aggressive, that is emotional dishonesty. When the standards of a society deny the full range of the emotional spectrum and label certain emotions as negative - that is not only emotionally dishonest, it creates emotional disease. If a culture is based on emotional dishonesty, with role models that are not honest emotionally, then that culture is also emotionally dysfunctional - because the people of that society are set up to be emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional in getting their emotional needs met.

What we traditionally have called normal parenting in this society is abusive because it is emotionally dishonest.  Children learn who they are as emotional beings from the role modeling of their parents.  "Do as I say  not as I do," does not work with children.  Emotionally dishonest parents cannot be emotionally healthy role models, and cannot provide healthy parenting."

"The dance that we learn as children - the repression and distortion of our emotional process in reaction to the attitudes and behavior patterns we adopt to survive in an emotionally repressive, Spiritually hostile environment - is the dance we keep dancing as adults. We are driven by repressed emotional energy. We live life in reaction to childhood emotional wounds. We keep trying to get the healthy attention and affection, the healthy love and nurturing, the being-enhancing validation and respect and affirmation, that we did not get as children. This dysfunctional dance is Codependence. It is Adult Child Syndrome. It is the tune that humans have been dancing to for thousands of years. Vicious, self-perpetuating cycles of self-destructive behavior."

The most destructive emotional abuse is the emotional abuse we learned to inflict upon ourselves.  We formed our core relationship with self in early childhood and have been judging and shaming ourselves ever since.  The most destructive thing about the emotional abuse we suffered because our parents were wounded, was that we incorporated the messages we got from their behavior into our relationship with self.  We emotionally abuse ourselves on a daily basis.  If we had healthy self esteem we would not allow anyone to emotionally abuse us - including ourselves.

"When we were 3 or 4 we couldn't look around us and say, "Well, Dad's a drunk and Mom is real depressed and scared - that is why it feels so awful here.  I think I'll go get my own apartment."

Our parents were our higher powers.  We were not capable of understanding that they might have problems that had nothing to do with us.  So it felt like it was our fault.

We formed our relationship with ourselves and life in early childhood.  We learned about love from people who were not capable of loving in a healthy way because of their unhealed childhood wounds.  Our core / earliest relationship with our self was formed from the feeling that something is wrong and it must be me.  At the core of our being is a little kid who believes that he/she is unworthy and unlovable.  That was the foundation that we built our concept of "self" on. . . . . .History has been, and is being, made by immature, scared, angry, hurt individuals who were/are reacting to their childhood wounds and programming - reacting to the little child inside who feels unworthy and unlovable." -

Loving the Wounded Child Within

"I don't remember how the particular insight that I am writing about here came about - whether I heard it, or read it, or just had the thought occur (which would mean, to me, that it was a message from my Higher Self/Higher Power - of course any of those methods would be a message from my Higher Power.)  In any case, this particular insight struck me with great force.  Like most great insights, it was amazingly simple and obvious.  It was to me earth shattering/paradigm busting in it's impact.  The insight was:

If someone loves you, it should feel like they love you.

What a concept!  Obvious, logical, rational, elementary - like 'duh' of course it should.

I had never experienced feeling loved consistently in my closest relationships.  Because my parents did not know how to Love themselves, their behavior towards me had caused me to experience love as critical, shaming, manipulative, controlling, and abusive.  Because that was my experience of love as a child - that was the only type of relationship I was comfortable with as an adult.  It was also, and most importantly, the relationship that I had with myself.

In order to start changing my relationship with myself, so that I could start changing the type of relationships I had with other people, I had to start focusing on trying to learn the True nature of Love.

This, I believe, is the Great Quest that we are on.  Anyone in recovery, on a healing/Spiritual path, is ultimately trying to find their way home to LOVE - in my belief. LOVE is the Higher Power - the True nature of the God-Force/Goddess Energy/Great Spirit.  LOVE is the fabric from which we are woven.  LOVE is the answer.

And in order to start finding my way home to LOVE - I first had to start awakening to what Love is not.  Here are a few things that I have learned, and believe, are not part of the True nature of Love.

Love is not:

Critical            Shaming            Abusive            Controlling            Manipulative

Demeaning            Humiliating            Separating            Discounting

Diminishing            Belittling            Negative            Traumatic

Painful most of the time            etc.

Love is also not an addiction.  It is not taking a hostage or being taken hostage.  The type of romantic love that I learned about growing is a form of toxic love.  The "I can't smile without out you," "Can't live without you." "You are my everything," "You are not whole until you find your prince/princess" messages that I learned in relationship to romantic love in childhood are not descriptions of Love - they are descriptions of drug of choice, of someone who is a higher power/false god.

Additionally, Love is not being a doormat.  Love does not entail sacrificing your self on the altar of martyrdom - because one cannot consciously choose to sacrifice self if they have never Truly had a self that they felt was Lovable and worthy.  If we do not know how to Love our self, how to show respect and honor for our self - then we have no self to sacrifice.  We are then sacrificing in order to try to prove to ourselves that we are lovable and worthy - that is not giving from the heart, that is codependently manipulative, controlling, and dishonest.

Unconditional Love is not being a self-sacrificing doormat - Unconditional Love begins with Loving self enough to protect our self from the people we Love if that is necessary.  Until we start Loving, honoring, and respecting our self, we are not Truly giving - we are attempting to take self worth from others by being compliant in our behavior towards them."

The overt forms of abuse are often much more readily identifiable than the more covert forms.  It is relatively easy for most people to see that raging and yelling are emotionally abusive.  That name calling and verbal put downs are emotionally abusive.   It can be hard to identify some of the more passive aggressive forms as being just as wounding - as being abusive and damaging.

"Passive-aggressive behavior is the expression of anger indirectly.  This happens because we got the message one way or another in childhood that it was not OK to express anger.  Since anger is energy that can not be completely repressed it gets expressed in indirect ways.  This takes the form one way or another, overtly or subtly, of us acting out the Codependent battle cry "I'll show you - I'll get me."  As a kid I was very angry at my mother for not protecting me or herself from my father - but it was not ok to be angry at my mother so I was passive-aggressive in various ways.  One was to not show any feelings.   By the time I was 7 or 8, I was being cool in a passive-aggressive response to her attempts to be close to me - I would not let her touch me, I would not show happiness if something good happened or pain if something bad happened.  I would just say "it's ok" no matter how much it wasn't.  I also "showed" her and my dad by not getting the type of grades as I was capable of getting in school.  I have spent much of my life sabotaging myself to get back at them.

Passive-aggressive behavior can take the form of sarcasm, procrastination, chronic lateness, being a party pooper, constantly complaining, being negative, offering opinions and advice that is not asked for, being the martyr, slinging arrows ("whatever have you done to your hair", "gained a little weight haven't we?"), etc.  If we don't know how to set boundaries or will go along with anything to avoid conflict, then we often will agree to doing things we don't want to do - and as a result we will not be happy doing them and will get back at the other person somehow, someway because we are angry at them for "making" us do something we don't want to do.  A classic codependent scenario is being asked where you want to eat and saying "oh, I don't care, wherever you want to" and then being angry because they take us somewhere we don't like.  We think they should be able to read our mind and know we don't want to do whatever. Typically, in relationships, one partner will ask the other to do something and the person who can't say "I don't want to do that"  will agree to do it and then not do it.  This will result in nagging and scolding which will cause more anger and passive-aggressive behavior.

The way to stop being passive-aggressive is to start being honest (first of all with ourselves), having boundaries (the more we get in touch with our inner children the more we can have boundaries with the angry ones that are causing us to be passive-aggressive), saying no when we don't want to do something.  It is easier said than done.  On one level what we are doing is recreating our childhood dynamics of being criticized by our parents.  It is because at our core we feel unworthy and unlovable that we have relationships - romantic, friendship, work - where we will be criticized and given the message that we are bad or wrong.  Because we don't Love our self we need to manifest people outside of ourselves that will be our critical parent - then we can resent them, feel victimized, and be passive-aggressive.  They are in fact just a reflection of how we treat ourselves internally.  The more we can learn to defend ourselves internally from the critical parent voice the more we will find that we don't want critical people in our lives." -

Emotional abuse is a devastating, debilitating heart and soul mutilation.   Bruises to the body fade away, bruises to the heart and soul stay - until we start focusing the Light of healing upon them.  Emotional abuse is crippling to self-esteem and sets us up to become trapped in the viscous self-perpetuating cycles of shame, suffering, and self-abuse that drive the dynamics of the dysfunctional dance that is codependency.

It is vital to start learning how to protect ourselves.  It is vital to start realizing that emotional abuse is not acceptable - that we deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.  In order to do that, we need to start learning how to treat ourselves in kinder, gentler ways - we need to start learning how to be Loving to our self.

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