For many of us, the veils are being pulled away during this time, allowing us to see the truth about ourselves and our lives in a way that we never have before. Many people are coming out of long-term relationships with abusive or narcissistic partners, friends or family members at this time, in a daze, not understanding how they could have not seen the reality of their lives, wondering how they could have lived in a bubble, firmly believing that they had a wonderful, happy marriage or relationship, when in reality they were being torn down and exploited on a daily basis.
When we are children, our minds are so creative that we spend our play time living in a make-believe world of our own imagination. When bad things happen, and we experience abuse, betrayal and abandonment, especially with family members, we tend to create a story that we can live with as part of the survival mechanisms our child’s mind sets up. Often that story centers around how loving and wonderful those perpetrating family members are, because our mind cannot grasp what has happened, and denies it, suppressing all associated emotions.
As adults, we will automatically and unconsciously do the same thing if we have not actually done deep emotional healing work, and deny the reality of the abusive, traumatizing situation we are in. We see what we want to see, and hear what we want to hear. We manipulate our perceptions to fit our needs. We deny the unpleasant and harsh reality of what is really going on in favor of believing that we are loved and cared for by the people in our lives, because that is what we have always done.
This wake-up call to reality usually comes with the realization that we do not trust ourselves, and that we are not in touch with our intuition and gut feelings. We had lost our connection with ourselves so long ago, in an attempt to survive our childhood, that we do not remember actually being in our bodies, and aware of our selves and our surroundings. We realize that we have lived our entire lives in LaLa Land, or within an imaginary bubble or our own making.
For many, the positive mental attitude movement, and the messages of spiritual books and teacher to see only the good and live in a state of uninterrupted bliss, fit perfectly with our goal not to see reality, and furthered our withdrawal into an imaginary happy world. What escaped us was that we were mainly living in our heads, not connected to lower chakras, and not grounded. While our heads were in a rosy cloud, we had no discernment, no healthy boundaries, and no real connection with anything, including ourselves.
Energy vampires and narcissists alike could sense us from a mile away, and while we thought they were so wonderful and loving, they took us for everything we had – right in front of our eyes. And we encouraged them, soothed them, nurtured them, and enabled them. And over the course of the years of us being busy believing that we had a marvelous relationship, we adjusted to living within the box they provided for us, and didn’t even notice that our self-esteem had gotten even lower, that we doubted ourselves even more, and that we trusted them more than ourselves. We brushed off the demeaning remarks, the betrayal, the blame, and stifling control. We defended their goodness to our friends, and portrayed the loving spouse or partner with all our might. We carried deep resentment and rage toward them, but we did not permit ourselves to feel it, or to become aware.
But something pushed us over the edge, and our house of cards collapsed. We hit the point of no return, where we cannot put our illusions back together and pretend again that we are fine. The bottom dropped out, and we may be in the free-fall of our lives. The veil is coming undone, and we are realizing that we have been everywhere but present in the here and now. We are at ground zero and vulnerable, which actually is a good place to be, because now we can open our eyes, and come out of the rosy daze and dissociations of a lifetime. We can reframe our experiences with honesty and see truth.
While we will inevitably have anger toward ourselves for not being able to see what was right in front of us, we must be gentle with ourselves, and forgive ourselves for not knowing any better. We did not fail, and we did not lose those years that we spent believing in something that wasn’t there. We have learned an incredibly valuable lesson. And we now have the chance to build a true foundation for living that is based on self-respect, trust in ourselves, and discernment, and a real connection with our own Divinity. We can now take time to get to know ourselves, and our emotions. We have healing to do – that’s for sure – but we are not broken.
It is now time to invest in ourselves and our future, so that we do not keep recreating the same familiar situations, attracting the same type of dysfunctional people. We must dig deep in order to stop the self-destructive patterns and habits that we have developed over the course of a lifetime. If we just put ourselves back together, and keep going, we are bound to repeating the same cycle over and over.
We must allow the full impact of this crisis to wake us up, and find the courage to peel back the layers of all the emotions we have dissociated since we came into this world. With compassion and self-love, we must allow our healing to take place. We have to excavate our inner child, and learn to be there for ourselves, no matter what. We must find our authenticity beneath all the “shoulds” and “have to’s”, and a lifetime of the projection of other people. We owe it to ourselves to be patient as we take baby-steps toward building a life in which we can thrive. It is a process from being outwardly oriented to finding that all we need in already within our most sacred self.
Neha