Reflection

One of the hardest lessons I have been learning as I continue to enhance my own life is that your life is a reflection of you. What you value, how you think, how you respond, what you intake, the relationships you have, the job your have, and the responses to your emotions, trauma, triggers, and the world around you are all on you. And your environment becomes the mirror that you need to see the effects of those things. With the right introspection partnered with emotional and mental wellness this can be a good thing that either validates your path or allow you to see what you would like to work on. The problem I have seen reflected in my reality is that a lot of us do not have any of what I just mentioned, and we take a fake it until you make it approach to those things.

Ouch, right? I know that one hurt me too but apparently that type of candid honesty is what those three things really look like. So now that you know can you really say that you have truly been embodying that? I wasn’t not for the longest. I went out of my way to learn all this knowledge and techniques to embody those traits and to assist others do the same. But when it came time to put my money where my mouth was for myself, I was very superficial with it. I did just enough to be aware and poke the wound but not enough to really dig out and clean the wound so that once I bandaged it the wound could actually heal. No instead for me it continued to be infected and fester constantly being superficial “cleaned”.

I knew what I needed to but having the courage to fully embody it? I wasn’t there yet lol and that’s ok. Did that mean I needed to stop the work I was doing because I wasn’t this “Perfect” Holy Person? Heck no! If anything, working with others and interacting with my “mirror” allowed me to work with myself subconsciously. I was so sneaky lol, and so are you. I am going to get a little vulnerable with you right now and as you read this, I want you to pay attention to your reaction and the feelings that come up for you. Allow me to be a mirror for you.

I have multiple sides to myself, as all of us do, but I am very intentional with what side comes out and around who. The masking is A 1, but with my family I tend to let it slip more often than not. They know parts of me the world will never know and that triggers parts of me in a very aggressive manner. And I do the same to them, which could be a good thing in a healthy environment, but that’s not what we had. Instead, we would just bleed on each other, consciously or unconsciously, abusing each other emotionally and mentally with little to no regard. Now, of course the egotistical me refused to account for my portion of the toxic wasteland that was created, and when I “did” it was usually at the sacrifice of someone else.

All I knew and was comfortable with when it came to them was embracing my victimhood. That’s what I decided that I could handle accepting that my mirror was showing me. My family was toxic and harmful and the issues that we were having were due to THEIR actions only and I was just rightfully responding. And from that point of view, I really wasn’t wrong. My family as a whole suffers from CPTSD, and we are just now in a place where the adults are even able to accept that there could be a problem. And while I was a little bit more aware than they were I was still not at the accountability part. You see by taking that step I was equating it to taking on “fault” as well and they needed to “pay” for that. However, I am still the “awakened” one so I will give them “grace” and allow them in my life without paying the full price. Aren’t I so nice?

No, I wasn’t. You see the issue was that I was not giving them or myself “grace”. I would keep them hostage in the toxic hell loop of guilt and shame that I had held myself hostage in. All the things I learned in order to help others I would use to manipulate the situation around me in order to look like the hero instead of the villain. Which probably has a lot to do with my anti-heroism now lol. I really had convinced myself that I had forgiven them and that the current issues we had all had to do with their inability to “heal” or be different. Was there some truth to that probably. However, that same sentiment was true for me as well. You see I was still so bitter and operating out of the persona I built to survive that environment, and I was projecting my inability to change onto them. And thus, transferring the responsibility of the image in my mirror to change in order for me to change. That’s not how mirrors work at all my friend.

You see it wasn’t until I was willing to take accountability and therefore responsibility for changing the image being reflected back to me that I was even able to utilize it for what it was. I always knew I wanted to be different but why wasn’t I being different? Why was I still being triggered? Why was I consumed with guilt and shame? Why was I so scared? When I asked myself those questions out of curiosity instead of the usual judgement and blame, I came to a freeing answer. I was still living as that abandoned and abused child, and you cannot expect a child to react to any situation maturely. You should never ask a child to be understanding or mature when it comes to the harm inflicted on them. They need to feel it, process it, and then be comforted in order to truly handle things. And by constantly reliving those initial moments and therefore those emotions every time something went wrong, or I was alone with myself, I was trapping myself in the embodiment of me as a child and expecting her to handle things like an adult.

Now that is some introspection! Did that hit any of you like a sack of rocks the way it did me? After I recovered from the emotional gut punch of that realization, I was able to stop. I was able to stop real time and move away from the child I was being to handle things as an adult. So, what did that look like. Acceptance, Planning, and Execution. Accepting that this was the place that I had been operating from, and that in order for me to do different I would need to separate myself (hopefully temporarily) from the environment so that I could truly heal and minimize the harm. Then I needed to figure out what I was healing from and what I wanted things to look like on the other side for myself. What and who did I want to be? How did I want to show up? I needed to figure this out with as little outside influence as possible. Then do it. Begin getting actively utilizing the tools I had received to not only process but actively be who I want to be.

You see how I was interacting with my environment told me everything I needed to know about myself. The things that hurt me, the things I wanted to change, the things I wanted to keep, and the environment I needed in order to fully embrace the fulfilling life I was currently living. Realization with action is true introspection and emotional and mental wellness. Everything doesn’t have to be “perfect” but accepting that and actively creating my version of happily ever after is what I had been working towards realizing this whole time. That is the “healed” me that I was masquerading as, and I am happy to see her more and more when I look at my mirror.