Power Imbalance in Abusive Relationships – Part 1

08/26/201503/21/20194 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

This is Part 1 in a two part series on power imbalance in abusive relationships, common misperceptions, causes and effects of power imbalance, and how to correct them.

Part 2 discusses further the differences between aggression, power, and control in abusive relationships and how healing allows us to access and rely comfortably on our own personal power in mutually respectful healthy relationships.

This article discusses misperceptions on the relationship between abusers and their victims and describes the predatory aspects of abuse and the not so obvious causes of power imbalance in abusive relationships.

There is a huge misperception on the relationship between abusers and their victims. That is correct…their victims. You will read often that abuse is the need to control and take power over another. While this may be partly true, this does not accurately or completely describe the predatory aspects of abuse and the not so obvious causes of power imbalance in abusive relationships. Not clearly understanding the differences can hinder healing and keep you vulnerable to emotional predators.

Dynamics of Work and Obligation in Healthy Relationships

starving soul hunger The core to healthy relationship are healthy interactions between compassionate people who have healthy views on work and obligation. Simply put, emotionally healthy people work for what they need to benefit and sustain themselves and those they are in relationships with. We expect to periodically self-sacrifice and put in the extra effort to benefit someone else because we know if we do, we will reap the rewards as well. We also expect sometimes to not work so hard and let others put in the extra effort to care for us when we need it. We know that we are paid for the value of the service we provide to others no matter if they are loved ones, customers, bosses, or even strangers. We also work for what we need because we know and are confident we can do so and enjoy working towards our goals. It brings us joy. It sustains our life. It nourishes our souls. It makes us better people. We know that having “skin in the game” builds character. If we reap benefits that are equal to or exceed the efforts or costs to achieve them, then we are happy, content, fulfilled. Why? Because we have literally proven to ourselves through our own actions and hard work that what we believe is true and benefits us and we are worthy of achieving those benefits. This is how we develop self-reliance, reslience, and self-worth.

Dysfunctional Work and Commitment Dynamics in Abusive Relationships

This balance of give and take and work and obligation that fuels normal character development, relationships, and human existence becomes severely skewed in power imbalanced relationships. Why?

Because abusers simply detest putting out effort that might, even in part, benefit someone else. They can work very hard and can spend inordinate amounts of time and energy working purely to get something they want. As most of us very well know, they can put in extraordinary efforts to groom and love bomb a potential mate or spouse. But putting the same amount of energy into finding or keeping a legitimate job, a personal relationship. taking care of a sick family member, demonstrating the loyalty and consistency necessary to be considered for advancement, or making the investment in personal self-development to merit consideration for more advanced positions are completely different matters and very unattractive enterprises to them. They want all the benefits of marriage, for example, without having to work for them or earn them! Abusers resist working to become better human beings more than any other kind of work. So even when it comes to respect and love and admiration, they want to come by them in the same manner as everything else – without having to earn them.

Abusers benefit from the self-sacrifice and work or their victims whom they exploit for their personal gain. The victims are stuck in “hamster wheel relationships” that go nowhere and get nothing back in return for their extreme investments of pain and energy. Their efforts are unrequited. Chronic exploitation leads to chronic emotional pain and trauma, overtaxing of our pain-based emotional mechanisms. They become depleted and emotionally fatigued, depressed, and traumatized. The extreme and long-term imbalance of power and chronic invalidation are the core to the damage from abusive relationship fueled by legacy wounded thinking and skewed beliefs that originated in abusive childhoods. It is this wounded thinking and these skewed beliefs that also makes us vulnerable to these predators.

Abuser Find Us and Prey on Our Vulnerabilities

Abusers find us. We do not find them. In reality, abusers aggressively and offensively target and prey on the vulnerable ones who will easily give up their power and energy to them. Abusers do this because they loathe working on self-improvement, cannot self-soothe, cannot generate their own power and get great enjoyment and emotional fulfillment from taking it from, where else? Others! As discussed above, they want all the benefits others can provide them without working for them.

The abusers shadow their pain on vulnerable victims and use them and play on their vulnerabilities so they defensively give up their power to them. Abusers learned these predatory practices from the same place their victims learned their maladaptive behaviors – in their own families. People who are emotionally fit do not readily give up their power to others. In short, they would simply not be bothered with abusers because they are confident in their self-truth, are resilient, and rely comfortably on their personal power and on their internal cues to define their worthiness. They reserve their self-power for themselves and others they voluntarily choose to share their power with and who treat them with respect. They monitor and protect their personal rights, authorities and divinity comfortably and confidently. They assertively would tell the abusers to go away or ignore them and the abusers would simply move on to the next victim.

Adult survivors of childhood abuse, on the other hand, suffer from low self-esteem and pain addiction because their pain-based emotions lose their protective functions, go haywire, and become toxic. In effect, when we are abused as adults, our exaggerated pain and trauma and accompanying feelings of unworthiness and defenselessness from our youth are triggered. So our shame is old unhealed legacy toxic shame and the beliefs are false wounded beliefs our childhood abusers shadowed on us that we bring with us into adulthood.

How Do Victims Become Victors and Take Their Power Back

Abusers do not hold some magical hold on us or power over us. We are not the source of our shame that drives our self-loathing. We are, however, vulnerable to abusers who target us due to damage from overuse of our pain-based emotions. It is our toxic pain-based emotions and false beliefs of powerlessness that cause us to give up our power to abusers who trigger our pain. We also believe falsely that we must suffer to be lovable, another skewed belief we were conditioned to believe in childhood.

So victims of abuse do not deserve the pain and are not powerless or defenseless to their abusers. We are not the cause of our pain and we are not responsible for it and we are not defenseless to it. We are, however, adults who are thinking like abused wounded children, maladaptive thinking we formulated when our brains and characters were developing and when we were most vulnerable that resulted from abuse and neglect and pain inflicted on us by those we trusted and were dependent on and who were supposed to care for and love us unconditionally. It was not our pain to begin with. This is pain and distorted thinking we shadow on our own children. This is how intergenerational abuse is perpetuated.

It is time to fix our self-esteem, heal our traumas, and TAKE OUR POWER BACK! It is time to break the cycle of intergenerational abuse. And as we heal, our children will heal through us. I explore these issues in much more depth in Part 2 in this series and in my book, Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors. You can read a free sneak peek and review of the book and purchase a copy here.

Codependency Does Not Cause Abuse

08/14/201502/18/20196 Comments

I’d like to clarify what I think is a huge misperception on codependency, healing, victimhood, and sources of emotional pain.

Abusers find us. We do not find them and we do not deserve disrespectful, abusive, damaging treatment. There is not something wrong with us that makes us deserving of abuse or pain. Abusers abuse us because we think like victims and unknowingly give up our power to them.

Codependency tendencies do not cause abuse. Codependency is a consequence of abuse because abuse mucks with our self-esteem and feelings of self-power. We learn to not trust our own selves for validation of our worth and instead turn externally to others to define us and decide what is acceptable in us. Codependency is a learned maladaptive coping mechanism that replaces what should be internal motivating behavioral controls and emotions we rely on and trust to keep us safe.

As codependency expert Darlene Lancer explains, “codependency almost always starts in a childhood that’s unsafe to express your feelings, thoughts, and needs or they were ignored. That damages self-esteem and turns us outward to another person, substance, or process. We lose touch with our true self and become dependent on and reactive to others. This process is addictive, because we can never be fulfilled from the outside when we don’t know or value our true self.”

We develop codependency in power imbalanced dysfunctional families where we learn to be dependent on others (we perceive as more powerful but who are not) rather than our own selves to define our self-worth and to validate us and as a coping mechanism to not being loved unconditionally. This has profound consequences on our emotional development! We can become notorious boundary violators ourselves! We were taught to maladapt, to adapt in the wrong way. We develop skewed beliefs about our lovability and our self-worth and where to source them from.

And as we get older, we become vulnerable to abusers or narcissists or psychopaths or bullies who are experts on homing in on our vulnerabilities and who target us! They find us and target us because this is just what they do. It is what they need to do to cope and survive. They are wired to aggressively go after others’ power because they cannot generate their own energy because they are disordered! So we become dependent on these creeps who manipulate us and do not have our best interests at heart and stay with them and feel defenseless to them because we are pain addicted and suffer from traumatic stress and chronic shame and feelings of powerlessness. We falsely believe that abusers and emotional manipulators have more power than we do to control our pain.

LEARN MORE ON HOW ABUSE SURVIVORS CAN BECOME NOTORIOUS BOUNDARY VIOLATORS!

As narcissistic abuse recovery expert Kim Saeed tells us, someone with codependency tendencies can lose sight of their own lives in the commotion of tending to someone else’s, which makes them prime targets for narcissists. In abusive relationships, they can end up loving someone who is unrestrained and they find themselves being more accountable for the actions of that person than the person is taking for themselves.

So we are not the cause of our abuse because we are emotionally dependent on others. If you believe this, get this out of your heads. If you believe this, shift your thinking now because this will cause you needlessly to take on extra blame and shame that will keep you from healing. You were victimized and preyed on by emotional vampires who hunted for you and targeted you because you are vulnerable, plain and simple and they feed off of your energy. You did not ask for, are not responsible for, and do not deserve abuse or emotional pain!

An emotionally healthy loving partner would remind you of your value and worth, support your self-assuredness, and not want you to be dependent on them. Emotional manipulators, on the other hand, victimize us. Once we deal with our vulnerabilities and heal our wounds and do self-esteem work we can make huge strides towards no longer being targets and no longer feeling powerless to these creeps and not being dependent on anyone except our own selves to define our self-worth.

There is another very important and not so obvious lesson here related to codependency and personal boundaries. Codependents can become boundary violators themselves to source from others what they need to define their worth. Read more on the importance of protecting personal boundaries here.

Kim Saeed cautions that our biggest challenge is learning to use our compassion responsibly and learning to care and help others without falling into codependent behaviors where we use others to define us, self-sooth, and cover our own dysfunctions and, in the process, enable theirs. We disempower ourselves and the person when we try to fix, solve, or make the consequences go away. We discredit and diminish our own selves when we redirect our personal power from ourselves to rescue others who do not have our best interests at heart.

The challenge is to support people along their journey without getting emotionally vested and entangled in “fixing” or “solving” their problems for them, or covering up for them. When you do, you will have acted with true compassion for yourself and others while honoring your own and other’s personal rights, authorities, and divinity.

What Makes Being Liked, Loved, Desired, and Valued Possible?

08/11/201502/28/20194 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

12049632_1613466202253151_7563358611981122153_n All humans naturally seek connections to other human beings. This is reflected in our needs to be liked, loved, desired, and valued. Ultimately, we at one time or another would expect to aspire to and, hopefully, achieve all four.

But is this realistic or possible in a world where we all are different people with different tastes, experiences, personalities, hang-ups, disorders, neuroses, levels of compassion, likes and dislikes, beliefs, opinions, goals, and changing needs?

How Self-Esteem Impacts Relational Health

While we are seeking and building relationships in our lives, we are also building self-esteem, our personal confidence and belief in our own personal worth and abilities to achieve joy and to keep ourselves safe. Our need for self-esteem drives our self-worth and self-respect and self-reliance and sets the stage for us to create and achieve goals that bring us love and joy, find meaning in our lives, and help us adapt to adversity and change.

Our self-esteem fuels everything we do and directs how we perceive events and people and how we respond to positive and negative emotions. If our self-esteem is healthy (which should be our goal), we are clear on our self-worth. This means we rely on ourselves and our emotions confidently for validation of our personal value because we know what we are capable of accomplishing, know we are worthy of joy, and set goals to bring us joy that we know we can achieve. We work hard to turn painful experiences into knowledge we know we can comfortably rely on in the future. We are also resilient and bounce back quickly from misfortunes we face and mistakes we make. When we do not achieve our goals or are unhappy or in pain, we do not hunker down in shame and rely on others to soothe our disappointments. Rather we take action and thought correct or course correct or get the advice or assistance to achieve our goals that, in short, make us feel good about ourselves, safer, wiser, stronger. We do not take no for an answer when it comes to achieving our goals which sustain our joy, success, and our emotional, physical, and relational health.

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So the role of other people is not to merely validate us and soothe our pain we do not think we can reliably handle independently. Their role is to complement us and to mutually share our joy, vulnerabilities, and personal power with us. We are self-sufficient, however, we comfortably seek connection or help from others when we want or need to. It is the honest but vulnerable connection with others whose truth aligns with ours that attracts and ignites us! We choose to love or be with others because their self-esteem, their truths, align with ours, we are committed in trust, and we have each other’s best interests at heart.

Alignment of Our Truths Attracts Us

Alignment of truth including common values, goals, and levels of integrity is what makes a person desirable, likable, lovable and valued to a person with high self-esteem. And our self-esteem, reliant on our self-worth and personal integrity, is what makes us lovable to ourselves. Healthy self–esteem not only makes being liked, loved, valued and desired possible by ourselves and others, it also helps to sustain our emotional, physical, and relational health and resilience.

12744552_10153491263859895_1023025528576497643_n People with high self-esteem are clear on their lovability and the level of respect and honor they deserve and expect in any relationship, be it personal, family, or work. People with low self-esteem, on the other hand, cannot readily look internally for resilence and validation of their personal worth and typically are pain addicted due to abuse or trauma or possibly even suffering from something worse. They may believe human connectedness relates to pain and suffering including physical and emotional abuse and betrayal and go so far as to sabotage healthy relationships they they feel unworthy of and unloved it.

How Abusive Childhoods Cause Us to Sabotage Our Health and Happiness

Interestingly enough, victims of abuse and the abusers themselves both use other people to soothe and ease their chronic pain. The main difference is that the narcissists and psychopaths do it offensively (knowingly with intent to harm and no remorse) and abuse victims do it innocently (unknowingly with no intent to harm). So being in a relationship with an abuser is not a relationship of alignment of truths, it is an alignment of short term alleviation of pains and gratification of needs. It is a relationship between a predator and its prey, a parasite and its host where one benefits at the other’s expense.

“Alignment of truth including common values, goals, and levels of integrity is what makes a person desirable, likable, lovable and valued to a person with high self-esteem. And our self-esteem, reliant on our self-worth and personal integrity, is what makes us lovable to ourselves. Healthy self–esteem not only makes being liked, loved, valued and desired possible, it also helps to sustain our emotional health.”

Relying on other people to define your self-worth or to soothe your internal pain is not self-esteem, is not mutually beneficial, and will lead to emotional fatigue, chronic pain, sadness, and depression. It also stunts your emotional growth and keeps you vulnerable to the narcissists and psychopaths, the emotional vampires who need your power and energy to survive.

th-17 The point here, folks, is that in terms of being liked, being loved, being desired, and being valued, IT IS NEVER ABOUT THE OTHER PERSON defining your acceptability and your worth. It is about you developing your own self-esteem, your own truth, gauging it’s worth accurately, upholding and honoring that truth and finding others whose truth aligns with yours and together, connected in trust, journey through life together fueled by the love and belonging that connects you.

Am I The Narcissist?

08/07/201502/12/20194 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

I hear frequently from readers who fear they are the narcissist and the one with the personality disorder.

My answer?

“Absolutely not!”

This distorted thinking is a consequence of prolonged abuse that started in childhood and its traumatic impacts on your beliefs, self-worth, self-assurance, gauges of reasoning, and your abilities to trust and regulate your emotions. It also is a consequence of not clearly understanding the differences between being narcissistic which is a normal and adaptive characteristic and being pathologically narcissistic that is personality disorder that has no cure.

The fact that you would even be concerned about this, demonstrates that your emotional capabilities although skewed, are intact.

Prolonged narcissistic abuse is slick invalidation from emotional vampires – carefully planned and premeditated efforts to stealthily through covert aggressive combat maneuvers, take everything valuable that you have to offer (your love, trust, compassion, beauty, generosity, child-bearing abilities, finances, or whatever) that they can manipulate from you to provide an illusion of grandeur and greatness to the world without any of the work.

When we do, we give up our power and energy that per our divine design at conception, were intended to be used by and for us to nurture our souls and become the best versions of ourselves as we search for internal truth – truth that we choose to share with others in relationships of mutual respect.

So, “no” you are not a narcissist. You, however, are a wounded victim of one or more who steal energy from you they cannot generate on their own. And perhaps you picked up some of their bad behaviors that will pass once you are away from them.

The good news is that you can fix your skewed thinking and heal and as you do, so will your children and you will thrive. You will make memories and people will love you just for being you. You will release the pain that made you vulnerable to them in the first place and become a stronger more self-assured version of yourself.

th-14 You will take your power back and thrive. I explore these topics in much more depth in my book, Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors.

Narcissists will be forever evil and when they are done and gone, the only person anyone will miss is the one they will never be.

Read more below on the topic from one of my favorite Facebook Pages of “Truth,” “Sanctuary for Awareness and Recovery:”

Sanctuary For Awareness And Recovery

Paradox with several Personality Disorders and mental illnesses: since the ego and perception are both affected, it is common for those with some personality disorders and mental illnesses with narcissistic traits to actually perceive those they are treating poorly as the ones who are narcissistic, because of their reactions to their behavior, or because they have healthy confidence and boundaries. The root cause is usually a lack of boundaries, and a lack of respect or awareness for other people’s boundaries.

So the person who insults your teeth might call you “narcissistic” if you don’t just let them insult your teeth. Apparently you were supposed to agree with them or hang your head in shame, not stand up for yourself against a blatant insult. So therefore in their mind the insult was perfectly fine, it was your reaction to the insult that was “narcissistic.”

Another example of this may be when someone enters your home or room without knocking or without waiting for an answer when this has not been established as the “norm” for them in your home or room, in other words you have not told them to “don’t knock, just come in.” They’re already showing a lack of boundaries with this behavior, so one shouldn’t be surprised that they react very defensively and emotionally when asked not to do that.

Saying and doing things that display hostility, arrogance, coldness, aggression, superiority or hatred are blatant displays of poor or absent boundaries, so when such a person’s behavior is confronted, disagreed with, or disapproved of, (speaking in a respectful manner that is), they are most likely going to react defensively and perceive it as arrogance, control, or an attack, and if they have some level of narcissism they may rage.

Why are Narcissists Self-Righteous and Manipulative?

07/24/201503/28/20197 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

th-12 Have you noticed that the most toxic people have the biggest and the most fragile egos?

Ever wondered why?

They are part of the facade, the illusion of smoke and mirrors masking a core of deep-seated shame and self-loathing and powerlessness. They are crude covertly aggressive parasitic attempts at taking others’ power for selfish self-serving purposes by those who cannot and do not want to generate their own. Oh, they may try to pass it off as power, however aggressiveness and the needs to control and charm and be self-righteousness and manipulate are not power.

Why Narcissists Lie and Why We Should Care More Than We Do

Truly powerful and influentially people do not manipulate others and are not self-righteous because, simply, they do not have to. However, generating our own power takes hard work including putting our egos aside for not only our own good but for others’ as well. And what key character qualities does this require? You got it – selflessness, conscientiousness, commitment, compassion and empathy: qualities these broken personality disordered people lack and have replaced with self-righteousness and manipulation and a sick desire to make others lose.

th-10 Now they cannot show their true colors to the world. Can they? How would they survive? How would they get others to give up the energy they starve for and need for emotional sustenance, for glue to mend their cracked psyches?

Of course! Why not portray a false image (e.g. ego) of charm and aggression (covert or overt) they need the world to see and prey on the vulnerable? Why not defend and perpetuate the false spineless weak persons they really are by judging others to prove their own power to themselves and to others and use whatever or whomever they can including religion to do so? Why not recruit personal assistants, “flying monkeys,” to help them th-11 create the magical illusion of power and grandeur and create their own “Land of Oz?” Why not commit the worst of “sins” in the name of God, America, or Buddha or Muhammed or for whatever reason or lie they can muster to justify what is really pure depravity and evil? Why not worship false idols – their own selves!

They want all the benefits we the virtuous folks work for and that the narcissists feel entitled to such as love and marriage and children and recognition without any of the work! In fact, they hate self-improvement! This is why they flock to and frequent churches and religious communities and politics and even companies and “do good” fund raising organizations that are driven by unethical “group think” cultures.

Why are So Many Politicians Pathological Narcissists and What Can We Do About it?

th-13 Now, evil lies on a long spectrum, however evil is evil. It is like being pregnant. You are or you aren’t and being a little bit is irrelevant to the greater purpose. So rather than work to become virtuous people of integrity and character and develop grace, tolerance, kindness, and generosity (which they loathe doing, by the way), these depraved people mask their weaknesses and prey on the vulnerabilities of others who truly are people of virtue.

Why Self-Forgiveness is Fundamental to Healing and Achieving Justice from Narcissistic Abuse

07/20/201502/12/20198 Comments

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

“Forgiveness is part of healing. It is not a prerequisite to healing. It is a point we reach when we understand and accept the truth about what happened to us from a position of emotional neutrality without the pain, blame and shame that our abusers shadowed on us.”

I’d like to share some information on forgiveness, justice and victimization that may not be so obvious to survivors of narcissistic abuse but is critical to their healing.

Survivors of narcissistic or for that matter any abuse were victims, no different than a victim of a crime, a brutal illegal attack or violation of our boundaries, rights, authorities, or freedoms. What is the difference between a brutal attack of one’s body or possessions and one’s psyche and one’s heart and betrayal of intimate trust? Not many. But there are a few fundamental ones.

brokenheart-wallpaper One attack, you may think, takes place in the conscious physical world – the other, in the metaphysical, the metacognitive world where we feel and think. However, the pain and shame and anger and fear and trauma we experience from a brutal physical or emotional brutal attack are the same. They inflict the same wounds and frequently open old ones. In addition, there are major differences to how we heal from the wounds. This is why.

We can achieve justice and emotional relief when our attackers are found, charged, found guilty, and punished for their evil deeds. Our victimization is then validated, our egos are soothed, and we can achieve some sense of safety, security, and closure. But what happens when a criminal “gets away with murder” and is free to roam and victimize whomever he or she chooses to target?

Isn’t this what serial thieves do?

Isn’t this what serial murderers and rapists do? 8cc14d8f-48d2-4d8c-97d9-3e66d991850e-medium

Isn’t this what serial narcissists do?

The answers are an unequivocal “yes” and pose huge healing challenges to their victims. Let’s explore these challenges closer.

Healing and Achieving Justice

Healing and justice are not acquired through resentment and revenge that serve no other purpose than feeding our egos, keeping us bonded to our abusers, misdirecting our compassion, and continuing to give up our power to them. These are reactive defenses that cause us unjustifiably to take on additional pain and blame and continue to suppress our pain and also keep us trapped and hunkered down in shame and inaction that will do nothing more than hamper our healing and recovery.

Equally, healing and justice are not acquired through excusing the evil or pain or betrayal that was inflicted on us by our attackers or by showing compassion for them. Our need to forgive can also be guilt-driven by our moral, ethical or religious 1935078_1109367059096008_7406065166067850262_n beliefs and convictions. I agree with renowned author and therapist Dr. Alice Miller and others that we do not have to forgive and that forgiving our abusers is a personal choice. We can add a huge amount of emotional burden to an already painful situation by being told if we do not forgive, we punish ourselves twice..blah blah blah. This can leave us conflicted and feeling added guilt and even shame when we really do not want to forgive.

We also while dealing with forgiveness have to deal with other daunting and unique challenges faced while grieving our losses. Effectively grieving after narcissistic abuse requires a reconciliation and a recalibration of our conflicting beliefs as they not only relate to forgiveness but also to loss, unrequited love, our lovability, and our pain and suffering.

How, then, do innocent victims “get justice” when their attackers get off free of charge? How then do they achieve emotional relief and a sense of security? Victims of emotional abuse do not even have the option of becoming vigilantes because the narcissists like the mutants on X-men and space creatures on Men in Black look normal on the outside, do their dirty deeds, and remain unscathed. In essence, not only are we the victim, but we also become the police, judge and jury.

Healing is All about the Victims, Not the Abusers

th-1 Healing, folks, has nothing to do with our abusers. Healing is, however, all about the victims. We are left to heal invisible wounds that were caused by our active but unaware participation in a very harming situation. Abuse survivors must work to turn their compassion and care inward and release the pain, trauma, shame, anger and fear that were projected onto them and inflicted on them by the emotional and conscienceless criminals, vampires, and thieves who also stole their identities. We, to heal, must not only release the pain and anger from the attack but also the shame from betrayal and of our unconscious complicity in the crime and our perceived foolery. This is why self-forgiveness and self-compassion are so important in healing. As Emily R., a community member at Yourlifelifter so eloquently stated, “forgiving a conscienceless person has absolutely zero meaning, thus, the real issue is learning to forgive oneself for not trusting oneself over their manipulative ploys of false promises and fake emoting.”

Forgiveness is part of healing. It is not a prerequisite to healing.

10453112_10150486967674990_1990359670124377576_n It is a point we reach when we understand and accept the truth about what happened
to us from a position of emotional neutrality without the pain, blame and shame that our abusers shadowed on us. Releasing the pain and anger with self-compassion will allow us to heal emotionally. Accepting our powerlessness to the pain stops the internal struggle in its tracks and emotionally “permits” us to direct our energy to healing. Self-compassion allows us to address our pain with kindness and not critical judgment.

But to fully heal we must forgive ourselves for the part we played. This is why understanding why we were targeted is critical to healing. We are then emotionally free to see things truthfully and accept what happened to us, accept our powerlessness to the pain with kindness, incrementally take back our personal power and redirect it to change our faulty thinking, rescue our own selves, and stop being vulnerable to emotional criminals.

775a67d2668997e917cee517e396fbca Healing is a process of self-discovery, self-analysis into the root causes of why we were victimized, addressing how our beliefs contributed to that, correcting our skewed beliefs, mourning our losses, building our self-worth as well as healing our trauma wounds. I personally believe, it is close to impossible to fully accept what happened to us and forgive ourselves for the part we played unless we first heal and recover from the trauma and then stop our faulty victim thinking. This requires fully understanding why we love people who inflict pain on us and why we are attracted to power imbalanced relationships.

“Forgiving a conscienceless person has absolutely zero meaning, thus, the real issue is learning to forgive oneself for not trusting oneself over their manipulative ploys of false promises and fake emoting.” ~ Emily R., a community member at Yourlifelifter

As a survivor, I can say that I do not excuse the despicable acts of the abusers in my life or absolve them of their “sins” (e.g. outside my pay grade) but I can say that I am clear on what happened and why it happened in my childhood, why I was targeted and why I let it happen into my adulthood. I am also very clear that the abuse no longer continues because I do not think like a victim so I am no longer victimized. I am not powerless to pain and I do not deserve to suffer. I choose not to participate in the dysfunction so they are defused and go away. They continue to target me because that is just what abusers do and but I am not emotionally vested. I no longer fear them. I no longer believe I have to suffer or self-sacrifice to be good or lovable. I do, however, accept them and readily identify them as the abusers and broken people they are.

Healing Henry Cloud We cannot expect things from people who are not capable of giving them. I accept that life is not fair and I was born into a herd of narcissists that I had no choice over. But I do have choices now based on my new found personal truth and not others’ lies. I choose a life I know I deserve, a life of peace, harmony, happiness, emotionally healthy love and mutual respect! I also accept that they cannot. I also accept that truly evil people do exist and that I do not possess the divine power, right, and authority to absolve them of their depravity.

I do, however, have the divinely provided right and authority first and foremost to forgive myself, heal, and to live a joy-filled life I am deserving and worthy of. The best revenge is healing, happiness, and success!

And in the process we achieve the justice we seek.