Maybe as part of al-anon, therapy, or another intervention, you learned about boundaries and cut people out of your life that felt toxic. There’s a good chance when you did that you shut down your feelings as well, and now are wondering why you can’t cry, can’t love, can’t feel. Here’s what happened:
Denying Your Feelings to Set a Boundary
You shut down your heart and pretended that you didn’t care, but you cared deeply. You set boundaries through brutal detachment, stuffing your feelings and cutting yourself off from them. Because you depended on the other person to meet your needs, you suffered a rude awakening as you suddenly depended on you to meet your needs. You were told it was the right thing to do but you didn’t really understand how it was the loving thing to do for BOTH of you because you were still so enmeshed. You had to wall off your heart so that you wouldn’t feel their pain and think it was your own PLUS feel your own pain and not know how to process it, how it was here for you to heal.
Leaving the Body (Unhealthy Detachment)
Your unwillingness to accept the emotional pain of losing your guidance system, of losing your “ruler”, your conditioner, meant that you were unable to process what was happening. It was too traumatic to feel ripped away from the source of your contentment. So you left your body. You let your spirit linger above your body and observe what was happening without feeling it.
This detachment, this leaving your body, made it possible for you to walk away or hold the boundary but it didn’t heal the trauma or allow you to experience — and live through — the pain of allowing this person to experience the consequences of their behavior.
Photo by Andrew Boersma on Unsplash
From the body, we feel all: our emotions and other’s. We are sensitive to energy and aware of how we affect other’s and how they affect ours. We can feel life leave a body. We can feel the pain so deeply because we are all one. We have reverence for their lives and their experience.
When we leave the body, we deny this pain. We deny the pain we’d feel if we were to take a life. We deny that the experience is even happening. We shut down our feelings and our humanity and then life quickly becomes meaningless, joy-less, without any redeeming quality or purpose.
Healthy Detachment
Those that can take a life of an animal to feed their family have a healthy detachment: that is they are in their body when it happens. They can feel the pain of the other animal. They can thank it for its life and use it to provide nourishment for their family with reverence and gratitude. They are choosing to expend its life for the sake of providing for several human lives. That doesn’t mean it’s without pain. It doesn’t mean that it’s always the right choice. But it does mean that they destroy with the intention of giving life and not without regard to the life they’re taking. It is a karmic instance: take one life and give several. It is a knowingness of the good and bad consequences of your actions.
Photo by photo-nic.co.uk nic on Unsplash
Holding a Boundary with a Substance Abuser
When you hold a boundary with a substance abuser from a conscious place, it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel their pain and your own. It means that you step out of the consequences of their behavior. You stop choosing suffering that you’re not creating. You realize that you’ve enabled them not to evolve and experience the full consequences of their actions. When you realize this boundary is held from a place of love and reverence for their life, the pain is manageable. The pain dissolves to give way to clarity that enabling them to not experience their own choices was delaying their evolution. You were interfering in their life path rather than improving it. And you were allowing yourself to stay behind on a path that was beneath your own level of evolution.
“When you deny that reality of our interconnectedness by not taking responsibility for how you affect yourself thus affecting the other, you are no longer in alignment with Source and you begin to experience the sometimes harsh consequences for your choices.” – Beth Rowles
The only way to invite someone to your path is to allow them to fully walk theirs. To allow them to experience getting lost in the woods, going hungry, having no resources. What harms the tribe, holds the tribe back, slices off connection, is harmful to others and thus is not in the spirit of universal Source, shared connection. When you deny that reality of our interconnectedness by not taking responsibility for how you affect yourself thus affecting the other, you are no longer in alignment with Source and you begin to experience the sometimes harsh consequences for your choices.
A Tribe in Misalignment
The tribe also denies its own consciousness if it allows you to do this. If it allows your misalignment. The tribe refuses its own divinity when it allows you to act as though It doesn’t exist. Your own failure to recognize your worthiness is a detrimental rippling effect on those around you and they are also denying their own worth when they stay in that imbalanced, unhealthy environment.
Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash
As humans we often forget that our quest is not for the individual but for the collective through our individual consciousness. We support others when we support ourselves. We love others when we love ourselves. (I’m crying writing this). What’s healthy for us, what reflects our own divinity, is healthy for others. The more groups of people who hang behind on the lower path, the more we hold our whole world back from the glorious experience, the paradise of living as a divine-inspired being. The more we tolerate inexcusable, unconscious behavior, the more we delay our own evolution.
“As humans we often forget that our quest is not for the individual but for the collective through our individual consciousness.” – Beth Rowles
Walk boldly forward with a refusal to deny your worth, to deny your needs, to deny your entitlement to the experience of a pristine universe. To deny the full expression of your soul incarnate. Walking boldly forward is how you draw others forward as well. Love the part of you that is unapologetic for its perfection and strive to magnetize the prospect of a new dawn, a golden sunrise, a dewy, magical, fulfilling existence for all.
Ready to learn more?
To learn more about setting healthy boundaries (without unhealthy detachment), click here to download my free guide or click here to take my online course: Getting the Love You Deserve.
Definitions:
Source: The Source from which we came, the original source of all energy. God, the Creator, Universal Intelligence, etc.
Enmeshment: Feeling as though others are responsible for our feelings and we’re responsible for theirs because we don’t know where we end and they begin, energetically.
Paradise: The present moment, stillness, presence, awareness, joy, alignment with Source, in gratitude and reverence for the beauty of life around us.
Reverence: The recognition that the life within another is within us. Gratitude.
Boundary: A limit that reflects our worth.
Holding a Boundary: Notifying the other and potentially moving away from behavior that doesn’t reflect our worth.
Healthy Attachment: Present and empathetic, attuned to our emotions and the emotions of others. Mutual trust and attunement to each other’s needs energetically (through emotions). In control of our thoughts.
Click here to read more about Marriage and Relationships.
- 48: Invest In The Kids: Applying Business Principles for Family Success - June 18, 2023
- How to Live Happily Ever After - June 5, 2023
- 45: Why Creating Marriage Health is Good Parenting - May 28, 2023
0 Comments