The age of conformity and the siege of wounded Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine.
June is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) awareness month and while some health issues are visible to the outside world, many people face chronic conditions that don’t have externally visible signs or symptoms — also known as invisible illnesses. In an effort to shed light on the millions impacted by these conditions in society as a whole, this series shares the impacts of emotional neglect and abuse causing complex post-traumatic stress disorder, with the goal of helping others reclaim their personal power and choose love over fear.
The Ramifications of “Save Me” “Pick Me” Culture
I always liked the idea of finding the one, being chosen, “Pick me please, I AM over here!” I imagined my happy ending would look something like scooting off into the summer sunset on a riding lawn mower with my hot stud muffin, like an ’80s movie end credits scene. But after nearly three full decades of searching, I’ve come to understand my destiny doesn’t lead to a happily-ever-after fairy tale, or a rom-com ending with another person, for me, it’s actually been a bit more like Stephen King novel.
Many of us navigate relationships (with friends, family, lovers) a lot like a suspense movie, secretly seeking the same feel good chemical spikes that naturally occur during a thrilling chase scene, the same way we get sucked into a toxic relationship cycle. Science even proves when we relate to others it delivers brief cortisol hits, arousing our fight-or-flight response [1], tricking us into believing that those tingly feelings must be love.
Am I the Problem, is it Really Me?
As a woman in her (almost) midforties, who’s been dating for decades, I’m interested in men. I’ve dated, had short-term and long-term relationships, situationships, boyfriends, lived with boyfriends, also lived with male best friends, been proposed to, never been married nor divorced, and never had children. I’ve since found out that some of those same men from my past lied, some were leading double lives, some not single but very much married, others had steady girlfriends, I was unknowingly a side piece, others hid their money, sex, and drug addictions, and others were with me for only what they get, take, or use, and most recently, the last couple men faked entire friendships and a romance with me, with the sole purpose to steal money and attempt to ruin my reputation. (By-the-way: Those professional sociopathic narcissistic con-artists actually have regular looking profiles on those dating apps. Shocker I know! That was my first mistake, thinking I could never be a target. I thought Nigerian or Indian Prince’s only hung out in email junk mail boxes, not in local cafes like real people.)
You might be thinking, wow, this gal sure knows how to pick ’em — and that was the running joke in my close friend circle for a while too, until I started to dive deeper. I realized it wasn’t a me problem, these aren’t supposed to be the days of my soap opera life. Pema Chodron said, “Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” So I put on my big girl panties, rolled up my sleeves and asked myself what am I missing here, am I the problem, or is it something bigger?
Well, you tell me…
Emotional trauma and the impact of psychological abuse
- My first boyfriend used sexual coercion, triangulation, manipulation, and threats to force me to have sex with him years (yes years) before I was actually ready. After he got what he wanted, he told the entire school I was easy and a slut. No one, not even my closest girlfriends, came to me to ask if it was true or how I was doing. (How is that for love?) Imagine the boy who said he loves you more than life itself, uses you for his own personal gain, then betrays you, spreads rumors about you, smears your name, then discards you, but only after he threatened and made fun of you and intentionally weaponized your insecurities against you — and ever time you tried to leave he threatens to commit suicide. I don’t think that is love…and where was the sisterhood? Where was anyone for that matter? Where was the love?
- My college boyfriend belittled, publicly bullied and intimated me daily and body shamed me. He would then push it aside, gaslight and invalidate me, “You can’t take a joke,” or “You’re way too sensitive.” When my male roommate, friends and family members saw this mistreatment, they all stayed silent. No one said anything. Where was the protection? Where was the love?
- When I lived with a boyfriend who started to financially, psychologically, and emotionally abuse me, I moved out to save myself and then told people closest to me, only for them to say, “Well at least it wasn’t physical abuse.” And “We don’t see that side of him,” and continued to socialize with him, and blame me.
- I thought I finally met a twin-flame, true love divine counterpart, but turns out he was a master manipulating narcissistic abusive romantic conman who gets his kicks off playing mind games, objectifying and lying to woman and psychological and emotionally abusing them. After I went no contact, blocked, and changed my number, even moved to another country to protect myself from him, many people in my inner circle seemed more eager to hear about the juicy details and “gossip” of my “love” life to break up their monotony, than to ask about my mental and physical well being. Where was the support? Where was the love?
- When I spoke up about the American sociopathic con artist living in Mexico, who faked an entire friendship with the only goal to take as much as he could from me and stole thousands of dollars, time and energy, I was gaslight, smeared, lied about, harassed, defamed, and slandered in the community and betrayed and lost some of my closest friends forever. When I told people I loved, instead of tending to my emotional and mental wellbeing, their first response was, “Well maybe you shouldn’t have spoken up.” Where is the justice? Where is the love?
We live in a time where spiritual bypassing, blame shifting, and projecting are passed off as normal, and these behaviors are deemed as an okay way to treat other human beings. And they’re not!
If you’ve lived a lifetime of being discredited, invalidated, and told you are being too dramatic, you need to sit down, be quite, your voice does not matter, you might too, start to question yourself, and wonder, maybe it is me? But this is a lot of drama and trauma for one person, for any one lifetime. And to be retraumatized when you try to ask for help, is actually just as big of an issue in our society.
Out of sight is not out of mind
Whether we mean to or not, we have to realize or silence and acquiescence to harmful acts is causing devastating psychological harm in society. Research proves emotional abuse may be the most damaging form of maltreatment due to causing damage to a person’s brain affecting their emotional and physical health as well as their social and cognitive development.[2] It takes a certain type of person to attract psychological abusers and not recognize it as abuse. This made me wonder why I was so unlucky in love. I started to work with a trauma therapist, and do inner child healing and shadow work, and low and behold it always goes back to our wounded little child.
People who bully, control, abuse and manipulate others are often acting from an unhealed inner child wounded place, and paradoxically those who get involved with them are also trying to repair a damaged childhood full of neglect and emotional abuse. In essence we are all just little kids, running around in adult bodies, causing extreme harm to one another, until we do the inner healing work.
So let’s do the work
People who are emotionally neglected or abused in childhood are more likely to get involved in abusive relationships often times without even recognizing it as abuse. That was me for nearly forty years blaming myself, not realizing the mistreatment was happening on the outside of me.
Further research shows when a child’s basic emotional needs are not met, and they experience, neglect, emotional abuser or abandonment, and care takers are insensitive to the child’s developmental emotional needs its considered serious abuse because it conveys to children that they are worthless, flawed, unloved, and unwanted or are only of value in meeting another’s needs. Not only does emotional abuse causes low self-esteem but it impacts the trajectory of our life. Those more likely to suffer anxiety, depression PTSD and get involved with abusive partners [3]. But recognizing abuse is only the first step.
Throughout my life, when I tried to stand up for myself and speak up about any mistreatment, it was always met with push back.
It seems most people are more interested in keeping the peace of the controller, by conforming to a damaging code of cultural conduct then communicate openly right from wrong and stand up against mistreatment, therefore perpetuating the abuse and saluting evil and blatant disrespect.
We live in a world where people are more concerned with how they look, fitting in, and their own reputation, and keeping their appearance intact than doing the right thing. The right thing is protecting what we love and standing up against mistreatment (period!).
The cost of ignoring the truth
Someone dies every twelve minutes from suicide in the United States. Depression and anxiety affect over 300 million people worldwide. Over 36 million people have suffered emotional and psychological abuse. We can’t keep pretending that our own actions, or rather inactions, are not contributing to the global mental health crisis. [4]. Psychological abuse happens in any type of relationship, including friendships, working relationships, intimate relationships, or familial relationships. This is a serious public health issue.
Emotional trauma and psychological abuse looks like:
- Blaming you for their problems, guilt-tripping, blame shifting etc.
- Making you feel inferior, invalidating your needs and emotions, ignoring your feelings
- Coercive, threats, body shaming, actively poking at your insecurities, name-calling, etc.
- Manipulation, controlling, overprotecting, gaslighting, triangulating, future faking, love bombing, devaluing, discarding, hoovering, etc.
- Cold-shouldering, dismissal, stonewalling, dehumanizing, invalidating, using the silent treatment, withholding affection, shutting down communication by refusing to communicate unless on their terms etc.
- Jealousy that turns into actively working to turn others against you, or guilt tripping, downplaying your accomplishments, secretly being in competition with you or trying to block your success, hold you back from movement forward etc.
- Verbal or emotional abuse, “joking,” public embarrassment, patronizing, insulting your appearance, belittling (doing harmful abusive things that generate distressing emotions)
- Neglect, especially in childhood (where your needs are consistently unmet and you’re made to feel inferior, less important, or forgotten)
- Spying on you digitally, psychically, going through and using your things, disrespecting boundaries, reading your journal, diary etc.
- Isolating you, financial abuse, abusive sleep deprivation etc.
- Cheating on you intentionally to try to evoke reaction play mind games, pick fights, cause drama etc.
- Weaponizing your insecurities and vulnerabilities as a way to hurt you, or fear is used to control or weaponized to control you
These behaviors may be normal to one who has grown up in an abusive home, but this is mistreatment and not healthy. Society seems to be brushing traumatic experience under the rug, which is building up more psychological angst.
Fear has most of us in a choke hold. People are scared to speak up. And people are relating to one another through fear. The physiological fear response is one of our most primal drives of human nature, so essentially, we are all relating to each other and trying to have healthy relationships through a broken operating system, a survival-struggle mindset. But here’s the thing, we aren’t our ancestors. There are no bears or lions chasing us.
Do you really want connection or control?
The only real threat is our mind and cultural conditioning, the patterns we’ve learned that convince us wrong is right, and right is wrong. We need to retrain our central nervous systems to calm down, yet when our amygdala hijacking causes inner turmoil it’s impossible to create meaningful relationships and intimacy [6]. So when it comes to having deep, meaningful, rewarding relationships, we’ve got to retrain ourselves to move out of survival instinct into thrive mode. This means becoming acutely aware of how we show up in the world and commit to treating each other with more respect and regard. The only real way to do this is to ask yourself are you really seeking meaningful, rich, rewarding, healthy connections or is what you really want control?
A road to a healed heart and healthy love.
Perhaps we start to do things differently. It could look something like this.
1. We recognize and acknowledge right from wrong, as in respect vs disrespect and hold one another and ourselves to a higher standard.
2. We no longer go along with the majority because it’s easy. This is cowardly and royally disrespectful to others who actually do have the courage to stand up for what is right.
3. We get honest with ourselves. We start to look at our own shadows and how we treat people. We do less blaming and shaming and more introspective work, asking ourselves the tougher questions…
- What are you tolerating?
- What are you ignoring?
- Are you putting out what you want to get back? (Karma is a real thing.)
- Who have you hurt?
- Who do you need to make amends with? Why haven’t you yet?
5. We look at our own insecurities, shadows, limiting beliefs and commit to healing them.
6. We realize we need each other. We stop trying to self serve, and protect only ourselves, and extended a hand to others, to uplift, support and look out for one another. We move collectively from “Me” to “We.”
7. We put up stronger boundaries and know our own value and worth. We no longer allow disrespect, and we stop enabling unbalanced behavior, addictions, and codependent dynamics. We remove ourselves from people who refuse to heal and continue to cause harm to us because of their denial and refusal to take self responsibility.
8. We drop the ego. We take accountability for how we show up. Our precious egos are blinding us from the truth that our pride is ripping us apart and causing humanities downfall.
9. We flip the script and choose love over fear. Let love lead the way. Be more vulnerable — more often, it is a strength not a weakness.
10. We listen more. When people share, we don’t take it as a personal attack. Instead we see it as a form of intimacy and need for connection.
11. We forgive ourselves and others, for they know not what they do, we send love, and we can do better.
12. We focus on daily self-care, self-love, and our own spiritual and personal growth.
13. We don’t compete or try to one-up or win. Instead we start supporting one another and come together in compassion, openhearted, and a curiosity to grow and connect on deeper levels.
14. We allow ourselves to feel emotions without fear, and we practice non-judgment for ourselves and others.
15. We prioritize inner child healing, self-care, and introspection.
16. We stop waiting for something outside of us to make us happy or save us. We become our own hero and save our self!
17. We get better role models. (See part two: Article: Hello — Role Models, anyone there? Here.)
And last but not least…
18. We always lead with love.
We remember that all relationships are about love.
- Real love does not cause, allow mistreatment or stand by while others are hurting.
- Real love does not try to silence, manipulate, dominate, or control you.
- Real love does not care about appearance or reputations. (Nor does it preoccupy itself with what others think.)
- Real love nurtures and validates and accepts.
- Real love is compassionate, vulnerable, and nonjudgmental.
- Real love focuses on healing, and mending, not controlling or coercing.
- Real love is self-aware and honest.
- Real love is a divine force that is built on the foundation of mutual respect and accountability.
- Real love is all there truly is.
We all deserve more respect and to be treated better than we have been before. It has to start with each one of us, raising our standards, and saying, “I will choose to be more loving and understanding today, both towards myself and others.”
