Some people think, "the more pain I endure, the STRONGER I get."

The "I can handle ANYTHING" mythology, and why people cling to it.

My childhood was pretty unstable. I grew up understanding that I couldn’t rely on anyone for my care. Thankfully, I developed a fierce sense of independence and self-reliance, which has served me well~ but it hasn’t been without its drawbacks.

The downside, is that my childhood history imbued me with a false sense of empowerment that was dependent on being needed by friends who had significant impairments. You cannot feel strong and mighty, around people who only WANT you but don’t NEED you. It doesn’t satisfy your yearnings to feel better than those less fortunate, clever or equipped to manage the little emergencies life tosses our way.

By the grace of God, this built-in grandiosity of mine didn’t spill over into my romantic attachments. I was intelligent enough to know I never wanted to be a man’s nurse, therapist or mommy~ only his Woman. My attachments with females however, did not escape my childhood programming, and I was always poised to help a friend in need.

My mother was diagnosed with Schizophrenia when I was seven years old, which was two years after my parents divorced. I believe her mental and emotional impairments forged me into the hyper-curious, self-reliant child that I was. When something is amiss or confusing in our home life, we feel compelled to try and make sense of it. Such was obviously the case, for me.

Human nature and its anomalies have never ceased to fascinate me. The conscious and subconscious parts of my mind have grown a sort of super-human determination to get to the heart of what makes people tick, and what stops ‘em from ticking. Over the course of many years, I’ve landed on and developed highly plausible answers to questions few people ever even contemplate. Perhaps this is the stuff philosophers and healers are made of.

My first book entitled, DO YOU LOVE TO BE NEEDED, OR NEED TO BE LOVED? could be thought of as a culmination of having worked long and hard to comprehend the need in myself to over-give, fix or rescue friends who seemed so lacking in life and love skills, they routinely needed me to help them redirect their course, and right their ship. The trouble is, these relationships were never reciprocal.

The fiercely independent, non-needing child must always find a way to receive compensation for what they give. The tide of the ocean routinely goes out to sea, but it must return to shore with sand and bits of shell it deposits, or no beaches would exist anywhere in the world. In short, if a lot more of us could learn to get as comfortable with receiving as giving, we’d have a far healthier world~ and our inner wells wouldn’t keep running dry, to where only martyred resentment can fill them.

Non-needing children grow up to be non-needing adults, but do they ever consider how often they deny others the pleasure of giving, on which they themselves, thrive? The one who needs the least in any relationship, is always the one in power. This is the allure of remaining a Super-giver. It ensures we’ll maintain the power seat or one-up position, in all our relationship experiences. As an additional payoff, we derive vicarious satisfaction from GIVING what we learned very early in life, it was impossible to RECEIVE.

No matter how hard we tried to get warm, loving, attentive responsiveness from our maternal object, we failed. It’s not necessarily that these crucial supplies weren’t intermittently available to us, it’s that we could never count on or anticipate them being accessible, if or when (God forbid) we really needed them! Hence, it was much easier to go without, than risk having to feel disappointment, which is such a painful experience for a young child, we tend to avert it the rest of our lives.

When we don’t expect others to supply us with nourishing emotional experiences, we can’t feel disappointed, when they don’t! When we’ve learned to be hyper-vigilant and prepared for painful setbacks (like losing a loved one or being captured by an enemy force, and having to survive torture), we get very busy defending against significant attachment, and/or neglecting aches and pains that arise in our body that could be signaling an important health concern that shouldn’t be ignored.

In truth, while we’ve busily built this monolithic sense of ourselves that’s invulnerable, what do we miss out on, in the interim? Do our lives feel joyful and plentiful? Can we allow ourselves to feel truly happy and content for more than a few minutes at a time, without emotionally preparing ourselves for some kind of faceless, amorphous monster waiting just around the corner, to rob us of our transient glee?

As tough, strong and perhaps invincible as we’ve fashioned ourselves to be since our childhood programming demanded it, have we made any room for ourselves to just be human? The act of deeply loving someone, inherently means that we need them emotionally (which is likely why so many resist and steer away from it)! When we’ve built an impenetrable suit of armor since early childhood to protect us from incurring further pain, how can anyone ever get really close to us? Have YOU ever tried to cuddle up to someone who’s encased in steel?

There’s a delicious irony, herein. Super-givers are instantly attracted to vulnerable, fragile facets in others~ yet have completely disowned/dissociated from these natural, human feelings in themselves (it’s often, why they won’t engage meaningful therapeutic help). Since we humans have an innate desire to feel stable, grounded and whole, we automatically search for features in others, that are missing in ourselves.

The sympathy and compassion we give to others, is actually our projection onto them of feelings we utterly refuse to experience for ourselves. They fly in the face of our entrenched sense of might and invincibility, so they’ve long been banished from our personality structure. Hence, others invariably receive what we cannot tolerate receiving from ourselves, or getting from anyone else.

The quintessential part of becoming emotionally healthy, is learning how to re-integrate all nuances of emotion we had to discard as young children, in order to survive in our home of origin. We cannot achieve being sound, whole, happy entities, if we’ve amputated various feeling states out of what we consider to be an “acceptable” emotional repertoire.

When we kill off ‘some’ feelings in childhood, ALL feelings lose their vibrancy. If you grew up thinking anger was a bad or wrong emotion and you shame yourself anytime it emerges, you’ve killed off the most passionate, activating, enlivening emotional experience you have available to you as a normal/complete human~ and other domains in your life (creativity, sexuality, joyfulness) will suffer as well, due to this diffused passion.

My book speaks to how and why I dismantled My pathological Codependency years ago, and the catalysts that forced me to confront the need to do it. It’s an easy read, yet the concepts and insights are so deep and vast, you won’t get to really benefit from the material, with only one reading. If you’re lucky however, you’ll get a ringside seat to clearly start seeing the dark, selfish side of your giving compulsions, and how your fear of genuine closeness has had you painfully attaching to people who are incapable of returning your love. There’s something going on deep inside you, that doesn’t really want this experience, and its name is Fear.

A gal pal and colleague once said to me, “Shari, as you work to grow healthier, real love will come along in the form of suitable partners.” What she never quite realized, was that wasn’t my goal. I merely wanted to be able to fall in love with Me. Anything beyond that, was merely ‘frosting’ on a well-baked, delicious cake that tasted scrumptious without any topping. If I got there, so can You.

Bottom line: What we HAVE, is what we WANT~ so if you’re dissatisfied with your current life configuration, try to accept that if your Subconscious Mind wasn’t working behind the scenes to impede what your Conscious Mind keeps asserting you “want,” you’d have created a very different reality for yourself a long, long time ago.