Digging for Diamonds

Digging for Diamonds

How growing up effects who you choose as a partner

Being a Wholehearted Man or Person means you cultivate the better parts of yourself, society and those around you. It’s kind of like you’re digging for diamonds, but in this case, you are looking for them inside of yourself. You’re looking for the best parts of you that have been buried by the struggles of life. these struggles usually arise from our childhoods and instead of growing up in a family environment that allows the diamonds in you to shine, the very act of your diamond or light shinning is incongruent with many a family dynamic. So, it must be buried. And there are many ways to burry these diamonds, yelling, shaming, ignoring, hitting, manipulation etc… So, imagine that you are a toddler and you see a bug on the ground, you get all exited and tell your parents about what you have found. Seems pretty innocent and it is. It is your light shinning, your diamond in this case is exploration and discovery. At this age most parents will either take interest in what you have discovered, or they will at least give a “oh that’s nice” response. Let me pause for a moment and say that life is moving forward and that we cannot each and every time stop to explore everything that interests our children. So yes, there will be times when we are trying to get somewhere and our little ones are more interested in said bug than in getting in the car and we must hurry them along.

For those of us lucky enough to have parents that stoped and took the time to be truly interested in what we were discovering all I can say is, I’m jealous! Many of us were not fortunate enough to have been raised by such parents. What I am saying is that when we get ignored it starts to burry that diamond. When we do not have our parents standing over us telling us that this is a good thing we are doing, which will further promote that explorational and discovery side of ourselves, we start to view the world through their eyes instead of ours. In the example above does not denigrate the child either to be clear. It becomes a growth stalemate.

Now fast forward to say around the age of 12 or 13 and you become interested in the opposite sex. You want to confide in your parents that you like a certain someone at school. The response from your parent to this news will hard wire into your nervous system from that moment on what your interactions and relationship with your parent around this topic is going to be. Their reaction can be on a sliding scale but for sake of simplicity I will boil it down to two main reactions. The first is “Oh really, well tell me more about this person and what do you like about him or her?” The second “What!? You’re too young to like someone, you don’t have time for that you have to focus on school, sports etc…

So, the first response is an inquisitive one that says I am interested in what you are interested in and I would like to know more. The second is telling the child that they don’t know what they are talking about and what they are feeling isn’t valid or worthy of discussion. If what I am saying is not hitting home imagine a time you have come to your parents with something and they invalidated you, ignored what you said or worse shamed you for thinking or feeling a certain way. John Bradshaw gives a great example when he was a little boy, “I came downstairs feeling sad and when I told that to my parents they said no you don’t, you’re not sad and so I went back upstairs to my room scratching my little head thinking I could have sworn I was sad.” Now imagine that the child is younger around two years old and is being told to shut up or not to cry or how about the ever damaging “what’s wrong with you, why did you do that?” These words begin to wire the nervous system together about how to think and feel about certain topics as we are learning and growing up. Back to the example of telling your parents that you like someone. The first response is natural, inclusive and creates a natural flow to the conversation and triggers the nervous system, and the brain that it is ok to talk about these things and not only is it ok, but they want to know more. This wanting to know more stimulates the brain to think further on the subject. The second response however is like a shock to the nervous system that tells it that this is not safe to speak about and furthermore that this is not a safe environment to express in general what you think and feel. As far as engaging the brain, you can forget that as it has had the exact opposite effect because the brain never even had a chance to come on line and be used. And so, the Diamond is buried that much deeper. You can imagine the damaged caused by this type of parenting over ALL the years of your life growing up. I say ALL the years because thats it, you’re born and are on this planet until you have reached the age of 18. In those 18 years you have been programed from your environment all the good, bad and ugly that it has to offer. Let’s put it this way, when you are born you are given a blank hard drive and it begins to record data on it from the world around you. And so, there it sits and writes and records, creating beliefs and ideas of how the world is and how people are and how you should think about yourself. What you should believe about religion or politics about dating and marriage. About how your friends should treat you and themselves. Everything of who you are came from everything of who and what you were around.

What I am getting to is, that ALL your time on earth + ALL your experiences = You. At this point I am sure many of you are saying to yourself, yes Captain Obvious what’s next that the sun sets in the evening? And here’s my point, on the surface this all sounds basic, but I believe that you can reverse engineer where you are at this very moment by looking back into the past. So, if you have trouble with relationships, let’s say that you choose women that lies to you. You have dated and married and dated again let’s say. And every time you are lied to from the small lies to the larger ones like cheating, it hurts, it kicks you right in the gut! You might eventually say to yourself and others that all women are liars. And you would be wrong, all women and even most women are not liars, not any more than men are. What you have had are a continual secession of partners who have lied to you. *(Disclaimer) If they are lying to you so that you do not hurt them or because you are a controlling SOB then you don’t count. So, I think the logical question to ask yourself is why do I keep picking women that lie to me? You may have heard the term ‘your picker is broken.” I would submit to you that your picker is not broken and that actually, your picker is spot on! Now what do I mean by that? I mean that your picker is choosing the exact type of person that you need to fulfill a dysfunctional part of YOU. Listen to this very carefully “We choose the EXACT type of person that our subconscious feels most comfortable with.” So now let’s break down to what that means. When we choose someone to be with it can be for a variety of reasons. Choosing to be with those that are habitual liars, where you are never going to get the truth and you must always keep guessing with that person is very consistent with the way you feel you should be treated. Let’s double click on this and little more, let’s really investigate what is going on here. These people that lie, they have a story for everything and they will take a kernel of truth and use that to then wrap the lie around. So, for those of us who don’t live in a constant state of lying and therefore do not think others have the potential to lie at the drop of a hat, we have trouble thinking that the person who is supposed to love us would find it so easy to lie to us. So why are we choosing these people and how does picking them stem from our childhood you ask? There are many ways us humans can excuse away the obvious bad behaviors and abuse from others and literally keep our blinders on so that the truth remains unseen to ourselves. I remember a girl I was dating that after about a month said to me “I feel so good to be with you and that I can tell YOU the truth. I have had to lie a lot, from growing up with my parents to my ex-husband because they were all so controlling.” Now I was so damaged, that I heard that and thought WOW! I am special, she sees she can be real around me and trust me, I must be a good person. I had my blinders on so heavy that I was completely in the dark as to what she was really saying to me which I will get to in a moment. Why was I in the dark you ask, because and here is the key, remember this my friends, I was so desperate to be with someone, that I was willing to sacrifice my dignity, self-respect and accept extremely poor abusive treatment from a girlfriend. So, now why was I so desperate to be with someone, to be afraid of being alone or the biggest fear, being abandoned by someone. This fear of abandonment is so programed into our brains from birth because to be abandoned by our parents will literally mean death. If there is no one to meet our needs for food, shelter, safety a love then we will die. Even if you get these basic needs met but they are met in a way that is the most minimal to keep you going they can and will stunt your physical and emotional development. Your diamonds will be buried at birth.

I believe that the fear of lose is so ingrained in us that it is always lurking around the corner and the advertising industry understands this. Some of the most popular items have always been centered around a place of lack. From the Cabbage Patch doll, black Friday events or even a Luis Vuitton purse we want something because we either believe it to be in short supply or that it costs more than we have and therefore is valuable. So now back to the ex-girlfriend. When we first met she had pumped me up good as to what a wonderful man I was (did not receive this growing up) how smart, attractive and how she saw such great potential in me to do great things. See, I never gained the sense of self and the belief in myself for those things mention by her. Those diamonds were buried deep inside to the point I could not see them so there I was receiving those diamonds from another person whom I admired and adored. What was really going on was that I was being played and that the ground work was being laid for a very controlling abusive realationshit ahead.

In reality, as I look back now what she was saying was “hey John, I just wanted to let you know that I lie to get out of things and I am an untrustworthy partner. I have lied to others in the past and I will lie to you in the future.” Which is exactly what happened. And I can tell you the exact moment that the diamonds I had carried in side of me the whole time began to surface. I would get literally screamed as by this person with the most horrible thing said to me. I was so confused because I thought that this person loved me and that we don’t treat each other this way. In order to not tell her right then and there to go to hell and me cutting this off immediately was due to my fear of being alone, the fear of what if I am wrong here and I blow a good thing. And being the fixer that I was, I thought if could figure this out and fix her, me and us! So being in all this confusion because nothing worked, I read books trying to understand me and her and did an enormous amount of thinking and trying different things with her. Still confused I decided that I needed another woman’s point of view. And because I was always told by the Ex that I didn’t know how to handle a real woman, figured I needed someone who was equally successful in business and a high achiever. I asked my best friends wife for advice on this. I explained what was going on with my relationshit and she was blown away and she was literally upset on the phone and what was taking place. Now here is the moment the diamonds began to surface. In mid rant about what I had just let her on to she said this, “John you are one of the most emotionally available guys I know, your funny, an amazing father, you own your own business and are a real man.” This, this right here hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like wait, what??? The diamonds of self-respect and dignity have come to the surface and all that was required was for me to bend down and pick them up from the ground and hold them in my hand. To look at them realize their worth and make them apart of myself. Well that did not happen and although I did glance down, see them briefly and then continued on my way to make this work. But that moment, that feeling of self-worth was burned in me even if it was pushed back into the corner of my mind. The story continues but that will be in another post.

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