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BROKENHEARTED?
As a therapist and a human being I am the subject and the object of a
phenomenon called complaining. Every one of us feels justified in our
complaints. But the complaints, by themselves, constitute a deeper
problem that belongs strictly to the complainer.
I would like to speak about a whole system of complaints that really covers
up the real problem.
And what is that problem?
The problem that I wish to address that is hidden under a mountain of
complaints is the experience of being brokenhearted ... that is at some
point in your life, you may have suffered one or a series of broken hearts.
For children who have to learn to survive in a particular family and the
environment, a series of broken hearts can leave a universe of deep primal
pain. In our culture, we very rarely ever address the question of a
broken heart. But, for many it is a serious matter.
If you were overwhelmed by a series of broken hearts in childhood, you will
be extremely vulnerable to serious broken hearts in adulthood. Some
important relationships can leave a huge mountain of hurt and pain that
gets piled up on top of brokenhearted pains from childhood. The
result is an unconscious feeling of extreme failure at getting your needs
for love ever fulfilled. Your experience may lead to a sense of being
a loser at the game of love. And, if your losses are so great,
hopelessness can set in and eventually a deep clinical depression invades
your entire being.
For some people, these kinds of broken heart experiences can actually lead
to the attractiveness of suicide. Extensive experiences with
childhood brokenheartedness can cause a complete
shutdown in areas of the brain that provide access to deep healing insight
and the acquisition of skills that lead to closure. Without closure
and resolution, you will carry a huge reservoir of repressed feelings and
that includes both bad and good feelings.
What does this have to do with
complaining?
If you take a survey of all of your own complaining and the complaints of
other people, you will be surprised and deeply enlightened by the amount of
complaining that exists. Usually, most of this superficial
complaining just leads to difficulties in interpersonal relationships, work
situations and other important avenues of human interaction.
If we look a little bit deeper, we may find an emotional state of being
that suggests that complaints themselves might actually be covering up deep
or hurts and broken hearts. If you orient your mind to being
sensitive about the behavior of yourself and others, you may begin to
notice how much broken heartedness there is in the world.
These feelings of being brokenhearted may not seem apparent on the
surface. But, if you look a little closer you may begin to notice the
brokenheartedness in other people and maybe even
into yourself.
So ... what good will this sensitivity
and awareness do?
It may put you in touch with what there is in your life that smacks of
being a broken heart. It may also give you some insight and
compassion into the brokenheartedness of those
who seem to complain and complain and complain some more (chronic complainers).
Failure is a fact of life. Failure is always an option!
Failure to get your needs met at any stage of your life can set the stage
for you to develop the tools, strategies and methods that will help you be
successful and happy in life. If you are overwhelmed and completely
suppressed by monumental amounts of failure, you will be robbed of the
necessary energy, desire and motivation to pull yourself out of the extreme
failure mode and reach for the stars.
My suggestion is to stop blaming everything else outside of yourself,
other people and even yourself for failure. People love to blame
and shift the responsibility for failure and pain on to something or
someone else. That just causes more turmoil. In a strange
sense, I love it when people put their "stuff" on to me. I
know it's not about me. It's really about them. When I complain
about someone or something, it's me who has the problem and it's up to me
to resolve it. I have the tools and the techniques to do that. My
recommendation is to adjust, adapt and grow beyond your wildest imagination
into a universe of infinite possibilities. The answers are already
inside of you. It's up to you to do the inner archaeology.
Janice: "I came to Dr. Paul loaded with repressed pain,
pessimism and hopelessness. I couldn't get closure or insight into
anything that I was doing that set me up for thousands of broken
hearts. I was broken down in childhood by parents who never told me
that they loved me. My whole life has been a struggle to suck love
out of every man that I could get my needy clutches on. I could see
that I was completely obnoxious and sickening in their eyes, even though I
was absolutely gorgeous physically. I was emotionally ugly and filled
with poison and toxins from childhood. What was worse,
is that I thought I was entitled to demand love, even though I could not
feel loving emotions.
When I broke up with my last lover, I never recovered and wanted to kill
myself. For months and years I blamed him for everything and I hated
the woman that beat me out and married him and the two of them seemed so
happy, while I was doomed to a life of misery and death. And I did
everything I could to stop Dr. Paul from being successful in treating
me. Failure is all that I knew and failure is what I was going to
bring to others. No wonder they ditched me. It took me a long
time to see how I was responsible for setting up my own failures and
misery.
With patience and expertise, Dr. Paul slowly got me to tap into my real
feelings and I began to become aware of how much torture and misery I have
been carrying around inside of myself. In time, I let my ex-boyfriend
and his new wife off the hook and freed myself to find out who I truly am.
My broken heart caused me to fail at every relationship and caused every
man to run like hell to get away from me so that they would not fail.
My parents failed me. I failed myself, I failed everyone else and now
I am learning to turn my failures into triumph. I have become much
more authentic as my complaining whiny façade crumbled piece by
piece. My heart is mending and my memories are clearing."
Conclusion: Deep pain implanted in the
past resonates throughout the system and begs for release and
resolution. You are doomed to repeat past failures to get your needs
met. You can reverse that tendency by establishing the need for
stick-to-itiveness and the willingness to take risks at
self-discovery. Running away from your self will only cause others
to run away from you.
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