Feeling betrayed, bitter, resentful – like you cannot trust anybody in life.
This is something that a lot of people that i have worked with face.
While having conversations with a friend i realized and remembered something, when we live life afraid of being betrayed it’s often because something happened.
While you’re growing up, your father/mother/someone you trusted suddenly acted in a way that you couldn’t trust.
Whether that meant violence from a caregiver or abuse, being misled, feeling taken advantange of.
When we lose trust, we tell ourselves that the only way to be safe is by not giving ourselves 100% to anyone or anything – because if you don’t invest yourself fully into something then nobody can betray you.
If you’re not really comitted to your relationship – if the person does something that hurts you, it’s not gonna feel as painful as that original betrayal.
When you invest yourself in a half-assed mediocre way in a job, if you get fired or you lose you’re job, you’re not gonna feel so bad because you were not fully immersed, devoted, comitted to it.
Here’s what happens – people develop this way of coping with life because when they’re growing up, it works.
They need to be cautious of how much of their energy, time, attention and emotion they invest in: their parents, their friends.
Because they’re constantly being betrayed,misled.
What this does to an adult is that the adult, out of his fear of betrayal, cannot commit to anything 100%, he cannot trust anything or anybody 100%.
This means that he ends up betraying himself, it means that they are living lifes in a half-assed way, a way in which there’s always one foot in and one foot out (of fear and some worries).
The way out of this is realizing that in our fear of being betrayed, we betray ourselves.
Because a career cannot grow without full comittment, our relationships cannot grow without full devotion and no personal process can happen if there’s no trust.
If you feel afraid of being betrayed, i invite you to explore.
Were you betrayed as a child? Are you betraying yourself right now in the way you show up?
How do i deal with people who are confrontational? Who are offensive? Who are out to hurt me or people that i care about without getting consumed in that kind of “game”?
First thing we need to do is understand that there’s always a part of us that draws a certain interaction from another person.
For you to feel insulted by somebody’s insult – you need to participate, you need to be an active co-creator of your own suffering.
The bullied and the bully are both characters of the same play, they’re both co-creating an experience that victimizes the two of them.
The bullied, because he sees himself as a victim, and the bully, because he cannot help his compulsions to make others feel the pain that he doesn’t want to heal.
What to do about this? What to do when someone’s being violent?
Understand and ask ourselves the question: What within me may be drawing this kind of attitude from somebody else right now?
If people cross a line of trying to harm you physically, that’s a different case, but most of the time, confrontations tend to be just emotional, mental, verbal.
The question is what do i do in these cases?
Well, understand that most people who come at you with a very charged emotional tone or energy are suffering, there’s something inside that is very uncomfortable for them to process, therefore, they try to bounce it back.
They try to outsource it, the pain they don’t want to heal is pain they want others to feel.
If you can remain conscious you will have a lot of compassion and you will see very clearly that the person yelling and screaming must be really miserable.
Beyond that, you’ll realize that it probably has nothing to do with you.
You can smile, you can remain conscious without getting “triggered” you can engage in a conversation from a point of consciousness, you can draw a boundary from a very calm point.
“Hey, i understand what you’re saying and i don’t appreciate the way in which you’re talking with me, so i’m going to ask you to please not use these words.” “Hey, i’m happy to have a conversation with you the moment that you’re open to having it in a very civilized manner.” “I welcome this interaction but it has to be under these boundaries of honesty, of clear communication.“
However, if there is anger inside of you, resentment, frustration, if there is pain, you’re gonna get “triggered.”
A good friend of mine says that to get triggered you have to be loaded to begin with, so think about that when you get triggered, it means that you were loaded of something that was not very enjoyable or pleasant.
Therefore, now you seek to engage.
However, if you’re conscious and aware, you realize that people seeking for a fight are people who are hurting.
Nobody joyful, happy, pleased and busy with a good life will ever attempt to harm somebody else. Doesn’t mean that boundaries cannot be drawn, it just means that there are ways to manage it.
There are ways to navigate the situations and they don’t have to be full of chaos, drama, violence, they can be conscious.
If you’re at peace, there’s not gonna be a fight because to fight you need two people.
Are you contributing or co-creating drama that is unfolding?
Can you see the pain that they’re going through?Can you be conscious enough to remain compassionate? to understand that it’s not about you.
Can you voice your preferences the way in which you want to communicate? From a place of awareness, intelligence and not one of reaction.
Let’s recognize that, no matter how good your childhood was, no matter how great your upbringing, your parents fell short in some way or another.
For some of us it was maybe something not so extreme, for a lot of people it was very hectic and a chaotic place to come from.
Families usually doesn’t synonym with peace, joy, understading, support or love.
What do we do when, as we become older, as we’re adults, we realize that we are carrying a lot of our unprocessed stuff, especially into our relationships?
Maybe a distrust from our mother projects itself onto our fear of the feminine, our incapacity to open up, to explore our emotions as men.
A father that wasn’t present, that abandonded you or your mother, expressed itself as a rejection of the masculine within you which may look like a rejection of structure altogether.
Having a hard time finishing projects that you start, having a hard time keeping up with discipline, habits, consistency and focus.
What do we do about this? How do we heal? especially when the most probably option is that an apology is not gonna come from our mom/dad.
Maybe they’re already dead, maybe what they did was so bad that we don’t want to talk to them ever again, what to do?
First, you got to separate the archetype from the person, father/mother are a sacred archetype, they are bridges, people who facilitate a body for you to come and live this experience.
They’re people that are in charge and responsible for taking good care of you, help you solidify who you are in your first years of development.
The archetype has certain expectations that, at least in the world that we live today, are hard to meet.
Most parents have children because they don’t know what else to do with their life, because they feel that’s the next step, a lot of times, out of a mistake, a happy and joyful mistake, it is rarely out of a very conscious choice of bringing our life into existence.
What happens is that nobody taught them, chances are that their upbringing was quite troublesome, their own parents were absent, violent or many other things.
If you’ve talked with your parents you may know, if you haven’t, it’s a good thing to ask…
There’s the archetype of father/mother, then there is the person, if i recognize that the person is most likely flawed and has a lot of good things but also a lot of unhealed, processed unconscious stuff – I can start to have compassion and create an enviroment where i’m more likely to forgive them.
If i hold them against the ideal archetype of their perfect self (perfect father/mother, divine mother/father) they’re always gonna fall short, then i’d judge them because they were not enough for me.
Because they did not raise me in the perfect way and although this is justifiable, every parent should raise their kids with love, support and tender loving care. Although we can agree on that…
We need to face reality, understanding that our parents, your father/mother or both are human beings. You have a lot of positive traits and also a lot ugly ones.
Nobody in this world can give something that they themselves don’t have, whether that is money, love, attention, understanding – your parents gave you from whatever was in their bag, good and bad.
If they had had more within them they could have given you more, but they didn’t, so when i separate the idea of a father from whom my dad is as a man, then i can have more compassion for him.
Because i extract the expectations, the pressure that i have assigned on him, because he was my dad.
“Nico, should we just tolerate everything they did wrong just because they’re human?“
Well, it’s not about tolerating or condoning but it is also not about condemning, here it’s about what is useful for you in your life, your development.
This is after working with probably thousands of people and helping them heal, this is accepting that you cannot change the past, however, you can change how you relate to it.
How you experience it, you cannot change the way in which you grew up, however, you can change the emotions that you carry about the bringing that you have.
You cannot change your dad/mom or what they did when you were younger, but you can transform the way in which you experience it, so you free yourself and you free them from that resentment, that hatred, that anger that may be within you.
That starts the moment that you can accept that they are also human and as humans, they had a lot of work to do, the uglier they were the more pain they were feeling inside and didn’t know how to process.
Remember, that pain that we don’t want to heal is pain that we want others to feel, the more pain that your parents inflicted upon you, whether emotional/verbal/physical stems from deep rooted pain within them that they didn’t know what to do about.
However, it’s like the person whose finger is broken and everything they touch hurts, then they realize that the world is painful and it hurts, then everything is to blame and to judge, without realizing that what hurts is the finger.
A lot of parents did this, they got angry at you but the anger had nothing to do with you, it was their explosion of repressed stuff.
Where it comes from/why it happened – that’s topic for another blog/video.
To start healing your relationship with your parents: Separate the archetype, understand that your parents only facilitated the body for you, but the life that you are was given to you by the divine father/mother.
You’re a son of the sun/earth, God is your father – if you don’t believe in God then the principles of creation, the universe, the energy that goes underneath all of it, the creator of life, that is the energy that gave you life and love.
That energy has never left you alone, it’s always been there, ready to embrace and support you whenever you open the doors.
If you remember this, you realize “I am son of the sky, of the earth, life was given to me by divinity and this body was given to me by a couple of parents who didn’t know better.” that’s okay.
You can forgive them and you can forgive yourself for carrying the grudge, carrying the weight, for drinking the poison of pressure, like the saying, drinking it and expecting somebody else to die from it.
It’s not useful, it’s not going to serve you and above all, it doesn’t free you, you’re bound to repeat the same thing with your children if you don’t forgive your parents, the things you dont heal with your family line are things that are going to pass down to whoever comes after you.
Separate the archetype from the human being, have compassion, understand the human being as somebody with flaws, qualities and probably a lot of defects, understand that your life was given to you by something greater.
The body was facilitated by somebody else and that somebody, like you and i, was just human.
We can cut him/her some slack for they knew and they did what they did, had they known better they would have done better. As we all would have.
The number one skill that you need in order to have a beautiful, joyful and loving realtionship is not love or beauty.
It’s not your capacity to be all cuddly, it’s not even your sex life.
It’s in fact your willingness and elegance with which you face conflict.
One of my friends says that your relationship starts with your first disagreement, in many ways, that’s true.
It is in the first moment that you’re bumping heads against each other that you understand who you’re contending with and who you’re co-working, co-creating with.
It is in the times that we’re pissed off, upset, angry, jealous, the times that we are triggered when something happens and our trauma comes to the surface, our reactions, our intolerance.
It’s in these times that all the spiritual work, all the self-development, all the quotes you’ve posted on Instagram better have a practical use, better have a tangible application.
It’s in these times that your love and light narrative must be used, because to be all happy, joyful… “I love nature, i love my boyfriend/girlfriend.” Is great…
But it’s very easy when they’re agreeing with you, when passion is through the roof, when they’re behaving in the way that you want them to behave, however, we’re all human and we’re bound. The question is not if but when.
We’re all bound to behave in ways that go clashing against somebody’s expectation of us, especially our lover.
Number one skill is knowing how to navigate conflict artfully, gracefully, with elegance, willingness.
Understanding that there must be a mutual desire to always want to solve conflict, to always want to sit with it, to always want to understand and process it.
If you’re with a partner that puts up stone walls and creates barries around their heart, that turns their back onto you and leaves you alone..,
Shuts the door or just leaves every time that a heavy emotion is triggered, then it’s going to be very challenging and painful to be in a relationship with them.
Because maybe youre willing to see what you did wrong, you’re willing to understand why they did what they did, but if they’re not, if there’s no openness on one side…
Then it’s like trying to go through a door that is locked, you may open it but you may hurt your hand in the process, you will stress yourself, you will harm the door.
Ensure that the person you are dating is as willing and comitted to you, to sit with the conflict, to try and navigate it, doesn’t mean that solving it means that you’re always lovey-dovey or you always come to a very clear agreement.
It means that you’re willing to sit through the discomfort together, to think about ideas, to understand that it’s not you against her/him, to understand that the conflict that you experience is a third entity in the relationship.
Because it’s you and your partner on the same team and the conflict in front of you, you have an opportunity to co-create and to understand how we can get through this together.
Problems arise the moment that you think it’s you against her, your perspective against theirs.
Remember you’re a team and every conflict is something for both of you to address, you have to have a partner that; is willing and is honest.
If you cannot trust what they say, no clear communication. Then nothing’s gonna work for you.
Because even if you feel that you resolve the conflict, if you’re hesitant, if they say something but act in a different way, they dont follow through on the agreements, if they make a commitment and the next day they break it, you’re in a lot of chaos.
Part of your capacity to have a good relationship and to respect yourself is ensuring that you’re dating someone that is honest and being yourself perfectly honest.
An honest person is not a person that says and does things that you like, in fact, it’s somebody who is not afraid to “rock the boat” If it means that they’re gonna express their truth.
You want somebody who is not attached to you in a toxic way, you want somebody who’s gonna prioritize speaking the truth over pleasing you, because this means that no resentment is gonna be brute and built underneath that.
You yourself want to make sure that if you don’t like something, you say it, that you’re honest about how you feel, that you don’t keep it in, especially not to keep the other person.
You’re both willing to connect, to handle conflict.
You’re both honest, you trust what the other says and you act on the word that you give to each other.
Finally, you communicate in a healthy way, all conflicts can be resolved with a lot of drama, a lot of passion, a lot of swearing, attacks.
They can also be resolved with elegance, it doesn’t mean that the emotions are not heavy, but it means that it takes a lot of consciousness and conscious effort for you in the midst of your storm/hurrican/chaos to find that center point where you are in the moment.
Feeling what you’re feeling, never bypassing it, but also never drowning in it, you remain a witness ot the emotions that inform you that something must be addressed and from that place you can speak, articulate what it is that you like or dislike.
Owning your point, your perspective, opening up your heart, sharing how you feel, not pointing fingers, acknowleding that your experience of life and reality is yours, but also understanding that you are a couple.
You are co-creating and in the same way you are very impactful on the life of the other person, since you’re teammates and you’re co-creators, it’s important that you learn to arrive to the same page and you do so without destroying or burning much of what brough you together.
It’s important that what you communicate is not charged with violence, passive aggression.
Know how to say it firmly, but lovingly, it’s important that you know how to honor your emotions and you express them but you never vomit them into the other.
These are the 3 secrets to know.
Find somebody who is as willing as you, to sit through the discomfort.
Ensure that the person is somebody whos honesty you don’t even question.
You communicate openly, fully, lovingly, in a healthy way.
If you have these 3 then no matter what happens in your relationship, a lot of crazy, wild situations may come but you will find your way to feel that the boat in which you’re standing is able to resist any storm and go through it, however…
If you dont feel confident or comfortable in your relationships ability to navigate through conflict, then it’s like going to the storm with a boat that is leaking, you might make it, but chances are that you won’t, even if you make it, it’s going to be scary and rough.
You’re not going to be the same, you’re going to be a little hurt and scarred from the process and relationships do not have to be that way.
Develop a healthy relationship with conflict and find somebody who also has development
