The Viable Alternative

Wow…how time flies.

A year ago, I wrote a blog titled, “One Year of Therapy – My Journey of Healing, Growth and Transformation,” where I talked about the changes I witnessed after my one year anniversary of starting therapy. Well, Wednesday, June 8th, I marked the completion of my second, or sophomore year of therapy.

When I sat back last year and tried to look into the future to determine what new insights, shifts of perception, breakthroughs and healing I was going to experience between then and now, I couldn’t really conceive of anything, so as I sit here now, a year wiser and more experienced, I’m excited to be able to fill in the blanks of curiosity I had a year ago of what was going to unfold.

I Can Feel My Feet

Last year, when I was giving my year update, I had explained that I was more grounded, meaning that negative thoughts weren’t able to throw me off as much as they used to before I started therapy, a greater connection to self and my emotions, and a greater trust in God.

After my second year of therapy, I can add another dimension of what it’s like to be more grounded – I can feel my feet more.

What does that mean?

Well, before I started therapy, I lived up in my head so much overthinking everything that I was literally disconnected from the rest of my body. At some of the therapy sessions, when I was asked to hit a pillow with my fists and let out a shout to give a needed release to pent up anger, the shout and the hit were in sync. However, when I was asked to hit the pillow with my legs and let out a shout to release stuck emotions below my pelvis, I would hit the pillow with my legs and my shout would come several seconds later.

The shout and hit with my legs were out of sync because I was disconnected from my lower part of my body. In fact, I remember back in ’09 when I did a Reiki session, the person who did it told me that from my pelvis down, everything was cut off. There was no flowing energy.

Now when I hit with my legs, the shout and the hit are just as in sync as when I hit with my hands and shout. Also throughout the day, I feel the sensation of energy flowing in my feet. This means I am now more integrated and embodied. It allows for me to not get stuck up in my head anymore, and when I start getting stuck within the thoughts flying around in my head, I just refocus on feeling my feet on the ground. This allows me to be more present and confident.

I liken being well grounded to being on a boat at sea that despite being in the middle of a raging sea storm, stays on the surface of the water due to it being firmly anchored to the seafloor by a strong anchor.

The more firmly planted int he ground you are, the more stable you are. To fly, you have to take root.

Identifying the Voices

In my second year of therapy, I was finally able to bring some sort of sanity to the madness going on in my head by learning how to identify the different voices that went on in my head and what the intention of each of these voices were. I even was able to discover the sneaky little ones that would fly under the radar because they were so seemingly innocuous that they always managed to trip me up after I was able to get past the loud, blatant negative voices.

These sneaky little voices were what always seemed to be able to reel me back into listening to the louder negative voices.

Now, with this clarity, I no longer feel like I’m in the dark fighting an unseen enemy who is able to see me while I can’t see him.

In addition, learning how to identify these different negative voices enabled me to better be able to use a tool that helps me separate myself from them so that they’re distinct from me and don’t feel as if they’re one with me. The tool involves making a space for myself that I’m grounded in and putting each of these voices out of “my space,” so there can be a clear distinction between myself and them.

This enables me to keep my sense of self while these voices jabber on without me being sucked into what they’re saying.

Being Proud of Being a Failure

Within this past year, as you must have read in my several past blogs, I finally was able to get the message my therapist had told me at our very first session two years ago, that I struggled with success because I was trying to play “small” for my father so as not to be bigger than him and to get his love.

Learning this enabled me to open the door to deeper issues I had about success including the core emotion of pride I felt deep within in the fact that I was trying to be a way I felt fit my father’s model of what success should look like though it held me back and made me into a failure. Also tied to this was a feeling of loyalty to being a good son to my father. These two core emotions were what I was unconsciously reacting to all this time and were some of the root causes of my behaviour.

Seeing God Differently

I also learned to look at God differently after discovering that I was unconsciously expecting God to be like my father. Thus, I always felt that God was holding something against me and was mad at me for something I did or some mistake I made, and was unwilling to bless me for those reasons. This made it difficult for me to trust Him and surrender to Him. Now being able to see the erroneous way I looked at him enables me to accept the fact that God loves me, wants to guide and bless me, see me succeed and also has His hand on me.

Confronting Commitment Issues

If you read this blog I had written here earlier this year, “Why I’ve Been a Cold, Unfeeling, Emotionally Unavailable Douchebag for Most of My Life,” you would learn that I also had a HUGE breakthrough and understanding as to what made me so emotionally unavailable for most of my life. and also why I’ve had major commitment issues with women.

What I didn’t explain in that blog is that I began to see that when I had gotten involved with certain women, the reasons I would come up with about her as to why I couldn’t commit to her were more about me than they were about her. Due to the uncomfortable emotions of the emotional incest I received as a child getting triggered as I got closer to a woman, I would come up with various criticisms about her in my head so as to quash these uncomfortable feelings, prevent myself from feeling “trapped,” and drive a wedge between her and me.

The good news is that now that I’ve become aware of this, when I start to go through my “freakouts” where I start to feel trapped and begin to look for all the things that are “wrong” about the woman, I’m able to catch myself in the act and instead sit with the uncomfortable emotions and allow myself to feel them so they can dissipate.

I am enough

Last year, when I wrote my year update on my therapy, though I was committed to having breakthroughs in the financial area of my life, I didn’t have much to report in that area.

Thankfully, that has changed…

I’ve finally begun to have breakthroughs financially and also some big realizations that I believe helped bring them on.

I believe my breakthroughs were imminent right from when I started looking at my own mental model of success and really started to question it. It was based on me having to work HARD for everything and if it came too easy or didn’t fit into the box of how success was supposed to happen it couldn’t be accepted. I started to realize that this model had no room for “luck,” or being in “the flow,” or being at the right place at the right time or any of those intangible reasons of how success sometimes happen.

One of the breakthroughs was accepting the fact that I don’t have to be able to logically explain my success, and that I can accept those x-factors that occur that are responsible for a person’s success. My success happening in that manner doesn’t make it any less meaningful than the next person.

I also realize that I’m allowed to use my natural gifts and talents to help bring about success. Before, I felt guilty using them because I felt that it would make success come to easily for me and thus it’d mean that I was undeserving of it, so I blocked myself from taking advantage of them.

Despite people telling me all these years, I now get that success doesn’t have to be this grueling, tortuous, Herculean feat. Sure at times I’ll have to work hard, but I don’t have to go through hell first just to prove that I’m worthy of it.

In fact, I didn’t have to work too “hard” for the recent financial breakthrough and that didn’t make me any less deserving of it. It made me realize that I deserved what I got simply because I AM ENOUGH. There’s nothing I have to do to prove that I’m worthy off success in any area of my life.

As I said these words, “I am enough” to my therapist while I was sharing my breakthrough, something shifted within me. I realized that my being enough extended also to achieving my desires in romance, lifestyle, etc. I gave an inner sigh of relief that I didn’t have to try so hard just to prove that I’m worthy of the things I desired in my life in each of these areas.

As a result of this realization, which was over a month ago, the big things feel more possible for my life. I don’t feel such a chasm between me and my dreams that I used to feel. Now when I think about the future I desire, the subsequent internal struggle I used to have isn’t there on the scale that it used to be. It’s like another layer of mental fog has been peeled off and I feel less tense.

Another interesting “side effect” of this realization is that as of recent, it seems like women have been falling through the ceiling into my life. However, as flattering as that is, I started therapy not to learn how to get with many women, but to learn how to be with ONE woman…or maybe two (hahahaha…..relax, I was JUST kidding 🙂 ) so I have to pass.

The Journey Continues…

Reflecting back over the past two years, I have to say that starting therapy has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.. In the past two years, I’ve grown in ways that were only a dream ten years ago because I didn’t have the tools nor the insight. It has helped me achieve new ways of being. It has helped me heal and it has changed me on an energetic level.

There have been some “aha” moments, and some big releases, but for the most part, the changes I see are an accumulation of a gradual, incremental process of consistently showing up and doing the work.

Do I still have issues? Uhhh….yes. Am I perfect? Uhhh….no. I will continue to be a work in progress till the day I die and I make no apologies for that. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the growth and am curious to see what new things my “junior” year of therapy brings me.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love