Breaking Patterns
“When you break patterns, it will feel vulnerable and you will feel empowered.
Allow yourself to sit with both.”
I am setting boundaries in my life - in so many areas, with myself, and with others.
I have enough self respect, self love, and healthy self-concept now to do so.
For a long time, I didn’t.
But you get to limit access - you don’t have to pour from an empty cup.
Intellectually - cognizantly - of course, I knew this already.
But for many women, and for many of us who grew up in dysfunctional homes, seeing mothers model self-sacrifice to self-extinguishing themselves - all the way to martyrdom and a disappearance of self- we have to unlearn this way of being in relationships.
We have to unlearn that this means we love well or are good women or that we are solely responsible for others, and the restoration and reparative work in relationships.
We often times give and give and give of our emotional labor -
It’s why women in straight marriages don’t live as long as men. They pour it all into their husbands. In doing so, they shave years off their life.
And, certainly, the pour into their kids.
But—you can’t pour from an empty vessel. A depleted battery.
It’s not noble to try to do so - it doesn’t make you selfless - it makes you self-destructive. And it may not be the best way to show up for the other person either.
The question was posed to me recently - who are you if you’re not in relationship to others? Serving others? Acts of love or service?
For a long time, quite honestly, I would have had no fucking clue.
But - I have learned. I am learning.
Choosing self - and serving others but not centering them and disappearing into them and other relationships - is the balance of someone who is in recovery, though has need for both 12 step programs for my self, and Al-Anon support, for my proximity to alcoholics in my life and the damage they inflict, especially when unhealed.
Breaking patterns and cycling breaking is hard work - but I am unlearning generational patterns. I am also sitting with these very hard but life-changing questions:
Will you keep defining yourself through roles of caretaking and emotional lifelines, or tolerate the discomfort of becoming someone else?
If you abandon yourself to take care of someone else, isn’t true that you’re not helping them or yourself, these others who are unable to self-regulate—aren’t you enabling and continuing to destabilize them and you?
Indeed.
And so, my work now is this -
“Meeting dysregulation in others without losing myself—but committing a resolve that I will not build a life around self abandonment.”
I am glad that I know that I can do hard things, because -
It’s tough work unlearning life-long patterns, over four decades in.