The Relationship That Is You

In all the great spiritual traditions, at their heart is tenderness—just to be kind inside, and then everything rights itself. Fear rests. Confusion rests. —PamelaWilson

For your journey, it is important that you have a core understanding of who you truly are. This will help you to feelcentered and strong. You are, in fact, a relationship— within yourself. You think, feel and behave toward yourself just as you do toward others. Though many of your beliefs about your self are conscious, your strongest beliefs and the ones that have the greatest influence on your emotional feelings and behaviors are in your unconscious mind.

Your emotions and behaviors are the result of your beliefs even though you might be more in touch with the emotions than you are aware of the beliefs that cause them.

I willrefer to this aspect of you as the personality self. Most of how you choose to move in the world is the direct result of the beliefs that make up your personality self.

Alongside your personality self resides your spirit self. Your spirit self is the energy of unconditional love, acceptance, joy and peace. When the energies within your personality self—your beliefs and emotions—cause a vibration that differs from the vibration of the spirit self, that dissonance causes you to experience pain. When the energy is harmonious, you experience peace.

We have two types of beliefs: beliefs about our self and beliefs about the world. Our beliefs about our self include whether we believe we are smart enough, good enough, loving enough and acceptable enough. Our beliefs about the world include whether it is safe or dangerous, supportive or rejecting, fair or unfair, and so on. These beliefs set up our expectations, our anticipations and our sense of what is possible. All of these are learned beliefs through which our sense of reality is created.

This inner relationship, which I call the personality self, begins to form in infancy. Some would argue it begins in utero, and others would even say it begins in a previous life. In essence, though, it doesn’t matter when it begins. What matters is the state of your relationship right now, in this present moment. Is your inner environment conflicted or peaceful, confident or fearful? The quality of your life, the choices you make, and the love you allow in is all influenced by this inner relationship.

Let’s start at the beginning: to be an infant is to be in a state of outrageous vulnerability. If, as infants, we were aware of just how powerless and vulnerable we actually were, we would have suffered extreme and physically destructive anxiety. So life offers us a way not to feel this immense anxiety; life gives us an outrageous egocentricity, an all-powerful sense that we control everything

When we cried and the bottle was brought to us, we believed we created that experience. And when it was not brought to us and we were hungry, we believed we created that experience as well. If we were yelled at, ignored or hit, we believed that we were the cause, that the pain was our doing, our fault. In this way, we were able to continue to believe that we had some power. 

We believed that if we created everything, then we could create something different when we felt the need to. If we were hit or shaken or ignored, believing it was our doing gave us the sense that we could change our selves and therefore have some power in our situation. This sense of control allowed us the freedom to not live in dire fear. We believed that, if we needed to change in order to please those in the parental role so that they would continue to love, feed and take care of us, we could. 

The quality of the relationship we have with ourselves started at the very first moment we experienced our bodies, our environment and others. From the very beginning, we believed that we caused what happened to us and around us. This is true for everyone. There are no exceptions. To develop and grow during this outrageously vulnerable time of life, each one of us was given this overblown sense of power. Unfortunately, some of the self-blaming beliefs did not get resolved, and they became a part of our unconscious self-concept, that is, the set of beliefs we hold about our selves.

How we were parented became the message of who we are, what we deserve, and what we are capable of getting in life. That early environment, especially the influence of those who parented us, formed the relationship we have with our selves. As an infant, we had no way of believing otherwise, no awareness of outside circumstances that affected how and why we were treated as we were. We had no other way to come to a different conclusion about our selves. At this early stage of life, including babyhood and toddlerhood, we had no alternatives, no way to understand our selves differently. Our parental figures, through their actions—whether conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional—provided us with a mirror by which we correctly or incorrectly determined who we were.

That reflection from our parental figures and our circumstances determined our self-concept, which is the accumulated beliefs we have about ourselves that we’ve been gathering since this early stage of life. The predominating parental behaviors we experienced then became the predominating beliefs we each hold about ourselves now—unless somewhere along the way we’ve been able to change them. 

Let’s look at this example: if 50 percent of the time a child is treated well and 50 percent of the time the child is treated badly, that child will be quite confused about his or her identity. I often say to my clients, ―We parent ourselves the way our parents parented us… until we change.‖ That is, we are now our own parents, allowing ourselves the experience of being heard or not heard, cared for or not cared for, protected or not protected, nurtured or not nurtured, understood or not understood; we are the ones who are allowing or not allowing ourselves to receive empathy or indifference for our pains and fears from within or from others.

Through our early experiences, we come to believe what life, for us, will be like; and from this, our expectations are born. How we treat our selves, how we allow others to treat us, or how we treat others are all reflections of our self-concept. We might be angry, fearful and punishing or generous, forgiving and kind. It all depends on what we believe about who we are.

The journey to the center of your heart is a journey through the hills and valleys of your self-concept and its resulting self-esteem. Our self-concept is the set of beliefs we hold about ourselves. Our self-esteem is based on our self-concept, and is the set of feelings we carry about ourselves. This journey, in a way, is like an ongoing, internal counseling session not unlike those among couples—with the ―couple‖ being you and your self. This journey will resolve inner-conflict and lead you to a beautiful state of peacefulness.

We might or might not be conscious of our beliefs and emotions, but the buried beliefs and emotions are the ones that have the upper hand in influencing our moods and our behaviors. Beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, lead to emotions. The only exceptions to this are emotional responses that are physically connected to certain medical conditions and/or reactions to pharmaceuticals.

If I said to you, ―Don’t go on a boat because the world is flat, and you can fall off the edge,‖ you would not believe me and you would not feel any fear of falling off the edge of the world. However, if for some reason, you did believe me, you would experience great fear and not get on a boat. In this example, it is clear to see how your emotions are directly related to both your beliefs and behaviors. 

Beliefs, plus their corresponding emotions, whether conscious or unconscious, are the energies that lead to behaviors. The previous example showsthat the person’s behavior of choosing not to get on the boat was directly related to the emotion of fear. Here’s another example: if I am a chair designer and I design a chair that I really believe is beautiful plus very comfortable, I will feel excited about building it and I will proceed with my project; but if I feel no real excitement about the design, I will not be moved to build it.

The emotions behind our beliefs are instrumental in moving us toward action. We are not always aware of why we believe, feel or behave as we do, but as we travel our path, all of that becomes clear and we become empowered to change any dis-empowering beliefsthat lead to emotional pain and the lack ofself-supportive behavior.

Our self-concept and our self-esteem are instrumental in our emotional and behavioral experiences in every moment, from whether we experience emotional reactions such as insult, anger, compassion or joy to whether we take an action, like applying to college, joining the military or becoming a parent.

Other influences on our life experience interplay with our self-concept and self-esteem as well. Those are the beliefs we hold about the world, such as believing hard work brings rewards, men don’t cry and so on, as well as the beliefs we hold about the unseen world; ourspiritual or religious beliefs. 

Our inner relationship can be seen as a dance between our internalized parented being and our internalized parent, that is, between our inner child and our inner parent. I’ve worked with many clients over the years who had an overbearing inner parent and also with clients who had a rebellious inner child. Both caused the turmoil they were coming to therapy to resolve.

One of these clients grew up in a southern Baptist home with extremely strict parents. Once she was old enough to be on her own, she took off, moved to a big city and became a stripper. With few job skills and a pretty face, she was able to support herself while she rebelled against her upbringing in any and all ways that she could. Her inner child was running rampant, and she had a hard time taking responsibility for anything. She came to a place in her therapy where she understood that she held a belief and an accompanying fear that, ifshe stopped being rebellious, her strict inner-parent would take over, blocking her from experiencing happiness. 

I shared with her the truism that ―We parent ourselves the way our parents parented us … until we change.‖ She realized that, by shutting out the overbearing parent part of her, she created a situation in which there was no tolerable parent with whom she could be in partnership with. We looked at a different kind of parent, one who was sensitive and caring toward her need for play as well as responsible for her health and safety. I helped her develop an inner parent who her inner child could trust, love and relate to.

When the relationship between our inner parent and our inner child is cooperative and caring, the result is adult behavior. This client, who was also a talented singer but too undisciplined to give that talent the focus it needed, went on to create a successful singing career. Her story demonstrates that when the inner child receives compassionate understanding and acceptance from the inner parent, the inner child can fully begin to trust him or her self and grow. This growth stems from the process of these two separate parts merging into one … that ―one‖ being the adult self.

What you believe about your self, how you feel about yourself, how you behave toward yourself and others, and how you allow others to behave toward you is the bottom line in creating the quality of your life. This relationship, that is you, is your personal reality. It is yours to create or recreate. 

Changing this relationship so that you can experience greater inner peace, less inner conflict and a happier and more confident self comes from bringing to consciousness those beliefs that block you from these positive feelings. I will present to you tools to help you with this as you travel your path, but first it will be helpful for you to understand that you are also an energy system. This knowledge, the subject of the next chapter, will help you strengthen your relationship with your self.