Solemate

by Lauren Mackler

  B.

  ____ I enjoy feeling special and/or being the center of attention.

  ____ I often get upset and/or frustrated when I don’t get what I want.

  ____ I often feel that I shouldn’t have to follow the rules that others go by.

  ____ It’s often hard for me to follow routines and be self-disciplined.

  ____ Total Score

  C.

  ____ I worry that my faults and flaws will be revealed to others.

  ____ I often judge and criticize myself.

  ____ I tend to make other people’s needs more important than my own.

  ____ It’s difficult for me to let others know what I need and/or set boundaries with others.

  ____ Total Score

  D.

  ____ I often feel angry, critical, and/or resentful toward others.

  ____ I often feel misunderstood and/or misjudged by others.

  ____ I am often controlling and dominating around others.

  ____ I often challenge and/or oppose the status quo.

  ____ Total Score

  Interpreting Your Score

  The section in which you received the highest score (A, B, C, or D) indicates the primary role you played within your family system. In small or single-child families, it’s not uncommon for the child or children to assume more than one role. Other roles where you scored high would be the secondary roles. In general, lower or more evenly balanced scores are an indicator that your family system was relatively healthy, or that you’ve done a lot of personal-development work to help you override the patterns from your family or origin.

  A: Hero

  B: Mascot

  C: Lost Child

  D: Rebel

  Now, in your journal, write your primary role (or roles) under the heading “My Family Role.

  CHAPTER 4

  MANAGING FEAR

  SO IT DOESN’T

  MANAGE YOU

  When I decided to leave my marriage but hadn’t yet moved out, I imagined a new kind of life—a life of freedom and independence. I envisioned new opportunities through which I could express my full potential and rekindle my passions. Faced with a deteriorating marriage that was causing me a great deal of pain, I romanticized a future where I was, once again, on my own. But when my husband and I physically separated, I experienced something else altogether. I was gripped by fear. I started having panic attacks. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in my new apartment, unable to breathe, my heart pounding. What was going on? What was I so afraid of? I was swept up in the fear that, without my husband, I would perish. Interestingly, I’d experienced this kind of panic only once before in my life, when I was four months pregnant with my first child. I’ve never forgotten it. One afternoon, I had a mental image of being abandoned by my husband and left destitute. I imagined myself huddled in a broken-down tenement with my baby, living in poverty. At the time, I believed this fear was evoked by my pregnancy, which made me feel incredibly vulnerable and accentuated my dependency on my husband. When he came home that evening, I was sobbing and shaken, still terrified. When I shared my fears with him, he was very supportive, consoling me and offering assurances that I was imagining the impossible.

  I didn’t have any idea where this feeling came from, this fear of abandonment and destitution, but it resur-faced again when our marriage ended. In truth, I had no reason at the time to think that I’d have any financial difficulties. We’d worked out an amicable agreement involving joint custody. I’d moved with my children to a nice apartment, a few houses down from our old home, where my husband remained. And, at first, my husband provided ample financial resources. But ultimately, in the months that followed, as if I’d willed it into being through my imagination, my greatest fear came to fruition. His financial support declined, and I found myself struggling to pay the bills.

  Where had it come from, this fear? Over time, through my personal-development work, I was able to trace it directly to my old conditioning. As far back as I can remember, I had believed that I needed a man to take care of me. Only then could I feel safe in the world. My brothers were conditioned to go to college and get good jobs. They were conditioned to be providers. In contrast, the message I received—through my parents’ comments, their role modeling, and our culture—was a very different one. Not only was my mother completely dependent on my father, financially and emotionally, but she made it very clear to me through her advice about how to dress, act, and behave that it was important to catch a man, to find a husband to provide for me. I still remember her words: “You need to lose some weight. Men don’t like women who are fat.” “Don’t you think you should get a padded bra? Men like a woman with a little more than you have on top.” “You talk too much. Men don’t like that.” In retrospect, such advice seems bizarrely inappropriate since I left home at the age of 14. More to the point, these messages contributed to one of my most deeply held core limiting beliefs: that I needed a man to take care of me. By imagining that I could make it on my own with two children to raise, I was violating that core belief. In my own mind, I had translated my conditioning into the idea that, quite literally, I needed a man to survive.

  Fear is a curious beast. Any number of situations, both real and imagined, can evoke fear. One of them is violating your core limiting beliefs, because those beliefs are all about survival; they’re all about keeping ourselves safe, about self-preservation. A little boy learns that it’s his job to take care of his alcoholic mother. Another learns that feelings of sadness and anger are taboo. Still another learns that the best way to escape an abusive parent is by keeping very quiet and staying out of the way. These children emerge from their families of origin with a mix of core limiting beliefs: Other people’s needs are more important than my own. My feelings are something I must hide. The world is not a safe place. Whatever the core limiting belief, going against it produces feelings of fear and anxiety.

  The Power of Fear

  I’ve devoted an entire chapter to the subject of fear, because it’s one of the biggest obstacles people face in moving forward in their lives and reaching their fullest potential. Through my work with many clients, I’ve come to believe that most people live their lives from a place of fear. If you’re living your life based on avoiding the things that you fear most, you’re not free to take risks, or to pursue your dreams and goals. We each have a certain amount of life energy. If your energy is being expended in staying safe—in avoiding failure, rejection, physical harm, and emotional pain by avoiding the people, places, and situations that trigger your fears—then that energy is tied up in your vigilance to stay safe instead of in fulfilling your potential.

  Managing fear is crucial to mastering aloneness. To manage it effectively, you first have to understand the nature and physiology of fear. Through evolution, we’re hard-wired to respond to fear with intensity. Hence, that panic I felt following my separation manifested itself physically in palpitations and shortness of breath. I experienced a classic fight-or-flight response, a physical response that’s been with us as a species from our earliest beginnings. For our evolutionary precursors out in the wild, the fight-or-flight response was a valuable survival mechanism. It’s not as useful when triggered by modern-day fears. Here’s how it works: When a person or animal senses a threat, the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary body functions—including heart rate, digestion, respiration rate, salivation, perspi-ration, and dilation of the pupils—moves into action. One part of that system—the sympathetic nervous system—controls our response. When it’s activated by something such as motion, sound, light, or images that signal a potential threat, the body goes into a state of heightened alert so that we can react by either fighting or fleeing. A neurotransmitter releases the hormones norepinephrine and adrenaline. Once we’re able to discern whether we’re actually in danger, that we’re actually going to have to do something, the body’s response intensifies, kicking in more of these powerful hormones. Heart and lung action accelerates;
pupils dilate; the blood vessels in parts of the body we don’t need for fighting or fleeing—say, the gastrointestinal tract—constrict; the vessels that feed crucial muscles for running and jumping and fighting dilate, and nutrients are released to fuel those muscles. In addition, cortisol, known as the “stress hormone,” is released in higher quantities than normal in response to the stress invoked by this fear. Cortisol helps the system react and then helps the body return to its normal resting state once the threat has passed. However, constant, chronic stress causes elevated levels of cortisol, which has all kinds of adverse physical effects, including:

  • Impaired cognitive performance (you don’t think as clearly)

  • Suppressed thyroid function (which affects your metabolism, among other things)

  • Blood-sugar imbalances (which can cause everything from a sense of fatigue to diabetes)

  • Higher blood pressure (which puts you at risk for heart disease)

  • Increased abdominal fat (which nobody wants, because it not only looks bad but is associated with all kinds of health problems)

  In addition, chronic stress can compromise your immune system, making you more susceptible to illness. Ultimately, living with chronic states of fear and stress is unhealthy for our bodies and for our spirits.

  Fear can be paralyzing. That’s a big reason why our core limiting beliefs have such a hold over our behavior. As an example, I had a client, Casey, a young woman in her early 30s. She was making just under $100,000 a year in a financial-services job that she hated, but she was unable to make a career change because she was gripped by fear. She’d grown up in a family where both her parents were children of the ’60s. They’d taken the habit of recreational drug use with them into adulthood and were unable to hold down jobs. Her reaction to growing up in the face of their dysfunctions involved taking on the role of the responsible one in the family, the caretaker, the provider. Casey started babysitting at the age of 12 to earn money. By the time she came to me for help as an adult, she was supporting her father, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and periodically sending money to her mother, who lived in another country. She was romantically involved with a man who was divorced, but still supporting his ex-wife and son. He’d made it very clear that he didn’t want to support Casey, and he was unsupportive of her desire to switch careers. She had replicated her relationship with her parents in her romantic relationship. Her core limiting belief: Other people’s needs are more important than my own. I have to be responsible for others. Her fear: If I make my own needs more important than everyone else’s, I’ll be rejected and I’ll end up alone. When she came to me, she was struggling with her desire to start her own photography business. She wanted to have more balance in her life and to be able to set her own hours. But without her boyfriend’s approval, Casey couldn’t make the move. She couldn’t put her own desires ahead of his. Fear was the predominant emotion that kept her frozen in place.

  Trance States

  How do our core limiting beliefs exercise such power over us? How does our conditioning rule our lives? Reichian therapist Stephen Wolinsky’s work on trance states provides some interesting clues to this process. Although I was first introduced to the concept of childhood trances during my psychotherapist training in Ger-many in 1993, it wasn’t until I studied Wolinsky’s work several years later that I was struck by how our childhood experiences and subsequent trance states drive the fears that hold us back as adults.

  In his book The Dark Side of the Inner Child,1Wolinsky describes the trance state as the mechanism through which we disconnect from our current reality and allow the emotions from our old reality—from our childhood or earlier life—to take over. A trance state is a situation in which we experience that emotional disconnect. It’s as if our emotions are hijacked by our unconscious minds. According to Wolinsky, age regression is the most common trance state.

  Trances explain why many of us react or behave in ways that seem out of our control, without understanding why. There is a part of us—which Wolinsky refers to as the observer—that creates and uses trance states as a way to protect ourselves and to survive difficult childhood experiences and traumas. When something happens in our adult life that reminds us of a past event—a trigger—we unconsciously recreate memories and emotions that relate to the past event rather than the present reality. That can cause us to react in ways that are often inappropriate to the here and now.

  Trance states can be invoked by all kinds of situa-tions and events. Not long ago, I was working with a client, Marybeth, on issues related to her aloneness. We talked about trance states, and a few weeks later, during one of our sessions, she recounted this story. That week, Marybeth had gone to an unfamiliar church where her son was singing with the choir as part of a school-related event. When she arrived alone at the Episcopal service, she found herself seeking out fellow parents with whom to sit. She said hello to an acquaintance and asked if she could share a seat, but the woman was saving the entire pew for aunts, uncles, and grandparents who were scheduled to arrive shortly. So Marybeth found a seat next to someone she didn’t know. Since the two of them were seated alone together, Marybeth reached out her hand and introduced herself; they exchanged a brief hello and the names of their children. The family in the pew in front of her was very well dressed and sitting stiffly, whispering barely audibly among themselves. Suddenly, Marybeth had an intense feeling that something was terribly wrong. Within moments, she was filled with anxiety. She was gripped with a fear that she’d been behaving inappropriately. Anxiety and embarrassment swept over her; she felt an overwhelming sense of confusion. She started to sweat; her mind racing. It took a few minutes for her to collect herself. “What was going on?” she wondered, recognizing that her reaction was out of proportion to what, if anything, might have occurred. Because of the work we’d been doing together on trances, she realized that she was in a trance state. It wasn’t her aloneness that was the issue. She was experiencing emotions that sprang from her early life. Raised in a very proper family, she’d grown up in the Episcopal Church, which she had long since abandoned. She’d been taught to be very quiet when entering the sanctuary. By talking so openly and moving from pew to pew when she’d first entered the church, she’d broken the rules; she’d behaved, she thought, inappropriately.

  Marybeth was disconnecting from the present. Somehow, the combination of events had taken her back to her early years in church, which, from her perspective, had not been about worshipping, but all about appearances: how you dressed, how you looked, how you behaved. Her core limiting belief: If I don’t behave appropriately, I’ll be rejected and humiliated. Recounting the experience to me as something of an epiphany, Marybeth reported that, during church services growing up, her mother would repeatedly shush her, along with her brother and sister, reprimanding them with stony glares if they spoke at all. Being in an Episcopal sanctuary, sitting behind a whispering family dressed to the nines—just like the people who had surrounded her in church so many years before—had triggered the sensation of shame and confusion she’d experienced as a child. In fact, she noted, issues around behaving appropriately at all kinds of events were emotional triggers for her because of her mother’s intense preoccupation with appearances.

  For Wolinsky, the dark side of the inner child is the shadow self that produces such reactions. These trances bring our pathologies from childhood into our everyday experiences, ultimately creating patterns of behavior driven by our core limiting beliefs. In The Dark Side of the Inner Child, he defines a trance as “the means by which symptoms are created and maintained and become a source of pathology as they are integrated in our habitual mode of response to the world.”2In other words, trance states are reactions based on the past. They trigger habitual behaviors that are grounded in our core beliefs and conditioning. In adulthood, those trance states surface again and again.

  Here’s another example. I have a client, a man in his mid-30s, who played the piano as a child. Every tim
e his parents had guests, they’d try to get him to perform. It made him feel uncomfortable, and he would make a lot of mistakes, which humiliated and embarrassed him. As an adult, any time he’s in a situation where he is put on the spot or is the center of attention, he gets very anxious. His core belief: If people notice me, I’ll be humiliated. Any situation he associates with performance—from speaking out at a meeting to delivering a toast—triggers fear. So his habitual response is to avoid the limelight.

  To experience the power of a trance state, take a moment to do the following exercise. Have someone guide you through the process, or record the instructions first and then follow along to the sound of your own voice reading them. That will allow you to close your eyes and focus on the exercise itself.

  Exercise: Entering a Trance State

  Close your eyes and sit back in your chair. Think of a situation or environment that caused you to react in fear. It can be something from your present life or a situation from the past. It might be a situation involving another person, a conversation, or a conflict you had with someone, or it might be an experience or a place in which you felt afraid or in physical danger. Recreate the situation in your mind with as much detail as possible. Notice the physical surroundings. What do you see? Who, if anyone, else is there? What are you doing? What is happening around you? What physical reactions do you have? How do you feel? What thoughts are running through your head? Notice your breathing and your body posture. Notice how recreating this situation in your mind makes you feel, physically, emotionally, and mentally.

  Now slowly allow that memory to fade and, keeping your eyes closed, observe what effect the exercise has had on your breathing, the way your body feels, and any emotions or other reactions you might be having. Take out your journal and spend a few minutes recording what you remember and all your reactions to it.