Author: Janice Holland

Why You’re Not Happy (Even If Life Looks Fine)

Do you sometimes see people running around enjoying life and wonder what you’re missing? Sometimes I used to think I must be a horrible person. I had so many things going for me, and I still couldn’t be happy. I would ask myself, is there something wrong with me? Am I a narcissist?

Then sometimes I would decide I was just going to be happy. I would fake it until I made it and just accept that’s who I was. But it wouldn’t take long for me to feel overwhelmingly depressed.

I had a little dark hole that would constantly pull at me, and I didn’t have the energy to keep ignoring it. My attempts to do so just made it scream louder, and then I really was in a mess. This, of course, made me feel worse because it would remind me that I must be crazy.

As I worked through my healing journey, I discovered there are three key reasons why we can’t just muscle up and be happy. We need to work through these three obstacles to move from just surviving and having moments of happiness to thriving and living a life full of joy and inspiration. To living a life where we love who we are and what we are doing and have hope for the future.

Life is never perfect, but it sure is a lot more enjoyable and fun when we love, enjoy, and fully experience the present moments we are in.

So what are these obstacles? And what strategies can you use to work through them?

1. Validate Past Experiences

When you don’t fully validate and process painful past experiences, the energy of those experiences gets trapped and contained within your body.

It takes consistent and continual emotional energy to keep the walls around those experiences high and the energy within contained. The energy and emotion inside are deep and strong, and to keep these feelings away from our consciousness. we can’t allow ourselves to experience any deep or strong feelings, even the good ones.

Allowing yourself to pull down these walls and grieve all the deep and strong feelings inside will free your emotional energy to feel deep and strong happy feelings too.

For me, this meant feeling and processing the sexual abuse I endured as a child.

For years I convinced myself that I was fine and that it happens to almost everyone. I tried to minimize my experience and leave it in the past. The walls I had built to keep all the grief and pain of those experiences out of my conscious daily awareness drained me and prevented me from feeling life in real time. I was guarded, with very shallow access to my feelings.

No one wants to go back and work through the pain of the past, but I discovered that doing grief work with my therapist allowed me to truly let go of the pain and thrive in the present.

2. Let Go of the Need for Control

When you’ve been hurt in the past, it is normal to want to curate a life where you can’t get hurt again. We create a sense of safety by ensuring our life is as predictable as possible. Any time someone in our circle acts in a way that is outside our control, we ensure they “get back in line” so we feel safe.

For example, if your partner doesn’t immediately return your text, you might get upset and lash out about how disrespectful he is being. If your kids don’t seem to be as concerned about their grades as you think they should be, you might panic and shame them, saying they will be stuck working in fast food restaurants for the rest of their lives. We want everyone to act as we think they “should,” so our world feels nice and safe and predictable.

Zoom out and look at this scenario… Could it be any more boring? No wonder it’s impossible to feel true joy and happiness. Joy and happiness come from the ability to be spontaneous, light, free, and unpredictable.

I think a lot of people mistake feeling safe for feeling happy. Being in a constant search for safety keeps us in survival mode. Knowing you are safe with yourself no matter what allows you to move out of survival and into a higher consciousness that brings joy, pleasure… and happiness.

It is true that many of us have very real pain from the past, and it is perfectly normal to want to protect ourselves from feeling that pain again by attempting to curate a life we can fully control. This is an unconscious decision we make out of self-protection.

Choose to make the conscious decision to let go of control. Trust that you now have all the resources within yourself to feel safe, no matter what happens. Releasing the need to control will bring you the ability to feel joy, pleasure, and fun again.

This one was difficult for me and took a long time to integrate. Because of my abusive childhood experiences, I overcompensated for my feelings of worthlessness and lack of safety with a drive for success and perfectionism to try to control how others perceived me.

If my co-worker wasn’t pulling her weight, I would stay late and work weekends to ensure the work was done, and done well. If my husband wouldn’t spend time with me or plan dates, I would plan dates and put all the reservations in his name so it looked like he was investing in me and our relationship. If my kids were not interested in wearing outfits that I thought would make our family look perfect, I would bribe them with candy so we could look good and put together as a family.

I thought that making myself and my family look like we had it together meant that we did, and we would therefore be happy. Man, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and it actually drove not just myself but everyone in the family system in the opposite direction.

No one likes to be manipulated, and even if we can’t exactly identify that’s what is happening, we feel it. Honestly, I had a bit of an identity crisis as I let go of how I wanted life to look and embraced living and feeling life in real time. What I can say is that since I’ve let go of control, life has been full of more peace and joy than I knew possible.

3. Look for Happiness

What we look for, we will find. There is a reason we constantly hear people talk about gratitude. When we look for things we’re grateful for, things we enjoy or love, we create more of those things in our lives. We begin to see how much joy and happiness we already have.

We so often completely overlook the goodness that’s all around us because we are preconditioned to see and experience all the things that are going wrong.

This third step is caused by not working through the first two. When we haven’t validated our past painful experiences, we look for validation in all our current painful experiences.

It’s like those experiences keep haunting us until we take the time to turn around and look at them. They cloud our ability to see the happiness we already have all around us. We can’t experience the innocence and joy in our children. Nor can we accept the love and connection our friends want to offer us or appreciate all the amazing things we are doing well at work.

When we are stuck in the need for control, we look for all future outcomes that will help us to stay safe instead of looking for all the joy and pleasure that is already in our life. We don’t have enough bandwidth to do both, at least not all at once; so, for example, if we spend all our time subconsciously looking for ways someone else might hurt or abandon us, then we don’t have the energy left to look for joy and pleasure in our relationships.

One day I had to make a choice. I decided I had had enough of being tired, frustrated, and miserable. I knew it would take a while for my circumstances to change, but that didn’t mean I had to stay stuck and feel isolated, frustrated, and lonely.

I made the hard choice to look for happiness. At first, I would journal things I found happiness in, and over time it became more subconscious than conscious. It also helped to talk about it with a good friend, as we both challenged each other in looking for happiness.

Sometimes I still struggle. If I haven’t been taking care of myself, this one is the first to slip. I start to slide back into an old pattern of looking for how life is screwing me over. I know that I’m better able to keep my mindset in happiness when I engage in self-care as often as possible.

If enough is enough and you are ready to move on from feeling like you are just surviving life, implement the following three strategies to overcome the obstacles to joy.

First, start journaling or processing your feelings about past experiences. It could be a good idea to do this step with a professional, depending on what you have been through.

Next, start identifying how much control you have over your life and the people around you and see where you can loosen up the reins a little.

I can almost hear you saying back to me, “But everything will fall apart if I let go!” Let it fall apart. You don’t want a partner and kids who live only to make you satisfied and “happy.” Let life get a little messy. They (and you) will be so much happier if they just get to be themselves, make mistakes, and develop connections out of genuine love and respect… not out of fear of failure or mistakes.

This last one is pretty simple: start looking for joy. Get curious when you find it hard or upsetting to look for joy. Often, turning things around is simply a choice. Change your subconscious conditioning from looking for what is going wrong to looking for what is going right.

These three steps will help you attract the people and experiences that will bring you everything you are looking for.

Before you know it, your past pain will be a distant memory that doesn’t impact your day-to-day life. Instead, you will feel a sense of freedom and joy because you’ll be able to live life in the moment rather than in your head trying to predict outcomes, and because you’ll have reset your pre-conditioning to look for the good in life everywhere you go.

This is what it takes to be one of “those people” who just seem happy and full of life. Which strategy will you try first?

May 12, 2025
Trauma Lies: Why Survivors Feel Like They’re Bad People

“Trauma is not the bad things that happen to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” ~Dr. Gabor Maté

I used to have this pervasive empty feeling inside. I tried filling it by eating, working, being a wife, making my life look great on socials—anything really to make it go away. I went to church, worked hard, and tried to be a good person, hoping the hole would fill and my life would feel whole and complete.

I went to therapy for the first time when I was sixteen years old. I remember telling my therapist about this black hole in the middle of my chest. It was bottomless and hot inside. I remember drawing it for my therapist, and one day we had a session where I went inside to see what was down there.

Strangely, I don’t remember the outcome of that session, but I do know that hole persisted for years. Well into my thirties. I would have seasons of time where I was more conscious of it than others, but nothing, no matter what I did or tried, would make it go away completely.

I went to school and became a therapist so I could learn all I could and help myself in ways others couldn’t help. Even with professional training, it still took a long time for me to sort out the bottomless pit that sat on my chest.

I realize now that the pit was composed of several different things, but the primary motivator behind its ever-presence was the fundamental belief that there was something wrong with me.

I believed everyone, in general, deserved to have a good life and good things, but I wasn’t so lucky. I didn’t really have a reason for why I believed this, just that this was my reality and I had to learn to live with it.

I didn’t believe that I deserved to have anything nice or good. My life was meant to be in service and sacrifice to others so they could advance and have a good life. Once I began to study trauma and its impact, I was finally able to put the pieces together for why I felt this way.

When we are kids, we don’t have any control over anything that is happening around us. We don’t get to say where we live, who we’re living with, where we go to school, or when we eat dinner. Nothing. The locus of control is completely outside of us.

We are at the mercy of the environment around us. For those of us who were not so lucky to be in an environment where we felt safe and secure and had our needs met, this presents a life-threatening problem.

We are mammals; we need connection for survival. It’s biological. When our safety and belonging are threatened, it feels like life or death because it is life or death. We need an attachment to our caretakers, our environment, and ourselves to survive.

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to express emotion. If I was sad or angry, I had to pretend I wasn’t, or I would not be allowed to be in the presence of others in my home. I was abused by my cousins, and I had to keep it a secret so I wouldn’t upset the connections of the adults who were around me.

I was taught at church that if any boy was looking at me, touching me, or treating me badly, then I must be doing something to deserve it.

My world was completely out of my control, and I was drowning in helplessness, pain, sadness, and disconnection. This isn’t a tolerable emotional state to maintain. I couldn’t control any of it, and neither can any other child who is experiencing events that dysregulate their nervous system with no one and nothing available to help calm, soothe, and comfort.

We have only one choice in this instance. We shift the locus of control from outside of ourselves to inside of ourselves. We decide that we deserve bad things to happen.

There are many ways this plays out for people. Some people decide they are bad; they were born bad. Some people decide they just don’t deserve good things or to be treated kindly because there is something wrong with them. They, for whatever reason, are unlovable.

I fell more into the latter. I didn’t know what was wrong with me; I just knew something must be wrong with me, and that’s why so many bad things were happening to me and no one noticed or cared.

This resolved the conflict of feeling helpless and out of control. This allowed me to stay connected to my family in any way I could and removed the helplessness that left me feeling vulnerable and afraid.

We adopt the belief that bad things happen to bad people so we don’t have to be confused about why bad things are happening to us. It’s because we deserve it.

This is something we all do when we are young and in situations that are out of our control. We find a way to shift the narrative to make us in control. If we determine that we are bad, wrong, unlovable, weak, or in any way at fault, then the helplessness and weakness are resolved, and we can move forward creating connections and safety within our family systems and culture.

This sets in motion a paradigm, a core belief, that shapes all of our choices, interactions, assumptions, values, and practices for our whole life. This paradigm informs how we interact with the world moving forward. Buried inside the paradigm are deep feelings of grief, loneliness, shame, fear, and abandonment. These are intolerable feelings that are too overwhelming to keep in our conscious mind.

For me, I unconsciously dug a deep black hole in my soul and attempted to bury the insufferable feelings that had nowhere to go.

Trauma causes our minds and our bodies to split from each other. The lines of communication are severed or distorted in order for our stress response system to work effectively at keeping us alive.

If you experience a trauma but have the opportunity to process it and have people to help you recreate safety, then the connection between mind and body can be restored.

For those who experience trauma but don’t have the opportunity to re-establish connection and safety, the mind and body remain disconnected. With this persistent mind-body disconnection, the paradigm shift of internalizing that we are bad or deserve bad things gives us two choices moving forward.

One choice is to shut down all feelings and go numb to emotion. We live in our heads and work really hard to be perfect, good, lovable, pleasing, and acceptable. We become workaholics, overthinkers, perfectionists, and incapable of tolerating any mistakes we make.

We do this because we unconsciously want so badly to prove to ourselves and the world around us that we really are lovable and good people. We really are worthy of being loved and accepted. We love others well, struggle to set boundaries, and will do anything to be seen as acceptable.

I can relate very much to this response to the belief that there must be something really bad and wrong with me. I must have done something to deserve abuse and neglect. These weren’t conscious thoughts, just an internal shift I made as a child to resolve the unresolvable. This isn’t unique to me; every childhood trauma survivor I know has done this.

The other option we have is to stay connected more to our body than our mind. To emote and express all the sadness, anger, and rage inside. People with this response have big emotions. They are explosive, struggle with consistency, struggle to hold down a job, or have addictions. If you ask them why they are struggling, they will usually say, “I don’t know.” They really don’t know because they are in their bodies trying to express all the energy trapped inside, but their minds are checked out.

Some identify mostly with one archetype, and some relate to being both. This is more of a spectrum than a black-and-white response.

For me, I was numb 95% of the time and always in my head. If something did ever really get to me, then I would switch to big emotions and not think about what I was doing. I’d get blackout drunk, smoke a pack of cigarettes, buy $30 worth of candy, and eat it all in a half-hour. My behavior would be extreme until I could get back to my head and shut it all down. Can you relate?

While neither response is good or bad, our society definitely rewards one response over the other. We praise the children who sit in the front of the class and act like “teachers’ pets.” We reward the workaholics and praise the overthinkers. This makes me really sad now that I am in recovery from being a pleaser.

My recovery took years longer than it should have because it took so long for me to figure out that all the things that people told me were good about me were not actually me at all. They were all an attempt to prove my worth, and as long as I stayed connected to being seen as good and acceptable, I was playing a role based in shame rather than being myself. I couldn’t see it because the role was reinforced everywhere I went.

There are some specific steps we need to take to set ourselves free.

The first is to accept and feel the deep pain of realizing we were innocent children who had no control over the uncontrollable things that were happening.

We didn’t cause it and didn’t deserve it. We were innocent children who deserved love, protection, and safety. There is no reason inside of us that we didn’t get that.

This is often hard to accept. For me, it felt like I was going to die when I began to allow the pain to surface. This is because at the time of the events, the pain was threatening my connection, which threatened my life. That isn’t true anymore, but my younger self holding all the pain inside didn’t realize that until I began to let myself feel it.

No one cries forever, and no one rages forever; it does eventually pass. It didn’t kill me, and it won’t kill you either, even though it feels like it might.

My favorite quote from Dr. Colin Ross, the founder of The Trauma Model Theory, is “Feeling your feelings won’t kill you; it’s your attempt to not feel them that will.” I have found this to be such a helpful reminder in recovery from trauma.

The second step is to allow ourselves to fully grieve.

Expand your tolerance level for being uncomfortable and sitting with uncomfortable emotions. Learn to feel all your feelings without activating your stress response and going into fight, flight, or freeze. Be present with them in mind and body.

This can take some significant work for those who have had complex trauma in their histories. It often requires the support of a professional in the beginning. What helped me most is grieving what didn’t happen as much as what did. The connection and support I didn’t receive. The protection that wasn’t given to me, etc. Grieve the life you thought you should have had but didn’t.

The third step is shifting the responsibility (not blame) to where it belongs.

If we stay in the mindset of blame, it keeps us stuck in victim mode. We are working now to be responsible for our lives and how we move forward.

I hold my cousins responsible for their behavior. I hold my family responsible for the support they were not able to provide. I don’t blame them, but I don’t let them off the hook either. I don’t need to know if they’ll “pay” for what they did or didn’t do. I shift the responsibility for their behavior onto them and am not really bothered with their consequences or lack of them. It doesn’t matter to me.

It took me a while to be able to say that. For so long I wanted them to get it. I wanted them to understand, take responsibility, or say they were sorry. Waiting for these things to happen keeps us stuck and tied to them. It doesn’t allow us to move forward and create the future for ourselves that we want and deserve.

I am no longer taking responsibility for their choices, and I don’t need to think about or see how their future plays out.

The fourth step is to take full responsibility for ourselves.

This was a difficult step for me. I wanted to blame my past for my inability to speak up, be bold, take action, or feel someone’s disappointment.

I can’t take responsibility for myself and create the life I want to live if I refuse to accept that my life is a series of choices I make from here forward. I am empowered now to decide who will be around me, what I do with my time, and how I show up.

I have shifted the paradigm from the belief that I’m unworthy to the belief that I am just as worthy as anyone else. I can tolerate people being disappointed in me, frustrated by my choices, not liking me, or anything else. I decide how I want to show up every day, and I am the only one who can create my life.

I have never thought of myself as a victim. In fact, I hated the concept, but I did have to accept that living in pleasing mode meant I was also acting like a victim, and that alone was my motivation for change. It was messy and took a while, but eventually I was able to build my strength and resilience to a point where I was comfortable getting to know and expressing my authentic self.

The fifth step is giving ourselves the tools, grace, and time to let all this play out.

Continue to get to know who you truly are; continue to feel and express difficult emotions as they come up without pushing them away or dramatizing them. And learn to hold more than one emotion at the same time.

I can now feel true, genuine love for my family while also being sad and disappointed by the way some things went down. For me, it wasn’t all bad or all good. It was both, and through healing I can genuinely feel and connect to both.

I have also had to grieve the loss of time. It took many years for me to recover from the black hole that drove my choices and decisions for most of my life. I sometimes wonder what could have been if I had been able to be my authentic self earlier. When these thoughts come, I grieve them, let them pass, and then go do something I love to do.

It doesn’t matter how old we are when we recognize the paradigm. It can shift, but we are the only ones who can shift it for ourselves.

November 8, 2024
How to Free Yourself from Pain from the Past

“There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body.” ~Eckhart Tolle

When I read this quote, it stopped me in my tracks. So much of our pain and suffering in the present is caused by us repeating cycles and dwelling on pain from the past. We want so badly to resolve our suffering. But our search for resolution often involves repeating the painful cycles we have already been through, in the hope that someone or something will change.

How many of us have gone through a divorce and realized in the process that the whole relationship was a repeat of a painful relationship from our childhood? How many of us are realizing that we continue to attract the same kinds of people into our lives? People who take advantage of us, want to use us, or have some form of agenda that creates more pain and suffering.

We live in our minds trying to think of all the ways we can protect ourselves and avoid more pain and suffering. The irony is that this inevitably creates more of what we are trying to avoid. This is because what we focus on, we create. The law of attraction is always at play.

For years, I lived highly dependent on my mind. I thought that if I got all the psychology degrees, considered all possible future outcomes, and created a well-thought-out plan of action, I would be able to fix my pain and suffering and free myself for a life of meaning and purpose.

It was devastating to realize after years of chasing a meaningful life that I could not create safety, joy, and purpose through the actions of my mind.

Subconsciously, I stayed trapped in cycles of pain while trying to resolve my past by hoping the people around me would change. I kept my life small so I could stay in control. I never wanted to be around crowds of people. I never wanted to share and be vulnerable, and I never wanted to let anyone see my feelings. I stayed hidden away behind my mind, where I felt in control and safe.

But I also felt miserable. Empty and purposeless. For a while, I was suicidal.

Thankfully, I left those feelings behind years ago, but the emptiness of going through the motions of life without a true connection to what I was doing or why I was here remained, and it was maddening.

I have found that more people feel this emptiness than anyone would ever think. Many of us keep it hidden in the silence of shame because we desperately want it to be fixed and go away. It’s embarrassing to admit that we feel broken and sad behind all the layers of achievement and pretty social media posts.

We attempt to fill this emptiness with eating, drinking, scrolling, having sex, shopping, collecting things, and so on. So many of us are terrified at the thought of spending a whole day, much less a whole lifetime, being alone with ourselves. Being with ourselves with no distractions.

The thoughts in our mind haunt us. We torture ourselves with memories from the past and worries for the future. We torture ourselves with thoughts of how disappointed we are in how our lives have turned out. We recreate pain from the past over and over again by dwelling on the twisted and tormented thoughts in our minds and feel that life is unfair.

Many people will tell you the answer is praying, reading the bible, going to a therapist, reading self-help books, or doing something with your mind. None of these things are bad in and of themselves, but no amount of staying in your mind will fix or heal the pain of your past that you continue to repeat in the present.

Unresolved emotions of the past are stored in our bodies, and they’re in the driver’s seat of our lives, causing chaos, disappointment, and frustration everywhere we go.

I used to think I was really bad at making friends. I usually would wait until someone approached me before striking up a friendship. I isolated a lot because it just felt safer and easier. Over time, I got frustrated because I realized that I kept ending up in these friendships with people who never really saw me.

My pain and fear of rejection was in the driver’s seat, so I protected myself by keeping the real me hidden away. If I caught anyone’s attention, I would play the role I thought I needed to play to be friends.

The biggest problem here is that this attracted other people who also played roles instead of being their authentic selves. The role they played was “take care of me,” while I was playing the role of “I’ll take care of you.” This match worked well initially, but always left me in the same broken pattern of not being truly seen. That empty crater in my soul just kept getting bigger and bigger.

The only way to stop the cycle of pain is to become fully present with yourself here and now. To connect to your body and the spirit within you that is ever present.

When you drop into your body and feel your emotions, you are then free to just be. So many of us are terrified of the silence of being with ourselves because the pain of the past combined with our present actions to distract ourselves haunt us. The secrets we hold inside are killing us.

You aren’t a bad person for the things you do to find some form of pain relief. Life isn’t about being a good or bad person. It is about being authentic, real, and connected, or disconnected and fragmented because of the cycles of pain on repeat.

Are you tired of the constant disappointment? Are you tired of hating yourself and your life? Are you tired of feeling like you are always behind, not quite enough, and devastatingly empty inside? It is so painful, isn’t it? It is so painful to feel the destruction and pain of the disconnection to our true selves. It is painful to face the things we do to distract ourselves from the reality of our emptiness.

Healing happens in the body. Pain is released from your body. Get out of your mind and into your body and you will be set free. You will experience peace and joy. You will stop the cycles of pain and be at peace with the present moment just as it is.

I know it feels impossibly hard. There is so much chaos swirling around in your body that it feels dangerous to actually feel your feelings. A great quote from my mentor, Colin Ross, helped set me free. “Feeling your feelings won’t kill you; it’s your attempt to not feel them that will.”

It is uncomfortable, it is painful, it can be overwhelming at times, but feeling your feelings will set you free.

Here is a place to start: Play some music that brings you comfort and close your eyes. Pretend you are getting in a glass elevator in your mind and ride it down into your body. Once the elevator has arrived in your body, identify the emotions you find. Write them down.

Lower the elevator a little more and see if different emotions are in a different part of your body. Explore your whole body and write down everything you discover.

For the days to come, spend some time with each of those emotions and ask them what they have to say. Give each emotion a name if it’s easier. Once you feel more comfortable with an emotion, you will feel safer to actually feel it.

For example, when I ride my elevator down into my chest, I can see anger. I named my anger Carrie. In my journaling time I ask Carrie, what do you have to say? She tells me all the reasons why she is angry and feels that life is unfair.

She tells me about my former marriage and how much I was taken advantage of. She reminds me of all the times he silenced me when I tried to share my needs and shamed me when I tried to speak up for myself.

She tells me about how enraged she feels that I never had a voice growing up. I was sexually abused and emotionally neglected, and if I expressed any emotion other than happiness, I was shamed and rejected by my family and culture. She is so angry for the “good girl” roles I had to play while never really being seen or valued.

As I get to know her and hear all of these things she has to say, I feel compassion for her and also start to feel anger along with her myself. Each time I connect with her, I validate why she is angry. The intensity of her emotion gets smaller and smaller the more I connect with her and feel her.

You can do this exercise with all emotions, and it can help you get to know yourself and not be so scared of what is contained inside.

When neither your past nor your emotions haunt you, you are free to love your life in the present moment just as it is. Flawed, imperfect, messy, and unpredictable.

Now that I’m not scared of feeling my emotions, I am at peace. Sometimes I still need to grieve the truth of what has happened to me. I will never be okay with the abuse and neglect I experienced. However, I can feel those emotions when they come up, and they don’t overwhelm me. I feel them for that moment, and then I can move on to enjoy the life I have created now. A life that has people who really see me and care about me in it.

Perhaps the biggest change for me is that I don’t feel I have to prove my worth to anyone. I am just me, and I feel at peace with that. This shift has allowed me to get out of my head and just be.

We don’t need to dwell on the past or control how our life looks or what will happen next. We can just be here in the present, full of gratitude, hope, love, joy, and all the messiness from the past lives we have lived.

January 22, 2024
Why It Can Feel Lonely When You Stop Overgiving in Relationships

“After you give so much of yourself to people over the years, one day you wake up and realize that you need someone to give to you too.” ~Sylvester McNutt

One of the biggest surprises I found on my self-care journey was how lonely I started to feel in the process, especially when I started to set boundaries with toxic people. At first, this loneliness had me questioning myself. I thought there must be something wrong with me, because I thought I was supposed to feel good and strong instead of scared and lonely when I did “the right thing.”

Honestly, most days the loneliness was so big it felt like healing wasn’t really worth it. After digging a little deeper and doing some research, I discovered I wasn’t alone in this feeling, and there is a key reason why loneliness is so profound at the beginning of a self-care journey.

Due to a variety of childhood circumstances, I had developed a personal identity that revolved around making others feel seen, heard, understood, and wanted. My whole sense of self was tied into how others felt about themselves.

I was really good at showing up for people, listening to them, meeting their needs, and ensuring they felt seen, heard, and comfortable. It initially never felt like a sacrifice to me to do this, and when it did, I was proud and honored to sacrifice my own needs and wants to make others happy.

While developing this ability to “see” and love on others isn’t inherently bad, it does become a problem when this is not balanced with the ability to also allow others to “see” me. It honestly never even crossed my mind to allow someone else to do something for me. When people would offer to do me a favor or help in some way, I would always decline their support.

Accepting was way outside my comfort zone, and I would make up all kinds of excuses to be sure I didn’t need anyone else’s help or support.

Over time, these one-sided relationships always break down. We aren’t meant to only give or only receive, so when these relationships start, resentment, frustration, and jealousy always develop too. Sometimes it takes years and sometimes it takes days, but it always ends with both parties feeling taken advantage of and frustrated.

If you are someone, like me, who tends to show up in relationships to give and not receive, then when you set boundaries and try to create healthy relationship dynamics, it will feel lonely and boring initially.

This is because we have developed an identity based on how we can make others feel. If we can make them feel happy, accepted, wanted, loved, and taken care of, then we feel happy, accepted, wanted, loved, and taken care of. We convinced ourselves (subconsciously) long ago that we didn’t actually need to feel all those feelings for ourselves; we just needed to help others feel them.

When the lie that we don’t need to be seen, loved, taken care of, or wanted is taken away, we will feel a strong sense of loneliness and boredom initially.

Why? Because you can’t develop a new, healthier sense of self without taking away the old first. If you don’t take it away, there’s no room for the new, healthier version of you to grow. We have to step away from the pattern of over-giving and only give in order to make room for the receiving part of us to grow.

It is in the space between not repeating old patterns but before our new patterns have developed that we feel lonely, and often bored. Being aware of where we are in the healing cycle is critical because most people feel that loneliness and go right back to their old patterns, saying, “It didn’t work.”

My challenge to you is to stick with it. This concept applies to all change, really.

Have you ever tried to lose weight? How do you feel in the first month? Bored, frustrated, lonely, tired, and all in your head about how much it sucked.

Most people then quit. Most people decide it isn’t worth it because they can’t stay focused on the long-term gain. Those who stick with it start to feel good. They start to see the scale drop, clothes fit better, and friends comment on how good they look. Once they start experiencing the rewards for the pattern change, they’re motivated to stick with it.

It’s the same concept here. Knowing that you are done with unhealthy relationship patterns where you are constantly taken advantage of, where you’re over-giving, exhausted, and feel invisible all the time, means you are ready for a change.

Keep this why in the forefront of your mind as you navigate the first steps of change that will be tough. You are dropping the old pattern of just giving, but you don’t yet have the new pattern of receiving in place. When you develop your ability to receive from others, loneliness is gone. Not just that, but life is far better than you ever could have imagined.

Allowing people to truly see you, know you, and love you is an incredible gift. It also means you will attract other people operating on a much higher vibration.

You will no longer attract people who only want to take from you. You will attract people with an equal balance of giving and receiving, and life will feel good. Relationships will feel good, and they will stand the test of time because they will be healthy and balanced.

If you are doing the right thing and feel lonely and bored, keep going. There is so much life on the other side.

July 30, 2023
How I Reframed Letting Go So I Could Move on from My Painful Past

We are truly free when we let go of the thought that the past could or should have been any different than it was. This is so hard.

The challenge is born from our desperate need to validate our feelings and experiences. It often feels like we are invalidating ourselves if we let go of the thought that the past should have been different. We have been through hell, experienced things most people don’t know about, and it initially feels so devastating to think of just letting it go like it never happened. Where is the justice in that?

I know; I have been there. Honestly, I still have moments where I pick up this thought and carry it around for a while because it just feels like the right thing to do. To honor myself and my experiences, I have to stay connected to the injustice of the choices that others have made—choices that dramatically impacted my life and created immense amounts of pain.

After almost nineteen years of marriage, my husband, my high school sweetheart, told me that he was gay and had never been attracted to me.

I promise; I know pain. I spent weeks wrestling with myself, trying to think of all the things that could have happened, or maybe should have happened, to avoid the situation that was causing me so much pain.

Things like wishing I had paid attention to the red flags when we were dating, listening to my therapists over the years when they tried to get me to work on the issues between my husband and me, wishing I had never met him or he had been honest with me (which would have been the best for both of us, as I’m sure the lying hurt him as well). So many things I wish I could change. It seemed insurmountable at times.

For months I didn’t even want to consider accepting my reality. This felt like the most invalidating thing I could do. The rejection I experienced over the course of my marriage is not something I would wish on anyone.

Was I surprised when my ex-husband told me he was gay? This is hard to answer. I knew something was wrong. I knew I felt crazy and invisible and ugly. The number of nights I went to bed in tears over being invisible to the man I married was too many to count.

Now that I finally get to live in truth, how do I move forward? There is a twenty-year mountain of grief I am stuck carrying. I personally find this reality the worst: other people’s choices can cut us to the core. Others can hurt us, and the only way to live a healthy, fulfilling life is to be connected to other people.

I can’t tell you the countless nights this reality has kept me awake. I want more than anything to live on an island all by myself. For years I convinced myself I could be fully self-sufficient. I will earn my own money and take care of my own needs. I don’t want anything to do with being close enough to people for them to lie, cheat, and hurt me again. I wish this worked. I wish there were a way, but I am here to tell you there is not.

You can go that route; believe me, I have tried. It only brings more emptiness and pain. The truth is, we are hardwired for connection. We are mammals. We have to have others to survive. Those who are thriving have deep, meaningful, loving relationships. They feel the greatest highs and the pain of the deepest lows when someone breaks trust. This is the human experience. Unfortunately, some of us have experienced deeper levels of pain, but what I know for sure is that we are all capable of healing.

I have had to reframe what letting go means. It will never mean that my ex-husband’s choices were okay. I will never say the pain was worth it or not that bad. Living in a catfished relationship for twenty years will never be okay. There will always be days I feel the pain and grieve the past. Thankfully, those days are getting further apart, but they definitely still happen.

Letting go is feeling the grief of my reality so I can accept what I cannot change. I cannot change his lies. I cannot change my choices to believe them. I cannot change that I abandoned myself and my needs for the sake of him and our kids. I cannot change any of that.

I can feel the deep, tormenting pain and grieve that pain until it stops tormenting me. When I allow myself to feel, to sit in those feelings for as long as I need to, I validate myself. I am not waiting on the day when he or anyone else validates my experience.

No one will ever know the true depth of our pain. The days we sat in our closets and wept or cried ourselves quietly to sleep. We can validate that for ourselves, though. We can share our stories so others know they are not alone in their pain.

I know many of you reading this know my pain. Your story might be different, but your pain is not. If you feel stuck in moving forward, please know that the greatest gift you can give yourself is to fully feel all your feelings. “Go there,” as they say.

You don’t need to do it alone. Allow a therapist, mentor, or trusted friend to sit with you while you feel the depths of all your feelings. There is freedom on the other side. I promise. It is not perfect; my grief is not forever gone, but I am free. I am free of his choices, and I am free to create a life I didn’t know I could dream for myself while I was still tied in his web.

The work is scary, hard, and only for the courageous and brave. There are so many people who are here to cheer you on and stand beside you while you do the work. Be brave and start the journey of letting go. You are worth it.

—

I recently heard someone say that compassion is the intersection of love and suffering. I feel like I carried suffering around for so long, and I know that my ex has too. My ability to truly let go and be free came when I was able to also see my ex’s suffering and lovingly let him go.

I met him with compassion. It wasn’t easy. Compassion didn’t come quickly, and some days it is still hard. We were both raised in a culture that valued being good and loyal over happy and seen.

Our tragic story is the product of valuing rules and goodness over love, happiness, and self expression. I know we are not the first generation to suffer from this mindset, but I pray we are the last.

December 15, 2022