Courage: Overcoming Fear and Igniting Self-Confidence (9 page)

We must trust that everything in the universe is guiding us to a higher place. We must accept that if we have an emotionally based behavior pattern that we don’t own up to or can’t see, we will repeat that pattern. We must surrender our excuses, justifications, rationalizations, and the fear that created them. We must recognize that our way of holding on instead of letting go has seen its day, and then willingly surrender managing these experiences. With this newly “retrofitted” foundation, we can confidently take full responsibility for co-creating our lives, opening the door to emotional freedom.

Taking responsibility means taking ownership. It means acknowledging that we have in fact participated (even if on an unconscious level) in the choices and actions that brought about the most painful events we have gone through. This is alarming only if we are not standing in the knowledge that we are living our intended life—the life that brings us the experiences perfectly suited to our becoming the women we have always wanted to be.

When we take 100 percent responsibility, we take responsibility not just for the circumstances of our lives but for our emotions and our internal world as well. We can’t heal what we can’t feel. In order to take back our power and regain control of our lives, we must take ownership of our emotions. This requires that we acknowledge and own the depth of our hurt and pain. Our painful emotions can push us back into the small, defensive, resistant shell of our old emotional wounds. The disappointments, grudges, and resignation stemming from past betrayals may come up and drive us to retreat and protect ourselves. But the Code of Emotional Freedom promises us that we are safe to let go of our struggle and our distrustful behaviors. Once we can recognize that we’re trapped in the limited reality of our hurts, we have a choice. We can choose to continue to allow our thoughts, words, and actions to be driven by fear, or we can choose to be guided by courage. With courage as our compass, not only do we take responsibility for our lives in the present, but we take responsibility for our futures as well.

In taking responsibility, stepping out of blame and victimization, and beginning to heal our inner world, we are able to ensure that we don’t unconsciously attract the same kinds of people, circumstances, and events that previously left us feeling victimized. How many of us have dated the same kind of person, had the same kind of boss, kept making the same mistakes over and over again? If we do not identify how we participate in these experiences and own up to our part, we will continue to repeat the pattern over and over again. It’s difficult to recognize a problem coming toward us unless we can recognize the issue inside of us.

Often, the issues that remain the most painful and hang around our necks like a two-ton anchor are set off by a belief that is waiting and wanting to be healed. Such beliefs are hidden—out of our sight and beyond our conscious awareness. But although they’re hidden, they still dictate our behavior. I call these beliefs Shadow Beliefs. When we are unwilling or unable to take responsibility for our lives, we can be sure of one thing: there is some unconscious belief driving our choices.

Melanie, a fifty-eight-year-old mother of two, came to the Shadow Process Retreat, my three-day workshop that promises to transform any area of pain and loss into success and happiness, to address her relationship. I noticed her one morning when she was emphatically raising her hand, trying to get my attention. When I called on her and she stood, her voice was shaking, and the microphone shook in her hand. She put the microphone to her lips and said, “I’m going to get divorced.” I could see the disbelief cross her face as she heard her own words amplified in the room. She repeated, “I’ve been married for almost forty years, and I’m going to get a divorce.” When I asked Melanie why she was leaving her marriage, she launched into a diatribe about her husband, Steve. She described his emotional and verbal abuse and the way he neglected her and their children. She blamed him for her unhappiness and described the weight she had gained and the drugs and alcohol she’d consumed just to be able to stay in the marriage this long. As she ranted on and on about her husband, I stopped her and asked, “Why did you choose to marry him?” And she whispered quietly, “Well, I didn’t want to.” Then she went on to tell us her story.

Melanie was eighteen years old on the day of her wedding. It was a bright, sunny spring day, and she was adorned in her wedding dress like a fairy princess, looking beautiful and waiting for the man of her dreams to enter the room. She heard him coming up the stairs and was breathless with anticipation, having decided to set her doubts aside to make this the most magical day of her life. Hearing his voice as he opened the door brought a big smile to her face. As she looked up to give him a warm, loving hello and embrace, Steve, without a glance, hurriedly walked by Melanie, not even acknowledging her presence. Her heart sank, her joy vanished in an instant, and an overwhelming sense of gloom filled her entire being. Melanie heard a voice screaming in her head, “Get up! Get out! You need to run away!” But Melanie couldn’t move. In complete devastation, she sat there paralyzed, frozen to her chair. As minutes went by with Steve still ignoring her, Melanie tried to think of how she could get out of this. What could she do? She thought about how her parents had taken out a loan for the wedding. She thought about all her friends and family who had arrived to celebrate her seemingly good fortune. She thought about her mother, who told her over and over again that a woman is only as good as the man she marries. Her mother would say, “If you’re a good woman, you’ll get a good man.” With each thought of why she couldn’t get out of it, she became more and more resigned to being the good girl. She told herself that Steve was just nervous and that it would all be okay. As she took her father’s arm and walked down the aisle, she plastered on her best “I’m so happy, joyful, and in love” face, but inside she wanted to die. The night got better for her as people drank, danced, and celebrated the newlyweds, but reality set in again days later as the couple moved into their home.

As Melanie told us the story, tears ran down her face. I could actually hear the shame, the pain, the loss, and the heartache of the beautiful young woman she was on her wedding day. Melanie stood there in shock as she admitted that she had never told this story to anyone. And when I suggested to Melanie that she had now exposed where she participated in this dysfunctional and abusive relationship, she said she had never thought about that before. But now she could see that pivotal moment of choice. She saw that she had a choice to turn around and run or to succumb, and that she chose to succumb and become the victim. For forty years, she participated in her own self-sabotage over and over again. Standing there in the safety of the seminar room, she realized that it was now or never; that if she was going to reclaim her passion, her vibrancy, and find any sort of happiness for her future, she would have to take responsibility for her choices and be accountable for the beliefs that had driven them. In taking responsibility, Melanie could finally access the courage she needed to leave her husband, the freedom to support herself and make her own decisions, and the trust in herself and her relationship with the Divine.

I can see her today, laughing so hard, realizing that she had given up so much of her power in blaming him when she could have owned up to her part and moved on anytime she wanted. On the day of her divorce, Melanie wrote me a note saying, “I’ve finally set myself free.”

By looking through the eyes of co-creation—seeing that we are co-creating this universe, co-creating our relationships, and co-creating our experiences—we can find the unseen patterns that exist inside of us. And with this clear-eyed wisdom, we are able to cut the line, drop the anchor, and set ourselves free. Released from the past, we are gifted with the emotional freedom to be the courageous women we were designed to be.

THE EMOTIONAL FREEDOM PROCESS

Put on a little relaxing music if you’d like. Bring out your journal. And with a calming and connecting deep breath, open up to answering the following questions:

1.
Acknowledging your inner victim:
Make a list of the situations in your life where you are blaming, pointing your finger, holding on to anger, and feeling like a victim.

2.
Identifying the biggest blockage:
On the list you just made, circle the three situations that most stand in the way of your courage and your confidence.

3.
Claiming your part in the drama:
Journal about whether you had a role in these dramas. What was your role in them? What choices did you make that put you in these situations? Please make a commitment not to blame or berate yourself. If you’re looking only at a place where you’ve been victimized, begin with an easier situation.

4.
Finding the gifts:
Answer the following questions about this challenging situation:

    • How can I learn from this?

    • What is the message I need to hear?

    • What is the gift that this experience holds for me?

5.
Freeing yourself:
Take an action that will support you in letting go of any baggage related to these three situations so that you can move forward with grace, determination, and divine confidence.

Courage Activator

Heal the people pleaser within you. Say no to at least three people who make a request of you, and affirm to yourself that it’s perfectly safe to say no. Enjoy! Do this as many times as you can in the next six weeks. “No” is your friend.

Confidence Builder

Go out in the world and get rejected three times. Purposely make requests (ask for favors, help, money, participation in something, and so on) that you’re sure will get turned down. You might ask somebody who is overly busy but has a great restaurant to come to your house to cook dinner for you and your family. Or ask somebody who hates to loan money to lend you fifty thousand dollars for four months. If they ask why, tell them it’s none of their business. Then, when they refuse, say, “Thank you for allowing me to ask.” Don’t tell them that it’s your homework! This is a potent opportunity to affirm that it’s okay for people to say no to you.

Courage and Confidence Bonus

Make a list of seven situations in which you told the truth even though you didn’t want to.

You have the power to bring a new, profound understanding and appreciation to your past and all the experiences you’ve had. I am going to suggest that you needed these experiences to be who you want to be in the world—for yourself, for your family, for your community, and for humanity. The perfect people and the perfect experiences have shown up in your life. You have had the perfect family for you to learn, grow, and evolve. It is only the Voice of Fear, in all its persistent yammering, that obscures these truths and attempts to diminish the power of the life you have lived. To silence the Voice of Fear, you need only reach a hand toward the beautiful unknown and call on heartful compassion to believe that there is a profound meaning to all that you have lived, even the darkest moments.

The Code of Heartful Compassion is birthed out of the belief that there is a greater reason for everything. There is a design for your life that is worth fighting for, a plan that holds profound meaning beyond your ego’s ability to understand. This code invites you to know and embrace this larger reality by stepping out of your limited perspective and into the worldview that there are no accidents and that everything is happening for a reason, even when you can’t see it. This view is life changing in and of itself, because it takes you out of “Why me?”; “Poor me”; “It shouldn’t be”; “Why is this happening?”; “Why did this happen?”; or “It’s all their fault”—any one of which then turns into blame. When your inner judge begins to find evidence to hold on to the hurt that keeps you rooted in the past, filled with resentments or grudges, you are prohibited from feeling your compassionate heart.

The Voice of Fear insists that the challenges you have gone through permanently scarred you. And the cost of listening to your fear can probably be most clearly seen in the patterns that plague you, whether they be repetitive cycles of self-sabotage, addiction, or relationship conflicts with lovers, friends, coworkers, or family members. These patterns might show up on your body or in your finances. But the steepest cost of all is that they undermine your courage and your confidence.

To enter the state of heartful compassion, we must search out and find what is weighing us down in the form of resentments and grudges. But for many of us, this requires that we first awaken from our denial. We often forget that we’re holding this undigested anger as we distract ourselves with the pleasurable addictions that obscure the emotional truth. These are the habits and cravings that leave us with nothing more than short-lived feel-good moments rather than the long-term inner peace that we seek. And even if we are keenly aware that we’re carrying grudges and resentments toward our exes, our bosses, or certain family members, we seem to use this knowledge as a defense mechanism. It becomes a shield that we use to build up a false sense of confidence and make ourselves feel better, all the while oblivious to the true cost of harboring these grudges.

We cannot have an open heart while we are carrying the burdens of the past. We cannot allow ourselves to experience our own grace and ease when we have our hearts closed to any part of the world. And we need not wait, as most do, until our death—whether it be an emotional, spiritual, or physical death—to drop the rocks of the negative feelings we’re harboring toward others. Most of us have many rocks, many grudges. We can let ourselves be weighed down by the rocks of resentments from our past, or we can drop them through the power of forgiveness. The choice is ours.

Many of us have read about and talked about forgiveness, and we understand intellectually why it might benefit us to let go of anger toward others. But we hold on anyway. Sometimes we think that by holding on to our grudges, we’ll get our revenge and make the other person pay for how they hurt us. But this just isn’t what will happen. A wise person once wrote, “Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person would die.” But the only one dying is ourselves.

Kathy walked into the Shadow Process Retreat in her favorite Juicy Couture pink sweat suit, her long, beautiful flowing hair swaying down her back—a head-turner for sure. Yet despite all her feminine swagger as she entered the room, she couldn’t conceal the devastation, hurt, and rage written all over her face. What had she endured? What experience had stolen her true self-confidence? She sat in the very front row with a seriousness that penetrated right through me. Everyone comes into the Shadow Process with some heartache, some hurt, some dark secret that they want to unload. But I could tell by the questions she asked and the notes she was taking that she was a deep thinker; she was unusually articulate and persuasive at arguing the case for her past. I later found out that she was a lawyer.

As the weekend went on, all I could think was “This woman hates me.” I was quite sure that she hated how I kept raising the possibility that ultimately every horrific experience comes bearing great gifts. Eventually it came to a boiling point. Unwilling to accept this idea, Kathy stood up to argue her case. As with any good lawyer, she had collected tons of evidence that there was nothing divine or good or even okay with what she had just gone through. She was the wronged party. That was her story and she was sticking to it. Case closed. I proceeded to tell her that she could go home with her resentment and rage intact, but it wasn’t going to make her feel any better or change any outcomes.

Kathy’s story went something like this.

Kathy and her husband were, by all appearances, the perfect power couple. Everybody wanted to run in their circle and emulate their glamorous life as a loving couple and family. Kathy was twenty-seven when she married Stuart, a man fifteen years older than she, someone who she believed was trustworthy, dependable, and generous—someone who surely would take care of her the way her father had. But after they had been together only a few short years, Stuart slowly began turning into a monster that she didn’t recognize. The clues began to accumulate. Over the years, he wouldn’t show up for his three gorgeous daughters’ school plays or music recitals, for family dinners, or even to kiss his daughters goodnight. Even though he knew the girls were waiting for him, Stuart never showed up for them. His drinking became a problem, and he seemed to always embarrass Kathy in public, whether it was fighting for the keys after dinner out, groping a woman in a French maid’s costume at a Halloween party, or getting drunk and being unwilling to say anything nice about his daughters at their b’nai mitzvah. In fact, when he did get the microphone that afternoon, he barely acknowledged his daughters, wasting those precious few minutes babbling on about one of the other kids at the party, the son of another couple.

Of course, then the cheating began. Kathy would wait every night for him to come home, rejecting the notion that he would ever go that far. But when women started calling the house, she knew she’d better open her eyes.

Then the day came when someone told her that she might want to read a website that Stuart’s disgruntled employees had put up online to expose him. Feeling nauseated, she pulled herself together, closed the doors, and sat in front of the computer, waiting to muster up the courage to look at the site. When she opened it, what she found was worse than anything she could imagine. A former employee had posted a message that read, “It’s too bad he’s such a scumbag. He’s got such a great wife. Do you think she knows that he’s cheating on her with her close friend Barbara? In fact the last time I was in his office, she was under his desk.” When Kathy read that it wasn’t only her husband betraying her but also one of her closest friends, someone who came to her house regularly for dinner and family events, it tore open such deep pain and hurt that she didn’t know what to do with her feelings. So she continued to do what was familiar: she stuffed the blinding anguish down as far as possible and painted on a happy face.

Then came the final straw—Thanksgiving dinner at her sister’s house. Everybody knew that Thanksgiving dinner was very important to Kathy’s parents, so the family dressed impeccably to show their respect. Their daughters looked beautiful; Kathy looked beautiful. Even Stuart had dressed up for the night and looked like the man she thought she had married. En route to the car, he stopped her, took her arm, and, turning her toward him, said, “I’m not going to your sister’s tonight unless you write me a check right now for half a million dollars.” Her jaw dropped. Not knowing what to say or do, with the girls waiting in the car, Kathy thought about what would be more horrible—giving him more money in his latest blackmail attempt, or having to explain once again to her family why Stuart wasn’t coming to dinner on such an important night. With hot tears burning her eyes, Kathy returned to the foyer, pulled her checkbook out of her purse, and wrote him a check for five hundred thousand dollars. As she handed Stuart the check, completely filled with shame, Kathy calculated that she had given or lent this man over three million dollars, and he still treated her like a piece of crap. She realized she was trying to buy the love he wouldn’t freely give her. Even though she had been determined to stay in the marriage to save face and to have her children grow up with a father, the emotional abuse was now more than she could handle.

Collectively holding our breath as she recounted the horror, the whole group of us in the workshop had to take a big exhale after hearing Kathy’s story. It was hard to believe that this had happened to anybody, but especially to this woman, who was obviously strong, confident, well educated, and worldly. I reassured Kathy that she had a right to be angry, resentful, and hurt. Certainly that would be a healthy first response. After hearing just the first few stories, even I was ready to take a knife to him. She had endured a kind of persecution that none of us should ever have to go through. I didn’t want to minimize her pain or the tremendous hurt that broke her heart, but for the next step to happen, she would have to look at what holding on to her anger and resentment was costing her.

Kathy acknowledged that she couldn’t get into a relationship with another man. In fact, she couldn’t even have dinner with a man without thinking about how he was going to betray her. It cost her being a role model for her girls, who were the most important thing in the world to her. They had started seeing her as a victim as they watched her repeatedly cower under their father’s domination. Now they had the victim/victimizer dynamic firmly imprinted on their psyches. Her anger and resentment cost her her joy, her emotional freedom, and the ability to fully appreciate how lucky she was to be born into a wonderful family who had enough money to set her up for life. All she could think about was how she had given so much of it away. When she truly realized the cost—on her life, on her children’s lives, on the future of her loving family—Kathy broke down in tears. She had lost her dream marriage. She had lost her dignity. She had lost her faith. But as she now allowed the hurt to be there, the anger subsided and she gradually started opening her heart to herself, to the sweet woman she was, a woman who had tried very hard to hold her family together.

Now it was time to see whether Kathy was willing to open up her heart to compassion. This was a big leap for somebody who had been through so much betrayal. So I asked Kathy to momentarily suspend what she believed about her life and to envision a brand-new reality. I asked her to stand in a place where the whole universe was loving her, where her highest self was cheering her on, where she could see only what was good and could find the gifts in her experience. I asked her to close her human eyes and look at her life through the eyes of heartful compassion. What did she see? The first thing she saw was how hurt and wounded Stuart was and how everything that he had done was an effort to make himself feel better because he felt so inadequate around her.

Through the eyes of compassion, she could see how much she had learned about denial and the true cost of it. Kathy could also see she had learned about financial responsibility for the first time since inheriting money from her family—a lesson she hadn’t had to learn before. Until the nightmare with Stuart unfolded, Kathy wasn’t aware of how ashamed and guilty she felt about being rich. She also wasn’t aware of how ashamed she felt about the state of her marriage. She had been living a secret life that separated her from her family so she wouldn’t have to expose the terrible truth that her husband wanted her money. The greatest gift she could see through the eyes of compassion was the powerful example she was now setting for her three daughters about how to take care of themselves and not wait for their prince to ride in on a white horse like their mommy had done. She had learned through all of her experiences that money could be replaced but that the love she had with her children was irreplaceable.

Now we were at the moment of truth. I asked Kathy, “Are you brave enough, strong enough, and courageous enough to cut the cord of resentment, to drop the rock?” She closed her eyes to find the answer to my question, and then she said, in a very soft, open voice, “I am. I am courageous enough to let go of this.” With that verbal commitment, I asked her to imagine that this whole life she had lived with Stuart was shrinking down to the size of the fingernail on her pinky finger. It would just be a tiny piece of her history.

Today, Kathy is living an amazing life. After going through my advanced training programs to become a coach and transformational leader, Kathy found a passion that could only have been birthed from her particular experience of marriage and divorce. She is profoundly inspired to be out in the world speaking about the work of Spiritual Divorce, based on my second book, and helping women transform their own divorce experience into a powerful catalyst for an extraordinary life. Free of her resentment and bitterness, she has tapped into the ability to help other women rise up from the ashes of the past.

At the very heart of Kathy’s healing and transformation was the forgiveness she finally found for herself and even for Stuart. It didn’t happen instantly, but the process truly set her free from the bondage of yesterday.