When I go inside myself I feel safe and connected. It takes all my strength to do that some days. I have been trained that I am supposed to get my happiness from outside things. I've found that that is just an oppressive way to live. If I depend on outside things then there is never any safety.
I remember reading about a football player who made so much money just so he could build a concrete fortress. He was sexually abused when he was little and this was the only way he could feel safe. The problem with that is that it's a false sense of safety. I call it danger disguised as safety. We think these things will somehow make us not as scared, but the truth is, only love will kill the fear.
We cannot change the awful things from our past and running from them creates a bigger split inside of us. It's like we create a false self so we don't have to be that person that the bad things happened to. The problem with that is that we create is a bigger wound. Our intention is to protect it but what we really do is perpetuate it. We leave ourselves wide open to be hurt over and over again. On a deeper level we hurt ourselves because we think we are the things that were done to us.
You see when you push the bad feelings down the good ones have to go too.
The only way out of this danger is to admit that we are in it. Then — and only then — can we begin to protect ourselves.
I know I’m asking a lot. How can it be that we had bad things happen to us, and then we screwed up our lives because of these bad things, and it's all our responsibility to fix it?
It sounds like a huge job, one that you might not think you have the strength to overcome but there is hope that you are not a victim: you have strength beyond your wildest dreams.
Think about it as if you were buried alive. You would not just die, you would do anything to dig yourself out. And you would have to do it slowly too so that it all didn't cave in on you, but you would do it until you were free :)
Then when you were free you would have to be even more gentle with yourself because in a weird way the dark suffocation had been comfortable. Now you are in the light, exposed, so you must grow slowly.
Sound familiar? Life, death and rebirth = fine line