The Secret of the Shadow (10 page)

“Screw you!” Lori screamed as she tore up the newspaper clipping. In that moment, Lori made her mother wrong, decided never to act again, and sealed in her fate.

Blame and resentment are the toxic emotions that keep us stuck inside the smallness of our stories. Woven throughout our personal dramas is an underlying conversation that might sound like this: “Look what you did to me. You screwed up my life. I’m a nothing just like you”; or “I’m never going to amount to anything—just like you told me.” We hold others responsible for our deficiencies and then set out to prove that we have in fact been ill treated and wronged. Our “poor me” story becomes our evidence, proving that we’ve been mistreated, neglected, or abused. And every time we fall short of doing our best, we have the perfect alibi.

We get to say, “If I hadn’t had that angry father, lousy girlfriend, alcoholic mother, or been raped, molested, beaten, ignored, abandoned, called names, I wouldn’t be like this!” Then we use every failure, every disappointment, every broken relationship or botched business deal to support our conviction that we have been victimized. We continually sabotage our efforts toward success and happiness in order to hold on to our resentment and keep our stories intact. Our continued failures or misery prove to us that we are right and those we blame are wrong.

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r e c l a i m i n g y o u r p o w e r It’s important to start to identify the people in our lives we get to make wrong by not living the life of our dreams. Maybe it’s our mom, our dad, our stepfather, the nuns and priests who raised us, our rabbi, our guru, our doctor, the kindergarten teacher who didn’t pick us. Maybe we get to make our sister wrong: If she hadn’t done that to us when we were six, we wouldn’t be such a mess. Maybe it’s the bullies who made fun of us or the kids in our class who left us out. The people we blame offer a perfect excuse for our self-sabotage. We are unconsciously punishing them by not being as successful or as happy as we could be. We say, either verbally or nonverbally, “Look, I really am a failure. You really did hurt me.”

I met Sunny, an aspiring writer, at a recent seminar. As we talked, Sunny told me that from the moment she was born, she felt that nothing she did was ever good enough for her dad. This was the theme of her story. The third of three daughters, Sunny was raised in a rural cattle-ranching town and was taught by her dad to work the farm as a cattle hand. Sunny was a sensitive little girl who was naturally nurturing and caring, but she didn’t have the heart or the knack for ranching. Sunny told me how she used to run off the farm in tears after being asked to push a pill down a cow’s throat or saw the horns off a baby calf. She was always left with the feeling of being worthless in her father’s eyes. She wasn’t the little boy she felt her father wanted her to be.

I soon learned that for years Sunny had been yearning to write a book about the lessons women teach one another. When I asked her what was holding her back from beginning the project, she said, “I feel in my heart that my book will be a national best-seller, 89

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w and that when my dad sees me on the talk shows and opens the paper to find my name in print, he will go to church on Sunday morning and tell people, ‘Look what my little girl did.’ I never want to be so successful that he gets to claim part of my glory for his own.” Sunny has wasted years of her life holding herself back from fulfilling her heart’s desire just so she could deprive her dad of the pleasure of bragging about her.

By the end of the weekend Sunny could see how much of her power she has given away to her father. She could also see that had it not been for her father’s disapproval, she never would have felt drawn to writing. I am certain that on the day Sunny fulfills her dream of becoming an author, she will thank God that her father was emotionally unavailable, because this lack of intimacy with him is what gave Sunny her dream. She will thank God for every little thing that happened to her, including the fact that he, with all his flaws, was her father. Sunny has a choice: She can choose to carry that grudge for the rest of her life, thereby depriving her dad of the right to be proud of her. But if she deprives him of her success, she also deprives herself. And she deprives the world of hearing what she has to say.

Most of us have been carrying around the same grudges our entire lives. And if we want, we can carry them around until we’re eighty-two. It might feel good to blame our mothers or fathers, our sisters or brothers. Pointing our fingers at others feels good sometimes. It’s a way of taking the pressure off ourselves. “You did it to me” feels a lot better than “I did it to me.” But the questions to ask ourselves now are, How many years have I been making my mother or my father wrong? How many times have I repeated the 90

r e c l a i m i n g y o u r p o w e r same unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to make them pay? How many more years do I want to do this? What have I sacrificed by holding on to my grudges?

If we’re not creating everything we want in our lives, we are probably holding resentment toward someone or something. If we’re not fulfilling all of our desires, we are sabotaging ourselves somewhere. We are still more committed to
not having it all
than to being happy. If we start fulfilling every desire we have, there will be nobody to make wrong, and without that tie to our past we will be free to live the life of our dreams. When we have let go of our right to be a victim, we will understand that we had the perfect parents who taught us the perfect lessons. We will no longer resent them, no matter how much they misled or mistreated us. Released from the smallness that being a victim ensures, we will stand tall in all our power and all our glory, and we will be grateful for every single incident, both dark and light.

W h at ’ s Y o u r E x c u s e ?

Whenever we are making others wrong, we are using them as our excuse not to live our lives to the fullest. As human beings we are masters at inventing excuses to justify the condition of our lives.

Like a leopard blends into the surrounding jungle, our excuses camouflage themselves as truth. They hide out and whisper quietly in our ears every time we try to go beyond the boundaries of our story. The scary part is that most of us hold our justifications as truths rather than as excuses. In order for us to break free from our 91

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w stories, we must be willing to expose the excuses we use to hold our stories together. With a discerning eye we need to look at our daily dramas, go through our list of reasons and alibis, and ask, “Is this the truth, or is it just an excuse?”

In order to begin the life-changing process of dismantling our current reality, we must expose the excuses we use to hold ourselves back and to stop ourselves from manifesting all that we want in life.

Our excuses act like invisible containers surrounding us, setting the boundaries of where we can go and what we can achieve. Our excuses justify the condition of our lives while making us believe we are powerless to reach the unreachable and attain the unattainable.

Imagine being surrounded by a clear glass container. Every time we wish to go beyond this invisible boundary we bump up against the glass and slide back to the place where we began. This is what happens when we believe our excuses. Unknowingly we continue to wind up back where we began, because our limitations have been set. They have been programmed deep into our minds, and like any good operating system they are just following instructions. Excuses keep us stuck in our current realities and perpetuate the continuous cycle of our discontent.

Our excuses can take many forms:

“It’s never going to happen for me.” “I can’t have it all.” “I’m not good enough, old enough, smart enough.” Or how about “I’m too old, too stupid, too fat, too tired, too
[fill in the blank ]” ?
Does

“I’m blocked. I’m stuck. I’m confused. I can’t help it” or “I don’t know how” ring a bell? How about “I’m too lazy. I don’t have enough energy. I’m a procrastinator” or “It will happen in God’s time, not mine”? Maybe your excuse is “I need more education, 92

r e c l a i m i n g y o u r p o w e r more information, or more help.” Does “I’m not ready, I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll never be ready” sound familiar? How about “If only I had a different childhood. If only I had a good role model.

It’s his fault, it’s her fault, if he would just change, if she would just change. I don’t have what it takes. Someone else could definitely do it better”? Is powerlessness familiar? What about “I need help”

or “If I speak my mind, people won’t like me” or “If I fulfill my highest potential, I’ll be all alone. Haven’t I done enough already”? How do your excuses sound?

Our personal dramas—our pain, our complaints, and our discontent—often become our excuse for not manifesting our most magnificent selves. Our dramas take up so much space in our lives that most of us wouldn’t know ourselves without them. In order to disengage from our dramas and step beyond our limited perspectives, we need to see what we get out of holding on to them.

A quick process you can use to see if you are making an excuse is to ask yourself the following questions.

1. Is this the truth, or is this an excuse that I have heard before?

2. Would
[name a person you admire and respect]
see this as the truth or as an excuse?

3. Am I responsible for this choice, or am I making others, God, or life responsible?

Asking yourself this series of questions should help you to determine if you are justifying the condition of your life by making 93

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w excuses. Let me give you an example. One of my favorite excuses used to be that I was too busy to have fun and take time off. I would hear myself constantly complaining as I told my dramatic story about how much work I had to do. Then one day my girlfriend Danielle cornered me and asked, “Debbie, who is in charge of making your schedule?” Although I knew that I was the one who was in charge of my schedule, I had a thousand excuses for why I had to stay so busy: “It’s my publisher’s fault. It’s my sister’s fault.

It’s my publicist’s fault. It’s my staff’s fault. They need me.” All of these excuses left me feeling powerless and like a huge victim.

Unquestioningly, I accepted these excuses as the truth. Then I stopped and asked myself, “Is this the truth, or is this an excuse I’ve heard before?” My answer was, clearly, “I have heard this too many times before.” Then I thought about my friend Cheryl and asked myself, “Would she see this as the truth or as an excuse?” I knew immediately that Cheryl would support me in seeing that no one in the world could make my well-being a priority but me and that I was using other people as an excuse not to take responsibility for my time. Next I asked myself, “Am I making others, God, or life responsible for my circumstances?” My answer? “Absolutely.” It was then that I realized that all my reasons were just some form of an excuse that left me feeling like a powerless victim of my own life.

I realized that if I wanted to have more fun and leisure in my life, all I needed to do was stop making excuses and take responsibility for my choices. And so I did.

Recently, while giving a lecture on excuses for participants in one of my coaching programs, I had yet another opportunity to examine where I might be using excuses in my life. I felt sure that 94

r e c l a i m i n g y o u r p o w e r I had blasted through most of what had held me back and kept me repeating familiar patterns, but I looked anyway. Then, a week into my inquiry, I began to feel a cold coming on. My cold symp-toms always seemed to be the same—a scratchy throat and a tired body. I knew those feelings all too well. It seemed I was always catching some kind of cold that would stop me in my tracks and land me in bed for a few days. Sometimes I would try to stop it from coming on by filling my body with every known supplement, and at other times I would just surrender to it and allow myself to be sick and stay at home. This particular week was an exceptionally busy one, and I felt I couldn’t afford to be sick. In the middle of my usual regimen of taking vitamin C and astragalus, I had a startling realization: Getting a cold was my excuse. I was blown away. Suddenly the lights went on and I could see clearly that every time I needed rest—every time I had too much on my plate or too many commitments to keep—I would get a cold. This was my excuse, my reason, my alibi—my way of letting everyone know I was out of commission and couldn’t take on any more.

Most of all, though, catching a cold served as a billboard that said,

“Don’t expect anything more of me.” Looking back at my childhood, I could see that I had a pattern of getting sick, and that that was how I received extra attention from my parents.

I went to bed that evening in awe of my realization, but still feeling like I was coming down with something. As I lay in bed I made a list of all the things I could do to take care of myself instead of getting sick. Closing my eyes and taking a few minutes to go inside, I was easily able to access the answers: What I needed to do was make sure I had plenty of time for myself every week. My 95

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w inner wisdom told me very specifically that I needed to schedule at least one hour each day for nothing but prayer and meditation. In addition, I needed to schedule one day a month, a “Debbie Day,”

for doing things that nurture my well-being.

What I have noticed is that when I am not using my excuses and running myself ragged but instead following my inner guidance, I stay relatively healthy and strong. Many times now I feel like I am coming down with something, but by realizing that getting sick is just my excuse for giving myself attention, I can choose to take the time to give myself the attention I need, even if that means canceling plans and disappointing people. Giving up our excuses propels us into the powerful consciousness of taking responsibility for our lives.

When we take responsibility, we step into the full power of our humanity. We leave behind the limits set by our stories and push beyond our shadow beliefs, those beliefs that tell us, “You can’t.” We step into the potent knowledge that we can co-create our desires and our dreams. Taking responsibility for everything we are is the greatest gift we can give ourselves, because it makes us whole. It empowers us and supports us as we move toward our full potential.