Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (8 page)

Of course I ran him down straightaway to talk to him. Ultimately, I was able to help him understand what he was doing, again and again, in all aspects of his life, and why. It turned out that his dad wasn’t around much during his childhood and wasn’t all that affectionate when he was. He gave his son no praise or adoration, no hugs of fatherly pride. Naturally this was painful, as it would be for any young man idealizing his dad. And it left him with an intrinsic lack of self-worth, a hole he was constantly looking to other people to fill. His dad forgot his soccer games, missed his graduation, and so on, and he interpreted that to mean he wasn’t a good enough son for his father to be engaged and interested. These issues were about his father’s shortcomings, not his, but he wasn’t capable then of realizing that. He had replicated that dynamic in all areas of his own life, projecting his relationship with his father onto all his present relationships in an unconscious attempt to win approval and get validation. But because he was looking in all the wrong places, he continued to find only frustration and inertia.

Once I helped him wake up to his behavior, he was able to get out in front of it. By recognizing that he was on autopilot, hard-wired to react to his history rather than to his present, he was able to take charge of his daily interactions and prevent these triggers from disrupting his life. He was able to see that whatever he felt in the gym toward me had nothing to do with me, someone he’d known for three weeks, and everything to do with his striving for his father’s attention and approval. The situation was a workout session with a tough trainer, nothing more, nothing less. By uncoupling his past from his present, he was able to build up his self-esteem enough to grieve over not having a more supportive
dad, move on from it, and arrive at a place where his approval of himself was enough.

BREAKING BAD: SHEDDING LIGHT ON REPETITION COMPULSION

Are you seeing how this syndrome works? If you aren’t aware of your issues, you’re destined to repeat the same unhealthy behaviors and patterns again and again as you struggle, unconsciously, to make old hurts right. And all the while you’re sabotaging the hell out of your life. Therapists call it repetition compulsion. We are unconsciously compelled to fix old wounds. But if you want to see it at work in your own life, it’s the reason you always date the same asshole guy, or the reason you continue to attract the same nonsupportive friends, basically the reason you always seem to have the same drama, the same problems.

Often people think that their problems arise out of a lack of intelligence, attractiveness, humor, and so on. “If only I were prettier, smarter,” we think, then these bad things wouldn’t happen to me. The guy would have stayed. My old boss wouldn’t have fired me.

But as you will realize as you go through this process, your problems arise not from your lack of positive attributes but from your lack of awareness of your actions. You’re not paying attention to
why
you attracted a guy who can’t commit. You’re not understanding
why
you have problems with authority, and so you rebel at work.

I have seen people rationalize their issues and problems by blaming circumstances or “bad luck.” This is utter crap and total denial. Luck is a lie. Luck, as someone said, is preparation meeting opportunity, and unluckiness is often due to lack of preparation. We create our own reality, and then we have the nerve to ask “why me?” It’s true that bad stuff happens to good people, and we’ll get into that a little later, but at some point we have to stop living and reacting to life unconsciously and take back our power. We have
to stop acting in ways that repeat painful patterns and feelings from the past.

Now, the reason our negative behaviors are unconscious is because they are painful, so we suppress them. But you can’t trick the psyche. Things that you don’t work on and work out get played out … again and again.

No one is particularly keen to look back at his or her life and dig up dirt. It can bring up feelings of anger, sadness, betrayal—often with family members who are still in your life, like your parents. They were your primary role models, after all. They played a hugely significant role in shaping who you are.

No one particularly likes to be angry with their parents. It sucks. It makes us feel separated from them, which brings up primal feelings of abandonment. It makes us feel alone, guilty, angry, and confused. So instead of examining the past carefully, we often say things like “My childhood was great” or “My parents were perfect.” We are in denial about the parts of our childhood that were hurtful because we love our parents and don’t want to blame them or be angry with them.

Stirring up the past can also make us feel guilty and ungrateful for all the amazing things our parents did do for us. So many people paint life in black-and-white terms: “My childhood was perfect” or “My father was a total asshole.” You see, if someone is perfect, then we have nothing to be angry about and nothing to be hurt about. We go into denial, but we end up playing out our unrecognized and unresolved issues with others. On the other hand, if something or someone is all bad, then losing them or being angry at them isn’t as painful, because there is nothing good about them to grieve losing. With this attitude, victimization can set in. “Poor me. Things were so bad for me. I’ve had such bad luck.”

I played this black-and-white game for years with my dad. He was a total jerk. There was nothing good about him. I was a victim of having a bad father. Poor me and good riddance to him. But finally the consequences of my attitude, and the behavior it created
in me, became too heavy a load to bear. That forced me to wake up, deal with my feelings, and change my outlook. Only when I integrated the good and bad parts of my dad in my heart and head was I able to mourn the loss of him as a father, forgive him for his shortcomings, and stop playing out the harmful dynamic in areas of my life where it was wreaking havoc (like at work with my male bosses, which I will get into a bit more in
Chapter 5
).

I bet you’re thinking,
If this stuff is so painful, why do I want to unearth it? And if I chose to repress it, how would I uncover it?
Okay, one question at a time. If you don’t look back into your past and figure out what makes you tick, you won’t be able to control how you tick. In other words, you won’t be able to control the direction your life takes. Like a watch where the minute hand goes counterclockwise, you will live in a way that takes you backward instead of forward.

I am not saying you should live in the past, but I am insisting you learn from it. If you haven’t done so until now, it’s time to start. Otherwise you will probably continue to carry this baggage around until the benefits you get from denial are outweighed by the bad consequences it’s causing in your life. If you’re not ready, stop reading, ’cause if you won’t do the work, the rest is pointless. Just know that this book will be waiting to help you out when you are ready.

If you do want to get “real” but don’t know how, then start with these exercises. Take a look at your life: long, close, and hard. By getting wise to what your issues and negative patterns are, you can stop them from holding you back. And I don’t want to hear “But I don’t know what my issues are” or “I have no idea why I do that to myself.” That’s a cop-out. You have to be brave and look beneath the surface of your life. You TOTALLY know what your issues are, even if you have been trying to suppress them. We can all find our hot buttons and deepest hurts if we look closely enough. Up until now, you may not have wanted to deal with them. But if you want to reclaim your power and your life, you must defeat these patterns.

I want you to answer a series of questions. They’re designed to shed light on your destructive patterns and their origins so you can free yourself once and for all. These questions are hard, and the answers might be even harder. If your immediate reaction is “I don’t know,” you’re on to something, and you need to push yourself further. Take your time. Sit with the questions and meditate on them. Ask family and friends for their input, but make sure the answers are all you. This is about searching your soul for the tools to rebuild your self-worth on a new, solid foundation.

If you answer them honestly, these four questions will tell you everything you need to know about how you undermine yourself and why. You date the jerk because he reminds you of your dad and you always wished your dad loved you more. You have problems with authority because your parents were stifling and arbitrarily strict, so now you keep pissing off your bosses and getting fired. You binge compulsively because as a child your parents pushed you toward perfection, made issues of your weight, and weighed you weekly, so now you eat to rebel and show them who’s in control. And on and on. Don’t be afraid to dig deep. You have to—if you want to lay a strong foundation and build on solid ground.

WORKING IT OUT

What self-destructive behaviors in your life do you want to change? (These are the things you do that you know you shouldn’t and yet feel compelled to do anyway.)

EXAMPLES:

Do you drink too much?

Eat too much?

Gamble or shop compulsively?

Cheat on your spouse?

Neglect your emotional and physical needs?

Work too much?

Do you get angry a lot and rage at people?

Do you seek the approval of others to feel worthy?

Do you yell at your kids?

Do you push the people who love you away?

What harmful dynamics, behaviors, and scenarios do you see repeating in your life? (These are the things that you perceive as happening to you, even though in truth you are creating them.)

EXAMPLES:

Do you keep dating assholes who abandon you or mistreat you?

Do people around you always let you down?

Do you get picked on or poked fun at?

Do you keep getting fired from jobs?

Do you continually surround yourself with people who aren’t supportive?

Do you feel like no one listens to you?

After you have established the patterns and dynamics that you need to work on, then you need to figure out their origin. You can do this by gauging how these things make you feel, and then attempting to figure out when you first felt this way in your life
.

How do you feel when you are engaging in self-destructive behaviors:

Angry?

Sad?

Alone?

Scared?

Helpless?

Worthless?

Neglected?

Disrespected?

Stupid?

Unattractive?

Unlovable?

All of the above??

What other times in your life have you felt this way? And how far back in your life can you trace this pattern?

For example, in the case of that former contestant, he was upset that I was ignoring him at the gym. That made him feel “less than” and neglected. By exploring other times in his life when he had felt like that and tracing how far back it went, we finally got to the root of the problem: in his early childhood his father never spent time with him. He never went to his baseball games, his school plays, and so on. By finding the roots of your feelings, you can begin to understand and resolve them so they don’t continue sabotaging your life
.

Dig deep into your emotional memory—go back as far as you can. It’s going to be painful, but that’s how you’ll know it’s working. Be brave, and know that the only way to go from here is up. Although it’s scary to feel these feelings, there are ways to heal them and move forward
.

You might uncover shortcomings in your loved ones and explore the ways they let you down. But that doesn’t mean they are bad people whom you have to villainize. It simply means they are human, like you and me. Recognizing the way their issues affected you allows you to stop internalizing their stuff and to forgive—both them and yourself. That is where true freedom lies. And that’s what we’ll discuss in the next chapter
.

CHAPTER FIVE

FORGIVE AND ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY

O
nce you have acknowledged the issues from your past that are messing up your present, the next step—and it’s a crucial one—is to work on forgiving the people who originated them. Most self-destructive behaviors are rooted in childhood trauma, although we can be knocked on our asses as adults, too.