Calling a spade and spade and black and white scenarios are inextricably linked and form the bigger picture of our lifestyle choices, depending on how we choose to see things.
Observing life through your intuition
Growing up, through intuition I was more observing of my life and through those observations, I became more adept at noticing certain behaviour patterns. Where we're able to call a spade a spade, and we're seeing black and white scenarios, we get to call the shots exactly how we see them, not how others would like us to see those, but that can work against us also.
I was born into the life I had and simply had to get on with it. With any childhood, good or bad, peaceful, neglectful or abusive, we live that life, until we’re able to change it. Of course, if we're one of the lucky ones to be born into a family without neglect or abuse, we get to see a more balanced view as an adult.
The foundations are the basis of childhood
Regardless of our upbringing and our formative years, they become our most profound, because the foundations are set for our adult lives. When we grow up around neglect, we can learn how things should be done, but for us to learn, we should become consciously aware, or the patterns of neglect can repeat. What we learn is not to sugar coat our lives, as we begin to see life more clearly.
Failing to make the link
For anyone dealing with abuse in their formative years, moving forward the vision may be slightly blurred and although we may see some of what we're dealing with, we're not always linked in, enough to understand or make the correlations. Unfortunately, not all of us make the link until much later.
Of course, the more aware of neglect, or abuse we deal with, the more chance we have of changing our life further down the line.
We were brainwashed as kids to only see things a certain way, even though we knew something wasn't right. It didn't take a whole lot of thought to figure out that the way we were living just wasn't normal, or like anything we saw on TV.
Most of the time we were treated like we were invisible, up until the time our parents needed something and then we existed. They not only forced us to wear blinders but they threw in the rose colored glasses to boot, so we never knew what was really going on.
It wasn't like we had a family meeting to discuss what all of us wanted. My girlfriend has said that I'm very black and white in my thinking which is probably very true, considering the way I grew up.
The reality is that I grew up in a world where we weren't allowed to see things as they really were. They led us to believe that we didn't have a lot of choices in our lives. I hate to even get close to remembering what it felt like, since it was just downright torturous, which they didn't get.
It left us ill prepared to deal with the real world, which I found out the hard way. They left us to fend for ourselves most of the time, so we learned how to survive and exist but not how to really live.
My friend is always asking me how I tolerate my current living situation and it's probably because it's what I got used to as a kid. It doesn't really faze me like it should, since I'm so used to just taking the pain, like they say in war movies.
Looking at the way things are right now, I know very well that it isn't right or normal, but I don't know how to extricate myself from the situation. My parents always talked about getting divorced but we're not married so that doesn't apply here.
I was blinded by the fact that she asked me out, which fed into my male ego; but I didn't see that I could have said no. Once again I was people pleasing, since I didn't want to hurt her feelings but it would have saved me a lot of years of suffering on both our parts.
She has needs that I have issues taking care of right now and I know it isn't fair to keep her from being happy. I'm sure we would both survive a breakup and it would be nice if I had a chance to be happy too, for the first time in my life!
Thanks Randy. Yes, when we don't stop to consciously think we follow the same patterns. I know that because that was my life too.
We don't stop to think about our lives, what we want, what is expected; we just 'go with the flow' until we decide to change the patterns from our unconscious thinking (when we're not taking control) to conscious, where we take control.
The more proactive we are the more we will start taking control of our lives. It's good that you see things as they are Randy, because seeing life like that will help you make some of those difficult decisions further down the line.
However we get to a certain stage, however long it takes us to come through the other end, I think we owe it to ourselves to follow our own lead and path.
People communicate through a thinly disguised veil of conformity that requires us to turn a blind eye or gloss over truths, especially when it comes to ourselves.
We don't seem to want to face up to realities. Being truthful in our relationships and to ourselves, would be a good start to seeing things as they really are.
Thank you. I've never personally done it, but if we do conform it's still important we face up to our realities, without hiding behind the veil of conformity.
Just because we conform doesn't mean we don't have to deal with our own realities. They will still happen around us whether we conform or not. Given my own life and struggles, I wanted to be honest to myself about my life and my struggles.
The CP Diary wouldn't exist without it, but I agree with you though, we must be truthful in our relationships and to ourselves, so that we can see things as they really are. Not to fundamentally means we're ignoring our issues and failing to see our life in the way it's playing out.
You have brought something mighty awesome from your past that kisses all of us, while seeing things as they were and making sure your children's lives aren't pressed against that.
Thanks Tim. I believe children's lives need to be better than their parents lives were, unless of course their parents had the most idyllic of childhoods and there wasn't anything that needed to be changed, but does that ever happen?
I made sure that my children's experiences would not be pressed against my own experiences. I didn't want them to struggle.
As a general rule, I live life in the present and tell how I see or saw my experiences from the past in the present, but choose not to live there.