A change happens in me when I deeply and clearly see the problem I have about myself and realize that it is not true.

Let’s do it through an example: Belly shame

Although I write about it through a specific example and through imagined happenings, please focus on the abstract behavior and mindset behind it (Though I find that the example may be very relevant to most of us). 

1 – I start facing it.

I sit down, close my eyes, and start focusing on my belly. I am feeling the curves, its big size, and the discomfort it is causing me. I am looking at myself from the outside with my imagination and what I see is an ugly, chubby person. I start to feel disgusted with myself. And I start to become depressed. 

I want to escape from the emotional pain and want to give up. I have my usual escapes: I pull back my belly, start to sit up straight, and put a relaxed smile on my face – ‘I am fit and beautiful, I am fit and beautiful…’. It works for one or two minutes and then my disgust and sadness are back. Probably this is the time I should go to the fridge… or head to the gym and start starving. Not that those worked. Nor the idea that I ignore the fact that I am fat and tell myself that I am still ok. 

There is no escape, I sit back in my pain of disgust. Maybe I can take it for one or two more minutes…No, but I cannot, I pass out. I cannot take it any longer. Let me just cry. You won. I am a failure. I admit I am fat.

(what happened: You could come closer to it. You had the courage this time to face it.)

2 – I am separating from it

I am genuinely facing my emotional pain and thoughts about my belly shame. Somewhere I read that the method to start processing my pains is to ‘revisit’ them and look at them consciously. Observe it while being in it. Good that this comes to my mind just at the right moment.

So I try to look at this situation from the outside, like an observer. Sort of like there is me and there is the situation. It is happening to me but I am not it.

Holy shit!! It is working to some degree. I am starting to feel some relief. And I am able to stay in it. What I experience is that I am still feeling those curves and how big my belly is, but I am basically just looking at it. I am not saying that it is physically pleasing but somehow the emotional pain is fading. 

(what happened: You have started to rewire yourself. On all levels.)

3 – Window of additional opportunity

In addition to the above, you may experience some other things. You may consciously realize that your beliefs changed (or even that you can decide how you want them to change.). And maybe not only in connection to the given issue.

If we take the above belly shame example: While you may not like the size of your belly, you are not shame-bound to it. And you may experience that you are now less shame-bound in other areas of your life also.

Notes

• Seek professional help or someone you trust if you feel unsafe! It is important!!! Someone who can hold you emotionally as you are doing your work. Tell that person what you are doing and what help you wish to receive.
• Don’t give up if it doesn’t work ‘soon’ enough. Trust me, you will find no one who did it ‘soon’ enough.
• Experience shows that although we all dream of a sudden and everlasting release, what happens to most of us is that we are going in and out until we fully process it and integrate it. 
• Although the above outlines a specific and consciously known issue, I find that it can work the same way for problems that we are not fully conscious of. 

Are you among those who change jobs frequently and you feel that it comes from some inner struggle that is not clear to you what causes it? If you may not have heard yet: It is happening to a lot of people recently.

I am listing some inner mental constructs (belief systems if you will) that may help to understand this behavior of yours.

(This article is not about the job or work environment, but about your inner relationship to your job/career. And there is any suggestion that one behavior is better than the other or if any is unhealthy. Perhaps quite the opposite.)

See what resonates with you the most.

There is a transformation taking place in me

You may be going through an awakening like a lot of other people in current times and your constant quitting of jobs is a byproduct of it.

However distant it may seem and you may not have originally come for such an explanation but consider it. (This somewhat stands out from the rest below.)  

The career/path is actually not for me

It speaks for itself, although it may not be conscious in many (most) of us that this is the core of our problem why we don’t enjoy our job. It is unfortunately common in our society today that we land in a career path that is actually not for our true nature. This is my oversimplified take on it: We ‘must’ choose way too early in life before we have the level of independence to be able to decide for ourselves. And then we carry on doing something we don’t really want and over time it solidifies more and more. 

To me, the great question here is: How do I get out of this? The circumstances work against me. Most of us (including me) who came across this will probably agree that it is tough to make the change – both from a practical/physical, and an emotional point of view. (I don’t have the silver bullet. I know from my personal life that my inner urge to change the course of my life in this regard became big enough to make changes.)

I mirror my unmet needs onto my workplace

This is about the mostly unconscious unmet needs that I carry into my workplace in an attempt to have them met. My goal with many of the articles on Self Chatter is to provide possible cause-and-effect type explanations, and since this subject is rather deep, I have put it into a separate article. See if this resonates with you with respect to job quitting?: I Have Been Waiting All My Life.

My inherent understanding of the dysfunctional and toxic nature of work life in today’s world

I find that this is becoming the main theme recently (the Pandemic was one main trigger for it). And frankly, this is truly good news. I wrote a separate article on this – The Cause Behind the Great Resignation. 

A huge amount of us are getting conscious of how toxic, inhuman, and dysfunctional our life at work is. I sincerely hope that a critical mass is building up that will trigger a positive change in how we want to work, how we want to relate to the world of work in general, and how we want to create meaning through what we call ‘work’. It will not be the old structures and systems that will suddenly want a change, but we will do it.

I don’t know what I want

It may sound a bit awkward to state something like this but there may be great deepness to it. I wrote a separate article on it here: Why don’t I know what I want?

I have a disorganized attachment style

I refer to John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and from those four Attachment Styles (Ambivalent, Avoidant, Disorganized, Secure) I find that the Disorganized Attachment Style is common among those (including me) who keep changing jobs. 

With a Disorganized Attachment Style (you can read about it more in the link above) we do not have a clear attachment pattern, we experience a confusing mix of behavior around us, and our relationship with our workplace serves both as a source of comfort and also fear.

(If you ever wondered why workplaces can be so disorganized and chaotic (even if companies pretend not to be such), well, with so many of us having some sort of dysfunctional attachment styles, what can we expect?)

Again, my oversimplified take on it: I gravitate towards workplaces where the main style of attachment is disorganized in nature (because it is ‘fa-mil-iar’ to me…). And when I get overwhelmed and fed up, I quit. If this is your main theme then the good news is that your decision to leave such a workplace means that your Self is actually healthy: You don’t want to be in a relationship that is disorganized in nature. 

I have low self-confidence

Again, it speaks for itself that it is impossible to feel good at my workplace if I do not have or cannot build a certain level of self-confidence in what I do. This is here as a possible ‘Aha’ paragraph because so many of us are blind towards ourselves regarding our self-confidence.

Fear is one of the hardest emotions to become conscious about. It goes deep and touches almost everything in most of us, yet it is very hard to consciously grasp what exactly we are afraid of. This article is for those who want to know the root cause of their fear. And I picked the one “root cause” that I see coming up everywhere.

In my life it took years to state why I feel fear many times. And this is what I distilled it down to: “I am afraid of losing my safety.”

How Does it Form?

Did you ever think about this: What comes first in your opinion, thought or emotion? In other words: Do your thoughts and beliefs form your emotions or your emotions form your thoughts (beliefs)? I asked this question a lot of times and way more people said that emotion comes first and they form the thoughts.

People dealing with this say that what may be closer to reality is this: First we have a sensory perception of the situation. Then our mind processes this perception, tries to understand it, make sense of it. The result of this “process” is what I call a thought. Then this thought (a way of looking at the situation) may trigger an emotion. 

So my point is: Fear is a reaction to how we perceive a situation. In other words our logic on how we understand the given situation.  

There are so many things that we can be afraid of. Why the fear of losing our safety is one of the main themes?

Why Does it Form?

Just this one article would be way too long to go into deep details and my intent is to come with some food for thought. Also, I am not implying at all that any of the below are in direct cause-and-effect relationship to the fear of losing safety.

• Passed on as a mindset from the family of origin or the “world around us”.
  • We are social beings, we learn from each other, we require unity. And it can happen all too easy that we unconsciously take mindsets and behaviors from people around us. Note: The fear carried on with the mindset may not have much or any connection to reality.
• Abandonment in early childhood.
  • Developmental psychologist recognize that abandonment – especially if prolonged – will lead to severe problems. I find that one of the layers deep down will probably be the fear of losing our safety.
• Emotional or physical abuse.
• A father (or father figure) unable to help the child to become more independent. 

Hiding Places

Again, I am not implying at all that any of the below are in direct cause-and-effect relationship. I am only trying to come with some food for thought again so that you can connect more dots in your life. (And I guess the below list could grow into the hundreds until we said, ok, now we covered some…)

• I am a people pleaser.
  • I was taught (verbally or non-verbally) that I need to always look to please people well beyond what is in balance so that they “don’t leave me and tolerate my presence”.  I need to be the inferior one.
• I am pulling back my belly so it doesn’t look that big. Belly shame in other words.
  • I get to the conclusion from the world around me that I need to look good to fit in. Otherwise I run the risk of getting excluded.
• I cannot say no.
  • Maybe I was not allowed to get to that place where I could understand that there is nothing wrong with saying no.
• I have a hard time to know what I want.
  • The idea of letting myself think freely and experiment mentally makes me think that I would lose control. Not to mention the shame that may also kick in.
• I want to become very rich.
  • It isn’t hard to inherit this twisted belief in our society that money will buy you safety…
• I do not dare to leave a bad job, a toxic relationship.
  • One of the main things why we want to belong somewhere is to feel safe. Sometimes at any cost. I am probably not saying a lot of new thoughts here.
• My back is hunched.
  • My belief that I have to be inferior to other people so that I “receive some safety” shows up in my body posture. 

Fear of Losing my Safety as My Main Belief System in My Life 

It can go so deep, it can start to form so early in life, and it can bind us so much that it can become the main theme. It can be so much in front of us that we can have a problem to consciously realize that it is one of our main themes. 

The cause behind the great resignation (which is pretty much the same thing as what is referred to as quiet quitting) is a mental and emotional shift. And it is a positive and good thing. It surprised many people, and the ‘professionals’ and ‘statisticians’ are coming up with all kinds of mechanical explanations, instead of looking at the mindset change that caused it.

The trigger

The combination of the Pandemic and lockdowns coming with it has been a near-perfect trigger.

The Pandemic

The Pandemic has been a shock to most of us – I really do mean a mental and emotional shock. Shock usually makes us anxious, confused, etc., but what is important to see is that it creates a ‘short circuit’. Also, this shock has happened on a collective level and on a mass scale.

The lockdown

I find that – among many other things – the lockdowns caused a reset to our personal lives. What happened was that we got removed from our everyday life. And we did not get into a familiar situation that we are used to – i.e. “work all day as before”, “socialize the same way as before”, “get busy filling your day with stuff and activities as before”. 

But instead, we got forced into doing nothing. We were given a “blank sheet of paper”. (Ask a meditation expert what miracles you can expect when you “do nothing”.)

The outcome

The combination of personal and collective shock, coupled with a halt to our “everyday life” triggered a lot of people to rethink their lives. A mindset change happened. More precisely the mindset has been there for quite some time but could not come to the surface. What was this mindset change? In one sentence: “Enough of the toxic, inhuman, dysfunctional, hustle-culture workplace that disconnects me from my own Self!”

It doesn’t matter if it was consciously or unconsciously done, it doesn’t matter if it was “forced” or done unwillingly, and it is also ok that there is fear and anxiety around it. It happened. 

And I find that the outcome has been truly positive and life-giving. I must leave the rest of the thoughts and personal opinions around it to the reader, to you.

Conspiracy theory

There are a lot of talks that the Pandemic and the lockdowns are a part of an organized effort to control and suppress the human race. If this is the case then the Great Resignation has been a blow to this effort. (Well, not the Great Resignation, because that is the effect, but the cause of it.)

Why do people shame each other? We immediately recognize and admit that it exists almost everywhere, yet it is not obvious why people do it. And I don’t think we realize how widespread it is in our everyday life.

Shame is arguably one if not the biggest obstacle to happiness. And probably one of the greatest sources of human suffering. A lot can be said about shame and our attempt with this small article is to touch on some main aspects of it and to talk about the actual act of one person shaming the other. Take the below as some food for thought.

What is shame?

It is a form of fear. Social fear.

What does social fear exactly mean here? It means that it comes from and through our relationships with other people.

There are two types of shame

Healthy shame

The general mindset: “I have done something not quite right.”

Healthy shame helps me to function well in my relationships and in society. In plain English, when I do something not quite right, it is ok to feel ashamed about it. It is generally somewhat easy to acknowledge it and change my behavior. The key here is that I realize that I did something not quite right and I know that there is nothing wrong with me as a human being.

Toxic shame

The general mindset: “There is something fundamentally wrong with me.”

Toxic shame touches the core of my being. I find that it is not that I did something wrong but it is my whole Self that is defective. I question my whole being and as a consequence, I do not see a way out.

Toxic shame develops early in life

This is very controversial but probably there is truth to it: If someone has a well-developed sense of self it is very improbable that he/she will develop toxic shame in such a state of being. But the early stages of self-development are very delicate and can be very bumpy. Imagine this real-life example: One of the crucial steps in the development of a healthy self and a healthy ego is healthy narcissism in the early years of life. A small child, at one stage of development, will “fall in love” with herself. She realizes that she is capable of amazing things, and she realizes how great she is. What can be less healthy than this realization? If all goes well then this small child steps over this and goes to other steps of self-development. Well, in our present culture and society, this hardly ever goes well. Instead what happens painfully many times is that the parents (or other “grown-ups” around) will shame that small child for acting so “shameless”. Why? Because the child’s behavior triggers their own toxic shame and they do not realize that the child’s shameless and grandiose behavior is healthy at this stage, it will resolve – well, if we let it or even if we help the child. This is one of the ways how toxic shame is unconsciously passed on from generation to generation.   

Why do we develop shame?

Shame is very social, and very relational. Only social beings are capable of developing shame. Shame can be thought of as a mental construct to how we relate to the world around us. A common real-world example: My mother shamed me and as a small child I “had no other option or another idea” than to internalize it and accept that “I am a flawed person”. My mother meant everything to me, she was my source of love, safety, joy, etc. It was at that time impossible for me to comprehend that she was wrong. Not to mention the unthinkable possibility that she wanted something bad for me.

How shame is a form of fear

I am afraid of losing my safety, I am afraid of losing love, I am afraid of losing connection.

One of the main effects of toxic shame is addictions

Toxic shame is unbearable to the point that we need to find some sort of remedy to it. One of the most common coping mechanisms is addiction.

Shaming

Such an effective way to control someone and limit someone’s life. Someone shames me, I question myself, I start to lose my self-confidence and dignity, I start to internalize it, get confused, anxious, and be in panic. I start to behave in ways I would otherwise not do – I basically lose myself and lose my limits. Easy to become a target to predatory people and manipulation.

The above is a conscious act. Another common act is when people unconsciously pass on their own shame. After all, shame is a mental construct regarding our social connections – passing on the hot potato has been an idea for many. If the receiving end is perceptive and allows it then it offers relief for some time.

If you wish to go deeper a fantastic book on the subject is John Bradshaw’s ‘Healing the shame that binds you’ – Learn more

I refuse to be afraid because I know I am okay!

I refuse to be afraid, and I don’t let others pass on their own fear to me.

I refuse to be afraid, and I don’t let people bully me!

I refuse to be afraid because I am getting better and better at finding out when there is real danger.

I refuse to be afraid and do not let some people manipulate me!

I refuse to be afraid because I know that it’s a dirty trick how some people want to control my life!

I refuse to be afraid because I am freaking fed up with it!

I refuse to be afraid because I have consciously chosen a different path in my life.

I refuse to be afraid and choose relationships based on other dynamics.

I refuse to be afraid, and people will treat me differently.

I refuse to be afraid because I am entering a new chapter in my life where constant fear is not needed anymore. 

I refuse to be afraid and surround myself with people who accept me.

I refuse to be afraid because I dare to face my fears.

I refuse to be afraid and take care of my mental, emotional, and physical health.

I refuse to be afraid because it feels fantastic to be brave!

I refuse to be afraid and encourage others to do the same.

I refuse to be afraid because I am learning more ways to calm myself and go back to normal.

I refuse to be afraid because my consciousness is growing.

I refuse to be afraid, and I am constantly flushing it out of my nervous system and thought patterns.

I refuse to be afraid because I know that there are a lot of other people who are like me.

I refuse to be afraid, and I know that my bravery is not arrogance.

The strength of phrasing my problems in a short and basic way is about deeply understanding my own self.

There is zero greatness to this post, no big revelations. It’s just that the subject is important, and there is a chance you will become more effective with your inner work. 

The method

Phrasing it

It sounds obvious, but you have to phrase it to name it. Otherwise, you run the risk of just endlessly ‘walking in a mist’. This is much more important than it looks, because it is so easy to be unconscious when we are in a conflict, a great deal of anxiety, or stress. Tell yourself to phrase your problem when it appears.

Why basic?

When you are basic it is a sign that you have gone deep. Your Self is basic. In the best way possible.

Why short?

Your true self hardly phrases thoughts and emotions in 30-word sentences. When your phrasing is short enough, it usually means that you have cooked it well.

Resonate

Go with what resonates with you. Your thought about your problem is only yours; no one else needs to understand it. And no one else needs to resonate with it. What matters is that it is true to you.

Change it as your understanding develops

It is a very good sign if you change it. It means that you are deepening your understanding. And you may change it back to a previous one; and that is all okay too.  

Have discipline

Phrasing your problems in a short and basic way will actually help in having discipline. It is less energy up front, and gives enough punch to get to the next step. 

An example

“Why don’t I get what I want?”

• It is short.
• It is basic.
• (It does resonate with me. There is much more to it for me than what meets the eye.)

In a “perfect world”, conflicts would not be hard to handle. I tell you what I want, you tell me what you want and we find a solution that is acceptable for both of us.

Most of us look at conflicts as dramas and as dangerous situations. We unconsciously connect the present situation to a dramatic/traumatic event that happened to us in the past and we project it to the present moment.

When a familiar situation arises that resembles a previous event that we once deemed threatening we fall into the “black hole” of panic, anger, fear and you name it. And in this “black hole” we can only use a degraded way of coping.

Another aspect that makes it hard for the majority of us to get out of the “black hole” is that usually everybody around us gets triggered in such situations. It is hard not to be in a panic when everyone else is.

Here is another aspect or possible setup: (This doesn’t necessarily involve a feeling of panic and fear, but anger.) We feel betrayed and angry because we find that the other person is immoral or unfair with their request. While this may be the case experience shows that in most cases this is not the case but rather our misjudgment – or it is because the other person thinks the same about us so they “fight back”.

One more possible aspect: Shame. We feel shame that we ask for something. So our shame triggers us and we go into the conflict situation with a sense of fear already.

One – probably the biggest – obstacle to most of us is that when we are in an emotionally triggering situation we cannot think clearly and cannot calm our emotions. This is exactly how trauma works: We become unconscious and degraded in our abilities. Psychologists say that the way out of it is to revisit our trauma(s) and take a look, this time with a conscious eye. And a miracle may happen that we may have a window of opportunity to “rewrite” them.

Once I am not triggered emotionally and mentally by the conflict situation I realize that conflicts are all normal, they are not dramatic or dangerous situations, it is ok to have needs – all in all just a normal part of human life.