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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
Once 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.
Sometimes crappy things happen to us, and we don’t have the knowhow or the resources to prevent them. Sometimes we really are victims. The mistake is to internalize the situation and make it our fault: I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, whatever enough, to make this person love me, to make that person stop hurting me, to make that person stop hurting themselves. Sound familiar? And in many cases issues of self-loathing continue to haunt us in our adulthood, manifesting in the repetition compulsion we talked about in Chapter 4.
Fortunately, as you evolve through this self-exploration, you will be able to change these patterns by recognizing them and refusing to let them repeat in perpetuity. Instead you will take responsibility for your life now and make different, conscious choices that propel you in positive directions. You can free yourself from the shackles of self-loathing, grow from your past hardships, and progress. But nothing can happen until you learn to forgive.
You MUST find a way to forgive the people who have wronged you. You may be thinking, Sure, this all sounds very enlightened. But you’re pissed, and you’re holding on to that anger because whatever asshole hurt or betrayed you doesn’t deserve forgiveness. Maybe you think forgiveness means condoning their behavior. Maybe you think your anger at the offender is their punishment, especially if no other punishment is forthcoming; forgiving the person would mean letting them get away with it. You may go so far as to seek retribution—“an eye for an eye” can certainly seem viscerally satisfying. But if you aren’t able to actually harm the other person, harboring anger at them can feel like the next best option. Holding a grudge can give you a strange historical sense of justice.
Here’s the thing, though: forgiving the asshole isn’t for their well-being, it’s for yours. If you can’t forgive the things that have been done to you—as a kid, as an adult, whenever—then you won’t be able to move on with your life. Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. Nor does it have to mean letting the person back into your life to hurt you again. It simply means healing the hurt that’s been done to you and continuing to pursue a prosperous, meaning-filled life.
The psychological, spiritual landscape of forgiveness is tough to navigate, but it’s a journey that yields powerful, permanent results. It will enable you to stop taking on other people’s issues and stop allowing their shortcomings to define who you are. You will understand that what happened to you wasn’t because of your limitations but because of the other person’s. For this reason, forgiveness comes when you are truly able to gain understanding and empathy for the person who hurt you.
Additionally, learning to let go will free you from the negativity that festers when you hold on to grudges and wounds from the past. Here’s a great analogy: soft tissue inflammation is helpful only in the first few days after an injury occurs. After that, if it’s allowed to become chronic, it often causes even more damage than the original injury. In the same way, anger is an emotional defense mechanism designed to mitigate pain after a tragedy. It confers a sense of purpose and a motivation, and if there is one thing devastated people need, it is motivation. But anger is insidious, and if it’s allowed to boil without being processed and released, it can cause far more harm than the initial offense. Studies have shown that holding on to a grudge can result in depression, insomnia, fatigue, and even high blood pressure. Being angry, fighting with people, hating people, or otherwise feeling wronged drains our energy both physically and emotionally. When we can’t let go of anger, we are destined to relive the pains over and over again, allowing the hurts to wreak havoc on our lives. Holding on to a grudge can damage or strain your relationships, distract you personally and professionally from work and family, and inhibit your ability to open up to new things and new people. It basically robs you of experiencing the beauty of life as it unfolds.
GOT A GRUDGE?
When you open yourself up and embrace forgiveness, you release yourself from victimhood. You then can find psychological healing from past wounds, and your life can take on new, positive meaning. If you put old hurts in a context that helps you grow, rather than holds you back, you become unstoppable.
I’ve touched on this a little already, and if you have read any of my previous books, you already know it, but as a kid I had a lot of anger toward my dad. It took me years to forgive him; hell, it took me years to figure out I even needed to. Until I was in my early thirties, I figured he was a total bastard who deserved the anger and hostility I felt for him, end of story. I used my hatred of him to propel me toward success. I was going to become wealthier and more powerful than he was. I would show him. I would have the last word. But this anger was messing me up in many other areas of my life, and ironically it sabotaged the very thing I had set out to achieve—professional success.
My anger really hurt me in my career. For years, I simply couldn’t tolerate a man telling me what to do, which proved to be kind of a problem. At work, I was replaying the dynamic with my father by fighting with my male bosses—constantly. Anytime I felt I was being treated unfairly or in a domineering manner, I acted out. It’s not okay to be treated poorly, but there are ways to handle things so that they turn out in your favor. I wasn’t following that rational course of action, and being a “charged” person in general, I pretty much told them all where to stick it. I got fired from two jobs because of it, and I’m convinced it’s the reason I wasn’t able to reach a deal with the producers at Biggest Loser for the third season.
So one day I was at my therapy session feeling particularly aggravated about the drama in my professional life, feeling sick and tired of constantly hitting the same wall. My shrink tried to tell me that until I
could work through my issues with my father and forgive him, the pattern of self-sabotage that had me in its grip would continue. Naturally, because I was also playing out my father dynamic with my shrink, I argued with him. I told him he was crazy, that my father had nothing to do with my work, and anyway, how on earth was I supposed to forgive someone who had done so many awful things to my siblings and me? The things he told me, after I calmed down, literally changed my life.
He explained to me that the key to forgiveness lies in understanding that those old offenses that my father committed were not intended against me personally. Whatever was done to you wasn’t done because you deserved it, or because you were inadequate, but because the other person had limitations. My contestant’s dad was distant, not because of anything the contestant had or hadn’t done—not because of anything he was or wasn’t—but because his dad had grown up with distant parents himself and never really learned how to give or receive affection. He did the best he could with the tools his life experience had given him.
The same goes for my dad. He grew up in an environment that didn’t equip him with the tools to help himself, let alone anyone else. Because of the way his parents raised him, he grew up feeling impotent and hating the side of him that was vulnerable and sensitive. As a result, when he had kids, he projected these insecurities onto us. “This is textbook stuff, all over the pages of psychoanalytic literature. The traumas of our parents that don’t get owned and worked out by them get unconsciously passed on to us, their children,” says Dr. Jo Ann McKarus, aka my mom.