I learned to force myself to grow up, to pretend to be responsible. I became a specialist in being a responsible victim.
I learned to take responsibility as a way of meeting the needs in my child ego state. When I took responsibility as a child I was loved, I was important, I was safe, I had adventures. The possibility of taking responsibility as something ecstatic and without pressure became almost impossible. I feel sad because my being wants to take responsibility for creating regenerative cultures, creating initiations for children to prepare for adulthood, but when I start doing these things I go into survival mode of I have, I should, I need, the world needs.
In my environment, when I was a kid, I started taking care of my brother and my cousins quite young. I remember since young age listening my grandmother saying "she is so responsible, look at her, this age and she can already cook and take care of the house". All the time I was taking responsibility as a child, I could feel so loved and important and that I had a place there. "I'm a good person because I'm responsible, I make things happen, I'm doing great, I'm doing right."
Somehow I associated responsibility with doing right and being good. And being irresponsible, that's bad. The result of that is pressure and self-cannibalism. It's a clever way to learn to hate responsibility.
You may have learned to take responsibility for meet unmet childhood needs. If so, all the ways you relate to responsibility as Adult are thought your Parent Ego State, and pressure and rules.
One of the ways I learned to relate to responsibility in this way was through the system of punishment and reward.
"If you want to go to your friend's house for the weekend, you have to do all your homework during the week."
"If you behave well during the year, you will get this gift at Christmas."
"If you don't eat all the food on your plate, you won't get to play outside with your cousins."
"If you don't respect me - be adaptive to me and do everything I say - I'll beat you up."
"If I do everything right - everything they expect me to do - then I will be safe, and they will love me."
I remember sometimes I didn't want to eat anymore because it was enough for me, but my grandmother was afraid that I was too thin and looking, so I ate even though I didn't want to, so she wouldn't be afraid and I could finally be free to play outside with my cousins.
First you do what you have to, then you do what you want. This is how I learned to disconnect from my impulses and create the strategy of wanting to want. I want to eat. I want to do well in school. I want to behave well.
With these examples, I learned to be afraid. Not conscious fear. The opposite. Unconscious fear all the time that if I did not do the right thing I would be punished in some way. And I didn't want to be punished, so I decided to do the right thing, to be adaptive, to be a good girl.
I hired myself for that job for a couple of years. I became really professional at seeing what others want even before they know what they want, I learned to play roles and pretend, I learned to dissolve into the groups so that no one would notice me, I learned to lie so clearly that no one would catch me. I learned to manipulate myself and others instead of directly saying what I want. I learned to squeeze myself and I manipulated myself to fit in, on the outside. I learned to be externally oriented.
To fit into what my parents, teachers, society wanted and expected, I learned to pretend to want what I wanted. I learned to want what I wanted because far away in the fantasy world I would be okay. I would finally be free to do what I'm doing now.
At school, when I was 5 years old, I remember several times when I wanted to sleep more, but it was time to go to school. Then I wanted to draw, but it was lunch time and I had to go to lunch because if I didn't eat I would be hungry later because the teacher wouldn't give me anything to eat. Sometimes I wanted to have lunch, but it was nap time and I was not sleepy. I wanted to play, but it was time to write. I wanted to write, but it was time to go home.
I disconnected from my inner compass to life and what I really want in order to keep up with my surroundings. In this way I somehow learned to hate responsibility because I thought responsibility was doing all these things that I have to do and if I did not do them something bad would happen. Our ability to grow up and take more responsibility is frozen in childhood because the standard culture is designed for us not to take responsibility but to be afraid of authority figures.
A year and a half ago, I began co-creating and collaborating with the Possibility Management GameWorld. One of the central purposes in this GameWorld is to prepare us to take radical responsibility. I remember in my first Expand the Box how my being was in extase with the powerfull Clarity of the maps, and the raw connection with Reality all the distinctions was connecting me with.
Since then I have tried with all my heart and being to be more responsible, to grow up, to go through the process, to go through the initiations and trainings, but it hasn't worked completely because I do it from the perspective of being a better person, from a place of adapting and behaving better in the spaces. From a place of wanting to want, from a place of trying harder. That's not authentic.
I was shocked when I read in this website "it is a mistake to try to force yourself to grow up before you are even alive."
I've been trying to force myself to grow up. I am trying to be more adult and with each beep I am trying harder. I have gone through emotional healing processes to be better, to fix myself. I am trying really hard to be a good possibilitator, just like I tried really hard to be a good student and a good daughter, and good sister, and goor player in the past.
I am sad because I love spaces where I and my colleagues can grow. I'm fascinated by the craziness and beauty of transformational spaces, I'm in love with initiations, and I'm sad that it's not my next step. That it's not where I am. I'm sad that I've been using these precious spaces to torture myself. I'm angry because I forced myself to grow up with the illusion that this would one day make me better and free. And I'm in the liquid state of letting this fantasy world crumble.
THE WAY OUT OF THE PRISON OF LIVING IN THE OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVE
If your goal is to be good at something, it's a sign that you're out of the present because you're moving based on the outside perspective.
That outside perspective it's a clear signal that your adult ego state it is contaminated with your child ego state. The child ego state is the part of you that really believes that you can't give yourself what you need. That's one of the places I'm working deeply with right now, and that's opening up space to come alive and deal with pressure.
The child ego state is trying to fulfill needs that were not fulfilled in the past.
It's a black hole of time and energy in your life, because whatever you do to try to meet the needs of that child, in reality they will never be met, ever, because that child is no longer here. That child is in the past. You can't change the past. When you try to do that you bring the past into the present.
So whatever you are trying to do, to belong, to be loved, to be important in a group, to be safe, to be sure of your life plan, will crash and you will be sucked and drained.
There are these five primary needs that you had as a child.
These are the needs that were not met for all of us in one way or another in our childhood. And it's a long grieving process to realize that you can't change that, to grieve the letting go that you didn't get everything you needed to grow up Alive.
The shift in the adult ego state is that you don't look or expect that the outside will give you that things. But you learn to take the stand for yourself. You become radical free to create.
So instead of having another person decide if you belong, if you are loved, if you are valuable, which is an orientation that comes from outside of you, you reclaim the center within and reorient from within where you decide. You decide that you belong, so that you can make offers of intimacy, so that you can create the space you need for yourself, so that you can make proposals. So that you can be radically free in the way you move and speak and create. You become the source of love, I become the source of belonging. ....
Radical freedom is a step toward you becoming the source. Radical freedom is learning to provide to yourself what you need and what you want.
We didn't learn to be in life. We learned to be in school. School took us steps away from reality. Radical freedom is getting closer to reality. It's about learning to be in life again, skipping the attachment to the stories.
I have begun a year-long experiment in radical freedom. I made this decision two weeks ago in a vast liquid state during the Women's of Earth Lab. I said yes to Sonia Gonçalves and Maria Diaz invitation to travel the world for the next year and experience life, start from zero, feel other winds, navigate the ocean, speak unknown languages, be homeless for one day, create recipes, sleep in mountains, learn to make fire with stones, sweep streets, practice, experiment.
A space of relief, a downtime, an indeterminate amount of pressure-free time set aside for self-recovery and discovery. A space to give birth to myself and to inhabit myself again. A time to discover if I like singing, a time to discover what my talents are, what my favorite ice cream is, what I hate, what I love.
This article it's the beggining of this research I'm holding space for about Radical Freedom and bulding stable inner structure to grow up.
What are the ways that you are not yet radically free in your life? What are your experiments on this? What are your thoughts and feelings when reading this article? I want to read you. Let me know bellow in the comments.
If you want to support me finantially in this research, I'm holding space for a crowdfunding to support me in paying for accomodation and food and buying thickets in the follow monthis. You can know more about here in this link. Love, Gabriela
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