Check out this chart about how I used to not have my shit together. This was a long time ago in my early twenties before I started any serious work on myself, and this is a map of categories about how I used to not have my shit together in four ways. So here's a walkthrough of not having my shit together for me and clients.
I see these four categories as the big ones about achieving some functionality and satisfaction in our lives. For about eight years to my early twenties, I worked in restaurants as a waiter, and through those eight years, getting out of that work, which was really, really hard, it was like leaving an abusive relationship.
I was extremely stuck in that business because I didn't think I could really do better or do anything else. I had horrible self-esteem about my capabilities having barely graduated from high school. And related to having that job, I was super dysfunctional with my money. I got paid in cash. I was impulsive.
I had zero budgeting skills, and I was always behind on rent and bills accruing those God awful bank fees. So the restaurant work also had terrible hours, like three or four doubles in a row from 10. Am to 12:00 AM Sometimes the hours, the dysfunction made it almost impossible to live in normalcy. Like I couldn't get the things, things like from doing my laundry to going on a normal date or whatever was linking up with someone to go on a hike, like forget it.
An important thing about. Only working that type of work is that when I wasn't working, I was coping with having a job like that, like which is another category in this chart. And I'm not blaming the restaurant work. It was a job that got me through college, so it allowed me some things. I had a little bit of money in my pocket, I could do kind of things with it.
Um, but it was really about the feelings underneath that job. The next categories. My relationships were an absolute mess. I would often be dating or chasing unavailable people. My relationships had this weird six weeks kind of limit to them. I would also date messy people to try to take care of them or chase them, to get them to tolerate me.
You know, depending on the day. Uh, whatever I did to get something going was kind of futile. I would easily get triggered to abandonment and was pretty wounded, kind of a negative soul with intensity. It was, I was hard to deal with. And I, to be honest, I wouldn't have dated myself either related to that. I was pretty emotionally dysregulated.
I had something called the smia, which is a low grade depression I had since childhood, except that I didn't know it because I had had it my whole life for that long. So I didn't have a frame of reference. I would either be somewhat shut down. Emotionally or reactive to others from an angry place, especially if I felt like you were letting me down or something.
Um, so I had these basic three states. I had angry, I had numb, and I had tired. And sometimes I'd be silly, but that was really the majority of it. I also didn't have much energy at all aside from maybe doing work or playing music. For the most part, I kind of lived in this exhaustive, yet keyed up emotional state.
The last category, I had some significant negative coping strategies going on. I was nearly a daily pot smoker. There was always booze going on. I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. There was no gym in my life. There was no therapy, there was no consistent anything. There was no reading anything substantial.
Really no consistent, good eating, no stable relationships, and I lived. In this like messy state of flailing around in my life, kind of asking when am I gonna get my shit together and have a real relationship? When am I going to be more on top of my money and not struggle so much or get a better job?
When am I gonna go back to school? When am I gonna give up cigarettes? Finally when I'm gonna be. Not in such an emotional hole that I lived in, like felt like every day, my answer to all those questions was putting my stock in my future. Like I will get better someday, but still not taking any real action on them.
I didn't really know how to do that, and that's something called mood dependent behavior, which I'll get to later. That sounds like when I feel like I can handle it, I'll look for a new job. When I'm in a better place, I'll quit smoking and I'm gonna come back to this later, as that level of thinking was my entire stuck place of not having my shit together.
Working with the mood dependent idea will really keep you stuck. So by the way, I see mood dependent behaviors as a symptom of childhood trauma. It doesn't have to be, but that's. They usually are. If you're new here, my channel is about childhood trauma and family dysfunction. I talk a lot about how our problems are rooted in subconscious stuck places developed in childhood.
If you don't identify with that, that's fine. The video will still be helpful to you and just know that every family usually has some kind of defunction going on on it. So you don't have to sign off on the childhood trauma thing. So let's look on how these four categories from my chart and each one, how they might actually apply to you in your own chart.
Everyone has specific ways that they don't have their together, which is what the video is about. I hope this helps you nail the thing that you're struggling with. So I like to frame four distinct categories for insight and direction here. So the first is career and income. Then there's relationships.
Then there's emotional regulation and then there's coping. Each one will have an impact on the other. So try not to think about this as picking up your main issue, although there's gonna be some work on that later. Each issue has a relationship to the other, which is super important. So try to take that in.
When one of my short-lived relationships ended, I'd smoke and drink more and become more shut down emotionally. And then now getting the laundry done or now it felt like even that was even more impossible than usual. And sometimes I get fire from those restaurants due to my lack of not showing up on time or having this like negative intensity about myself not having our sh.
Together can have consequences. It can be really messy. You'll see when I talk about how a success in one area is gonna be a success in the other, so try not to get caught up in it being such a tangled mess. So I'm also framing these prompts more about emotional stuck places versus situational stuck places.
Like my stuck place at the restaurant was really more about my belief system rather than a crummy jaw market, if that makes sense. So here's the first category, which is career and income. Career and income to me is like having. Footing beneath us that we can function everything else from having a place to live, you know, and the ability to buy things like groceries or self-help books about surviving capitalism.
I'm partly joking there. Having an income is a source that is super important to having our show. Together, and I'm putting this first because having one shipped together greatly depends on not having to live from a crisis place like facing homelessness or bills or mortgage stuff, or having your cell phone service shut off or in a constant can't get ahead mode.
I'm aware that most people live paycheck to paycheck like I did, so I, I'm acknowledging that your income and career don't have to be that dire either. Like not having your. Together about, it could be about having money, but loathing what you're doing. Like you might not be able to change that, but if you're, if you're ruled by unconscious beliefs from childhood trauma that keep you stuck, let's focus on that part.
And also without that kind of financial foundation or purpose in our lives. The stress of just surviving or not feeling satisfied will ramp up and affect everything else. It'll affect our relationships, emotional control and coping. Like who out there actually has a job but you hate it so much and you complain to your partner a lot about it, and there's distance there.
That's what I mean. So here are some common stuck places around career and income. And before I read these, I'm not criticizing you, I understand some of these situations can't be changed, but keep thinking about the emotions on these, not the situations. First example is being stuck in a job due to the belief that it's the only thing that you're good at.
That's usually not true. This often goes with being unable to say no to task at work or taking on extra shifts or something like that. Um, another is being inexperienced and overwhelmed about how jobs work. Like if you're new to the workforce, another is only focusing on career. And your income to the detriment of your emotions, relationships, and coping.
That looks like workaholism avoidance of not having your personal rest time with your emotions. Your job can mean too much, and it might be your only identity. That's also common for childhood trauma. Another example is working too many jobs and not knowing how to get good paying ones or increasing your salary or worth.
For example, I had several low paying side hustles even after I stopped doing restaurant work and finally landed on a higher paying one job. With normal lives and some good benefits. So it's a process. Another example is having an unconscious unhealthy attachment to your job. Like you tend to take on jobs, like you're taking one for the team.
Like these are extremely hard interpersonal jobs that wipe you out. An EMT driver, an ER nurse, a therapist. Keep thinking about patterns that you have. Like I took the fight to every job I've ever had. I've always been fighting authority, and that is a pattern that I had to look at. Another example is having black and white beliefs about your career or money, like I should be a doctor because only doctors and lawyers live well.
But I hate both of those careers. For me, maybe you're incredibly good at being self-employed, but you don't know that yet. Turns out that was the case for me. Another example is having deep seated triggers around money, such as living in lack. Living in lack can look like also that you're consumed with.
Fear that you're one bad day away from losing your job or losing everything. That can be a very much a childhood trauma thing in a triggered state. Another example, which is odd, which is being actually extremely well certified and intelligent and gifted, and you have the degrees and you're skilled, but you have issues.
Sliding into making a lucrative career or income work for you. Like you might be extremely qualified, but you can't follow through on something. Another example is having our income and our career issues affect the other three. Like you have a trigger with a difficult boss, a. That emotionally disregulates you for three days and you lose that time and your partner feels left out because you're constantly talking about work and you end up doom scrolling or drinking way more than you should be.
So take a moment and reflect on how your income and career issues might be related to childhood. Are you a bit workaholic to avoid feelings? Because that's what was modeled or that was a good strategy that you came up with. Do you not feel like better jobs are out there due to the belief that you can't handle them or you don't deserve them?
Take a moment and reflect on any of these and relate them maybe to your parents. Did they struggle with any of those ideas? Maybe put in the comments. To make it more known to you, more so career and income spaces have a wide breadth of issues in stuck places. In addition, there's the reality that there might not be the perfect career or income situation, but the focus here again, is how we get stuck and we're unable to get out of our own way around income in our work life.
In a funny way, the best story or advice I kind of have about career and income is that I tell people that I was a pretty crappy employee. Like I wouldn't have hired myself back in the day because I was so burnout negative and I hated the whole thing. And it turns out that I'm much better suited for being self-employed.
So just kind of think about that and sometimes it's, we have our issues, but sometimes it is a situational environment kind of a thing. But again, there's always gonna be beliefs under that. Next category is a big one is relationships. Relationships to me, are often what tells us how much we don't have our shift.
Together regarding our emotional maturity and our satisfaction from relationships or even our relationship with ourself from an inner child place. That might sound like super bad news, but try not to feel freaked out about it. Like taking a deep breath and looking in the into this stuff can really fix our relationships.
I get that there's a lot of pain here. And incidentally, I have yet to meet a childhood trauma survivor who didn't struggle greatly with emotional intimacy. And partnerships. So when I say relationships, I'm primarily meaning romantic, but also includes relationships of all forms and closeness for our focus.
Let's keep it to romantic relationships as really looking at the ways that we don't have our together. Here are some common issues around relationships pertaining to not having. Together about them. These are the usual suspects in the mental health world. So I hope you can relate to these and identify and not feel like they're entirely unique to you.
It's not good to feel like you're the only one. Really reflect on these. If there are patterns for you, like with the other categories, like if you've done this with maybe two or more people, that it wasn't just a random glitch in your dating life. Um, first example is choosing unavailable people and ending up lonely and frustrated with partners.
Dates, exchanges, a real or imagined pattern of never feeling like it's reciprocal or kind of even domish a big one here, it's super specific, is putting all of our self-worth into our sexuality and not our substance as a person because our trauma tells us we're only as good as how as attractive. Or how pleasing we are to someone else.
It could even do this with earnings. Next is getting into a relationships and then around two months jumping ship after really getting disgusted with the person about their choice in things like footwear, or they don't like Paso or they're too peopley sometimes it can be anything we overly focus on.
If this is a pattern for you, it could really be about an attachment wounds in creating distance. It's definitely an inner child thing to contradict what I just sort of said about getting this. Disgusted with somebody, is they actually dating people who are abusive or dangerous? And a lot of this stuff is actually getting some help and bouncing things off about who is safe and who is not.
But that's definitely a pattern that a lot of childhood trauma survivors have is dating, abusive or dangerous people. Now their example is dating people who do not seem to be equal to you so that we can kind of have the upper hand, like we can be superior if we're the one with a better job. Well, I gotta ask why are we with them then if we have that inner child energy going on in judgment?
Another example is avoiding intimacy and dating entirely. This isn't always bad. Sometimes it's good to take a break and not need a relationship, but you gotta ask, is it coming from a place of personal growth and change? Or is it coming from a place of protection out of fear? And it's definitely can be a place of being just disgusted with dating in general.
That's also a thing, but you gotta, but you gotta check the inner child kind of stuff going on, on the inside about it. Another example is constantly picking on our partner from a place of being superior or triggered or having contempt for them, annoyance with them. This is a, a marked absence of a chill acceptance and appreciation of our partner.
This can really kill intimacy. I'm not saying there're just not gonna be problems. But there's an inner child focus on them, which is a lot like projection. Another example is being in a highly imbalanced partnership where you pay the rent and you schedule everything for the kids, and there isn't reciprocal efforts.
It's very triggering. Like you might be a doer from a video I did on childhood trauma personalities, which I can kind of link. In the description. Um, and it's a good accompanying video for a lot of this stuff. We all have our relationship stuff, but many people with childhood trauma go through a phase of choosing people where they can have like nothing to work with, which is a lot like our parents.
Or we can have amazing, sneaky unconscious skills of getting out of intimacy. Like I say, inner children can be like ninjas of getting out of intimacy. So it's important to get some help figuring out from someone like a therapist or get some help who preferably has their. Together. Um, don't get me started on that, to be a good sounding board.
'cause that stuff is gonna be tricky to figure out. Next category is emotional regulation. Like with having an income, having our shit together emotionally makes everything work better in our lives. When we're not emotionally regulated, it can feel like being intoxicated where we're kind of foggy and distracted and unable to focus on other things.
And it's interesting to me that getting out of survival mode or maybe finally having a workable income helps us emotionally regulate more. So. Than anything else I think, but also learning how to emotionally regulate our trauma stuff puts us in a better position to be able to handle obtaining a greater income.
It's funny how all four categories are interrelated like that, and they greatly affect each other. Here are some signs about not having one together. Emotionally reminder, this is not judgment. First example is getting overly triggered by many things and losing functioning. Sometimes a trigger will last days or sometimes over like a half a year, like a really bad breakup, like it could be a small conversation and a part of you believes that you've made a horrible mistake at work and that conversation, which can really.
Take us over in our head. Another example is being stuck only looking for the negative or living in negativity. I'm in no way suggesting to be positive, but maybe shooting for neutral in your life is better. This is really like a Debbie Downer energy that nothing works in our life. Nothing has ever worked and nothing will ever work.
That can really get in the way of getting our shit together. It's definitely an inner child thing. Related to that, we can be dysregulated ourselves when we engage in self-hatred, which sabotages everything. That is also oddly a coping strategy in the next category. Um, another example is being highly activated around intimacy, like not trusting partners due to prior betrayal.
Or overly look, looking for the ways that a partner might be aloof or potentially disappointing you or will, they will eventually leave. So this is really an inner child projection issue and it's exhausting to have that going on. Everything is gonna work better if, if a lot of these get resolved. Another example is being reactive at work where things feel like life.
Or death and you have this reputation at work about being too intense and that not in a good way. Another example is really getting caught up in trying to meet expectations of others, like abusive people or difficult family or pushy people. Like we have to figure out if the person is actually helpful or harmful.
This is gonna, uh, greatly affect our emotional regulation. Like, are you being helped or are you being controlled? Another example is being triggered to intense shame where you become reactive from shame. That can mean everything from getting in super intense about a mistake to overly compensating or covering something up.
Another is being ruled by anxiety, where you're too exhausted to date, to keyed up to find a new job, or to find a healthy partner, or stop coping in ways that don't feel good, but you're really stuck in them with the anxiety. Another example is struggling with depression or the dysthymia like I had, which is a low grade functioning depression that I often see in proximity to dissociation.
Like the low energy prevents you from doing what you wanna do or being able to get out of your own way. Even that's like finding a better job or a better roommate or something. Being able to emotionally regulate is not just about being aware of these things, but finding just a little bit more ability to function.
While you're experiencing the shitty emotions, which is a start, like you might be able to get to the place where your emotions don't sabotage your goals or your needs or your dreams, but you are maybe from the beginning feeling them while you're doing the hard thing. It's okay. Side note, my emotional dysregulation would greatly improve if I found a new restaurant to work in, or if my band played a really good show with a certain band, or if I started dating someone and the newness was intoxicating.
But while those things were uplifts, I would often land in the same place. So this is really good to look at the patterns we have and trauma symptoms 'cause we'll all, we all have like a built in forgetter with our childhood trauma and hopeful thinking, which kind of bites us in the. Maybe leave a comment here about what this looks like for you or what kind of goal you would like to have, or actually something that has actually helped around emotional regulation.
Last of the four categories is coping and perhaps the most important because it's a direct response to the other three categories and triggers from the other three categories. Think about this one this way. How do you deal with your feelings when we grow up in family systems that don't help kids deal with feelings in healthy ways?
Children then have to find ways to deal with them and cope with them on their own. Or we pick them up from how dysfunctional parents cope with their feelings. Here are some examples of coping strategies that prevent us from having our shit together. A coping strategy is a behavior usually around the concept of escape.
Raise your hand out there. If you were a kid and you daydreamed a lot as a kid, that's kind of dissociation. You might have learned to dissociate from your life. Really early on to cope so that the kids come up with these things. The first example is magical thinking. We can cope by fantasizing or not being real about getting out of, say, debt or our current income level and or being with someone who is highly dysfunctional or an abusive partner or magical thinking is like, it's not that bad, or it'll get better later.
And hoping for the best and ignoring big things is how you maybe deal with your feelings or actually not deal with feelings. And this is a fantasy that things will get, again, will get better on their own in the future without taking any real action, which is a lot like codependency. Another example is drinking porn, sexual sex stuff or substance abuse.
It might be a confronting question right now, but does your intake get in the way of you getting what you want in life? Both materialistically and being the person that you actually wanna be. Another example is our cell phones. Like we're all addicted, but are you on it in order to deal with your feelings when you be, could be using that time to do something else that you want to go after.
What does your screen time amount tell you? About being your level of stuckness. This also applies to video games. I personally play video games for like an hour a day to decompress. In the past, before I really kind of did any work on myself, if I had an Xbox in the nineties, I would've been on it for five hours and probably would've made it to my restaurant shop.
Um. Another example is rescuing or caretaking others. Do you find yourself in a pattern of trying to be a superhero or, or really getting triggered around other people's problems? Do you distract yourself from your own life through other people's problems? In this one, we can actually cope with childhood trauma.
Shame, like things like abandonment and having a tragic parent by overly showing up for people in our present lives to our detriment. Another example is fantasy topics, hobbies. Overspending money and time on something like that is kind of an escape for you, but being unable to stop yourself and escape in any way prevents us from kind of growing.
Just kind of pick your poisoning. It could be porn videos, it even could be reading. It just really depends on our energy around the thing. And related to emotional regulation. This may sound kind of goofy, but sometimes we cope by self hating ourselves and loathing ourselves. That's kind of, we can get a hit of self.
Pity, and that's like a vicious cycle that comes for survivors that we really have to confront in a healthy way. So just know that all of those things are pretty, pretty common for childhood trauma and it's, it's just hard to be a person actually, especially if you've experienced childhood trauma where there is greater need to cope.
The ways we cope actually might be the best place to start seeing if we can get unstuck and lessening our coping is a huge source of self-esteem and taking some personal power back. Like, can you quit drinking for two months and work on yourself? Can you stop reading fantasy or romance novels while putting off that book that you wanna write?
Can you set a boundary with a friend who calls you in crisis but never changes or takes your advice kind of a thing. These all involve coping and will affect the other three categories. So in order to get our shit together, we have to understand those four categories and nail the issues first in order to be able to work on them.
Let's talk about getting our shit together with three major ideas. The first is gonna be how you map out how you specifically don't have your shit together. The next is gonna be mood dependent behavior, and then we're gonna pick one thing. So. Map out how you don't have your shit together. Specifically create a chart like I did in the beginning of this video, specifically listing things in each category, like map out the stuck places instead of feeling like you're shooting in the dark about maybe what's going on or what's wrong for you.
So here's a hypothetical chart for income they put down. I'm too available at work and I people please. I'm also underpaid and I live in lack. I'm not paid for the extra work I do. So that's their income. Under their relationships, they put down, I expect my partner to support my unhealthy attachment to work.
We fight about me not being present, moving on to emotional regulation. They wrote down, I break down from feeling not seen or that my efforts aren't valued. I feel attacked, and then I get distant and I get passive aggressive at work. Those are all emotional regulation kind of issues. And lastly, for coping, they put down, I double my efforts to make people happy.
Probably to their detriment. I'll binge drink after a work binge or a fight. Probably not good, and I consistently look for jobs online, but I don't apply. Also, a coping strategy related to something coming up called mood dependent behavior. In this chart, it requires some brutal honesty in everyone's chart will look different.
Number two is make some notes on how one category affects the other, like the person's people pleasing at work. And that chart that I just said makes their drinking go up and their fights with their partner go up next. What you can do is you can write out what it would look like. If you didn't have these issues going on, it might be helpful to pick one of the issues that affects the others more, which I'll talk about in a minute.
In the example I gave, I focused on the person's work being a major thing, like with the people pleasing. Maybe that's gonna be emotional regulation for you or coping for you, like getting fired because of your addiction to social media at work is gonna be a thing. So that's the what I mean to, how to focus on that.
The most important thing, maybe the most important thing in this video is the fourth piece with this one is notice in the chart example that I gave, which is very common for childhood trauma survivors. The person is caught up in a subconscious mission. It's like their inner child is trying to achieve something at work.
That messes up everything else. Ask yourself or notice if there is an unconscious mission you have that doesn't work or doesn't belong in the present. Say your inner child is obsessed with the idea that your partner is cheating on you, that's gonna affect your coping, your emotional regulation, and most likely work.
So that was all about mapping out how we don't have our shit. The next piece is very important is mood dependent behavior. Coming back to mood dependent behavior that I mentioned earlier. You can think about mood dependent behavior as an unconscious. Contingency plan that we will have going on that actually doesn't really work or doesn't match the reality, and it keeps you from growing or achieving what you want.
Here are some examples of mood dependent thoughts, like, I'll stop fighting with my partner when things die down at work. Next week I'll stop watching internet porn. When I actually get into a relationship or when I get back into doing my art, I'll start looking for a job when I have. More emotional head space in when I'm not so exhausted.
So notice some things. All of those thoughts are about the future, not in the here and now. All of those thoughts and beliefs that you'll be able to have more energy when external things are more in place, possibly like on their own, like not coming from an internal resolve that you have. And yes, sometimes things just work out or work gets easy.
Or we might have a, we might shift out of a coping phase on its own or be in a more productive phase. The goal is to be able to be consistent and be able to consistently shift, to be able to get out of our own way. That took me many, many years, but it's a process that I eventually got to write out any mood dependent thoughts that you have, what does that look like for you?
Then next, write out how the mood dependent thought doesn't actually work regarding to getting your shit together. That maybe even the mood dependent thing is a fantasy that you might have. I've spent most of my life. Pre therapy waiting for my life to get better on its own. And it, it just didn't, I was wrong about that.
So the third thing we're gonna look at is just simply start to get your shit together. So we know about the four categories and how they might affect each other. We also know that we might be diluting ourselves subconsciously through mood dependent behaviors. Also, we have like a subconscious fantasy going on that our inner child has going on.
Let's get our. Together, but building on the ways we actually do have our shit together first. Like when we don't have our shit together. Those problems feel like internally they feel huge, they feel internally global, that we're a complete up, which isn't true. Um, it always makes me think about a scene from the eighties movie, the Breakfast Club, where all the teens are kind of talking about how their family sees them as fun.
And then they start talking about things that they actually can do. And Anthony Michael Hall just goes, I can make spaghetti. You know, like don't lose sight of the things that you actually can do. Big ways or small ways. Like tell, like tell me right now in the comments section, what is something that you can actually do that?
You do have your shit together. About in my own chart that I talked about in the beginning, I left out the ways that I actually did have my shit together. In some ways. Like that job is, I was actually employable in restaurants. So yes, it was only restaurants, but it was a start. I had some money to function.
I got through college with it. Relationships. I was cute and dateable. I was just overwhelming and really, really wounded. But you know, whatcha gonna do? Um, emotionally I might have been an emotional mess. People around me could talk to me in a real way. There wasn't much surface-y about me, which was kind of refreshing, I think, and for coping, like, yes, I had all these coping skills going on, but all of those things I did with drugs and craziness helped me understand the pain in others.
In a weird way, I could also take risk from learning how to take on from the unhealthy risks that I did, meaning I could start my own business later in life because I wasn't so terrified. To try things and yes, I'm saying my risk taking with drugs and alcohol was eventually turned into risk. Taking in healthier ways to maybe go after jobs, go after dates that were healthier, that kind of a thing.
And I had the skill kind of like, I'll try anything. And that served me really well in life. So luckily I got sober and I didn't self-destruct, but it was kind of an asset that I had. There is that perspective related to the next task of recommendations of how to get your. Fit together. All of these can involve the help of a therapist if that's available to you or a coach.
Um, you just really gotta be thoughtful about who you pick. Pick the one thing in your chart that affects the others more. If you're drinking or your coping gets in the way of your emotions and your relationships, just maybe focus on getting sober around that thing. If you approach all four categories at once and fixing everything at once, it's probably not gonna work out 'cause it's like too much too soon.
Uh, or a perfect from now on, kind of a thing that. Inner children can really live on. From my experience, just getting a better job or a better income in my life will affect everything else in the positive. If you are in a pattern of dating disastrous people, affecting your job, emotions and coping, maybe stop dating.
Maybe kind of get sober around that. Just learning how to not blow up at people with some emotional regulation skills can make your life incredibly better and will probably reduce a lot of childhood trauma. Shame and reduce frustration. Even doing a program like stopping drinking for two months or indefinitely maybe makes so many other things come into place.
Um, the secret mission of that kind of one thing, remember what I said earlier about an unconscious mission we can have from our potential childhood trauma or our inner child, like the person who was people pleasing and kind of workaholic in that chart I gave earlier. The importance of picking one thing right now and the thing that affects the others most is most likely going to be related to a childhood trauma issue.
If the person from that chart who is workaholic picked the job thing as their major thing, which would probably be a good move, they could start to discover that their childhood trauma mission of trying to be seen when they were maybe abandoned or neglected in childhood. They could also, people please and try to make work be amazing because they grew up in chaos where everything felt like nothing was ever gonna work out.
Um, with some highly dysfunctional people. Raise your hand or that if you've ever, if you've been that person or you've met a person that always wanted. Things to be like amazing. It always makes me wonder about what are they trying to make better when it's really not that big of a deal and coming back to that person with the chart.
Like they might get triggered when their partner just wants them to be present with them and their inner child is like, Hey, I've gotta do this mission to make everything better at work, so I'm okay. You know, if we plug that concept into from my chart in the beginning, a good place for me to have started back then.
Um, and I did start unpacking this in therapy was probably my relationship issues. Like my childhood trauma was one of neglect and abandonment and chaos. So most of my dysfunction was like my inner child's mission to find someone who could tolerate me and rescue me, or that I could totally fix them, and then we would live in happily ever after.
That's where I would sometimes overwhelm the women that I would date, and either through negativity or intensity. And that subconscious mission, that childhood trauma inner child issue I had was where most of the work that I needed to do in therapy, like around which kind of just kind of fixed it on its own later.
If you get stuck with this subconscious mission kind of thing. Think about it from terms of like what pisses you off the most, what triggers you the most out of any of those four categories or just pick what like. Pisses you off the most in your life. That's a pattern. So some suggestions and final thoughts, and thank you for sticking with me so far.
I needed a resource to get my shit together about the major issues that I had, like I needed the resource of therapy. If that's available to you, I know that that might be loaded. It's hard to do this on our own, but it, it is possible. I know it's annoying to hear, but try to start small. Don't think about it as changing everything overnight.
Um, commit to doing something right now though. Put into the comments, um, what you might want to commit to. One small thing or big thing related to your chart, or do the chart and come back to the comments. It takes a lot of trying. Unfortunately, this is gonna be a process. Maybe commit to getting one new job, interview a month.
To either get a job or get out of a job that doesn't serve you. The only remedy to mood dependent behavior is gonna be here and now action. It took me, for example, it took me four attempts to finally quit smoking and all of those attempts which were successful, like I stopped for six months or a year, and then finally I stopped forever.
All of those involve throwing away my cigarettes in the here and now. And that's really the opposite of mood dependent behavior. What mood dependent behavior tells us, we think we can't tolerate discomfort that we need to go through in order to get our shit together, but that's really not true. The fact that the discomfort in the here and now yields to the changes we really want to see in our lives.
And lastly, getting my. Together was a long process. Once I started going to therapy and changing my coping strategies for healthier ones, I kept building on more successes. It was like really building a house, but it was really the building that foundation and digging was the hardest, like pouring a foundation.
And I'm not sort of saying that that has to be a job for you. Whatever your biggest thing is is kind of what I mean by the foundation. And lastly, lastly, the harshest truth I have to hear is that our inner children will say, I can't. I can't do that right now. I can't try right now. I can't learn to seek out different people.
I don't know how, I can't tolerate dating new people or a type of person, or working in a new field or going back to school. The I can't is coming from a place of pain where we didn't have any help as children, but that's different now. We were adults and we can handle. Way more than what we used to not be able to handle.
The trick is to not have our inner child's pain and belief system running our lives and while trying to get our shit together, it's probably not gonna work. So a lot of this stuff is really gonna be start to kind of look at some inner child dialoguing and build a relationship with that child. Because if they're kind of running amuck in our lives, they're not bad.
It's just how this stuff works. It's probably gonna sabotage us more. So I hope that this video was helpful to you. I would love to hear about the one major thing that you would like to pick. How did your chart go? Did you discover like the subconscious mission that's keeping you stuck? And I would love to hear from you and it's, it's honestly, this work is really about just footwork versus coping.
And or just waiting for things to get better, which is kind of like, that's always kind of a sad place to be, and I really lived in that for so long. So
