Please Check Yourself!

Friends, it is high time that we ALL fully recognize something:

Society and the culture in which we were born and raised has conditioned and trained us to believe, behave, and respond in ways that are harmful to us and others.

 

If you do not do the difficult work of fully investigating your beliefs, your attitudes, your emotions, your fears, your triggers, your behavior, and your patterned responses, then you WILL unconsciously harm yourself and others whether you ever realize it or not.  

Cultures change slowly. Beliefs change slowly.  Physical changes are slow to manifest. Mindsets are slow to shift.  You have ingrained patriarchal, colonialist, racist beliefs embedded in your DNA, in your nervous system, in your beliefs, your responses, your fears, unless and until you actively root them out.

 Let me share a story with you.

  I took our youngest son to the dentist yesterday. 

The hygienist walked out to the waiting room, called his name, and he went back to the exam room with her while I stayed in the waiting room.

When his cleaning was over, she walked him back to the front and called me over to the desk with them for us to check out.  She handed me a prescription for a special toothpaste, explained that some of the enamel on his teeth is breaking down again, that he isn’t brushing his teeth good enough, and that he needs to come back again to have another area repaired.

I replied with something along the lines of, “OK.  I can’t say that I’m surprised.”, while he piped up with, “I’ve been doing better. I have! I’m going to do better.”

She continued, “Yes, well, he really needs to do better.  I asked him back in the room, ‘Doesn’t your mom ever say anything or get on you about brushing your teeth?’”

<screeeeechhhh>

Whoa.  Hold up. 

She just said,“I asked him, ‘Doesn’t your mom ever…..?’”

Excuse me??!!

Wait?  It’s MY responsibility to ensure that this other human brushes his teeth on a regular and consistent basis??  For how long?  For all of eternity?

Perhaps I should note, for you, the reader:

My son, whom I had at the dentist, turns 18 years old in less than a week.

He has received years’ worth of instruction on the importance of brushing his teeth.  He has studied bacteria in school.  He has been seeing a dentist every 6 months, at least, since he was 4 years old and came to live with us. 

He has long since been capable of brushing his own teeth.  Brushing his teeth is now, and has been for some time, HIS responsibility, not MINE. 

And, quite frankly, as a woman who has spent years in therapy trying to heal from a lifetime of this sort of unfair, untrue, dishonest, patriarchal, abusive bullshit, I take offense at the mere suggestion that it is, in any way, MY fault or responsibility.

Don’t worry.  I didn’t trigger.  A year ago, I would have. 

Instead, I simply laughed and said, “whoa, whoa!  I assure you that his mother has, in fact, taught him about the importance of brushing his teeth and reminded him over and over, for years, about doing so; but he turns 18 years old next week.  He is an adult now.  This is on him, not me.  If he wants to avoid having to come back to the dentist, then I guess HE will need to learn that HE needs to brush his teeth better.”

 Now, was that hygienist trying to guilt me into believing that it is my fault, that I should do better, that my son bears no responsibility in this, that he shouldn’t be held accountable for his own failures?  No. 

But is that what she was implying with her words?  Yes.  She was simply unconsciously repeating what she has been trained to do without thinking her words through. She was simply continuing her own generational trauma and patterns of the past.

The saddest part of this whole thing, for me, is this - what do you think she has unintentionally taught her own daughters, if she has them? 

How do you think their mental health has fared, believing that they are responsible for other people’s choices, other people’s behavior, other people’s refusal to do their part, when they have absolutely NO power to control any of those things?

After years of therapy and study and finally breaking free from a lot of the lies of this co-dependent, patriarchal, colonialist society myself, I can tell you what they’re probably dealing with.  Stress, anxiety, panic disorder, physical illness, autoimmune disease, fear, anger, resentment, isolation, addiction, abuse.

You control you.  And only you.  Make good choices for yourself.

They should control themselves.  And only themselves. Let them make their own choices. 

Then, be honest with yourself and hold yourself AND them accountable for the choices that have been made.

Truth. Honesty. Accountability. For ALL.

 

#dothework

#codependencykills