I know that you have thought of the childhood roots of your toxic ties in adulthood. A toxic tie is when you feel yourself being held hostage in a relationship in which you feel yourself losing power. You don’t want to feel this way, but you don’t seem able to stop.
One common root of this is being raised by parents who had a toxic tie to one another. We cannot change our past, but we can change our present for a brighter future, and in so doing. support our children in developing healthy relationship patterns in their adulthood. So this post focuses on how we as adults, parents and teachers can free ourselves from toxic ties, and protect our children from cultivating toxic ties as well.
Our liberation begins as we recognize that the other person is not exerting any sort of power over us. Our own unbalanced feeling of attraction is the cause.
If you examine your feeling of attraction you will discover that it is always connected to a shimmering image in your mind. You think or envision that person in a way that arouses your feelings of attraction, longing and need. That feeling of wanting, longing and need is your power seeping out of you. You are losing power to an image in your mind.
If you go to work on developing the strength to live in a present state of thoughtless awareness, you will notice that the feelings of attraction dissipate when you hold your mind in a thought-free state of abeyance. It is not the person you are attracted to or feeling a need for; it is the image. You can no more hold an image in your arms than you can catch the wind or grab hold of a puff of smoke. Thus, you feel perpetually needy as long as you remain attracted to the image in your mind.
Your toxic tie might be a result of another person having the insight into you, and the skill necessary, to intentionally project just the sort of image that incites your deepest longing. It is all to easy to make the leap in our assumption that because this person triggers your feeling of need that he or she truly is the solution to your neediness and the source of your fulfillment. It is then not just the mental image of the person that you lose your power to, but the physical image that you see with your eyes.
The reality is that someone may be capable of appearing to be your ideal, while the truth may be that this person is actually incapable of treating you well on a consistent basis, and may not even have any interest in being kind to you. Your longing to possess the physical image of another person is really based on a mirage.
You can feel excruciatingly attracted to the image of someone. The pain can be so great that you feel absolutely desperate to get that image to be entirely subservient to your will and desire. You can feel agony just looking at that person, or thinking of that person.
The stronger your attraction to or longing for an image, the more power you are losing to that image. Even if someone whose image you find attractive behaves in a manner that seems just about perfect relative to your deepest desires (it will never be totally perfect, but you are likely to overlook the flaws when the promise of pleasure is quite great), that does not mean that person can or will ever repeat that performance. This is like the addict who takes a drug that sends him into ecstasy the first time, but that never quite seems to deliver another high that good; so he continues coming back for more and more in quest of what was never truly real in the first place.
To gain freedom from a toxic tie, then, requires the necessary work of gaining freedom from thoughts that arouse attraction or power-loss to mental image. That work is crucial, and it takes a lot of long-term discipline to accomplish it. In addition, what is required is your understanding of what it is that you want from the image that you feel so strongly attracted to. That person’s appearance is arousing within you a powerful desire for an internal experience that you long for at your core. What is that experience?
You might presume that it is sexual, but sexuality is empty, superficial and unfulfilling without a particularly deep emotional component of inner connection, love and authentic, spiritual bonding. In fact, sex without that bonding feels degrading on a deep inner level. Could it be that self-degradation is what you are really after when you feel yourself being held hostage in a relationship with someone with whom you feel a loss of your power?
The ideal purpose of a relationship is to enhance the empowerment of both partners. If you feel disempowered by the relationship, it is inherently toxic for you. You need to do the inner work necessary to free yourself from the internal ways that you give up and lose your power in the relationship. This involves getting very deeply in touch with your feelings, because it is only through clear awareness of your deep inner feelings that you can sense your loss of power.
The practice of being aware of your thinking, so you can stop thinking of images that you lose power to, is step one of getting free of a toxic tie. The practice of being deeply aware of your feelings all the time, in the present moment, is step two.
The appropriate way to feel at all times is deep, genuine and complete inner peace, fulfillment, contentment, safety, happiness and love. When you are feeling these feelings you are in your power. When you leave these feelings you are losing your power. You are being held hostage by a toxic tie. You are not wrong for feeling longing, grief, anger or any other form of internal suffering; but you are internally imbalanced when that is happening. Your work then is not to judge yourself or deny or repress how you feel, but to do the inner work needed to get back into your inner peace, back to your point of power.
Your point of power is crucial. It is your leverage in life. When you are losing power your whole life begins a downward spiral. As you recover and maintain your point of power, everything in your life seems to work out, like grace. Becoming involved in a relationship in which you lose your power will cost you; it may even cost you your life if you get too involved for too long. We cannot afford to spend much time off of our point of power, and we cannot make it anyone else’s responsibility to return us to that point, or to keep us in that point.
We can define a toxic relationship as one in which we are counting on another person to return us to our point of power. We believe that we need that person to behave a certain way toward us for us to avoid losing our power to our own unbalanced reactions. No one can do this for us, though, and the more we count on someone doing this for us the more power we end up losing to that person.
It is ironic that what we ultimately want from someone we desire is for that person to extinguish our feeling of desire, to return us to the inner peace we felt before our desire was aroused. By practicing living in our center of peace, which is our point of power, our capacity to remain lodged in that state grows stronger, and the peace and power we feel grows deeper. As we choose inner peace rather than falling for the ruse of attraction, we provide ourselves with what we were wanting from the person who cannot give it to us.
Attraction to a mental or physical image means that you have been aroused out of your inner peace, into the illusion that you can experience more pleasure and fulfillment from an outside source. Again and again and again this leads as you end up feeling worse and worse the more that you pursue the satisfaction promised by the image.
How can you tell if someone is truly right for you? You find that person to be in harmony with your inner balance, rather than someone who stimulates imbalance within you. You do not experience a longing for more of that person or from that person. You feel free to grow in your own power as you pursue the path in life that liberates your greater power. Not just free, but entirely supported in doing so. You are not trying to get anything from another person, but rather find your power by doing more for others in ways that feed your sense of power through loving service.
When we feel bound by a toxic tie we find ourselves with someone who is opposed to our empowerment. That person feels threatened by it because our growth either makes him or her feel inferior and inadequate, or he or she fears that we will in someway outgrow and therefore abandon him or her. Such a person will attempt to block your path of liberation. He might insist that you stop listening to music that you love, that you stop dressing in ways that express your freedom and power, that you leave your chosen career of passion to get a regular job, that you play smaller in social situations. That person will cut you down in a thousand ways in an effort to put a lid on your budding power. At some point he or she will deliver the ultimate blow by using all the power you have given away to make you feel utterly helpless, powerless, pathetic and dependent. In other words, he or she will attempt to transplant your idea of God, and attempt to place himself or herself in that role in your life. The devil will demand your soul in exchange for what you want from him, and even if you give it, you will find that the devil cannot be trusted to make good on his promises!
In the end, we are always thrown back upon ourselves. It is up to us to learn and to recognize how we give our power away, so that we can stop. We give our power away by entertaining mental images that incite our longing. We give our power away by relating to physical images as accurate representations of the power to please us fully, deeply, truly and consistently. Ultimately, we give our power away by leaving our place of inner peace, that is our point of power, in the quest of an outside source of greater fulfillment.
The power of a toxic tie to hold you hostage in a disempowering relationship is dissolved as you practice living in unconditional inner peace more and more consistently. We achieve this by practicing not-thinking whenever a mental image stirs our feeling of attraction or desire. We must add to this the practice of staying consciously aware of our feelings in the present moment. And then, when you find yourself feeling a strong sense of longing in response to the sight of an alluring physical image, to take your attention off of that image and focus instead on living in a thought-free state of present awareness, with your attention focused on feeling whatever degree of inner peace you can experience. What you hold your attention on expands.
In my phone-coaching I guide, coach and train individuals in the process of gaining liberation from thought, gaining attunement to feelings, and releasing from the toxic inner patterns that cause them to feel trapped in toxic relationships. See www.themethodforlove.com and click on contact to set up a time for a complimentary phone conversation with me to discuss your needs and for me to provide you with some keys.
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