I’ll never forget the day that I sat in my therapist office and she proclaimed the words that my heart had wanted to hear for so long. She said to me “You are in every way a normal healthy human being, able to have good relationships, experience intimacy, closeness, and bonding”
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Have you ever seen reality TV on the final episode where the winning contestants name gets announced and they almost wanna collapse and start crying and saying this is all I’ve ever wanted to do in my life.
They got the thing they were so hungry for. That is the feelings that hit me when my therapist said those words to me. Yes indeed, I’m a healthy person in every way able to life a full life. Not an ounce of toxicity to be found anywhere. I wanted to collapse to the floor like a reality show contestant that just found out they won.
There is a good reason for why knowing I’m a healthy person is important to me. You see, I was born into a highly toxic family. To sum it up, I was born into a game of thrones world filled with lying, emotional manipulation, backstabbing.
Growing up I had been exposed to a whole world of behaviors that leave one annihilated and also teach you to annihilate and destroy others. For the longest time I held a deep fear in me that I would go out into the world hurting others the same way I’d been hurt by recreating all the behaviors I had learned from example.
Family get-togethers resembled closely the Game of Thrones episode “The Red Wedding” where the Starks get invited to what they thought was a simple wedding celebration but by the end of the episode a pile of corpses are lying all over the floor. Even at a young age I would walk into a room or gathering and the air would stink of agenda and motivation and i had to develop instincts in order to survive.
In my mid 20’s I set my intention that I was going to make my way out of this mess and become an amazing human being, healthy, capable of life, free of all toxicity. At that time I had no clue how I was going to do that. There was nothing within my family’s example of behavior that I could reference on how to behave like a healthy human being.
Little did I know that the act of setting my intention and making that choice would be the key to me reaching my destiny. Bit by bit I would read article on relationships spend time with healthy families and watch how they behave. I wanted to run away from the toxic background I came from so badly that i spent every waking minute doing things to rewire myself to learn new behaviors.
My fiery intention, commitment, and consistency paid off. Eventually the behaviors that came naturally to me where closer to that of ones typical of a healthy loving home instead of what grew up in. One day I discovered something about the brain called neuroplasticity.
To put it in laymans terms the brain has been designed to have a great deal of flexibility to change like an elastic band. One can come from a toxic background but with time and commitment reach the other end of the scale and end up completely healthy and whole.
On the other hand one can come from a loving nurturing background but can slip and slide and end up in complete toxicity. The background one was born into doesn’t have to be their destiny. It all depends on each persons intention they have set and daily choices.
I hadn’t noticed but eventually I was making so many healthy positive choices that I became just as healthy as people who had been born into good homes. What started to happen is that I would begin relationships with people from good families and they could see nothing wrong or off about my behavior.
It was then that I realized that I had truly crossed over and that I will never have to fear that I would hurt another human being by carrying into the relationship the toxicity I grew up in. A true life story of the tortoise and the hare….slow and steady wins the race.
For those of you who watch Game of Thrones ought to know that my family pretty much resembles the Lannisters. But through my own set of healthy choices, even though I was born a “Lannister”, I worked out my life to be that of Queen Daenerys Targaryen… chilling in the desert, freeing slaves, and dancing with dragons.
Photo Credit: datawallpaper, walliki
