Why do you lose yourself in N?
First, you probably have your own trauma. Trauma victims often relate best to other trauma victims. You may have your own self-worth issues or most probably were raised by N yourself, so you’re just repeating your trauma patterns. Here is what’s really going to toast your bun!
You will start to become just like N if you don’t diligently work on your own self-care and healing.
You will get lost in your own pain, anger and self-absorption. Just as you recreated your own childhood so did N. They hurt you over and over just as they were hurt. This could risk you becoming numb, just like N and then becoming N. This is incredibly dangerous if you have children. One N is tough, being raised by two is debilitating as you already may have experienced
I was suffering. I was in a lot of emotional turmoil. I was struggling. I wanted to have good friendships. I wanted to have meaningful connections. I wanted to be a source of joy for others and to live in a state of joy for myself. Yet, my own internal turmoil, coupled with a lack of understanding in how to set firm limits with others, caused a lot of grief for me.

I was either beating myself up for “not acting right” or angry at them for “not acting right”. Until I realized, even though they engaged in ‘usury’ behavior, they are also suffering. I too was suffering, not just because they engaged in ‘usury’ behavior, but because I didn’t know how to set healthy boundaries.
I wanted to learn and to grow. This started with me going within and asking “what about them is stirring up emotion within me?”. This is not what most people are conditioned to do. Most people are conditioned to focus outward and to focus on “Look at what they did!”
We do this covertly with teams pitted against one another. This creates the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ socially acceptable schism. Then it’s look at those groups, those religions, those colors and the list becomes endless of ways to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’. This is the function of the N Ego – to separate. For apart we are weakened. This is why so many will blindly follow – we are too weak to blaze our own path!
So to understand N, I first had to understand self. We can expand this to understand anyone else, first we must undertested self. If we ask the question “Why are they triggering us? What is going on with us? Where is this reaction really coming from? What is this reaction really about?”, then we can start to understand self.
Sadly, I and many people like me, thought preparing a laundry list of what I perceived “others” did wrong would help me feel better. My experience is it made me sick and sicker. The more I focused outside self for explanations, the more unwell I became. Anger soon turned to resentments (festering anger from way back when). Upset turned to depression. Fear turned to perpetual anxiety. The key to end all this suffering was to face self. Here is an example.
We ask for help. They agree to help. They don’t help. We are X. X will depend on our own childhood. We are hurt and feel rejected if that is how we felt as a child. We are sad and believe we can never count on anyone if that is what we had growing up. We will think, they have forgotten us again because we don’t matter if we were the forgotten child. We will think they relapsed if our parent was the using forgetter. We may think they lied and never intended to help and that will be our trigger. Do you see this pattern? We will create a “story” about what they didn’t show up. The “story” will be directly tied to our personal wound. So the “story” will match our past – not anyone else.
So what is really happening here? Are we not just really recreating the same cycle of our past trauma? So the solution is to change the cycle. We can stop the shame cycle by stopping our “story telling” around other people’s actions. We can change the meaning we attach to ‘them’ not helping because that is the only thing we do have the power to change. Then we can learn to set healthy boundaries so we can attract “helping” friends to our life! The helpers will replace the harmers but the work must start within us and with us first!