Emotional Expression Part 4: Reflections

This is part 4 on my series about opening up to emotional expression. To read the previous posts in this series, click here for Part 1, click here for Part 2, and click here for Part 3.

It’s now been about 2 years since all of these incidents. I was able to feel through a heap of emotions in both of these experiences with my parents; fear for the first time, and also anger and grief. I don’t know how soon I would have gotten to those emotions otherwise.

I still have many emotions to feel about these events and about my childhood, and I still have many issues with emotional expression and facade, but these experiences helped me and taught me a lot.

I want to reiterate that this blog is not meant to be a prescriptive suggestion for what you should do in your interactions with your parents. All these choices to confront and express with my parents were ones I made on my own as experiments. But I wanted to write this to share what I feel the experiences showed me about issues that we all face.

The Aftermath

My dad never got in touch to see me before I moved. He told everyone that I have fabricated everything I’ve ever said he did to me or to others. He has convinced my brothers and his side of the family of this as well. He has not been in touch with me in the last 2 years and I suspect he has blocked my phone number and email.

My grandmother on my Dad’s side passed and I was not invited to her funeral nor told at all about the death by anyone in the immediate family. I found out later, accidentally.

My mom has also stopped talking to me completely in the last 2 years. She also didn’t want to see me before I moved countries, and she has not responded at all to the few emails and texts I’ve sent her since then. I’ve had a grandparent, an uncle, and a cousin die on her side of the family and I wasn’t invited to any funerals, nor was I told that they passed. Rather I found out later from cousins.

My parents both sought out my brothers to get them on their “side” after these events, which is a pattern they’ve engaged my whole life. I did not tell my brothers about any of the interactions with my parents nor involve them at all. My parents hate each other, but both feel the same way towards me, and have wanted my brothers and other family members to attack me. I also had an interaction with my grandfather where I shared in an email how I honestly felt about family dynamics. After hearing about all these interactions with my parents and grandfather, one of my brothers sent me a few emails saying things like,

“The most abusive person in the family, most angry, delusional and damaging person I’ve met in my life is you. I truly wish you figure out what’s making you so unhappy, but honestly hope I never hear from or about you again. You bring nothing but pain.”

“Like a child, you make things up to put others down to build yourself up. This is good bye, good luck, I don’t miss you and I don’t plan ever to hear from you again. I can’t think of a time in the last 15 years you’ve made anyone’s life better. If anyone chooses not to sever ties, that’s their choice but this is the last conversation I’ll have with or about you.”

This brother has since had a child of his own, again which nobody told me about nor has invited me to meet. My other brother just stopped talking to me without any direct confrontation.

While these messages from my brother are harsh and I do have hurt to feel about it, I recognize that my siblings are only reflecting the precise emotions that my parents have towards me. Both my parents saw these emails from my brother and didn’t say anything, and the reason for that is that they have trained my brother to feel this way about me and so these are their feelings towards me exactly. My parents (and grandparents) feel glad when my brothers attack and reject me. My brothers were also abused in many ways and I am older than them, so I saw the pain created in them as little boys, that they now want to avoid.

My brothers are attacking and rejecting me in an effort to avoid their own pain with our parents and about their own childhoods. I have compassion for that. That being said, I am grieving the loss of my brothers and still miss them a lot.

My family’s preferred mode of punishment and abuse has tended to be to initially attack me and tell me that I am a terrible person, and then after that, to completely ignore me. The “You’re dead to me” projection is the primary punishment in my family, and my dad has even said that to me directly in the past. My mom has the same feeling, but due to her heavy facade, hasn’t said the actual statement, but her behavior has been much the same as my dad’s. This has been their response to my honest emotional expression.

So since all of this, most all of my family has cut me out, with the exception of a couple of cousins. I am also in touch with my 9 year old half-sister. But that is it.

I am finding it extremely difficult to work through being hated by most of my family, but I have to say that I don’t regret any of the efforts I went to finding out what the truth really is. While losing most all my family has been so hard, it has absolutely been worth it. It’s not worth keeping our family “close” and together if it means living in delusion and having our emotional expression continue to be suffocated. It now feels obvious how awful of a trade that is to make.

Opening to Emotional Expression

Now I’d like to share some of what I learned from these experiences with my family, and how I feel that it might be relevant for others in exploring their issues with emotional expression. Everyone’s situation is unique but I wanted to share to encourage exploration and maybe save others some time and heartache.

Some of what I learned:

1) I can trust my intuition as to what I suspect my parents’ real motivations and feelings are, rather than self-doubting.

Not only was I bang-on in my intuition about what my parents’ real feelings were towards me, it was even worse than I had thought. So not only was I not exaggerating or being paranoid, in fact the suspicions of what I thought the truth might be, still didn’t go far enough.

When I had these experiences with my parents, I’d been listening to Divine Truth for 9 years and I’d had personal feedback about my parents from Jesus and Mary. I started unraveling the truth about my dad when I went to therapy 16 years prior. So after 16 years since starting on looking at childhood stuff and 9 years listening to DT, I really thought I understood the truth of what happened in my childhood and I really thought I accurately saw my parents for who they are. I thought I got it.

But even after that amount of time studying my family and listening to Divine Truth, if you would have asked me if my mom would be cold and cruel in my deepest moment of vulnerability with her, and after only one sole time expressing my emotions with her, totally cut me out of her life, I would have said ‘No, she’s not that bad. She wouldn’t do that. She’s my mother after all.’

If you would have asked me if my dad was capable of killing women, of severe violence and abuse, I would have said ‘No, he’s very emotionally abusive, but he’s not going to kill someone. Just because he gets angry and spanked me doesn’t mean he’s murderous.’

If you would have asked me if I thought my family would eventually not invite me to funerals and not tell me about family deaths or births, and appear to decide to never talk to me again, I would have said ‘No, they’ve got major issues but they’re reasonable people.‘

But I was wrong about all of that, even after all that time and study and feedback. I am not judging myself for being wrong about it. Rather I’m emphasizing this to help others reflect on the potential that they might think they know the truth about their parents, but don’t actually know. I needed to trust myself and not doubt any of what I suspected, because in the end all of what I suspected was true. If I had trusted what I thought might be true, it would have allowed me to explore what the truth was, and access emotions sooner. From what I have observed, most everyone downplays the truth of their parents’ feelings and demands on them.

2) Not knowing the full truth of my parents’ motivations and feelings towards me cut me off from accessing and feeling important emotions for my growth.

I could not access certain deeper emotions unless I knew what the truth was about the threats I’ve always been under since conception, and what the real motivations and feelings were from my parents towards me.

During the experiences as well as in the last 2 years, I have been able to get into layers of rage and sadness that I would not have been able to access had my parents’ true feelings not been exposed. Their true colors were only fully exposed when I emotionally expressed myself. The truth did not get exposed to anywhere near the same level when I just talked and said (albeit confronting) words, but controlled all of my unbridled, messy emotional expression.

Before these experiences, I truly believed that emotional expression wouldn’t expose any additional emotions within me. I thought, “I’ve already confronted my parents and told them the issues, what more could come out emotionally now?” What would be the difference, really? But I was so wrong. The difference between emotionally expressing and not, could not be underestimated. Heaps of emotion poured out of me only when I finally faced some terror of emotionally expressing myself.

Also, there were so many patterns and tendencies that I have which I was quite confused about before these experiences, but which I now understand so much better. It is a huge relief to feel much more clear about yourself and why you do what you do, feel what you feel, and have the problems that you have. So many more things in my life and my past now make sense. This also means I feel certain issues are far more solve-able than I felt they were before, because I was just so damn confused. It’s helped my clarity and faith a lot.

3) What my parents said to me about always loving me and the kind of people they say they are, was never true. It was a complete lie.

I was still, to some extent, believing what my parents had always said to me. As I mentioned before, an issue in my family is heavy facade, even within the family, behind closed doors. As a child, my parents, particularly my mom, presented a huge facade about their love for me, while their treatment was very different. They also have very heavy facades about being great people generally. And so even as of a few years ago, I somewhat still believed what everyone said. I believed that my dad would never threaten my life, that my mom would never abandon her children. But the things my parents said about how they cared about me didn’t have a shred of truth.

It is emotional to come to terms with the fact that your entire childhood and relationship with your parents simply wasn’t real. It was a house of cards that the truth could have easily blown over in an instant. But the truth is helping me heal and helping me with opening to a relationship with my true parent, God.

4) The threats, judgements, and projections towards me about my emotional expression are a part of what created my facade.

There have been so many teachings I’ve imbibed about emotional expression, such as that an emotionally messy woman is disgusting, pathetic and utterly unattractive. An angry woman is the the worst kind of woman. Having anger of any kind makes you a shocking, abusive person. You are a horrible person if you’re upset with your parents. You must hide your emotions from others and be respectable. I have felt that crying means you’re weak and can’t handle life well and demonstrates you’re a bit of a failure of a human. My family views my emotions as evidence in their beliefs that I’m mentally ill and crazy.

I have internalized these beliefs and judgements about my own emotion and about similar emotional expressions in others as well. This is a part of what created the facade I ended up having, involving appearing “nice”, “together” and “mature” etc. As a child this facade helped me avoid anger and grief, and helped me avoid a lot of fear and terror related to the threats from my parents if I didn’t have this facade. My facade was in many ways a huge protective barrier for perceived safety. A lot of scary things would have happened if we emotionally expressed ourselves as children.

I can see the logic that now I don’t need that facade, I am not a captive child in my parents’ home. So now I can deconstruct my facade if I wish, which is something I’ve done a little bit of but still need to really decide to do. But in any case, I have a bit more compassion about my facade than I did before. These experiences helped me see that there are reasons I have and want a facade, it’s not just that I’ve got some weird dark problem of wanting to be fake for no reason, or that desire for facade is a personality flaw. It is inevitable I ended up with a facade, given the threats about emotional expression that I was under and the judgements I was systematically attacked with. I do not need to condemn and judge myself for wanting and having a facade, rather I need to just learn about how to get rid of it now.

I also have more compassion for myself and my rigidity and desire for emotional control. I have a little more compassion for the immense rage I’ve carried my whole life, and I have a small sense of how life-changing it will be for me when I am willing to get more into the grief of all of it. Judging myself a bit less and having some more compassion is helping things progress emotionally.

Final Thoughts

The likelihood is that my parents will never talk to me again on Earth. So now I try to visually imagine my parents in front of me and try having emotional expression and see what comes up. I also find it helpful to think of situations throughout my childhood and teenage years when I shut my emotional expression down, and re-imagine that exact same scenario if I had expressed. This has exposed more truth about what resulting abuse would have been likely, and also an opportunity to feel the emotions I never got to feel and say what I never got to say. I will say that this strategy has not brought up the fear that came up when I was actually in front of my parents, but has helped to get to some anger and sadness.

It seems the threats from our parents if we honestly express our emotions can be immense. We can be cast out, rejected, blamed, shamed, accused of fabricating everything, and told we are horrible people. They may never talk to us again for our whole lives, they may want to physically harm, rape, or kill us. They might want to sabotage our life in some way. Our parents’ true colors often do not come out until we are honestly emotionally expressive. I didn’t at all understand the true conditions I was placed under with my parents until I was expressive.

It has been revolutionary for me to consider that God doesn’t feel about my emotional expression the way my parents feel about it. I have always, without realizing it, assumed God would be as horrified and disgusted by my emotional expression as my parents are. It is strange and liberating to feel like God doesn’t judge me screaming my head off in the woods, or feeling scared, or crying hard and often and easily.

I want to acknowledge Divine Truth and Jesus and Mary as the teachers of Divine Truth for sharing the information they have and for assisting me with personal feedback. I’d never have gotten to the emotions and truths that I have without their teachings. Truly, all that I’ve experienced and realized with my family has been thanks to the fact I’ve heard Divine Truth and been given personal assistance by Jesus and Mary.

To wrap up, I wanted to give some journaling prompt ideas and also video recommendations.

First though, I wanted to mention that I’ve had a couple of questions emailed to me about my experiences I’ve written about in these blogs. I am thinking about possibly doing a Part 5 of the series that would be a Q&A, if there are any additional questions to the ones I’ve received. If your questions are about emotions or facade generally, it would be much better to watch the Divine Truth material than to ask me. But if you have questions about my personal experience and process then I am happy to take those and maybe answer them in another post. So if you do want to send, please email me at godloveandtruth {at} gmail.com

If you’re interested in learning more about emotions and the fear of emotional expression, the Divine Truth videos that I recommend are:

Facing My Fear of Emotions videos

Videos about facade

Emotions and Feelings FAQ playlist

I am a big fan of journaling prompts, and so here are some of my ideas that you could journal about with regards to the topics I’ve talked about in these posts:

If you were to not doubt yourself, what are your suspicions of the worst case scenario of what your parents really feel about your unedited emotional expression?

If you were to not doubt yourself, what are your suspicions of the worst case scenario of what your parents might have done to you if you had consistent, unedited emotional expression?

What emotions did you openly display in front of your parents as a child, if any? Not just the words you said (though that’s a part of it), but the full, unedited, unrestrained expression of emotion?

Did you express anger around your parents? Did you cry in front of them? Were you ever very emotionally messy with them?

Were you allowed the expression of some emotions, but not others?

Was it different with one parent than the other, or with your other caregivers?

Did you ever notice a difference in your freedom to emotionally express compared with your friends’ families or portrayed on TV?

Why might you be hesitant about or resistant to the idea of emotionally expressing?

What judgements towards yourself (and others) do you have about being emotionally expressive?

In what ways might not knowing the truth about your parents’ threats and conditions be limiting your growth and your life?

Well, I think that’s it for now from me on this series. I just want to recommend being careful about your self-doubt, and also recommend looking at the judgements and fears you have about emotional expression. I am so glad that I understand more now and have more truth and have been able to access emotions that I couldn’t before. It’s much better!

All the best,

Courtney

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Photos 1 and 2 by stormseeker via Unsplash

Photo 3 by Tarek Correa via Unsplash

Photo 4 by Faris Mohammed via Unsplash

Emotional Expression Part 3: Dad and Me

To read the previous posts in this series, click here for Part 1 and click here for Part 2.

This is Part 3 of this series about what I’ve learned about emotional expression in the last couple years. This blog post will be about experiences I’ve had with and regarding my dad in the last couple years, that has helped me to understand his affect on my struggle with emotional expression.

As I mentioned in my first blog of this series, I have never expressed anger with my dad, and rarely has he seen me cry. Being around my dad has always sent my anxiety sky-high and I would fully “freeze” in his presence. I’d barely breathe, my body would go numb, my throat and belly would clench and I’d often struggle to talk at all, much less emote. I would get quite stiff and quiet around my dad which I now recognize as terror. I think I have often totally gone out of body and dissociated when around him.

I have been aware of my dad’s unloving behavior since I was a teenager, when I had a short stint in therapy, and the therapist was the first person to help me see my dad was abusive.

Growing up with my dad, he sometimes would grab me roughly or shove me, and would scare the family by slamming fists on tables or slamming doors or suddenly yelling etc. He also spanked me a few times but this was considered normal in my Christian upbringing. Because his physically aggressive outbursts weren’t daily or weekly, and didn’t leave me bruised or bleeding, no one thought they were an issue. One time in my childhood he grabbed me and kissed me on the lips and it completely freaked me out. Often I would notice him looking at me too long and it made me feel terrified and ashamed.

Later in my adulthood, more stories about my dad came out. My mom told me that when I was a baby in the car with them, my dad purposefully drove into the curb to scare everyone because he was angry about some destination direction mixup. She also said that once after I left for a school dance as a teenager, my dad remarked that I looked “smoking hot”.

So I already had some awareness of his creation of my struggle with emotional expression in my childhood. My dad is very narcissistic and abusive, and gets a sadistic sort of pleasure from pulling down others, wants power and control over everyone in his environment, and desires to harm people emotionally. He is very manipulative and blaming.

In the years since I was a teenager, my relationship with my dad was on and off and overall rocky. We would often be in touch for a short period of time before he attacked and I drew a boundary and then sometimes we were not in touch for a few years.

Because of my fear of my dad, nearly all my correspondence with my dad has been over email, letter or text. I have always been too afraid to even confront him live on the phone. His responses to my confronting him via email or letter have always been the same: that I am the abusive one, I’ve harmed him severely, I am to blame and he hasn’t done anything wrong.

One time in my early twenties I told him I’d only attend his wedding if he went to a therapy session with me, so we went to one. I tried to share how I felt but his emotional abuse was so bad that the therapist couldn’t keep him civil and herself seemed terrified of him.

Prior to the events I’ll share from a couple years ago, I had come to terms with the fact that my dad was abusive. I had also realized he had sexually predatory feelings towards me. I had known for a long time that a real relationship with him was not possible, and unlike with my mom, I never really tried or hoped for one. I didn’t try to convince him about issues, and I didn’t have the same feelings of desperation that he see what he’d done and validate it like I felt with my mom. I think I had just given up on that a long time ago.

However, because the experiment with my mom had helped me access previously repressed emotions and revealed some really important truth, I wanted to see if I could also experiment with my dad. However, I knew it was a long shot that he’d even agree to see me at all.

But wanted to try, so I texted my dad, which was the our first contact in about 5 years, to ask if I could meet up with him before I moved to England to discuss our relationship. He texted back only, “Not unless the first words out of your mouth are apologies.”

This is one of his abuse tactics, so I knew I would not be able to meet up with my dad unless I groveled and admitted I was horrible, which of course I wasn’t going to do. However I wanted to try to experiment with emotional expression with him somehow. So, a few days later I decided to try to call him. I knew he very likely wouldn’t pick up, especially knowing it was me calling, but it was a huge fear to call him and risk a live conversation, so I wanted to see what would happen for me emotionally if I did.

It took me an hour to call him. Every time I’d get close to calling, I would nearly pass out. My hands would shake and my throat would close up, I felt like I could throw up and then I felt lightheaded. I kept cycling through all these physical sensations of fear. This was only the second time I think I’ve properly felt fear in my life, with the first time being with my mom.

In the process I realized it was a different sensation and a different kind of fear than with my mom, though in both cases I was feeling terror. With my dad, it was like a terror of physical danger and of physical violence, like I could be physically attacked and die. Whereas with my mom, I am not afraid for my life with her, however I did feel terror of a different kind with her. It was an odd thing to experience this terror with trying to call my dad, because he didn’t know where I lived and couldn’t access me, so why would I have this seemingly mortal terror of physical safety?

I eventually called and he did not pick up, but I left a short, shaky and teary voicemail saying I wanted to deal with issues but he needed to want to as well, and that what he’d done to me wasn’t ok. I had rarely shown that kind of emotion with my dad, even if it was for only a short voicemail. I cried for a while after leaving the voicemail, and it was good to get some more sadness out.

A few weeks later and unrelated to this attempt to contact him, I found out that a couple years prior, my dad had nearly choked his then-partner to death after years of physical abuse including other choking incidents and threats to kill her. He also told this woman that when my mom decided she wanted to divorce my dad, that he considered killing my mom and himself afterwards.

I also found out that years ago he’d been physically violent with some young boys, sons of some of his friends, which of course, had caused fallout with those friends.

This was all earth-shattering for me to learn.

Why?

Well, reading this you might not be that surprised given the background I gave before, but I had no idea my dad was capable of this. My parents were together for about 23 years and he had never choked, hit, or threatened to kill my mom or my brothers and I. I thought, my dad was definitely toxic, but not like this.

I say I had no idea he would do this, but then when the revelation came out that my dad had nearly killed a woman, I realized I’d always known this. Suddenly it made sense to me why I’d always had this level of terror with my dad, and a feeling that my dad could kill me or be incredibly violent. Over the years I would sometimes think to myself or tell friends that I suspected my dad could kill me, but I’d dismiss myself as paranoid and dramatic. My family also always reinforces that I make things up and exaggerate everything and am crazy. So my self-doubt had been huge.

I realized that the only reason he hadn’t choked or nearly killed us was that we were extraordinarily subservient and submissive to my dad. We never stood up for ourselves. We were truly like meek cult followers in the Christian household I grew up in, with my dad at the helm as the cult leader. In particular for my mom and I as the women, it was accepted that he was the superior and we were the inferiors and that we were lucky to be in his presence. Our roles were clearly defined and we obeyed.

In contrast, the woman he abused was not as subservient and she did stand up for herself to some extent and called out his behavior, which he responded to with severe violence. My dad has been far more severely violent with women than men, and so it also confirmed my suspicions that I grew up with a dad who hates women and is a misogynist and chauvinist (also evidenced by many other patterns of behavior that he has).

Additionally, I found out that my dad had even made comments in public situations about my body, telling people how great he thought it was that I had bigger boobs than my mom did or how hot I looked at times. So I found out what I had always suspected but also self-doubted about, which was just how sexually predatory my dad was towards me. This had always been a topic of confusion for me as I wasn’t sexually abused in the traditional sense. I might not be remembering something, but my sense is that I don’t have any forgotten memories of overt sexual abuse. Rather, it helped me realized the sexual threat was severe and was there constantly, and this is why I have had some of the symptoms of sexual abuse victims.

So while I didn’t get to experiment with emotionally expressing myself with my dad like I did with my mom, I still learned a lot. And anyway, it wouldn’t be safe or self-loving to put myself in his presence unless it was in a public or safe setting where he couldn’t physically harm me. But a lot of emotion flowed before and after the attempt to call him to emotionally express myself, and a lot of emotion flowed following the truth I’d found out about my dad.

The truth coming out like this helped me realize that if I had emotionally expressed myself with my dad in my childhood, particularly about any of his issues, or his treatment of me, the threat I was under was severe physical violence and even death.

Because our family were so perfectly pandering to him, we didn’t see the truth of what he was actually capable of; what was actually in him all along. Severe violence was always a second away, but it didn’t come out for many decades due to the pandering we did. He didn’t need to be violent, because we were already so successfully oppressed in our emotional expression.

I think there is a lot in this for many people out there to consider about their parent(s). I am not saying all parents are under-the-surface murderous; of course not all are on the end of the spectrum that my dad is. But how many of us tell ourselves, Yes, ok, I was spanked a few times. I was yelled at a bit too. But my parent wouldn’t have killed me.

Or how many of us tell ourselves, Yes, ok, my parent looked at my body a bit too long at times as I was growing up, but they weren’t sexually predatory towards me.

It is so easy to tell ourselves stories about what our parents are and aren’t capable of, when really we don’t know because we haven’t honestly emotionally expressed ourselves with them.

All of this furthered my understanding that my dad also influenced me to have a facade of emotional control and “niceness”. I was the safest with him if I had zero emotional expression of any kind.

And while the big revelation with my dad at this point was that the threat to not emotionally express myself was violence and death, I have also continued to reflect on other aspects of his emotional oppression of me. My dad is completely shut down emotionally and sees emotions as indulgent, and unnecessary. He violently hates and detests emotion. To him, fear and sadness in indicate weakness and mean that you’re a failure of a human, most definitely not respectable. These judgements extend to both women and men.

However because my dad also has significant chauvinistic and misogynistic feelings towards women, if a woman cries around him, his feeling is, Of course, a woman crying again, just typical behavior of the weak, pathetic creatures that they are. He projected disgust at my crying and generally feels women crying are whining and moaning. He feels that emotionally expressive women are unattractive and ugly. He has only ever been cold, rejecting, abandoning, and judgemental towards my sadness.

As a child, he would often make fun of my fears, and make me feel stupid and weak for having them. He would laugh at them and make jokes about them and it would make me feel incredibly small and dumb. At other times, he would say or do things in order to purposefully increase my fear, in some kind of sadistic taunt, even though he wasn’t afraid of that same thing. He often seemed to get pleasure from making me even more afraid.

And now I know that an emotional expression of anger from me could have been met with physical violence or death. In addition to the physical threat, my dad would also have projected an angry woman is evil, shocking, unattractive and disgusting. He, like my mom, projects that my emotional expression is hurting him and illustrates that I am a bad person.

This has been a very emotional thing to come to terms with my dad, but also indescribably validating in explaining so many of my issues.

In the next and last part of this series, I’ll share a bit more about what I’ve learned from these experiences with both of my parents about emotional expression, self-doubt and facade.

Love,

Courtney

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Photo 1 by Karl Fredrickson via Unsplash

Photo 2 by Peter Lloyd via Unsplash

Photo 3 by Reymark Franke via Unsplash

Emotional Expression Part 2: Mom and Me

For Part 1 of this series, click here.

This blog is about the experiment and experiences with emotional expression in my relationship with my mom a couple years ago. For a couple years, I’d been aware that I was resisting dealing with mother emotions, in particular anger at her and how she has treated me over my life. Jesus and Mary had helped me see I was wanting to stay in an angry place and not wanting to feel the pain underneath it all. I am still in that place to a large extent, though not as stubbornly as I was, and have now been able to access some other deeper feelings too.

I knew that my not dealing with my mother-based emotions was affecting my relationships with other women as well as with emotional expression, my self-esteem, facade, creativity and more.

I also was planning on moving to England to be with my husband Perry, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to see my mom in person for at least a few years or longer. So I asked her to meet up in the hopes I could make some progress with some of these emotions I still had.

As I mentioned in the last blog, I realized I had never once emotionally expressed myself with my mom. However, previously, my mom and I had had a number of conversations over the years about the issues between us. These talks went nowhere, with her always denying and gaslighting. I always wanted a lot from the interactions; I wanted her to see what she’d done, understand it, and validate my pain. I wanted her to change and stop doing the same things now, and basically, to love me and hear me. Of course, none of this has never happened, and so holding out for it and demanding it got me nowhere.

The previous discussions I had with my mom about the issues between us were much like a political debate. I was physically stiff, didn’t really make facial expressions or gesticulate, and was also monotone and didn’t cry or display emotion. My mom has similar facade and desire for emotional control and so she was this way in the interactions as well. The talks were about very serious issues but we were really just doing this intellectual competition debate thing with each other. We had had a few hours-long discussions in this manner, just arguing really, but in this extremely “calm” and controlled way.

With her I always wanted to appear like a “together” and “respectable” grown woman. I wanted to win the intellectual debate, to strategize my arguments into an analysis and conclusions that she simply couldn’t deny. I wanted to win the competition with her that she had began with me as a child, about who was the more mature and impressive woman. I also wanted to take back the power she’d always had over me. I never could.

The facade my mom taught me is that women should never be angry, because being angry means you’re a bad person. Anger is shockingly evil and horrible, especially in a woman. Being emotionally messy in any way, including with sadness, is unattractive and shameful. Fear should be justified or downplayed but never felt properly. Always portray that you are pleasant, only ever have lovely feelings, and have it all together.

In the past, my attempts at discussions with my mom never helped me get into deeper emotion because my motivations to make her understand and change were all wrong, and my desire to get power were just to prevent feeling small and helpless and bad about myself. I wanted to take anger out on her. I now realize that I wanted to enter the discussions to avoid emotion, not to feel it.

So I knew I had to do something different to what I’d done before. I needed to go into it with a completely different motivation: I needed have the sole desire to get emotion out of me, and challenge some of my own addictions. I needed to give up trying to get power or win a competition. I needed to have no expectation that she understand or change in any way. I also realized that if anything was going to be different, I needed to express myself with my whole body and self, not just in the words I said. I felt that my sole desire had to be to get suppressed emotion out of me so I could keep healing myself. In some ways, you could say it had to not even be about my mom at all.

The emotional expression part is what terrified me the most. I felt that emotionally expressing myself with her was overdue since I was about 5 years old and I had no idea what would happen if I finally did it. I didn’t even know if I could do it. I have always felt shackled emotionally, locked in a stranglehold, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to do anything different. I didn’t feel confident at all.

I also had no idea what it would look like. Would I cry? Would I be angry? Would I gesticulate? What would I say?

I prayed a lot to God and journaled a lot in the week leading up to it. The prayer was pretty much just to do something different than I always had and get some emotion out. During the “prep” for this, I realized that I had been so focused on the fact I had anger with my mom that I needed to resolve and get underneath, that I had completely forgotten I might still have fear in my relationship with my mother. I had not been focusing on fear at all. But the thought of expressing myself in a more real way with her was incredibly terrifying, and leading up to meeting her a lot of fear started to kick in.

We arranged to meet in a park, and by the time my mom walked up to the blanket I’d set up, I was shaking like a leaf. My whole body was reacting involuntarily and I had never experienced this before. I was shaking and sobbing at the same time, and her initial reaction was disgust. She offered to rearrange the chat for a time when I wasn’t so emotional.

I had no plan going into it but I began to just say how I felt. Rather than arguing points in a philosophical way or debating about things that happened, this time, I just said how I felt. It felt completely different than before. Rather than trying to be an adult woman peer of my mother in a power struggle with her, I gave up the power struggle completely and just remembered that at one time I was her little daughter and she was my mommy and I am devastated about our relationship.

Throughout I just said things like,

“I’m feeling really scared of this chat.”

“I just feel like you’ve always hated me and I don’t understand why.”

“I feel like you never listen to me.”

“I’m so completely heartbroken about my childhood.”

In just saying how I felt, the emotional expression also flowed more.

The whole time I was sobbing and shaking, I had snot running down my nose and was gesticulating. At times I was yelling and crying and shaking at the same time. Beforehand, I had no idea what would come out of me but I now think I felt terror, anger and grief almost all at the same time (or at least all within this short span of time). I felt a kind of a childlike hysteria and emotional desperation, broken-hearted and devastated and raging and terrified. I found that just praying to express myself and then saying how I felt, without trying to argue any points, naturally meant the emotions came out better.

My mom tried to get us back on the philosophical arguing points and continued to do a lot of attacking and blaming and denying. I didn’t take the bait of getting back to intellectual debates, I just kept praying to God to feel my emotions and express myself truthfully. During the interaction, other emotions I felt were helpless, powerless, small, and out of control — all emotions I’d never felt when trying to be adult-like rather than childlike.

Twice my mom walked away in the middle of me talking and went back to her car, returning after a few minutes to tell me why I was wrong. It was an odd behavior from her that I didn’t expect, but now I can see was her wanting to punish me with abandonment, but then deciding she couldn’t leave until she had me back under power and control.

I was taken aback at the total coldness and the rage and condescension coming from her. I was sitting down on the ground sobbing and she stood over me the whole time, never sitting with me and never touching me. At one point she threw tissues at my feet, as if to say, get yourself together, you disgusting disgrace of a woman. The feeling she gave off seeing me on the ground sobbing, shaking, screaming, snotty, hair messy and red-faced, was utter disgust and pure rage.

I had thought she might have some concern for how upset I was, to show some empathy or have some response to my vulnerability, but instead she was more cold than she’d ever been.

Finally, for the third time, she suddenly walked away from me while I was saying something and sobbing and shaking and screaming, got in her car, and drove off.

I stayed and cried and shook for a long time. Eventually I left, and started feeling severely spirit attacked and began spiraling and worrying I was an evil, abusive person. I talked with a dear friend who was utterly kind and just encouraged me to not self-attack and worry but rather keep feeling about how my mom had responded to my emotional expression and vulnerability, and that this has told me a lot about my childhood. In the following days, quite a lot of emotions continued to come out of me.

This experience with my mom (especially right before and during the interaction with her) was the first time since listening to Divine Truth that I’ve ever properly felt fear. Mary has a great blog called “Let Yourself Fall From the Plane” and for the first time I understood what she wrote in that blog because that is exactly what it felt like.

Since then, I have been able to access some sadness and grief about my relationship with my mom. Previously to this experience, I felt only anger and was not aware of having any sadness or grief with her at all. I could not access it whatsoever. Now some of that sadness flows at times, which is really important for me to continue allowing. I also still have a lot of anger, but am far more aware of grief and despair and heartbreak that I feel with her.

One of the things that I felt in retrospect was that in the previous controlled and “polite” discussions with my mom, that I was projecting way more rage at her than when I was in the park actually yelling and swearing. I could be wrong here (also something I’m still working out) but it felt like when I was hysterical in the park, though I was loud with my sobbing and yelling and even swearing, my emotion was flowing and was somehow more contained, and less was actually coming out towards her. In the park I was just concerned with getting stuff out of me, and discovering some more truth, whereas previously my real desire was only to punish my mom and force her to listen to me.

So it felt like an important lesson in that I can be sitting, hands folded in my lap, talking in a “polite” way without any swearing, voice never raised, and project more rage at a person than when I’m owning my emotion and yelling and sobbing and gesticulating wildly making a commotion. In my family the seemingly-polite-but-underhandedly-raging manner of relating is considered nice, respectable and reasonable, wheareas emotionally expressing like I did is considered evil and shocking. And so to my mom, my emotional expression was far more offensive, and yet I feel I was projecting less at her than when I was more in the facade that she approves of.

One of the other striking realizations that came from this experience with my mom was thinking about how little she could handle of my actual emotional expression. In the controlled debates we’d had before, she would sit for as long as four hours with me, or engage in many very long back-and-forth emails and seemed comfortable, even though I was saying very confronting things. Before the park, we had discussed our issues to death already and completely exhausted the topics of concern between us. In this interaction in the park, I wasn’t saying anything new that I hadn’t said many times before. And yet, when I was fully emotionally expressing myself, she couldn’t even handle talking to me for 15 minutes.

In other words,

Me saying things without emotional expression – mom will stay for four or more hours, for numerous debates.

Me saying the same things with emotional expression, just once in my entire life – mom won’t say for fifteen minutes.

This was a huge revelation for me about why I have struggled with emotional expression and facade. I’ll discuss more of these reflections in later blogs.

The truth is, how my mom reacted isn’t really how I expected her to. Because of her facade about loving her kids more than the world, and the kind of person she presents herself to be (and my investment to still believe that facade), I truly thought she would have a more heartfelt response, but there was no warmth. This is part of what triggered more sadness for me in the days following. It felt like her “true colors” had now come out only when I expressed emotionally and hadn’t ever before this.

More thoughts to come on what this taught me about emotional expression, facade and self-doubt. The next blog will be about the experiences I had with my Dad with regards to these topics.

Love,

Courtney

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Photo 1 – Will Truettner via Unsplash

Photo 2 – Will Paterson via Unsplash

Photo 3 – Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash

Facing American Country-Based Injuries, Part 3

Politics!

Any American knows that in the last few years, politics have become an even more central part of our daily news, comedy shows and talk shows. It is often commented on, how upset so many Americans are these days about politics. Our next presidential election is over a year away, and yet dozens of politicians have begun actively campaigning, and nationally televised debates between these candidates have already happened in the last couple months.

I’m continuing to learn more about the country-based injuries Jesus and Mary brought up with me in feedback last year, and I’m finding it confronting but also interesting.

The main inspiration for this Part 3 was really just that I recently found more Divine Truth videos that discuss these country-based injuries. They really hit the nail on the head in terms of explaining and clarifying issues that I’d started to wonder about. When I watched them I just felt, Man I’ve gotta post these videos on the blog NOW because they’re so pertinent for Americans! So I wanted to share those videos here and also later in the blog share a bit about some of my recent personal thoughts on the topic.

The first video is from the Forgiveness & Repentance series that Jesus and Mary have been releasing over the last few years, and the video discusses many issues relevant to Americans and those in Western countries. I really recommend watching the entire F&R series, because there is vital information throughout the series related to country-based injuries. If you did want to start from the beginning of the series, you can click here for Session 1 Part 1, and watch in order from there.

The video below is partway through the series, so you may still want to watch the previous material first, but this video contains specific examples about politics. When I watched this I was both confronted but also felt like, BOOM THERE IT IS, yes.

Additionally, I found that the discussion in the video above was a great follow-on to some discussions about politics that Jesus mentioned in some of the 2016 Assistance Groups. Specifically, the following two videos contain some examples (I’ve embedded the time code in the link so the video starts to play at the particular question):

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about politics in the context of the American country-based injuries, and so wanted to share some of those thoughts. As always, my disclaimer is that my views, and this blog, are not endorsed by Jesus and Mary, nor affiliated with the Divine Truth organizations, and my analysis and statements may not be accurate. They’re just my own contemplations while in the process, and are always subject to the influence of my emotional injuries.

Ok, politics: I have no formal history or experience in politics, however over time in my adulthood it has become something I’ve found myself following more closely, though as I mentioned before, any American would probably know it’s hard to avoid politics nowadays with it being everywhere.

I’ve particularly been thinking about what Jesus seems to have said about how at the moment, the politicians in America become “successful” politicians in part by feeding the addictions of Americans. This turned some things on their head for me, because I’ve wanted to believe that our politicians and political system are not giving us what we want and deserve. I think many Americans see it this way. And so my first thought was, “I wonder really how many Americans would even agree or see that often the politicians are pandering to us“.

However, when I think of the kinds of addictions politicians could be feeding, I think of all the conveniences, luxuries and resources that we have and have come to expect, and especially how we feel like we deserve to have them regardless of their potential negative impact on the rest of the world. I also think of the fears we have that we want our government to defend us from. I also think of our personal lack of responsibility and desire for the government to take over a lot of that for us.

Recently I’ve observed myself watch certain political candidates give speeches, and talk about their promises if they gain the office they’re campaigning for, and I’ve at times felt “inspired” or “relieved” by those speeches. I’ve then thought…. Hold on, if this is making me feel good, and yet most politicians are feeding addictions to get the favor of people, what’s really going on here on a soul level for me?

That observation then made me think about my personal interactions with Jesus, Mary and others who have confronted the country-based demands in me that I haven’t wanted to see, and that I still want to justify and keep. When that’s happened, I’ve been very emotionally defensive, resistant and angry, as I often become when addictions that I want are confronted. I’ve felt that I don’t want to hear about these country-based addictions, would like others to please stop telling me about them, and have generally just felt flipped upside down emotionally and very jumbled when the topic comes up. What I’m trying to say here is, I feel very different emotions when Jesus and Mary talk to me about truths about country based addictions to the emotions I feel when I hear certain political leaders campaign and speak about the country.

I’ve then thought, If the politicians were in the right space from God’s Perspective, wouldn’t I feel the same way when I hear them talk about America to how I’ve felt when Jesus and Mary have confronted my country-based addictions? And if I don’t feel similarly confronted, isn’t it logical that these politicians must be pandering to and supporting the addictions in me, thereby creating the ‘nice’ or optimistic feelings I sometimes get when hearing them talk?

And so it seems that I must keep looking at what appeals to me about what they say, and why.

By the way, an important clarification here: I’m not saying that everything that politicians promise or want for the country are things I believe are unloving. For example, before there was marriage equality in the USA for gay and lesbian couples, some politicians voiced the intention to make it so. I think marriage equality is absolutely a loving thing, and of course it makes sense people would be very excited and optimistic about hearing politicians talk about something like that.

So in this blog I’m just focusing on the issues that may not be loving from God’s Perspective, and the things that are addictions from God’s Perspective (which by the say, I’m not even clear on everything that is or isn’t).

Additionally, when I listen to candidates aspiring for high positions in federal or state governments, I’ve noticed that they rarely, if ever, talk about what Americans should not feel entitled to. They don’t talk about what we’re constantly getting that is not ethical and moral, and how we need to change our demands. Rather, they usually talk about how great Americans and America are, and most of the time, their speeches feel like a reinforcement of how much we do indeed deserve all we get, and more, because we are so wonderful.

Politicians also rarely talk about whether or how something Americans want affects the rest of the world. They talk about America in a way that makes us sound like an island; like there is no outside world to really consider with regards to what we want or have. I’ve noticed I rarely hear about countries outside America at all in these dialogues, except ones we think might be a threat to us. Occasionally, politicians will position America as generous and helpful towards certain countries, though I can’t help but wonder if they’re countries that barter with us, and pander to us, and therefore helping or supporting them benefits us selfishly. So I have noticed politicians don’t talk in the context of the entire world, and how we can benefit everyone on the planet; we only talk about our own benefit. And these are the same emotions reflected that I personally have: a lack of interest or desire to give to the world, and only an interest in myself and what benefits me.

I’d never before even clocked that there was anything unusual with how candidates gained favor, how they got elected, and what they talked about. I never noticed they didn’t talk about our impact on the world much. But I can see that this is because I have always been in agreement in my soul with these attitudes. I can see that this same self-focus and disregard that our country displays as an entity, are also personal emotions I have, and ones that play out when I am in day-to-day situations with others. And even though I have a lot of resistance to it, I can see what Jesus is saying in the videos above about the personal responsibility we each have, and how I can’t really blame it all on our politicians as if they are not reflecting the collective and the issues of love in myself.

So with this blog, I wanted to share the videos, and to share that I think it’d be interesting for us all to observe how we feel emotionally when Jesus talks about the truth about America, our politics, and our country-based injuries, and then compare that with how we feel emotionally about politicians that we are inclined to like (and maybe also the ones we don’t like), and how we feel about their their promises and visions. I think this comparison could tell us a lot.

So that’s it for today, and I wanted to update my “Master List” of DT material I’ve found so far that has information on American country-based injuries or general issues in western countries including the USA:

20070914 General Discussion – Q&A From People In Cocoa S1P2: This video includes discussion about the USA’s destruction of the natural environment. I have embedded the link directly to this question.

20120218 General Discussion – Blocks To Spiritual Progression In The USA

20150930-1400 Judgement Towards Others: This video contains relevant reflections for many in first-world countries.

20161108-1350 Governance Principles: In this video the question is asked, “If Governance Principles ensure restriction of those in lower development, why do evil people seem to be in power on Earth?” and a discussion relevant to America ensues. I have embedded the link directly to this question.

20161122-1510 Responsibility Principles: In this video I ask Jesus, “Why do humans often give societal power and authority to people who are not self responsible or developed in love?” and a discussion relevant to America ensues. I have embedded the link directly to this question.

20161123-1350 Compensation Principles: In this video Jesus discusses how our fear contributes to countries going to war. I have embedded the link directly to this question.

20170919-1630 God’s Laws of Forgiveness & Repentance: This video contains discussion about American politics.

All Forgiveness & Repentance videos, which highlight how not forgiving and repenting personally contributes to country-based, societal and global pain.

xo,

Courtney

Photo credits: Ashton Bingham, David Everett Strickler, Drew Hays, Josh Johnson

Facing American Country-Based Injuries: Part 2

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been back in the USA now for several months after nearly a year outside the country. Considering my country-based injuries were some of the biggest issues in love highlighted to me by Jesus and Mary when I was in Australia, I was curious to see how I’d feel coming back.

In the last blog that I wrote on the topic of country-based injuries in Americans (and to some extent also those who live in other rich countries), I shared some feedback and truth from Jesus about these injuries within myself and others in America, and some of my own reflections from that. You can view this post by clicking here if you haven’t seen it.

As a disclaimer, today’s post contains my recent thoughts and reflections on the topic, which I haven’t had the chance to discuss with Jesus and Mary, so they are only my opinions and I can’t say I’m totally accurate about them, or that J&M or God would agree that I am assessing things correctly.

 

Things I Noticed

The first thing I noticed upon being back after a year was, as Jesus has discussed before, the insane amount of choice available here. Even just landing in the Los Angeles airport from Brisbane, the airport snack shops indicated I was indeed back in America.

When I went on my first grocery run, just to a standard store chain store, there was no mistaking I was back. On this first shop in an American store in a year, I walked past an aisle and was struck by the sight of the the tortilla stock. Multiple brands with many different sizes and flavors overflowed the end cap display, and then spilled deep into the aisle as well. I stopped and tried to count the different individual tortilla options–the various flavors and brands. After passing about 25, I stopped. I mean I know Americans love Mexican food, but over 25 kinds of tortillas? The options and variety in terms of shopping–in person and online–for literally anything is truly unlike anywhere else. Prior in my life, that amount of options never would have caused me to even blink, and like most Americans, I’d been irked if my particular favorite was out of stock.

I was reminded of how easy everything is here. Every errand I had to run, every bank-related task, every dealing with any government body, everything single thing I needed to do to get back up and running after a year–it was all easy. Service in all industries is so emphasized in America, and everything is so cheap! As a person with a lot of demand for things to be free and cheap, I noticed how low pricing is on everything, even compared to the UK or Australia, where I had been for the last year.

It’s weird, when you start being aware of addictions that you previously didn’t realize you had. As I settled back into life in America, I could feel myself sinking back into the enjoyment of all the demands being met again. I internally rolled my eyes at myself as I discovered that yes, I do indeed have feelings that the way things are in America is how things should be. I bought my cheap gas for my car and and then went and picked out of those 25+ tortilla options and literally thought to myself, America is badass.

There have been many times I have now caught myself in my entitlement that I should get things, when I want, because I want, fast, cheap, and with little consideration for ethics and morals in any part of those choices. I can feel the demand in me that the USA government should do something about everything, and blaming them for anything going wrong or that is unloving about the country–because of course nothing wrong with this country or how it operates is in any way my personal fault…

I am finding so many examples of our entitlement as a country that I feel like at some point I might try to focus in on particular examples of what I’ve noticed in myself and others. But in this blog, I wanted to focus on a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is DENIAL, and how codependent addictions between people support that denial.

 

Denial & Facade

Another thing that struck me upon being back is how happy everyone seems. I know the emotional climate and overall mood can vary widely depending on where you are in the USA, but in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I live–and I imagine in many places throughout the country–people just overall appear pretty “happy”. Enthusiastic, optimistic, energetic, friendly.

I found myself thinking about what Jesus said to me about Americans having a facade of niceness that can cover many dark and evil emotions, including superiority, and how contrasted that truth is from the generally jubilant and contented mood I was observing. It is a pointed example of how well-developed our individual facades, as well as collective facades as Americans, can be, and what a shocking difference that can be to the truth of our emotions and our intentions. I thought, If we as Americans are violating God’s Laws in massive ways, and degrading our condition with our sins all the time, and hurting so many people in the world, what it is that is making us appear happy? Because clearly we are not living according to Divine Truth and Love.

I then remembered an FAQ clip from the DT FAQ channel that I’ll link at the end of the post that explains some principles that I was thinking of when reflecting on this. In this clip they share that if we are “happy” without being truly on the Divine Love Path, it is only because we are getting addictions met. And so, I feel like this disparity between the truths I received from Jesus about the real emotions of most Americans with the appearance of general contentedness, is because us Americans are getting our addictions met so epically, and so therefore we appear, and even believe within ourselves, to be happy. Additionally, we agree with each others’ facades about being nice people, and that makes us feel pretty good, too.

When I was in Australia and receiving personal feedback about my own country-based injuries and how I act them out, after I while I started wondering: Why, if these issues are so severe and so unloving, as well as being present in almost all Americans, hadn’t they really flagged up for me personally before? In other words, how had I never clocked them? There are indeed plenty of other Americans who would rightly call me entitled (I’ve since discovered that I may be even more entitled than many other Americans are), but how had no one ever sat me down and said, “Yo Courtney, these things you do are really, really off.” Why hadn’t the confrontation like that ever happened with anyone in America before?

Why, among my day to day interactions and friends and family, we don’t ever pull each other up on the entitlement? Why had nobody flagged it to me before, and I also hadn’t noticed it in others? Or if we do notice it in ourselves or others, we don’t seem to care that much?

I also wondered, if almost all Americans are demanding, entitled and selfish, why don’t we get pissed off at each other all the time? How is it that we are able to generally go about our lives without huge amounts of hostility towards each other? Well, first off, I know it’s not true we don’t have hostility towards each other, because of course we have a great deal of issues within the country from Americans towards other Americans. But what I mean is, with that level of demand and selfishness, why aren’t we in fights with our family and friends constantly over the issues of love? And as a country, why aren’t we in an outright civil war; a full country-based meltdown? And why can we maintain this somewhat law-abiding society, as well as still mostly believe America is king?

These ponderings made me think about the issues of codependent relationships between people. To share what I mean by that, I’d share an example from my relationship with Perry. For me personally, it’s helping to think of how things can play out between two people, and then see how that also can play out in a whole nation.

 

Example of Codependently Supporting Denial & Facade

In my relationship with Perry, the emotional injuries I am most concerned about are not the ones we have that are different and in conflict with each other, but rather, the ones that we agree on. In areas where our injuries or demands are different, where we do not agree on that demand or about that false belief, we will inevitably clash. This clashing will highlight that one or both of us is out of harmony with God’s Truth and Love on the matter. The conflict will happen quickly for things we don’t share injuries about, and that conflict will expose that there is an issue. This will then mean it will be hard to keep going down that track without realizing something needs to be looked at.

On the other hand, Perry and I have many emotional injuries that are the same as each other, and interestingly, many of them are the same emotional injuries I’m talking about in terms of country-based injuries. Perry and I are both demanding, entitled, selfish and self-focused. These, or any injuries that we both agree on, in my opinion, are far more dangerous. When we agree, we can easily support each other in entitled and selfish choices, never disagreeing with each other, and even not believing we are being entitled or selfish at all. We can reassure ourselves and each other that there is no problem in that area.

I once asked Jesus and Mary why it would be, that Perry and may often seem to get along with each other, if we are both demanding and selfish people, and Jesus and Mary explained to me that instead of projecting our demands at each other (which would eventually create conflict and pain), we may externalize our demands outside the relationship onto other people, and onto systems. In this way, our individual demands are being fulfilled, but maybe not by the other, because they don’t need to be. We are getting them from somewhere else. We can then exist in a space where don’t exhaust each other, and things may appear peaceful and harmonious in the relationship.

It’s like, if I have a demand at the world to get a popsicle every day, and Perry won’t give one to me but I am easily able to find someone else in the world to give me one every day, I have no need to necessarily get angry at Perry for not giving me one, even though I do have the demand for it from someone–anyone. And if Perry also feels he should get a popsicle every day too, and also finds random people to get it from and thinks that’s totally reasonable, we’re going to end up being demanding popsicle fiends who take from everyone else, but don’t fight with each other.

We can then easily live in the delusion that everything is alright and that we are very reasonable and kind people, which is exactly the facade Perry and I have both had.

I have learned that a lot of the time, I tolerate and put up with issues in others because I also want them to put up with that exact same thing in me. It is a barter: you overlook my shit, and I’ll overlook yours.

I also realized in this process that the same thing happened within my family in my childhood. My parents also had the country-based injuries, some of which I outlined in a bit more detail in my previous post. In my childhood, I can see that we were constantly reinforcing within the family that our family, and our country, is awesome, meanwhile there was no consideration about others in the world. In the few experiments I’ve done with bringing up these topics with my family and some friends, I have often discovered immediate resistance and anger that is exactly like the kind I have had myself in receiving feedback about country-based demands: “Who, me? I’m not like that! No way. You’ve got me all wrong. I’m not that bad.”

Sometimes I think of the danger of those agreement injuries in Perry and I, and metaphorically, it feels to me like walking down a road, hand in hand, patting ourselves and each other on the backs, saying, “Aren’t you lovely! Aren’t I great person! Aren’t we nice people!” Meanwhile we are being completely oblivious to the damage we are creating as we bulldoze the world with our entitlement, and end up at our destination only to realize this path we’ve been walking all along has been straight into the hells. But we’ve been too busy getting and eating our popsicles and congratulating ourselves and each other on how nice and awesome we are, that we never looked up from our own navel-gazing long enough to even realize the degradation that was happening.

 

America Collectively

What I shared about Perry and I is also what I feel is at play within America as a collective. We think everything is good, meanwhile we are degrading ourselves collectively into the hells while reassuring ourselves and each other that we are not that bad. We want to believe our own facade, we want to believe each other’s facades, we want to believe the collective American facade.

We can appear to have a somewhat functional and happy society, because it is not other Americans who are suffering from our demands, it is the rest of the world that we are taking from. We are externalizing our demands and entitlement outside the country onto other countries. This then allows us to collectively have a facade that we are nice, and a false sense at times that we are happy. We also then don’t turn on each other within America as readily as we probably would if the rest of the world weren’t being forced by us to continue to give us everything we want.

There are ways I know that I don’t even want to be aware of what I do in my country-based injuries, so this blog is not to suggest that I am out of denial myself. I also cannot yet share about sincerely desiring to change this, or how you actually change it, as I am not at that stage yet either. However, I feel like I’m in a bit less denial about it than I was a year ago, and definitely less than I was when I was growing up in my family. So I thought the topic of denial, and how we as Americans within our families, marriages and with our friends and the collective, can easily support one another in that denial and facade, is an interesting thing to reflect on.

My current experiment is just to challenge myself to be more honest about the ways I am still in denial and facade about these emotions and motivations in myself, my family and in the USA. And, the truth about how much I want the addictions more than love, and where my desires are truly oriented towards. I am a person who loves to try to skip ahead to emotions farther down the line, usually while still being in facade, rather than continue to deconstruct the denial and facade layer. And so I hope that this focus will begin to start moving things in terms of the country-based injuries.

I’ll keep sharing periodically on these experiments, and for any other Americans I’d love to hear what you are going through or looking at in the same areas for yourselves.

 

Resources

In the last blog post I linked several DT videos where Jesus and Mary have talked about American country-based injuries, but I want to link some other videos that I was watching while thinking about these topics and that I really like.

By the way, if any of you are watching DT vids and find material embedded in longer videos that talks specifically about American or “first-world” country injuries, I would love to know about them so I can watch myself and post them in this series–you can email me on the contact page on this site with those if you’d like.

“Why do we feel happy on the ‘Natural Love’ path & sad when following ‘The Way’?” This video was one that I was thinking of regarding why Americans can seem happy and enthusiastic if we are actually sinning so much and not honoring God’s Laws, Love or Truth.

Divine Truth videos about denial

Divine Truth videos about facade

Also, I found a book called The Entitlement Cure by Dr. John Townsend, and both Perry and I are finding it really helpful–I recommend it.

Love,

Courtney

 

photo credits: Matt Howard, Luke Stackpoole, freestocks.org, img.ly, Nick Dunlap