A wind storm kicked up in the middle of filming. We apologize for the small noise disturbance in the last part of the episode!
Over the course of our lives we develop a sense of self.
We figure out what we think,
what we feel, what we like and dislike
what our values are,
what we really want what,
what other people think about us...
We developed this sense of self
and when this does not occur,
meaning there's an interruption to this natural process of development,
we become very confused about our sense of self.
It's as if our core is missing.
And this creates big problems for our life,
and big problems for our relationships.
Please pause and read before you watch this video:
The Human Hyphen Pattern
In childhood, some people grow up in
environments where the reality is that it's not safe
to be different than the other people in your environment.
Most especially, usually, one or two people
upon whom your needs depend.
When you grow up in this type of an environment
any difference that leads to some kind of conflict
between you and these other people in the household
leads to things like rejection
things like punishment,
things like isolation,
things like disapproval,
things like withholding of needs.
All these things we can't really live with as a child,
and so one way of adapting to this type of environment
is to give up any aspect of yourself
that might be in conflict
or different, in a not okay way
from these people in your childhood environment.
You learn essentially, that the way to have relationships
is to give aspects of yourself up.
Essentially what this person is doing
is denying, suppressing, rejecting or disowning
any aspect of themself
that puts them at odds with,
instead of in Confluence with this other person.
So, Confluence is what they're after.
To imagine Confluence,
I want you to think about two separate streams of water
coming together to flow together as one stream.
As the waters mix,
you can no longer tell which stream is which stream.
In this state of being,
the two waters are relaxed, in accord, in harmony
and are flowing in an easy going kind of way.
The opposite of conflict.
Confluence is a blissful state of being,
a profound togetherness.
And to generalize, people desire and seek confluence.
But, not no matter the cost.
When confluence becomes dangerous
is when somebody seeks to establish confluence
no matter the cost to themself.
When somebody does this,
when they try to reject, deny, disown or suppress
an aspect of themselves
so as to achieve a state of confluence,
it's not actually real confluence.
It's false.
They become inauthentic,
and give up their personal thoughts, feelings, desires, needs,
preferences values and whatever else
for the sake of achieving confluence
and avoiding conflict.
And it is by doing so,
that they slip into the human hyphen pattern.
The human hyphen pattern
is when somebody is so committed
to this pattern of trying to find Confluence
with somebody no matter the cost,
that you will watch their persona shift
based on whoever their primary attachment is.
What this means is,
is you will see somebody
become so many different versions of themselves
based on whoever they're in a primary relationship with.
To the point where you're kind of going:
"I don't know who the hell this person is".
It's sort of like they're a living breathing hyphen.
For example, if Justin exhibits this pattern
and he is with Rachel,
you're not gonna be meeting Justin,
you will be meeting Rachel-Justin.
and if he is with Sarah,
you're also not gonna be meeting Justin,
you're gonna be meeting Sarah-Justin.
And believe me when I tell you
that Rachel-Justin and Sarah-Justin
are very different men.
Because each is simply a reflection
of the specific woman he is with.
Each is what she wants him to be
and what he must be in order to have confluence with her.
Even though he's gonna fight you
that each new version of him is the "real him".
The reality is with the human hyphen pattern
the only access a person has to a sense of self
is when they're alone.
The minute they're with another person,
especially someone they want that togetherness and harmony with,
they're lines between "me" and "you"
begin to blend.
So that you can understand this pattern better
I'm gonna give you two examples:
The first example that we're gonna start with is Brody:
Brody grew up in a household with a very domineering mother.
When you walked inside Brody's house as a child
there were paintings that his mother did of herself
and mirrors everywhere.
What's the common theme?
It's pretty much her way or the highway.
She didn't even really want children,
the reason that she had children
is because of the man she was trying to secure at that time.
Brody grew up knowing
that the Universe revolved around his mother.
She was largely prone to ignoring him
and what he learned is that
the only way that he could get her attention,
is if he made sure
that he was meeting her needs in the moment,
or that something he was doing was fueling her ego in some way.
As a result,
as a child he wore the clothes that she picked out for him,
he behaved exactly how she wanted him to behave,
he adopted her views on everything,
he stopped doing anything he liked
and that she didn't approve of,
he validated her even when a little voice inside
said that he didn't agree,
he said "yes" when he wanted to say "no",
he made himself into a male version Mini Me
despite considerable pain to himself,
but, as a result,
unlike his brother who failed to be able to do this with his mother
and eventually committed suicide,
some of his needs were met,
and he got to have a "special" relationship with his mother.
This was really his only chance at emotional survival.
Subconsciously,
what Brody has learned over the course of his life
is that conformity to a person
is a necessary ingredient
for having a relationship with that person.
The problem is,
this belief of his is actually so painful,
he can't even accept
that subconscious belief that belongs to himself.
So, the way he copes with this
is that he tells himself
that each new version of himself
is more and more like the real him.
Brody tells himself that with each relationship
he's getting progressively more and more and more authentic.
But to the people that know him the best,
they've been through this so many times
they know it's complete BS.
Instead, they're simply watching this person change their colors
depending on whoever he's with on a given day.
Brody was in a relationship with Tori.
Tori was a very driven girl.
she was obsessed with self-help and had big goals for herself,
she was a super social go-getter with leadership qualities
who loved skiing and cooking.
when Brody was with Tori,
he was business oriented.
He wore his hair short, with no facial hair
and dressed in business attire.
He spent time self-reflecting
and figuring out his own patterns,
he was a really positive and easy going man,
he was very social and spent lots of time in the kitchen
and reveled and living in the snow.
When Tory ended the relationship with Brody,
he ended up in a relationship with Jocelyn.
Jocelyn loved travel, leisure time and horses.
she had a strong sense of right and wrong,
should and shouldn't,
she believed that people should be approved of
exactly as they are, not changed.
She had a small group of friends,
but preferred to spend most of her time one-on-one with him.
When Brody got into a relationship with Jocelyn
he grew out his beard,
gave up his business attire for outdoor clothing,
cut off all his friendships
to focus solely on her and her friends,
started looking after her horse,
despite having a severe allergy to horses,
quit his business oriented job
to start his own business in the travel industry
where he could take off weeks at a time
to do leisure activities with Jocelyn.
He started suddenly expressing strong ideas
of what is right and wrong,
despite having been such an easy going person before.
And suddenly,
he started to get into these intense conflicts
with the people he still had in his life
from his time with Tori.
Remember that the people who were around Tori
are super into self-development right?
But now, he's adopted Jocelyn's belief
that nobody should change themselves,
they should be approved of exactly as they are.
So now, not only is he fighting with them
that self-development is abusive,
he's also telling himself
that it's a waste of the time that you have on Earth.
Not only that,
Brody is now telling himself
that because that group of people who are associated with Tori
were all about self-development
and always interested in him changing something about himself,
they never really loved him and therefore he never really belonged.
And actually that was kind of abusive
and so they're kind of bad, right?
So now, he gets to find that confluence with Jocelyn
against a common enemy.
Which gives him an even more enhanced
sense of togetherness with Jocelyn.
Brody has paid a very heavy price
for the confluence that he has found
with every single woman in his life.
Starting with his mother.
And one of the saddest things about this pattern is that
Jocelyn has no idea
that Brody is simply in, yet another one
of his inauthentic patterns and relationships.
One that she will fall victim to.
Instead, she's still telling herself the story
that she's found such a compatible man.
Brody becomes some version
of whomever he's in a primary relationship with.
So the reality is,
nobody, including Brody,
knows who he is.
Now, let's take a look at Cindy.
Cindy grew up in a very large family.
I mean tons and tons of siblings
and parents that are just too busy for anything.
As a result,
she was largely ignored.
She didn't have any reflection
and it was impossible with this much Social chaos going on
to get any real attention.
When she was seven years old she finally met a friend,
and for the first time she had someone who cared about her.
this friend wanted to be close to Cindy
and wanted to make Cindy just like her.
This friend encouraged Cindy to get the same haircut as her,
to get into Girl Scouts just like her
and to become obsessed with cats just like her .
Cindy did so and felt a kind of Heaven
in being just like someone.
She modeled her movements and mannerisms
and speech patterns and interests
and everything after her friend.
She finally had someone to do this life with.
She had figured out how to be able to get someone
to be intimate with her
and to be together with her and pay attention to her.
She had figured out how to matter to someone:
"Be just like them".
Cindy now exhibits this same pattern
with all the men in her life.
So, first let's look at Derek.
Derek was kind of a redneck.
A guy from Nevada, fresh off a Ranch.
When she was with Derek she was a proper redneck woman
who got into spin fishing,
wore camo pants or a trucker hat
and bleached the tips of her hair.
She picked up smoking,
she listened to country music
and she temporarily
gave her daughter over to her mother's care.
Then, Cindy got into a relationship with Camden.
Camden was a really good Mormon boy from Southern Utah.
When she was with Camden,
suddenly she was dressing in conservative blouses and skirts,
she dyed her hair a tasteful blonde
and curled it to make herself look classier,
she moved into a family-oriented neighborhood with him
and didn't just start going to church,
she decided her entire life
revolved around relief society meetings.
She no longer listened to music.
She brought her daughter to live with her again,
and modeled her behavior after the perfect stay-at-home mom,
baking cookies and doing crafts
and making sure to teach her daughter about morally appropriate behavior.
But then, Cindy got into a relationship with Seth.
Seth was an avid Harley-Davidson rider from Colorado.
When she was with Seth,
suddenly she dyed her hair black.
She wore tight jeans and midriff shirts,
she got a tattoo,
she went from adhering to Mormon values
and judging everyone who didn't,
to being a self-proclaimed beer connoisseur.
She quit her job and started working for Seth
at his garage Brewery.
She used to be a volleyball player,
but her volleyball team
learned they could no longer depend on her showing up
because she was busy riding motorcycles most nights
and on the weekends.
And her daughter found herself alone in a house
with her new stepsister, Seth's daughter,
while their parents were out on the road.
Cindy's family distanced themselves from Cindy.
And she never had any long-term friends.
For two reasons; the first is:
every time she got into a new relationship with a new person,
her entire social sphere would be overhauled
and gotten rid of,
for a brand new social group.
And, her family learned there's nothing you can depend on
relative to Cindy, it's better to just step back
and watch the whole charade at a distance.
Here's the other sad part about this story:
Cindy loves telling the story after every breakup
that the reason she broke up with him
is because every man she gets into a relationship with
is a narcissist.
She tells herself that every man's a narcissist
because inevitably in the relationship she just ends up feeling like
she can't "be herself" when she's with them.
The reality is that
actually not a single one of the men that she has been with
is actually a narcissist.
All it takes to be considered a narcissist by Cindy
is for somebody to have a strong sense of self.
Because what happens the minute she meets them
is that she automatically changes herself
to conform to them,
even though they've never asked her to.
They were simply reveling in the fact that they'd found a woman
who is so compatible with them.
It's very common
that people who exhibit this human hyphen pattern
tend to blame the other people in their life
for why they have lost themselves,
without realizing that the reason they lost themselves
is because that's their relational adaptation
for how to establish that confluence with the people in their lives.
The reason that this human hyphen pattern
is so difficult to break is the following:
I'm going to spell it out for you, because this,
you should probably freeze frame this
and really let it sink in,
because it's such a big awareness. Okay...
This is what you've got to realize:
When you develop a codependent relational style
which the human hyphen pattern is part of,
you genuinely want that sense of closeness
and harmony and confluence with someone
That is authentic.
You want it so badly,
that you are willing to be inauthentic
to get it.
Therefore, when you are inauthentic,
but get what you authentically want
as a result of being inauthentic,
your internal guidance system
will tell you that you are in alignment with your authenticity,
even if you are lying.
To understand more about codependency
you can watch my video titled:
The Truth About Narcissism and Codependency
Relational styles are second nature to us.
In fact, they are so natural to us
that we tend to make them
our default way of being in relationships.
We just slip into them
without realizing that we're in them.
But, realize it, we must.
Because I have to tell you the honest truth...
If we don't realize it,
we're no longer living from a space of free will,
we're no longer choosing.
We're living in a space of determinism.
And it's a determinism
that's gonna get us in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Staying stuck in the human hyphen pattern
will prevent us from ever truly being authentic and honest
with ourselves and others.
It will make finding a truly compatible partner impossible,
it will make it impossible to create a life that is right for us,
and it will make it so that we will leave a trail of tears
in our wake.
Consider that if you are giving something up,
if you are suppressing,
denying, rejecting or disowning some aspect of yourself
so as to find confluence,
you may just be slipping into the human hyphen pattern.
And you've not actually found confluence.
Because that confluence that you feel
is not actually confluence,
you are setting yourself up and other people up
for Indescribable levels of pain.
it is not true confluence,
it is illusion and it is deception.
And there is no possible way
for you to actually have authentic relationships
that are feel-good relationships,
unless you are able to have a "me",
at the same time as a "you"
in your relationships.
To be quite honest with you,
the progression of human relationships on earth
are absolutely dependent
upon your capacity to develop
a "me" at the same time as a "you".
Have a good week.
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I wanna thank you personally
for the bravery that you have to step into awareness.
I'll see you in the next video.
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