namaste everybody, I am lisa a romano the breakthrough life coach and today I got a great letter from a woman named Cassie
in Milwaukee and Cassie has asked me a pretty loaded question and that question
is Lisa why do I always end up in power struggles with other people no matter
who it is I feel like others are trying to take advantage of me a little about
my background my mom is an unrecovered a CoA and my
dad was a passive aggressive alcoholic he and my mom fought all the time today
I noticed I argue with almost everyone I know my husband and now even my kids say
I am so negative your thoughts please thank you and I love you Cassie from
Milwaukee so Cassie this is a really great question and I really do I applaud
you and I bounce the love and enlighten you because you're being self reflective
right you're looking at the cell we are we are a society in a world full of
people that are not observing their thoughts so if you're not observing your
thoughts what are you doing Cassie you are reacting to your thoughts that is
just the long and the short of it so if you're not observing the way you think
then you're reacting to the way you think and if you're not careful you may
not even realize that the way you think is the result of what I call childhood
programming because we were all brainwashed as children we just were
every child today is brainwashed you know if you think about your religion
you didn't pick your religion you know if you were born born a Mormon then
you're a Mormon because your parents were Mormon if you were born somewhere
in India you'd be you know maybe a Hindu so we have to just kind of like embrace
the idea that were all products of our environment and no matter well depending
on who our parents were what their religions were with their ideas ideas
about life were there those ideas those outside external ideas are very much
going to have impacted the way we think and feel today so you were raised by an
unrecovered a coa who more than likely suffered from codependency
because when you're an a CEO a and your parents are alcoholics your parents
don't see you right they can't see you because their brain is fogged over due
to alcoholism they have an addiction and when you have an addiction the addiction
becomes numero uno you need to fuel that addiction so when you're an unrecovered
a CoA you grew up in a home where you felt invisible and very sadly what ends
up happening is you end up feeling like there's a pane of glass between you and
the people that you love so imagine a little child who has an alcoholic for
mommy and this child wants to feel seen by their mother and father but and I
mean psychologically seen by mom and dad and they can't because mom is obsessed
with or doesn't even realize it her brain is fogged and she's she's an
alcoholic so she wants she wants to drink and when you drink lots of you
know your now colic there are a lot of things that you have to end up trying to
cover up right you cover up the fact that you're drinking you cover up where
you were you cover up how you spend your money bla bla bla and all of these
different things filter into and affect the way you're able to mother a child so
your mother Cassy comes from that type of a background which means that your
mother probably never felt seen your mother never felt real your mother never
felt like who she was was important so now she marries a passive-aggressive
alcoholic her husband your dad and that's probably because she's in a CoA
so she attracted into her life experience a husband who probably
mirrors a lot of the same types of characteristics that one up or both of
cause you tell me if both your grandparents were alcoholics both my
grandparents my mother his mother and father both alcoholics so my mom's a nun
recovered a CoA so I immediately understand what it must have been like
for you to grow up with a mom who's a nun recovered a CoA and dad who's
passive-aggressive and alcoholic so you say that your mom and dad you you
observe them fight all the time so remember the same-sex parent they say
is the most influential parent to the child so you were very much influenced
by mom um so you didn't tell me if your husband's passive-aggressive or whether
or not he's an alcoholic but based on your history mom being the ACOA
unrecovered with the history of alcoholism on her side right it's let's
say this is mom and she's got alcoholism on her side and then your dad is is an
alcoholic he's got obviously now who knows if his parents were alcoholics but
we definitely have this thing going on that has been passed down to generations
so you are watching your mom who doesn't feel seen more than likely who is
probably has a lot of repressed anger from being an adult child of an
alcoholic very wounded suffering from an attachment trauma because when she was
growing up who was there for her so all of these feelings are within the being
that is your mother and he or she is a grown-up she's having children and her
body is grown-up but that doesn't mean her heart and her mind is grown-up and
now she's attracted your father into her life who is also an alcoholic and she's
working out all this this unresolved childhood stuff with your dad so if your
dad is passive-aggressive I'm sorry but I think passive aggressiveness is a form
of gaslighting I think sarcasm is a form of gas lighting so even though your
mom's an undetermined ACOA you know I can almost guarantee you I
was married to a passive-aggressive person and I was angry oh all that they
have died because he'd say one thing and he would do another you know words would
come out of his mouth and he didn't mean anything he said so I
couldn't rely on anything and then when I expected him to do what he said it was
gonna do and he didn't do it I was infuriated I was so angry and then I got
mocked because I got angry so it was like he was doused in gasoline on me
lighting a match and then when I was dancing all over the place screaming
from being burned he would laugh at me like it was my fault that I've gotten
upset so I really do I empathize with what type of home you grew up in but
here you you're observing this right you're
observing mom feel very frustrated and like she can't control her husband and
like she can't get anywhere right because when you're married to somebody
who's passive-aggressive you can't get from point A to point B and the happiest
people are the people who are able to stay in some type of a flow when you're
dealing when you're married to an alcoholic or a passive-aggressive person
or a narcissist there is no flow there is always this bumping up against a rock
always there's always a mess as always you can't get through we're meant to
flow we're energetic beings you know really liking yourself to a river
you're supposed to be flowing downstream rivers don't flow upstream think about
water water think about water being like electricity and know that if you you are
mostly water you know as a matter of fact our beings are mostly water we are
supposed to stay in some type of a flow so your mom you observed your mom unable
to stay in the flow probably her own being was out of float because of her
childhood and then she's married with passive-aggressive man so there's a lot
of this for your mom you're witnessing that so you're being downloaded with
this type of a dynamic so um it sounds like you have taken on some of moms
powerlessness and you just I want you to really search your own mind and try to
figure out whether or not you are showing up in relationships trying to
gain the power perhaps that your mother never had because as little girls we
watch our mothers and if they feel powerless you know we are downloaded to
feel powerless and now what will happen is we go out into these instant
situations feeling absolutely feeling unseen and then what some don't you're
the grandchild of an alcoholic so you qualify as the ACOA too so it's very
possible that you're showing up feeling insecure if your mother was not secure
and she didn't have high self-esteem more than likely she didn't do a very
good job modeling modeling high self-esteem for you as a young woman
so you providing with everybody then there's an esteem issue there you
don't feel seen you don't feel respected and now you're trying to control people
into respecting you and that's just not necessary when you learn to have esteem
for yourself and you Revere yourself because you know that you're good enough
and that happens with a lot of introspection you know we've become
fully self actualized but you cannot be fully self actualized until you're able
to observe the self so it sounds like you are learning to do that so I'm
really really happy about that you're saying that your husband and now your
children even saying that you're negative very often times a COAS and
grandchildren of alcoholics and codependents in general we focus on the
things that we don't want and we don't focus on the things that we do want and
as a defense mechanism we focus on the things that are wrong because we think
we have to fix what's wrong for us to be able to stay in the flow but for anybody
who is unrecovered grandchild of an alcoholic or an ACO a or a codependent
you know that the minute you fix one problem there's another problem right
behind it and it's not so much that we have problems as much as it is the way
we are showing up in our life and what we are paying attention to so many of us
were wounded from childhood is unresolved we are don't know how to see
the good we are not attached to things that we want to experience we're
attached to things that we don't want to experience we don't know how to let go
and have fun we don't know how to appreciate the beauty that is around us
we are constantly hyper vigilant scanning the environment for the next
booby-trap because we have lived in a state of survival our entire life so it
sounds to me dear one that based on your childhood you probably lived in a deep
state of survival and now when you show up in relationships with other people
you might still be in that state of survival even though you might be okay
you might not need to live in the state of survival but what I would like you to
do and keep us posted I would like you to really take a good inventory of your
life and ask yourself is anything that I need to be afraid of
what kind of relationship do I have with my husband what kind of relationship do
I want to have with my husband what other patterns do I see what
patterns do I see in myself do I recognize as being patterns from my
childhood you know what attitudes and behaviors
have I taken on from mom that I that I don't really want to have how could I
start having more fun in my life what things are actually working in my life
what you want to do is you need to teach the brain that you are not living in a
state of survival until you are getting into again always happens when I make
the video so bizarre I digress but in anyway what you want to do is you want
to actually teach your brain to understand that you don't have to live
in a state of survival because your brain doesn't know that your brain likes
the familiar so if you lived in a state of survival as little girl and you've
never confronted that then you're probably living in a state of survival
as an adult so what I want you to do is really really look at your life and help
your brain understand that you can do not have to live in a state of survival
help your brain understand that it's okay that other people have their own
opinions that everybody is entitled to their own opinion help your brain
understand that you don't have the right to control other people's opinions
that's very liberating that's very free how other people feel
is none of your business you are the creator of your own world you are the
creator of your own reality you are I bow as far as to say you were the god of
your life you know God flows through you God is creator is living within you and
it's up to you to create the kind of life experience you want for those of
you who believe in God believe and create a believing source what kind of
world would be living in if source just paid attention to the things that he
thought or she thought or it thought were wrong you know
source only flow source C is good wants to create so even though there might be
a smidgen of the world that doesn't have a lot of let's say grass over here
creative just kept creating grass someplace else
you know downstream downstream downstream downstream so what I want you
to do is I want you to understand that we've come here to create we've come
here to manifest and when we're focused on things that we don't want we're not
creating we're actually taking ourselves out of the stream of creation we're
taking ourselves out of the flow so I want you to do dear one miss Cassie
from Milwaukee you start focusing on the things you do want to experience start
focusing on the things you like that are working and then ask yourself you know
all the questions that I just you know rewind rewind this video and write down
the questions that I just asked you to ponder and see if you can figure out you
know ways in which you can pull yourself out of survival so that you won't feel
like you're on higher alert so much anymore because there really is no need
to have a power struggle with anybody at all you know people are entitled to feel
what they want about you and their opinion of you is none of your business
and you don't have to convince anybody that you aren't good enough because you
are every single person on the face of the earth is a seed of God a seed of
creator and the potential to live an amazing life is in every single one of
us the issue that we have we the issue is that we struggle with today is that
there are some people that are below the veil and lots of people lots of people
that are below the veil and not that many people above the veil so we have a
world full of people that are unconscious to the childhood programming
and they are reacting to the thoughts and beliefs and the conditioning that
has been programmed into them when they were children and you dear one are on
the awakened path I know that because of the questions that you're that you're
asking so see if you can cognitively rise out of this survival mode
get out of here amygdala get out of your hippocampus and see what happens
start focusing on what's going on in your life that's actually good and see
if you can make any connections to your child's I think get back to us let us
know how you do now I must say everybody I bow to the love and a light in you so
next time by