A healthy
relationship gives you energy, helps you feel relaxed, and makes you feel
wanted and comfortable just the way you are.
Personality seems to
be the sum total of our genetic and learned experiences and the way we put
millions of pieces of experience together to form a whole sense of self.
Since personality is
a constant building-up process of adding more and more awareness and skills to
a base, those children with a weakened or incomplete base will just not fully
learn all that they need to as they grow up and what they learn may be distorted
by their upsetting experiences.
To become a
Caretaker, you need to be highly intuitive of the needs of the BP/NP,
intelligent enough to learn the distorted and contradictory rules the BP/NP
needs to function, observant enough to keep track of all the nuances of the
fast-changing emotional family environment, and creative enough to find ways to
calm and appease the BP/NP but also with a low enough self-esteem to not think
that you deserve better treatment, more consideration, or equal caring in
return.
Caretakers try hard
to be compliant, nice, and agreeable.
You learn to bury your own needs, feelings, and opinions, sometimes even
from your own awareness.
When you bury your
thoughts, ideas, wants, and needs too long, you no longer know what you like,
want, or feel.
"Never give
up" could be the Caretaker's motto.
To you it seems disloyal, selfish, and unloving for you to even consider
giving up on any relationship.
Manipulated by anger
means that you are giving up your power in the relationship.
General ways of
setting boundaries include saying "No", making decisions and choices
of your own, staying with your own feelings even when someone you care about
has different feelings, solving only your own problems, and using your beliefs
and opinions to structure and direct your life.
Setting boundaries
is a significant step toward moving from caretaking into self-care.
The most important
action that you need to take to quit caretaking is to break out of the Drama
Triangle. This means you are going to
quit taking on the roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer. All of these roles require one person to be
superior, right, good, and better than the other person.
When you start
feeling overwhelmed, unable to cope, depressed, and wanting to isolate, you are
moving into the victim role.
Don’t automatically
trust your feelings. Ask yourself if
your feelings are based on present reality, on past experiences, or on fears
you have about the future. Only then can
you decide what actions you want to take to deal with the feeling.
The past may not be
a helpful prediction of the present.
You need to learn to
identify feelings that are based on present facts rather than memories, rules
or delusions, and manipulated experiences from the past. Feelings based on
manipulation, past responses from others, and past traumatic experiences are
identifiable by their "over-the-top" expression. That is, they are too strong and too dramatic
to be a response to a present feeling.
Feelings from the
past that come into the present are called transference.
Your emotional
buttons are often the negative things you secretly think about yourself that
you try to ignore or even pretend that you don't really think.
Feelings are
actually a combination of emotions and thoughts blended together. Raw emotion
is really a physical reaction caused by a chemical release in the body. Feelings are the result of observing that
emotion and making some kind of sense out of the reaction.
Fear, obligation,
and guilt will continue to be the BP/NP's favorite tools for pulling you back
into the Drama Triangle.
