You Can Have the Life You Want!!

15 Apr You Can Have the Life You Want!!

Most people think that they just have to settle for the cards that life has dealt them and make the best of it. I too was one of those people that believed that. I went sleepwalking through life trying to make the best of what I was given. Some was okay, but a lot was not! I tried to smile and say, “It’s okay…in God’s timing or, “God has a plan.” But as days went by, then weeks, then years…and I still did not have the life I was seeking, I wanted answers that life had not given me yet.

The one thing that I can truly remember wanting ever since I was a very little girl was a man that I could love and would love me. I even picked out my very handsome husband, and two children out of a JCPenney catalog when I was 7 or 8 years old…for those of you reading this, remember when JCPenney used to mail out a huge catalog every year! However, I can clearly remember sitting in grade school at about the same age thinking that I would never find a man that would love me. I didn’t know why I thought that at that time. It would be many years later I would figure out why I had those feelings. It had to do with my, “father issues.”

During those years, before I figured it out, I went through life pretty unconsciously. In fact, I sometimes drank lots of alcohol, so I wouldn’t have to be with my feelings because I was in quite a bit of emotional pain and alcohol made it go away…for a while anyway. During grade school and high school, I never had a boyfriend. Although, I watched soap operas and would just daydream that I could have a relationship and someone that loved me like, Luke and Laura!! Boys did not seem to take an interest in me until I got to high school and wow, I could not believe that all of these hot senior boys were taking an interest in me!! One senior, in particular. He had a girlfriend at the time but he still pursued me. I was so flattered and just would take any attention he gave me because I had no self confidence in myself whatsoever!I mainly had no self confidence because of my family life. As I would also later find out, my mother was pretty narcissistic and never really happy about anything, my middle sister pretty much the same and was constantly putting me down, my father was an enabling co-dependent and my younger sister was, “The Golden Child.” The Golden Child is a term given to the “favorite” of a narcissistic mother. I also had acne that would flare up, especially after another disappointment in my life, and that certainly didn’t help with my self esteem. We never had much money and growing up, and when it was just me and my middle sister, if we asked to do something such as say, take a dance lesson, my mother would say, “I have two, I can’t.” But when my younger sister came along, 7 years after me,she was allowed to do mostly every extra curricular activity she wanted to. Talk about deep resentment!! Which we were not allowed to be upset about! So, after a while, I just stopped asking for anything. My first year of high school went pretty well, I was on honor roll, had the attention of many cute senior boys and started to make many new friends and was having lots of fun. However, in high school, it’s all about if you are a cheerleader, a majorette or involved in a lot of after school activities and I was none of those things, so all of this new- found fun with high school seemed to dissipate quickly! I started losing interest in school fast, so my grades started to drop. As I look back, I see that not only was I losing interest in school because I thought I was a nobody and very emotionally unhappy, I started losing interest in school because of the way it is set up. I think at that time I had an unconscious feeling something was very wrong with the way our school system is set up and I was rebelling in some way. So, I hung out with a group of “party people.” This group mainly just partied with alcohol but some pot too, which I loved but didn’t do very often. I think some of the group partied with some harder stuff but that never interested me. Some very cute boys were part of these groups and I would often make out with one of them towards the night’s end. None of them really went beyond the point of making out. I had to really like someone before I would have sex with them and even then it would take a lot for me to do so because I was taught that sex was wrong!!  But we lived in a small town and people talked and gossiped so I would often get accused of having sex with boys and then be called names like slut because these boys were not my boyfriend. I couldn’t understand why something I wanted so badly I could not have but I think part of the reason it didn’t happen was because I was stuck on that boy I mentioned earlier…that hot senior with the girlfriend I was so infatuated with and I only wanted him. One of the many times I was infatuated with someone that did not reciprocate those feelings back to me and it would happen many times over throughout my life. It would cause much anger, frustration, self-hatred, resentment, disappointment and many other emotions that I would just stuff inside thinking they would just go away but as I later would come to learn from a book with this same title, Feelings Buried Alive Never Die…by, Karol Truman.

So, with all these buried emotions and these negative experiences, I was pretty unhappy and depressed but I would never even acknowledge this to myself or anyone else. I thought it was my outside circumstances that had to change for me to be happy, like most of us were conditioned to believe. I started a life makeover…started taking classes through work that could help advance my position there, started exercising, working out, and buying new clothes to accentuate my new smaller figure and my life seemed to change for a while. I was again starting to attract a lot more men again and then finally, “the one,” or so I thought at the time!

I met Paul when I was, 21 years old. Well actually, I met him when I was younger than that…I kind of knew him through mutual friends but he was married at the time. It was one night right after Christmas, on a Tuesday, in fact, that I just had to go out. I went out with this mutual friend and she happened to mention that he was getting divorced. Then, low and behold, we see him at the first place we went to for the evening. He was kind of “hitting on me.” I kind of knew instantly that I was kind of attracted to him. Then when he asked me to dance I had a feeling that I never had with any man ever before and I knew there was something really special between us. I just thought that he was way out of my league! For one thing, he was 7 years older than me, and I thought he was quite accomplished with where he was in life, very good looking and very buff. It didn’t take us much time to start a relationship but that relationship was very dysfunctional and caused me more pain than I had ever felt in my life. When things were good, they were blissful but when things were bad, they were the debts of despair!…for me anyway.  We were on and off all of the time. The slightest thing would cause him to break up with me and it was the WORST feeling in the world! I felt as though my crack-cocaine had been taken away…although I had never been addicted to crack-cocaine but I knew I was highly addicted to him. After a while, I didn’t want to even tell friends and family that we broke up because I knew they would think I was crazy each time I went back. As I said, I was only 21 years old when we started dating. I guess I thought it was because of something about my appearance that was making him break up with me all of the time so I started seriously dieting and working out again. I got the skinniest I had ever been and was receiving a lot of male attention again; which included my boss at work. I would always talk and laugh with him but never gave him much more thought than that because I was so in love with Paul. My boss, John, would ask me to go to various functions and I thought it was purely platonic but then one evening he took it further than that and asked if he could kiss me and to my surprise I let him annndd, I really liked it!!! I was so confused and felt soooo guilty, even though Paul had cheated on me numerous times! Well, I guess this new-found attraction made me have more confidence and have the nerve to tell Paul that we had been going out for three years and that I needed some kind of certainty where it was going. He said that he loved me and wanted to marry me someday but couldn’t tell me anything definite right then. To my surprise I told him that I couldn’t go on like that anymore and broke up with him! I think I surprised the hell out of him too! So, I thought now that John and I could date freely but no, I was wrong. After John found out I was free, it didn’t seem that he wanted me any longer. I couldn’t understand this!  Did I just imagine that John really liked me? Did I read all the signals wrong? Could I even trust my own judgment? I was pretty devastated but just buried my feelings, as usual and drowned my sorrows with my friends, as usual.

One thing that did transpire from this is that now Paul  was chasing me and I really wasn’t that interested, to my surprise again. However, he wasn’t giving up and I now kind of liked how the tables had turned and now he was the needy one. I did still love him too but I found that I did really like John and I couldn’t stop thinking about him.  But John  was MIA, so I did get back with Paul and he was a totally different man…the man I always wanted him to be. Then a few months later, he took me on a cruise and proposed on the side of the deck under the moon. I kind of knew by then it was too late but I still said yes. I knew though I wasn’t as happy as I should be about it but I had this beautiful ring and I was moving to Florida with him and getting the chance to move out of my childhood home and I was in my late 20’s…it was time, I was getting old!! So I moved to Florida and lived with him before we got married but still was thinking of John. There were even more times that Paul and I broke up during our engagement and I found myself back at John’s house, heavily making out and then him asking me to stay and me turning him down. He would get mad and then I wouldn’t see him again but still was thinking of him.

Paul and I had other major things happen in our relationship and he was becoming increasingly more controlling and more and more dependent on drugs and alcohol. I didn’t feel like I should go through with the marriage but didn’t know how to tell him. So, we had a big fight and he gave me an ultimatum, and I finally had the courage to finally break it off. I knew that I had to put a lot of distance between us or we would do this back and forth thing for the rest of our lives, so I packed up my stuff and moved to Las Vegas where my sister was. I really loved Florida and hated to leave. I also loved the lifestyle that I had with Paul but didn’t think I could do it on my own, with my job at a bank. My sister was a cocktail waitress at a Las Vegas Casino, so I set my sights on that. I figured Vegas was very close to LA, and I could pursue my dream of acting, modeling and singing to kind of make up for the broken off engagement and John and I not working out. I still kept secretly holding out hope that John and I would cross paths again.

I made the move to Vegas, in May 1997. I was really saddened to leave Florida behind and Paul’s family, whom I really loved, and it was also sad and scary to be breaking off an engagement and leaving my “security blanket.” I was kind of excited about Vegas, more so the opportunity that it gave me to pursue something I had always wanted to do but never thought I would get the opportunity for…getting “discovered,” in the entertainment business. I also was excited about being a cocktail waitress and making lots of money too, especially so I could obtain the lifestyle that I had with Paul in Florida. After about a month of stressing about not having a job and no real savings, I finally got hired at a local’s casino that my sister was working at. I was soooo excited to be making my own money and being able to pay my bills. Life was starting to get pretty good again. After about three months working at that casino I got a full-time shift, was dating a lot and having fun going out and exploring Vegas. I still never forgot about John and as I kind of intuitively knew this was going to happen before it did, my sister ran into him while she was visiting Ohio, in February 1998; gave him my number and he called me! I was floored! I didn’t want to get too excited though…I wasn’t sure if it was just as friends or not.

He came out in, November of 1998, and I was as nervous as could be. He took me out to dinner and he started holding my hand and we had a very romantic rest of the evening. I was so happy! However, that happiness soon turned into major disappointment two days later as he told me that he only wanted to be friends! I was crushed and didn’t know how to handle it, however I had to spend the rest of the evening with him. So, I drank a lot of wine to deal with it. I couldn’t even take him back to his hotel. I had my sister do it and balled my eyes out the whole drive home. I think I was “over it” by the next day because I started to work like crazy. I was still working at night at my casino job but was also working during the day at many convention jobs as a booth hostess.I still was going over in my mind what went wrong? What could I have done differently? Did I make up that first romantic evening in my head? Why can’t a relationship with a man ever work out? Why can’t I have what I want???

I kept dating more and more men but each time it turned out the same…the ones that really showed an interest in me, I was not interested in and vice versa. I was so dismayed by all of this and just kept reading and reading all of these spiritual/self-help books and although a lot of things seemed to conceptually make sense, I was still always having the same outcome in relationships with men. I actually started to have panic attacks when I was dating this one guy. It was about our fourth date when I knew things could take a more serious turn and I started having panic attacks. It didn’t take long for this relationship to start to fall apart as well. I had to find reading material that explained why all of this was happening to me. I think it was at this time that I started developing, Depersonalization-derealization Disorder.  It’s kind of hard to explain but I didn’t feel like anything was real. I kind of felt I was present in this reality but I really wasn’t. I could not take one more rejection so I kind of blocked everyone out of my life. I then attracted a female friend from work that I let live with me. I thought she was safe because she was a female but she was pretty, for a lack of a better word, psycho! I am then asking, okay forget the men, but why can’t I attract any good female friends in my life?

I was becoming very lonely and very disenchanted with life. I bought more and more self-help and spiritual books to help make sense of my life. I went to psychics, spiritual retreats in Sedona, created Vision Boards, saw a Relationship Therapist, did and became certified in Reiki, meditations, and started attending a Religious Science Church. Things did seem to get better for a while but I still was not really getting those close female friendships, nor was I getting close to falling in love with a man but oh, was I attracting men! Lots!! It was fun but I wanted something deeper. As I did all of these healing efforts, my relationship with my sister became more strained. She was always quite angry and always had to be right and I wasn’t taking it anymore. I was standing up for myself, so we didn’t talk for two, whole years.

I also knew for a very long time that Vegas was not the right city for me, I didn’t like living in a desert and being so far away from friends and family. I wanted to get, “a real job,” again but I had been doing cocktails for so long I didn’t know how I was going to make the transition back to a “real job” again. I temporarily thought of moving to NYC, until I visited there again…too big for me at this stage of my life! I knew I wanted to be somewhere closer to home, where they had four seasons but didn’t necessarily want to move back to my hometown of Youngstown, OH. I almost took a job as a financial advisor in Vegas but then I heard that the owners of my current casino where opening up a casino, 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, PA, which is about an hour and twenty minutes away from Youngstown. A friend mentioned that I could get promoted to a Beverage Manager and go back home and a light bulb went off and I knew this is what I had to do.  I got the position but I just planned on using this position as a way to transition back into a regular job.

Little did I know this was going to be the most stressful time of my life(well, one of the most stressful times of my life!) I was pretty much on my own with the responsibility of “opening a casino,” and all of the responsibilities that came with that. In fact though, that’s pretty much how my whole life had felt…on my own. The employee’s were out of control and I didn’t get the back up of upper management.  I wasn’t really meeting any men that I was really interested in but I did have a lot interested in me, including my 75 year old boss!  There was one guy that I worked with that I ended up having a two-year emotional relationship with. The only problem was that he was married; supposedly not happily, but married! I never even so much as even touched him but we liked each other. I was feeling more and more helpless and unhappy!  I was not happy at this job for several reasons and most people there did not treat me with respect.

The General Manager at the casino and I did not like each other and we only had a temporary facility that we were operating from until the permanent one was available. The GM fixed it so I would resign because he eliminated my position and I didn’t want the other position that was being offered to me. I really wanted a wine sales rep position but didn’t have enough experience so I took a few other jobs until I finally got a wine sales rep job later on.  It seemed though with every other position that I had, I always seemed to get mistreated by someone and didn’t get the respect I deserved. I was unhappy for various reasons and always thought it was the job or this person or that person picking on me. But wherever you go, there you are.  I even ended up getting a position teaching a wine class and actually couldn’t believe that I got it because I had to come up with a lesson plan and teach it to a class with the dean in the classroom. It turned out to be so overwhelming because once again I was kind of left on my own with not a lot of support to teach something that was very complex. Then I ended up being let go and the school closed up shortly thereafter. This was at the beginning of 2010, and it was just the start of many things being “taken away from me.

I was living in Pittsburgh and all of my money was going into my property that I was renting out in Vegas. I had a terrible management company that was constantly saying I needed repairs and not paying me on time. After going into my 401 K(which I lost a lot of money from, from the 2008 crash), to maintain and upgrade this property all while being on unemployment, I realized that I could not continue this and had to short sell my property. That was really hard because I loved this property and hated to give it up. I thought I had everything all planned out prior to leaving Vegas, I had no bills, no car payment and over $20,000 in the bank. Now my savings was dwindling, along with my investments and I was losing my home. I was living with my parents again, which was extremely challenging, especially living with my mother!  I had no car payment when I first moved back. However, I did buy another car after about a year of being back, with payments of $400.00, per month and that was getting increasingly difficult living on unemployment.  At first I kept “trying” to get a job and what once was a very easy thing for me to get seemed to be impossible! I didn’t even get hired as a fricken bank teller paying $8.00 per hour!! I knew then that this employment realm was closed for me right now, which wasn’t too bad at first because I had unemployment coming in and I was living with my parents. But when unemployment ran out, that’s when true panic and despair set in. Finally, I had to give up my car too. I knew I had to surrender everything but my parents couldn’t understand it nor my friends and the rest of my family. This was not me. I was a go-getter and would work several jobs just to have what I wanted. So they could not understand and my explanation of some, Dark Night of the Soul, wasn’t cutting it for them. It was so embarrassing! I sooo wanted this to be over even though I was understanding on some level why everything was happening as it was, most of my friends and family did not. I’m sure they thought I had gone crazy!

I was more into spirituality then I ever was. I was serving on the board at a Unity Church I was attending and sang in the church choir there but had to resign and quit singing once I had to give up my car. Again, embarrassing!! Even they, who understood spirituality, didn’t understand what was happening to me. Since living with my parents again, I discovered all I have been running away from. I was SO ANGRY at my mother annnd my father, whom I always thought I wasn’t holding any animosity towards. I was angry with my mother for mostly, not being a real mother, and the nurturing or the lack of nurturing you receive from your mother especially, will shape and define the rest of your life. There are also emotional needs that a daughter needs from her father and I don’t believe those needs were ever met for me either. I found that I felt like I was in the way at my parents house. That they really didn’t want me there, especially my mother. My father just normally retreated off to his “man cave” downstairs and was usually emotionally absent like he had always been. It was becoming more apparent to me everyday that all relationships are built from the relationship you had with your parents and siblings and if I were to ever attract a healthy relationship with a man in my life I would have to heal the relationship with my family. I was using several different healing modalities previously.  The most effective at first were Reiki and healing meditations. However, one day I was participating in an online healing summit for attracting your soulmate and a man by the name of, Nick Ortner, was a guest speaker on this summit. Nick Ortner, is the founder of the Tapping World Summitt, and on this particular Soulmate Summitt, he was introducing this technique that I had heard about before but didn’t know much about.  It was called EFT, which stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. So what is EFT?  EFT, is a process where you tap on certain acupressure points to release blockages from your energy system. It is based on the premise that all pain, either physical or emotional, is a disruption in the body’s energy system.  I had firmly come to believe that before I discovered EFT, I didn’t know how to truly remove these blockages for good. Okay, back to the online summitt! After listening to many other teachers on this event, Nick Ortner was next. He introduced, EFT, and then offered to do a sample session to let go of a previous love relationship so you could attract another. I really thought I did everything possible to let go of my relationship with Paul, but I just kind of blindly followed through with what he said to do. Basically, you do a round of tapping on the acupressure points while stating an affirmation of how you probably currently feel about the situation, e.g., “I just can’t let go of Paul,” and then you continue through the points, with different affirmations until you release some unconscious emotion related to that.  I don’t recall what point I was tapping on and the exact affirmation that was used but oh, do I remember the emotion that came out when I did it!!! Prior to this, I had truly believed that I was not still hanging on to him. It was at this moment when I was like, whoa, this stuff is powerful and I started using it on everything!! I was beginning to learn the answer to the question I was asking over and over…”Why can’t I have what I want?”…because I have energy blockages blocking my desires. I truly believe that if I didn’t use EFT for all of my blockages I would have been in the Dark Night of the Soul, for much longer than what I was.  So when do most of the blockages begin? I believe mostly in childhood. It is during the ages of 0-7, our brains are in the Alpha and Theta Brainwave cycles and we are just downloading the information that we are observing from our environment. This is the same state a person is in when they are in hypnosis or meditation. We observe the way our parents interact with each other and then determine that that’s what a relationship looks like between husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend. As a matter of fact, it is said that the first major relationship that we are in is usually based on the dynamic between your mother and father. They say that usually your first partner has very similar characteristics as the parent you had the most difficulty with, and boy oh boy, if Paul wasn’t like my mother in many, many ways!! I also have come to believe that the basic relationship dynamic today and for a very long time has been between someone who is more narcissistic in nature and the other being more co-dependent in nature.; not always, but most of the time. My mother was more narcissistic and so was Paul. I was more co-dependent.

If you want to heal your blocks you have to be willing to go back and revisit and heal your childhood. I will go more into detail about this in my next post.