From Controlling To Surrendered

I have always much preferred to feel angry rather than sad.  When I am angry I feel empowered, protected, strong and in control.  When I am sad, I feel vulnerable, weak, exposed and embarrassed.

I have been a person who decided at a young age that it was the wisest move for me to hide my heart and its delicate and sensitive feelings.  As a result, I grew into an adult that held onto this habit at the expense of my own happiness.

It is easier for me to fight with someone who is trying to love me and get closer to me, than it is to surrender to the love I feel for them. 

I was abused and disrespected whilst being told I was loved as a small child.  So that word immediately puts me on guard.  The phrase I love you has been a huge fear trigger in my life.  The really dangerous people for me in my past, who could do the most damage to my heart, were the ones that used that four letter scary and powerful word the most. L.O.V.E.

I am often asked when working with people, who are recovering from their own heart trauma,

"How do you know who the safe people to love are, and who the dangerous ones are?"

I needed help with this question myself, fourteen years ago when I started to work on detoxing my own fear.  This is where wise elders and therapists are very useful.   I needed to learn about personal boundaries and what was emotionally healthy for me and what was not.  I had spent years being disconnected from my own heart and guarding it from anyone who said they loved me, so I needed tutoring on how to make wise choices and changes.

I used to think the act of surrender, meant admitting defeat. And in a way these days for me, it does.  I have needed to stop fighting love and my desire for it.  Until I did this I could not let it into my life, and learn how to grow with it not against it.  Fear won and love lost.  Nowadays, love wins and fear loses when it comes to matters of the heart.

I know it sounds a bit contradictory but whilst I fight relationships with fear, I keep fear alive in my life and it dominates and infects every choice I make.  When I surrender my fears and invite love into my life, it is like allowing someone to get some tweezers and remove a big splinter of glass from my foot and clean the open wound afterwards.  The disinfectant stings and it is challenging to surrender, but in the long term for our health it is the only wise move to make.  To let others closer who choose to honour and care for us is the only way to win true wealth in life for respectful love is the ultimate currency. 

Surrender within the world of love and our hearts, is a voluntary and brave act, not an act of cowardice.  It means to choose to allow people including oursevles, their own  power, personality and choices, and let go of the need to fight, control or over power ourselves and them.

I once thought if I surrendered and let go of my anger I would collapse into a vulnerable mess forever and other people would walk all over me and take advantage of me.  My reason for believing this was based on a childhood where I was abused and taken advantage of.   And many who are afraid of love as adults have good reasons as to why this has become a habit for them.  As a child they did the best thing a child knows how to do when they are afraid and wounded, they hide.  We hid our hearts away for safe keeping.

However as an adult, I abuse myself when I continue to hide my heart, by holding onto control, for it keeps love out.  I deprive myself of what I crave the most when I hide.  To be seen, loved and respected for who I am and for who I am not. 

The most important relationship I need to lovingly honour is the one I have with myself.  People pleasing others and allowing them to treat me with disrespect is fighting and controlling my hearts  truth.  My truth today as an empowered adult, is that disrespectful relationships are not okay anymore,  including the one I have with myself. 

So sometimes my surrendering to love, means standing up and speaking up respectfully and assertively to another to let them know that their disrespectful behavior is not okay.  When I surrender to truly loving myself I won't allow another to disrespect me.  As a mother and wife I would not stand by and allow anyone to disrespect my sons or my man, and so surrendering to my love for them, often means standing up, not fighting, but standing up and speaking up.  I don't have to be aggressive to get my point across; I can do it calmly and assertively as a mature adult. 

At other times surrendering to love might mean me shutting up, stopping being busy and just making space for another to have their opinion, their own way to dealing with things, and to let them love me.  To allow them come to me instead of blocking their every move or scanning them for fault.  To just surrender my control and let them come close.  To shut my mouth, and my thoughts off and to feel, not think.  That for me is always a challenge.  To allow loved ones access to the sacred inner world of my heart.

I will not give my heart to anyone these days; it is my responsibility to take care of it, nobody else's.   However, I will generously share it these days with those I love and trust. 

The internal room I had allocated in my hearts little house, as a child when love came to visit, was less like a room and more like a walk in linen closet.  For love only seemed to visit me briefly when I was a child.  Loving connections were transient so I didn't need to build a very big room for love.  It rarely stayed overnight, or even had time to sit and chat, so when love came to visit, we just stood in my hearts tall closet and chatted, then love left.

As I have detoxed my fear over the past fourteen years, it has been like knocking down thick concrete walls in my hearts home, to open up verandahs and huge living areas inside of my heart.  My therapist and beautiful Barb have been like architects for my hearts home, consulting me on available options and wonderful designs I can choose from as I undertake this huge internal renovation project.  I  feel I have moved from being a controlling frightened princess living in a small dolls house, into a surrendered but empowered Queen, who needs much bigger chambers in her hearts new palatial estate to now live and build new entire wings  for  generations to come.

This might sound a bit wanky to some of you but when talking about the invisible inner world of emotional healing I find it so helpful for myself, and others have echoed with their feedback, that word pictures bring to life this sacred, rarely seen, but beautiful inner world we all experience.

I still have much work to do with my hearts renovations, but the one great thing about the work I have done so far, is that there is so much more room inside of me, I have space.  This means that the big hearted King I have invited to share my heart with me (my husband Mr. Delicious), actually has room to dance with me now, I can let him in and we can waltz.  In the past any man that tried to gain access to my heart was crammed into my standing room only linen closet with me.  It is not surprising that we would always end up fighting because it was too bloody small for a big hearted man and me.  My narrow hearted room allowed me to control him and keep him still so he could not emotionally move much.  I felt safer this way, restricting and controlling how much space a man had to love me in.  It kept me unhappy and emotionally malnourished, but I felt safe.  And feeling safe has been my priority as an adult as I was unable to stay safe as a little girl.   So no surprise that my previous relationships always ended up with me needing relief from the emotional claustrophobia I used to feel anytime a man tried to get close to my heart.  I would ask him to leave, and if he wouldn't go willingly, I would leave and shut the door on my heart so I could feel free and emotionally breathe again.

The room in my heart where romance waltzes and love is made is still under construction.  However once completed it will have luxurious winged chairs to sit and read in, it will have a wonderful balcony to enjoy intimate meals on and also slow dances.  And I have already purchased the wonderful bed.  It is a four posted walnut wood,  masterpice with carved lions foot feet, and a wonderful cream draped canopy.  It is sheer delight to climb into our bed.

As my beautiful Barb often tells me about life and ageing, that if we keep honouring our heart and surrendering to love, that the best is yet to come.  I now know this to be a universal truth for us all to look forward to.

If you would like to explore more on the subject of personal boundaries you might enjoy my blog on Personal Boundaries under the Family Friends and Foes heading at the top of the home page.

A quick update on the meeting I had on Tuesday with the Publishing House, well .... it went as well as these meetings can go.  He had not read my manuscript as I only gave it to him in the meeting, but he had read some of my past work.  I spoke to him about my vision for my new book child Emotional Monogamy and my hopes for it ...  and he was excited.  He stated that he would like to offer me a book deal and so I will await the arrival of his contract and keep you posted.

I would like to leave you with these beautiful Word Vitamins today crafted by Octavio Pazas as you might choose to reflect as I often need to, on how willingly you surrender to love, to sharing your hearts inner room and sacred space with another.

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.