Lethal Loyalty

Joy and misery are both dances within a dream

The clarity and gravity of the moment when you realize:

You sacrificed yourself nearly to death for a lie. Or rather, thousands of them. This is a moment many of us must contend with.

The night is silent. Your intuition was right. As were the warnings from others that you once shot down and rebelled against, as you simultaneously tried to smother your racing heart, whose every beat confirmed the words meeting your ears.

Deep down, we always know the truth.

Sometimes it can be hard to discern intuition from a trauma response, and if we’re used to being in fight-flight-freeze, this can lead to us ignoring our inner guide altogether.

Or we may be in denial, because we think we’re not built to take another L. In this case, the gymnastics we’ll do to avoid the truth is baffling at best.

Sometimes, it is easier to believe and relax into a hornets nest of deception and lies… if it means we don’t have to face that we’d been exploited for everything we had, and even the things we didn’t know we had, but a certain breed of opportunist can smell it from miles away.

Lethal loyalty. Stockholm Syndrome.

Loyalty is a virtue in and of itself, but when not applied with discernment, or the wisdom of awareness, AKA when we aren’t connected to ourselves and have a gag order on our intuition, it can get us killed.

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I did not cry or scream. I sat in silence as I saw the full truth revealed at last. A friend was on the phone with me. I asked her this:

"How did I let myself get this low? How did I allow someone like that into my life? Even in my addiction, I wouldn’t associate with someone that bad..”

She said….

We had to let them in. (She has her own story with this.) We had to let them in so we could touch this pain and so the cycle would stop. The lesson is Never Again. If it hadn’t gotten that bad, we would have kept doing it.

Meaning, if you come from a background of trauma and have had a life long struggle with self worth and getting mixed up with some twisted people who treat you in a “familiar” way, meaning reflections of our worst experiences on the planet, then yeah, like any cycle, like any addiction — you have to hit rock bottom. Or you will not stop.

This is not to say anyone deserves abuse or brings it on. Not at all. What I am saying is that people who experience it on severe levels typically have histories of it. A person who has a solid structure within themselves and was raised with good self esteem doesn’t let people like that anywhere near them.

But when we run to familiarity in a world of uncertainties, and the familiarity we know is chaos and abuse, well, guess where we’re likely to run for “safety” until we receive the wake-up call that we have to save ourselves, not others, and not ourselves through others?

We are beautiful for our so-called brokenness, because the light gets in through the cracks, and we are reborn and rebuilt.

But sometimes, before we get to wherever it is we’re going I guess… a danger along the way is:

We can over-empathize, over-sympathize, and even fall in love with— other broken people, for the simple fact that we see how damaged they are, and we don’t want to leave them, because we know what that is like. We want to save them, the way we wished someone would have saved us.

This type of thinking can be fatal. It often is.

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Both the

Recovering Overthinker

and

Dragon Rose Temple

published articles yesterday that resonate well with this regarding solutions.

Rev. Rose talks about the importance of boundaries, and not saving other people. I’m here to echo that and also say that in most severe cases it can get you killed. Not everyone who is broken wants to heal. Not everyone who needs love actually wants love— they want novocaine.

Recovering Overthinker talked about the calling of the higher self, and why we often ignore it. Both writers are speaking of solutions and preventions to this situation.

Answering the call to our higher selves is one of the scariest and bravest things we can do. I still struggle with it, and I am trudging my way toward it more and more every day, but there’s nothing easy about it. I had to get really badly burned and have a loaded pistol to my head three times to hit a point where I was going to STOP giving my energy to places it should not be— fuck the reason I told myself to justify it. NO.

We are our own responsibility. I am my own responsibility. No one else. And if I am so “loyal” to someone else and think I love someone so much that it winds up almost taking my life, and my solution is to fix them so they’ll stop abusing me? Holy shit, full stop, therapy needed.

That isn’t love.

Instead of saving myself and putting myself back together, my instinct was to try and save the person who was causing the wounds, so I would be “saving my self by proxy”.

That is abandonment and avoidance of self, and a betrayal of self. It is absolutely in the category of not answering the call to ones higher self, it’s completely ignoring that any higher self or self at all exists.

This may be a darker read, but this is not an anomaly of a situation. I write for me because I’m still processing the shock, but I’m also writing because I know there are people out there going through the same thing.

I know how hard it is when you feel like no one could possibly understand, so you say nothing at all, and because of that isolation, it continues.

Memento Mori. In many ways. But also.. I am grateful for the Reaper. Not every death is a physical one. But that old life, that instinct toward “lethal loyalty”, all the trauma-fueled co-dependency and total abandonment of self, even the person I thought I knew and loved with everything in me, all of those tendencies, cycles and ILLUSIONS are now dead.

Thank God.

Death tonight is quiet. It is a strange peace, born from one final blow of betrayal, and one last final revealing of scandal and deceit.

The process of going within begins, in many ways. I allow whatever arises to do so…because if there’s one thing I know? When I’m finally done, I’m fuckin done.

The gems along the way will be deeply seeing into the nature of self abandonment, avoidance of higher self and destiny, the avoidance of seeking the Divine and instead replacing it with external chaos and fools gold — attachments to other people that are equivalent to drowning yourself in a vat of acid.

The human mind is a powerful thing.

Joy and Misery are both Dances within a Dream. Guru Nanak said that a long time ago. Turns out just about everything can be a dance in this dream.

I wonder what happens, when we awaken in the dream?

Guess we get to find out now.