There is a lot of emerging shadow happening in the world right now. Power dynamics are shifting. Boundaries are being challenged. I am a firm believer that whatever is happening in the external world around us can be healed to an extent through processing the internal self. The more of us that do the work, the larger the ripple will be.
Today I am writing about hatred, rejection, death currents, and the internal monster WE ALL HAVE INSIDE US. No one is free from this human dilemma. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t somehow resonate with what is happening in the external world. Be brave. Look within. Find the parts of yourself that scream, “GO AWAY!” Use them to discover the parts of you that want protection.
Bring your adult consciousness into the scarier aspects of being alive. When you do the work of true shadow acknowledgement, you can begin to hold yourself and others in a new way. When you can meet shadow with compassion, safety, and acceptance that you it has not yet received, you are healing a hidden rift that deserves attention.
Everyone has a part of themself that gets rejected, is hated, or is put away and not consciously explored. Some of us we might be so used to holding it all together that we don’t even recognize we have a part of ourselves we don’t let anyone else see or ourselves feel. The monster self is a coping mechanism to acknowledge the rejected self without actually doing the work of owning the shadow aspects of hatred, separation, rejection, pride, and fear.
The monster self leads is into our pathways of self sabotage. We use the monster as a way of expression, as a test, and as a means to push people away. Those who somatically process turn the monster inward. Self hatred gets projected onto the physical body. Disease is used to internalize the pain of inherent rejection. What you do with this part of yourself and how you do it is a product of how you were raised and rejected.
Take a moment to touch into all the negativity you experience in your life. Your struggles, your tendencies to self sabotage, your physical pain, and even your own death fantasy. Can you handle simply holding these negative currents in your body without making them go away? Can you notice them without being what you fear?
Tolerate your negative self for a moment. You KNOW this place in you, even if you avoid it. Let it simply sit and be present in your conscious reality. Don’t make it anything but what it is - the unloved and rejected parts of yourself that no one has held with compassion and acceptance.
Monster Origin Story
Rejection of aspects of self starts early on in life. We all had times in our childhood when we were told to “go to our room” or the equivalent, right? Then there’s the times that we were used as an example for how not to do something or be a certain way. Spirited children with energy and emotional expression are not comfortable to raise. They certainly aren’t easy to put in classrooms or get to sit still at family dinners. Add in the emotional, physical, or sexual abuse aspect of innocent childhood that has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with an adult in your life not being safe. Even caring and present parents couldn’t shield their children from the reactions of teachers, caregivers, or worse…peers.
Needless to say, there is a lot of room for feeling unloved and rejected in childhood.
Some of us had parents that supported us during hard times and made us feel loved, accepted, and essential. For those of us who had an adult accepting us and supporting us through these hard emotional reactions, we may hold it together a bit better or be able to hold compassion for the unloved inside us. Those of us with parents who were intensely emotional, abusive, narcissistic or shut down don’t have that cushion. This is when intense self hate might not have a voice of love or care attached to it at all.
How can we learn to be okay with the parts of ourself that only know rejection?
The inability to know what to do with the part of you that didn’t fit inside the family body, social norms, or was abused and abandoned didn’t just go away. It had to go somewhere. The way we were punished and how we reacted to that punishment created our coping mechanisms towards our own hatreds, our fear of rejection, and our tendency to sabotage.
Your monster is complicated in it’s defense but actually completely simple in it’s underlying needs. All monsters want to know they aren’t alone. Inside the monster is a child feeling the pain of not being loved.
To Express?
How did you cope? What did you do with which aspects of yourself to survive? Do you know? Do you simply choose to live your life never going there and wondering why you always have a lingering sense of being off or not right? Have you labeled yourself in some way that gives you permission to never explore the “DO NOT CROSS” boundary you created internally?
All this not okayness and rejection and abandonment had to go somewhere. It all amalgamated together and created a part of you that doesn’t know how to be safe, seen, and secure. This is the source of your unloved and unlovable fortress.
The fortress is your monster, protecting your hurt self from further harm.
Having an extreme reaction to a situation and being ostracized in the midst of it creates confusion in a child. Experiencing negativity (abuse, trauma, or simply being yelled at) without knowing what was done to cause the problem creates a different sort of confusion. The reaction we have to this kind of treatment is inevitably painful. We reject our own self in an attempt to avoid further pain.
Confusion and chaos, remember, are aspects of the lower self. When we get confused we are aligning with the part of ourself that believes it needs to hide to survive. When we get chaotic we are aligning with the part of ourself that needs regulation but does not understand how to regulate. Both chaos and confusion are the fuel the monster self uses to recreate what it is trying to avoid over and over again. It uses chaos and confusion to keep what it is protecting inside safe.
Do you remember what you did as a child when you were hurt? Did you continue to express and flip out and reap the consequences? Or did you suppress and contain all those reactions to fit into the mold you were being taught was acceptable? Did you get quiet or did you get loud? Most likely there was a bit of both going on.
BUT. All this rationalizing might be putting an adult spin on how things really happened inside you.
As children, there’s no thought process transpiring in the midst of any extreme emotional outburst or punishment. There is simply survival instinct…taking over…expressing itself in chaos or control.
When being rejected (and made to be alone) for being too emotional or intense, eventually calm would come. Then calm noticed something was even worse. No one stuck with us. We were not loved THROUGH the outburst.
When being punished, we learned that we’d rather be in control of our own hurt than allow someone else to hurt us. This gets pretty convoluted in that we decide to start to hurt ourselves rather than be hurt without understanding why. This is a huge source of sabotage behavior.
When being irrationally abused without cause, we started to think that simply by being ourselves we we were not acceptable being who we are and needed to become way more vigilant to control other’s reactions towards us.
Our adult self needs us to start to rewire all of this confusion and chaos. We need to cultivate an ability to send a different message to ourself. Often we don’t know how to do any of this because our child self’s defense and reactions are so strong. This is confusing because our child self and monster self seem were capable of saving us. Often we don’t actually realize we need help when our monster is activated.
In fact, the times in our life where we resist help and get stuck in our own problem while rejecting every one else is a sign that our monster is keeping us safe.
There are times in life when emotions TAKE OVER. This is our monster’s unregulated way of seeking help. Chaos and confusion reign when our child consciousness has the stage. When a monster goes into expression mode, it uses extreme emotional eruption to push people away and create what it fears. This is related to when we expressed and faced consequences in our childhood. Volcanic emotional expression nails in the coffin for creating the expected rejection, abandonment, or punishment as a result of our behavior. Of course anyone we love is going to get the brunt of this expectation when the monster unleashes the truth of what it has to express.
The attention/rejection dysfunction of emotional freaking out is one a lot of us have experienced in relationships. The outward freaking out, “I need to emote” type of negativity is easy to reject. Really…how many of us are actually comfortable with angry eruptions and hurtful comments?
People who tend towards over containing (no reacting, holding it all together, going cold) and under containing (emotional outbursts, mean accusations, not holding it together, running hot) in emotional situations tend to attract each other. This is an unconscious push/pull energetic that will need to be brought out of shadow through attention to both people’s emotions, not simply the obvious emoter. If only the emotionally loud person gets attention and space, then resentment and shut down is going to build in the other.
An inability to have an emotional reaction needs everything an ability to have an emotional reaction needs - attention, love, care, compassion support.
The emote/rejection cycle is a total trap, especially for those of us who tend to attract relational dynamics where one person emotes and one person stays quiet. After all, the quiet person has a monster as well. There are always the children that get locked in a room alone and then live their lives expecting to be left alone forever. Those children go cold in their expressions to try to avoid rejection.
Or Suppress?
The less obvious but more devious side of our survival monster is found in its suppression aspect. Suppress can mean to simply go numb. Suppress can also mean to become hyper vigilant. Suppression instincts over compensate survival in an attempt to hide the rejected self and control the environment into safety.
Suppression is scarier than expression in reference to what it creates in our monster self. When we suppress we can get really tricky and subversive in the ways our monster acts out. Suppression is where we are more likely to sabotage, get sick (somatically processing our negativity) or too closed off in an effort to protect the self from the unwanted results of being unloved. Remember lack of emotion is suppressed emotion. Suppression means that emotion is going to come out somehow and that somehow is rooted in destruction.
The suppressed monster is one in which a person pretends to have it all together while inwardly freaking out or vigilanty style safety scanning. These are the people we might even turn to when feeling emotionally turbulent because they can hold everything together. A false self ideal is found here. We feel good by holding it all together while inwardly being terrifed of what would happen if we responded authentically.
The suppressed monster lives alone. It repeats thoughts obsessively to find a solution to the problem. It holds onto resentments. It thrives in its secret life. Those who love us spend period of time living with the sense of an explosion waiting to happen. We fear the barbed comments targeted to push loved ones away. Suppressed monsters thrive on hurt and hate (often self hate). They unconsciously want others to hurt as much as they do.
Hidden monsters are mean. They are machiavellian in the way they go about creating their own pain and suffering to prove to everyone who loves them that their survival is necessary.
The Monster Dynamic
The Shadow…The Demand…The Unconscious…or The Conscious?
Now here’s the thing. A monster actually WANTS the people around them to become monsters too. Monsters feel safer with other monsters! This can be conscious or unconscious…but it is absolutely present in the monster body. The way a chaotic and confused person feels safe with the intensity of the emotions inside them is by causing similar intense emotions to be felt by everyone around them. That’s how they feel not alone, not abandoned. It’s also how the monster justifies its existance.
The pull to react with your own unique to you monster-style response is very strong when dealing with someone whose potently expressing their rejected self.
This is especially true the more we care about someone. Of course our own monster is going to start to feel pretty activated when we risk loving more, sharing ourself more, and being vulnerable to our own fear of being unloved and abandonable. Living with the fear of rejection leads to nervous system stress and eventual explosion to relieve that stress. That’s part of the appeal in the monster dynamic. It lives with an unconscious expectation. How long will it take for the hidden monster to explode and prove itself to be necessary?
The pull to become a monster can be as tricky inside ourselves as another person’s demand is tricky. It may look like innocently defending yourself, justifying your own reaction, rationalizing your behavior, or trying to prove your loved one wrong. Either way when you respond by becoming your own version of monster (or perhaps your elevated ego state of NOT monster aka suppressed monster) the monsters in both of you have won. They aren’t going anywhere. They are simply digging into the trenches of the belief that you are rejectable and abandonable. They are clearly proving you are not worthy of love as your imperfect self.
Relational Impulse
If you experience someone else’s monster, your impulse is going to be activate your own monster. In fact, many of us AS parents do or did what our parents did to us simply because our own monster gets triggered and activated without any control. Because the nature of chaos, confusion, or suppressed calm is all rooted in the negative self, we will not feel loved in this space until we are actively capable of acknowledging that our monster is not, in fact, creating what we think it is going to create - rejection, punishment, abandonment or even death.
Rereading that paragraph after I wrote it, I tried to edit it. No luck. I can’t take anything out and I would add to much to this post if I put more in. It’s potent. Try reading it a few times.
Deciding to love someone through their monster’s expression and suppression of extreme emotional intensity can be one of the hardest aspects of being with another person intimately. It’s not peaches and cream, softness and vulnerability. It’s loud. It’s messy. It’s also incredibly rewarding to prove that monster wrong.
The place inside all of us that believes no one can possibly love us as we are feels safer when it is not alone.
People around us and in relation to us are going to respond to this side of us with their own negativity. That’s why couples fight and completely miss each other. This is why friendships end suddenly. This is the source in you that burns bridges and cuts ties rather than sticks around to work things out. We lose staying power in relationship not because of all of the myriad rationalizations for separation that we might believe to be true. We lose the desire to stay when our monster tells us it is threatened.
Not having a desire to be compassionate with ourselves in our own monster means we will never believe another can love us through it. We let the monster win whenever we love someone and defend against caring more, needing more, or wanting more.
Just like the “good” parts of us, this monster part of us needs to know our important relationships can love us through it. Holding the container of lack of defense on behalf of another is the place where we can begin to heal the bridge between the part of us we cannot control or act out from to the part of us that actually is okay and knows how to interact with others.
Monster Rewiring
The thing to remember in the midst of any monster style defense response is that relationship is not available in the moment of the defense. When a person is in their own rejection current, they are not capable of relating honestly and clearly. All there is space for is to emote, feel, let go, express, shut down, turn off, or become unavailable. The monster is simply not capable of feeling relational, mutual, interested, or curious.
The monster is so busy projecting abandonment and all the negative expectations that go with it, that the only thing it will respond to is zero contest and an attempt at presence. Here is where we find our every day inner dao in relationship!
When you are in relationship with someone and your actions push the monster button, you cannot fix their defenses by engaging directly with the monster. The challenge is to simply pay attention and maintain you own clarity. You have to pay attention and not merge with their unconscious demand to become a monster yourself. Monster rewiring is a mutual experience of breath and flow into the body when one person is capable and the other person is not.
To heal your own monster, you are going to have to admit to yourself you are interested in putting in the work of learning how to stand the process of healing other people’s monsters. Monster healing is one of those situations where transformation can only happen together. This work can not be done alone. Alone, you’re just proving your monster right by putting it back on the shelf of ignorance when you don’t need it. What I am talking about here is one of the most profound and necessary aspects of healing the self that can only happen in relationships where people care so deeply about each other that they want to grow each other into their core selves.
I’m going to create an embodiment video on regulation for my next post. My sense though is that this post has enough to think about that I need to pause here.