Healing the Addiction to Drama

The fear of intimacy is debilitating, it can keep so many of us trapped in victim consciousness, stuck in endless cycles of abuse, fear and addictions all the while projecting our deeply rooted wounds and pain onto the people we care for most. Most of us who suffer from this fear tend to push away the one thing we crave most, closeness with others. We were intended to connect, having a sense of community and a tribe is crucial to our well being. So many of us are desiring deeper connections, yet we are completely disconnected from ourselves. Our psyche is fragmented and we end up searching others and the world for this sense of connection that can only come from within, and it is the one thing that can heal this fear of being seen and vulnerable and that will open us up to the beauty and safety of relating intimately

The "wounded” woman may react to her partners behavior by intentionally triggering their “pain points” this is because “she” is deeply immersed in her own suffering and craves someone to be there with her, to ease her loneliness. Instead of calming heated confrontation she may add fuel to the fire as a way to validate her fear of conflict and activate the nervous system that is addicted to chaos, stemmed from drama in the childhood household. This perpetuates the cycle of blame and victim consciousness that allows for wounded girls to stay stuck in this pattern of emotional codependency & toxic relationships. They may continue to stay in the unhealthy relationship, because being treated disrespectfully feels more comfortable and familiar than feeling loved and respected. Most wounded women would prefer to stay in this harmful situation then face their even greater fear of being alone.

Instead of voicing their needs kindly, they may stay silent to "keep the peace" or they may tell everyone they know about the arguments, disagreements, and conflict and subconsciously relive the story over and over again in their minds as a way to stimulate that emotional chemical cocktail that the nervous system is used to receiving. This allows for them to not accept responsibility for the situation and pushes the blame onto their partner as a way to not accept their own internal conflict. This creates a feeling of constantly being in emotional and mental conflict, that may begin to cause anger, irritability and frustration projected onto the partner as a way to deny personal responsibility and to unconsciously push away the closeness that is deeply desired, but was never met in childhood. This created a belief of unworthiness to receive intimacy and the ego will “protect” the emotionally distressed inner child by sabotaging the intimacy through “fighting” as a way to resist and avoid being vulnerable out of fear of rejection or abandonment that may be projected through behaviors mimicked by a toddler (yelling, crying, stomping, “causing a seen”) it’s cry out for love, but not from the partner, from the Self.

When growing up in turbulent and unsafe households the body becomes addicted to stress because it is the feeling that is most frequently being experienced and expressed in the home. It becomes habitual to behave in a state of constant defense. It essentially becomes more “normal” or habitual for the body to feel tension and stress rather than its natural state which would be pleasure and peace. We begin to distort this feeling of constant angst and pain with “love” and it keeps us trapped in unhealthy relationships, chronic pain, fatigue, illness, anxiety and depression. It drains us and we feel as if we have nothing left to give.

What needs to be given to you is your own time, nurturing, love and respect. As wounded women we want this to come from outside of us, particularly from our romantic partners, but the only way we become awakened women is by going inside of ourselves, creating a new image of the goddesses that we truly are, but were never taught to be. When we treat ourselves like queens we teach our partners to become kings and together we build empires that last because they are built from eternal love rather than parental conditioning.

When a relationship doesn’t have lots of conflict and drama it can become boring to those who grew up associating it with love. Not having drama in relationships will feel unfamiliar and we may begin to think that something has gone “wrong”, when in all actuality it is healthy, but as a “wounded” woman we may unconsciously seek this state of chaos in our relationships because it is learned behavior from our primary caregivers. We have attachment wounds that stem from early childhood that affect how we relate, especially to our romantic partners. We may fear that if there is no drama then there is no passion. When we have attachment issues we can easily distort drama for passion and call it romance, but later we may find that what we feel is resentment. We have to see beyond the mask of the current relationship and probe beneath the surface to see the reasons we may have attracted unhealthy or toxic relationships into our lives. Most likely what is found are beliefs stemming back to behaviors learned from our mothers and fathers. We attract “wound mates” as a reflection to heal the root of the core wound created by the most influential caregiver in our early life. We must use our relationships as tools to discover more about our attachment styles and love language that will give us a better understanding of our needs, which we can then meet and shift our ability to relate to ourselves and to the world around us. Relationships are not just for us to “feel good”, pleasure, please and gratify our egos. They were created as vehicles for us to grow, to become the best version of ourselves.

If you find that your relationships don’t help you to become your most elevated and joyous version of yourself, see them as teachers helping you to love yourself more, to become the love you sought in them, but couldn’t seem to find. Once you begin to give yourself the love you seek, you find that there was never really anything missing, not from you, your partner or the relationship, it was only your perception of what love is that had been distorted. When we believe that pain and chaos is love, that is what we will attract. When we believe love is unconditional and free, that is also what we will attract.

When we can stop blaming the people we are in relationships with and begin to see them as reflections of our beliefs and behaviors we let them off the hook and we free ourselves from needing the love of another in order to feel loved, whole and worthy, just as we are. We stop relying on them to fill a void within us that only we can fulfill and we begin to love them unconditionally. We no longer need them to change in order for us to love and accept them, because we have given that love and acceptance to ourselves and now we are in a state of oneness that allows for us to see ourselves in every person, whether we like what we see or not, we accept it in them, because we accept it within. Contrary to popular belief, it is not anyone's job to change anyone, it is only our job to change our perceptions. And with each encounter with any being we are gifted the opportunity to shift our perception and we can begin to discover more about who we are. We release the judgement and open up to compassion. Only when we can freely extend compassion to ourselves can we extend it to another.

Then we can begin to love in a new way, in a way that fulfills us and heals us. If you react strongly to being told that you are a “wounded woman” then it in fact confirms it. There’s no shame in it, in fact it’s how most of us were taught to be by our mothers and grandmothers, what we can do is to become better, act better. Observing your reactions and behavior to others actions and behavior toward you can teach you a lot about yourself. This is how we become an “awakened” woman.

An awakened woman may react to her partners behavior by detaching from her emotions, focusing on her breath. This allows for her partner to express their deepest emotions while listening from a place of openness and understanding, without interruption or manipulative demands, she guides the conversation with gentle communication as a way to keep it from escalating, she maneuvers around the drama that her ego may be demanding, and she bravely chooses to anchor herself in the heart space, she is able to listen and hold space for her own wounds and emotional reactions while also holding space for her partners, she consoles and comforts “him” through his challenging emotions, she does not yell or scold him, she holds him gently like a child, soothes him with her strength, not with her breasts or body, but with her grace and peace of mind.

Staying centered in the midst of emotional upheaval is one of the most challenging lessons we will ever face. It asks us to lay our ego aside, surrender to the self created pain and begin to repaint the image of what we deeply desire in relationships, to stop the ancestral patterns of pain, betrayal, violence, manipulation, and drama that we learned from our caregivers and rewrite our story, when you do that you rewire your nervous system and you begin to write a brand new script, about a brand new you.

Personally, learning and recognizing this addiction to drama that was deeply embedded in my subconscious and nervous system has taken a lot self awareness and self love. I’ve had to find new ways of expressing my emotions as a way to not cause unnecessary drama in my relationships as a way to keep them “alive”. My favorite practice has been channeling it into dance. I love expressing my emotions through music. This helps me to move through the egos desire to cause conflict and by the time I am done I have returned to a state of peace and love. This allows for me to re-approach the situation from a new energetic state. During my dance session I release emotions in a healthy way, rather than projecting them onto my relationship I give myself a “time-out”, I acknowledge my inner child's demands and I grant her wish. This keeps me emotionally balanced and I am then able to clearly communicate what it is I am feeling and why, without the drama.

Thank you for reading!

Love & blessings, Ashley <3