What is your addiction to drama costing you?
My mother and father were driven by vanity - it’s how they bootstrapped themselves out of the working-class poverty mindset into the middle class. The culture of their upbringing in Yorkshire was the inverted narcissism of the poverty mindset. It was a culture that celebrated ignorance and poverty. It was so ingrained that in the 1970s the Monty Python team created a famously ridiculous satirical sketch “Four Yorkshiremen” that took aim at this.*
My parents rejected this glorified ignorance and poverty mindset and the motivation to escape was so powerful that it set them up for financial success for them and myself.
The downside to it was that they spent the first 20 years of my life telling me I was not good enough for them. At home, there was frequent criticism from both of them, and all of it was driven by vanity. Their vanity was equally as dogmatic as the culture that they were so desperate to escape.
And the emotional wounds that I carried created a conflict within me with both towards attraction and away from rejection. I desperately wanted to be like my Mum and Dad to make them love me - this was the attraction. But I absolutely hated the vanity dogma and rejected their culture, as much as they hated the culture that they had come from.
Over the past few years, I have been contemplating the Gene Keys - a westernised interpretation of the I Ching - a spiritual text from China that is over 5000 years old. And recently I had got to contemplating the 12th Gene Key.
“The 12th (Gene Key) Shadow is the love of your own uniqueness. It is about learning to love yourself, which is the true definition of vanity. However, vanity only stops being vanity when you realise that to love yourself is actually to love everyone else, a revelation demanding a quantum leap out of yourself altogether.”
Rudd, Richard. The Gene Keys: Embracing Your Higher Purpose
The downside to this for me, in rejecting the vanity of my parents and all the bullshit drama that my parents laid on me, then I’m also rejecting my own vanity and uniqueness.
The only way through this was to contemplate the inner conflicting beliefs that I carried and find a way to kill the drama that I had inherited from my parents.
Sometimes we can spend years or, in my case decades, knowing that we have inner conflicts but we don’t know where to start to look into our darkness where these inner conflicts are hidden.
Once we shine a light into our darkness and we see the conflicting beliefs and the drama that has us trapped in a cage of disempowerment, then we have amazing tools that help us to effectively kill the drama and resolve the conflicting beliefs.
Dealing with conflicting inner beliefs is an advanced emotional clearing technique - and because it requires a ‘quantum leap’ of revelation described so eloquently by Richard Rudd - it is called quantum clearing.
It was only when I came to contemplate my shadow of vanity did I realise I had such strong emotions around it.
And, as usually happens when we start contemplating a specific shadow, a number of events happened that triggered me off around the shadow of vanity.
I went out on a dinner date with an amazing woman and the chemistry was hot. We were both strongly attracted to each other and at the very same time I was feeling strongly repulsed because she also was married and looking for an affair. At the end of the night, I was torn between two really strong desires of wanting to kiss her and also not wanting to kiss her.
In my contemplation of my shadow of vanity, I realised that this was the very same drama that I’d found myself in with my mother, wanting to love her but hating her too.
I also realised that my rebellion and wanting to escape and be free from my parents had crystallised about the age of six, when I had first seen the Disney classic film “Peter Pan”. I can still recall how much I loved the film and how much I wanted to be Peter Pan with a Tinkerbell and a Wendy. Ironically, in the first scene of the movie, Peter is also chasing his shadow.
In the past, my rebellious inner Peter Pan would have taken great glee in finding a new Tinkerbell to rescue (an unhappy wife) to take her away from the miserable Captain Hook that was holding her prisoner in a cage (her husband). The shadow of vanity was there.
In reality, I was absolutely 100% certain that I didn’t want to be a “saviour” accessory to her drama with her husband.
I was also noticing the shadow of vanity in my corporate work and the drama created there.
Each week I come across corporate folk who absolutely insist that they are the ‘smartest person in the room’. This too is a form of vanity shadow drama which really impacts team performance, and it wastes a lot of time. I hadn’t realised until I looked at my own shadow of vanity just how much this was really irritating me, and how much it related to my father and his drama with me.
I knew then that my intent for my next clearing was to look at my shadow of vanity and what the cost to me of continuing to allow myself to be impacted by the drama that I was noticing.
I also knew that I specifically needed to do quantum clearing because of the huge resistance I could feel within me to doing any emotional clearing.
The cost of me not taking action was also clear to me.
Without addressing my drama, I would continue to fail in relationships and continue to end up dating unavailable women.
There’s a saying about corporate dynamics that I learned from a CIO about 15 years ago that went “don’t wrestle with pigs, you get covered in shit and they love it.”
If I took no action to address my shadow of vanity, I too would continue to waste my energy at work being distracted by the corporate pig-wrestling dramas.
Looking at the problem, I had three sets of interlinked drama with conflicting towards and away-from feelings. There was the drama around my mother, the drama around the Peter Pan archetype I had adopted and the drama around my father.
Each instance of drama was also a point on the drama triangle - the father on the point of the aggressor, the mother on the point of the victim and the Peter Pan archetype on the point of the saviour/ rescuer.
The quantum clearing would get me integrated back to neutral.
The death of my drama would set me free from my own cage of disempowerment.
What is your addiction to drama costing you?
What is it costing you when you don’t take the actions to resolve the inner conflicting beliefs that have you trapped in bad relationships?
What is it costing you to continue to be distracted by the corporate fu3kery?
What impact is it having on your health and wellbeing?
What are you waiting for?
“The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy - and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we scientists don’t know how to do that.” - Gus Speth
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