Breaking Free From An Emotional Cage

So you think you are free just because you got over that illness or left a bad marriage, right? You think once you are at the end of that one event, everything will be great, and maybe for a moment it is. You feel relief and possibly even excitment at what you have accomplished and the prospect of what you can now do. But then reality sets in. You are only free from that situation, that instance in your life. You are not really free though until you break from your emotional cage.

This is not just carrying around extra baggage that you hear about all the time from everyone. This is the fundamental stuff in your core that you have taken with you and have built around you. You may not have started the bars, but you slowly allowed them to take hold, and you have let them protect you for so long. They are what you know. For you to break from them will take courage, strength, and determination from deep within you.

I am talking from personal experience. I just recently realized that I was still bound in my emotional cage. I didn't even know I was in that emotional cage until a close friend had pointed it out one evening. I was happier than I had been in years. How could I be in a cage? I was great I proclaimed. The response back was, have you really moved beyond and accepted that you are this amazing, beautiful, majestic woman with so much to give? Do you know you deserve happiness? Do you believe that your story can inspire and help the way anyone who knows you does? Well those questions left me realizing I had not really left because I said no to all of them.

I had left a 4 year marriage two years earlier that had damaged both my son and I in so many ways. You see I settled for less when I said I do in the first place. The breast cancer at age 24 had left me feeling like I was less than a person because I was scarred from one side to the other physically. Emotionally I felt no one could love a person who was half a woman. So when my ex came along saying all the right things I fell. I was a single mom who was a half a woman and here come a man who was raising his own two boys. Perfect, a father for my son whose dad left when I was pregnant and a man to accept me. Wrong.

Within a year it was discovered that the oldest step-son was sexually abusing my toddler son. Social services got involved. The other step-son was also being molested, by his brother no less. The system was only concerned with the two older boys and my ex because he was a father of a victim and perpetrator. Since my son was a toddler, it was said he wouldn't remember. I was labled as a problem because I voiced displeasure at the way things were being handled by everyone. Essentially he got away with nothing happening except he was removed, placed in a home where he was given all kinds of services, and since this family was affluent his lifestyle shot up. As for me, I was blamed by me ex and his family for making a big fuss over nothing and the marriage fastly fell apart. It also didn't help that there was never an acknowledgment that my son's life was forever changed. I left when the relationship became not just emotionally and mentally challenging, but physically as well.

When my son and I left, we moved home to my parents for a few months. We lost over half our stuff and essentially had to start over. I had not worked for all the years in the marriage so I had to look for a job. Within a few months we were in a apartment, I was working, and with the help of my church and family we had furniture. Now two years later, I was no longer angry and we were in a good place. Life is still a struggle and we still have not replaced everything but we are moving forward. So how can I still be in a cage?

Well there is a simple and a complex answer for that. The simple answer was that in many instances I would still play the victim, something I had gotten used to without realizing. I may be a strong person and having gone through so much have a lot of determination, but when things don't go my way, I fall into that victim mentality. I start to say that no one cares, no one will ever care for my son and I. I have a temper tantrum if you will, and emotionaly lash out where I feel sorry for myself because I was labeled a problem when all I was trying to do was get someone to hear me and see my son and I were drowning. An sometimes all it takes for me to go to that place is for someone who does care to not respond when I am having a rough day, or for a few bad days to add up and for the old feelings to creep in.

The complex answer is that we all struggle at times with feeling like we are not worthy. We all struggle with wanting to feel loved and appreciated. We don't understand that if we don't truly love, appreciate, and give ourselves permission to be worthy, then we are in a cage. We put ourselves in these cages that either we have built or maybe someone else built for us and we than lock ourselves up.

How can our individual beauty and brillance shine if we keep it locked away under the guise of we don't deserve anything great and wonderful in this life? How can we inspire if we hide away in fear, terrified of rejection that we have already created before anyone has even come around? How can we truly love and give if we are not able to first love and give to our own sacred being?

So yes I am now in the process of breaking out of my emotional cage. The best way to do so I believe is to be good to myself. Accept that what has happened did so to teach me about perserverance, forgiveness, and faith. I am learning to trust myself more as well, to trust in those instincts and intuition. Above all, I am realizing that when I do love myself and have faith in myself, the response is always so much more better than when I am having my emotional temper tantrum of victimization!