"How can I untangle myself from this dangerous situation?"
Madeleine: I have an out-of-town friend, Bernard, with whom I've been close for many years. But I've always had a sense there were some ways I couldn't really trust him, and I've seen that he often uses his girlfriends. But through the years we've always been there for each other, including helping each other out financially when the other was in need. Currently I owe him a few hundred dollars and had to postpone the date that I told him I would pay him back, because of a family emergency. Bernard is now in a relationship with a very controlling woman who sometimes threatens violence, and who found out about the loan and is now threatening me about paying it back and about no longer communicating with Bernard. She has been intercepting emails I send to him about trying to work out a different way to pay him back. I have also, in the past, given Bernard personal identification information, which I now feel has compromised my security. The last payment I sent to Bernard he didn't acknowledge receipt of, which we had an agreement that he would do. I want to extricate myself from Bernard altogether, but I still have to deal with arranging to pay back the loan, complicated by his girlfriend intercepting our communications and making threats. I feel caught between a rock and a hard place on how to communicate with Bernard, resolve this loan situation, and untangle myself from what seems like a potentially dangerous situation. Do you have any advice?
Jane: In a past communication, I remember a similar pattern that came up for you in relation to your older sister and other members of your family, where they would be deceitful and try to undermine you with other members of the family. And there was something emotionally violent about what you were describing. It's like at the heart of family for you was danger and deceit, rather than acceptance, comfort and safety. The similarity to what you're currently experiencing and this pattern in your family is not a coincidence.
When we experience life as not working, it's never about the nature of the way life is. The kind of event with your friend that you have been describing is not something most other people experience in their lives. It's not the nature of relationships. When you have a pattern like this going on, it comes from an internal and unconscious structure you have in relation to whatever the people involved represent for you (such as intimate or close relationships), dating back to when you made the original limiting decisions*. This is skewing your perception of what is going on in the present, and affecting the kind of people you allow into your life. It's also affecting how you conceive close relationships. As a result you have had warning signals about this man for years and didn't pay attention.
Limiting decisions* that relate to emotional or physical survival put you out of reality in relation to survival so that you feel that you're not going to survive in places where there really isn't a danger, and you don't notice where there really is. Therefore you don't protect yourself where you should. This makes it difficult to know what kind of realistic actions to take, because you don't know what's real and not real. There is only so much you can do by trying to compensate for it, go around it, or avoid certain situations, because your whole way of structuring the way you conceive of relationship is affected by the limiting decision*. So you're in a situation that requires personal transformation. That's what life seems to be presenting you with. That means recognizing the problem is inside of you, not outside of you. From the perspective of the work I do, that would mean getting to the bottom of what the limiting decision* is that is holding this in place, and clearing it.
*Limiting Decisions: Unconscious decisions locked in place in early childhood, such as "I'm bad, unlovable, not good enough...," "People can't be trusted," "There's no one I can rely on."
© 2011 Jane Ilene Cohen
