Gaining Clarity & Building Resiliency

Click the links below to read the overview of each of the lessons:

Choosing to face your problems

Resiliency faith-based perspective

Gaining Clarity

Needs

The BELIEF self-assessment tool

True change

Choosing to Face Your Problems

Although I had made several decisions to face problems during my childhood, I made a major and critical decision to make myself vulnerable and to attempt to live with my mother for the first time in my life. As a young child I wanted my mother to want me, to show me some affection and nurture. On the other hand, I was angry with both my parents for abandoning and rejecting me as an infant!

With the only mother I had known for 12 years, Mrs. Virgil Dinkins-Tolliver, a woman who had taken me in as an infant and cared for and made sacrifices for me as if I was her blood child!  Mrs. Virgil was being placed in a nursing home to recover from an amputation of her lower leg due to problematic issues with diabetes. I had to decide to make myself vulnerable and to try to connect with my mother. The attempt to live with my mother and make a connection with her was brief and a complete failure.

My mother had abandoned me as a baby. What made the situation even more painful is that in the small town I lived in my mother lived just on the other side of that small town – so I would often see my mother in passing and usually at thanksgiving and Christmas at my maternal grandparent’s home – so every time I saw my mother I would be re-traumatized and the anger only grew.

For the first seven or eight years of my life my father’s presence was extremely minimal – although he rented a room from Mrs. Virgil, the lady that had taken me in as a baby. During my childhood my father would be absent for 3 to 4 months and present for a couple of days on a consistent basis.  However, during the few days when he was present, he would almost always be drunk/under the influence of alcohol.

So, at the age of 12 I continued to struggle with the reality that my father and mother had voluntarily chosen to abandon me. What I didn’t know at the age of 12 was I would never see my father again. At the age of twelve I was faced with a decision to cope with complex and pervasive trauma, trauma which had motivated angry and aggressive behavior. During my 3^rd grade year, I hit my teacher causing her nose to bleed. During 4^th through 6^th grades, I stopped doing most of my homework, I continued to use anger to lash out as others, to avoid accountability, and to provide a sense of false security and control for myself.

It was at the age of 12 that two positive things happened that started a multi-year change in my life. First at 12, after the failed attempt to live with and connect with my mother I moved in with my maternal grandmother. My grandmother was a strong, wise, and loving person. No one since my – surrogate Mother Virgil Dinkins-Tolliver had shown me such love and kindness, so I of course mgsoaked up all of my grandmother’s love and kindness as I possibly could!

The second positive event was meeting my 7^th grade Math Teacher Mr. Burgess. Mr. Burgess was not only the first African American Teacher I’d had, and he was the very first male teacher I’d had. Mr. Burgess taught me Algebra – a subject that I didn’t have the ability to learn. However, most importantly Mr. Burgess as an African American man and a teacher – Mr. Burgess taught that me real achievement and change was possible! Mr. Burgess was the 2^nd person and the first man that did not accept my trauma driven fear and excuse making for inappropriate behavior and victimhood.

At 12 I began to make small steps toward positive change – decision making can be scary and difficult, however if you refuse to confront your problems you will not change! Some wise person once said “If nothing changes – nothing changes.”

Resiliency faith-based perspective

Reframing

To re-frame means to change the spiritual and emotional setting in which a situation is experienced and to place the situation in a different spiritual and emotional frame – by validating the actual context of the situation, verifying personal responsibility during the situation, and identifying mitigating factors present during the situation– which fits the facts of the situation, but results in major components of the meaning of the situation being changed – or re-framed.

It was not until my early 20’s that I was able to successfully re-frame the abandonment and rejection of my parents. For years, the traumatic effects of the trauma I suffered had caused me to develop distorted core beliefs like “I’m not loveable” and “Everyone close to me will leave me.” These distorted core beliefs led to fatalistic and self-defeating coping strategies like “I’ll sabotage and prematurely end relationships on my terms, with the thinking that by sabotaging and prematurely ending relationships the pain won’t hurt as much.

After having a spiritual encounter and awakening that focused on being set free of past trauma, personal mistakes, and unforgiveness. This new focus really broadened my perspective and gave me real hope for a victorious future. As more focused on forgiveness, personal improvement, and understanding trauma increased I was able to decrease my focus on my personal trauma and increase my focus on trying to understand the thinking and actions of my parents.

Re-interpreting

Until this point in my life, I had always asked questions like “Why did this happen to me?” Why is life so unfair?” After the spiritual encounter and awakening I was able to start the process of re-interpreting the actions of my parents, I was able to start focusing on why my parents abandoned and rejected me. I was now able to understand some of the personal and collective trauma my parents were suffering through – at the age of 5 years old my father was a fall down drunk. At the same age my mother was dependent on alcohol as she had to have at least one drink every day. Dependency is based on volume – it’s based on the belief and behavior that I can’t live without, make decisions, or function without the drug/chemical. Over a period of focused effort empowered by new knowledge and hope I came to realize my parents were not purposely trying to hurt me – they were reacting negatively to the impacts of trauma on their individual lives as well as the trauma from their relationship.

Re-defining

As I was able to re-interpret my parent’s behavior towards me, that insight increased my self-image and my self-esteem. This new positive self-image and self-esteem fueled my desire to re-define myself. I began to understand that the trauma I had suffered was not my fault, that I wasn’t unlovable and not everyone close to me was going to leave me. I no longer felt powerless, and I now felt like a new person. Suddenly I began to feel like I was no longer the child of two alcoholic parents – I was now feeling like I wanted to re-define my life. I went on to become a Licensed Social Worker, Clinical Substance Abuse Counselor and I obtained my bachelor’s degree in counseling. The good thing is I’m still in the process of re-defining myself.

Re-designing

Like re-defining I’m still re-designing my life as well. To me re-designing is largely about correctly identifying the stage of life you’re in and then correctly identifying the tools you need to maximize that particular stage. Re-designing is also about making minor and major alterations to your life – alterations that can look completely different than trauma impacted stages of your life. During the re-defining and re-designing stages of my life I have experienced the immense pleasure of finding purpose in my painful and traumatic childhood – as a Clinical Substance Abuse Counselor I have the pleasure of collaborating with individuals addicted to drugs and alcohol. As I continue to re-design my life, I’m excited about what’s coming next!

Gaining Clarity

Clarity is the ability to see life as it actually exists – not what we wish or hope life to be. I didn’t know what Clarity was until I almost lost my family. At the age of 21 I had a moment of clarity after my wife kicked me out of our home for cheating, gambling, using & abusing drugs and partying 4 to 5 nights per week.

During the first three years of our marriage, I did just about everything I could to ruin our marriage. I was clearly not ready to make such a serious commitment as marriage, additionally I had not successfully worked through my childhood and adolescent trauma. Having that lack of clarity meant that even though I was an adult chronologically – however I was functioning as a trauma impacted person. Psychosocially I was functioning as an adolescent, motivated by fear, insecurity, anger and control issues.

In order for me to gain a deeper level of clarity I had to determine what my priorities were and who was important to me. On the verge of losing my family and facing a possible divorce my fear of losing my family became the impetus for coming into a new level of clarity. In that moment it became clear to me that what I really wanted was my family.

Condition

The first step in gaining clarity is to identify and assess my current condition. Assessing your current condition requires a high level of honesty and sincerity. Any attempt to minimize mistakes, or rationalize poor decisions, or attempts to justify damaging behavior will undermine an accurate assessment of your current condition.

 Commitment

After I conducted an accurate assessment of your current condition the next thing is to make a commitment to your new priorities that have come from your new level of clarity. Without the new level of clarity that leads to new priorities you cannot commit to your new priorities. Commitment is critical for progress because commitment to your priorities requires a sincere focus. A part of creating a sincere focus requires you to voluntarily and intentionally eliminate distractions. The elimination of distractions cannot be forced upon you – the elimination of distractions must be a personal decision motivated by your new level of clarity.

Consistency

I learned that the proof of passion and sincerity is consistency. Consistency demonstrates a high level of clarity and commitment. Consistency makes the statement that I’m invested and I’m not leaving any room for excuses, rationalization or justification. On the other hand, I learned that inconsistent behavior creates doubt, fear, distrust, and insecurity in those you’ve made commitments to. The more consistent I became the more trusting my wife became – which motivated me to be even more consistent. Consistency has tremendous benefits – and it creates its own positive motivation!

Needs

Because my parents abandoned me, I felt incomplete. This feeling of being incomplete created a need for acceptance, approval and belonging. I wanted to belong and be accepted by my parents, however that belonging and acceptance would never happen between my er and me, leaving a hole in my heart that would take years to transform.

In my case the abandonment and rejection from my parents came at birth so the negative and painful impacts of their abandonment and rejection felt more profound to me as a child and during my adolescence. My desire to be loved, accepted and approved by my parents drove me to crave attention, to constantly seek the approval of others and to find a place to fit in.

Unfortunately, I spent my childhood, my teen years, and the early part of 20’s looking for acceptance, approval, and belonging in very negative, anti-social, and self-defeating ways. In human growth and development, I wasn’t equipped to deal with these traumatic issues in my childhood, therefore I tried to cope with the pain by hurting others and hiding my painful emotions – not realizing I was developing an environmentally conditioned, trauma impacted, self-deceptive belief system that once in place would work to bury my emotions, keep others away and continue to reconnect me to my trauma.

I would often ask myself questions like “who am I?”…..“where am I from?”…..“who accepts me?” … and “where do I belong?” I desperately wanted to be accepted so any chance I got I would hang around my friend’s families, in fact the larger the family the better. Eating, playing, and talking with my friends and their family members provided short-term acceptance, approval, and belonging.

I’ve learned over time that we all have four core needs in life: (1) love (2) accomplishment (3) self-esteem and (4) self -control. A lack of these core needs being met tends to create feelings of incompleteness, inner turmoil, identity confusion and insecurity – which propel self-defeating beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors. I learned that without love it can be extremely difficult to have positive self-esteem and without self-control it can be almost impossible to accomplish positive goals.

Thankfully later in life I was able to develop a relationship with my mother and I was able to be accepted and approved of by her. This created a strong sense of belonging and helped with the need to transform those feelings of abandonment and rejection.

The BELIEF self-assessment tool

Beliefs

Unlovable

The abandonment and rejection I experienced from my parents led me to develop a belief system. At the tender age of 6 years old, because of the pervasive trauma I was experiencing my predominant belief about myself was – I’m unlovable. At that young age, experiencing pervasive trauma. lacking life experience, psychosocial development, and emotional maturity my predominant belief was that I was unlovable. As a 6-year-old the only reasonable answer to my parents’ actions was to belief I was the problem, there must have been something about me that caused them to treat me in such a traumatic way.

Everyone that gets close to me will leave me

This false belief of being unlovable then led to a second false belief – because I’m unlovable then everybody who gets close to me will abandon me. This belief created a level of fear that led me to shy away from wanting to be close to others. There was an inner turmoil in my life – I wanted to be close to my family and others, however I was deathly afraid that if I allowed people to get close to me they would inevitably leave me because I was unlovable.

I need to sabotage relationships

Therefore, I developed a belief that I must control all my relationships, friends, family, and others. My belief was I could no longer take the pain of being rejected and abandoned – so I would determine when these relationships would end. In fact, because I believed I was unlovable and that everyone who gets close to me would inevitably leave me – my fear and insecurities drove to sabotage relationships that had somehow become deeper that I expected. I became an expert at suppressing my feelings and sabotaging relationships which eventually led me to become emotionally manipulative. The more emotionally manipulative I became the less I really knew myself and I was losing my ability to connect with my inherent and authentic self.

Eight building blocks of our belief systems

1. Family: Moral development, character development, learned behaviors and social development. (From birth to approximately 10 years of age our primary purpose in life is to please our family and bond with them.)

2.   Friends: The need to be accepted by our peers based on our instinctual need to be a part of a group. (This happens at about 11 or 12 years of age.)

3.   Environment/Culture: The cumulative effect of the families and neighborhoods we grew up in.

4.   Media: The reinforcement of secular philosophies.

5.   Trauma: The traumatic events and dysfunctions of life.

6.   School: The development of structured academic learning.

7.   Religion: The reinforcement of moral and character development.

8.   Experiences/Consequences: Experiential learning/Results of our decisions and behavior.

True Change

True and real change was difficult for me because I did not want to reveal my problems. The impacts of the trauma that I experienced as a child and adolescent created beliefs that caused me to try and fit in whenever I could due to my loneliness as an only child between my parents.

However, the trauma also caused beliefs in me. that told me I wasn’t good enough for others to change their plans or behavior for me. I was desperately trying to avoid being rejected and abandoned and I was willing to be deceptive and manipulative, to gain acceptance and approval.

So, my motives for being accepted by others and being approved by others were propelled by trauma induced fear, insecurity, and low self-esteem. What on the surface appeared to be a cooperative attitude was really a desire to manipulate others to get my own needs for acceptance and approval.

My favorite deceptive and manipulative tactics and behaviors were to adjust and modify my behavior to gain acceptance, approval, and a place to belong. The real self-deceptive effect on myself was others were not truly accepting and approving me – because I wasn’t actually them the opportunity to do so, I was solely thinking about my needs and my motives were completely deceptive.

I adjusted my behavior in manipulative ways to fit into situations where I would most likely have not been invited to fit into. Additionally, I adapted and customized my behavior to make others believe I was someone I was not. I was very opportunistic in manipulating others as I was driven to find places to belong.

Further, I manipulated others selfishly by modifying my behaviors partially to make others believe I had made permanent changes. I wasn’t really practicing new behavior I was acting as if new behaviors were now a part of me.

Adjust/Adjustment – to change so as to fit; to adapt; customizing behavior(s); situational; opportunistic.  (Change your Behaviors)

2. Modify/Modification – to change partially in character or form; partial practice; acting as if there is a complete change; to limit. (Change your Personality)

3. Change – to make different; to alter; committed; consistent action; full of integrity. (Change your Beliefs)