Hostage of yourself, how can that be?
Have you ever felt trapped by your circumstances? Like things are going on in your life, and the only option you have in hand is to suck it up?
Whether it is an unbearable job that you can’t leave because you need to pay the rent and barely make it to the end of the month, your abusive partner, or simply your one thousand plus one chores as a mom, nobody else in the world would do if you don’t.
Hundreds of situations come to mind where you might have felt somewhat like a hostage of yourself.
You may be involved in dynamics where you have nothing to gain; you may allow yourself to be abused, belittled, taken advantage of, or taken for granted; all of these situations denote a lack of love for yourself. What happens is unpleasant, loving, or convenient for you, yet you don’t lift a finger to fix it.
Why?
Maybe you don’t know what to do or feel emotionally conflicted. Any solution you can think of causes distress, or you think it will only bring more chaos or frustration. Perhaps you can’t move.
Your circumstances surpass you, and there is nothing you can do to change them, at least from where you’re standing. Undergoing this leaves you feeling a bitter cocktail of depression, anxiety, unworthiness, loneliness, anger, guilt, sadness, you name it, but the glue is a smallness sensation.
Sadly, I felt like that earlier in life. Maybe that’s part of why I became a therapist and energy healer. Ain’t randomly pursuing a specialization in trauma studies either, I guess.
After all, as one of my mentors used to say, All those whose career path led them to help and service have entered through the same door:
Pain.
As I discovered in my healing journey, several issues can hold you hostage of yourself. Below are three of the top ones:
1.-You can’t forgive yourself:
According to Triana Arnold James, President of Georgia National Organization for Women NOW, in the article “Are you holding yourself hostage?” Written on LinkedIn, when people (maybe you) have made a big mistake, whether in a relationship or business, with a severe consequence for your life, often it costs you a lot to forgive yourself. Even after the recovery is in progress, you have a hard time letting that -sh#$-thing- go and keep recriminating and punishing yourself for the past mistake.
Triana’s proposal to move forward when facing such a challenge is to follow these 3 steps:
- Accept your responsibility akin, Own your mistake.
- Modify your behavior when possible, when pertinent and relevant. At times, that’s off the table because certain circumstances would make it unthinkable or impossible, and you learn to make peace with it.
- Looking forward to what’s next. Stop looking back. Train yourself to allow the past to become the past and to inhabit the present moment.
2.-You are trapped in your roles:
You are more committed to the roles you have assumed in life than you are compromised to your true self. Your titles have become more significant than you, or you have allowed other’s definitions of you to speak louder than your own voice.
Or, as the transformational coach Ingrid Burling answers to that question in Quora :
Being a hostage of yourself means you have become a prisoner of your belief system. Your beliefs significantly impact you (or give them so much power) that you can’t see any further or change your perspective. As she continues, it can mean you can’t get out of your head and see or listen to anyone’s point of view but your own.
3.- You are an emotional hostage:
The article ”How To Tell If You Are An Emotional Hostage And What To Do About It,” by the Regain Editorial Team, speaks about some common factors that can lead to becoming an emotional hostage and the characteristics that make you more prone than others to become one.
Being an emotional hostage of others or a hostage of yourself can be an exhausting and unpleasant experience.
How do you feel when you’re an emotional hostage? What’s that like?
You may feel stuck, unsure of what to do in a particular case or about a relationship, as a consequence of someone aiming to manipulate you emotionally. Emotional manipulation (sometimes extortion) occurs when a person forces you or coerces you to prioritize their needs, excluding your own needs and considerations. It doesn’t matter if it’s consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively. These sorts of situations can vary in a broad range of intensity, stress, and risk. And from very subtle covered to highly obvious. The emotional hostage situation can often happen very randomly or sporadically in life. Let’s use the article above example:
You’re picking up your friend to attend a party. She said she was ready, but suddenly, you’ve been waiting in the car for 15 minutes, not knowing what to do. Should you call? Should you wait? Or should you leave? What bothers you most is that your friend already knows when she will be ready, but she’s not giving you the proper information to make your own decisions. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, you are held hostage of yourself, not hers, cause all the time, you have the agency to do something about the situation, but you don’t.
Nevertheless, an emotional hostage situation can also be about something much more complex, defining how you relate to others, to someone specific, or even how you engage in certain types of relationships.
You might be a hostage of yourself if you are in a codependent or abusive relationship or prone to form those types of bonds.
Let’s take a closer look at this:
Your partner has a short temper. He gets upset over the slightest thing. He might adopt dramatic or extreme reactions. Or perhaps he applies a silent treatment to you. So, you prefer to abstain from anything that can upset him. After all, it isn’t such a big deal, you try to convince yourself. Moreover, you’d better wait until he tells you what to do. Your ability to make decisions and discernment feels foggy due to a sensation of guilt and compromise or obligation.
You often find yourself weighing the worthiness of saying or not saying the way you feel about something because of the negative way they react to the most minor disagreement. You end up held hostage by social norms or expectations, guilt, shame, or threats. Either way, your power to act has been undermined by the manipulative person and your feelings about the situation holding you hostage.
How did you get to that point?
When you are in a vulnerable emotional place, you are likely to become an emotional hostage and struggle to set healthy boundaries.
When you suspect you can be an emotional hostage of any situation, you should take two actions:
One internal and the other external.
- Internal check:
- Identify what you are feeling and explore the root cause of this feeling. Put a name to your emotions and ask yourself if they are factual, based on something real, or are a product of a general fear or anxiety emotional state.
- External check:
- Speak up.
- There’s nothing wrong with expressing your feelings or needs. Be gentle and calm, but you should be able to honor your needs and be safe enough to do so when in healthy relationships.
Picture by Shankar S. found in Flirck.
Now, let’s say after observing or analyzing, you came to a conclusion and already confirmed that you are, in fact, someone’s emotional hostage. Probably the first question that will come to your mind will be:
Why me?
What is it that got me involved in such a situation like this?
If you are a hostage of yourself or emotionally of someone else, the root causes might also be one of the following:
–Learned helplessness:
Or you can call it Emotional paralysis.
If you try to overcome adversity without getting results despite all your efforts, you can have a sense of impotence and powerlessness. Thus, you stop trying out of habit. This is a typical response in trauma and abuse survivors, especially in cases of childhood trauma.
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Bessel A. van der Kolk
Caged dogs:
Back in the ’60s, a psychologist named Martin Seligman conducted an interesting, although at the same time a bit disturbing, study with dogs.
They split the dogs in the experiment into two groups.
The first group of dogs was placed in cages and subjected to “unescapable” electric shocks. A second group of “free dogs” were released in a “safe place” among the ones who received the electric shocks. Then, the researchers set up a “scene” with a new threatening situation.
Before ranting against the fairness or unfairness of this experiment, let us first focus on the fact that it was conducted in the 1960s, when things were quite different, including the respect for both human and animal rights. Finally, the experiment is already done, and we cannot change that fact, but we can learn from the results obtained.
Back to the dogs:
Dogs reacted like this:
The “free dogs” jumped, ran, forced, and escaped. On the contrary, the previously shocked dogs lacked the initiative to escape. For conditioned people to believe their efforts will be in vain or make no difference in the situation. Shanida Arabi says in the article “From Learned Helplessness to Hopefulness: How to Overcome Emotional Paralysis and Take Your Power Back,” Written for Thought Catalog.
As she explained, the “free dogs” had a sense of control and agency. They decided to respond in a way that allowed them to remove the negative stimulus they faced. They had no previous experience informing them that wasn’t possible. The first group, instead, had developed a sense of helplessness because their earlier experience showed them that their situation was inescapable.
From dogs to humans:
If you have developed learned helplessness, you are likely to ignore routes of escape. Maybe you tend to avoid trying any option that might change the current circumstances or challenges faced, even if you have available opportunities. When confronted with a thread, the barriers preventing you from escaping may not be others but the ones within you. You’re a hostage of yourself.
There are paths to overcome this learned helplessness. One of the more effective ones is to re-train the body to release the sense of paralysis linked to traumatic experiences. When you are either physically or psychologically deprived of safeguarding yourself, there will be an imprint remaining in your body. When this happens, it can leave you feeling powerless, according to trauma expert and therapist Bessel Van der Kolk. Author of the Bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score. Reengaging the body in movement-related activities can counteract this.
–You are a victim.
Life is doing something to you.
Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith is the founder of Agape International Spiritual Center.
You probably saw him in the famous documentary “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, who was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007 by Times Magazine for this movie.
He has described 4 four stages of spiritual growth, development, and unfoldment.
The first of the described stages of spiritual growth is the Victim Stage. In this state of awareness, life is “happening” to you.
Oprah interviewed him about this subject, and he said we all move through these four stages of consciousness. When you live in the first or Victim stage of consciousness, you falsely perceive that your happiness or unhappiness comes from a place or something outside of you. You think the things controlling your outcomes and determining your happiness are out of your reach, influence, or control. He explained to Oprah in the interview, speaking about “Being a victim Here’s what you don’t get, that when you live from a victim state of consciousness, you are not even experiencing reality. You’re just living what you think about reality. You are being a hostage of yourself.
Drawing on these relevant studies and information, here’s a wrap of the most common causes of why You can be held as a hostage of yourself and tools to do something about it:
- Being too hard on you and your past mistakes:
Accept what it was. Modify what you can. I look forward to what’s coming. Move on.
- You are trapped in your roles:
Review your belief system. Identify which ones are useful and which keep you prisoner. Let go of what no longer serves you.
- You are an emotional hostage:
Carefully observe your emotions and look for their root. Speak up. Look for help.
- Learned helplessness:
You might be trained not to try to improve your circumstances, most likely due to some previous trauma. But you can re-train your body and mind to release these patterns from you.
- You are a victim.
You live life from a victim state of consciousness, and you believe you have no choice or impact over your circumstances, and they occur randomly over you.
Being Hostage of Yourself: A Practical Guide.
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