There have been and always will be forces attempting to control us. They will persist as long as we allow them to.
Becoming a mom in a state of fight or flight, I was susceptible to all sorts of influence that I wasn’t aware of.
I lived in a belief system of lack and scarcity. I did not believe there was enough – Enough time. Enough money. Enough of myself.
I was unquestioningly living at a pace of burnout, striving for a carrot that didn’t truly align with the values of my soul.
My boundaries were porous, and I absorbed the external expectations about who I should be and how I should raise my children.
If you really look at the mechanisms of society, you can see all sorts of ways in which a mother’s confidence in her trust of knowing is undermined. (This happens to fathers and non-parents as well.) When our own confidence is eroded, it becomes easy to be susceptible to external forces overpowering what feels true for us.
This can look like feeling a desire to take a certain path in one’s life or to create something, and even well-intentioned questions from friends or family triggering a sense of doubt that squashes the spark that felt so real and true just a second prior.
For me, taking on external expectations created a sense of internal conflict. I had these desires of what I wanted to do with my life, and I also had this literal sense of external pressure that kept those desires contained – almost trapped.
Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t even aware that those external pressures were not mine. I could not differentiate self from not self. Those external forces had integrated into my being and kept my true self contained and controlled.
Once I stepped out of the society where the expectations were so unconscious to me, I relatively quickly began to recognize what had not been mine, the healing began, and the true self grew, taking up more space and not giving any room for the external to plant itself.
As long as we give space for the external to overpower our true selves, we are controllable. It’s not for the controlling forces to relinquish the control over us. It’s up to us to not give the forces space within us to overpower us.
Controlling powers may feel strong in this moment. It’s an opportunity for us to look within and ask ourselves how we have bought into systems and given them space to control us.
Feeling hopeless and like victims will never allow us to not be controlled. However, we can do something, and it starts from within.