Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.
My name is Lisa A.
Romano.
I am a life coach,
Bestselling author,
YouTube vlogger,
Meditation teacher,
And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.
I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.
My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.
May your heart feel blessed,
Your mind feel expanded,
And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.
So today we're going to be talking about the power of letting go and try to dive a little bit deeper into what it means to let go.
So when I think about letting go,
I understand that letting go is essential.
I sort of think about hanging on to the back of a car bumper when I should let go.
And so many of us cling to experiences and relationships and thoughts and ideas and old beliefs and never realize that these are actually emotional and psychological and even subconscious attachments.
Letting go means that I am acknowledging that there is some aspect of me,
Some conscious or maybe subconscious aspect of me,
Or maybe even some pattern,
Some default pattern within me that's causing me to feel and to think and to believe that it is good for me to stay attached.
It is really never good to stay attached.
It is always good to love people from a detached place or a place where I don't lose myself.
So I love the way the author Melody Beattie explains it.
It's like wearing a loose garment.
So you know you're in this relationship,
But you wear your own coat.
You don't wear your partner's coat.
You don't share a coat.
You wear your own coat in the relationship and your partners wear their own coats in the relationship.
And so there's this healthy space between you and this other person.
This can be really difficult when you've secured a relationship with someone and you've shared with them and they've become a part of your life.
Think about having to end a relationship with a romantic partner or a spouse and how difficult it is to unravel and to detach from all the things that you two have built together.
Letting go is a very difficult thing to do and it's not actually even an event.
It's a process.
And so the first step in letting go is recognizing when you are enmeshed,
When you are codependent,
When you are obsessing,
When you are losing yourself thinking about this other person,
When you find yourself ruminating about what they're doing,
What decisions they're making and what decisions they're not making.
We see this a lot with someone who struggles with codependency,
Somebody who is a natural fixer,
A natural rescuer,
Who generally tends to enable and who feels empowered when fixing other people's lives.
We see this in parent-child relationships where mommy or daddy thinks that they're doing the right thing by organizing the child's calendar,
By making the child's doctor's appointments,
By making sure that the kid gets their insurance card,
Making sure that the card gets inspected.
After 18,
We hope that we've raised children who understand what it means to be more self-responsible and self-reliant.
And you'd be surprised,
Maybe not,
But I know I was when I looked back and I zoomed out on my life,
I realized of my three children,
The one that I did the least for actually seemed to be the most self-reliant.
They're all self-reliant to a certain extent,
But my little one,
Because I got divorced when she was still very young,
I didn't have a whole lot of time to sit with her,
To do homework with her,
You know,
The way I did with my older two and especially my oldest son.
And it was amazing when I zoomed out and I realized,
Huh,
The child that I was not on top of,
That I was not checking up on all the time,
The child that realized mommy was busy,
And although I always made sure my children did what they were supposed to do,
There was a level of reliance or self-reliance that my little one had that was natural because I just didn't have the time to keep tabs on her as much as I did with my oldest son when I wasn't working so much outside of the home.
When I got divorced,
I was always working just to survive.
And the little one seemed to just understand that I have to take care of myself.
And it was amazing to peel back and realize that in this space of health where my little one knew that she was responsible to study and she was responsible to,
You know,
Take care of herself and get her homework done,
I would check it,
But she had to get it done.
I wasn't rummaging through her backpack and what tests you have to take and what homework has to get done.
She did this naturally by herself.
So between she and I was this healthy space.
I wasn't overly concerned and I wasn't,
You know,
Completely enmeshed in my relationship with her.
And although I was just trying to survive at the time,
In terms of how I raised my children,
I saw a huge difference between the helicopter parent I used to be,
The enmeshed co-dependent parent I used to be,
Hovering over my son,
Making sure that everything that I did was done properly and how I raised my daughter by circumstance and how it benefited her for the two of us to have this healthy space.
Letting go means that we have to confront the ideas and the beliefs that are responsible for our attachment.
When we are co-dependent,
We attach to many ideas that are actually false.
These are subconscious negative programs and they're rooted in emotional neglect,
In some type of child abuse,
Childhood neglect,
Psychological abuse,
Feeling minimized,
Criticized,
Humiliated,
Projected upon being raised in an alcoholic home or a home that suffered with addiction or by parents who missed the mark,
Parents who were busy in their own right and were very detached in an unhealthy way,
Completely aloof perhaps to what was going on in the lives of their children.
For parents who did not know it but may have been on the narcissistic spectrum or the co-dependent spectrum,
A narcissistic parent is someone who is not aware,
Some would say that they are,
But let's just imagine that we're talking about the narcissistic parent that is on the spectrum and doesn't know that they're a narcissist and they expect their child to do everything that they tell them to do when they tell them to do it and how they are told to do it.
And if children do not do everything that their parents want them to do the way their parents want them to do it,
The children are devalued,
They are minimized,
They are gaslighted,
They are triangulated and sometimes even smeared to the family.
Parents who abuse their children without any idea or any care about how their words affect or impact their children.
These types of parents are aloof,
Distant,
Detached,
Just don't care about how their actions are affecting their children.
In the case of addictions,
The addictions have taken over mom or taken over dad and they're unable to meet the demands and the needs,
Very necessary needs of their children.
There is role reversal.
So if mom is an alcoholic,
Dad is enabling mom and the children are just supposed to expect to suck it up and even though alcohol is controlling mom,
Alcohol is actually controlling the entire family system.
So the whole system is sick.
When a parent is codependent,
There is oftentimes emotional abuse by one parent to the next and the parent who is codependent pushes it under the rug,
Acquiesces to the more dominant partner,
People pleases,
Rescues,
Enables,
Nods their head and stands by their spouse through thick and thin even though the spouse is not someone who should be supported in lots of the cases.
So children are taught one way relationships.
It's all about the person with the issue,
The addiction or all about the person with the biggest mouth or all about the person who is going to criticize you the harshest.
And so this is obviously dysfunctional.
And when we're growing up,
We attach to these ideas that are born out of these experiences.
So I need to tone myself down.
I need to shut up.
I need to pretend.
I need to act like I'm happy even though I'm not happy.
I need to find a partner that has lots of problems so that I can take care of this person,
Fix this person and I can avoid,
You know,
Being called selfish because I'm not selfish.
Look,
I'm a martyr.
I'm taking care of this person.
And so that's just one way and that codependency can show up in the mind,
The subconscious mind of a young adult who's growing up and venturing out into the world of relationships.
We attach to these ideas.
These beliefs become a blueprint.
We run our lives.
We're actually attached.
They're ingrained.
We're enmeshed with them.
They become us.
They become our way of living.
They become our way of breathing.
They become our way of behaving.
And so letting go begins with acknowledging and becoming aware of the beliefs that we're attached to that are actually dysfunctional.
That's why learning about codependency and learning about narcissistic abuse and learning about shame and guilt and so on,
Self-esteem,
Self-love and what blocks self-love,
Feeling not enough and all of this.
That's why it's so important to learn about because the more knowledge you have,
The more awareness you gain about how you are showing up in a relationship.
So the awareness is key.
And then what we have to do is we have to reframe these beliefs and we have to reorganize them.
So if I believe that I am not enough because I experienced childhood abandonment,
Then I recognize that this feeling of being rejected and abandoned has created this need that I am not enough for love.
So my quest would be,
Well,
The abandonment is there and I feel not enough and that's there.
But it's not my fault that my parents couldn't nurture me the way I needed to be nurtured and it's not the fault of my inner child that they developed this faulty idea.
So I need to accept what's there and accept the past and let it go.
But you can't let go of something until you acknowledge it,
Until you understand it,
Until you can hold it and look at it and poke it.
Once you understand that what's wrong is not you,
It's your programming,
It's your thought process,
It's ingrained,
It's an attachment.
Your inner child is still experiencing this abandonment trauma and you're unconscious and you don't know it.
And so becoming aware and then reframing and then making sure that you're self-caring,
You're making sure that you up your self-care as you begin to let go of people and of situations and of relationships that drain you as you begin to recognize that you're in a toxic relationship and you need to let go of this person,
You absolutely need to up your self-care.
You need to pay attention to and make a list of all the times that you say yes when you mean no.
You need to make a list of all the times that you are engaging in experiences,
Maybe parties,
Maybe events,
What have you,
That you really don't want to go to.
Pay attention to all the people that come to you and expect you to solve their problems.
Pay attention to how you show up and you offer advice even though you haven't been asked.
Pay attention to the things that you attach to,
The people that you attach to,
The ideas that you attach to,
The behaviors that you attach to and question everything.
Letting go really does rely on your ability to be self-aware and to be able to move in a direction that liberates you instead of keeps you stuck.
So I hope that this has helped you better understand the power of letting go,
The power of recognizing attachments,
The power of recognizing that you are enough and the power of recognizing that codependency is rooted in attachments.
And the reason we want to attach as adults is because we didn't securely attach to the adults in our lives that we loved when we most needed to be loved,
When we were the most trusting and the most impressionable.
And as adults,
What we're trying to do is we're trying to avoid feeling that sense of abandonment and we avoid feeling the sense of abandonment by falsely presuming that the answer is to attach to everything and to everyone.
Thank you so much for being here.
My name is Lisa A.
Romano and I'm the Breakthrough Life Coach and bestselling author.
And you can learn more about my work by going to www.
Lisaaromano.
Com.
