Are you aware of Who is showing up when you are interacting or engaging with the universe and its actors? By WHO, I mean which version of yourself are you projecting to the people you engage with? I am one of those people who believe there is a public persona and a private persona. The only thing is the personas are made up of so many personalities – not in the multiple personality clinical disorder sense – but in the idea that we are constantly projecting a partial part of our true self, hence we show up in bits and pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. Then again, while it appears like many personalities it’s just one personality only showing a parts or bits and piece of itself!
The other day I was having a discussion with my niece and I was telling her that when you are in your thirties (which she is), all issues you had in your childhood with your parents, siblings, extended family, etc just surface to the top like a tea bag in water. The issues lie buried for years, then thirty something comes along and boom one day they just surface. If you do not deal with the unburied tea bags there and then, chance are you may end up getting estranged from your loved ones by the time you hit your 40s. Even worse, the unresolved issues will manifest in other ways, show up negatively in your relationships with your friends, husbands, boyfriends, kids, associations, etc. My niece laughed, said I was being dramatic and made it sound like these “unburied tea-bags” were more like body snatchers that gives one multiple personalities! To which I said definitely yes the personality is shaped by issues we experience from childhood life
As it happens, this conversation with my niece was like a déjà vu, because in the same week prior our conversation, I had gone out to a friend’s house for dinner. After a lovely evening of great food, wine and conversation most of the guests left and I found myself in the company of three interesting women around our host’s dining table at the stroke of midnight. That’s when the real deep intimate conversations usually begin. Other than the lady host, we really were strangers to each other. One of the ladies who happened to be the youngest of us around the table and in her mid thirties, just blurted out that she was avoiding her mother (not her biological mother, but the Aunt who had raised her from baby when her birth mother couldn’t). She intimated that while she felt guilty about avoiding her, she couldn’t help herself; she just felt she did not want to deal with her and had been avoiding her calls for weeks!
I knew instantly without really knowing the exact detail of her issues, as they were unnecessary, that she was going through the “buried tea-bags surfacing period” of her life! The tea bag(s) had come to the surface! They always do in your thirties whether you like it or not and when they get unburied the tea leaves are no longer contained in their nice thin casing, but are all gashing out in an uncontrollable floating mess all over your life!
I looked into her eyes, and I asked her why. At first she said she really did not have any explanation, other than that they were issues that she was dealing with and didn’t really feel like talking to HER. The way she said HER you knew these were issue about their mother/daughter relationship. Instead, I just said to her “Don’t be angry, it’s better to just confront it and deal with it now, rather than later. It will not be easy but it will be worthwhile.” She looked at me as if I had said a foreign language that she knew she did not understand yet was surprised that she did. She looked at me and asked what I meant? But in actuality the unsaid question from her eyes to mine was “How do I deal with it?” So I explained to her and the other two ladies at the table my own tea-bag liberation journey with my Mom and how when I got into my thirties, I had to do my own house cleaning with her in order for us to turn a new leaf. It took six long years. It was risky because it could have gone terribly wrong. But it got done! Today my Mom is my best friend forever and I love our mother/daughter relationship.
After I had shared my experience with the ladies, I turned to the young lady and reiterated that she needed to confront this with her own “substitute” mom instead of avoiding it. It was obvious she loved her. But she was angry on so many levels because she felt that her substitute mother had failed her in more ways than one and like a tea bag, all the issues and incidents where floating to the surface. When she shared with us the incidents of her pain, I understood. The woman who raised her and she called mother had denied her pain, her traumatic experiences, her reality, and the experiences that she had suppressed for years were not awake like a knives twisting in her back. The best thing she could do was deal with it and unless she dealt with it these knives would keep on twisting reminding her of her hurting girl child! And it was showing up in more ways than one. By 2am, the other ladies had also shared their mother/daughter stories and tensions. At the end of the evening I felt that in retrospect, my girl child issues with my Mon were so trivial and paled in comparison to their traumas! But still emotional pain, while relative, was still pain and it hurt regardless.
The best part of having the buried tea bags surface is to allow you to become self-conscious in knowing who is showing up! Who is showing up in public or private associations, in friendships, in relationships with love, money, self-worth, self image, etc. The personality is a versatile, multifaceted entity because of the way our life experiences and adventures has manifested in us into an interwoven unique personal quilt. As such one’s personality has an elephant syndrome – one part could show up to some people while another to others and yet another to others and before you know it they all know different parts of your rump but never the whole elephant! It’s just means they only know a bit of you and that’s a healthy thing. It’s only unhealthy when YOU, are not aware which part of yourself shows ups - when, why, how, or in what context. Then you create confusion with your unconscious piece personalities and wonder why loved ones and friends see you that way when you think you are actually projecting yourself a certain way!
Copyright @ April 7, 2011 by Dr. Tendai Ndoro (DocNdoro) – Founder, SLIPPA/Brighten The Corner Foundation; CEO EDCTrainers, LLC.
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