Welcome back and congratulations on getting through this past week. Let's keep steppin'.
Next up in our exploration of the chronically abandoned, historically haunted beings that we could maybe know rather intimately, but may have been avoiding for decades instead, the continuation of our own self adventure....
We have tension, anxiety, exhaustion, agitation, and general shitty vibes from tense misalignments with.. you.
What's a misalignment?
Misalignments are when you have a personal value, something that you believe is important or that really matters, and you believe it from your own core.
But that value is not backed up by the way that you behave, think, speak, treat others, the beliefs and behaviors that you've accepted via others, et cetera.
To say this plainly, misalignments are when there is a thing that you are doing that you do not believe in or care about...
Or there is a thing that you believe in and care about that you are not doing.
Misalignments vs weakness
It's important here to state that it's a lot more accurate to say 'misalignments are the ways you are not allowed to think, feel, behave, and believe in congruence with your own values.'
This is generally due to the circumstances of life, ways that you aren't permitted to do the things you believe in or ways you are forced to do things that you don't believe in.
This creates tension between some things that are living deep in your core. What your 1) subconscious knows vs 2) what your consciousness demands based on what your circumstances have demanded, is an easy way to try to look at this.
With this in mind, it's important not to equate having misalignments in your life with weakness of character. That will create a shuilt obstacle that will stand in the way of aligning your misalignments.
Ignored misalignments
Most of the time, we don't know that we're making misaligned decisions and we haven't had the freedom of empowered choice to live our most authentic lives.
Our misalignments generally are not conscious.
But once we do become aware of them, well, we kind of need to take care of them.
If we don't, we're likely to hurt others.
And it's a misalignment to know that one has misalignments and refuse to address the misalignments. Knowledge and behavior acting in oppositional ways, right? It starts to be a choosing avoidance and inauthenticity over temporary discomfort issue if you're aware that you're doing things you don't believe in or not doing things that you do believe in.
Ironically, choosing avoidance for temporary comfort comes with increasing discomfort with every single misaligned decision that's made.
The discomfort truly only grows larger and more trauma tapping and abuse evoking over time if we do not iron out these misaligned bugs.
How does one know if they are out of order with themself?
Signs of misalignments
Angst
Misalignments feel like being pulled in opposite ways internally. Half of you is going left. The other half is trying to go right.
It feels like you're fighting within your self.
It can also feel like sandpaper on your insides. Corrosive, full of friction, debilitating and wearing over time.
Or there can be a kind of grinding, grating feeling in the brain and or body, as if your real beliefs and inauthentic beliefs are coarsely rubbing against each other, again, inside of the container of your being.
That being said, misalignments are often agitating. It feels horrible in an unspeakable, difficult to describe sort of way.
Misalignments rile you up. They make your existence mighty uncomfy. But one might have no idea what is pissing them off, because these misalignments feel like long, lingering frustrations and resentments when they're carried out over considerable durations of time.
We get used to that feeling and also start to estimate that it is 'just how we feel' when that time period is extended.
And oh, how long these misalignments can go on...
Some people live their entire lives in opposition with themselves and individuals' true wants, needs, beliefs being actively worked against.
If you have a very crotchety relative, coworker or ex who comes to mind, someone who was just a real fucking asshole all the time, perpetually frustrated and taking it out on the world, you might consider if they were living against their own selves; misaligned.
Anxiety
Misalignments can be more than agitating. They can also be very anxiety producing.
Something inside of you is screaming, no, no, no. And yet another part of your brain insists, yes, bitch. Yes, you will do it anyways.
This can feel a lot less frustrating and much more frightening with a forward, future-focused time orientation. Then we get anxiety.
Depending on how you bully your self into obedience, you might shake you to your very core with misalignments.
You can wear your self down.
You can become your own worst enemy with demands of misaligned behaviors.
Self-abuse
If roughly every move that you make makes your heart want to explode, or if dread fills your days without obvious reason, if you live with anxiety that has no basis, a sense of shakiness without resolve, if you are always pissy, you know it, you're not happy about it, you try to figure it out, but it persists....
there's some chance that you're thinking and behaving on incongruent wavelengths in a way that sparks fear and worry and annoyance of yourself with your self like a double dosage of emotion with absolutely nowhere to go.
It's also worth noting that misalignments can just be exhausting.
Exhaustion
It drains your battery to be thinking in two different directions, or feeling one way and acting against it, convincing your self it's necessary with abundant thought.
Or you might be behaving in oppositional ways, running in circles trying to neutralize your misalignments with fixing behaviors.
Or you could be thinking to the West and acting to the East.
Remember how much we hate dissonance of all forms? Yeah, there's a really good reason for that.
It is upsetting and it is exhausting.
When your energy is split like this, when you're sending your self in multiple directions mentally and or emotionally and or behaviorally on a continuum, second by second, year by year, it really lessens the power that you have. Like an army split into subgroups rather than fighting as one unit.
You are the commander of those units, not only disorienting your army, but also having all the background conversations that lead up to the commands that you're making unto the army before issuing and then monitoring them.
I'm saying, it takes a lot of energy.
You don't have the same amount to give, the same impact or sense of vitality or conviction when you're not in alignment. You will be aware of it, of the tired, exhausted feeling, though you might not be able to name the source of it.
Figure when you're arguing with your self, forcing you into actions that don't really work with or for you, it's like trying to herd your self around.
Or the more complex trauma relevant metaphor is, it's like you're trying to convince a toddler to do what you want all day, every day, within your self... And you have to play the part of both the toddler and the supervising adult somehow. Meanwhile, you're expecting both parties to stay happy while this happens.
You might also see misalignments as being your subconscious working in oppositional paths. Your unconscious thoughts tell you, you must, and they also tell you, you cannot.
But you don't hear any of that explicitly. Instead, your head runs back and forth, dishing out disturbing and contradictory conscious thoughts when it's not too tired to function at all.
Mysteries contained in misalignments
Overall, when you are misaligned, you take from your self, generally to give to others in some way.
Your own internal and external actions, therefore, deplete your energy without it being restored.
But you don't know why.
There's not a clear reason for this exhaustion waving in your face most of the time.
It can be very subtle.
Or it can be what feels like an unquestionable area of life that sparks the mismatch, so you can't even identify it as such.
Misalignment is a chronic experience that makes a fucker wonder if the body and brain are failing them, if they're just miserable for no reason as a standard, if life is just this consuming to where you barely feel alive at all.
Hiding misalignments from our selves
That said, most people work very hard to mask their misalignments from themselves, and you may have been doing this too.
Part of the self-defense system is hiding the ways we're not acting according to our own values and interests from our own recognition.
It can be very frightening to realize that you've been misaligned, especially when you first come to that conclusion.
It can call so many decisions into question, really your whole freedom of will, pointing out how highly influenced a person may have been by others and by trauma, and how those influences tend to snowball over time.
How life can end up not reflecting the person who's experiencing it at all.
It's fearful to recognize misalignment due to its life implications, "Did I choose any of this?" and due to the potential for beating your self up, if you decide the answer is nah.
Shame and guilt
We can layer in shame and guilt that one might feel as examples of behaving in contradiction to your personal values come streaming into the brain projector.
That creates even more tension and an instinct for self-harm, especially as our misalignments relate to relationships.
For instance, if you know that you care about people's wellbeing, freedom, and autonomy, but you find instances to brood upon when you know you were demanding and controlling via anxious attachment, memories of being a poor partner plague you...
You might feel a lot of strain between 1) your conscious, ideal, personal beliefs: "autonomy matters, we cannot control each other, boundaries are great...."
And 2) the contradictory, unconscious belief that you've acted on: "but I need you. If you leave, you might not come back. I am unlovable if you don't prove otherwise, et cetera."
Thus, along with the relational anxiety that drives the anxious attachment, you'll likely also be feeling dank, shameful, semi-conscious recognition of your own actions pissing you off.
"Why am I behaving like this? I do not believe in what I am doing."
Seeing the reality of ourselves in order to get realigned can be a very difficult step, and many of us try to avoid it for all of the pain and shame it can cause.
But if getting back in contact with you comes with a recognition of your tenuous sense of existence, as we love to say, let's consider that it might be highly tenuous because your insides are grinding against each other, and the way that you might be acting out of alignment, very, very, very likely is due to prior trauma.
Trauma and misalignments
When we behave in ways that do not make sense for us and we're somehow oblivious to it or feel like it's out of our control to fix it, tis oft because of traumatic fragmenting.
We've decided that to survive, ee must think or be a certain way due to a traumatic event that is separate from the rest of our memories and emotions and beingnesses.
So we fall into a rigid survival-based behavioral pattern with a very limited perspective around that trauma, and we repeat the behavior without being able to see another option.
Even if that behavior contradicts everything else we believe, it can be a blind spot for us.
Oftentimes, we know what we believe...
But brain and body have been intimidated to act in line with someone else's beliefs, and the mind may not be able to see that there is any other way.
Imprisonment via misaligned decisions
Hence, we can end up living like prisoners in our own systems.
The decisions that we feel forced into. The mental patterns that convince us to act against us. These are the prisons that we may create for ourselves.
How do prisoners usually feel? Frustrated? Agitated? Powerless? Anxious? Exhausted? Just like how we've been describing misalignments.
If you feel like you're incarcerated in your own life in so many ways, but still you're not sure why these are the prevailing sensations, you've quite possibly been misaligned.
Becoming aligned
This can only be resolved through spending enough time with your self to understand what your real values, beliefs, and needs are, and then to begin making changes.
This requires one to realize that they have not been making the most them native decisions and to recognize what that feels like - How a misaligned decision and internal no is experienced for that individual.
That way, a Fucker won't end up misaligned again, at least not in the same way. The trauma recovery benefits really cascade from there as we stop recreating our patterns on a loop.
To do this work:
Number one, start spending time with you as we're all working on.
Number two, start naming your values.
[You'll need to start naming them based on what you feel firmly about in a calm, definitive way internally. Think of the things you'll fight for, the things you put your attention on when permitted to decide for your self, the things you want for every being, even outside of your self. What you appreciate in other people, what you talk about in close, trusting relationships. Start to define your true values, what matters to you.
Some of mine are not to being pro-life, but pro-quality of life. Minimal work for survival, everyone should be able to access resources. Consideration and recognition of life equality for all beings, down to the worms that I save. Freedom for everyone to be who they are without fear. And how do I know that these are some of my values? They're the things that rile me. I navigate towards conversations about them. I think about them on my free time. I feel about them. I sing about them. I scream about them. I would lose blood about them.
So, how about you? Start to define your own true values based on your observations and knowledge of self. What gets your goat when no one else is around to discuss it?]
Number three, spend more time with you for the purpose of:
Step four, noticing when you feel baseless, angsty, exhausting, anxiety, agitation, et cetera, and consider if it has relevance to your values versus your recent actions.
[If you're inside suddenly feel like sandpaper or like someone is taking a blowtorch to your brain, then you want to stop.]
Step five, try to investigate what is this feeling in relation to what's happening around you?
[What have you been preparing to do? What have you recently stopped doing task wise? When did this sensation start? How does it relate to what's been happening in and out of you?
What have you been thinking about, dreaming about, having faint ghost memories of or fake conversations about? And how do those values begin to connect with what you truly want, need and believe at your deepest level? In your most authentic set of beliefs and shit that you care about, how are these emotional experiences connecting to the things that you're discovering that you really give a shit about. If you do this work and you use uncomfortable emotions to find thoughts and behaviors, feelings and behaviors, beliefs and thoughts that have been pulling in different directions, then]
Step six, you go ahead and gently process why.
[Why did you wind up in this misaligned position where you're thinking and feeling one thing, but doing another? And make sure again that you approach this gently, with compassion. Do not get judgy about it. How were you convinced to act, think, speak, or behave this way? What didn't you realize before? What conditions were making it seem necessary?
What trauma had not been processed yet, which made it seem like the only safe or correct option? How were you convinced or not allowed to act against your self? How were you just trying to stay safe?]
This can be a very emotional step. So remember our tools from the stress and big emotion stops on our tour and try to use them to stay with your self while you contextualize your misalignments.
Then, when you're ready, which can take a while, the identifying and processing misalignment step can be a very slow and consuming one which might stretch out for some amount of time. Do not rush it. You will get to step seven eventually when your emotions are aligned with this behavior.
Step seven, decide how you can behave in a less tension evoking way as you move forward.
[How could life feel easy and one directional? What amendments can be made? Where is your focus and how can your behaviors match that emotional and attentional spend? Get your ideals in your brain and then]
Step eight, practically prepare your self to make them real, little by little.
[Run some scrimmage sessions, mentally preparing for the next instance of potential belief, behavior, deviation, or intention, action, mismatch. Remembering what influenced your misaligned decisions in the first place, in the past. Recognizing how that felt and how it feels acutely when you're faced with a new misaligned option.
If you get granular with this, if you identify that feeling of an internal know when presented with a potential behavior, you can recognize what stimulus it is that drives you down the wrong behavioral path, a certain thought or feeling, person or event that takes place right before you have that 'no' sensation, but recognize that they have the power to spin you into acting against that internal no and taking actions that grow with ever expanding inner strain if you make the wrong turn.]
[Process summary and example
Identify all the details you can about your misalignments, why they have taken place, what they feel like, what often causes them to happen again in your world.
Dig in and understand your choices, the stories of your misalignments.
And then choose differently.
Example: You know what I believe in? Escaping the prison of capitalism for all of us, every human being. But you know what I do every day if I'm not careful?
I misalignedly have my ass sitting in front of my computer by 5am and then I work until it's dinner time. Not happily, but because I am compulsed to. Because I don't think, on some level, that there is any other way. And that's because of trauma. Let me be clear. It feels like death. It is excruciating and draining to perpetuate this behavioral pattern. It is not a stressless behavior. And yet, I will do it every day. I have learned that this is a misalignment that drains my soul and my batteries and my will to be alive.
I have done the work and pinpointed that the stimulus event which causes me to leap into this mismatching behavior is internal panic about financial lack and disappointing people. Or on the external front, it's just seeing my computer or engaging with abusive individuals. So knowing all of this, I have changed my behaviors. I don't open my computer unless I am about to work. When I notice that feeling of internal panic about finances or fawning, I know it's my same old trauma pattern, not reality that's pushing me to behave in a way that is not native to me.
I practice with this feeling by behaving against it. When I feel the compulsive, fearful, trauma-born emotion, I know that it is not the right behavior for me to sit down and slave drive myself. The correct thing for me to do instead is not working right then. Literally do anything else. To follow that compulsion, to act in that old pattern would just be a perpetuation of my trauma.
I do not need to think about it beyond that point anymore because again, I have sealed in the knowledge.
Now I can feel the misalignment signature and act in a way that actually is correct, healthy and beneficial for me.]
self-guidance through alignment
The beauty of doing this work is easier self and life management, moment by moment in your life.
Name your value. Name the feeling of behaving against it. Practice being with you so you feel it when you do get misaligned.
And then when the situation presents itself next, or a similar situation, you'll be prepared to behave differently, purposely, in line with who you know your self to be based on your inner GPS.
This vastly reduces the tension of being with your self and guiding your self.
It takes pressure off of your brain, which is trying to figure everything out on its own, to analyze, to be infallible.
Finding your aligned signature and misaligned signature reduces the bickering between critical personality parts that might pull you in opposite directions. It stops you from diving into obsessive what-ifs and reaching for self-alignment. It also gives you material for self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, and newfound self-esteem.
As you eventually see and feel the evidence of your growth right in front of you and inside of you, you will reach a new level of self-understanding, which makes so much of the self-punishment a moot point. It can just go away.
Things can feel much less tenuous inside of your brain and body.
I'm saying doing this work is hard. It always is. That's why it's called inner work, not inner sit.
But the relief is worth it.
RELIEF
Noticing and naming the strain that you feel becomes your glossary.
The next time you feel that feeling again, you know that the situation is not right for you. That's the end of the conversation.
You develop your own intuitive leadership, your self decision-making skills. You don't have to think and think and think about every aspect of life.
You can think about it in a different way, more open-mindedly, free from your rigid perspectives.
You have a backup resource that you build inside of your self, a way to check in calmly for confirmation and to cut out all of the busy brain scrambling.
You have an emotional shortcut to decision-making, behaving, and existing.
It'll eventually be like, "ha ha ha, well, that proposition feels fucking terrible inside of me. Like someone is scraping my organs against a pummelstone. Hmm. I guess that means this is the wrong move for me. I'm not sure what the right move is, but it is not this. I need to step back and patiently listen to my insides for another answer." And that's the end of it.
Alignment NOT AVOIDANCE
NOTE: We are not talking about avoidance.
If you're noticing a negative sensation and choosing to go nowhere near it without connecting it honestly to a misaligned personal value, you might just be avoiding something.
How do you know the difference between avoidance and misalignment?
Well, if you haven't done considerable work to determine what's bothering you and how it maybe relates to past traumas - If an idea just launches to the forefront of your mind and you say, "what a relief. That's it. Problem solved."
[As in, "I feel anxious because I guess I truly don't value doing homework. So I just shouldn't do this assignment."]
There's a good chance that your brain has found an avoidant excuse, not a misalignment.
Do whatever you want. You are welcome to follow that thought, but you'll increase your misalignment discomfort and have intensive reality testing to do later if you're jumping on the avoidance train.
Long-term benefits of alignment
If you do this authentically in a non-excuse-making way; if you learn to listen to and work with your self to determine your values and aligned behaviors and internal indicators, then you won't be a follower, a sheep, a victim, or a miserable cunt.
Better mood
You decrease your negative affect enormously, decreasing baseline pissiness and angst.
Energy
You add energy back into your body and brain, which is self-generating.
[Behaving in line with your internal system amplifies the energy that you have innately by spawning more similarly powered behaviors, which then feed back into your system through thoughts and emotions and observation of the results of your behaviors. It's like the water cycle. You won't need pots of coffee every day if you are aligned because your own energy expands and propagates itself.]
Guidance
You will know when a decision is right or wrong for you when you learn your alignment signals.
[Rather than feeling like a clueless, idiot child in your life forever, once you taste alignment versus misalignment, once you behave in alignment with your self and feel the difference in your comfort level, you'll begin to feel more adult, more secure, stabilized, and self-assured.
Less fear
It will become a *relatively* stressless experience to be alive because you won't be relying on your brain all the time. You won't be fighting your own thoughts. You won't feel like you're cosplaying as who you are supposed to be. You'll just grow to be that person. And every move you make will be easier, less straining, less fearful.
self authenticity
Alignment allows you to melt into who you are and to operate from that place.
Inner "no";
Sense your limits and best choices.
[Anything that is out of place or out of line for you will feel like someone is trying to cart you back off to a cell. There will be a dreadful, no echoing inside of you. You'll get a strong signal somewhere in your being, halt fucker, this is not for you.]
self-clarity
And you will have the knowledge to know what it means, which is probably what has been lacking for you in the past.
[You've probably felt this inner "no" before, but didn't know how to interpret it. And thus you may have fallen into those misaligned patterns and wrote off your own feelings, thinking they didn't matter.]
Confidence
Now you know the way you feel absolutely does matter.
It indicates what is right or wrong for you.
Practice it, accept it, believe it.
A tip:
Stop thinking of it as work to be getting aligned.
Start thinking of it as living the way that you haven't been allowed to live before.
Summary and process recap
Misalignments are usually not conscious,
they are often created by trauma,
and they are generally not reflective of ways that we want to be.
They are usually reflective of ways that we were not allowed to be.
Misalignments are also not a sign of weakness. Unless, unless one refuses to face them and instead causes damage from their misaligned emotions and thoughts and behaviors that they don't even believe in, such as being abusive while not believing in relational abuse due to the uncomfy agitation and fear of living out of line with themselves.
To not be like the very people that we are all trying to heal from, we need to tackle our misalignment problems. Otherwise, we are perpetuating our trauma.
[One last time to run through this process:
You spend time with you.
You notice the tensions that seem baseless.
Pay attention to the memories, feelings, and demands upon your self that come up just before those tensions emerge.
Combine that with your knowledge of you, what you know about your self, and what you really value.
Try to piece together the story of what is going wrong, where you're not quite enacting your highest, most idyllic beliefs.
And then take that lesson away gently, contextualizing what has caused the misalignments. "Okay, I've been letting my brain get away with me a bit in reaction to..." name the life challenge or negative influence. No big deal, it happens to everyone.
Let's recalibrate, then, by running through possible upcoming scenarios and planning out how you can respond more in line with your own values.
And then stay with your self enough to notice the sense, the shift of misalignment and follow through with your plan, listening to you and behaving in a way that matches the tone of your own beliefs again and again and again.]
By doing this work
You develop aligned habits from your behaviors and you don't have to think so hard about what you're doing each day.
Your life will be readjusted into alignment and then maintaining itself in that state through your new behavioral patterns.
Do it over and over again, and you learn to use your self-guidance system in situ so that even brand new novel situations are not an alignment crap shoot.
You won't suddenly act against your self in a moment of anxiety or uncertainty.
You'll have all the knowledge that you need to make the best decisions for you from inside your self, from your own inner signaling from your true, authentic shit you actually care about.
And that is how you get your self on the same page as your self all the way through without having to continually suffer through additional life-tapping, frustrating, grating, draining, and highly tense motherfucking misalignments.
This has been tense misalignments along our spooktacular journey into the self.
Up next, we will visit our less than fine moments, embarrassing memories that haunt our days and dreams if we ever actually allowed ourselves to sleep.
I'll see you there if you choose.
