Staying has a cost.
This episode examines what happens when appeasement becomes unsustainable and when staying becomes more dangerous for your well-being than leaving.
I want to talk about a moment often mislabeled by others as drama,
Rebellion,
Selfishness or you have changed.
And this is a moment I'm calling rubbing someone off.
And this is not attitude,
It's not aggression,
It's not even choice in the way we usually mean it.
It is the moment when your nervous system refuses to keep paying the same price for someone else's acceptance of you.
I'm Anamail,
This is Exile in Rising.
Let's begin.
Rubbing someone off.
Rubbing someone off,
It means you stop following someone.
You stop compromising your truth and your belonging for their half-acceptance of you.
Acceptance of only the parts of you that accommodate them.
Let me repeat this.
This is very important.
Rubbing someone off means you stop following someone in a dynamics of power over you.
When someone has power over you and you are overpowered.
And it means you stop compromising who you are for their half-acceptance of you.
Or acceptance of only the parts of you that accommodate them.
Your words,
Your actions,
Your thoughts,
What goes in their interest.
Rubbing someone off means you dared,
And how dare you,
To question their authority,
Their rank,
Their hierarchy,
Their ego,
Or their self-proclaimed throne.
And what it means?
It means your wisdom,
Your intelligence,
Your creativity,
Your sexuality,
Your leadership,
Your ideas,
Threatened their inner system and their sense of authority and prestige.
That means rubbing someone off.
Because you disturb an established order that was never meant to be questioned.
The order of how things are and how you should be.
An order you were expected to fit into,
Bend for,
Shrink around,
Pretzel yourself into.
So think about many patriarchal systems.
It can be a family of origin.
It can be a system where you work.
It can be a church.
It can be a relationship with your partner.
So I'm talking about power over dynamics.
Rubbing someone off is a tipping point for your system.
For your expansion.
It is the moment you begin moving toward selfhood.
Toward queenhood.
Toward kinghood,
If you will.
It happens after you have bent for so long.
After you censored yourself pretty and politely for so long that you know you will die if you continue.
And by then,
Your soul,
Your spark has likely already resigned.
It resigned after years of silencing,
Adjusting,
Waiting,
Hoping for change.
Hoping that you will be recognized,
Acknowledged.
And what you begin to sense next is that your body will resign too.
These are signs.
When your mental health is no longer enough of warning,
The body prepares to speak.
And it speaks through collapse,
Symptoms,
Sickness.
And this is a tremendously painful place,
And it's a threshold.
There are two paths emerge,
And there is no third.
Therapists,
We can see this in our office all the time.
And clearly,
There is no third path.
One path is to continue following others.
To follow them.
Again,
Power over dynamics.
And to follow them means also to follow your body into death.
The other path is to begin learning how to follow yourself,
Your truth,
Your body,
Your signals.
Your vitality.
And following yourself doesn't begin with positive thoughts or fantasy healing that everything will be transformed in one weekend or in the 30 days,
Some sort of challenge.
It's a fantasy healing.
Because deprived mind,
Survival brain,
Your nervous system,
Does not believe in those fantasies.
You cannot fool your nervous system.
There is a deep intelligence in your nervous system.
And the mind is deprived.
But it's very alert.
It is intelligent.
And your mind is looking at the last decade or decades for evidence.
It sees that you followed power over systems.
You obeyed quietly.
You did your best.
And the mind cannot be fooled.
Because it knows there wasn't you in that bargain.
It sees that following power,
Systems,
And others led to dying of your soul,
Of your heart,
Of your joy,
Of your happiness.
And it's questioning what kind of leadership and following could cost you your vitality,
Your inner life,
Your ambition.
So the mind does not trust you leading yet.
So to feel mistrust is okay in this part of healing.
What your system needs to learn is that trust is not the starting point.
That's why many,
Many times clients who are coming after retreats,
And they spend thousands of dollars,
And they feel okay for a couple of weeks.
And then they feel like they are regressing again.
Because that promise of big healing after this weekend or after this,
Whatever you have to sign up yourself for,
Is not working.
And they feel like they are failing their own healing.
But it's simply because the starting point is a trust.
And your nervous system cannot trust you yet.
And that's okay.
The starting point is learning,
Micro-experiments,
Where you will learn to trust yourself.
You're learning to trust.
You're not trusting yourself to heal first.
First,
You're learning to trust yourself by leading yourself.
And you begin like a toddler,
On a very wobbly feet,
Exploring,
Experimenting,
Falling,
That's okay,
Standing again.
And those falls will hurt less than staying in a place where you can't feel the pain.
Where you wait for someone else to change,
While your life drains away.
That waiting place was set up for you from the beginning.
Where you were never meant to stand there,
If you're a person of color,
Visible,
Invisible minority.
You know that place very well.
It's a place where you have never meant to stand.
With all your efforting and trying.
And in that place,
You were falling continuously,
Never rising,
Never given a chance to rise.
And it's a dying place.
Dying place,
Trying to rise.
Trying to fit in.
And one day you do realize there is nothing left to lose.
And the fear of doing it on your own becomes less damaging than the fear of watching yourself disappear in relationship where you don't even exist.
Where you don't matter.
Where you don't even have a voice.
At that point,
Your mind,
Your heart,
Your soul,
Your body needs reassurance.
And it needs gentleness,
Witnessing.
Like a loving parent offers a toddler learning to walk.
And you need a patience.
One day at a time.
This is how you're building self-trust.
And it's okay not to trust yourself.
And as you begin to lead your own walk and stop following a path that harms you,
You will feel a shift.
It is a very deep shift.
It rises from your innate postural tone.
It's innate power.
It feels like expansion in your body.
It goes upward and outward.
And yet it has a deep gravity tone.
And also,
You will return to your hiding.
Absolutely,
You will.
This is normal.
So healing is cyclical.
It's not linear.
We really need to learn to stop with the fantasy healing.
And the change can be you will notice how you speak.
You will ask more questions.
You will start to open up more.
You will stop managing other people's discomfort.
You will no longer make yourself nice and pretty so everyone feels comfortable around you.
You will no longer make everything and everyone around you nice and pretty so everyone feels at ease.
And this will not make you cruel.
It will make you assertive,
Grounded,
Fear in your truth.
And you can still be kind,
But fear,
Because you will stop shrinking so you don't disrupt how others think things should be when it comes to you,
When it comes to your family,
Your money,
Your choices,
Your path,
Your creation,
Your activism,
Your love.
And also,
You'll become more playful.
Some clients,
They start changing different colors.
You will stop muting your excitement.
This is very important when you stop muting how happy you are.
And you will also stop pre-shrinking your joy to avoid disapproval or silence.
Women know this.
You're almost trained from the beginning,
From very young age,
To silence our joy and happiness and goofiness.
To shrink our joy and happiness,
It's an enormous self-betrayal.
It's enormous deprivation of our own vitality when we censor our own joy.
So,
You will recognize without regret when you are still rubbing someone off.
And when that happens,
It is time to say goodbye to a person,
To a people,
To systems,
To beliefs.
And it's a time to cut them away,
Because you were already in those systems ostracized anyhow.
And you can unfollow that type of leadership,
That rigid thinking,
That outdated belief systems,
Because you know it's too costly for your life.
The cost is high,
Because you know it's too costly for you and for your well-being.
And it's okay to cut people off,
Because you know the cost.
And when you start exploring,
When you start walking,
You will find others walking too,
Next to you.
You will not be alone,
Despite how lonely you felt while following people who exhausted your life.
And you will then stomp with your feet,
And you will bounce,
You will hop.
And once you have this conscience developed,
You will never drag yourself into following and compromising your existence,
That maybe someday you will be half accepted while you wait to disappear.
So,
To summarize all of this,
What rubbing someone off really is,
You stopped following,
You stopped bending,
You stopped shrinking.
This is not about rejection.
It is about withdrawal of consent.
There are actually many times you didn't even give your consent.
And that consent means consent to hierarchical authority that was never negotiated.
Or relationships where your voice cost you your safety,
And your mental health,
And physical health.
Or to the system that reward your obedience and punish your liveness.
And when you rub someone off,
What they feel is not hurt.
What they feel is loss of control and loss of power over you.
And that's why the reaction can be disproportionate.
And why people react so strongly when you stop complying is because you didn't threaten them by being cruel,
You threatened them by being yourself,
By your intelligence,
By your dignity,
By your creativity,
By your sexuality,
By your questions.
And these things destabilize systems built on rank.
So when you stop accommodating,
You're not breaking the rules.
And also this can be punished in the system of tyranny and dictatorship.
When you're,
Quote unquote,
Breaking the rules,
You're actually exposing them.
And then people are reaching out for tone policing,
Character attacks,
Moral framing,
Or they would say you are selfish or ungrateful.
And this is not a feedback.
This is actually not a feedback.
This is used to put you back into containment and to silence you.
I do talk a lot about tyranny and power over systems,
Authoritarian regimes,
Nick behavior.
Take a look what's happening globally.
There is a democracy now where you absolutely cannot even question people who are leading country and governments.
Right?
You can't rub them off,
Or you can.
And what's very important also for you to recognize,
If you're in toxic relationship,
Narcissistic relationship,
Many times mental health is no longer enough of a sign.
But body starts to feel so exhausted.
And this is trauma truth.
Because we don't suddenly fall apart.
We adapt.
We are able to adapt for years.
We appease.
We perform.
We do the work.
We stay nice.
And then with all this efforting,
There is a moment your body will just stop performing.
And it comes through pain,
Through anxiety,
Exhaustion,
Illness.
And this is the way when your body is saying,
I will not carry this arrangement any longer.
And in that moment,
We have only two choices.
Because it's very clear in your system that if I continue,
Something will die.
And one part is to keep following others and following your body into collapse.
By others,
I mean power over your systems or person.
And the other is to begin the terrifying,
Clumsy process of following yourself,
Where you absolutely will not trust yourself at the beginning.
And that's okay.
Because the pride mind does not believe in overnight transformation.
And it shouldn't.
And the mind is not pessimistic here.
It's evidence-based.
And it looks at decades of compliance.
It remembers obeying parents,
Obeying norms,
Obeying everyone in the church,
Obeying partners,
Obeying work systems,
Obeying men if you're a woman.
And it simply knows that there was no you in that bargain.
So when someone says to you,
Oh,
Just trust yourself,
Everything is in your mind.
Well,
The mind is saying back,
Based on what evidence?
And this is not resistance.
It is pure intelligence.
And self-trust,
We cannot declare over the weekend,
Over repeating the same mantra.
It's not working.
Absolutely,
It's not working.
I can see this with hundreds of clients.
Self-trust is trained,
Is trained.
And there is a deep intelligence if you're in your nervous system.
If your primal brain is saying,
Wait a minute,
I don't trust this.
And that's why we need to start experimenting with trust.
We need to learn to trust.
It is development.
And what we need to learn is that healing is cyclical.
It's not linear.
The most damaging myth in healing culture is that healing is linear progress.
No,
It's cyclical.
And it goes,
You can assert yourself,
But then you will retreat.
You will grow,
But maybe same day you will hide.
In one hour,
You will speak,
But also be quiet.
And then you come back stronger.
And this is not regression.
It is integration.
We need to learn that.
Cyclical healing means we are integrating.
That's all okay.
Because nervous system,
As you know,
I'm somatic experiencing therapist for PTSD and PTSD.
Trauma recovery.
We do titrate a lot.
We pendulate in and out,
In and out,
Which means nervous system expands in cycles.
We want to expand those capacities.
It contracts to digest.
And if you shave your contraction,
You slow your healing.
And as we learn to build back trust,
We are also ending managing other people discomfort.
Where we stop organizing our life around other people's comfort.
Not because you became cruel,
But because you stop raising yourself to maintain harmony for someone else.
And many people panic with this.
Oh my God,
Am I becoming selfish?
No,
You're becoming real.
And you can still be kind.
You can be assertive with manners.
You can be truthful with deep care.
And that's not aggression.
That's adulthood.
Also,
This is a time when you request reciprocity in relationship,
In a healthy relationship.
Not in power over dynamics.
Because in a power over dynamics,
Right,
If you're living with someone who is continuously putting you down,
Narcissistic behavior,
Sadistic behavior,
Patriarchal,
Very domineering,
Patriarchal,
Man-leading systems,
It's just a simple time to say goodbye without any regret.
Because if you're still rubbing someone off,
It is time to say goodbye.
No drama,
No revenge,
Simply honestly.
Because in those dynamics,
You are already excluded.
You're already silenced.
You're already unseen.
And leaving that names what's already there,
And it will not disappear.
The system will not change.
You're changing the system from outside by speaking your truth,
Not by staying silent inside of the system,
Which is not working for you.
You move from that system to the system,
What works for you,
What's aligned with your values,
With your sense of fairness and justice and moral values.
So you're not abandoning yourself.
You're coming into alignment by abandoning the system,
Which abandon you or never give accepted you from the beginning.
And also,
This is not your path to being isolated.
When you're coming back to yourself,
When you're cutting out the lines with people who never accepted you and made you feel less,
You will find your own community and you will learn to walk awkwardly,
Imperfectly at the beginning.
And you will find others walking too the same way.
And you will absolutely bounce your feet.
And this is not rebellion.
This is your survival turning into sovereignty,
Your self-authority,
Your essence.
And to summarize all of this in quick lines,
You can write this down.
Rubbing someone off means you stop following someone who is not healthy for you.
Don't be with people and systems who are accepting the parts of you that accommodate them.
When your mental health is not enough of a sign for you,
Your body will start.
To collapse.
Please don't wait for that.
To make a change.
The mind doesn't trust you leading yet.
Do not pathologize.
Mistrust.
That's okay.
That's absolutely okay.
We are learning to trust again.
Healing is cyclical.
It's not linear.
Relapse into hiding,
Lack of self-confidence,
Is not failure.
It's a part of integration.
There you actually expand your capacities.
Stop managing other people's discomfort.
And say goodbye.
You are already ostracized there anyway.
I am Anna Mael.
This is Exile and Rising.
And until next time,
Be gentle with yourself.
Much care.
Much care.
