“How can I discover why my past is limiting my present without having to go through years of soul searching or psychotherapy?”- Dr. David Gruder
Your childhood survival plan contains five key elements:
- You developed a Happy Ending Fantasy. It is unbearable for most children to live without hope. Your happy ending fantasy gave you hope that there was more connection, validation, and/or safety available than whatever amount you were receiving as a child. It kept you motivated when the going got tough and it shielded you from completely self-destructing as a child.
- You developed a set of Rules you believed could make your happy ending fantasy come true. Your job was to figure out what those rules were and to follow them consistently. There were two sets of rules you needed to discover. The first set was about your authenticity, rules about what to change, cover up, over-emphasize in yourself to get more of the connection, validation and/or safety you needed. The second set was about how to deal with others. These were your rules for how to make things easier to compensate for, to contain, or to manipulate others, in order to get more of the connection, validation and/or safety you needed.
- You developed Pandora’s box. This metaphorical holding tank is your inner treasure chest that holds in safekeeping whatever you felt you could not show to the world. It includes the aspects of your authenticity you felt you needed to cover up in order to get more connection, validation, and/or safety. It also includes your undigested life experiences that are waiting for you to properly digest. Paradoxically, you are forbidden from opening this box. You know the box I’m talking about: it contains the “don’t go there” experiences you have buried somewhere within you. It’s the “don’t mess with what isn’t broken” story you tell yourself, even as you hide aspects of yourself from others because you secretly know that something is broken.
- You developed a Mask that presents the public self you believe the world needs to see in order for you to be lovable, accepted and/or safe. Its job is to make you look like you’re following the rules and also to hide from others the contents of your Pandora’s box.
- You developed Anesthesias to numb your emotional pain. This pain came from three primary sources: a. not experiencing sufficient connection with others when you most needed it; b. carrying a growing backlog of undigested life experiences; and c. failing to make your happy ending fantasy come true no matter how hard you tried to follow the rules, hide parts of yourself in your Pandora’s box, and pretend you were your mask. Your first two sources of pain caused you to develop your survival plan to begin with. Your survival plan itself produced your third source of pain. The first things you turned into anesthesia may have been your greatest strengths.