I was watching the Net's vs Celtics and one of the announcers was talking about Kyrie Irving. They were saying how he thrives on the criticism and the fans booing him. They even went as far as saying he purposely will do and say things in the press to get the fans on him.
Now I played basketball, not on the NBA level of course, but there is so much truth to that, I would find reason's to pump myself up for the task at hand. If you are about to be in a fight or you go to school and the fight is supposed to happen at 3, so you spend all day finding reasons to be upset because you need to be in that zone. All of those situations do require some form of readiness BUT the problem comes when you live life this way and I will explain!
I am not a doctor, I am not a counselor, but I listen, I read and I do the work on myself! I am very self-aware, and I know and have identified my flaws and shortcomings and I work on them daily. That is what life is about, understanding that you are constantly growing, BUT you cannot grow if you are not your authentic self!
You see when you are not true to yourself, it can be very hard to sit with yourself. What that looks like could be you constantly have to be in motion, you have to constantly feel a part of something because of the optics. You see if you are a part of something, you feel like people will think you're doing something and that matters a lot when you struggle with really facing your issues.
You see might be struggling with past trauma that you can't address because if you address it, you will feel weak. Why would you feel weak, well it could be that your childhood could have been filled with examples that weren't the best! Let's say you are a guy who grew up seeing his father not being what "society" thinks a man should be! His father might do the dishes, do the cleaning, run the errands, etc.
Now as you grow into your teen years, you have listened to everyone saying your father is less than a man, you heard the jokes, you saw the laughing. So it is at that moment you decided that will never be you! So you go into manhood hiding emotions, you can't tell even the person that you love how you really feel because you think that makes you less than a man! You find yourself dealing with many women because you think that is what makes you a man. You know deep down inside you have a messed up way of thinking but the way you have been being a form of protection.
If you are a woman, you might have grown up around women who depended on men for everything. You might have seen women who never had anything in their own name and they were okay with that as long as a man was doing for them. Now you also see that every time the woman would end up alone, broke and bewildered when the man left! So you grow up wanting nothing to do with that lifestyle and you want to do everything for yourself, to you, there is an I in the team because you are the team.
Now that formula might on the surface seem to be going great to others, but secretly you hurting inside. You have a problem connecting, you constantly feel less than, and even though you could be the most successful person in your family or friend circle, you still feel less than.
In your relationships, you end up treating the person who has loved you in spite of all this the worst because you can't show that they are needed because of your past that you haven't addressed. So you alienate them, or you find the smallest thing to hold on to that will keep you upset or wondering about that person simply because you have to remember that you don't need them.
You see both cases have a simple solution, you have to look in the mirror and be real with what the problem is, it's you! You see there is a fear of losing ourselves when we don't know who we really are! Once you have removed the trauma we often wonder what is left?
That is why we choose to hold on to the trauma, but we have to understand that letting go of the trauma that we think is a strength that has gotten us where we are today does not mean the sense of survival is gone! When you break out of the constant state of survival, it allows us to embrace opportunities we never saw before!
