Written by Debbie Gill. Debbie Gill is a Trauma-Informed Therapeutic Coach, author, speaker, and creator of the Go Within Methodology. Through an approach that integrates subconscious belief transformation, Body Wisdom®, shadow work, inner child healing, and parts work, she helps women uncover the beliefs and survival patterns keeping them stuck, reconnect with their inner wisdom, and bridge the gap between what they know and how they live.
This article is the first in a series exploring the beliefs and patterns that can keep us from living what we already know. The series draws on Debbie Gill’s broader work through the Go Within Methodology™ and themes explored in her upcoming course, Coming Home.
For years, I kept choosing the same type of man, a man who needed fixing.
Eventually, I could see the pattern. What I couldn’t see was why I kept repeating it.
As long as I was focused on him, his problems, his struggles, what he needed to change, I didn’t have to turn my attention toward myself.
And I didn’t want to.
I was afraid to look at my inner world because, from where I stood then, it looked ugly. And somewhere inside me was the fear that if I didn’t like what I found there, other people certainly wouldn’t like it either.
So focusing on someone who needed fixing served a purpose. It kept the focus off me and my own need to heal.
But that wasn’t the only pattern I couldn’t understand.
What’s Wrong With Me?
I gave to people, a lot.
I was generous, especially with the men in my life. Yet eventually, they would leave.
My first thought wasn’t that I was giving too much. It was: What’s wrong with me? I’m nice. I’m generous. Why do people leave?
It didn’t make sense to me.
Then one day I heard Wayne Dyer explain something that changed the way I saw it.
He held his hands out in front of him like the two sides of the scales of justice. When one person gives too much, he lowered one hand several inches. The relationship becomes increasingly unbalanced.
The person on the other side can begin to feel that there is no possible way to reciprocate, to restore the balance. And sometimes, rather than continuing to live with that imbalance, the person leaves.
Suddenly, I had another way of understanding what had happened.
Their leaving didn’t mean there was something wrong with me.
My generosity wasn’t bad. But giving so much that there was little room for reciprocity created an imbalance I hadn’t been able to see.
That led to a much more important question:
What was driving me to give so much in the first place?
What Was Underneath the Giving?
Eventually, I understood.
For much of my life, I felt invisible. Somewhere along the way, I had equated not being seen with not being loved.
I wanted to be loved.
In fact, I was starved for love.
I didn’t love myself, so I looked to others for the love I didn’t yet know how to give myself.
That realization didn’t come all at once.
After I got sober and completed rehab, I went to my first meeting. Someone said something to me that I have never forgotten:
“Let us love you until you can learn to love yourself.”
And so I did.
For most of my life, I searched outside of myself for what I thought I needed, only to later discover it was inside me the whole time.
Giving too much was one expression of that searching. Choosing men who needed fixing was another. If I could focus on them, love them, help them, fix them, I didn’t have to look too closely at myself.
At the time, I couldn’t see any of that.
I could see what was happening on the outside: I was nice. I was generous. I cared about people. And still, people left.
What I couldn’t see was what was happening on the inside.
Knowing Isn’t Always Enough
This is one of the most important distinctions I’ve learned through my own healing and through the work I now do with others:
Knowing what you do is not always the same as knowing what is creating it.
People can spend years learning about themselves. We can read the books, attend workshops, go to therapy, participate in recovery programs, meditate, journal, and become remarkably insightful about our behavior.
I know I do this.
I know where this pattern started.
I know this isn’t working for me anymore.
And then we do it again.
Why?
Because intellectual understanding and subconscious change are not necessarily the same thing.
In my experience, subconscious beliefs formed early in life can remain locked and invisible, quietly influencing how we see ourselves, what we expect from other people, the relationships we choose, and the ways we behave.
We see the behavior.
We experience the consequences.
But we may have no idea what is operating underneath them.
Making the Invisible Visible
You cannot consciously examine something you cannot see.
That’s why one of the approaches I use in my work is Paradigm Mapping. It is a way of beginning to uncover the hidden beliefs and internal paradigms that may be shaping a person’s experiences outside conscious awareness.
The goal isn’t to judge the pattern.
It’s to become curious about it.
Instead of asking:
What’s wrong with me?
We can begin asking:
What’s driving this?
That is a very different question.
One assumes there is something inherently wrong with us.
The other invites us to look beneath the behavior and discover what may have been learned, believed, or adopted long ago.
Once something that has been locked and invisible becomes visible, we finally have something we can work with.
And sometimes we discover that a behavior we have criticized ourselves for actually served a purpose at one time.
Helping, fixing, giving, pleasing, achieving, controlling, or striving for perfection may have helped us feel safer, more accepted, more valuable, or more loved.
The question isn’t whether that strategy was “good” or “bad.”
The question is:
Does it still serve who I am today?
Coming Home to Yourself
My own journey eventually required me to do the thing I had spent so much of my life avoiding.
I had to go within.
I had to become willing to look at the inner world I had once believed was ugly.
What I discovered wasn’t a person who needed to be fixed.
I discovered a person I needed to understand, accept, forgive, and eventually love.
That changed the relationship at the center of everything else, the relationship I had with myself.
Today, that understanding is at the heart of my work: helping people bridge the gap between what they know and how they actually live.
Because lasting change isn’t simply about accumulating more insight.
Sometimes it begins by becoming willing to uncover what has remained locked and invisible and bringing it into the light.
When we can finally see what has been shaping our lives from beneath the surface, we have an opportunity to make a different choice.
And perhaps that is where coming home to ourselves begins.
Learn more about Debbie Gill and her work on her She Owns Success Expert Profile.
