The Bridge
*****This is the second of three blogs in a series about being courageous with our growth.*****
Ready to jump back in? Pack a snack and a drink, lace up your sneakers, we’re going on a walk.
Simply defined, a bridge is a structure that allows crossing over an otherwise difficult or uncrossable area. Bridges can range from the nature-made fallen tree to a spectacular man-made sculpture such as the Golden Gate Bridge. Either way, we move from one side of what blocks us to the other side. Bridges also can be found in music, dental work, electrical circuits, and even our noses. They all function similarly.
Emotionally, we use bridges as well. We build them piece by piece with healthy coping skills. They support us in moving from being alone to being in connection with someone else. These healthy skills allow us to cross over the river filled with emotional crocodiles. They’re wearing name tags: fear, loneliness, shame, guilt, conceit, superficiality, avoidance, anxiety, criticism, gaslighting, etc, etc, etc. Each of those crocodiles snaps at our heels as we stay true to our path of crossing the bridge to the other side.
The bridge in this 3-part blog series is the emotional bridge that offers us safe passage from living in fear of giving and receiving love to a place of feeling sure and secure in the abundance of love we have to offer and can receive.
It’s the bridge between codependency and autonomous self.
It’s the bridge between me abandoning myself to me being accountable to myself.
It’s the bridge between emotional immaturity and being an emotionally responsible adult.
It’s the bridge between the young child psyche and the adult psyche.
It’s the bridge between being controlling and being in control of oneself.
It’s the bridge between insecure self and courageous self.
Lastly, it’s the bridge between not seeing your worth and securely owning your worth while sharing it in healthy ways with others.
Crossing this bridge is conquering the self that is telling you to stay small, stay compliant, stay quiet; to shrink and not be an inconvenience or a burden; to be pleasing and overfunction so other people in the relationship don’t have to change by growing up and carrying their share of the emotional weight in the relationship. In the first blog of this series we discussed The Call of Courage. That call of courage makes a sound around this bridge as it skims the water, swirls around the arches, whistles through the supports which hold the bridge upright. Courage is heard in the expressions of taking accountability in impact letters, offering apologies, tears of vulnerability, expressions of regret that relay accountability rather than justification. Courage is heard in how I change my narrative, how I silently and lovingly speak to myself, how I confidently and securely speak out loud when advocating for myself within our relationship.
On this bridge we cross over from making fear-based decisions resulting in a scarcity of love to a place of being strong and confident within ourselves and giving and receiving love in abundance.
Crossing this bridge takes courage, without a doubt. It also takes an action plan. We know where we’ve emotionally been living our lives and we know how we want to begin feeling and expressing our feelings in more authentic and fulfilling ways. How do we get ourselves across that bridge?
That’s the next blog.
I’ll be waiting for you there.
Embrace your best self! Anne