Changing Your Life with PTSD, Part 2: Know Your Relationships

On my journey to here, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out why: Why am I so unhappy? Why does everything seem so pointless? Why am I jumping at shadows? Why am I so alone?

The answers to these questions differ for each person, I think, and I don’t think finding them is easy, but there are a myriad of simple tools available to learn about yourself. And even if some of them seem a bit hokey, they worked for me. I offer them up only as proof that knowing more about your own thought patterns, history and personality will help you change. The only way to avoid retracing the circular steps of the past is to identify those steps you took. The steps your family took. The mistakes you made. Because you will make them over, and over, and over again unless you learn to put your feet somewhere else.

When I was in the hospital, one of the counselors I spoke to started me on the path to recognizing familial patterns when she asked me if I could identify my triangular relationships. When I asked her what she meant, she drew a triangle on a piece of paper and pointed to one intersection of that triangle.

“This is you,” she said. She tapped another point. “This is your mother.” Tapping the third point, she asked, “Who’s here? Who changes the way you and your mother interact with one another?”

“My stepfather,” I said. “My grandmother.”

And I began to think about the other people who could be sitting on that single point.

“How many of these triangles do you think exist in your life?” she asked me.

“A lot, I guess.”

It was just one exercise, but it started me on a journey. I began identifying myself and the people in my life by matching their personalities to archetypes. Once I understood the archetypes who acted in my life, I could understand how I reacted to those archetypes. Whenever I needed to learn something as a kid, I always started at the library, because I learned early on that no one could hide anything from me if I learned how to find it myself; so I guess when I sought to change my life, it was natural for me to start in books to find the answers.

I started with astrology, because it’s the easiest, simplest way to type people, by their birthdate. While simple astrological signs might not seem like much, just learning how your astrological sign relates to another can be an eye-opening exercise.  Getting your birth chart done will also help you understand the patterns in your life that started from birth, and some of the blockages that you may be carrying around like an old set of baggage. You might find that getting your chart read by a professional astrologer really opens your eyes to the patterns that seem to strangle your life; I myself found that I was able to untangle a lot of things once I saw those triangles for myself.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t believe that stars control anyone’s fate. But the 12 horoscopes are powerful tools for understanding ourselves and others. In astrology, triangles in our chart indicate painful, difficult emotions and relationships, and maybe it was easier for me to confront these “triangles” in my life on paper first.

Another tool I used was the enneagram. Based on Jungian archetypes, the enneagram will also help you identify those emotional patterns that cause you to develop certain types of relationships, and identify the harmful and helpful patterns that can either lead you to, or keep you from, your better self. The enneagram is a bit of work, but you can do it yourself, and it is good work. I followed Don Riso’s system as laid out in his books, especially Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. You can take a free sample of the RHETI (The Riso-Hudson Enneagram Test) online, or pay only $10 to take the full RHETI.

I highly recommend perusing the entire Riso-Hudson Enneagram Institute site to learn about the enneagram, the archetypes, and the system before taking the test. And another good read is astrologer Liz Greene’s article, The Eternal Triangle.