We're not talking about habits. We're not talking about a mindset, but something that I refer to as EMOTIONAL GRAVITY. What do I get pulled into? What are the little gravity vortexes that I get sucked into emotionally? It's the quiet thing that tells your mind "I need that thing even if it's bad for me, or even if it hurts. I need that thing even if it's bad for me." The core of what I want you to get from this is harsh. Bottom line: your nervous system does not want what is healthy; it wants what is familiar.
What does emotional gravity mean and what that truly is?
Humans are very predictable but it's not because humans are stupid, it's because our nervous systems are very very smart. Your brain doesn't want new things. It wants old things that it already knows how to survive. This is why somebody who grew up in absolute chaos is going to feel bored when there's peace. This is exactly why somebody who is ignored as a kid gets addicted to people who give them no attention or take their attention away on a very regular basis. It's why somebody you probably know in your life was constantly controlled as a kid and then they start controlling everybody else, and what do they call it? Leadership when they grow up. They're not chasing what feels good like you might think because of needs decisions and values. They're chasing what feels like home; even if home was hell, they're still chasing home.
How the system works.
If it feels familiar, it feels safe.
If it feels safe, it becomes attractive.
If it's attractive, then it becomes repeated.
Familiar, safe, attractive, repeated.
So you're not choosing, you are recycling. People are not choosing they're recycling. And not all of these emotional magnets or emotional gravity traps look the same. Some of them are super loud and screaming, some are very quiet and whispering.
So I want to take you through the 4 types that you're going to see out there in the wild. Even in yourself.
1) The first one is called THE MIRROR MAGNET. This pulls you into and toward people and environments that treat you the way you were treated growing up. If Dad was really critical you're going to find critical people. If Mom was distant, you're going to date somebody who's emotionally three states away from you.
2) THE ECHO MAGNET. This one makes you just recreate pain to give you the placebo that you're in control. I'm going to remanufacture pain so that it feels familiar, which gives me a fake feeling of control. This is when you choose burnout. You choose drama because at least you're the one holding the match that lit the fire this time.
3) THE REVERSAL MAGNET. This one flip flops the roles. This one flips it over. So if you become the thing that hurt you if you felt powerless, you become the dominant one.
If you ever felt invisible, you take over every room. You're the loudest person in every room. This is not healing but it feels like healing. It's the placebo of feeling better. It's armor with a smile on it. It's not healing anything.
4) THE COMPLETION MAGNET. This one's sneaky because you keep finding people in your life who resemble the people who hurt you. Why would we do that? Because we hope to God, we pray, "This time, I'm finally going to get the love that I didn't get back then. I need to find that person so I can learn how to control that type. So this is every one of us here tonight has an internal voice or a friend with an internal voice that says, "You know what, maybe they'll fix it. He's going to get better. He's really working on himself. Now he's going to start fixing all those things." Everybody's got a friend like that. It's a trap. It's a fantasy. It's Groundhog Day but with trauma. That's all it really is.
Let's dive into these a little bit. Here's a picture of some of these what they look like in the real world instead of an abstract description of them.
PART 2: REAL WORLD EXAMPLES OF BEHAVORIAL MAGNETICS
When it comes to THE MIRROR MAGNET, let's say we have this guy in mid-40s, great career, really sharp, charismatic, but every relationship ends the same way. He's drawn to that tone of voice, that disapproving tone of voice, what I would call passive disapproval. And it's not because he wants it. It's because it feels like his mom. He didn't like it when he was a kid. That's not what I'm saying. He hated it when he was a kid, but it taught him how to love on a leash, and now his little compass is pointing North and it's saying "that feels like home. Let's go to that because it feels familiar. It feels like home."
In a REVERSAL MAGNET scenario, I personally met a woman who used to be really quiet, gentle and she got steamrolled very constantly on a very regular basis. And now, she leads a team of 200, controls every decision, keeps people very much on edge. She's respected but no one is close to her at all. So she says that she's just "I'm really just focused on work." She's not. She's terrified. She's scared. The part of her that was vulnerable got punished, so now she becomes the Punisher. That's the REVERSAL MAGNET. She became the threat so she would not feel threatened again, and it works. It works. It's actually effective but it's lonely.
Example of a COMPLETION MAGNET.
This one is kind of nasty. This goes back to a guy that I've coached one time. A guy I coached has got a brilliant mind, amazing beautiful heart, and he keeps falling for these women who are really chaotic, like emotional hurricane type of people. And every time he's trying to help. He's trying to make her get better, so she's finally going to love him back. And what he doesn't realize is, he's chasing his dad, not his mom. He's chasing his dad through women. So dad was volatile. Never said I love you, so now he's on this lifelong quest to finally be enough for someone just like dad. So his little script says "find somebody like dad and complete the process, and then I will complete this unresolved story arc that has been going through my entire life. Not because it's good but because it's unfinished business. What I told him is look you are not dating women; you're dating the hope that this time the monster becomes safe. I'm going to make a monster become safe. That's all you're doing. You're not dating women.
Part 3: Let this sink in. Just because something pulls you in does not mean that it's right for you. It just means that it matches your oldest pain; that's what it is. How do we break this spell? What do we get out of it? What if our compass is pointing to some dys functional, toxic, awful human being or awful situation? We have to rewire it.
STEP ONE: SPOT THE LOOP A pretty easy question here is just asking what keeps happening that I say I don't want but I keep allowing?
STEP TWO: NAME THE MAGNET
Is it a mirror or it's an echo, is it reversal, or is it completion?
STEP THREE: TRACE THE ORIGINAL SOURCE by ASKING 3 QUESTIONS
1) Who taught you that this was normal?
2) Whose love came with conditions?
3) This is even deeper. Who in your life made you feel that safety has a cost, like you have to invest something in order to feel safe?
STEP FOUR: EXPOSING THE LIE
The pull that we feel, that adrenaline spike, that's not chemistry. That's childhood. So where is the lie that happened in childhood that I'm continuing today?
And if you start going through some of these transitions and undoing and unraveling I want to tell you one thing: you have to go into this knowing that peace will be absolutely unfamiliar . . . at first.
The hardest part of doing any of this work is peace doesn't feel peaceful when your system is wired for chaos. It feels like disruption. It feels like something is around the corner. It feels like I don't deserve this what is about to happen. So peace is never peaceful if you have a system that's wired for chaos. It feels boring, maybe like something's missing, like a let down, but that's the absence of adrenaline that's going to trick you into coming back to that gravity trap, or whatever, the magnet. You're not bored, you're healing through this process. So if you go through this it's not hard. Everything we're talking about the back of your mind is going to be like, "Yeah, yeah, I could do this but it's going to take like years. It'll take 6 months. It'll take me 19 days just to walk through all these 4 questions that Chase put out there." That's not true. It's easy. If you don't think it's easy, you're bullshitting yourself because you don't want to become a little bit uncomfortable for a little bit. So don't expect peace to feel like some hot tub. I want you to expect it to feel like withdrawal; you're detoxing from pain that you thought was love, and what I can promise you is that you don't have to figure all of this stuff out right away. You just need to get honest on paper where it's out in front of you, where you can read it, let the truth show up even if it feels uncomfortable. And I would say that is where Freedom starts.
