Are you Trying to Collect your $200 Before you Pass GO?

Have you been trying to heal from a break-up or loss without going through the pain?

Are you trying to recover from an addiction or dependency without letting go of the resentment, shame and/or guilt?

Do painful memories continually haunt your thoughts?

Are you obsessively worried about someone or something?

And most importantly, are you a hamster on a wheel never getting anywhere in the process?

You know from your experience playing Monopoly, you cannot collect $200 until you pass GO.  AND, you won’t win the game with just passing GO one time.  You need to go through the process of playing the game for a bit to get collect the houses, hotels and score the biggest bank.

You need to spend money to advance, you need to rest on a property for a bit while making some deals and even collecting some cash/knowledge from others playing along with you.  By rolling the dice a couple of times, moving forward and maybe even ending up in jail along the way, you will move forward and collect that $200!

Healing from an addiction, a breakup, painful hurts is much in the same.  There will be times when you’ll need to have those strategies to make it through.

Here’s a similar way of looking at our healing as it relates to the game of Monopoly.  I’ll use something very familiar to me as an example – my fear of abandonment and codependency.

I started out with my bank (my intention to heal), but I really couldn’t do much with that at first.  My intention just wasn’t enough…I needed to play the game!

So I picked my token and off I went…I landed on different spaces and instead of properties, I purchased self-help book after self-help book (Love Me, Don’t Leave Me, Co-Dependent No More, Adult Children of Alcoholics Workbook and Daily Affirmations just to name a few) building my library shelf and iBook to capacity.  In the beginning, I was just going around the board gathering information purchasing some houses along the way.

I still couldn’t win the game though.  Maybe I was getting richer in information collecting money while others landed on my properties with houses on them, but I still wasn’t winning.  There were still things in my way.

After I collected a few more $200s and passed GO! a few more times, I landed on different spaces while turning in my houses of information for bigger and stronger pieces – I was learning how to build those houses on stronger foundations.

My greatest Monopoly investment was the Emotional Freedom Techniques Hotels I invested in.  As a guest at these hotels, I was treated with such kindness, compassion and respect by the most experienced practitioners.  We spent hours tapping on my fear of abandonment and how it was impacting my life as an adult, my co-dependent people-pleasing and caretaking traits that showed me how I was always looking for validation from outside people and things.  Resting here, I explored and tapped on memories and circumstances from my childhood that limited me as an adult.

The greatest gift I had, of course, not knowing it then was spending a few turns hanging out in jail.  AND, I had no GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card in my pocket.  I had to do the work.  I had to wait patiently to roll doubles to be set free.

It was in that corner square jail cell I got my freedom.  Behind those metal bars in the dirt of despair, the darkness of sadness and muck of discomfort, I could finally let go of my tight grip of those metal bars holding me back from my purposeful life.

We cannot win or move forward until we finish the whole game.  Maybe we don’t have to win, but we must play.  We need to go around a few times, collect some $200s along the way, buy some houses, turn them in for stronger hotels, get thrown in jail and pack it up, put the game away and maybe even take it out a few times for some more fun, but…

The only way we will be successful, pain-free or at least pain-less is if you go through the pain – we cannot go around it, under it, over it – WE MUST GO THROUGH IT and until we do, we will be that hamster going around and around never getting any relief and never moving forward.

If it’s your turn and you’re ready to get started, email me at coach@coachnancylundy.com or book your free session here.