What is a Cycle Breaker?
Many people have asked me what it means to be a cycle breaker. In essence, it means that you inherited patterns, beliefs, habits, and coping mechanisms through your ancestral line either through genetics or learned behavior, and you’re no longer choosing to repeat and perpetuate those patterns. When you decide to break a generational cycle, you are essentially freeing yourself and your ancestral line from a curse that has kept generations of people doing the same harmful things as those who came before them. It requires you to stand in your power and feel all the pain that has been wrought by this toxic system and find a new way to move through it. Most of us began breaking these patterns without much guidance or assistance because life forced us to find a better way for ourselves.
In my experience, I was pushed to the absolute brink of misery living in the midst of these toxic patterns in order to begin deconstructing them and changing my behavior and life in order to free myself. I was a people pleaser for a good portion of my life, and I had to become disgusted by my daily life in order to motivate myself to adapt. My suffering was the gateway to my freedom. Every step on this path was hard fought because I had been living in survival mode my entire life. I had to realize that I wanted a better life for myself and that I deserved peace and freedom long before I had the strength to make the big moves that brought me here. I had to love myself enough to find my voice and my backbone. I had to realize that there was more for me in life than what I had been clinging to out of desperation and toxic attachment.
My people pleasing tendencies were rooted in my fear of abandonment and fear of rejection. I had to identify these issues and begin working on the deep pain that was wrapped up in these fears before I could gather the strength to finally take steps to move past them. I spent many years feeling terrified of being alone, thinking that I needed codependent relationships in order to survive. I personally had to come to the realization that I would be happier if I died alone than if I continued on my path as planned. We all find our breaking point somewhere, and that happened to be mine. I began to conquer those fears when I chose to leave my toxic relationship and make a way for myself on my own.
Looking back to myself four years ago, I see all of the ways I had been hindering myself and holding myself back in every area of my life and it makes me a bit sad. The path to my truest self was littered with ugly truths about my life choices and the motivations behind them. I know now that I had to go through every bit of those difficulties in order to become the person I am today, but I do wish that I had figured it out a bit sooner. I spent years repeating those cycles and breaking my heart repeatedly through many different life situations before I finally saw that I deserved much better. The biggest issue that held me back was my victimhood consciousness that was telling me that my life was this way because of my external experiences. I had to see how my actions and inactions were prolonging my suffering and keeping me trapped in the cycles.
I had to learn to do the painful detachment work to untangle myself from every bit of toxicity in my life. I had to learn how to advocate for myself, and I had to create boundaries to protect my energy. Learning how to enforce those boundaries without creating more distortion and upheaval in my personal relationships was incredibly difficult, but it was absolutely necessary. Sometimes situations have to get messier before they can be truly resolved, and that’s why this path is so hard. It requires an enormous amount of strength and perseverance to continue that work when your fragile heart is trying to convince you to go back into the comfort zones that were suffocating you.
Every inch of this journey is hard-fought, but every milestone reminds you that the pain of rebirth is as essential as it is awful. Learning to choose yourself when the world tells you that you are a living sacrifice for others seems impossible at first. Realizing that you are worthy of your own love, care, and energy is a battle when others are constantly clamoring for your attention, but it’s one that’s worth fighting. You must summon the courage to take care of yourself first, or you have no hope of truly caring for others. If you’re depleted to the point that you can’t satisfy your own needs, you will eventually fail everyone else as well. You also have to see that it’s not your job to take care of the other adults in your life. Some people will continue to draw on your energy endlessly despite your suffering if you allow it. My invitation for you is to decide that you’re not available for that kind of energy exchange anymore. You’re allowed to choose yourself and opt out of these patterns moving forward.
We all have different cycles we’re working on, and we all get to choose individually if we will break them or repeat them. Once you see a pattern in your life that’s no longer serving your highest good, you get to choose to repeat it or change it. You can continue to loop endlessly for the rest of your life, and no one will stop you. We’re all welcome to settle into our comfort zones, and we can stop evolving as a soul at any point because we have free will. Thankfully, we also have the ability to begin working on our soul’s evolution and healing at any point in our lives. You can decide today that you’re ready to hop off the hamster wheel and follow your heart toward a better life, and you’ll find yourself a few steps closer to it every day as long as you show up for it. As a cycle breaker, you must learn to listen to your heart. In those moments when you’re feeling challenged by a cycle, your heart will tell you what you need to do.
We sometimes have to betray our own heart over and over again before we learn that it knows best. Even when it’s telling us to uproot everything and start over. Some of these steps might feel impossible at the time, but taking the actions to make them happen will show you that you can do anything. That’s when you realize that you’ve had the power all along, and you start to wish that you knew it sooner. That’s what inspires me to continue to write and work with people on this every day. My healing path led me to help other people break out of similar patterns by sharing my experiences, and I’m so grateful for every one of these opportunities. I know I’m serving my purpose when I see my clients crushing their cycles and making progress toward a happier life. I’m a living example that the work is absolutely worth it, and that everything changes once you make your wellbeing your highest priority. You deserve someone who will put you first, and your new life starts when you realize that person is you. If you’re stepping onto or continuing this journey today, I’m sending you so much love and strength. You can do this, and you deserve the beautiful life that you’re cultivating.