I Promise You Nothing

I've struggled almost all my life with feeling like an outcast. First, I was rejected by my biological father. I am told he did not come to the hospital to see my mother for 3 days after my birth. On the day I was born, I was promptly taken from my mother as I was an incubator baby. My birth was traumatic. Newborns need to bond with their mother and father. I did not have that experience.

A child cannot survive without its parents providing for it, caring for it, and protecting it. A mother’s role is the nurturer and distributes the food while the father provides the protection and shelter. Let’s not get all PC here. Of course, women can be fierce protectors of their children and fathers can be super nurturing. These are archetypes in our psyche.

It’s why I felt more masculine in my affectionate style as I have this hanging gate of aloneness in my undefined Heart center (gate 40). It’s one of the ten expressions of love identified in the Human Design system. It is “the father”, the provider. While the other side is “the mother”, the distributor (gate 37) that forms the channel of community.

I've always been the black sheep in my family. When I met my husband-to-be, I was only 15. I bonded with his family as I saw his family as a family of black sheep. His parents, still married, had raised their children to be individuals. It was permitted to have different opinions and share them openly. I had found a place where I felt I belonged. My husband was my everything. He was my best friend. He was my family. There was nothing more important to me than being the ideal wife or the role model wife.

My biological father had rejected me. The man I was taught to call Dad was in truth my step-father and father to my brothers. I needed to earn his love. I needed to prove my loyalty to him. It was very much about my survival, unconsciously, as I had already been rejected by one father. I needed to gain his love but I was not his blood. Nor could I ever be his blood. No matter what I did, I would never be enough for him. I would never be his true daughter. This is part of my conditioning of my open Heart center, our Will center. It’s the source of our sense of worth.

Everything I did, I did to gain his love. On my eighteenth birthday, I received a card or letter from my biological father, and I returned it to him unopened, as an act to prove my loyalty to my stepfather.

Years went by, and the next test of my loyalty was my wedding. Despite having been separated from my stepfather since I was 6 ½ years old, I wanted him to give me away, as any daughter would.

By that time, I had matured to the point where I understood my biological father's need to have a relationship with me. He had attempted to make contact with me this time through my mother. My husband-to-be had pointed out to me that the way I was treating my biological father was not in my nature. How could I be kinder to strangers than I had been to my biological father? To make his point he asked me the question, “Would I not want to know how our dog, Stewart, (who went missing just before he was a year old), was doing if I had the chance to? Of course, I would! And with that in mind, that opened me to allow my biological father to attend my wedding as a guest, but not in the capacity of my long-lost father.

A line had been drawn. He had rejected me and I rejected him in return. As an act of self-preservation, maybe? More likely, to prove my loyalty and my love for my stepfather.

My stepfather chose not to attend my wedding. I reached out to him on my wedding day to reassure him of his place in my life and asked him to reconsider. You see, being part of a family, every family carries its own traditions. This is what holds the family together. I broke my family bond when I invited my biological father to my wedding. Despite having written him letters, I have not had a relationship with my stepfather since.

In my infancy, I felt I was the glue of the family. I felt it was my duty to maintain the peace. To try to control the emotional atmosphere. I am the youngest of four with a significant age difference between my 3 elder siblings and myself. And their father was an alcoholic. There was abuse, physical and verbal abuse perpetrated against our mother and us kids. I could detect emotional disturbances before they erupted – this was my undefined solar plexus at work. I learned my presence had the power to soothe and keep the peace.

This also made me a very sick kid. At a young age, I was hospitalized with three bleeding stomach ulcers. I had three specialists working to identify the problem. Only one concluded it was bleeding ulcers even though the evidence was conclusive. The other two could not believe a child could have ulcers as this was typically an illness only adults experienced.

My deepest struggle in my life has been to understand where I belong. As an outcast or black sheep in my family the need “of being a part seeking a whole” was profound for me. I was diagnosed in my forties as having Asperger’s. That brought me a great sense of relief because as I learned more about being on the autism spectrum, I felt it explained why I was so different and perhaps why I felt like an outsider.

But the question remained, where do I belong? What is my life's purpose? And how do I break free from my story of my past, to transcend the situation I was born into?

Every family has its own culture, traditions, values, beliefs, and secrets. In my family, abuse and alcoholism were the secrets we had to keep to prove our loyalty and maintain our family bond. Secrets become family traditions.

My family always discouraged me from becoming a writer and author because they feared the truth being told. Out of loyalty, I never published my story. That is about to change as I have broken free from this conditioning in my Human Design.

Tribal love carries a heavy debt with either of these gates, the gate of friendship (gate 37) and the gate of aloneness (gate 40) which create the channel of community. This is the marriage bond, the mother and the father. The fear of breaking that bond is an act of disloyalty. When you break from family tradition, you fear losing everything. The “not-self”, your shadow, will stay in a miserable marriage rather than break with family tradition. The not-self will sacrifice itself to save the family especially when you also have an undefined Splenic center.

I’ve been described as having the loyalty of 10 St-Bernards as I continue to stand by my mother’s side (if you knew of our back story, you’d understand this better) yet I recognize I will never be able to prove my worth to my family. Perhaps, because I am the product of my mother’s disloyalty. Not that she was unfaithful but because she broke the marriage bond and took another husband.

Anyone who has an undefined solar plexus will have the tendency of wanting to avoid conflict at all costs. I have a hanging gate of grace (gate 22) in my emotional center and a hanging gate of aloneness out of the heart center, my not-self nature wants to create harmony around me and within my relationships; that’s the influence of the gate of friendship (gate 37) in my body graph.  I’m a real mother-hen.

There are 10 aspects of how love is demonstrated according to the Human Design system. The gate of aloneness is one, and in my case, I show my love for others through everything I do; everything I do, I do for you. It’s a masculine type of love as it wants to work for others.

As a child, it irritated me to hear the words “I love you” because these words were not coherent with the behavior of the people in my life. I’m also uncomfortable with saying “I love you” out of habit. It is critical that when someone says “I love you” their actions support this message. You don’t love me if you abuse me. You don’t love me if you take me for granted. You don’t love me if you break your promises or fail to stand by your word. You don’t love me if you cannot stand by my side in solidarity. You don’t love me if you don’t stand up for me and protect me. You don’t love me if you cannot be by my side to comfort me. You don’t love me if you can’t be there to hug me after a long day. Do you see how I say “I love you” through all my actions? “Everything I do, I do for you” is the love from this gate of aloneness, and it needs to be shown respect.

My mother and I have the same gate of aloneness. However, she has a defined Heart center and she expresses it a little differently. She is less about the doing and more about the giving. My mother is the most generous person, to a fault, that I've ever known.

Watching my mother as a child, how I viewed her through a child's eyes, was that she was trying to buy people's affection, to buy their love. I’ll buy you this but I want you to love me and take care of me. I did not see it at the time as being an act of love, or generosity. Her favorite thing is to take people out to eat at restaurants. She was trying to buy people's loyalty. When she ran out of money, she lost those friends.

As an adult, I still struggle with accepting gifts from the people I love because I fear they are trying to buy my loyalty or my love, and they don't need to do that with me. What will win me over is when someone makes a promise to me and keeps their promise. When somebody does something for me that I need support with to meet my needs, that says “I love you” to me.

You can see from the glimpse into my past that aloneness I experienced even when I was surrounded by my family – this is the gate of aloneness (gate 40). I suffered from this feeling of being an outsider, being alone, not because I was different or on the autism spectrum. But because I wasn't supported and nurtured by my family.

It is why I still tend to prove my value through over-doing or over-giving. My very long publications are proof of that! You see that gate 40 sits in the Heart center. It's also known as the Ego center. It is the fuel source for Will Power when you have this center defined. In my body graph, it is undefined. It is white. That means it is how I am easily conditioned by others. In my youth, I did not know my value. Therefore, I needed to prove my value. I was the sacrificial lamb. Slaughter the lamb so the family can survive. It is about feeding the family and when this center is undefined with this hanging gate of aloneness you can easily become a workaholic.

However, when you have the Heart center defined, you have a natural tendency to set boundaries with your time and energy. You know you need to have a balance between work and rest or work and play.

When you break the pattern of conditioning, you have the opportunity for your undefined centers to become a source of wisdom. I have learned to establish clear boundaries and I understand it's about how much I am willing to give without having to prove myself. Ok, I still have some work to do on this.

My DNA is looking to connect with others, through friendship to create a bond of family. This is my hanging gate of aloneness seeking what’s on the other side, gate 37, the gate of friendship. In my not-self as a child, I was desperate for friendship and suffered from feelings of being alone. This translated into my adult life that when anyone sought me out, I could not turn them away as a friend. I understood the profound need for friendship.

There is also a mystical level to the gate of friendship. When I did not feel a family connection my not-self asked the question, where do I fit in, in the bigger picture? It questions, what is my life purpose? Where do I belong in the world?

When you have this hanging gate 40, in an undefined heart center, what you want more than anything in the world, is somebody to love. That loneliness and desperation caused me to attempt suicide a few times in my youth. Even though I felt rejected and unwanted, I knew I could still love somebody. I wasn’t about to be picky with who.

When I met the man I would marry, he became my entire world. Everything I did, I did for him. Fourteen years into our marriage, I had an accident that triggered PTSD and my marriage began to break down. At the time, it seemed because I was unable to work. You cannot imagine how devastating those two things were for me. One, I suffered from PTSD which meant I was no longer able to work. I am designed to work. It’s my method of demonstrating my love. Gate 40 is about being a provider for your family. I no longer had a career. I no longer had a husband. I no longer had a purpose in life. Those were the two things that defined me as a role model wife.

I cannot recall a time in my life when I was not doing the work of introspection, to transform and overcome my past and not allow my past to define who I am. I can say the shortcut has been learning Human Design. As I operate as my true self, or rather as I get closer and closer and closer to my true self, as I am still going through my de-conditioning process, that gate of aloneness, no longer has to look for what's on the other side; what I don't have, family. The only family I have is my mother and this is no longer a problem in my life.

Everything undefined in your Human Design, all the white areas, is how you get conditioned. When you start operating according to your strategy and authority, in my case I need to wait to respond from my Sacral authority, everything that once made you operate as you're not-self can become a source of wisdom. For me, the other side of gate 40 is gate 37, a gate of peace. It’s about inner peace. Regardless of what is going on externally, I still have inner peace.

In my youth, I struggled to have inner peace because I was looking for it outside of myself. I was trying to control my environment or the people around me. I didn't want them to become emotionally volatile because it made me uncomfortable (that’s the open Solar Plexus). That's why I was a people pleaser. I didn’t have inner peace but I could create outer peace.

When you’re operating from your not-self of this channel of community you become deeply resentful and bitter. The gate of aloneness will ask, when do I get to live my life? The gate of friendship will ask, when will someone take care of me? You may have an Electromagnetic connection with your partner, each with one of the two gates. This is what attracted you to each other. But over time, when you’re operating from your not-self, it becomes a divide in the relationship because neither feels loved. We become complacent and don’t give the other the recognition they need to maintain that bond.

I now value myself. I can retreat from my friends, from the people I love, without suffering any kind of repercussions because they understand when I go into my solitude, this is how I replenish myself. I frequently refer to it as “filling my cup”. You’ve heard of the concept of “your cup being half empty or half full”, right? I had a coach who introduced me to the concept of a “cup and saucer”. She had said that your cup should be overflowing and that you only serve others, not from your cup but from your saucer. I needed to learn to maintain my cup and not continually be giving or over-doing. I’ve learned to maintain my energy and to respect my boundaries. I only give my energy when I have the energy to give. This has allowed me to regain my health and well-being. The only “somebody” I needed to find, was myself.

I mentioned earlier about suffering from ulcers in my childhood. Gate 40 is related to the stomach and gate 37 is related to the mouth. My stomach suffered because I did not receive the support I needed. Because it is an undefined center, everything gets amplified. Ironically, one of the ways to bond is through food. Nothing says you're part of my family more than when somebody takes you home to meet their parents and have dinner together.

Anyone that has this gate 40 are providers and therefore sought after to work. This gate loves to work because that’s how it expresses its love. If you don’t have anyone to love then you don’t want to work. It's the father figure who provides for his family, and is the “breadwinner”.

For some people with gate 40, it's about earning love. One way is through your work. By making money. The not-self says “I can never have enough money” because you are trying to prove yourself through monetary gains. It's the person who says I bought you this, that, or the other, now show me you love me. You owe me that much. If you don’t want their affection, it’s better not to accept their gifts otherwise you will pay the price.

Another thing I witnessed in my family, there seemed to be this unspoken but very present, family tradition or family rule of an invisible accounting system. Everything was being recorded as a debit or a credit. I did something for you so I expect something in return and you had better pay up when called on. That’s the nature of tribal love. Everything carries this debt of “you owe me”.

In my mother's case, she returned home to take care of her mother in her old age. My mother deeply felt that one day her children would take care of her. I happen to have this gate so perhaps this is why I have stepped up now to take care of my mother. Whereas her sons feel they don't owe her anything.

When somebody with this gate 40 gives, whether it's giving gifts or doing things, the not-self wants to be highly praised. It needs more than simple thanks. It needs the recognition that he/she has made some kind of sacrifice in the giving of that gift.

Whereas when you're operating correctly with that energy there's no need to be praised. What it wants is simply to be respected or a small amount of appreciation is enough.

The difference between the not-self and the true self here is that when the person is acting correctly and they give, it feels good. That is the reward in itself. It cannot be turned around later to be used against the person who received the gift. The not-self will say that their generosity was abused.

There is a harmony between gate 40 and gate 37. Gate 40 is the provider and gate 37 is the distributor. If you are defined in either of those gates you can experience nervousness about promises. Either being nervous when you make a promise or being nervous that others will break their promise. That is why I have noted in my publication I can provide one post per week and state I intend to post every Friday. But this is a self-imposed deadline. I must also give myself wiggle room to allow for the unexpected in my life so that I can use my energy correctly. That is how I operate correctly with my Human Design.

So, ask yourself, when you do something for someone or you give something to somebody, do you feel they owe you something in return? Their affection? A favor? Recognition? Praise? Or is it given free of charge because it feels good with no expectations of something in return?

Finding inner peace comes from recognizing your self-worth. And you can only do that when you know who you are. Human Design is the shortcut. It’s called Self-worth. It's not Others-worth. Stop looking at others to define your value. You’ll find yourself making promises you can’t keep.

P.S. At the time of this post, my mother remains in hospital care. Please forgive me if this post is a little rough around the edges.

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Next Time…

I have decided to change how I do things. I will no longer be providing what is traditionally expected, a sneak peek at what’s coming in the weeks to come as this goes against my Human Design.

I am designed to respond. So, I am inviting my readers to ask me a question about their Human Design - perhaps, on something that has been covered in one of my articles that you need some clarification on. I will give priority to my subscribers who are not my friends although my friends are still welcome to ask me questions.

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