Rescuer In Recovery: No-one is f***ing coming to save you rescue yourself

By Justin Lodge

I was a rescuer for 47 years.

I spent those years ignoring my own problems and trying to rescue everyone else. I had been socially programmed to be a rescuer by my family. Rescuing was part of my family-culture and ran through our DNA going back at least four generations. My grandfathers were rescuers too, and like me, their rescuing behaviours destroyed relationships and cost lives. My rescuing behaviours cost me two marriages, both ending in divorce, and left me burned-out and broke without food for my children on Christmas Eve.

This is my story about how I chose to rescue myself first, break free of social conditioning and became a Rescuer-in-Recovery. I went from being burned-out and broke to living a thriving new life, writing a #1 Amazon best-seller and stepping into my own sovereign power. This book will show you the path to RESCUE YOURSELF FIRST and:
How we can get a new perspective on our blind-spots, and find the gold in them;
Why we can gain from understanding our limiting beliefs installed in childhood;
How unlocking our unconscious is the key to becoming a rescuer-in-recovery; and,
What actions we can take to get the right kind of help that sets us up to build a new thriving life.

I help strong men and powerful women who have a deep-desire to make a positive difference in the world to learn to rescue themselves first. To overcome their unconscious negative self-beliefs and to choose to live a new vibrant life that they love. To become the person that they were always meant to be. One of my friends said to me once, “You’re the first coach I’ve met that I don’t want to punch in the face.” She could bench press close to 100 kilos, so I’m really happy she didn’t. And it is one of my proudest recommendations.

Find out more at www.justinlodge.info

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781008953598

Book preview

PREFACE

Iworked so hard to do the right thing in my first marriage.

I worked so hard that I gave myself double pneumonia.

When I also failed to rescue my second wife then I nearly killed one of my best friends when I lost control of my anger and distress.

There are many people like me who adopt the role of rescuer and choose to stay in a dysfunctional relationship.

The risk is that, like me, you might lose control and harm yourself or someone else.

Get working on your own self-care and your own safety.

Choose to rescue yourself first.

Being a rescuer is one point on the drama triangle that we unconsciously adopt as a result of childhood adversity.

Like me, you may very well be a rescuer, operating on a point of the drama triangle in an unconscious trance of disempowerment.

You will find that being an aggressor is also there too. It might not be the confrontational type of anger, sometimes it is passive-aggressive expression in negative self-talk, such as asking, Why am I so broken?

Being a victim will be there too, it’s just that we’ve jumped to the rescuer or aggressor to get away from being a victim.

Being a rescuer is not necessarily a good or bad thing, it has positive traits as well as negative traits. Massive self-sacrifice for the common good that is celebrated by western society illustrates the positive traits e.g., Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa and Diana, Princess of Wales.

In this book, we dive into the shadow side of being a rescuer to show what is not working, and why.

We look at what you can do to choose to embrace this shadow side of the rescuer, love it and let it go. This book shows you how to choose to rescue yourself first.

In this book you will:

•Read stories of my past and my family, and how being a rescuer is part of my generational heritage, and how I learned to rescue-myself-first;

•Learn about the opposite polarities to aggressor and rescuer, and how I integrated them to create a strong spine and a powerful heart; and,

•Find out what you can do to choose to rescue yourself.

Choosing to rescue yourself is a choice to get perspective, to think outside the boundaries of the drama and to become empowered.

I have valuable, lived experiences that I’ve learned-from and I have healed into a thriving life.

I invite you to choose to become the person that you were always meant to be. To choose to do the work on yourself. To choose to do the work that shifts the perceptions and false beliefs from your childhood that got you here in the first place.

You can choose to take this path of conscious growth. Or you could choose to wilfully embrace the trance of disempowerment that you’re feeling right now and find someone else to rescue instead.

Because no one is f***ing coming to save you. You need to choose to rescue yourself.

Choose.

INTRODUCTION

Ispent 47 years from when I was 3 years old, attempting to rescue my own mother from her own pain and anger.

And I was so firmly attached to my identity of being a rescuer, I managed to run through two divorces in 25 years when I failed to rescue them.

I tried to rescue women who were just as broken as I was.

So, I did it again and again. Multiple times. I’m a serial offender.

I chose to try to rescue because it mirrored my own state of sad dysfunction.

I spent 47 years trying to rescue the women that I loved, as a proxy for the first woman that I loved, my own mother. The thing was my mother thought that she was doing the right thing. The beliefs that she held reflected her childhood adversity and pain that she had experienced herself. It was inter-generational pain that was being passed down.

And in writing this book, I realised that being a rescuer was part of my family’s ancestry.

Both my grandfathers were rescuers too. Of the living and the dead. The emotional cost of their rescuing was huge for that generation of my family and my grandmothers.

The emotional cost, pain and adversity was then imposed onto my father and my mother. And then passed down to me and my children.

I am now in-recovery from being emotionally unavailable to myself, my life and my family because I was too busy trying to save them to take care of me.

If you hang around with other people long enough that are also in-recovery, you get to see some patterns.

The pattern I see is that, sometime during our childhood, a grandparent, parent or sibling so overwhelms us with their pain, that we spend the rest of our lives trying to rescue them and make them happy. We are held hostage to this pain.

Because we think it’s normal, we then seek it out and look to rescue others. We project that way of being into and onto our lives and lovers in many different ways.

We people-please. We find it really, really hard to ask for what we want. We get resentful that people don’t appreciate us, and we get angry and take it personally when our lovers or our children act out. We become angry, resentful, emotional doormats.

We sometimes have types of mental health symptoms that could be described as post-traumatic stress disorders: we have random breakdowns when we get flashbacks to adverse childhood events, where we were perhaps abused or bullied, and we are highly anxious.

When someone we love gets angry and or annoyed, we’re hyper-sensitive.

We often seek out relationships with partners who, out of their own pain and distress, then try to control, manipulate or bully us when they get frustrated.

When we get scared by that then we run like hell, and we ghost the people that have triggered us. And they have no idea why. We run because we’re too scared of the overwhelming pain that we’re so desperately trying to deny. We don’t stop to explain.

So, what does recovery look like?

We have to choose to release and clear the emotions that we have buried inside us from our childhood adversity.

We have to embrace our shadows, love them and let them go.

We have to welcome the discomfort of being triggered, of allowing the emotion to surface and integrate, knowing that it is showing us the way to finding inner peace.

The only way to surface these emotions is to make yourself vulnerable.

Choosing to be vulnerable can be frightening, but the rewards of being free of the emotional chains that we have bound ourselves with is exhilarating.

We have to break the ties with the people who we have allowed to hurt us. We have to stop the behaviour of choosing lovers and partners that we need to rescue.

We then have to find our power.

We get healthy and stop the numbing out behaviours that we do for self-protection.

We stop smoking.

We stop drinking too much.

We stop eating too much.

We stop wasting time on the Internet.

And with the support of medical professionals, we stop taking the medications that we use to cover