How to Get Out of Your Own Way Page 10

  I wasn’t going to let that happen. I needed to break the cycle. I realized the pattern and I needed to reprogram myself, just like Locke High School deprogrammed me from thinking I had to fight like an animal. Just like one of my mom’s ex-boyfriends reprogrammed her and made her realize that physical abuse in a relationship is not love.

  I wanted to stay married for me and my ex-wife but as a father, I couldn’t stay married because we were not getting along, and I saw how our child looked sad when she saw Mommy and Daddy arguing. I could tell that what we were doing was affecting her. Kids are not stupid. They know something is wrong when Mommy and Daddy get loud and come in all angry and mean. They’re affected by it.

  So, unfortunately, divorce was my form of breaking the cycle. I had set my bottom line, and it was our daughter. I did not want to create a new Gibson monster. I didn’t want to create a monster in our child. I didn’t want her to grow up acclimated to arguments, saying mean and evil things. I recognized the dysfunction in me, and I understood further why it existed in our relationship. I know how dysfunction impacted my life and my outlook on life and I didn’t want those negative seeds planted in my child and the best way to fix it was to get away from it. I finally saw what was going on and I had to make a grown-up decision. I was actively deciding to change my family’s history and that of the future Gibson generations.

  After the marriage was over I wondered if my ex-wife and I would still be married if our daughter weren’t in the picture. I kept thinking this because we had a bunch of unresolved issues before we got married and our being married only heightened the drama. But if our daughter weren’t in the picture, those problems would have just been affecting my ex-wife and me, not us and our child.

  We can create monsters in each other. And then once we create that monster, we want to run away from it, and that’s what I did. I created a monster in my ex-wife and I couldn’t handle what I created. She created a monster in me, and she couldn’t handle what she had created. I remember what we used to be like together. We had a ball, but at the time, I didn’t think I had it in me to stick around to get back to the way we used to be.

  I had the time of my life with my ex-wife. We had the most fun of all the relationships I had ever been in. We laughed, we traveled, we joked, we were silly, we had a good time. But the problems were definitely there. When I pray, I just hope and pray that God heals her and removes any bitterness, hostility, or anger that she may have toward me, from all of the things that I may have done wrong. I pray for her all the time, that she’s able to heal and get past the things that didn’t work out between us, because I want her to be happy.

  Sometimes I think it’s crazy that people try and stay in each other’s lives when they know the relationship is clearly dysfunctional. I’m not a coward. Divorce for me wasn’t a cop-out; I’m not a quitter, I’m a realist. And my being a realist is still within my opinion and my reality. Everyone argues—it’s normal, it happens. The question is, What level of dysfunction are your arguments reaching? How are you arguing? Ask yourself, are your arguments evil, vindictive, and malicious, or are you just having a disagreement? Our arguments were unhealthy, and that was the difference. What we were going through, and the way we were going through it, was just way too negative. And I decided it was enough.

  Can You Break the Cycle?

  A few years ago, I experienced a conversation that I will never forget. It messed me up and made me really think that my mentor John Bryant was right, that most of who we are as adults is someway, somehow directly connected to our childhood.

  I was living at a friend’s house in the Hollywood Hills while I was working on an album. One night I asked my mom to come out and visit me. We were sitting in the Jacuzzi of my friend’s infinity-edge pool, so it seemed like we could slip off the side of the mountain. There was a full moon, and it was pitch-black in the hills, so other than a few lights that were on in individual houses the only light that my mother and I really had was from the moon.

  It was one of those nights—my mother was sober and we were getting along, it was the first time we ever had relaxing mother-and-son time in a Jacuzzi. Something in me told me to ask about her childhood, which I had never done before. I asked her, “Mama, what was it like in your house with your mother?” This is when the night got spooky and really scary for me. She said, “Well, my mama was a complete drunk. She was so drunk all the time, like every day, all day. She would lose control of her bladder because she had so much alcohol in her system. She would bring these boyfriends to the house. I hated her boyfriends because she would let them come in, and they would just run the whole place. They would control everything as if we had no say-so, it was just crazy. She used to hit us and she was abusive and her boyfriends used to hit us, and they were abusive. I just felt like I had no control of my childhood.”

  While I was listening to her describe her mother’s actions and other details that she shared that I won’t reveal here, I was shocked that she was describing her own actions as my mom. I could have said the exact same words about her. But when she was telling me her story not even once did she connect herself, her habits, what she did, what she said, or the way she raised us, with what her own mother did to her or what she had been exposed to. I said to her, “Mama, you just messed me up right now.”

  And she said, “What?”

  I looked her in her eyes and said, “So, Mama, I’m not in this Jacuzzi with my mother. I’m in this Jacuzzi with my grandmother.”

  She got loud and firm with me, and said, “What are you talking about?! I’m nothing like my mama.” She got really pissed, and wanted to get out of the Jacuzzi. She was clearly shocked and distraught, disgusted even, that I had compared her to her own mother.

  “Mama, yes you are. You were drunk all the time. You lost control of your bladder a few times and didn’t even know it was happening. You put your boyfriends over us. Our house had dysfunction and fights and verbal and physical abuse. Everything you just described to me about your mother and the way she raised you and the things that she exposed you to are the same exact things I’m able to say about you. So I’m in the Jacuzzi with my grandmother.”

  I exhaled. It was as if she had taken the breath out of my body by dropping this stuff on me. I said, “Mama, I want you to know I love you so much for sharing this with me, because I forgive you now. I forgive you for the way you raised me and all the things you exposed me to. Because you’re a creature of habit, you just raised us the way you were raised. All I can do at this point is just pray every day that God gives me closure over what you did and the way you raised us.”

  I felt relieved. Her story made me understand that she was just a duplicate of everything she had been exposed to, and it allowed me to turn that corner of forgiveness that I had been struggling with my whole life.

  That conversation furthered my journey of wanting to break off all those bad habits that I was exposed to growing up. I wanted to become the individual that God ultimately wanted me to be.

  As a master of your environment, you have to take responsibility for the type of life you choose to live, and recognize the types of people and dysfunction you’ve brought into your life, if you have. Once you do that, it becomes easier to imagine your life without it, and you begin to realize how much it’s been holding you back. Once you accept that you are just as much a part of the problem as the other person, it empowers you to actively start to find a solution. If not, the longer you let negativity stick around, the more comfortable it becomes in your life. It becomes your life. Your choices, decisions, and actions are affected by it. I want to tell you that the dysfunction doesn’t have to be your life. You can break the cycle. All you have to do is decide today that you want better for your life and it will happen.

  Being a reflection of your environment doesn’t mean that you will always be a duplicate of your childhood. A lot of people are total opposites of their childhood environments. Some people grew up in a home that was so peaceful, so pleasant,
structured, and strict that they are desperate for dysfunction, and they’re on a mission to be the opposite of their childhood. Some kids grew up so sheltered that they work hard to act “regular” and end up rebelling from their nurturing upbringing. The key is to ask yourself why you need to have negativity in your life.

  We’ve heard many stories of children who grew up wealthy, or stars who grew up with all the money they could ever imagine and completely sabotaged their entire life, with drugs, partying, and being rebellious. Anyone who didn’t grow up with that type of money and lifestyle would wonder why anyone who was raised with so much wealth would be so crazy and wild. But it’s just a pattern that most of these people aren’t aware of. They’re on a mission to try and find their own identity and they’re rebelling against the family blessings that they were born into. Whether rich, poor, or extremely wealthy, every child during their adolescence is trying to figure out their own identity. I’ve heard on numerous occasions from people who grew up with money that they told their mothers and fathers not to give them anything, that they wanted to do it on their own. I guess that’s their way of saying they want to find their own identity and feel a sense of fulfillment from achieving something themselves.

  Imagine being a guy by the name of James Smith, whose father is Mr. Smith the billionaire. Wherever James Smith goes, everybody talks about his father. His father had made his money before his son was even born, so it doesn’t matter what the son does or how he does it, he’s always on a mission to get out from under his father’s shadow. Some people can grow up and be completely fine living like this, but other people can get rebellious. Some children may decide that they are tired of having everybody remind them of who their father is, as if they aren’t worth anything, as if they are not even human because they haven’t achieved nearly as much as their father did. This can make someone decide to take their life to a whole other level and be completely dysfunctional, as if they want to peel off the very identity that they were born with because they feel like they don’t have one of their own. There is a flip side to every coin when it comes to breaking the cycle.

  There’s no way to tell how our experiences will shape us. There are always different perspectives and opinions on the same situations; it’s the beauty of being a witness. If four people witness a horrific car accident, all four people will be impacted and react differently. It doesn’t matter how somebody else is feeling about what took place, it just boils down to the way you were affected by it.

  I don’t want to associate dysfunction with anything positive, because it’s not positive, but it can be educational: In order for you to recognize it and know what to stay away from, you sometimes need to go through it. In order for us to grow, we first have to be made aware of what our habits are. If I’m describing you, you should sit still, be honest with yourself, and try to put your finger on these habits and make a commitment to put these habits to rest one at a time.

  If you are aware that there is too much unhealthy negativity in your life or relationship, you have a choice. You must come clean with yourself that you’re horrible at picking friends, boyfriends, or girlfriends. If you are able to see and come to terms with the reality that you make bad choices about the people you invite into your life, then you have started to educate yourself and have taken the first steps toward picking better people.

  The problems come when someone shows you their dysfunctional qualities and you keep them in your life even after you decided to stay away from these types of people. If you do, you’re not making use of the knowledge and experience that you have. A lot of times we get into a relationship with a new person who is the exact duplicate of the person we just left. You may want to believe that because you left one dysfunctional person that things will be different, but you just jumped into a new relationship with the same person in a different body. Because you are still dysfunctional, you went from one to the next to the next. You left James and went to evil-ass Tony, or you left Kelly and went to crazy-ass Monica. All of these people are the same. If you are getting with the same type of person in different physical bodies, you’re not growing. You have to grow, you must get away from them, you have to evolve. I, Tyrese, could say that I was in a relationship with four different people who were the same. Whatever negative characteristics they didn’t have that would have reminded me of the girlfriend I had before, I figured out a way to bring that out in them. I figured out a way to bring more dysfunction out of them. But I finally saw the pattern and started to reprogram myself. I made a decision that I wanted better for myself and I was going to correct those habits and control them. I can say I am no longer that guy at all.

  The people around you are a direct reflection of how you feel about yourself. I am not telling you to go out and break up with your partner right away, but if you’re in a relationship with someone you know is not good for you, you have to question how much you love yourself.

  I don’t know if it’s possible to eliminate dysfunctional tendencies completely, but what we can do is consciously stay away from dysfunction, or recognize it before it explodes, put things in perspective, and try our best to not let anything get out of hand. Think of dysfunction as the third partner in any relationship you have, who sits patiently in the corner of the room waiting to be invited into a peaceful situation so it can come in and do its job. Once you do this, you are another step closer to putting yourself in control of your environment. Control the negativity rather than letting it control you.

  How Dangerous Is the Dysfunction?

  Women and men will usually make a decision to move forward based on how their relationship seems. It may look safe but then someone gets hurt—emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes physically. People aren’t stupid—we’re just clueless. We’re in the dark and we’re uninformed about what’s really going on and we don’t know how to respond or deal with something we think we can’t control.

  Everyone’s going to argue, so the question becomes, How do you argue? What are you saying while you’re arguing? How far are you going to prove your point or to get your argument across? What are you using to drive your point home? Are you using secrets and very private personal matters as ammunition in your argument? And if you are, why are you bringing that up? People do this as a way to get back at the person they’re fighting with when their mission is to hurt them—and that shows there’s a lot more anger there than they are conscious of or want to admit to.

  We can be upset about what someone did to us, but we don’t know how to deal with it, and like a domino effect, this can create a dangerous chain of events. How do you know when your relationship will get violent?

  Violence breeds violence. If you grew up in a house where you witnessed acts of abuse or violence, you may have learned to deal with problems by fighting, reacting, and getting physical. A lot of guys end up in jail because of what they were exposed to, and over the past several years there has been a growing number of women going to prison because they responded to, or initiated, domestic violence. These women got fed up with their husbands’ and boyfriends’ lying and cheating, or mental, spiritual, and physical abuse. Some discovered a new pain they could never have seen coming and didn’t know how to deal with: that the fathers of their children were down-low brothers, living a secret homosexual life. Ladies, I really want you to hear me out on this: You may be going through or have been through something mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically traumatic, and you’re running to your mama, friends, and neighbors to help you process and try to get through it. The worst thing you can do is not seek help. I have noticed that some women have too much pride and ego and associate getting help with being weak. But you must seek help, in the form of therapy and counseling, because what you’ve been through is some heavy shit. You can talk to the people you’re close with all day, every day, but more than likely they are not going to have the answers. They can help you sustain your emotions but it doesn’t mean they will dig deep and help you get the closure you deserve.


  No matter the cause, today’s women are reacting with stabbing or shooting. It seems like they are dealing with their emotions differently than they were twenty years ago, even if they had no prior criminal record or anything violent in their past that would predict their behavior. One of my close friends believes that many American women today have a more masculine energy and have lost some of their femininity because they’ve been through so much. I’m not sure if this is the reason, or if it’s because widespread news coverage of such crimes ends up planting the seeds for another woman to commit the same type of violent act. No matter the cause, it only takes one second to mess somebody up bad. One second. How long does it take to pull a trigger? It’s murder, and it’s done in a second or two—you killed somebody.

  It’s arrogant for you to believe the next second belongs to you. It would be humble of you to make use of your next second in the greatest possible way you can. It only takes one second for your life to end, especially if you keep going back to situations that are abusive and messed-up. You can’t assume that you’re not going to die. Why go and sign yourself up for something that you know is not good for you? It only takes one second for an angry guy or girl to snap and hit somebody. It only takes one second for that man or woman to hurt you or kill you. When you know you’re in a dysfunctional situation you’ve got to get out of there. It’s arrogant to believe they will change. When someone shows you who they really are, believe it. There are a lot of people who have been on the end of physical violence or even death because they didn’t pay attention to the clear signs of abuse in a relationship and convinced themselves that their partner would change.