But You Picked Them On Purpose

追加: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]I used to think I had a type. Then I realized I had a wound. And every person I picked, romantic or otherwise, was chosen by that wound to keep me comfortable. This story ain't really about dating. It's about your need to always [music] be in control. It's about the real reason most of us never even come close to achieving our business ideas, relationship goals, and creative endeavors. I'm going to show you exactly how I sabotage my own progress by either isolating myself or surrounding myself with people I could outshine or control.

[00:00:29]while I tricked myself into thinking we were actually building something. My name is Tijana Jackson. I'm the people's mentor. And what if I told you the real reason you don't go after the things you say you want has nothing to do with discipline or willpower and has everything to do with emotional patterns running in the background, [music] quietly messing with your decision-m and follow through. Me and Romani Malco will be hosting a live 90-minute workshop extravaganza where we help you confront the emotional blind spots keeping you stuck. So those emotional blind spots can never [ __ ] your [music] potential again. You want to work with some real ones? Link is in the description. Before folks try to come for me, I got to take ownership of my own dirt. Many moons ago, I tried to be a rapper. I built a crew, assigned each man a role that they really wasn't qualified for. Hype man, DJ, producer, road manager. Then I quietly proceeded to do all eight jobs.

[00:01:21]I was booking the shows, writing the raps, mixing the records, hustling the merch, showing up to perform, collecting after the shows, and paying for studio time. The one dude in the crew who actually had talent, real talent, the kind that should have been in the room when deals got cut, he was so underexposed. Underexposed, that's the PC term for extra country. He just stayed in trouble. Fights, a stable of baby mamas, DUIs, and court dates. So when it was time to hit the road and actually do the thing, he wouldn't go.

[00:01:48]He loved being a star in his zip code, but petrified of being a stranger anywhere else. The reason I was doing the road manager's job is because he made a habit of knocking out the promoters. [music] I got tired of having to back out of these venues like bank robbers. My DJ was the ladies man. He used to disappear into the building like asbestous. Show up the next morning with lipstick all over his face. You see, back in my era of hip hop, a crew was a status symbol. No different from how folks viewed nice cars, arm candy, big houses, 9 in flaccid. A crew symbolized a support system, symbolized unity, and a force to reckon with. It symbolized you being cool, symbolized folks having your back. But my crew was none of that.

[00:02:28]In fact, my crew would steal from me.

[00:02:30]They stole from me so much I told them to claim that money on their income tax cuz I wasn't paying for [ __ ] And in order to maintain the benefits of that status symbol, I carried that crew for damn near a decade before it became obvious we was never going to be successful at selling mixtapz. You want to know what's crazy? When I finally moved on, these ninjas resented, cussed me out, threatened to beat my ass, said they was going to take turns boning my gal. That really hurt me, man, cuz they did it when I was at work. They resented me for no longer carrying them. Mind you, I fed these ninjas for damn near 10 years. The lesson. A lack of boundaries is a gateway drug. Lack of respect is the overdose. Bars. Who knew asking grown men to seek employment with justified death threats? Hearing this might make you judgmental of me, but I'm actually talking about you. Look at your life. You think your dissatisfaction is a byproduct of choosing the right partners, the right teammates, or the right companions. Let me put this in helmet gear terms before folks start clicking out of this video. The real reason for my need to carry five grown capable men on my back for 10 years was not because they each bought something unique to the table was not because they were each connected in ways that would benefit the bigger picture. It was because in truth I was a loner. I suffered a severe sense of abandonment as a child and as a result I went to extremes to avoid appearing as lonely in the world as I was in my heart. Type bars in the comments if you feeling my pain but that's just part of it. What made me into a loner? The household I grew up in was chaotic, dysfunctional, and incredibly damaging to my overall self-esteem. I don't know about y'all, but boomer parents didn't give a damn about feelings when I was a child. It seems backwards now, but emotionally dysregulated parents would berate or beat the [ __ ] out of their children for being emotionally dregulated. Boomer parents would bring all kinds of dysfunction into the household.

[00:04:22]cheating, alcoholism, domestic violence, and they never checked in with their three, four, five, six, seven year old children to clarify or at least help them process the chaos they had put them through. If anything, they would just double down on their ignorance and try to justify the [ __ ] In my era, Gen X and millennial children were left to process all that adult propaganda on their own. And even though we was kids, a lot of us was left to carry out adult responsibilities because our parents was too busy chasing pleasure and avoiding their own emotional discomfort to behave as responsible adults. And that ain't even the sad part. The hood would reinforce all that negativity by making fun of your ass as you walk to school and trying to beat your ass as you ran home from school. But make no mistake, this is America. So, the racial dynamic further invalidated this already invalidated little boy [music] wearing his mama's sneakers to school. This is what makes each generation of dysfunction more and more infantile.

[00:05:18][music] People who grew up in dysfunction like me end up trying to live their adult lives the way they wanted their childhoods to be. The messed up part of it is what they really end up doing is recreating the same lack of safety, lack of love, and lack of stability as adults because they subconsciously find safety in familiar dynamics. Psychologists [music] call it repetition compulsion or trauma reenactment. I like to call it love and hip hop. But my point is, I was desperately trying to succeed at a doover of my childhood in my adult life.

[00:05:49]Trying to live out [music] that childhood fantasy movie I wish I'd grown up in, but all I could seem to achieve was a reenactment of the same childhood drama that was more suitable for an episode of Cops. Type bars in the comments if one of your relatives ended up on that show. And it gets deeper.

[00:06:04]Though I was just a child, I was made to be the mature adult in my household because my parents were impulsive, volatile, and irresponsible. I had to be the responsible one, the cooler head, and the protector of my younger siblings. So naturally, as an adult, carrying faux, grown, irresponsible men on my back for 10 years was a baked in part of my identity. Do y'all see how this works? Now would be a good time to hit the like button if you like something. And if you motivated as hell, go on and hit that notification bell.

[00:06:31]But the only way that my channel can truly grow is if y'all share this with you folks. Let me show you how deep this hurt goes. The real reason them dudes felt comfortable cursing me out and threatening to bone my girlfriend wasn't because they was bold. It was because I allowed it. And I allowed it because I did not grow up understanding boundaries. I grew up in a culture, a household, and a community that reinforced that type of disrespectful [music] communication on a daily basis. Back in my era, folks did it for fun and we called it capping. Literally hurting each other's feelings and shaming one another as children was a highlight of the day. And those same people, myself included, grew up being heavily triggered by that same tone and style of communication as adults. But the irony is we communicate exactly like that once we get triggered once again as adults.

[00:07:20]My violent road manager, oh, he was just my dad only now he was knocking out promoters and not my mom. Thank God. my DJ who would disappear for days at a time, especially when we was on the road. That was both my parents out having affairs on each other and only coming home when it was time to give each other venerial diseases. The really talented dude in the group who wouldn't dare leave his backyard. Probably the one I resented the most because he mirrored me to a tea. [music] Deep inside, I was terrified of every move I was making and he mirrored that. The difference was I had the ability to be terrified and do it anyway. But let's go one step further. The real reason you, me, we choose dependent partners, incompetent companions, and dysfunctional teammates is because we really just control freaks. And we confuse their dependency for loyalty.

[00:08:07]It's okay. You can cry. Just type bars while you do it. The thing we ain't talked about yet is how so many of us grew up feeling emotionally abandoned by at least one of our parents. So, our tolerance for [ __ ] is greatly affected by our fear feeling abandoned once again [music] as adults. We loners be so terrified by the unpredictability of other people because of what was modeled for us by the people who were supposed to love us the most. The people who abandon you emotionally, physically or both. As a result, we only feel safe in certain types of dynamics. When we alone, when we in familiar environments, around dependent people we can control, and a lot of times we can only partake in things with predictable outcomes. We low risk to no risk type folks. And that's a huge part of why our progress feels slow. While we live our lives feeling stuck and miserable. Our need to control is a mental prison with psychological shackles. And the warden's name is shame. Type bars in the comments if you get that. Yeah, you heard me. You hide, pretend to be good and act like you know things that you don't because you think shame is a real thing. And then we spend our entire lives recreating the same drama we grew up in, the same relationships, not even realizing we foolishly trying to perfect the childhood we never had. You want proof? Look back at all your favorite rap groups and boy bands. There was always one really talented [music] dude and the other two, three, four members of the group was basically high school talent show stars with drinking problems. Tell me why 20 years later only one of them had the wherewithal to successfully reinvent [ __ ] I sell more merch than the other two, three, four members combined. Well, it's partly because some of them did, but you get the point. Matter of fact, type the group that come to mind in the comments.

[00:09:48]In my 57 years of life, nothing has robbed me of more joy than my deep-seated need to control. Because it's not just around my career and business endeavors, it's in my love life, too. I sought out every woman who mirrored my missed opportunity to finally save my mama from her abusive husband, my father. I sought out every woman who exhibited the same impulsive, volatile, and manipulative communication styles as my parents in hopes of finally being heard. I sought out women who were the addicts, the mentally unstable, the chemically imbalanced, the extremely dysfunctional underdogs so I could redeem myself as being better to them than my daddy was to my mama. So basically, the same thing I was doing with my rap group is the same thing I was doing in my love life. Type bars in the comments if you get that. And once again, I was equating a dependency to loyalty. You feel that heat in your [music] skull, that blood racing underneath your skin, that's called the truth. It has a tendency to make you feel like that. Type bars in the comments if you hot right now. Look, dog, everything I talk about on this channel boils down to one thing. Helping you process your emotional blind spot so you can get out your own way and begin to follow through on the things you say you want out of life. Me and Romani Malco host a live 90-minute workshop where we help you identify those emotional blind spots, sabotaging your follow-through and crippling your potential. And we don't let you leave the workshop until you know exactly what to do about it. You want to work with some real ones? Link is in the description. If you are somebody who identifies yourself in this story, please understand this truth that took me 30 years to swallow. The crew you carrying ain't [music] your crew. The partner you keep afloat ain't your partner. The woman you saving ain't your queen. No dog, that's your cargo. Though you may continue to love them, continue to work with them, do not mistake them for anything other than what they is.

[00:11:41]Companionship and cargo, not your counterpart or collaborator. Doesn't give you the right to disrespect them or belittle them. Just remember, cargo gets transported. Cargo gets carried. Cargo cannot drive the truck. Cargo cannot read the map. And cargo damn sure cannot tell you where you going. So when your cargo gets in the front seat and starts grabbing the wheel, that ain't betrayal.

[00:12:04]That's you forgetting what you loaded into your life, don't resent the cargo because cargo remained cargo. You the only one trying to convert cargo into a captain. And you've got to own that because now you know why you do it. Now, if you think I'm out here making this up, let me hand you the receipts. In 1983, an epidemiologist out of Duke named Dr. Sherman James studied 132 workingclass black men in the South. And what he discovered was called John Henryism. That's the clinical term.

[00:12:33]Translation, it's what happens when you've been conditioned to outwork everybody, carry everybody, never complain, and your only coping strategy is to grind harder. James proved that higheffort coping with no resources to back it up was directly linked to hypertension and early death in black men. The thing y'all out here praising each other for the hustle, the grind, the carrying, that's the same thing killing us. So when I tell you I carried four grown men for 10 years, that wasn't loyalty. That was a documented coping mechanism with my name on the prescription. Then in 2005, Dr. Joy Degrad dropped post-traumatic slave syndrome. 12 years of research. Her theory, the trauma our ancestors survived didn't disappear when slavery ended. It got passed down through behavior, through parenting styles, through what we tolerated and what we punished in our own kids. That dysfunction in my house, my parents weren't broken on accident. They was raised by folks who was raised by folks who had to bury their feelings to survive. That's one hand me down I could have did without. Type bars in the comments if this calls you out. In 2012, Dr. Lisa Hooper out of the University of Alabama published a study on parentification. Parentification, that's the clinical term. translation. It's what happens when a child gets handed grown people responsibilities while they still small enough to need a juice box.

[00:13:47]Hooper studied this across black and white college students. And what she found was that parentification ain't just bad parenting. In black households especially, it gets passed down as a survival adaptation. One parent working three jobs, the other parent nowhere to be found or volatile. So the oldest kid had to become the manager of feelings, [music] the protector of siblings, the one who held it all together while everybody else fell apart. Sound familiar? That parentified child don't grow out of that role. He grows into bigger versions of it. Now instead of managing his little brother's lunch money, he's managing full grown men's career trajectory. Same job, bigger paycheck, same isolation. And here's the kicker. When you the kid who had to be the adult, you don't know how to be in a relationship with another adult. You only know how to manage. So you spend the rest of your life surrounded by people who need managing because that's the only role you was ever trained to play. You wasn't picking partners. You was hiring dependent cuz your wound was looking for the same job description it had at age seven. Dog, if you serious about breaking that cycle, you better put your eyes on this video right here and click it now cuz it's f to go