Let’s not beat around the bush, making a decision can be really hard. This is especially true when the stakes are high. This is also especially true if you struggle with indecision in general. When we are facing a decision, we really want to make the right decision and we are really afraid of making the wrong decision. Afterall, there are negative and positive consequences for any decision that we make. But what most people don’t know is that the key to making the right decision is to make the decision specifically according to your values and more importantly, according to how you prioritize those values.
A value is what you consider from your honest, authentic core to be most important. For so many people, there is an inconsistency between what they value doing and what they are actually doing. The reason this does not work is because satisfaction with our own life can only happen when the things we do and the way we behave in the world towards others and towards ourselves match our values. And at the end of the day, we need to be able to powerfully prioritize our top value.
If you are currently struggling with a decision and would like additional information related to this topic, you would benefit by watching three of my videos. The first is: The Secret to A Happy Life. The Second is: Indecision (Decisions and Indecisiveness). And the third is: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences.
But today, I’m going to share with you a priceless exercise that will help you to make the right decision. To do this exercise, you are going to take whatever situation you are in and figure out what making any of the choices involved in the situation would give you. It’s best if you come up with at least five things per choice.
When you do this exercise, you will find that the things that each choice would give you are essentially values. So, by doing this exercise, you are becoming aware of what values you would be in alignment with and what values you would be making a decision for in any choice.
For example: Imagine that a person has been invited to go on a vacation with friends and that they are having a really hard time deciding whether to go or to stay. This person would create one column for the values that they would be in alignment with (or get out of) going on the vacation. Then this person would create another column for the values that they would be in alignment with (or get out of) staying. It might look something like this:
Going on Vacation Staying Home
Inclusion Security
Connection Thrift
Excitement Responsibility
Spontaneity Duty
Memories Rationality
From there, you are going to arrange all of these values in order of priority… Most important to least.
For example, when the person in our example arranges these values in order of absolute priority. It might look something like this:
Inclusion
Connection
Security
Thrift
Memories
Responsibility
Duty
Rationality
Spontaneity
Excitement
Make the choice that is most in alignment with the highest value you selected! Doing so is currently the best choice for you.
Using our example, based off of how this person arranged their values, it is clear that they would be more in alignment with their top values by choosing to go on the vacation with friends. And so, this is the decision that they should make.
This exercise is an epic one for literally any decision you may be facing. It is especially useful if you have exhausted all of your options for trying to find a third option or a choice that does not require you to choose between two or more of your top values. These are situations where you are most likely facing a really hard choice.
When you do this exercise, and you make your decision based off of your top value, you are making your decision based off of what is most important to you. Doing so makes it so that whatever you decide to do has worth, is beneficial to you and has meaning to you. And that will help you to handle any of the consequences that come with that decision. You will be making the decision that is truly right for you.
Success is the accomplishment of an aim or of a purpose. It sounds simple enough as is. If someone’s aim is to get a college degree and they get a college degree, we can say that they have succeeded. If someone’s purpose for writing a letter was for the other person to feel loved and the other person actually felt loved by reading the letter, we can say that they have succeeded. But we need to simplify the idea of success even further by looking at a more objective, universal perspective. The reason for this is that we may accomplish an aim or purpose that we don’t truly want.
Let me explain. A person may not actually want a specific job, but they may apply for it and set it as an aim anyway. If this is the case, they may succeed in getting that job. But doing so will do very little for their wellbeing or for their personal sense of accomplishment. To simplify it further, from an objective, universal perspective, to succeed is to achieve what one wants.
And this is why no one can actually agree upon what is and what isn’t a success. No one can agree upon the picture of success. And this is because 1. People disagree about what aim or purpose is good and right. And 2. Not everyone wants the same thing because people have different values, needs and desires.
For example, many people in the western world feel that having a mansion and a penthouse and multiple businesses and 5 luxury cars and a closet full of designer clothes and constantly traveling on your private jet means that a person is experiencing success. However, if you were Amish, you wouldn’t think so. You would believe that living a modest and simple life is good and right. Therefore, your picture of success might look like a simple home with no electricity, home cooked meals, a horse and buggy, spending quality time with family, friends and community and enjoying the natural world.
Or for example, one person might really want and value quality leisure time. They would see success as someone being able to have lots of enjoyable, zero pressure “down” time. And another might really want and value achievements. They would see success as someone who is proactive and busy so as to produce and to rack up awards and reach goals.
A person’s picture of success changes over the course of their life. It changes because desires change and perspectives change and beliefs change. Never the less, we love to think that other people should have the same estimation of “right” and “good” that we do, want the same things as we do and have the same values as we do. Therefore, we think our own picture of success is superior and therefore, everyone else should have the same picture of success. When they don’t, we tend to feel superior to them and try to convert them to our picture of success.
For humanity to progress, we need to be able to recognize all forms of success rather than minimizing or negating some while exalting and revering others. Regardless of whether or not we, specifically want that aim or purpose and therefore type of success. Imagine a world where you have two people. One is a thespian who is usually short on cash and who moves to whatever city has a part in a show to offer. One is a lawyer with tons of money to burn and who will not take any real risks in life. It is obvious that these two people have different desires and values. Their picture of the success they want is different. But imagine that the lawyer can genuinely recognize the thespian’s ability to tell stories and confidence in front of a crowd and dedication to ruthlessly following their passion as success. And the thespian can genuinely recognize the financial security that the lawyer has built up and the business they have built up and the legal knowledge they have attained as success.
When we say “I can’t recognize that person as a success” what we really mean is “that person has not achieved anything that I want and that I value”. This being said, it is especially hard to recognize something as success when it is obvious that the way that someone goes about attaining what they want harms someone or something else. In which case, we could say that this person has succeeded at their aim or purpose, but has not succeeded at harmony or at creating safe relationships or at creating system health or at enhancing the wellbeing of the other. But this is not going to matter much to a person unless what they want is safe relationship and harmony and system health and the well-being of the other. And what we are left with is being desperate for them to want that, so as to treat it like an aim and incorporate it into their picture of success.
Now that this has been said, and you understand how many forms of success there can be and how individualized the picture of success is, it is important to know something else. For people to accomplish something together (to succeed together) they have to agree upon the picture of success. If they do not, it is inevitable that at some point, their values and desires will clash. As anyone who has been part of a team can tell you, it is a huge issue on a team when everyone’s picture of success is different.
One’s picture of success is a big element of compatibility in relationships. Also, people may share the same values, but in what order? Life has a way of ensuring that our values will be tested against each other. When this is the case, we may need to prioritize between two or more of our top values. And if someone else that we are trying to accomplish something with would prioritize those same values in a different order, it is a guarantee that they will not agree with the decisions and actions we take and vice versa. Suddenly, their values and our values will be juxtaposed. This is a recipe for conflict.
So that you can understand this, I’ve got an example for you. Max and Richard own a business in healthcare for seniors together. Both of them love financial success and both of them really care about helping people that need care. So, starting a business in healthcare was the best of both worlds. A few years back, their company got sued. As a result, they needed to make enough money to afford the court case. This situation caused both of their top values to be tested against one another. Max decided that because his top value in life is financial security, money was the bigger value and therefore, should be the priority. Meanwhile, Richard has always had family money. He decided that helping people who need care, regardless of money should matter most. Both simply assumed the other was on the same page instead of directly communicating.
Suddenly, they were disagreeing on everything. Max wanted to sever relationships with insurance companies that were difficult to get pay outs from and discontinue some of the programs they had for seniors on low incomes and consider merger deals with much larger competitive companies. Richard wanted to bleed their accounts dry for the court case and even do fundraisers if necessary so they could continue business as they had always done; especially their programs for seniors on low incomes. You may look at this conflict and immediately jump to the conclusion that Richard is the better and more moral person in the situation. But even the accountants agreed that Richard’s course of action could put them out of business altogether, meaning that not only would Max and Richard personally suffer, every last one of the seniors under their care would no longer have care and would have to start over from scratch with a new provider. The point of this entire story has nothing to do with morality. What it is about is values and a picture of success and whether two people’s values and picture of success are compatible, especially when situations arise that force people to prioritize.
When you are trying to establish compatibility so as to achieve anything with someone else, whether that is a good relationship or a business goal, it is important to make sure that you are on the same page with them about the picture of success and also, should the need arise, the prioritization of values.
Long story short, success is to achieve what one wants. We could argue all day over whether someone is or isn’t a success based off of whether they have or haven’t achieved what we value and want. If I were to give you my picture and therefore definition of success, it would be about what I want. Even the universe’s more objective picture of success is about what the collective universe wants. But to make it more grounded, if someone wants to be traveling the world, traveling the world is successful to them. If someone wants a millionaire lifestyle, a millionaire lifestyle is successful to them. If someone wants to be awakened, being awakened is successful to them. If someone wants a close family, having a close family is successful to them. And our picture of success will evolve over our lifetime as our needs and perspective changes. The most important question is: Is this way that I am thinking, are these decisions that I am making and are these actions that I am taking actually helping me to achieve what I really want?
To be completely honest with you, most of us are still operating from an oversimplified, primitive mentality regarding the Universe that we live in. Part of this primitive mentality is that we expect the Universe at large (or that which many people call Source or God) to be all knowing and able to control everything that happens; as if all of us were just chess pieces being played in the name of some greater plan that has already been decided upon.
If you think about it, the relationship we have with the universe is rather like the relationship we have with our parents when we are three. And growing up to find out that the truth of our parents is different is scary for many reasons. The same can be said about finding out that the truth of the Universe is different than we thought.
When we imagine that the universe can control everything that happens or doesn’t happen, we imagine that if the Universe loved us and wanted the best for us, it would sense our desires and simply make them happen for us. And that similar to our parents, if it doesn’t, it means that we have displeased the Universe and are being punished in some way.
Essentially for the sake of today’s conversation, I need you to recognize in yourself the expectation that if you have experienced something unwanted and therefore, you have a desire for the opposite experience, the Universe can and will bring that opposite, wanted experience to you. This is especially true for things we, ourselves feel powerless to bringing about. For example, if you have experienced people betraying you, you may think that the Universe can and should simply bring people to you who will never betray you. Or if you experienced failure, the universe can and should bring you success. Or if you experienced being taken for granted, the Universe can and should bring you a life where instead, you are deeply valued and appreciated.
Because of this expectation, we become very upset when instead of finding ourselves in the opposite, wanted experience, we find ourselves in yet another repeat of the painful, unwanted experience. And guess what? Each and every one of us will find ourself in repeat situations. This is especially painful when those situations were unwanted in the first place and therefore, we desire to never experience them again. This happens because of the nature of the law of mirroring, which is one of the principal laws governing this time-space reality that we call life, and also due to the nature of expansion.
This is not happening because you are bad and wrong and are therefore being punished. It’s not happening because this Universe (What so many call God or Source) could make something different happen, but simply isn’t for some reason. It is happening because you are a fragment of the Universe and that means, you have free will. You are a creator, whether you are a conscious creator or an unconscious creator. And if you have any way of thinking or behaving that feeds into creating the unwanted experience in any way, that way of thinking or behaving has to be changed for the unwanted experience not to happen.
It is easy to see this concept with other people. Imagine that a person wants a relationship, but they withdraw from a partner every time they get close to them. This behavior will keep feeding into the creation of the failure of their relationships. The Universe cannot control them into being intimate and close and not withdrawing. It also cannot create a relationship for them without them changing because there is no real relationship if one party in the relationship refuses intimacy. And that is not what this person really wants. What the universe can do is to be in a relationship with them. To the degree that it lends its energy (which is massive) to them getting what they want. To their expansion. This means helping them to become self-aware so as to change patterns that are not serving them so that they can align with their desires. At the same time as helping to align them with the people, places, circumstances and things that are a match to what they are wanting. Therefore, using our previous example, this person who keeps withdrawing in relationships has to recognize their own behavior and choose to change it with their own free will in order to be a match to the relationship they want.
I have said before that to heal is to experience the opposite. Therefore, it is tempting to think that the most healing thing is to simply BE in the opposite experience. But sometimes the most healing thing is to be in a repeat of the original experience, and to see a different perspective, make a different choice and/or take a different action.
When we have a pattern… a way of thinking or behaving that lends its energy to creating what we don’t want, it is likely that we will find ourselves in a repeat. A variation of the same situation all over again. And that it is not meant to re-traumatize us. Instead, it is a huge healing opportunity. And the most healing thing is to become more aware and by doing so, to change a pattern, a way of thinking or behaving that is in fact lending to the creation and therefore repeat of that very unwanted experience. And that getting to the healed state (the opposite, wanted experience) is contingent upon US changing that way of thinking or behaving. So, we could say that the way we are thinking and behaving is lending its energy to the re-creation of that unwanted experience. AND at the same time, the most healing opportunity could very well be the repeat of that experience.
So that you can understand this better, I’ll give you an example. Jane grew up in a dysfunctional family dynamic with non-religious parents in a southern Baptist community. Jane was not only made the scapegoat of her family; she was also made the scapegoat of the community. She longs to be a part of a close-knit group of people who see her goodness and take responsibility for their own insecurities. We could say that for Jane, such a group would be the healing experience. But what if I told you that it would be vibrationally impossible to bring Jane into that experience because of the way that she thinks and behaves. And what if I told you that if it was possible to simply give Jane that experience, despite the way that she thinks and behaves in relationships, that it wouldn’t be the best thing for her. There would be zero free will, conscious creation and personal empowerment in it. Therefore, Jane finds herself in a nightmarish repeat of her childhood scenario.
Jane formed a very close-knit group of friends who all decided to live together in an artist’s colony. One of the other women in the colony, Beth is very intimidated by Jane. She feels Jane is a superior artist. She hates the way that her boyfriend acts around Jane. As a result, Beth started to see Jane as a threat. Because of this, she began to triangulate the other members of the colony against Jane. It worked. It worked because one member of the Colony knew that Beth has been there in the colony longer than anyone and so, not aligning with Beth created insecurity around their living situation. It worked with another because they had a huge insecurity around sexual infidelity. This person’s own parents were torn apart by infidelity and Beth chose to triangulate against Jane by suggesting that Jane was trying to seduce her boyfriend away from her. And so on and so forth. Each member of the community had an insecurity that they did not take any personal responsibility for. Instead, they simply decided to preserve the image of their commune being wonderful, except for Jane. And soon, Jane’s character was under attack. It was a repeat of the situation in her childhood.
Without going too far into the process she went through to get there, Jane realized that her pattern that fed into the creation of becoming the scapegoat is a totally dysfunctional relationship with pressure. She realized that whenever she finds herself in a situation where someone tries to put pressure on her for something that isn’t her responsibility, she has no boundaries around it and she just takes the pressure and takes the pressure, which means taking responsibility for things that are not hers. Of course, she is a magnet for people who don’t want any responsibility for themselves or others. And once a person learns she will do this, they eventually make her responsible for everything in their life. And if she refuses to take it, she is immediately made the bad guy and the consequences of the responsibility being dropped come down on her.
For just one example, it is the responsibility of her roommate Jess to come up with her own rent. Chronically, each month, Jess is short on rent. Jess cries about it and Jane takes the pressure to make up the extra rent. The reason being that if she doesn’t, no one else will and they, not just Jess, will get in trouble with the landlord and possibly be kicked out. Jess loves to use this consequence as leverage for getting Jane to pay for her.
Jane realized that she takes pressure for others chronically because this is what was expected when she was a child and this is what it is to be a scapegoat. When the Baptist community treated her poorly, her father didn’t defend her, he made it her responsibility to try to not take it personally. When her mother made her the problem in the family so that she could avoid facing the fact that she was unhappy in the life that she had chosen and changing something, Jane actually took the pressure and tried to act in a way that pleased her mother. When they expected Jane to caretake her younger brother, Jane took that pressure and resentfully watched him as if he was her son every day after school.
Jane realized that she was in a repeat situation so, she must do something different this time than she did the first time, and that if she succeeded, it would be a healing experience. Jane decided to not take the pressure and for the first time, to put the pressure back where it belonged. So, after really deeply looking at her actions to make sure that nothing she was doing was actually something she should not be doing. As well as sorting through what actually was her responsibility and what wasn’t, she set a firm boundary with Beth. She had a conversation with her about how she has to face her insecurities relative to her own art and her own looks and her own relationship with her boyfriend. She told her that if she fears that someone can threaten the relationship, who she really distrusts, is her boyfriend. And Jane set the boundary that beyond ensuring Beth that she will never cheat with him, she would no longer be made responsible for keeping their relationship secure, that was their job.
Despite the relatively amicable nature of the talk itself, Beth was still subconsciously benefitting too much from Jane being the bad guy and not facing her insecurities, so this only escalated her tactics. Beth decided that she would threaten to move out of the community and convinced another roommate to go with her. Normally, Jane would have taken the pressure and been so intent on avoiding all the consequences of that happening that she would have taken responsibility for doing whatever it takes to make Beth de-escalate and feel good to be in the house again and to come across as good to the other roommate. Instead, she said “Ok. That’s really sad, I wish you wouldn’t go, but I can see if your insecurities are just too big to be in the house with me, then leaving might just be the best option.” Beth was flabbergasted and furious. She and the other roommate packed their stuff into a car and left that night in the middle of the night.
That same week, she also told Jess she couldn’t pay for her rent and after only one month of someone else having to pay for her so as to not get kicked out of the place, the rest of the community asked her to leave to make room for another person who would make the rent. Long story short, they couldn’t find enough artists to move in to come up with rent. But everyone agreed that it was not Jane’s fault that they didn’t take responsibility to do so. And so, all the remaining roommates got evicted from their little artist commune. The thing is, Jane felt like the consequence, which was very painful, was still worth it. She could see how unhealthy the responsibility dynamics were. And she felt better because she was not under as much pressure and could see how to avoid being a magnet for irresponsible people and how she could avoid getting into a dynamic where she would run the risk of being scapegoated again. She wasn’t stuck in a social system where she was the scapegoat anymore. She also didn’t run away from that social system only to end up the scapegoat all over again in a new one. Her new healing practice was: Only taking pressure and responsibility that was actually hers to take and outside of that, only taking pressure and responsibility that she actually wanted.
When we find ourself in repeat situations, we immediately think “this shouldn’t be happening”. And why wouldn’t we think that? It isn’t what we want. It’s the opposite of what we want. But from a more objective perspective, we haven’t gone backwards. And it is what should be happening. We have re-manifested/been put in a healing experience where the healing thing (whether we recognize it or not) is to change the thoughts, behaviors, habits and actions that make us a match to and bring about that unwanted thing in the first place. We are meant to learn what it takes to lend our energy to the creation of the opposite, wanted thing. And to employ our free will to change those detrimental patterns so that the next step is to actualize whatever it is that we are truly wanting.
In today’s world, you probably have heard a lot and probably will hear a lot from other people about the importance of work-life balance. But is it really necessary?
The idea of work life balance is the idea that it is only possible to have a healthy lifestyle if you separate your work from the other elements of your life, such as your personal life. And after doing so, seek to establish a state of equilibrium where you equally prioritize the demands of your career and the other elements of your life.
Right off the bat, there is a problem with the philosophy of work-life balance that is easily visible in the term itself. It suggests that your work is separate from and not part of truly living. That truly living is everything else outside of work. It suggests that living is the time you spend with loved ones, your home, your hobbies, the vacations you take etc.
If we look back over the course of history, there are too many reasons to list for why a person in any era decided to take a specific job or perform a specific task; not because they felt intrinsic motivation to do it, but because it was a “so that”. It got them something else they valued. Over the course of history as society evolved and experienced so many changes and different revolutions, societal needs and values changed. And with it, so did the lifestyle of its citizens. This was especially true when the whole of human society began to operate on the exchange of money. This was especially true when religions began to govern how people should live. This is also especially true in countries where societal evolution meant beginning to view a citizen as a part of a machine.
In the life philosophy of these industrialized societies, one’s profession was divorced from one’s talents, values, intrinsic motivation and passion. Instead, it became the societal norm that you have to work (even if it is a job you don’t like) so that with the rest of your time, you can have money to have a home and personal life and have what you really love and do what you are really passionate about. In these countries, the idea of work-life balance originated as a key element of health. The main reasons that it was seen as a key element of health is that 1. It didn’t take much time to realize that if all a person’s time in a day is spent meeting the demands of a job that they don’t like, they will very quickly become depressed and their wellbeing will decline. And 2. These societies were set-up on the structure of a nuclear family. And if a person’s work is separate from their family and yet they work all the time and don’t have any time to dedicate to their family, the family falls apart. This spells instability of the societal structure. So, the short-sighted solution that arose was the idea of work-life balance.
We need to throw the idea of work-life balance out the window. It is an outdated concept that represents nothing more than a symptom fix. And it instills the wrong mentality in people’s minds about work. As a replacement for the idea of work-life balance, we need to focus on what any specific individual person needs to achieve a state of health and wellbeing. And this means there will be a TON of variability regarding how they manage their time, how they organize their life and how much energy and time they put into what in their life. People need to customize their life.
Regarding the place that work fits into someone’s overall life, I want you to think of a scale. On either side of this scale, we have an unhealthy extreme. On one side, you have someone who has complete resistance to work and who believes that work is not life and who refuses to get a job or work because of it. On the other side, you have a workaholic. A person who spends all their time working as a coping mechanism and as a method of avoiding other elements of life. Everyone falls somewhere on this scale. For example, one person may do a job they hate only so that they can have money to have the basic necessities of life. Another person may not work for a livelihood because their livelihood is provided, so the only work they do is intrinsically motivated and for pleasure. Another may do a job they like and are intrinsically motivated to do some of the time, but they make sure to limit the time and effort they spend on it because of their other priorities. Another person may feel such deep purpose and meaning in their work that the vast majority of their time is dedicated to it and all the other elements of their life are integrated into it and organized around it. Keep in mind that where a person currently falls on the scale may not actually be the right place for them on the scale.
The vast majority of people who believe in the importance of work-life balance are coming from the paradigm on this scale that either: Work is only a thing you do so that you can do the other stuff, which to them feels like really living. Or work should be something you like, but you need to prioritize other things equally to or more than work. And they are arguing for work-life balance so as to defend the rightness of their place on the scale as well as to project what they think is right for them onto other people. Keep in mind that the place that is right for someone to fall on this scale is a big factor when it comes to compatibility in relationships.
The way to know if someone has arranged their life correctly for themselves with regards to how much time and energy they dedicate to what in their life, is that they will be thriving. Their life will feel good. If a person is feeling distressed because of how much time and energy they are putting into their career, that is your indication that more time and energy needs to be put into something else, such as leisure time. If a person is experiencing conflict in their relationships because they are so focused on their career and their partner or friends want them to prioritize quality time together, it is time for a re-evaluation. This indicates that a person needs to re-assess their own priorities. This could mean that an adjustment towards decreasing focus on work and increasing it on something like leisurely social interaction would lead to greater life satisfaction. Or it could mean that there is incompatibility between the two people regarding values and lifestyle choices.
The concept of work-life balance tends to cause people to globalize about what is right for all people and by doing so, to lose sight of how individually customized life must be for people to experience satisfaction. I’ve got three examples for you to help illustrate this. The first example is Joe. Joe is a doctor who is passionate about solving endemic diseases. He is currently working for doctors without borders as well as a few other humanitarian groups. He finds so much meaning and purpose in his work that it is his absolute priority. As a result, anyone who enters into a romantic relationship with him cannot rely on him staying in whatever city or country he is currently in because he may be transferred. And they can’t rely on him to not cancel on things he has agreed to being present to, because he is always on-call. For Joe, his work is his life because for him, it is the most important thing in his life.
For joe, the other elements of Joe’s life and his other needs have to be organized around his work. And we need to seek to customize his relationships to his work. He needs to seek compatibility with a woman who shares Joe’s values and who can support his career. For example, this woman might be someone who is very independent and thrives on having her own time away from a partner. Or this woman might be someone who wants to sign up to do this work with him, so that she can derive her own sense of purpose and togetherness from supporting Joe’s purpose and being together in the cause. In this case, she would go wherever Joe is stationed and lend her energy towards supporting Joe so that he can help people.
If we approach Joe with the idea that Work-Life balance is important, we would make the mistake of encouraging him to reduce his work and by doing so, take him away from his purpose, his meaning, his passion, his motivations and his values. We will also lead him into an incompatible relationship with a woman who has other values and wants him to cut back on work to be with her doing other things… A relationship where the best he can hope for is mutual compromise. And Joe will feel miserable in his life because of it.
The next example is Gabe. Gabe is feeling really insecure about the fact that despite incredible pressure to do so, he feels no drive to get a career or to settle down with a wife and kids. Nothing about the traditional life suits him. He feels passionate and lit up inside and motivated to learn new languages and to explore new cultures and places. He is an explorer and a traveler at heart. In fact, this is his reason for being in this life. His life-purpose if you will. People often look at Gabe as immature. They put pressure on him to settle down and find a career. They talk about the importance of work-life balance. Although they don’t mean to suggest that Gabe should cut back on work. He doesn’t really have a career. He simply takes a temporary job in a location to make a bit of living money and then goes onto his next location. Instead, what they mean to suggest is that they think that Gabe will only be fulfilled if he gets something productive and permanent to do for work and gets serious in his work building a family and reduces his level of ‘play’ around the world. But this is actually wrong for Gabe. Gabe was never meant to live a traditional life and Gabe is actually meant to make his life about traveling and exploring. If Gabe is honest, he does not really need predictable financial security. Part of the excitement that causes him to feel alive is trying out so many different things and experiencing so many different lifestyles through the opportunities he comes across for work around the world. Gabe should not try to find a relationship with a person who wants a traditional life. And the concept of work-life balance does not even apply to him and his life purpose.
Lauren is a human resources administrator. She also has a partner and two kids and three dogs and a mortgage and friends and extended relatives that she cares about. Lauren is living what we might call (in today’s world) a more traditional life within society. Lauren is currently distressed because it seems that by working eight hours a day, five days a week, the demands of her work and the demands of her personal life are in competition with one another. She is experiencing burnout. If Lauren were honest, she likes to do her job. She likes the security of the pay. She likes the tasks she performs. She likes her colleagues. But her work is consuming so much of her mental energy and time that she doesn’t feel she has enough to dedicate to the people in her personal life that she cares about. She is thinking about work even when she is at home. She doesn’t care so much about her work that this feels good. She really wants to be present and have energy to be a good partner and mother and friend. If we take the traditional approach to Work-Life balance, we may encourage Lauren to cut back on her work hours and work part time. Or if she can’t, to learn techniques to leave work at work when she goes home. However, what Lauren really needs is not balance. What she needs is the flexibility to be able to organize the many priorities in her life so that she is satisfied with her ability to give enough and to resource enough from each one of these priorities throughout the week. The actual solution to this conundrum is for Lauren to be able to telecommute. She is a self-disciplined person whose issues would easily be solved by working from home, even if that were only on certain days of the week. If she had control over what hours of the day she was working, she could organize her work around her personal life rather than organize her personal life around her work. And as a result, she would thrive.
Humanity is out of alignment with work. Work being an activity or task involving mental or physical effort that is done in order to achieve a purpose or result. Sit with that definition of work for a moment. It is as much work when someone plays a game of tennis as it is when someone pours concrete for the foundation of a house. A person may or may not engage in a specific activity or task regularly in order to establish a livelihood. A person may or may not be in alignment with their values when they engage in an activity or carry out a task. A person may or may not enjoy that activity or task and therefore may or may not enjoy expending the effort inherent in it. A person may or may not do an activity or task because it is meaningful or purposeful. But it is the meaning, purpose, value and level of enjoyment that a person finds in carrying out a task or doing an activity that dictates whether someone is in alignment with what they are doing. Therefore it is the meaning, purpose, value and level of enjoyment that a person finds in carrying out a task or doing an activity that dictates whether a person is happy doing what they are doing.
Where the progression and expansion of humanity is headed, is towards each person’s purpose for being and place in society, being dictated by what their intrinsic talents, interests, motivations, values, and enjoyments are. When this happens, every person’s work will be purposeful and meaningful. Work will become play. Only one person’s play will look very different from another person’s play. One person’s play and therefore work may be cleaning things. Another’s may be designing rockets. Another’s may be caretaking children. And someone’s work may or may not be something that they do in exchange for money.
Not every person’s purpose for being is about a “career” they are meant to have. But some people’s purpose for being definitely is. On top of this, the amount of time and energy that a person dedicates to one thing vs. another will be customized. This means for example that for one person it will be right for them to dedicate 80 hours a week to their career and the remaining time to sleep and spending quality time with a loved one. For another, spending the majority of their time connecting with people and only some time on other things will be right for them. For another, their life might look a lot more like the “balance” that we traditionally associate with work-life balance. And each person’s relationships will look different based on what life element prioritization is right for them specifically. There is no cookie cutter approach to human happiness. This includes how much time, focus, energy and effort is dedicated to a person’s career vs. the other elements of their life. How to know whether the prioritization, time and energy someone dedicates towards the different elements of their life is right for them is that the person will like their life and they will be thriving.
Polarity is an integral element of life. Contrast is a reality in this universe. This means that both positive and negative co-exist. Both positive and negative are inherent to reality. To have a full picture of reality, one must be able to recognize both in anything. But the ability to recognize both the positive and the negative in anything is, for lack of a better way of explaining it, an unbiased, impartial, objective skill. We get into trouble when we become bias towards either aspect of reality.
People become heavily bias towards the negative or the positive. They lose their objectivity and their perspective becomes subjective. They start to manipulate their perception of reality in whatever way serves them. For example, a person will start to ignore positive elements and only notice negative ones if they have been traumatized by disappointment enough to decide to never get their hopes up again, and keep themselves expecting the worst; so as to not be let down ever again. Or for example, if a person does not trust in their ability to feel negative emotion without experiencing huge consequences or trust in their power to see a negative and do something proactive to exact change upon it, a person will start to re-frame every negative they see into something positive instead.
Metaphorically speaking, we can get into trouble when we only wear rosy colored glasses through which to view reality and we can get in trouble when we only wear dark glasses through which to view reality. And today, we are going to talk about one dysfunctional behavior that is rampant within human society and that occurs when we slip into a bias towards the positive polarity inherent within reality… Negating negatives with positives, which is a form of toxic positivity.
When we negate negatives with positives, what we are actually trying to do is to make the negative thing un-real. We are trying to convince ourselves or other people that it does not exist. We are nullifying it, abolishing it and making it either un-true or less true. It is a form of denial. It is a direct and deliberate invalidation of the negative thing. We do this because we feel we cannot handle it being valid, true or real. Because the behavior of negating negatives with positives belongs to the coping mechanism of denial, you would benefit by also watching my video titled: How to Call Bullshit on Denial.
So that you can understand this behavior better, I’ll give you an example. Amy was ecstatic to find out that she was pregnant. But at three months along, she suffered a miscarriage. Amy was absolutely devastated. So much so that she became depressed and developed serious anxiety attacks. Amy’s heart was broken, so was her faith in the future that she wanted. A few of the people in Amy’s life did not know how to deal with their own painful emotions and thoughts that crept up when that happened. As a result, they did not know how to hold any space for Amy’s painful thoughts and emotions. And so, the coping mechanism they reached for and encouraged Amy to reach for was negating the negatives with positives. They wanted to make the negative invalid so they did not have to deal with it. They said things like: “Now you have an angel looking out over you”. “At least it was early and you didn’t get to know your baby”. “You got pregnant and so you know you can always get pregnant again”. “If it happened, it was probably for the best, there must have been something wrong”. “Well, the upside is that you and your husband can focus on each other and do some more traveling in the meantime, there won’t be space for that when there is an actual baby in the home.” Needless to say, these perspectives only compounded Amy’s trauma. As a result, she felt totally not understood, isolated and alone with her pain and made wrong for her perception of the experience, therefore she started questioning her own sanity.
There are several dangers inherent in negating negatives with positives. I’m going to list some of them for you.
When you negate a negative with the positive, you are actively stepping out of reality. You’re trying to cancel out the negative element of reality, so that you can convince yourself that it doesn’t really exist and you can feel better because you are in an illusion that the positive is the only thing that is real. Reality is actually your only axis for power. This means any action you take is not one that is exacted upon what is real. It will not lead to the intended results. Therefore, you have rendered yourself not only out of reality, but also powerless. This can get you into some real trouble. To understand this, I’ve got a real-life example for you.
Jen was a single mother who really needed a partner. She met Nicholas and got attached to him quickly. They started living together after a few months of dating. Jen started seeing a lot of red flags and negatives about Nicholas. For example, Nicholas definitely fostered an emotional dependency in her. He seemed intent on convincing her that no one in her life actually knew, valued or cared about her and that to the opposite, he was the only one who did. Nicholas had no friends his own age whatsoever and whenever they would go to a social gathering together, he would not engage in adult conversation with her, instead he would seek out the company of whatever children were there and she would find him wresting with them and tickling them. Often, Nicholas would get up in the middle of the night and make any number of excuses as to why he needed to do something other than stay with her in bed for a bit. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he had some kind of double life. Nicholas was unexplainably nervous about police officers and if there was ever a police car parked somewhere that he made plans, he would immediately change plans and keep driving. Sometimes Jen felt that Nicholas was more interested in her daughter than he was in her. He would often suggest that Jen should go on vacation or go to the gym and let him do her the favor of watching her daughter. He was always offering to spend time with her and to drive her to ballet practice. Often, because of this, Jen felt left out of their little “club”. Well, as it turns out, Nicholas was a child sex offender who had established an incestuous relationship with Jen’s daughter about one month into them living together.
The problem is, Jen uses positivity as a coping mechanism. And she especially employs the technique of negating negatives with positives. So, with every negative, she had a way to negate it. She told herself he cared so much about her that he was so afraid of losing her that he felt threatened by her being close to other people. She told herself that it is amazing that he is so good with children, that it was a sign that he was young at heart and was repelled by the impurity and pretense in adults. She told herself that the good thing is that she found a man that is so interested in her daughter and so willing to step up and be an integral part of her life too, unlike other men. She refused to get up when he got up at night to snoop on him. Instead, she told herself that some people are night owls and being up at night is integral to their creativity and that her ticket to being a good partner by loving him the way he is, is to allow him the space to be that way. She told herself that Nicholas’s avoidance of the police was proof that he was being protective because as we all know, there is so much corruption in the police force, they are simply legally supported criminals. Jen put herself out of reality and into an illusion that felt good to her. Unfortunately, by being out of reality, she could not act upon reality and therefore, she failed to keep her daughter safe in such an extreme way that neither of their lives will ever be the same. You cannot make the right choices or do the right thing in any situation if you are not willing to see the full picture of reality, including the negative elements of reality.
When you negate the negatives with the positives, you run the risk of mentally and emotionally abusing yourself. You gaslight yourself when you invalidate the part of you that sees a negative reality. It is to suggest to that aspect of yourself that what you see, you didn’t see, what you feel, you have no good reason to feel and that you should doubt your estimation of reality. You emotionally invalidate yourself when you do this. You dismiss and reject your painful feelings and thoughts. This is to send the message that those thoughts and feelings are unimportant, unacceptable, inaccurate, insignificant, irrational and not real. When you do this to yourself, this is how you are making a part of yourself (or many parts of yourself) feel. When you invalidate the part of you that sees the negative or that is in pain because of it, you are refusing to see, hear, feel or acknowledge it. Therefore, you are condemning it not only to isolation. But to being alone and in pain. It makes you doubt your own sanity and feel like you are going crazy, which will make you afraid of yourself. It also denies you the authentic support you need in order to deal with what you are facing.
When you negate the negatives with the positives, you run the risk of mentally and emotionally abusing other people. You run the risk of gaslighting them, making them feel like something is wrong with them for what they think and feel, dismissing and rejecting them, making them feel like what they think and feel is unimportant, unacceptable, insignificant, inaccurate, irrational and not real and condemning them to being not only alone, but in pain alone. It makes them doubt their sanity and feel like they are going crazy, which makes people afraid of themselves. It denies them the authentic support they need in order to deal with what they are facing.
When you negate the negative with the positive, you are in a coping mechanism. To cope with something is by definition to make a specific alteration mentally, emotionally or physically so that you can manage or adapt to something that is causing you stress. By definition, we only cope with a situation when we perceive that we cannot change or eradicate it. But the thing is, we often cope with something that we can change or can eradicate. And so, when we negate the negative with the positive, we are often keeping ourselves in detrimental situations unnecessarily and failing to change things we should change. We have succumb to false powerlessness, albeit disguised with a positive façade. Metaphorically speaking, instead of realizing we are in jail and getting out of the jail, we are making ourselves ok with being in jail by convincing ourselves that it isn’t jail. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: How To Let go of a Coping Mechanism.
When you negate the negative with the positive, you are in a state of avoidance and resistance. You are misusing recognition of the positive elements of a thing by turning it into a tool of avoidance of the negative and a tool of resistance against the negative. You are trying to shut part of reality and anything associated with that reality down. In a universe governed by the law of mirroring, whatever you resist, persists. Also, it is an invitation for the reflection to get bigger. If you refuse to see a reflection and are thus unresponsive to it, it will escalate until it becomes something you literally cannot deny. So, it is a set up for future disaster.
When you negate the negative with the positive, it prevents growth and it prevents expansion. Growth comes from facing the unwanted, gathering insight regarding it, letting it define what you want instead and the process of alchemizing oneself and one’s life so as to create improvement and ultimately, to achieve what is wanted. Recognition of the negative is what creates movement and change. Without it, stagnation occurs. For example, imagine that a family has many dysfunctional patterns. Patterns that have caused real harm to the individuals in that family and that have set them up for failure in their other adult relationships. That dysfunction will never change, it will simply be perpetuated if the members of this family refuse to acknowledge the negatives inherent within their family dynamics and patterns. If each member of the family only recognizes the positive in the family and uses positives to negate every negative about the family, they are in an illusion about their own family. They are creating an overlay and expecting every member of the family to buy into that overlay. Anyone who tries to make the family system improve, by bringing up and trying to change the dysfunction, will then be ostracized. The consciousness of this family has then stagnated and is not growing and progressing and expanding. The dysfunction simply passes from one generation to the next. And believe me, the universe has some serious tricks up its sleeve for shaking up families like this. When you negate the negative with the positive, you thwart progress. You thwart it in yourself, others, the world and the universe at large.
Toxic positivity, in its many forms, is often very subtle. We are normalized to it in our current society. Because we don’t recognize how detrimental it is, we still think all forms of positivity (including negating the negative with the positive) are good. But don’t forget that we once thought that heroine was a fabulous cough medicine. So, we need to recognize when we are doing this and when other people are doing this and put an end to the misuse of positivity.
If you are reading this, chances are this is not your first rodeo. You have probably spent considerable time reading self-help books and consuming both spiritual and personal growth material. No matter what role someone is in (whether they are the one teaching and producing and selling content or whether they are the one consuming it) the vast majority of people involved in self-help, personal growth and spirituality, have the same subconscious or conscious aim… To get to a point where life only feels good.
And here is where some serious confusion needs to be cleared up. The biggest lie that the self help/spiritual industry perpetuates is that there can be an end to contrast. That it is possible to get to a point where life only feels good with no negatives and where no unwanted things happen anymore. It’s at this point that I have to tell you that just because we say we are spiritual but not religious, doesn’t mean that we haven’t carried over the same religious beliefs and given them a makeover. The self-help/spiritual industry is selling you the idea of heaven, just like so many religions have. Only this time, it’s had a makeover. Now, instead of reaching heaven (an end state of positivity) after you die by doing things right and good enough while you are alive, it’s all about reaching heaven (an end state of positivity) while you are alive by doing thing right and good enough while you are alive.
If many people were honest, this is their actual expectation for doing things like workshops, conscious manifestation exercises, therapy, shadow work, self-help processes, meditations, breathwork and health regimes etc. And so many people suffer because of this hidden expectation that they have either generated or been directly sold.
Contrast is one of the integral elements of this time space reality. What I mean by contrast is the existence and the perception of polarities such as positive and negative, wanted and unwanted, dark and light, pain and pleasure. Contrast is the root of both personal and universal expansion. A physical human is meant to sort through the wanted and unwanted elements of this time space reality so as to give rise to desire. And then, to line up with that desire with their thoughts, words and actions. Doing so, causes a person to actualize the expansion. But this improved state of being will come with a new set of contrast. And so, the process starts all over again, propelling the person into the ever-expanding state of being. For example, let’s say that a person really wants to have a life in nature on a self-sustainable farm. By actualizing their desire, they may have things like a sense of independence and freedom, the peacefulness of the natural world, a life that is wholesome, high-quality food and simplicity. But they may also experience things like inconvenience, lots of labor that needs to be done personally in order to maintain things, a feeling of disconnection from the rest of society and a decrease in financial income. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Want To Succeed? What Pain Will You Say Yes To?
All this is not to say that you should simply give up on life being good and give up on joy and give up on aiming for the constant improvement. It is the desire for life to be good that causes personal expansion. And it is the process of lining up with (so as to actualize) the things that you desire that makes life a process of ‘the better it gets the better it can get’. But this is very different than expecting that you can and should get to a place where there is no more contrast. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: The Ticket to an Empowered Life.
What you are after by chasing a state of heaven while you are alive is a state of ended-ness. No desire and therefore no progress or movement or expansion is born from a being who has everything they could ever want and is only ever experiencing the positive. And you came to this time space reality specifically because you were able to see the value of expansion. To have committed to this time space reality and to seek an end to expansion at the same time, is a contradiction.
Aside from all of this, there are some main reasons that it is so important to not be doing self-help processes or spiritual practices with the expectation that eventually, if you do them good enough, you will get to a point where you never feel or experience anything negative and life will only feel good.
You will fail at it no matter what you do. And you will fail at it through no fault of your own. You will not fail because you are not doing something right. You will fail at it because the reality of life and how this time space reality was designed is in direct opposition to a state of ended-ness. Because of this, not only will you be out of reality (which only ever leads to unwanted results), you will also feel like something is seriously wrong with you and like you are not doing something good enough or right. This will cause you to suffer unimaginable levels of pain. Some of you who are watching this are already in this pain I am speaking about. Imagine that life is an ocean. In this analogy, the contrast of life is like the waves in the ocean. To master life is to master the art of surfing. To operate with this expectation of getting to a point where life only ever feels good and only wanted things happen is to think “If I just surf good enough, the waves will stop coming”. No person who actually attained enlightenment is teaching anyone how to stop the contrast of life. They are teaching you how to develop a different relationship to the reality of contrast (to the waves of life), and this in turn changes your life experience for the better.
If you engage with self-help, personal growth and spiritual things so as to reach a state of positive ended-ness, everything you do is a ‘so that’. You will be doing a great many things you hate so as to get to a reward you want. But this means that you will hate the process of life and never achieve the reward that you are trying to get to. This is a recipe for burnout, powerlessness and despair. You will especially get into trouble if you are using lots of shadow work to try to reach a state of heaven while you are alive. The here and now experience of life itself will not only be painful, it will not be worth it because the reward for doing painful things (which you think is a life where nothing ever feels negative and you never experience something unwanted) will not come. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: If You Want to Be Happy, Don’t Do This!
If you approach life in this way, you will never live life in the ‘now’. Instead, you’re on a rat wheel trying to get to a perfect future. There will be no actual appreciation of the now. Because even if you engage in the practice of appreciating the now… even that practice is a ‘so that’… something that you are only doing in order to try to have a better future.
You will fail to fully commit to the adventure of life and to mastering the process of expansion. Instead of really committing to playing the game of life and extracting the benefits from it, you’re going to be in resistance to it, trying to get out of it and transcend it. You will not be fully committed to life. You’ll have one foot in and one foot out of life. And you cannot truly manifest if you don’t put all your energy into life. Also, you will be in resistance to both pain and desire. For this reason, it would benefit you to watch two of my videos. The first titled: The Meaning of Pain and the second titled: Are You Afraid of Desire? The Truth about Desire.
You will walk around with an attitude that if you or someone else is in pain or experiencing negative or unwanted things, you or they are doing something wrong/bad and that it means something about you or them. By the way, this is simply a modern facelift that was done on the idea that if someone doesn’t get to heaven when they die, it is because they did something bad or wrong. What you will most likely make it mean when you experience negative or unwanted things is something that causes you to feel inferior to others who you think are more right and more good than you are because their life is better than yours is… That they are more enlightened than you are.
And walking around with this attitude will cause you to hold a person in less esteem if they are experiencing pain and unwanted things. You may tell yourself that you’re the more successful or enlightened one. You can often hear this insinuation in people’s voices when they ask “How are you a match to that?”. As if reaching a state of positive ended-ness, a heaven in life, is a measure of how good and right someone is.
This belief and this expectation puts you into a state of narcissism and in a personal bubble reality built for one. At its root, the expectation that one should get to a place in life where nothing negative or unwanted ever happens, arises because a person is desperate to get away from pain. When people are in pain, they tend to be very narcissistic. It’s very hard to care about the wellbeing of others when you are in pain. And so, even if you have been sold on a practice such as taking the other person’s best interests as a part of your own best interests, you will ultimately only do that because you think that it will lead to you, yourself experiencing no more pain in relationships. And you will only seek to attain a state of oneness because you believe it is the ticket to you feeling good and no longer separated. Again, it is the attempt to manifest a heaven... an ended state of positivity for yourself.
Unfortunately, many teachers as well as the self- help/spiritual industry itself has sold you the lie that there can be an end to contrast. That the goal is to actualize heaven, a state of positive ended-ness, while you are alive. And that if you are not there yet, you need to do something different and better. Because of all of this, you are chasing a goal that you will not reach. You have used your degree of happiness in life as your measure of your own goodness and rightness. You have turned your life into a “so that”. Joy in life is not dependent on there being nothing negative and on never experiencing unwanted things. Contrast is not an oppositional force to joy. You can love your life and still experience contrast. You can do everything right and good and you will still experience the contrast that is inherent to life. Otherwise, the second any being became enlightened, all homeless people would suddenly not be homeless anymore and no animal would eat another animal and no one would ever lose a loved one because death would not be a part of life. So, either no being has ever achieved enlightenment or contrast is inherent to life, whether a being has achieved enlightenment or not.
With this in mind, I want you to ask yourself this question: If I accepted that there will never be an end to contrast. That no matter what I improve or what desire I attain, there will always be both negative and positive, wanted and unwanted inherent with it… what would I do differently in my daily life today?
And remember, there is no difference between working your ass off to get to heaven after you die and working your ass off to reach a state of heaven while you are alive!
We tend to make the basic assumption that if we are around something positive or that holds a higher vibe, that we will begin to feel better. But this is not necessarily the case and today, I’m going to explain why.
First, let me explain what I mean when I use the word vibration or “vibe”. Everything in the universe is made of energy that vibrates, and energy that vibrates imparts information. The amplitude and frequency of energy is what determines how (in what form) that energy will express itself. We call this a "vibration". It is a term you will hear often in spiritual circles. You may hear someone say that something has a “high vibration”. This means that it has some positive quality and effect that is beneficial to a person in some way. For example, we may say that rose quartz has a high vibration because it is nurturing and mood lifting, it enhances warmth and connection with others and helps people feel compassion towards one another. Or we might say that a person has a high vibration because they are so awakened or intuitive or fun or confident or open.
We live in a universe that is governed by the law of mirroring, also often called the law of attraction. In a universe governed by the law of mirroring, things that share the same time and space must be a vibrational match in some way. Because of this, we see things like entrainment occurring. How this applies to vibration is that when two energies are in the presence of one another, they will come into resonance with each other. Usually, the less dominant frequency will change to match the more dominant frequency. And to generalize, the higher frequency is usually the more dominant frequency. Therefore, if we are in a less than loving mood and we are around rose quartz, it will cause us to come into a more loving state.
Because of this, it is tempting to think that if we are around something that has a high vibration, it is a given that we will feel better. This is the case often. But as you might have noticed, this is also often not the case. Sometimes, being in the presence of something with a high vibration may make us feel worse. And here are the top reasons for this:
You may feel worse around something with a high vibration because of resistance. Resistance is any oppositional force. When entrainment starts to occur with something high vibe, any part of us that may be against that positive state will kick into strong resistance. It may be confusing why any part of us would be in resistance to something positive and beneficial. But it happens all the time. Here is an example. Imagine that in your childhood, your personal power was seen as a bad thing. Any time you demonstrated personal power, it led to negative social consequences. If you spend time around someone who has a lot of personal empowerment (a higher vibration than you hold) this is likely to cause the part of you that has the negative association with (and therefore resistance to) personal power into resistance. As a result, you will feel negatively towards that person. And your body will register them as a threat. To understand more about resistance, you can watch my video titled: Urgent! Deal With Your Resistance Before You Do Anything Else!
For things with a lower frequency to entrain with things that hold a higher frequency, they need to release anything that is keeping their vibration low. Anything that is not a match to that higher vibration. For this reason, high frequency things and people are famous for causing a kind of “detox”, “purging” or a “coming up to be cleared” process to occur within lower frequency things. For example, shamanic medicines that hold a very high vibration often cause vomiting and extreme emotional releases and a purging of the subconscious mind. Or for example, let’s say that we are experiencing a safe, loving relationship. Being around that high vibrational experience may cause us to re-sensitize to and no longer normalize the fear we feel socially and it may cause all the accumulated grief about all the abusive relationships we experienced to surface. Thus, causing us to feel worse.
Being around something that holds a high vibration may make you acutely aware of what you lack or of where you aren’t. When this happens, it is common to feel bad about yourself and about where you are. Many of you have experienced this when you are feeling really terrible and you spend time with someone who is having a fabulous time in life. Suddenly, the contrast between where you are vibrationally and where they are vibrationally makes you feel even worse. It’s as if their happiness makes you feel even more miserable and sorry for yourself and feel even more like a failure. Or for example, if we visit a group of people that are higher vibration in that they are open and honest and intimate and committed to each other, it may cause us to feel worse about our own social circle. Suddenly, because we have the comparison, we start feeling even more alone and surrounded by distant, dishonest people who only have relationships of convenience. If we subconsciously slip into negatively comparing ourselves with whatever holds a higher vibration, we will feel worse about ourselves and our life.
When we are exposed to something high vibe, it naturally induces a process of healing. And healing is not always a feel-good process. When we heal something, we change a pattern that is unwanted into a pattern that is wanted, usually into some form of its opposite. For example, if we feel demeaned, to heal is to feel valued. Or if we are lonely, to heal is to achieve togetherness. But this process often entails us becoming aware of and experiencing painful things.
There is a big difference between something that is simply pain relief and something that is healing. For example, imagine that someone is suffering because of their inauthenticity. And imagine that they share the same space with someone who is authentic and who also supports their authenticity. The process of healing so as to become authentic may involve things like becoming aware of how inauthentic they are, being willing despite fear to enter into conflicts instead of avoid them, changing or even ending relationships that were not created from a place of authenticity, seeing the pain they caused others by entering into those relationships on an inauthentic foot. Leaving the familiar and creating whole new life for themselves etc. None of that feels good, but you can see that it is good for this person to go through that process. You can see that definitely it is better than if this person simply found a way to feel good, even if it meant staying inauthentic.
It may sound counterintuitive, but even though the fact that something feels good to you can be an indication that something is good for you, that doesn’t mean that anything that feels bad is bad for you. Also, something that feels good to you may very well not be good for you. There is a definite limit to knowing that something is good for you because it 'resonates' with you.
For example, it doesn’t always feel good to exercise. But exercise is good for you. Cocaine makes you feel good. But it isn’t good for you. Physical affection is good for you, but it won’t feel good to you if you have trauma around intimacy. Having your ego stroked will feel good, even if getting your ego stroked in a situation will keep you blind to something dysfunctional that you are doing, and thus keep you stuck in a detrimental illusion.
When we are around a high vibrational thing and it causes us to feel bad, it does not mean that high vibrational thing is bad for us. It is simply an indication that we have something negative or painful that needs our attention on the road to raising our own vibration or healing or finding improvement.
Raising your frequency may cause negative side effects and may cause you to feel worse before it makes you feel better. But even though it may not always feel like sunshine, gumdrops and roses, it is good for you!
Jack is 47 years old. Even at 47 years old, he has never had a real career. He is still working temp jobs. Because of this, he is always struggling financially and has never been able to buy his own house. Instead, every year he has to go through the process of finding a new apartment to rent. And because the prices keep going up, but his pay checks don’t, his lifestyle keeps going down and down. And when it comes to relationships, it seems like every woman who he commits to, eventually wants a better lifestyle. More than he can currently give them. But they feel like if they want to improve their life, it will be on their shoulders alone to do so and to drag Jack along, since he has no motivation and thus, provide that lifestyle improvement for Jack as well. Because of this, his relationships always devolve into him feeling like he is not good enough.
Jack is not fighting against this reality. He has accepted it. But having accepted it, Jack has slipped into powerless about it. Jack has decided that he can’t change it. Because he has decided that this is the reality and he can’t change it, he has decided that life sucks and that it is just going to keep sucking. He doesn’t want to put any effort into trying to make it different because he can’t face the idea that he might do that and nothing will change, enhancing his pain. So, telling himself that he can’t do anything to change it, prevents him from putting what little energy he has towards something and it creating no results. But the problem with this is that he has slipped into apathy. By the way if you want to understand more about apathy, you can watch my video titled: How To Cure Apathy.
Jack is passive to his own life. He does the bare minimum to get by and he spends most of his time escaping into video games and amateur league sports. He does absolutely nothing to try to change the reality that he is struggling financially and has no career and cannot offer a woman anything other than his company. He flips the polarity dynamic on every woman who he gets into a relationship with and makes her carry and provide for him, while he does nothing except show up to his temp jobs, play video games and sports. He has accepted the negative reality of where he is. He has added the meaning “I’m screwed then and can’t do anything to change it”. And he has stopped trying to bring about what he wants.
Blaine is 47 years old. Because he went into medical debt, he is currently working temp jobs. Because of this, he is struggling financially and he is living in his parent’s basement. The woman he is with has a stable career, but is always too stressed to be happy and is carrying more weight that he is financially. Because of this, she often says she feels like she is his mother rather than his woman. She is deeply unhappy about their life together. On a subconscious level, Blaine does not feel like he can handle facing any of this reality. It would make him feel so powerless, he might become like Jack. So, Blaine refuses to see, acknowledge or accept the painful reality of his life. Instead, he focuses only on positives. He reframes anything bad or negative that happens. And he acts according to the reality that he wants to see, rather than the reality that is. He wants the reality to be that he is not working at temp jobs because he knows he’s better than that. But he acts like this IS the reality and so, he tells himself and other people that he is a crypto currency trader by profession and despite making almost no money by trading, often turns down temp jobs he is offered.
He wants the reality to be that he can afford anything, so he charges things to his credit card and lives above his means. He wants the reality to be that he has his own apartment, so he finds one and lies about his income to get it. Of course, by doing all of this, he increases his debt. He wants the reality to be that he and his girlfriend are in a wonderful relationship. So, when she complains about their life together, he decides that she has just had a hard day at work and he settles her down by rubbing her feet. Because this usually puts her in a better mood, he does not think their relationship is in trouble and is absolutely shocked when one day, she breaks up with him and moves all of her stuff out.
Blaine will not see or accept any reality that causes him to feel bad about himself or his life. And so, he makes decisions and takes actions according to what he wants to see and wants to be real, as if it is already the case. When he does this, he is so out of reality and is living in such a fantasy world that only he occupies, that not only does he seem mentally ill sometimes, he also keeps hurting himself and other people. He makes the wrong choices and does the wrong things because he is not responding to what is real.
What you saw showcased in these two examples is the human tendency to go one of two ways when it comes to unwanted elements of reality. When it comes to the topic of reality, people make the mistake of either:
Accepting an unwanted reality and then sinking into powerlessness about it, so as to let go of what they want to be the reality instead. And so as to do nothing to change it into something better.
Refusing to see the unwanted reality and instead, acting according to the reality they want to have be true.
Both of these pendulum swing strategies get people into big, big trouble. The first strategy causes a person to give up on what is wanted and decide that life is pain and slip into the illusion of powerlessness. By doing this, you are no longer able to see what CAN be done. For example, the time that Jack puts into video games could be spent on learning a skill that might make him more money or on looking for and applying to different jobs. It is obvious to everyone else in Jack’s life that he is absolutely not powerless to making good money. They are constantly frustrated by his passive, apathetic behavior.
By using this strategy, you are in fact out of reality because you are not seeing the wanted or beneficial elements of reality that you could draw on and use in order to bring about a change. And you are not in reality relative to what you CAN do to create whatever it is that you are wanting. You are no longer an active participant in personal expansion. Expansion must then happen to you and despite you, which is a dangerous invitation. If you want to learn more about why not actively participating in expansion is a dangerous invitation, watch my video titled: Why it’s Dangerous to Stay in Your Comfort Zone.
The second strategy causes a person to slip into a narcissistic bubble reality. When a person is in their own reality, acting as if what they want to have be true is true in the here and now, they are alone and they make the other people in their life alone too because of it. This creates parallel perceptual realities, which destroys relationships. On top of this, it is to slip into not only denial, but also a form of mental illness. A person starts to behave in a scary way because they don’t perceive anything negative, such as dangers or risks or reality. It’s guaranteed that with this strategy, the person has no actual power because when they make decisions or take actions it is not a decision or action exacted upon what is real and so it will not have the desired effect.
Unfortunately, many modern spiritual beliefs have contributed greatly to this negative coping mechanism. Especially amongst those spiritual communities that are centered around the Law of Attraction. There is an idea floating around that to deny or not acknowledge the unwanted, so as to merely focus on what you want to have be true (as if it already is true) is how to manifest. This is not true. This is the way to become mentally ill and slip into a narcissistic parallel perceptual reality. Tools that help you manifest what you want to have be real (including visualizing things as if you already have them) must come with the willingness to also see reality and to see what is. To live an empowered life and to be able to create things in reality, you must be able to acknowledge what is (including the unwanted elements of what is) and also practice focusing on and taking action towards what you want instead.
Imagine someone came into a hospital and the reality was that they were internally bleeding, but you didn’t want that to be true, you wanted the reality to be that they are well. Now imagine that because of this, you acted as if they are well. You told yourself that their dizziness was because they drove to the hospital and just got motion sick. You told yourself that their swollen, tight abdomen was because they had gas. And you gaslit the crap out of them by saying that they are ok, sending them home with a Lolli Pop and a smile on your face. It’s easy to see that you are not mentally well. Not only that, because you were not in reality, you could do nothing to change the reality and thus were making yourself unnecessarily powerless. And not only that, you made the wrong decisions and did the wrong things and there were huge consequences for it.
If you use the strategy of pretending that what you want to have be real is real, you will make yourself unnecessarily powerless, you will make the wrong choices and take the wrong actions and there will be serious consequences to you and everyone around you. If you find yourself slipping into this second strategy, you would benefit by watching two of my videos. The first titled: Reality. And the second titled: The Most Dangerous Parallel Reality.
Both of these strategies find their roots in our early life experience. When we are young, and when we experience unwanted things, it is necessary to learn that we can do something about them, so as to have a better experience. When we see our parents doing something to actively change unwanted elements of their own lives as well as experience them acting as allies regarding changing the things that are causing us pain, we learn that reality does not imply that we are powerless to unwanted things. We learn a sense of empowerment about the things we don’t like in our life. And this empowerment gives us bravery to look at the unwanted aspects of reality and do something proactive to change them.
When we don’t have these early experiences, we often learn that no one can do anything about the unwanted elements of reality. We have a sense of powerlessness relative to things we don’t like about our life. So, we decide to cope with this sense of powerlessness in whichever way is less painful to us specifically… We either cope with this by accepting unwanted realities and succumbing to a false sense of powerlessness about them so as to focus on something other than creating improvement. Or we cope with it by refusing to see and accept unwanted realities and living in a dangerous fantasy as if what we want to have be the reality, is already the reality.
In this life, the ticket to an empowered life is to see and accept the reality… what is. This includes both the wanted and enjoyable elements of reality and the unwanted and painful elements of reality. One does not negate the other. And from there, to actively participate in the process of expansion by capitalizing on the wanted and enjoyable aspects, while proactively changing the unwanted elements into what we want instead. We are meant to see the reality (what is) and to actively bring about what we want to have be the reality (what we want). This causes not only expansion for ourselves, but also the people around us, human society, the world and the universe at large.
This process of continuously sorting through the contrast of this time space reality so as to transform the unwanted into what is wanted, means that we are constantly in the process of appreciating what is, while also continuing to create improvement. We let go of the idea that the goal is to get to a place in life where there is an ended-ness; because everything is perfect and there is nothing more to improve upon. We enjoy this game of exploration and change around consistent improvement. We begin living with the attitude of the better it gets, the better it can get.
Most of us reach adulthood with a burning desire… To be approved of, liked and loved exactly as we are. Those of us that grew up in dysfunctional families tend to struggle with this dynamic the very most. In dysfunctional families (and remember that most families today fall somewhere on the spectrum of dysfunction) the parents exhibit a behavior or many that are detrimental to themselves and to other members of the family. But they display an unworkability when it comes to changing that behavior. This puts every other family member in the position to continue to try to get them to change that thing about themselves and face consequences for doing so, or to accept and adapt to the dysfunction by enabling it. When they accept and enable it, leaving this person exactly as they are, they receive approval and positive feedback for doing so. The parent or caregiver feels loved. As a result, they learn that the definition of loving someone is appreciating a person exactly as they are and not asking them to change anything, even if what they are doing is detrimental to themselves, to the person and to others.
When we have to change ourselves so that someone else in our family doesn’t have to change and so that they approve of and love us, we feel bad about ourselves. We feel unlovable for who we authentically are. And we set out on a lifelong quest to be loved exactly as we are, without having to change anything… including what is dysfunctional about us. Ironically, we set out on a mission to unknowingly become the very thing that hurt us. We become inflicted with the very same wound that made our parents unworkable. And because that wound then makes us unworkable, we inflict the very same pain on the people in our lives that our parents inflicted on us as children. We damage them with our un-changeability.
Because our subconscious definition of love is to appreciate a person exactly as they are and to not ask them to change anything (even if what they are doing is detrimental to themselves, to us and to others), this is what we are looking for. We are looking to finally be able to be in the position that our parents were in with us when we were growing up… Where we have a person who demonstrates their approval and love of us by not ever disapproving of us. And by not ever asking us to change anything. We have decided that this is how to know if we are supported and loved. We want to be in a feel-good relationship the way we are, even if our behavior is not conducive to a feel-good relationship. We want our partner to make themselves compatible to us, even if they are not actually compatible to us. And we often decide that the ultimate testament of love is if someone is willing to be in pain so that we can have this experience. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: The “Suffer So I Can Feel Loved” Relationship Dynamic.
When we have this pattern, this desire gets in the way of self-development, personal expansion and making necessary changes that would make our relationships and life better. If we want to be loved exactly as we are and without changing anything about ourselves, seeing anything about ourselves in a negative light and consequently making changes to anything about ourself, seems to take us in the opposite direction from what we really want. So, we stay as we are. And by staying as we are, we become a new link in the chain of the same dysfunction that runs through our own family line. And our relationships become a repetition of the same dysfunction. This pattern is one of the hardest for people to put an end to.
So that you can understand this pattern better, here is an example. Weston grew up in a home with a father that was passive and took the back seat to his mother. His mother was super into control and got everything her way. In her home, everything had to be the way she wanted. This included how Weston dressed, behaved, when and how his needs were met and what his interests were. Weston was in a lot of pain about this. He was hungry, but couldn’t get food because his mother decided it wasn’t time for him to eat. He wanted attention, but couldn’t get it because his mother decided she didn’t want to give it and put no energy into finding someone who could give it to him instead. He hated the preppy outfits she made him wear. They were uncomfortable and he always had to keep them clean. He longed to wear lounge clothes. He loved to spend time exploring, but his mother put him on a regimented schedule. He loved music. But his mother thought that was a useless interest and enrolled him in academic interests, where he didn’t excel. When anyone had conflicts with her, there was no win-win to be found, she would simply get rid of the person. Weston watched her do this with his older brother, who was sent away from home to a behavioral modification boys camp when his behavior displeased her. And this led to Weston becoming conflict avoidant. Weston conformed to what his mother wanted. He felt he was not loved exactly as he is. But, as a result of changing himself to suit her, he became the golden child. He demonstrated his love for her by approving of her exactly as she is and changing himself, because she was unworkable. She would not change anything. In her mind, if her children were good and loved her, they would do exactly as she says.
Because of all of this, Weston is on a subconscious mission to find love. But not real love, his dysfunctional definition of love. He is on a mission to be loved exactly as he is and not have to change anything about himself and his behavior, even if it causes the other person pain. Recently, Weston moved in with his girlfriend Sahara. And Sahara is suffering. There are things that Weston is doing that is detrimental to himself and to her. When conflict arises, he refuses to engage and leaves the apartment. He spends all his free time listening to music and exploring places he hasn’t been to in the city instead of finding ways to improve their financial situation, leaving her to be the primary provider for the two of them. He leaves piles of things everywhere in the apartment because he hates to clean. His ill-fitting lounge clothes have holes in them and he wears them everywhere, even when it is totally inappropriate to do so. And she is pretty sure they don’t want the same things in life. Many of these things don’t only hurt Sahara.
Many of these things are actually sabotaging Weston’s success and preventing him from getting what he wants. There are negative consequences he is experiencing as a result of them. People don’t take him seriously or see him as professional because of how he dresses. He is stuck in a crappy financial situation and in an apartment he hates. He can’t have good relationships because he doesn’t handle conflict well. He is distracted and unfocused because of the clutter everywhere and is constantly losing things. And instead of finding a compatible relationship arrangement with Sahara, he is simply keeping things as-is, which means the emotional tension in their relationship keeps rising to the point where the relationship is mostly negative now.
Sahara is being more loving to Weston and one could argue, more in alignment with his own best interests than he is by recognizing that certain things that Weston is doing are working against his best interests, and by drawing his attention to the need to change them. But Weston refuses to entertain this notion. In his mind, if she truly loved him, she would stop creating conflicts, approve of him spending time on music and exploration, stop getting upset about finances, stop getting upset about the apartment being clean (or simply clean it herself) stop caring about what he wears and start focusing on all the ways they are compatible instead of harping on the idea that they might be incompatible.
Because Sahara gets upset with him about these things, he doesn’t feel valued or loved. He keeps insisting that if she valued and loved him, she would value and love him exactly as he is and would not ask him to change any of these things. He is being unworkable because of it. He refuses to change anything about himself. Weston has slipped into a withdrawn, surly attitude because he feels Sahara isn’t a good person because she keeps trying to change him. And he thinks that because she wants his to change, Sahara doesn’t really value and love him. Of course, this just serves to make the relationship worse.
Whenever Weston gets negative feedback about anything he does, he feels harmed, unseen, shamed and unloved. Recently, Weston attended a self-development seminar. And he hated it. When the speaker suggested that in order to get what he wants, he has to change himself, he disagreed and he felt insulted. He decided the speaker is not a good person. He thinks that the advice he got is the opposite of what he needs to do. All he was really looking for was validation. All he really wanted was advice about how to get what he wants while staying exactly as he is. All he really wanted was to be told how to get the experience of being valued and loved the exact way he is and without changing. When the speaker explained that to get different results, you have to be willing to change, he decided that the seminar wasn’t for him and simply didn’t return after lunch for the afternoon segment. Weston is thwarting his own self development. He is looking to stay the same. He is looking in the wrong places for validation and he is simply looking for people to approve of him exactly as he is and enable his dysfunction. But he is stuck in the illusion that this is progress and this is love. Weston doesn’t see things about his behavior as being dysfunctional and will not recognize them as being detrimental to himself and others, even though much of his behavior is dysfunctional and is detrimental to himself and to others. So, he feels it is self-hating and against himself to change them rather than self-loving and for himself to change them. He has become just as unworkable as his mother was. And now, Sahara is in the same position with him that he was in with his mother.
When we fall into this pattern, the reality is that we have decided on a subconscious level that someone only loves us if they support our dysfunction. We also fail to really make a conscious choice about what things we want to change about ourselves because they are detrimental to us and others and which things we want to stand for and embrace because they are beneficial to us and others. And in turn, this makes it impossible to properly assess compatibility in our life. We can’t assess our compatibility with places, jobs, situations, things or people. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: Incompatibility, a Harsh Reality in Relationships. When it comes to life, knowing (a) what you are willing to change (and why) and (b) what you are unwilling to change (and why) is critical. You need to know where you can and where you can’t be pliable in order to create the life you genuinely want.
To love yourself is to act in alignment with your own best interests. Changing something about yourself that is detrimental to yourself can be a profoundly self-loving act. To love someone is to take them as a part of yourself. When you do this, their best interests become a part of your best interests. You cannot be ok with them being in pain for your sake. And so, you want to either (a) change the thing about you that is causing them pain or (b) recognize that you are unwilling to change what is causing them pain and thus, must acknowledge incompatibility and act accordingly, so as to not keep them and you stuck in the pain of that incompatible situation. The more compatible we are with someone, the more they will approve of us exactly as we are. But love is something entirely different. Both love and self-development imply some degree of making changes to ourselves.
To generalize, even though death is an inevitable part of everyone’s life, people are terrified of looking directly at the reality of death. It is a subject we want to avoid. This attitude that we have towards death is detrimental to us in many ways. One of those ways that it is detrimental is that it prevents us from seeing life clearly. What anyone who has had a near death experience or who has lost a loved one will tell you is that death changes your perspective towards life and towards all the different elements of your life; most especially the people in it.
To view life and to view relationships from the context of death is both profound and meaningful. It has the capacity to change the way we relate to life and the way we have relationships. The sad thing is that we often wait for an actual death to confront us in some way for this way of looking at things to be forced upon us. We wait until either someone is on their death bed to communicate from this perspective or we end up too late and someone in our life has already died and because of it, we were unable to communicate to them from this perspective.
Today, I am going to present to you one of the most powerful relationship exercises you can do. Here it is: You are going to pick someone in your life. You can literally pick anyone such as your friend, a co-worker, a cousin, an aunt or uncle, a grandparent, someone who really impacted you either positively or negatively in your childhood, one of your siblings, your partner or one of your parents etc. I will tell you that this practice can create particularly profound shifts when you do it with one of your parents.
From there, put yourself in the perspective of either you being about to die or them being about to die. Pick whichever option puts you in a more lovingly, open objective perspective. Either way, know that just like when someone is on their actual deathbed, this is the last time you are ever going to see them in this lifetime. It is your very last opportunity to communicate to them. And from this place, you are going to write them a letter or speak a message to them… As if these are your last words to them. Let this letter flow intuitively from the core of yourself. But in order to help you with this practice, here are some things you might consider:
Who are you writing to? What is their personality? No two people will need or appreciate the same message. Personalize your letter according to who they are and their specific personality and needs. This will allow your unique relationship with them to shine through the letter.
How do you want them to feel? What is that lasting imprint you wish for them to carry with them regarding you and your relationship to them? Let this set the emotional tone for the overall letter.
What is your intention for writing this letter in the first place? Let this intention serve as the guide for how you write or speak it.
What tension between you needs to be resolved and what might you say on your end to resolve it?
What painful thing between you needs to be acknowledged? And what might you say on your side to reduce that pain between you?
What conflict needs to be put to rest or what closure needs to be created and what might you say to put it to rest or create that closure without denying any of your own needs?
What might you need to acknowledge regarding their pain relative to you or apologize for?
What might you need to explain so they understand it, without justifying yourself?
Do you have any cherished memories or moments you want to remind them of?
What do you love, admire and approve of about them authentically and honesty?
How would you want them to feel about themselves, you, your relationship and their life at the end of their life or yours? And what might you say to evoke that feeling within them?
What might you want to thank them for?
Might you want to communicate the objective story you are going to tell other people about your relationship with them in retrospect in order to give them a taste of your perspective about your connection over the course of time together?
What have they taught you or what did you learn from them?
What is it that they deeply need or want to hear from you? How might you give them what they want to hear from you in a way that is authentic and that does not hurt any aspect of you to express?
Can you see their vulnerability? How might you speak directly to and answer to that vulnerability in a safe and caring way?
Is there any question you want to ask them that would bring you closer to truly and compassionately understanding them?
Is there anything you need to reassure them about regarding themselves, you or your relationship?
What is left unsaid that must be said?
What could you authentically say that might bring them peace and solace? Is there any way you could let them off the hook for something in a way that does not hurt you in any way?
Make sure that nothing is left unsaid. And once you have written this letter, take that leap to be vulnerable by giving or sending it to them.
If you find that you are in a super angry or disapproving or negative mental and emotional place when you sit down to write this initial letter, and feel the need to confront them on their wrongdoings or make them see how much they hurt you, know that you can write several versions of this letter. There may be more than one layer to work through in order to reach the full truth of your sentiments about and to them. That being said, when someone is on their deathbed, at their most vulnerable, it tends to strip away these top layers and what someone is left with is what is deeper and what is more objective. It leaves you in a place of love. Love is not an up-beat, all positive state of affirmation. It is a deep, truthful, expansive state of closeness. This means, if you really genuinely put yourself in this perspective of having only this last chance to communicate to someone before you never see them again, this deeper more objective perspective about them and you and your relationship will surface.
I’m going to challenge you to not lie in this letter. One thing I notice when people are on their death bed is that people get emotional and want the other person to feel good and so, they lie just to make the other person feel good. They totally bulldoze parts of themselves when they do this. For example, a person may have been disowned or physically abused by their dad and say “You were a really good dad at the end of the day”. When that isn’t true. At the end of the day, they were not a good dad. However, that doesn’t mean that he was all bad. For example, this same person might say “I loved so much when you used to take us in the back of your Cadillac to the corner store to get candy.” And that is totally true and also not damaging to any part of themself to say.
The purpose of this letter is the same as it would be for you communicating a last message to someone right before they die. In general, what you are looking to do is to reduce tension, conflict and pain rather than to create it. It will surprise you how freeing this letter will be not only for them, but for you. And the profound impact and importance of communicating at this level when someone is still IN your life and alive, cannot ever be overstated.
In English, we call someone or something the “underdog” when they are the ones with less personal power than the other party involved in a situation. Because they have less power, they are thought to be at the disadvantage, have smaller status, have smaller chance of succeeding and are perceived to be the victim in the situation.
Human beings naturally support and root for the underdog. There are many reasons for this. For example, many of us feel vulnerable in the world. Many of us feel like we are at the disadvantage and like the odds are stacked against us. This makes us identify with the underdog and internalize them. Therefore, rooting for the underdog feels like rooting for ourselves. People love unexpected triumph. We love when people win against the odds. It gives us hope for ourselves.
Another reason is that power tends to threaten us. When someone has power, we fear that they might use that power to oppose our own best interests. We feel like they don’t need us. It also makes us feel less than them, all of which hurts our self-concept. So, we tend to want to see people with power lose that power. On the other hand, when someone does not have power, we feel both empathy and sympathy for them. We feel they need us and this enhances the sensation of there being an emotional bond between us and them. We feel morally good about ourselves for supporting them and we feel subconsciously above them. It makes us feel both right and good to support someone who is at the disadvantage. This boosts our self-concept. So, we tend to want to see people without power, gain it… just not too much of it that it then threatens us.
Another reason is that we subconsciously experience pleasure at the misfortune of others when envy is involved. We tend to envy the person who has more power, advantage, status, success and is perceived to be the victor. When we see that person lose their power, advantage, status or success, it decreases the pain we feel about what we lack and about our self-concept. We perceive the situation to be fairer, regardless of whether this is the case or not.
On top of all of this, one of the defining features of our species is care. This includes support for those of our species that are disadvantaged. A direct affront to survival of the fittest, we care for and support our weak, starting with our completely relationally dependent babies. It is not common to see the young, disabled, ill, weak or old of other species being picked off by predators, attacked by their own kind or left to die. When we hear this, we feel horrified. It’s not how we do things and it’s not what we believe is good and right to do. This species trait played a role in our species evolution. It is wired into us on a biological level.
In principle, there is nothing “wrong” with our natural affinity for the underdog. What we need to be aware of is that our natural affinity for the underdog leads to a kind of underdog effect whereby we become blind and fall prey to some pretty big shadows. And today, I’m going to list some of them for you.
First, we know that people root for the underdog. We can exploit this tendency. The fact that people root for the underdog gives us huge incentive to come across as the underdog in any situation where we want people to get behind us and support us. A person can act like the one who is at the disadvantage and is the victim, regardless of whether this is actually the case or not and others will fall for it. Any of you with siblings have probably experienced this one in action. A younger sibling acts the villain and initiates some kind of misbehavior. The older one, who is actually the victim in the situation, reacts to it. The younger one starts crying and yelling to come across like the victim to the parents in the house, because they know the parents will see them as the underdog. And they do. The parent comes in the room, immediately sides with the perceived underdog, which is the younger child, and takes action to guard the younger child and punish the older child without any attempt to assess what is actually going on. No doubt some of you have experienced the younger sibling taking a break between sobs to triumphantly stick their tongue out at the older one. This child knows they have won. And they have done so by exploiting this tendency in people to support the underdog. You may feel this kind of childhood behavior is fairly benign. But take that same behavior on into adulthood.
This behavior becomes a manipulation tactic that people use to try to stay safe socially and to try to gain the support of others. It is especially exploited when someone is trying to gain support for themselves at the same time as rally people against someone else. This is when the underdog effect becomes your biggest ally in your game of victim control. You can use the underdog effect to deceive others. You can do this to such a degree in fact that you can have all the power in a situation and you can do all kinds of terrible things to someone else in that situation, but as long as you don’t appear to others to have that power and as long as you appear to be at the disadvantage, you can deceive other people into seeing the other guy as the top dog and the bad guy. And so, people start to enable and support the person that is actually creating the problem. In layman’s terms, they unknowingly have been deceived into supporting the villain and going against the true victim in a situation.
So that you can get a clearer idea about this dynamic, I’ll give you an example. Joelle just recently moved into an intentional community. The intentional community was started by Tegan. Tegan is a healer by trade and is for lack of a better word, the matriarch of the intentional community. Joelle doesn’t like authority and thinks that everyone should be on equal ground. As a result, she immediately started getting into power struggles with Tegan. She started triangulating other community members against her, arriving to community meetings late, refusing to do the tasks that Tegan assigned her, taking every opportunity to compete with Tegan’s knowledge about healing, helping herself to Tegan’s essential oils, asserting that she had something better to do when she was invited by Tegan to socialize, and giving Tegan ultimatums regarding her needs.
One day, when Tegan was hosting a healing retreat, she was called away to take an emergency telephone call. When she came back to the group, Joelle had taken the liberty to take over the group and was answering questions and leading them through a yoga exercise. Later that night, Tegan, who was furious and at the end of her rope, confronted Joelle about her usurping behavior in front of the whole community. Joelle played the underdog card.
First, Joelle started tearing up and denied that she was in any power struggle with Tegan and in fact, asserted her deep respect for Tegan instead. In other words, she started by actively gaslighting. Then, she went on to explain how she had taken over the group as a favor to Tegan and thought she would be grateful for it because she had left them high and dry. And then she started crying about how hard it is to live in the community because she is new and doesn’t know her place yet and is always doing the wrong things by Tegan. The tactic worked. Most of the community members started feeling empathy for Joelle and started feeling like maybe Tegan was being unfairly hard on her. When she saw this new tactic working, Tegan snapped and yelled at her for pulling a victim control drama. But that only served to hand Joelle the win. The rest of the community members defended Joelle against Tegan and some of them started seeing Tegan in a different, more negative light. Joelle had succeeded in acting like the underdog to the degree that not only did she get away with everything she was doing to Tegan, she also managed to manipulate Tegan’s intentional community out from under her as well and rally them around her instead. Of course, they were all pawns in a power game that was just won by Joelle against Tegan. But they were too blinded by the underdog effect to see it. They thought they were protecting Joelle, the underdog and victim from Tegan, the top dog and villain. When the reality was the other way around. To learn more about the way that people use the dynamic of victimhood to their advantage, watch my videos titled: The Victim Control Dynamic (Escaping Control Drama in Relationships). And Anger and The false Villain Dynamic.
The underdog effect enables us to let ourselves and other people off the hook, when we and they should not be let off the hook. And at the same time, put all the pressure and accountability on the shoulders of whomever we perceive to be the one with more power. There is a tendency for people to give others a pass when we perceive them to be at the disadvantage, weaker, have smaller status, have smaller chance of succeeding and/or when we perceive them to be the victim. We don’t hold them accountable for what they do or don’t do. We have a soft spot for perceived weakness. It is a psychological fact that the more mistakes someone makes, the more likable they are perceived to be. And the weaker someone is perceived to be, the more people tend to develop a protective affinity for them. Because of this, we feel compassion for them and relieve them of accountability in a situation. We put all the pressure and accountability on the other guy. And we enable dysfunction when we do this.
So that you see what I mean, I’ll give you an example: Miriam is married to Dirk. Dirk is a very aggressive man with a rage streak. He regularly beats his kids. Miriam is terrified of conflict and doesn’t feel capable of leaving Dirk and living out in the world alone. So, she stays and tries to make her kids behave in a way that prevents Dirk from getting angry. Most people will give Miriam a pass because of her weakness and fear and lack of character strength. But her actions had severe negative impact on her children. She enabled and acted as an accessory to their abuse for years. She was a bystander. She kept them in an unsafe environment. She actively supported and maintained dysfunction to the detriment of everyone involved.
I’m going to ask you the following questions and I want you to seriously think about them: Is someone accountable for their weakness? For their limits? Is someone accountable for their lack of personal power? For the character strength they lack? For their failures? For their mistakes? Or are these things an automatic pass?
If the answer is yes, then people will keep using them as an excuse both for what they do and for what they fail to do. We have to seriously consider this because there are VERY real consequences for these things. We can definitely have compassion for someone who hurts other people with these behaviors. But should that absolve them from their responsibility and accountability and should it absolve them from the consequences of their actions or inactions? Consider that to take responsibility for one’s own weakness and limits and mistakes is to not put oneself in a situation in the first place where that weakness or limit or mistake is going to have real consequences for oneself or others.
All too often, we fall into the trap of letting a person off the hook (who is the one that is actually accountable) because they are perceived as weaker and therefore the underdog. And with that, we fall into the trap of placing the accountability on literally any other person around him or her that is stronger, more capable and who seems to have more power.
The underdog effect can cause us to run the risk of making the people around us and our own human society weak. If other people’s power threatens us to the degree that we want people to stay just powerless enough to not be a threat to us, we keep other people down. We keep them small. If we experience pleasure when people who are at the advantage experience misfortune, we subconsciously wish for each other to experience hardship and we slow the progression and advancement of our own species. If we enable and defend weakness, lack of character strength and failure, we are ensuring that it will not only continue, it will grow. If we fail to see other people’s power and fail to reflect it to them, we will fail to help them to step into their power. We are condemning them to powerlessness. If we see the person who lacks power as the automatic good guy, there will always be incentive to stay the victim, to stay powerless or at the very least, feign powerlessness and victimhood as a manipulative tactic. If we only identify with and internalize the underdog, we will remain disconnected from and ignorant of the aspect of ourselves that is more powerful and is at the advantage. The underdog effect can cause us to act as an oppositional force to our own expansion, the personal expansion of others and the expansion of society. It can cause us to thwart our own progress as well as the progress of others.
So when you root for the underdog, just make sure that the underdog effect doesn’t get the better of you!
In today’s world, people operate from two different paradigms in their relationships. Either they build their relationships on the foundation of compromise. Or they build their relationships on the foundation of compatibility.
To compromise is to settle a dispute/conflict or reach agreement or alignment by way of mutual concession. Remember that to concede is to yield, give up or give away something you value. To compromise, by definition, is to accept something that is lower than is desirable. In any relationship, there will be times when for example you say: “I want to eat at a Mexican restaurant” and the other person says “I want to eat at a Chinese restaurant” and you agree to going to Chinese, because in that moment, what genuinely matters more than what you eat is that the other person feels happy or because in that moment, you’re really hungry and what you eat is not really that important to you. But these kinds of every day concessions aren’t really compromise because in that moment, relative to things like this, you are not giving up something of value and you are not accepting something that is undesirable. You will not feel pain when you do this.
When we build our relationship on the foundation of compromise, we believe that it is loving to concede relative to the big things. Things where we are accepting lower than desired and we are giving away something of value. You will feel pain when you do this. But you will think that the pain of compromise is how you know you love them. And you will think that the pain they feel as a result of compromising is them loving you. And often, if people are particularly conflict averse, they will give in and expect others to give in like this for the sake of maintaining harmony in the relationship.
When you build a relationship on the foundation of and around the belief in compromise, you believe that while it’s great to have compatibility, love and will power can make most relationships work. This means that when it comes to the big things (such as what other people might consider serious incompatibilities) you truly believe that if a person loves you and in order for them to be right and good, they must give in to some degree and take a little pain for the sake of the relationship and your happiness. And you expect the same thing from yourself as well. There is a lot of give and take in your relationships. You may believe in meeting other people halfway. And you genuinely believe that compromise is necessary for a healthy partnership, rather than having your own singular happiness at heart. You believe in mutual sacrifice.
Compatibility on the other hand is when two things are able to exist or occur together in a state of harmony and without conflict. If two things are compatible, their co-existence is beneficial and ads to the wellbeing of each of them. Whereas incompatibility is when two things cannot exist or occur together without creating conflict and without being a detriment to one or to both of them. Compatibility is not about sameness. Sameness could spell compatibility or incompatibility. Compatibility is about creating the right arrangements with people and putting people in the right place in your life according to their boundaries (personal feelings, thoughts, desires, needs, behavior, truths etc) and your boundaries (personal feelings, thoughts, desires, needs, behavior, truths etc). Compatibility is about agreement and alignment being reached by finding a win-win scenario for both parties, where neither must give something of value away or take pain for the other’s sake.
When you build your relationships on the foundation of compatibility, you don’t believe in giving in when it comes to anything in a relationship that will cause you to feel resentment, frustration or pain; or that will compromise your sense of personal wellbeing. You don’t believe in mutual sacrifice. You don’t believe that balance in a relationship is about meeting half way. Instead, you believe that loving someone means making sure they are not in pain. And them loving you means making sure that you are not in pain, even if that means that you cannot be with a person in a certain relationship arrangement because of it. Therefore, you also don’t believe in having your own singular happiness at heart. But you don’t believe in sacrificing your singular happiness for the sake of the other person’s happiness either. And you believe that in order for a person to be right and good, they must be willing to look at the incompatibilities that are causing pain and be willing to find a different, more compatible arrangement for you both. You believe in symbiosis rather than give and take.
When people build their relationships in two different paradigms and base their relationships on two different foundations, it spells disaster. The disaster of one person’s relationship paradigm being based in compromise and the other’s being based in compatibility, can be seen in conflicts in every kind of relationship. Two siblings might base their relationships in these two separate paradigms. So might two partners, two friends, two colleagues etc. And it leads to a very similar pattern every time. It leads to one person feeling like they are in a relationship with someone who only cares about themselves (because that person expects them to accommodate and sacrifice and be in pain and oppose their own best interests for their sake). And the other person feeling like they are in a relationship with someone who only cares about themselves (because they are totally unwilling to meet them halfway or concede and have to have it their way and are willing to end the relationship instead of give in a little).
For the sake of enhancing your understanding, I’m going to give you an example. Tom and Melissa had been dating for three months. They have now entered into a committed relationship. Melissa bases her relationships in compromise. Tom bases his relationships in compatibility. But neither of them knows it consciously. There is trouble in paradise as you would say. Melissa and Tom are having issues because Tom is a flirt with a very rich social life. At every opportunity, he meets up with his friends and attends social events. When he enters the room, he is the center of attention and he is smiling and laughing and chatting everyone up. He is in entertainment mode. Melissa feels she may as well not even exist. Melissa is much more introverted. She wants a partner that wants to be with her one on one. She doesn’t want Tom to look at, much less talk to any other women. She is happiest when Tom is with her at her home, with her dog and just having quiet, intimate time together. Because of this, the resentment and frustration between them is growing.
Tom sees this as a serious incompatibility. He has tried several times to suggest different arrangements so they can reach a win-win. For example, he has thought about reserving two days of the week to be with her at home one on one, which isn’t a sacrifice for him because he would like that. Any more than that however, and he would start to resent her. He has thought about getting her a e-course on how to overcome social anxiety. He has thought of every possible way to make her experience when she is socializing with his friends and networking more fun for her. He has thought about having an open relationship so that she can have an introverted man who will stay with her at home, but they can still meet each other’s needs and benefit from each other’s romantic company. But Melissa told him that this is not an option. She would simply end the relationship with him for that other man. And now, Tom is at the point where he has told Melissa that they might not be right for each other as partners at all and may need to just be friends. Tom feels like Melissa wants him to prove how much he loves her by choosing to give up what make him happy for what makes her happy. The fact that she would feel pleasure as a result of him giving up something important to him makes Tom distrust her and question whether she is a good woman or emotionally dangerous.
Melissa can hardly believe what she is hearing. She feels like she might just be waking up to the fact that she is in love with a narcissist. She sees Tom as totally inflexible. She yells at him that he is a ‘my way or the highway’ kind of person and that he will never be able to have relationships because of it. She thinks that Tom continues to show a lack of flexibility and an uncompromising nature. She does not understand why it is so hard to just meet in the middle. Her idea is that she will accept the idea of him going out half of the week if he promises not to flirt or talk to other women. And the other half of the week, he can be home one on one with her. And what makes Melissa furious is that unlike Tom, she has already made all kinds of compromises to make him happy. She left her dog at home alone on several occasions to go out to some social gathering or other with him. She made food for him a bunch of times when she didn’t feel like it, so that he would feel satisfied. She didn’t see her family on Christmas because she gave into going to his parent’s place instead. To her, this is feeling like a one-way relationship where the universe revolves around Tom and where everyone else is expected to concede, but he never will. Besides, Melissa believes that a good man does not flirt with or talk to other women or fail to pay attention to their own girlfriend at social get togethers. She firmly believes that he needs to heal out of this behavior.
Tom and Melissa are operating from two totally different relationship paradigms. Tom has no idea that Melissa is compromising in the relationship so often. He doesn’t actually expect that and he wouldn’t actually be ok with it if he knew she was doing this. In his mind, he is trusting that if she says yes to something, it is because she is genuinely happy with the decision she is making, otherwise, she would not go along with it. Melissa has no idea that Tom does not even believe in compromise. He will not give up anything that is important to him. He will not do anything that might cause him to resent her. And this is why he is being like he is being. In her mind, it is obvious that compromise is what makes a relationship work. And if she knew that he didn’t see this and therefore planned to never compromise, she would second guess their entire relationship. One thing is for certain, it is a waste of time arguing over the specifics of the conflict they are having around their social lives when the real issue is that they don’t even operate from the same relationship paradigm and therefore, are looking in two totally different directions for the solution.
Often in conflicts that have their roots in this dynamic, you will find that someone who is operating from the relationship paradigm of compromise will come across like a codependent and someone who is operating from the relationship paradigm of compatibility will come across like a narcissist, regardless of whether this is actually the reality or not. It’s important to separate out these relational styles from these two relationship paradigms. A person could very well be either and adhere to either relationship paradigm and a person could very well be neither and still adhere to one or the other relationship paradigm.
If you are curious to learn what I think about compromise and compatibility in relationships, you might want to watch two of my videos. The first titled: Why You Should Never Make Compromises in a Relationship. And the second titled: Incompatibility, a Harsh Reality in Relationships.
If it seems like you are in any kind of relationship with a person who is operating from a different relationship paradigm, set aside the conversation about the specific conflict you are having. And instead, switch the attention to a conversation around the fact that you are operating from two different paradigms. One of you believes in compromise and the other doesn’t and so you are pulling in different directions for a solution, thereby only enhancing the feeling of unworkability on both sides. It is time to examine and question your own relationship paradigm as well as the other person’s so as to consciously arrive at a relationship paradigm you can stand for, hopefully together. It is so important to get into the same relationship paradigm with your partner. If you don’t, every argument you have with them will be fruitless because you don’t even agree upon the way to go about having a successful relationship in the first place. You will be unknowingly fighting for two different outcomes. All this being said, can you recognize which relationship paradigm you operate from?
Over the course of our lives, we develop a sense of self. We discover what we like and don’t like. What we value. What we think and feel. What we really want. What other people think about us, etc. We form our self-concept. But sometimes this process of development is interrupted. And when this happens, we never form a strong sense of self. It is as if our core is missing. And this creates all kinds of problems in our life, most especially in our relationships.
In childhood, some people grow up in environments where the reality is to have a self that differs from others is unacceptable. It implies unsafety, rejection, disapproval, isolation, the withholding of needs, punishment etc. They adapt to this environment and cope with it by giving up any aspect of themselves that is in conflict with the person they need to feel aligned with. They suppress, deny, disown, reject and try to change these parts of themselves so as to establish confluence with that specific person… Usually the one who holds the power regarding their needs.
To imagine confluence, think about two separate streams of water coming together to flow together as one stream. As the waters mix, you can no longer tell which stream is which stream. In this state of being, the two waters are relaxed, in accord, in harmony and are flowing in an easy-going kind of way. The opposite of conflict. Confluence is a blissful state of being. A profound togetherness. And to generalize, people desire and seek confluence. But not no matter the cost. When confluence becomes dangerous is when it becomes a coping mechanism or social strategy that a person uses, no matter the cost to themselves. They develop the pattern of feigning confluence where confluence does not actually exist, simply to avoid what they fear will be the result of conflict. They become inauthentic and give up their personal thoughts, feelings, desires, needs, preferences, values and whatever else for the sake of achieving confluence. Which is not true confluence. And it is by doing this that they slip into the Human Hyphen Pattern.
The Human Hyphen Pattern is when a person is so committed to confluence as a coping mechanism and relational style that their persona changes in accordance with whoever their primary attachment figure is. Therefore, you will see many different versions of them and not know what the truth of them actually is, separate from whomever their current primary attachment figure is. They are like a living breathing hyphen. For example, if Justin exhibits this pattern and he is with Rachel, you will not be meeting Justin. You will be meeting Rachel-Justin. And if he is with Sarah, you will be meeting Sarah-Justin. And Rachel-Justin and Sarah-Justin are VERY different men. Because each is simply a reflection of the specific woman he is with. Each is what she wants him to be and what he must be in order to be in confluence with her, even though he will fight you that each new version of him is the “real him”. The reality is, with the Human Hyphen Pattern, the only access a person has to a sense of self is when they are alone. The minute they are with another person, especially someone they want togetherness and harmony with, their lines between ‘me’ and ‘you’ begin to blend.
So that you can understand this pattern better, I’m going to give you two examples. Brody grew up in a household with an incredibly domineering mother. She had mirrors and paintings that she had drawn of herself all over the house. She had no interest in children. In fact, the reason she had children was to secure the specific man that she wanted. Brody grew up knowing that the universe revolved around his mother. It was her way or the highway. She ignored Brody. The reality is that the only way he could ever get her attention or stay safe was if he was doing something that met her needs or enhanced her ego. As a result, he wore the clothes that she picked out for him. He behaved exactly how she wanted him to behave. He adopted her views on everything. He stopped doing anything he liked that she didn’t approve of. He validated her, even when a little voice inside said that he didn’t agree. He said yes, even when he wanted to say no. He made himself into a male version mini-me, despite considerable pain to himself. But as a result, unlike his brother who failed to find a way to please her and who committed suicide, some of his needs were met by her. It was his only chance at emotional survival.
Subconsciously, Brody has learned that he has to choose conformity to have a relationship. And he does this so naturally, it is terrifying to watch. But to Brody, the belief that conformity is what is necessary to have a relationship is so painful, he lies to himself. Each time he ends up in a relationship with a woman and he changes like a chameleon, he tells himself and everyone else that the new version is who he really is. That he is getting more authentic to who he really is with this new woman and that anyone who can’t accept that, can’t accept the real him. But his friends have been through this with him so many times, they know it is BS.
Brody was in a relationship with Tori. Tori was a very driven girl. She was obsessed with self-help and had big goals for herself. She was a super social go-getter with leadership qualities who loved skiing and cooking. When Brody was with Tori, he was business oriented. He wore his hair short with no facial hair and dressed in business attire. He spent time self-reflecting and figuring out his own patterns. He was a very positive and easy-going man. He was very social and spent lots of time in the kitchen and reveled in living in the snow.
When Tori ended the relationship with Brody, he ended up in a relationship with Jocelyn. Jocelyn loved travel, leisure time and horses. She had a strong sense of right and wrong, should and shouldn’t. She believed that people should be approved of exactly as they are, not changed. She had a small group of friends, but preferred to spend most of her time one on one with him. When Brody got into a relationship with Jocelyn, he grew out his beard, gave up his business attire for outdoor clothing, cut off all his friendships to focus solely on her and her friends, started looking after her horse, despite having a severe allergy to horses, quit his business-oriented job to start his own business in the travel industry where he could take weeks off at a time to do leisure activities with Jocelyn. He started suddenly expressing strong ideas of what is right and wrong, despite having been such an easy-going person before. And he suddenly got into intense conflicts with the people he knew from his time with Tori over their belief that life is about growth and change. Suddenly, his new belief was that he should be loved and approved of exactly as he is and that personal development was both abusive and a waste of precious time on earth. He told himself that because they kept trying to tell him that this new version of him was not ok, they never really loved him and he never really belonged with them. In fact, his time with them was abusive to himself. Seeing them as the bad guys with Jocelyn and himself united against them only served to further enhance the feeling of confluence he so desired to have with her.
Brody has paid a heavy price for that confluence. And of course Jocelyn has no idea that he is so lost in a detrimental and inauthentic relationship pattern that one day, she herself will fall victim to. Instead, she thinks she has finally found a compatible man. Brody becomes some version of whomever he is in a primary relationship with. So no one, including himself, really knows what the actual truth of Brody is.
Cindy grew up in a very large family. A family with so many siblings and with such busy parents that life was chaos. And there was no way to feel like she mattered and no way to gain a sense of intimacy with anyone. She had no reflection and so, she did not develop a strong sense of self. As a result of all of this, she was emotionally deprived. When she was seven years old, she finally met a friend and for the first time, she had someone who cared about her. This friend wanted to be close to Cindy and wanted to make Cindy just like her. This friend encouraged Cindy to get the same hair cut as her, to get into girl scouts just like her and to become obsessed with cats just like her. Cindy did so and felt a kind of heaven in being just like someone. She modeled her movements and mannerisms and speech patterns and interests and everything after her friend. She finally had someone to do this life with. She had figured out how to be able to get someone to be intimate with her and be together with her and pay attention to her. She had figured out how to matter to someone… Be just like them.
Cindy now exhibits this pattern in her relationships with men in her adult life. Derek was a red neck from Nevada. When she was with Derek, she was a proper red neck woman who got into spin fishing, wore camo pants, a trucker hat and bleached the tips of her hair. She picked up smoking. She listened to country music and she temporarily gave her daughter over to her mother’s care.
Then, Cindy got into a relationship with Camden. Camden was a good Mormon boy from southern Utah. When she was with Camden, suddenly she was dressing in conservative blouses and skirts. She died her hair a tasteful blonde and curled it to make herself look classier. She moved into a family-oriented neighborhood with him and didn’t just start going to church. She decided that her life revolved around relief society meetings. She no longer listened to music. She brought her daughter to live with her again and modeled her behavior after the perfect stay at home mom. Baking cookies and doing crafts and making sure to teach her daughter about morally appropriate behavior.
Then, Cindy got into a relationship with Seth. Seth was a Harley rider from Colorado. When she was with Seth, suddenly she had died her hair black. She wore tight jeans and midriff shirts. She went from adhering to Mormon values and judging everyone who didn’t, to being a self-proclaimed beer connoisseur. She quit her job and started working for Seth at his garage brewery. She used to be a volleyball player. But her volleyball team learned they could no longer depend on her showing up because she was busy riding motorcycles most nights and, on the weekends, instead. And her daughter found herself alone in the house with her new step sister (Seth’s daughter) while their parents were out of the road.
Cindy’s family has distanced themselves from Cindy. She doesn’t have any long-term friends. Her entire social group gets replaced every time she is in a new relationship. And her family has learned that there is nothing you can count on with Cindy. It is better to just watch the charade from a distance. Cindy loves to tell herself that every man she gets into a relationship with is a Narcissist because she always ends up feeling like she can’t “be herself” with them. But the reality is that they aren’t actually Narcissistic. And all a man has to do to be considered a Narcissist by Cindy, is to have a solid identity. Because Cindy immediately conforms to any man she is with so as to feel a sense of confluence. But then later blames them for having lost herself, when they never pressured her into changing in the first place. They simply reveled in how compatible to them she initially appeared to be.
The reason that the Human Hyphen Pattern is so difficult to break free from is because of this: When you develop a codependent relational style, which the Human Hyphen Pattern is part of, you genuinely want that sense of closeness and harmony and confluence with someone. That is authentic. You want it so badly that you are willing to be inauthentic to get it. Therefore, when you are inauthentic, but get what you authentically want as a result of being inauthentic, your internal guidance system will tell you that you are in alignment with your authenticity, even if you are lying. To understand more about Codependency, watch my video titled: The Truth about Narcissism and Codependency.
Relational styles are so second nature to us, they are difficult to change. They become a kind of default for us and we slip into them without really realizing it on a conscious level. But realize it we must. Because staying stuck in the Human Hyphen Pattern will prevent us from every truly being authentic and honest with ourselves and others. It will make finding a truly compatible partner impossible. It will make it impossible to create a life that is right for us. And it will make it so that we will leave a trail of tears in our wake.
Consider that if you are giving something up or are suppressing, rejecting, denying or disowning something in order to feel that sensation of confluence with someone, you may very well be slipping into the Human Hyphen Pattern. You may be setting yourself and other people up for pain. The confluence that you feel, is not true confluence. It is illusion. And it is deception. And your relationships will only progress if you learn how to have yourself and have other people too.
When we are children, we are completely relationally dependent. What I mean by this is that we are dependent on other people to get what we need and what we want. We are born into a social system where we learn that our best chance of getting other people to meet our needs and fulfill our wants is to create incentive for them to do so. We learn that we must please them. If the people in our lives are displeased with us, if they don’t like us and don’t love us, they don’t act as allies to our wellbeing. They either ignore us or act as adversaries to our wellbeing. Because of this, we adopt the subconscious belief very early on in our lives that being approved of, liked and loved by others is the pre-requisite for getting what we need and want.
The process of socialization trains us that the most important thing is to be perceived as good. If we are perceived as good, we will be approved of. People will like us and as a result, we will get what we want for it. For example, being a good girl or good boy = getting that cookie you want. I like you = I will invest in your success by giving you the support you need to succeed at that goal you have.
By the time most of us reach adulthood, the concept of being liked and the concept of getting what we want is so linked in our heads that we spend a lot of our energy in our adult life trying to be liked by other people, specifically so that we can get what we want. But a key step we must take in order to succeed, is to separate these concepts from one another.
So that you can understand what I mean, I will give you an example.
Jake is an aerospace engineer. He is so interested in aviation that his entire existence revolves around it. Many years ago, Jake was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. He struggles to understand emotional situations and tends to say the wrong thing whenever someone is upset. People don’t find him empathetic. He is also very hypersensitive and controlling about his environment and this uptight behavior means they can’t relax around him. Jake is not what many people would consider to be a generally likable person.
Since Jake was 12 years old, he has always had his heart set at getting a job as a propulsion engineer at NASA. At his current company, he works as team lead on a large team with other aerospace and mechanical engineers. Recently a team conflict has arisen around a new design concept. Jake acts no different than usual during this conflict. He starts acting robotic and spaces off instead of listens. He becomes argumentative and inflexible and starts throwing facts in people’s faces. In response, his entire team organizes to escalate the conflict and complain about Jake to Jake’s boss. They have a team meeting with his boss behind Jake’s back. When Jake is called in to talk with his boss about the way that the team feels about him, Jake experiences a complete existential doom. He feels like his future is suddenly bleak and he has a meltdown. He storms out of the building and rushes home and ends up curled up under the table in his kitchen wanting to die.
What is happening with Jake is that the conflict made him feel like he will never be liked by people. And if he will never be liked by people, he will not be recommended to NASA and the people at NASA will never see enough value in him to say yes to having him on their team. He has adopted this belief from his life experience. Jake doesn’t realize that likability is not the pre-requisite for him being such a good aerospace engineer that he will be recommended and valued enough to achieve the position he has his sights set on. His desire to be liked must be separated from his desire to be a propulsion engineer at NASA. Separating them will make it so he can see all the ways for him to get what he wants, rather than sinking into the powerlessness of thinking that what he wants is at the mercy of other people linking him; which is something he does not excel at. If Jake realized that he could get what he wanted even if people didn’t like him, he would feel immediate, deep relief.
Think about what you want in your life, especially think about that thing you want desperately. And I want you to ask yourself: Am I making being approved of, liked or loved the pre-requisite for getting that thing? What if being approved of, liked or loved is NOT the prerequisite for getting that thing?
Being approved of, liked or loved and getting what you want are two separate things. There is the potential of course that what you want is to be approved of or to be liked or to be loved. And if this is the case, you can go directly for it, as a separate desire from the other things you want in your life. You can pursue it as if that is the end goal in and of itself. But so often, when you ask the question: Why do I want to be approved of or liked or loved, it is because you think that being approved of, liked or loved will get you something else that you want. You will find that you are making it the pre-requisite for that thing you want. So often, wanting to be approved of, liked and loved is a “so that”. To understand more about the problem with “so that” thinking, watch my video titled: If You Want To Be Happy, Don’t Do This!
You don’t need to worry that dropping the need to be approved of, liked or loved, as your venue for getting what you want, will make you a total asshole that no longer cares about being nice to others. That only happens if don’t care about other people and are only being nice to others so that you can get what you want, which is a totally separate topic. You also don’t need to worry that separating the concept of love from the concept of getting what you want will make you an unloving person. The practice of love is the practice of taking another person as a part of yourself. It has nothing to do with getting what you want. Love is also a whole separate topic.
There is an incredible freedom and empowerment to be found in questioning whether being approved of, liked or loved is the pre-requisite for getting what you want or not. Considering that it isn’t. If you knew that it wasn’t, how might you go about getting what you want instead? As a result of doing this, your options for getting what you want open up and multiply significantly. Trying to make other people approve of, like and love you ceases to be your only venue for the actualization of what you want and at the same time, it ceases to become the barrier preventing you from what you want. It starts looking like simply a bonus.
Hi there,
Let me take a moment to explain my process to you. In other words, my method for helping people to improve their life experience. It is my hope that by understanding my process, you can decide whether or not it is something that you are ready for and whether it is right for you.
Let’s say that someone wants to improve some aspect of themselves or their life experience. The first thing we do is to identify what the problem is. We identify what is not working for them. Usually this will be a thing that is creating pain or suffering in their life. Sometimes, it can be hard for people to identify and admit to what the problem is, even when it is causing them pain. Some people may even be in denial about it and attend my seminars and seek help despite saying things like “My life is fine. I have a great life.” When this is the case, I will help someone to admit to what the problem is and help them to come out of denial about it. And depending on the person, this may involve some confrontation. The first part of the process requires a person getting to the point where they are able to own what their problem is and look at it directly.
Next, we will identify the cause of whatever is not working for them. The cause of the problem. There is always an origin to our problems. There is a “when this started and why it started”. You can’t hope to solve a problem unless you understand when and how and why it started. I approach a person with the attitude of: It isn’t what is wrong with you, it is what happened to you. Usually, this process of identifying the origin of the problem involves a person looking deep into what happened to them over the course of their individual past histories and seeing clearly how these key experiences led to them making specific decisions and adopting specific beliefs and behaviors and taking specific actions. All of which may be contributing to their problem today. During this part of the process, we find the root of the symptoms that are manifesting in a person’s current life.
The root cause of the problems we face in our adult life almost always occur before we exit the time period of our childhood where we are operating from a state of felt perception and enter a phase where we begin thinking about the world. This transition happens for most children around age eight. So, this means that my process involves looking at your childhood experiences, and primary relationships, including the ones that are negative and traumatic. If you are afraid about the danger of false or implanted memory, I want you to be aware that you do not need to worry about false memory and you do not need to worry about implanted memory when you are engaging with my process. Memory can be extremely reliable, a veritable recording of the past. Memory can also be distorted, contaminated, constructed and destructed. Human memory is both more capable and more incapable than we would like to make it out to be. It is incredibly complex. This is why, when it comes to my process, I encourage people to stop thinking in terms of true of false all together and instead, think in terms of VALID. Regardless of whether or not a memory is a perfect replica of what happened, it is valid. It means the mind is trying to communicate to us through actual memory or through symbolic memory about what is unhealed within us and what needs to be resolved either way. Memories don’t come up for no reason. Relative to your memories, it is no one else’s place to decide what is true and what is false. That is for you, yourself to come to terms with. But figuring out what your being feels is unresolved and bringing resolution to it is essential, otherwise, we remain stuck in the past, we operate from determinism rather than from our free will and our past will simply repeat itself in our adult lives until we resolve it.
Your past experiences are formative. They shape the structure of your personality, how you engage in relationships, how you behave in different situations and how you perceive and experience the world. When we are in pain because something is not working for us, we have to be willing to identify it and change it. To resolve the traumas and the thoughts, words and actions that we developed as a result of them that are keeping us stuck. And doing that changes everything.
All this being said, there is something important to understand. We live in a universe that is multidimensional. People are not straightforward. They are multifaceted. The process of identifying the root cause of a problem, so as to figure out how to fix it in a universe that is multi-dimensional and with a person who is multifaceted means that the problem someone is dealing with may be multilayered. It may be something we need to address in a specific dimension. There may be several elements feeding into one problem. And these elements may need to be addressed on many different levels as well.
For this reason, I use an unlimited amount of awarenesses, tools and methods and approaches to identify and gain awareness of the root of a problem. I also use an unlimited amount of awarenesses, tools and methods and approaches to solve that problem. This is because there is no “one size fits all” equation to a problem. What there is, is trends. So that you can understand what I mean, one person may have a problem that is the result of trans-generational trauma. Another person might have a problem that originated when they decided to adopt a specific protector personality in response to a trauma in their childhood. Another person might have a physical ailment that is manifesting because of a specific painful relationship pattern that is currently occurring in their life. Another person might be suffering because they simply lack a certain bit of information that would change the way they experienced life. If I approached each of these issues with the exact same tools and in the exact same way, it would lead to poor results. Some need to be addressed on a mental level. Some need to be addressed on an emotional level. Some need to be addressed on a physical level. Some problems need to be addressed on a spiritual level. The reality is that we are spiritual beings living a temporary, human experience. There may be problems that need to be addressed on a purely mental or physical level… Problems that don’t have anything to do with spirituality at face value. But there is no way to live an integrated life when we deny this entire dimension of our lives. And sometimes, the key to someone’s life improvement and healing can only be found on this level of reality.
To give you a very small taste of some of these tools and methods that I may choose to use to help someone either gain awareness of the problem or solve a problem, I may for example decide that they should use The Completion Process or any number of meditation techniques or shadow work exercises or somatic experiencing or parts work or breathwork or display work or The Connection Process or Trauma Release Exercises or core belief work or channeling or integration processes or work with subconscious patterns or stream of consciousness exercises or presence work or shamanic ceremony or therapeutic art or journeywork or discussion etc. etc. I offer many of these awareness’s, tools and methods to the public totally free through my free YouTube videos and also through my books, e-courses, products and workshops.
Once a person identifies what the problem is as well as the root cause, we identify what they want instead. This is like identifying point A and point B. It may sound hard to believe, but a lot of people struggle because they know what they don’t want. But they don’t know what it is that they do want. That is like having a map, but with no destination point, only a starting point. When people decide what it is that they want, there is a kind of gap between where they are now and where they want to be. I help people close that gap. And closing this gap implies identifying what it is that is preventing them from doing so. In my line of work, we call this ‘resistance’. I work with a person to help them to resolve their resistance to any part of this process of closing that gap between the current unwanted condition and their wanted state. At first, this may strike you as odd. When would anyone have resistance to what they want? The answer is: Any time you have not already achieved it. If a person has not already achieved something they want, there are oppositional forces at play. To give you just one tiny example, a person may say that they want a romantic relationship more than anything. But they may have a belief that they will lose themselves in a relationship and they may never really leave their house to socialize. In this case, the person’s belief and actions are in resistance to what they want. That resistance must be resolved and released for this person to actually be in a romantic relationship. During this part of the process, we look at the resistance to the change and resolve it, which is necessary to get from where they are to what they want. Doing this closes the gap between where they are and where they prefer to be via thoughts, words, and actions.
My process puts people in a point of conscious choice. They can choose to not change and to instead continue on as is, keeping their point of view, patterns, past dynamics, and the way they do things. Or they can choose to make a change and actually make those changes. Sometimes these changes simply happen spontaneously as a result of any step in this process. Sometimes, these changes require more conscious discipline.
We can use our awareness to make different decisions, change our beliefs, see the world in a different way, alter our behavior, and do different things. I don’t want people to engage in this process with the attitude that they must change themselves because something is bad or wrong about them. I want them to engage in this process of changing themselves and making changes to their life because doing so is self-loving. If something is causing you pain, it can be profoundly self-loving to change it. When done from this intention, changing things within yourself and in your life is something you do FOR yourself rather than against yourself. What all this means is that signing up to my process implies that you want to make a change to yourself and to your life and that you are willing to do so. If a person does not want to become aware of what their problem is and does not want to change themselves or make changes to their life, this work that I do is not the right choice for them to make. This process is only right for people who are willing to change themselves and who will own their choice to change themselves as being their choice. It requires you to take responsibility for what you want to change and what you are willing to change.
By making these changes, a person will then be standing in the improved state, having made different choices, seen a new perspective and taken different actions, thus changing themselves and their life for the better.
I want to mention that if at any point in this process, emotions come up, they are treated as valid, important and as messengers of personal truth.
Now that you have a better idea of my process, let me add a few things.
My process is a very deep healing process. It is not a process to simply make you feel good. Ultimately, we all want to feel good. But if you value feeling good above everything else, you will struggle with my process. The reason is, sometimes to get to a place of improvement, you have to face and do some pretty hard things. For example, imagine that a two people married each other out of obligation and their current life is miserable because of their relationship. A person may be able to come in and teach them a tapping technique to sedate their reactivity to one another or a therapist may be able to make them feel a little better by having them practice four positives for every negative. These are pain relieving techniques, a bit like Novocain. But there is a difference between pain relief and actual healing. For actual healing to occur, they would have to first look at the truth that they married each other out of obligation and that the marriage is what is making them unhappy. That is both scary and painful. Then, they would have to go through the process of deciding what to do about their relationship. Assuming that during this process they decided to evolve their relationship to something else rather than a marriage, there are several elements of their life that would have to change and that they would have to face. Things like dividing up assets, dealing with other people’s opinions and projections, stepping out into a different life etc. so that one day, they can officially say that they love their life so much more than they did before. Sometimes my process feels really good to do. But sometimes it is a hard and really uncomfortable journey to genuine improvement.
Another thing is, most people are smart enough to be able to change the things they see are not working for them. When people can’t seem to get improvement, it is because there is something that they don’t see and don’t know. There is something that is subconscious. My process requires you to venture into the realm of the subconscious. Deep into what you don’t know that you don’t know. Because of this, you will be challenged to consider things that you do not resonate with. For something to ‘resonate’ with you, it must be something that you are already somewhat conscious of. For example, imagine that a woman has deeply suppressed anger. Everyone else may be able to see that anger. But if I tell her that she is angry. She is likely to look at me and say “that just doesn’t resonate with me. I’m not an angry person.” She will feel like she is holding on to her sense of autonomy and personal truth by asserting that she is not angry. But by doing so, she doesn’t realize that she is forfeiting the opportunity to heal and get what she wants. It will feel scary, but to begin to explore anger when she gets this reflection from me, is to gain self-awareness and to come more into a place of consciousness and therefore free will and choice. It is for her to have the chance to actually heal.
My process is hard because it can challenge and change the narrative of yourself and your life. It can cause your worldview to change. It requires facing reality. It requires you to see things about yourself and your relationships and your life that may cause you to feel shame. The truth is not often easy to swallow or face. It causes you to see all the ways your current life has been built on inauthenticity. It implies changing yourself and your life, which is something that people naturally have a resistance to.
The reality is that everyone would benefit by this work. But that does not mean that everyone wants it. In fact, if you are not really wanting this kind of process I have described, engaging in it can feel traumatizing to you. If you are one of these people, who does not really want this kind of process, you can keep it on your list of options and try out other options instead.
All that being said, given that the process of genuine healing is different than pain relief, and is therefore sometimes painful before it is good, you may be asking why it is worth it. It is worth it because it will free you. It will make it so you are not stuck anymore. It will give you tons of awareness and knowledge, which will put you back on track and you can carry that awareness with you for the rest of your life. It will restore you to a state of congruence and wholeness. It will relieve you of the heavy weight of your past traumas. It will cause you to make changes so that your life is actually one you want to live, rather than one you need to develop coping skills to deal with. It will fill your life with meaning and cause you to live a life that is both real and in alignment with your values. It will line you up with the kinds of relationships you have always wanted to have in your life. It will cause you to create a life that is authentic to you. It will get you what you truly want in life and so much more.
As soon as people learn about the Law of Mirroring (what many call the Law of Attraction) they begin asking the question: How am I a match to this? They begin to recognize that their own personal vibratory energy field and consciousness brings in certain people, places, things and experiences that vibrate at the same frequency. Essentially, your external life experience is a reflection of something within you. For example, imagine that as a child, you were abandoned and that abandonment is not healed within your consciousness. That means you are still a vibrational match to abandonment later in your life. Or for example, imagine that you are someone who does not consider other people’s best interests, only your own. You will be a vibrational match to other living beings that do not consider your best interests, only their own.
You will also see it happen that when someone experiences something unfavorable, a person who knows about the Law of Mirroring will automatically ask them “how were you a match to this?” Of course, when you do this to someone else, it is unattuned and also has a connotation that as if the pain of the experience isn’t bad enough, on top of it, they somehow brought it on themselves and is therefore their fault. But, the tendency for people to ask this question has revealed that many people have a huge misunderstanding about the Law of Mirroring (also called the Law of Attraction).
With this idea that you must be a match to something in order to experience it, comes the idea that the more conscious you become, the more control you have over your reflection and therefore, the less unwanted things you experience. Essentially, people seem to think that the day will come when a person doesn’t have any negative experiences and if they do, it suggests that there is something un-healed in them or wrong with them or that they did something to bring it on. There is also an idea that if you are conscious enough and control and heal and purify your vibration enough, you will no longer be a match to negative experiences, only positive ones. As if the contrast of life somehow no longer applies to you. And this is not true.
Contrast is the breeding ground for expansion. With no contrast there is no expansion. And everything in life has contrast. What this means is, everything has an upside and a downside. Everything comes with wanted and unwanted elements. This does not change no matter how conscious you become.
At face value, the Law of Mirroring is simple. It’s just the principle of reflection at work. It is an exemplary construct for self-awareness and therefore awareness in general. However, people over simplify the Law of Mirroring by thinking that it is only one thing that is reflecting. For example, they think the only thing that is reflecting is what they, themselves are or do. When this is the case, when they say “how are you a match to this” they are implying that you are or you do the exact same thing as the other person does in whatever scenario you are in and are therefore ‘getting a taste of your own medicine’. Or for example, they think that the only thing that is reflecting is childhood trauma that is still active vibrationally speaking. When this is the case, when they say “how are you a match to this” they are implying that you have an unhealed childhood trauma that is un-healed and that is reflecting yet again in your adult life. Or for example, they think that the only thing that is reflecting is what they think and believe. When this is the case, when they say “how are you a match to this” they are implying that you have some core belief or way of thinking that is reflecting as an experience.
Any of these things could be the case. In fact, all of them could be the case. So many other things could be reflecting or said another way, could make you a match to what you are experiencing. To give you a short list, some of the things that could be reflecting both positive and negative as a specific experience are: Your beliefs, what you are currently thinking, your resistance, your desires, your feelings, the reality of the choices you made, unresolved traumas, positive memories, ancestral patterns, personal truths, lies you tell yourself and others, things you are avoiding, pre-birth intentions etc. It may be of interest to know that universal orchestration and assistance is a match to you by virtue of your desires being reflected. But the reason that your life experience is so complex and varied is because so many things are being reflected at once.
The intention for those who have projected into a time space reality based on the Law of Mirroring is that they use it to do a 1-2 step. The idea is that you look at and fully perceive these reflections and become more and more aware by doing so. And then with that awareness, decide what is consciously wanted and consciously create that. When this happens, the reflection changes. The problem is that you have a camp now of people who only use the Law of Mirroring construct to become more and more aware, but never use it to consciously create what they want and deprive themselves of happiness by doing so. And on the other side, a camp of people who ignore the reflection, depriving themselves of awareness and instead, only using it to create what they want to see.
And all that being said, you need to understand that having accepted that there will always be contrast that comes with anything, choices will make you a match to certain contrast whether those choices are conscious choices or not. And sometimes, the only way to ensure that you will not experience a certain contrast is to make a different choice all together. For example, making the decision to participate in life on planet earth, you are going to experience gravity. Or for example, making the choice to be a surfer means you are going to get cold and wet. Or for example, making the choice to be in the public eye means that you will experience projection, be critiqued and be judged. Or for example, making the choice to be a parent means you are going to experience the pressure of the wellbeing of another life depending on you.
I’m not saying that if you choose to be a surfer that you just need to accept that you will be cold and wet and leave it at that. In fact, expansion is so often about experiencing the specific unwanted thing that comes with a specific choice and working to alleviate that unwanted element. Meeting with the contrast that comes with a specific choice in this way creates improvement.
For example, this is why surfers have wet suits now. But a surfer should not get wet and cold and ask “why am I a match to this” as if it is expected that they could, if their vibration was high enough, still surf, but not get wet and cold. If this person decides they do not want to be wet or cold at all, it isn’t going to work to try to work on thoughts or beliefs or feelings or traumas or whatever so as to be able to surf and not get wet or cold. They must make the choice to no longer be a surfer. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences.
It is important to understand what so many people do not understand about the Law of Mirroring (also called the Law of Attraction) … Choices make you a match to certain things. And so, even though it would benefit you to consider any and all things that may make you a match to a specific person, place, thing or experience, recognize what contrast you are experiencing simply because you made a choice that lined you up with it. When this is the case, often the only way to not have that experience is to make a different choice entirely.
I want to tell you about a man. This man was the son of an unwed mother. He was left at a home for unwed mothers until he was two months old, that is until his young mother’s father decided to bring him and his daughter to live with him. He was then raised to believe that his mother was his sister and subjected to physical and psychological abuse. He became a very shy child and he had a speech impediment. As a result, he was the target of bullying. Despite all this, he became the Methodist youth fellowship vice president at his church. He took jobs cutting lawns and delivering newspapers. As an adult, he aimed his sights at success. He made sure to dress professionally and develop a sense for high quality. He became friendly. He developed amazing social skills. He was incredibly intelligent. He had a swift sense of humor. He studied the law. He got a degree in psychology. He got heavily involved in politics. He saved the life of a friend’s nice when she nearly drowned. He also saved lives when he worked on a crisis hotline. He also became a good skier. This man is Ted Bundy. An American serial killer and rapist. One of the most notorious criminals of the late 20th century.
I want to tell you another story. This time about a woman who was dangerously devout. She would go on to demanded that a divorce and remarriage ban should be part of the constitution. And yet hypocritically, showed public support for the divorce of one of her powerful, influential supporters the same year. She was vehemently against contraception. As well as women’s rights to body sovereignty. She called abortion “The greatest destroyer of peace today”. She opened care homes where hygiene was terrible. Needles were re-used. And disabled children were often tied to their beds. She forced baptisms there regardless of the individual’s wishes. Her main goal was not to be a social worker, but to promote Christianity. In fact, she said “There is always the danger that we may become only social workers… Our works are only an expression of our love for Christ. Her charity, which got millions donated annually went to the catholic church rather than to her care homes, which stayed in extremely poor conditions. She was often criticized because despite not having money for supplies, the walls of the care homes were covered with her pictures, like a shrine to herself. She believed that suffering brought you closer to God. This is Mother Theresa, the prominent and revered humanitarian considered to be a female saint.
I want you to notice how in both cases, you were thrown into a state of cognitive dissonance. Notice how the minute that you learned it was Ted Bundy we were talking about, all of his compassion inducing and positive traits seemed to suddenly be negated and not count. Notice how the minute you learned it was Mother Theresa we were talking about; you became uncomfortable and suddenly the positive feelings you felt about her seemed to be poisoned?
The reason this happened is because all of us struggle with dichotomy. We have an inability to hold dichotomy. As people, we struggle with grey. We want things to be black and white so we know what to do with them. It is a coping mechanism. We can’t seem to wrap our minds around the idea that nothing and no one is all good or all bad. And one does not negate the other…
That there is contrast in everything.
Part of awakening and expanding one’s consciousness is developing “And Consciousness”. To acknowledge nuances. To be able to perceive and integrate dichotomies. Doing so, evokes the feeling of being torn between two extremes or seemingly opposing truths. It feels a lot like being stretched. This stretching is a feeling that often implies that personal expansion is occurring. In the moment that we acknowledge a contradictory truth or state of being and expand wide enough to be able to hold both, as if holding both is ok, we have dis-identified with both extremes. We have ceased to become either or and instead have become the thing that is holding both. By holding both, instead of aspects of our self being separated by them, we have created a state of integration or wholeness within our being. To learn more about this, I encourage you to watch my video titled: And Consciousness (The Modern Day Replacement For The Middle Way).
Until people have made a practice and mastery of this, and are able to hold dichotomy, you will see this all good or all bad thinking. You will see it in every biased and slanted media story. You will hear it in the way people describe other people in their life. You will notice it in your own perception. People will continue to demonize and glorify, condemn and praise. And twist any information they come across to suit a black or white narrative.
This tendency can even go so far as “splitting”. Splitting is simply a magnification of this protection mechanism that people have, where they view things as all bad or all good. Splitting is the result of the perceived inability to manage all of the positive and negative qualities of others, yourself, situations, life and the world. When we can’t manage the mixed feelings, confusion and anxiety inducing chaos of positives and negatives (especially dichotomies) we ‘split’ things into ‘all good’ or ‘all bad’ camps in our own consciousness. It is a form of fragmentation relative to our own perception. In a moment that we do this, we see a thing, ourselves, another person, a situation, the world, or life as all good or all bad. We slip into all or nothing thinking. Either we are amazing or garbage. Someone else is either a monster or a saint. Things are either always or never happening. We love something or hate it. We start to see things as absolutes, with no middle ground. And what makes splitting so incredibly obnoxious as a coping mechanism is that it is so inconsistent. It tends to swing from one extreme to the other. We may be perceiving that a person is wonderful and good and then one thing happens and it is as if that perception is entirely washed away and suddenly, all of that positive experience is gone. We have no access to it anymore. And instead, we perceive them as entirely destructive and bad. To the opposite, we may be perceiving that life is always a completely negative nightmare. And then something happens and it is as if the sunlight enters our perception and suddenly, we feel good about life. And life is going great.
Splitting often involves our memory. This means when we are in “all good mode” relative to something, we only have access to positive memories about it. And when we are in “all bad mode” relative to something, we only have access to negative memories about it. A variation of this is that we may twist our positive memories into negative ones or twist our negative ones into positive ones in order to fit our ‘all good’ or ‘all bad’ narrative.
If you find yourself struggling with dichotomies or contradictory information or mixed feelings, ask yourself and answer honestly: What would be so bad if both were true? What would it mean? And why would that be so scary? For example, if a person was faced with negative information about someone that they consider a really good friend, they might ask themselves this question and the answer might be: I won’t know what I can and can’t trust them with. I can’t keep myself safe if I can’t predict them. Then ask yourself, How might you accommodate for or alleviate that fear?
If a person chooses one extreme or the other, it is because something is keeping them safe in being in that extreme. Looking at the other perspective invites the perception of unsafety. For example, seeing a person as a monster and not looking at the positive aspects of them, may keep a person feeling safe because it means that by contrast, they are good. If they are good, it means they are lovable and will line up with positive things instead of meaning that they are defective and will line up with painful things. Or for example, seeing your mother as all good, makes you feel safe because it means you can trust her and you don’t have to be on guard or feel the pain of separation from her that often occurs when you notice negative things about someone. So, figuring out how being stuck in a specific extreme keeps you feeling good/safe is an important part of developing AND Consciousness.
If you catch yourself slipping into black or white thinking, for example if you notice that you feel that someone is all bad or all good. Or if you start to perceive your world as going totally black. Or if you hear yourself say “always” or “never”, consciously look for whatever information brings you to a more objective, complete and whole view. For example, if you have been sucked into a negative view of yourself, deliberately look for positive things about yourself. If you hear yourself say always, deliberately remember times that were an exception to the rule. Not to negate your current perception, but to add to it.
You may need to do something to bring yourself out of fight or flight mode first. When we are in fight or flight mode, the part of our brains and bodies that can execute objective thinking is disabled. We need to notice how we really feel and from there, regulate our nervous system in order to not let our distress trap us in an all-negative thinking state. Or alternatively, we need to notice the reality of the unsafety we feel and regulate it, so as to not let ourselves be trapped in an all-positive denial state because we are trying to cope with our distress.
Black or white thinking is a form of cognitive distortion. It is to miss the whole, objective view of something. So, challenge yourself to hold dichotomy.
Knowing your truth and being and living in alignment with your truth is a critical part of creating a happy life. If you don’t know your truth and live according to it, you will never create a life that is right for you. You won’t make the right choices for yourself, you won’t find people who are actually compatible to you, you won’t speak the truth, you won’t do what is right for you to do. And you will unintentionally gaslight everyone.
The downside of the process of socialization, which all of us go through when we are young, is that it teaches us that some things are acceptable and some things are unacceptable. This includes truths. When there is something that is true for us or true about us that falls into that unacceptable category for the specific social system that we are born into, we feel shame about it. We are trained to suppress, ignore, disown, reject, hide and deny that truth. We do this so effectively for the sake of our own survival, that we don’t just hide our truth from other people, we hide it from ourselves. And by doing so, we lose touch with our own truth.
The thing is, just because we do this with a truth doesn’t mean that truth goes away for us. In fact, it still shows through in different ways, causing us to send conflicting messages to others. Throwing them into a state of cognitive dissonance and even causing them to feel gaslit by us.
To gaslight someone is to sow seeds of doubt in their mind that makes them question their own sense of personal truth and reality (things like memory, judgement, perception, feelings etc). It is to try to convince someone that what they see, they didn’t see, what they hear they didn’t hear and what they feel they have no reason to feel. To learn more about gaslighting, you can watch my video titled: Gaslighting (What is Gaslighting and How to Heal From It).
If we are ashamed of a truth we have, we will go to great lengths to suppress, ignore, disown, reject, hide and deny it. We will fail to do so completely. And so that truth will still shine through. As a result, we will be a walking contradiction. We will gaslight people with what we say vs. what we do and how they see and experience us.
To help you understand this dynamic, I will give you a couple of examples. Joel was the son of a single mother who was very young when she had him. She had a pattern of getting into a new relationship and getting pregnant each time, only to be abandoned by the new man. As a result, Joel ended up with 5 siblings, each with a different father. Joel’s mother lived off of the government. As a result of all of this, Joel spent his childhood taking on responsibilities that were not age appropriate. His childhood experience gave rise to an extreme desire to not have any responsibility, most especially for anyone else. The truth is, as an adult, he wants to be guided, provided for, protected, taken care of and for someone to take responsibility for him. But Joel lives in a society that says this desire is wrong. That the only way to be a real man and to be respected, is to be responsible and to guide, protect, provide for and take care of others. So, Joel is ashamed of his truth to the degree that he tries to deny this truth.
In the beginning of his relationships, he does this quite well. But he can’t keep it up for long. Eventually, the façade of the responsible man can’t be maintained because it isn’t the truth. And he starts acting passive, manipulatively setting up situations where he has to be taken care of, refusing to step up and take responsibility for things and making other people provide for him. People soon experience the truth about Joel. But because he continues to say that responsibility is everything and that he wants to take care of others and protect them and provide for them, everyone around him starts to feel gaslit.
Cala is a woman who was raised and lives in a Muslim community. Cala has never fit in very well. The truth is that she is opinionated, driven, competitive, strategic and achievement oriented. She loves the feeling of personal success and she loves wealth and money. But, her society frowns upon these character traits in a woman. Cala feels ashamed of who she really is. So, she does her best to become the model woman according to her society. She does her best to practice charity, be obedient, devote her time to helping other people succeed and tell herself and her children that money must not be a distraction from what truly matters. Because this isn’t the truth of her, Cala is a very confusing person to be around.
One minute, Cala will show up to someone else’s house with food when they are going through a tough time. The next, she will erupt in exasperation about having done it. She chose a life with a husband and had two little girls. But she resents parenting them and once she gets them off to school, she spends most of her time trying to be the best at her own personal hobby, singing. Cala professes to not care about money or status. But she swoons over designer hand bags and gets into conflicts with her husband often over her tendency to buy only the highest status products, regardless of their unjustified cost. She is constantly competing with the other women in her community regarding how she looks and what she has that they don’t and what she knows that they don’t who she knows that they don’t. Cala’s husband is constantly confused and frustrated by her. She acts like she hates their life together, but leads him to believe the opposite. The other women in her community often talk behind Cala’s back about how “snake-like” she is. Mostly because it feels to them like she simply feigns friendship, when really, she is treacherous.
The reality is that Cala would be much happier and a much better person if she simply owned the truth of who she really is and found an environment and social setting that welcomed that truth. The truth is that Cala would make a kick ass business woman and would excel in a setting that celebrated her strategic, achievement-oriented character. In fact, people would find her much less frightening if she were unapologetically the way she really is, as opposed to her trying to cover up who she really is and coming across deceptive. Because Cala is ashamed of the truth of herself, she unintentionally gaslights other people. People can tell she is one way, but she goes to great lengths to have you believe she is another way.
All this being said, there is such a thing as intentional, conscious gaslighting, which is a form of psychological abuse. But there is also such a thing as unintentional gaslighting. When two people are stuck in a parallel perceptual reality, this unintentional gaslighting can happen. To understand more about that, you can watch my video titled: The Most Dangerous Parallel Reality. But unintentional gaslighting can also occur when someone is so ashamed of a truth that even though you may be able to see it, they are still in the process of trying to deny it. Therefore, if you find yourself in a situation where you start to feel like someone else is gaslighting you about themselves, consider that this might be what is happening. And that you won’t get the actual truth unless 1. You make the truth they are trying to deny ok for them to have. Or 2. They get brave enough to own that truth, regardless of potential consequences.
In modern society, anger is the emotion that is disapproved of the very most. In fact, it is so disapproved of that if someone gets angry, people do not see it as an emotion that the person is experiencing and expressing. People see it as a character or personality defect. The reason that people disapprove of anger is because anger implies conflict. And so many people see conflict as bad and wrong.
The thing is, people are wrong about anger. Anger is a reaction to perceived powerlessness. It occurs when someone opposes a boundary you have (a boundary being a personal truth of yours, a feeling of yours, a desire of yours, a need of yours or one of your best interests). This opposition induces pain. And for those of you who have recognized fear as being related to anger, fear is one form of pain. The anger will escalate to rage when the person who has opposed the boundary shows unworkability and therefore increases the person’s powerlessness regarding being able to get out of pain.
For example, imagine that one of your personal boundaries is that you need a partner who is available. But your partner withdraws. This will cause you to feel pain. If you feel powerless to getting your partner to be available, you will then get angry. And if your anger does nothing to discourage their behavior and encourage a positive change in their behavior, and they continue to be unavailable, they are demonstrating unworkability. It is then likely that the anger will escalate to rage. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Anger Hack (What To Do When You’re Upset).
When a child is little, the child needs to know that mom or dad is an ally, not an adversary. If the child’s desires, needs or best interests are opposed by something the parent does or doesn’t do, the child gets very scared and feels especially powerless to their life experience. The child does what he or she can to make sure that his or her parent is allied with him or her. The child gets angry to discourage future opposition, disconnection, unavailability or whatever other behavior the parent is exhibiting, which is threatening to the child. Knowing this, what is interesting is that if you look closely at the genuine purpose behind anger, you will see that it acts to promote a social bond, not to disrupt it.
If a parent loves the child and does a good job parenting, he or she will feel a deep motivation to make the child feel good and secure. Therefore, the parent will respond to a child’s anger by re-establishing alignment with the child, and by being an ally regarding restoring the child’s sense of security and wellbeing. This child grows up with a healthy relationship to their own anger and sense of self. This child will grow up to have healthy boundaries. However, if a parent does not love the child or does a bad job parenting, he or she will turn against or withdraw from the child’s anger. A hostile parent will use the child’s anger against them. This parent will become defensive, belittle or punish the child for being angry in the first place and make it clear that the child’s anger has nothing to do with something they are doing to oppose the child’s boundaries. Instead, the child’s anger means something is wrong with the child. An unavailable parent will use the child’s anger as a reason to withdraw further and to become even less available. The message to children in these kinds of households is clear: You can do nothing to get me to behave differently, no matter how much it hurts you or scares you… You just have to put up with whatever I do or don’t do. Or else, YOU are the problem.
The person who grows up in this kind of household will learn that anger itself is the problem, that it destroys relationships and weakens bonds, that anger is bad and wrong, and that whoever is angry is the bad guy. And this opens the door for a very upsetting pattern within human society.
There is a rule of thumb currently that the one that gets angry is seen as the problem. The one that gets angry is seen as the one who started the conflict. The one who gets angry is seen as the one that is bad and wrong. And the one that gets angry is the one that loses in the end. No matter whether this is actually the reality or not. And the sad reality is that other people can use this rule of thumb as a smokescreen for themselves. A person can employ all kinds of dysfunctional, destructive behaviors and be seen as the good guy no matter what, as long as they don’t get angry and the other person does. In today’s society, anger can make a person who is not the actual problem in a situation be seen as the problem. It can make a person who is not in the wrong be seen as the one in the wrong. It can make a person who did not start the conflict be seen as the one who started the conflict. It can make a person who is the true victim in a situation be seen as the villain instead. And I call this ‘The False Villain Dynamic’.
So that you can understand this dynamic better, I’m going to give you a couple of examples.
Jodie runs a salon. She is a driven, assertive, intense personality by nature. This personality is what allowed her to get so much success. Tatiana has just taken a job at the salon. Tatiana isn’t actually content being on the bottom of any totem pole. She wants to run her own salon. But she hasn’t yet done what it takes to strike out on her own. She doesn’t like the idea of Jodie or anyone calling the shots, even in her own salon. Tatiana wants to do things her own way, even if doing so goes against the best interests of Jodie and her salon. The reality is that Tatiana took a job at the salon and immediately started a power struggle with Jodie. She started being two faced. She was friendly to Jodie’s face but behind Jodie’s back, she went to work complaining to all the other employees about Jodie and doing her best to find out whatever small grievances the other employees had about Jodie, so she could fan the flames of those grievances and triangulate them against her. She would also play power games in other ways, like going over Jodie’s head to negotiate taking certain clients for herself that Jodie had given to other stylists. And confronting Jodie in front of every other employee about the idea that Jodie should offer them all better benefits. And generously helping herself to the beverage refrigerator intended for salon guests at the end of the day.
One day, this entire situation came to a head when Jodie and one of the other head stylists confronted Tatiana before the salon opened about her defiant behavior. Tatiana immediately took the opportunity to run out of the office and out into the salon, where the other stylists were prepping their stations. She picked a place where everyone could hear what was going on. She started crying and explaining through her sobs about how much she was going through in her life and about how unfair it is that everyone’s needs and feelings and ideas come second to Jodie’s. Jodie could see the compassion and defense that Tatiana was trying to elicit from the rest of the stylists. The manipulative power tactic behind the move made Jodie furious. So, she blew up. Instead of acting sympathetic to Tatiana’s tears, as the other stylists expected, she started yelling at Tatiana and confronting her further on her damaging behavior. The rest of the stylists fell for it. They saw Jodie as a narcissistic tyrant and Tatiana as the obvious underdog that was getting picked on. A few of them even stepped in to defend Tatiana against Jodie. The tactic had worked. Tatiana was able to use Jodie’s totally justified anger as a smokescreen for her own problem behavior. And the rest of the stylists had fallen prey to the false villain dynamic. As a result of Tatiana’s behavior, three of Jodie’s stylists quit. Her relationship with several others remained tense for years. And when Tatiana quit, she got to walk out the door feeling justified that she was Jodie’s victim and keep telling the story like that to everyone she met. When the truth is in fact the other way around. To understand more about this dynamic, you may want to watch my video titled: The Victim Control Dynamic (Escaping Control Drama in Relationships).
Another example is that Mason is in court in the middle of a custody dispute. Mason’s ex-wife still feels so personally insulted by the fact that Mason wanted a divorce that she wants to get back at him in any way she can. She has decided that the best strategy for doing so is to try to get full custody of their children. So, she starts to create a parental alienation dynamic between Mason and the two children they share. Soon, both of his kids become hostile and spiteful towards him and start criticizing him despite the fact that neither of the children can rationally justify the way they feel towards him. They start using adult language and phrases to describe their issue with their father because those are the things they are being told by their mother. On the other hand, they start to think that their mother can do no wrong and is both the victim and the saint in the scenario. They also reject every extended relative that is related to their dad’s side of the family. Mason’s ex-wife is brilliant at strategically making sure that she comes across in a way that makes her look like a good person. She has already managed to dupe the court appointed family therapist this way. At one point, when Mason is confronted about a new untrue allegation that his wife has made, he can’t take it anymore and he loses his temper. He yells in the courtroom “This is complete bullshit. She’s just making this shit up.” His ex-wife celebrates. In fact, she smiles. But the Judge misses it. He is distracted and upset at the outburst. It takes his ex-wife’s lawyer two seconds to jump on the opportunity to reinforce in the judges’ mind that his client’s desire to take the children away from Mason is justified and also what any good mother would do, given that Mason is prone to endangering the children with his rageful outbursts and uncontrolled behavior. And the courtroom actually falls for it. Their resistance to anger has made them fall for the false victim dynamic. The judge now has doubts about Mason’s emotional and mental stability as a father. And the outburst confirms the false narrative that Mason’s ex-wife has conveyed to the court appointed therapist. The outburst has made both the judge and the court appointed therapist biased, which will affect Mason’s future court appearances as well as the outcome of the case.
In our society today, a person can get away with all kinds of negative things by capitalizing on society’s collective resistance to anger. Our dysfunctional relationship with anger can make us blind to the actual problem and to seeing who is creating the actual problem. And this will continue as long as people continue to have such a dysfunctional relationship with anger. It will continue as long as people allow themselves to be duped by the False Villain Dynamic.
I’m going to start out this teaching with a story. Logan is a man in his 30s. He was born to parents whose marriage was not a good one. Neither of his parents wanted to look at their own dysfunction or unsavory personal truths. As a result, they focused on what was wrong with Logan. For example, when his father didn’t feel inclined to dedicate any quality time to Logan and spent time in his garage working on cars, instead of seeing that the issue was his lack of desire to show up as a father, he made Logan the problem for being needy of his time and attention. And when Logan’s dad would get explosively angry at him, his mother would make excuses for it and tell Logan he had to change so as to not make his father upset. Instead of seeing that the issue was her own relationship insecurities and how they led to chronic conflict aversion and enabling of really destructive behavior in her husband, she made Logan the problem for not tiptoeing around his father and not preventing family conflict. Logan became the family problem. As a result, his self-concept went into the trash can. He saw himself as inherently bad and because he couldn’t seem to change that about himself, he spent his life torn between really wanting to be light and good but at the same time, embracing his darkness and badness as if that were the truth of who he was. He fell into the only crowd he related to. He covered his body in dark and aggressive tattoos. He spent his time listening to heavy metal music. He hung out every day at a grungy motorcycle repair shop. He got into fights regularly. And he got addicted to meth.
Logan made an appearance one day in his twenties to a family camping holiday. He was dreading it. Sure enough, about one hour after arriving, Logan’s dad started criticizing his life choices and they got into a verbal yelling match. The argument got so heated that Logan’s father got into his caravan to drive off. Everyone was so focused on the intensity of the conflict that they had not noticed that Logan’s two-year-old niece, Josie was playing in puddles in back of the caravan. When Logan’s father angrily put the car in reverse, he backed over his own granddaughter. They tried to give her CPR and mouth to mouth. But she was declared dead on the scene.
Needless to say, this tragedy ripped the family even farther apart. Logan blamed himself for what happened. He could never get over what happened. He spent the next ten plus years of his life pushing against the past. I mean all of it. He obsessed over what he should have done differently as a child and in his teens and on that day that his niece died. He obsessed over how his family should have been different and what every person should have done differently. The sense that something needed to have been different about the past filled him with a desperate need to change the past. He fantasized about a different life he could have had. Any time he would communicate with his family he would get furious at them for things they had done. He could not accept that what happened in his life had actually happened and that it could not be un-done. As a result, he grew more and more unwell on a physical, mental and emotional level. And all he experienced was utter powerlessness. Logan increased his use of drugs to try to mitigate that pain.
When something unwanted happens, especially if what happens is life altering in what a person perceives to be a bad way, he or she will usually immediately enter into resistance with what is and what was. The refusal to accept what has happened and that what was done cannot be undone, leads us to a mental, emotional and even physical obsession with trying to change what has happened. It leads to denial. It leads to fury. It leads to slipping into protector personalities. It leads to depression. It leads to confusion. It leads to bargaining. Acceptance does not mean that you are ok with something. It does not mean that you approve of it. It means that instead of pushing against something, you let it in (own it) and recognize it as real, valid or true.
The problem with pushing against anything that has already happened, is that it is wasted energy. It is futile. No amount of effort you put towards it will ever lead to any results. It will not cause any wanted change. And it will keep you fixated on what was, where you are powerless, preventing you from making any positive change to the here and now. And seeing as how no one else can change what already happened either, you trap them in a desperate powerlessness to being able to make anything better when you expect them to change something about what they did or didn’t do. Doing this is one of the hardest things to do in life. But doing this is also one of the most freeing and empowering things you can do.
To stop pushing against the past, accept it instead and re-orient yourself towards what to do from here going forward is one of the hardest things to do because it means you have to admit to truths you don’t want to have be true. Look at realities that are so hard to look at that you don’t trust yourself to be able to deal with them. Swallow the fact that you have lost something and that it is gone. That something specific that you wanted for your future will never be. And recognize that some things will never be the same going forward, and in ways that you would never have wanted. Doing so seems to run up against the truth that you are a creator of your life experience and that you can prevent what you don’t want and bring about what you want.
But there is empowerment to be found in accepting that what has happened has in fact happened and that you can do nothing to change what has already occurred. In that place of incredible simplicity, all you are left with is what can be done now and what can be done going forward to make things different than they were. All you are left with is: What now?
The value of becoming aware of what could have been different and what you or someone else should have said or done differently is that it gives you an answer about what to say and do differently from this point on. And it gives you a picture of what you need to change or need other people to change from this point forward. What now? Reality is really your only axis of power. It is the place where your focus and energy will actually lead to results and cause positive change.
To use our previous example, Logan would have to accept a great many things. Such as the fact that his father didn’t want to be a father. And that his father was violent and not there for him. And that they had a terrible relationship and still have a terrible relationship. That his mother is a codependent, who was more concerned with her own security than his wellbeing. That he had no one to protect him. That he was the family scapegoat. That he formed his identity around that role he played in his family. That his family is dysfunctional and as a result, he coped with that in ways that only enhanced that pain. He would have to accept that his niece is dead. That his terrible relationship with his father and the family dysfunction was a huge contributing factor in the fact that she died. That she is never coming back no matter what anyone does. His childhood, which is gone, was a suffering one.
Logan would then have to accept that what has happened thus far in his life has in fact happened and that he can do nothing to change what has already occurred. He cannot go back and un-do or change anything. He has to let go.
Logan would then re-orient himself towards: What now? He would pour his thoughts, words, time, energy and action into how to change things for the better going forward. For example, he might become aware of what he needs from his father going forward and clearly communicate that to him. He may ask his father the same thing. He might devote his focus to changing the way he sees himself and challenging the bad guy/problem person narrative he adopted and has been maintaining so far. He might deliberately seek out relationships with people who live a healthy lifestyle and who are into self-growth so that he is influenced to live a healthy lifestyle too. And so that he can experience people looking at their own dysfunctions rather than simply avoiding that self-reflection by focusing on him being the only problem. He might decide to keep a picture of his niece in a locket as a reminder to try to understand what another person is really perceiving, feeling and needing and why when a conflict occurs, rather than to simply slip into defense. He might make people aware to make sure they know where the kids are at all times, especially before moving any vehicle. He may use the completion process to go back and create a sense of resolve for what happened, as well as to become aware of what unmet needs he had then, that he can now meet from today forward.
Notice when you are pushing against what happened or what is, as if all of your energy is going towards trying to make something that already happened, unhappen or be different. What do you need to accept? And once you accept it, what now? Where should your energy go now to make things more like how you know you want them to be?
Use your awareness of what you should have done differently to clearly define how you want to act differently today and in the future. Use your awareness of how you needed people to act differently in the past to clearly define how you want or need them to act today and going forward. Use your awareness of what was unwanted about what was and what is to re-orient yourself towards putting your thoughts, words and actions towards what you want the rest of today and the future to be like instead.
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