Sometimes people come to me with specific questions or issues. They want to know about why a one time event happened, about this physical ailment they’re experiencing, or about this one relationship and what it means. Often it’s very specific and while they are giving me the details of what occurred, what they think it means, what they think is involved, and why they think it happened in the first place, I’m preparing to dig into what the bigger picture might be. Then I open their soul book. It’s kinda like being told there’s a cool school of fish over there, parking the boat over it and then seeing the whale breaching right under you. The details so very much don’t matter because “OMG! There’s a whale!” Ok, so new game plan.
In these cases the specific event is just the most recent example of a pattern that has been going on for a very long time. It’s a lifetime of setting themselves up to fail. They enter into situations that are guaranteed to make their lives worse, ignore the negative things they know about others and their intentions while doing exactly what is necessary to put themselves in the crosshairs, and give up their own power at the drop of anyone’s hat, then blame others for how things fall out. Whether the pattern is connected to how they interact with family, with employers and coworkers, in their career field, in relationships, in where and how they live or all of the above, they repeat the it like it’s an old friend that will never let them down. And it won’t.
These self abusing patterns are guaranteed to do exactly what they are set up to do. The problem is what that goal is. Many times it seems positive: to be validated and seen for how good we are at what we do, to be loved, to be needed and wanted, to make a difference and so on. All good stuff. However, the means and the method leave something to be desired. I mean, cutting off someone’s head will cure their migraine permanently, but at the cost of any future life they may have wanted to live. Getting one more new job can certainly fix things unless we’re choosing the job with the same old criteria and entering into it with the same behaviors as before. We can start dating again and hope that this one will be the one, but if we’re still using the same old behaviors when we interact with them it will just be wash/rinse/repeat.
Yet these people will constantly look at the details of each negative event as if it’s discreet. Like the mouse that is constantly looking down and scurrying to get what it needs so it doesn’t see the hawk until it’s shadow falls when it’s too late, these people refuse to see the pattern or even acknowledge it. They poke at the details, rearranging that, blaming this, trying the other thing and never getting any traction. Unfortunately, the Devil isn’t always in the details, it can be sitting idly by watching us do all its work for it.
