“Every day brings new choices.” Martha Beck
I was having lunch this week with a dear friend of mine who has been divorced from her husband for a little over a year. She asked me for my opinion to a sincere question: “Do you think I’m hiding from love?” She hasn’t dated much since her divorce and although she would like to have someone in her life, finding love hasn’t been a priority for her.
I thought about it for a few seconds and gave her my honest answer: “No. I don’t think you’re hiding from love at all. I think that there is a part of you that genuinely wants to have a loving relationship by your side, but there is another part of you – a stronger part of you – that does not want that. If that weren’t absolutely true…you would have it by now.”
Whatever it is we are experiencing in our lives, we have in our lives because we are CHOOSING it, either consciously or unconsciously.
It does not matter if it’s something we view as either positive or negative, if the larger, louder, stronger part of us wasn’t choosing that, it wouldn’t be our experience.
Even if we intellectually believe that we want something but we don’t yet have the experience of it in our lives, there is a part of ourselves that actually DOESN’T want the outcome. And that part of ourselves is the one that is driving our experiences.
Let’s say you want to have a relationship that feels healthy and loving, but what you actually have is far from that in your current relationship. There is a part of you that actually doesn’t want that…
- There is a part of you that is so afraid of failing or being rejected that you never really try to make yourself vulnerable and heal your current relationship.
- There is a part of you that doesn’t believe it’s possible to have a healthy, loving relationship with your current partner and is not ready to face the possible outcome that in order to have that kind of a relationship for yourself, you might have to leave the current relationship.
- There is a part of you that knows it is possible to feel accepted and loving in your relationship, but it will require a lot from you in terms of personal growth and frankly, you’re tired.
This hard truth – that we’re either intentionally or unintentionally choosing the experience we’re having in our lives – is both irritating and empowering.
- It’s irritating because… well… frankly it makes us feel a little better to think that it’s outside of our control. It does, doesn’t it?
- But it’s empowering because once we’re willing to go there and really understand what the unconscious thoughts are that are keeping us from what we think we want, we can create almost anything in our lives.
We get to choose how we view this information:
We can reject it because it irritates us…
Or…
We can take action, diving-into understanding how we’re doing this and learning how to do it differently.
So now that you know that you are actually choosing your experience (even if it’s unconscious)…what will you do with the information?
