Quantum
HEALTH
Issue 10 March 2011
He initially blamed the economic recession, but also suspected that he had some kind of inner saboteur–some inner programming that attracted failure. His frustration was intense. None of the goals he’d set in life, even the most modest ones, had worked out. He complained that his whole life was a series of being thwarted from his desires.
Curiously, whenever he let go of wanting anything, he could just about earn a living. But as soon as he thought that his business was doing well or that he could do even better, all success stopped. He started looking for reasons. What could he blame? Perhaps other people had advantages he didn’t have? Maybe others got special favours or preferential treatment? Maybe he just wasn’t good enough or clever enough? He became envious, dispirited, depressed and bitter. He felt ready to give up.
One of the ways to extricate yourself from such recurring defeatist patterns is to look to your past and the unconscious programming you learned early in life. As Dr Norman Doidge says in The Brain that Changes Itself, instead of only remembering events from the past, people often actually relive them. The more a thought gets repeated (especially those with intense emotion), the more real it seems. However, a positive change in thinking that gets adequately reinforced not only redefines the original event, but alters the brain structure.
Back to our example. A continuing puzzlement for this businessman was why his mother had left him as a baby. His father and stepmother had raised him. He was ten years old when he discovered that a local woman he knew was, in fact, his mother. He also recalled that his father used to smack him for getting things wrong. Not surprisingly, he grew up hating to get anything wrong. He liked to do everything right the first time. So whenever things started to go wrong, he developed a new strategy: remove all expectations and cave in. Then he could relax, although he still felt like a failure.
He had developed several unhelpful beliefs based on those early formative life events, such as ‘don’t
52 Quantum Health
expect anything as it’s all futile’, and ‘there’s no hope for the future’. Part of him erroneously felt guilty because his mother had left him. Therefore, he felt he ‘didn’t deserve success’. He also felt emotionally undernourished and couldn’t reach out for love. His pattern of using sex to try to lessen his sense of isolation didn’t help. Clearly, his past memories needed to be revised, conflicts resolved, and people he felt had transgressed against him forgiven.
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He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. George Orwell
Making the Shift People who have survived a major challenge– illness, war, accident, loss or repetitive failure– become great by making that event a turning point of life. They re-define who they are, what they do, and why they do it, in the most positive yet humble way. They persevere. They trust and have faith that no matter what their journey entails they will prevail in the end and reach their desired destination, even if it looks a bit different from what they originally envisioned.
The man in our example began by separating each of the old unconscious beliefs from current reality, and then understanding their origin and intent. Instead of judging those fearful and angry voices from the past, he acknowledged that those thoughts had been his best strategy to protect himself at the time. He began to realise that each belief presented only one idea or an interpretation of the event, and he saw how his beliefs were coloured by faulty reasoning.
Next, he decided that enough was enough and that he was willing to change. Choosing to view his life from a truly objective perspective, he asked
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