There’s some important mechanics behind the ability to release a negative pattern and create a positive new belief or way of being that involve why the victim-blaming of the “you attract everything that happens to you” interpretation of the Law of Attraction is counterproductive to healing.
If we know that our beliefs are created in response to a trauma or event in our lives that informs our understanding of the world – that is, that our patterns are learned behaviors – then we know that our acting or feeling in certain ways or allowing certain unhealthy circumstances to continue isn’t our “fault,” per se, but rather a very natural response to the life circumstances that were beyond our control when they happened. We must take a moment to understand with self-compassion why it was completely reasonable for us to respond as we did, that we were doing our best in the ways we were shown how.
We must feel fully how, for example, of course we grew up thinking love or safety must be earned through our goodness if that’s how our parents taught us to believe, and how of course we perpetuated those beliefs long after we became adults because that is literally how our human operating system is designed to work, and how nobody taught us growing up how to program it ourselves, because we were made to learn things like algebra and whitewashed American history instead and to perform certain skill sets on standardized tests instead of being taught how to feel, play, and communicate.
At that point, a moment happens – we can realize a crucial truth: “Oh, not only is this not my fault, but this actually doesn’t even belong to me. This belief or pattern isn’t really even mine. This was an adaptive response to a lie I was told.”
And when we realize that, we can truly let it go. It’s no longer an identity, it’s no longer a part of us, it’s no longer in any way a fault or a shortcoming – it’s merely an impersonal program we picked up along the way. A buggy app that needs an update.
Self-compassion has the ability to remove the charge around a pattern. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll probably feel that charge come up in us as it’s releasing, like grief as the purging of a toxin, but then we really do get to just let it go.
You can’t skip over that step, in my experience. It’s too risky. You have to be able to grieve for the fact that you didn’t deserve what happened to you.
When my clients are grieving their traumas, even though they have come to me for advice helping and fixing things so they can feel better, I always make sure we’ve established, “That wasn’t fair that that happened to you. You deserved better.”
In fact, in Timeline Therapy, the modality I primarily use in my 1-1 work, we specifically revisit their timeline and allow them to give themselves the experience they know they deserved from a place of love and care and competence and justice. That’s the thing that makes the shift.
Only someone who’s already integrated the meta-belief of self-compassion can gloss over the pity party step, and that is like Jedi level mastery, friends – that is not what your clients are going to need from you for their healing until they’ve been working with you for at least a couple years, in my experience. And even then, even with those clients, I always ask them first if they’re ready for the breakdown and action steps yet or if they need more time grieving the suck.
So for everyone who’s still on the “victim consciousness” or “you attract everything that happens to you” cars of the LoA train, it’s really important to understand that even if you mean well you’re typically not being helpful or efficient. You’re actually jamming the healing channels.
Yes we create our reality but we create our reality alongside 8 billion other humans who are also creating their own realities, and while we may be responsible for the relationships we choose to stay in or the energies we choose to feed or focus on, we’re not responsible for others’ choices in how they behaved toward us.
Even a woman with an ACE score of zero still has a 5% chance of being sexually assaulted.
Only when we know it’s not our fault do we also know it’s not ours.
So let’s upgrade our understandings, shall we?
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