Before reading on, stop and consider your gut reaction to these words—if you have heard them, or if you were to be told this at some point in the future. What reactions and emotions show up?
Now take a moment and consider this question: What thoughts and beliefs lie underneath these reactions and emotions?
The answers will give you very useful insight into your life patterns, which start in childhood and are a result of our environment as well as many years of acting, saying and doing things in a certain way.
Our patterns are derived from both our conscious and unconscious beliefs. Considering the disproportionate influence of the unconscious mind (effecting around 95% of our thoughts, actions and beliefs), it takes a bit more digging to reveal underlying themes which reside there. Once we delve into the unconscious, as explorations like the questions above help us to do, we can receive clarity and understanding as to how and why we do what we do. And that will help us to create new, more loving patterns that allow us to build lives of peace and well-being for ourselves and our families. .
Within the unconscious realms, guilt, blame, shame, victimhood and martyrdom are a few of the big issues that often get exposed. Bringing these patterns and beliefs to the forefront of our awareness reduces the fear surrounding them and the power they once had. Revealing them can then lead to their healing.
We don’t need to take decades to reprogram toxic thoughts and beliefs. However, shifting beliefs does take some work. As we remain in awareness of our stories (discussed in September), we can start to dig up patterns and beliefs that strongly influence our apparent reality.
When it comes to our lives and our children, identifying our own patterns and beliefs is highly useful. Imagine the difference in your reaction between these two scenarios as presented by a teacher or therapist:
“Testing has revealed that your child has a learning disability. She is going to need special help.”
versus
“Your child learns differently than she is being taught. Let’s work together to find an effective way for her to learn.”
How would you react to each of those possibilities? The first implies life long struggles with no way out. Many of us would go immediately to a doom and gloom type reaction based on our underlying fears that there is a problem with our child and worse yet, it is our fault.
The second offers a different viewpoint which might take us to a pattern of hopefulness, of possibility. I am not advocating denial of test results if you have received similar news about your child. I am trying to exemplify how different patterns and beliefs can come into play according to how something is presented and perceived.
We may not have control as to how information is presented to us, but we do have an opportunity to reframe our perception of the information. We do have the ability to reframe language to match new beliefs, patterns, and stories. We do have the innate power and wisdom to transform the first sentence into the second sentence, and approach our children, and those who diagnose and support them, from this perspective.
On a personal level, I recall experiencing an increase in negative symptoms during my first pregnancy every time I read the “What to Expect this Month” handout that was presented at my checkups. Eventually, I skipped reading the handout, giving it straight to my husband. I told him that if anything arose that was of concern, I would tell him and he could look it up in the handout to see if the symptom was typical. Needless to say, I experienced significantly less of these “expected” symptoms.
Over and over the temptation is to focus on our children, what they are doing or not doing, their choices, tendencies, flaws, fears and how all of their behavior is manifesting in present day challenges. However, once we see that our own patterns and beliefs are one of the root causes, influencing their environment and them, we can choose to reveal our patterns and beliefs and shift them in order to create a space that frees our children from continuing our patterns.
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