Resisting our savior’s instinct

When I think about healing, a specific patient of mine comes to mind. She was in her mid-fifties, and she had just gotten out of the hospital after a knee surgery. She was recovering from alcoholism, and she had been under tutelage to deal with her money for years. She was on her own, since she never had a partner and her entire family had died.

I used to work with her five times a week. She was very friendly and had a great sense of humor. She kept telling me that she wanted to make it, and she was motivated to do the work. She never spoke about her addiction. Due to family traumas, she was experiencing mental health issues, and every day, kept rewinding stories about her dead relatives, and that the old times were the best.

We started to implement steps together, for her to get better. She was agreeing to everything I was suggesting. But I soon realized that, even though her words were positive, her actions were the opposite. Like finding a bottle of wine in her fridge, seeing her completely hangover the following day, impulse-buying, or a destructive diet.

It made me think that, even though people say something, it’s not necessarily the truth. Which is a common occurrence in Life, right? People tell stories and they end up not fulfilling the prophecy, for various reasons.

But there are also people who, even though they say they want to change, will never actually step up to the plate. Like my patient.

The thing with change is that, let’s be honest, it’s HARD. No matter what we tell ourselves, it’s so difficult to change. When we start doing the work on ourselves, we feel all the stuff coming to the surface, and this is far from being a pleasant feeling. It’s very uncomfortable, shaky, unknown, and it takes a nearly constant state of stress for us to be able to deal with these emotions. Like a surgeon would cut open somebody, this is what we do with our own mind. Once the cut has been made, we have no other choice but to take take out all the trash and stitch ourselves back up. But sometimes we are so afraid of what we’ll find inside, that we end up putting a bandaid on the cut and forget about it. The stuff that must come out is still there, taking different shapes or forms, to remind us that we are out of alignment with our Truth.

Digging our stuff is not for the faint-hearted. But, do we have a choice? Yes, we do. But do we REALLY have a choice? Well, probably not. Because when we start acknowledging our stuff, then change, transformation, can occur. If we don’t, we’ll stay stuck in these low vibrational states of Being, living in survival mode, pretending we’re good and under control, while the only truth is that we would prefer living in a lie rather that the light. It’s too much pain, it’s too much change. It does not fit us, to feel good and to be different from our family that has perpetuated those states of consciousness from generation to generation. We are afraid of change, because we don’t know what is on the other side of it. Addicted to our emotions and our way of coping with reality through food, drugs, behaviors, attachment, we miss out on Life.

One of the big lessons I’ve learned with this work is that, we quickly see when someone wants to go all the way in, or not. And as a professional, we must also take a step back, because now, by wanting the person to heal, we mess up with our vibration, and their’s. Who are we, anybody, professionals or family members of a loved one, or a partner, or a friend, to want to change someone, to prevent them from drowning in their own misery, or to wanting them to be the hero of their own journey? We are not entitled to their healing. We are not entitled to make them, to hurry them up to feel better. Just because we have done more work, and we have the intellectual knowledge that something better exists for them, does not mean that they have to abide by our rules. People create their own set of rules at every moment, and they own the keys to their Life. Let it be experiencing it in a true remarkable way, or a miserable and uneasy way.

And that’s a reality we need to make peace with. This reality is ours, in our Life, and we know how far we’ve come and how we would never go back to our old self. Despite that, we feel like being the hero in someone else’s journey. We feel like they should know better or do better or think better or eat better.

Being at peace with others not being okay, and not expecting them to live up to our standards, is a big step in surrendering to the reality of Life. Once we understand that we create our own resistance with others, our relationships will become easier and not self-interested anymore.

The only option for us is to keep doing our work and show the world that we are becoming a better person every day, and allowing others, giving them the space, to experience Life the way they chose to.

With love and gratitude,

Caroline

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