Lessons Learned for Healing
Part of the radical forgiveness process involves looking for patterns in the situation that made me unhappy.
What I’ve been looking at has been my tendency to hire a business coach to help me grow my business and sooner or later I find myself feeling let down by the person I hired. I end up having a hard time seeing the benefits I received and focus on how he or she failed to meet my expectations. I then come to the conclusion that I’m “doomed” to never have the kind of business I want.
In fact in some cases, I end up feeling downright antagonistic toward my former coach and it takes time for me to recover any warm, friendly feelings towards them.
The pattern I’m seeing is that:
- Initially, I feel very excited about the new person I’m working with because they seem to be offering something: a process or way of looking at things or perhaps they’re going to teach me how to do something better that the last person missed the boat on. For example, last year I was feeling angry and disappointed because although the coach I worked with knew a lot of great strategies and skills, I felt he just didn’t get me.
- I felt very understood and appreciated by my new coach and was excited by the opportunity to created a successful business based on me being myself rather than having to fit a particular mold.
- Over time, I got to the point in which I felt I was “complete” with my coach and that I was no longer receiving anything I found particularly new or useful above and beyond what I had already received.
- Rather than tell the coach how I felt, I continued to work with her because I always enjoyed the sessions and came away feeling like I had received benefits. I guess I found it challenging to articulate this because it felt like such a subtle issue. I would question the value of my observations.
- I began to feel resentful because I wasn’t getting much for what i was paying and by the time the relationship ended, I was feeling a lot of resentment, disappointment, and frustration.
In addition, I’ve noticed that I tend to see new coaches as “the one who’s going to help me make the big breakthrough I need in order to finally be successful.”
I find myself hoping, even expecting that the coach is going to teach me that new process or create an opportunity for me to make money or introduce me to some key person who will help me get rich. I’ve sometimes used the analogy of “being discovered” like someone saying “wow, you should be a movie star,” and all it takes is a screen test and a few introductions and success is finally mine!
In reality, I’ve never experienced this kind of success. When I have been successful it’s never been because one person finally notices what I can do Even when I’ve been in situations in which one or more persons genuinely admire my abilities, it’s always temporary. In business, people are always moving on and maybe I have a great manager for a year or two and they leave or get promoted and replaced by someone who I don’t like working with.
It’s a childish desire but an understandable desire.
The point here isn’t to judge myself or make myself wrong but to ask the question, how is this current situation evidence that, even though I don’t know why or how, my soul created this particular situation in order that I learn and grow.
In radical forgiveness, Colin Tipping writes that the emotions we experience as the result of our problem are because our souls want us to heal and have the experience of unity.
In my case, the anger and bitterness I feel as the result of being let down by someone I wanted to trust is meant to help me learn that these situations are meant to help me heal and experience Divine love.
As I begin to see the higher wisdom at work I learn I am being guided from a place of Love and I can then
- Let go of feeling like a victim (something unjust was done to me and I have no power to do anything to help myself).
- Stop feeling as though I’m constantly moving through a war zone because instead of worrying and waiting to be hurt by someone else, I can feel safe that I can forgive the person or situation and move on.
- When I am able to truly forgive. I can feel peace…even love and gratitude for the situation, all that negative energy dissipates and quite often the crazy-making behaviors or dynamics just stop without me having to do or say anything.
I’ve already noticed that today I a lot less anger or resentment.toward the person I was wanting to forgive. I am aware of some residual annoyance but it isn’t all consuming the way it was as recently as Monday.
I am aware of feeling some apprehension that this is a temporary respite and as soon as I talk to this person or hear their voice the anger and resentment will flare up again. However, it’s important to acknowledge that I’m feeling relief today.
Also I’m only about half-way through the steps and there is more to address the residual. Another thing to keep in mind is I haven’t yet done much to forgive my own part in the situation which I believe will also help because usually the reason there’s so much emotional charge is because the other person is doing something that reminds me of something in myself I can’t accept.
For example, I know I am almost obsessive about wanting to make good on the results I promise in my marketing. Although I can’t ever promise anything I find myself wanting to “be the hero” and wanting people to say, “Judy helped me double my sales…” I suppose I believe that once I have the evidence that I can consistently get results for other people, I can finally qualify for earning six-figures because I’m giving that value to me clients.
That last paragraph brings up a lot of interesting observations for me. For example, there are so many factors that contribute to successful clients: my own attitudes, my client’s attitudes toward success, my client’s willingness to do the work, etc. And ultimately, if I have issues accepting myself and valuing myself, chances are good those are the kind of clients I’ll attract and chances are also good that they aren’t going to do very well because they have they’re own issues that are holding them back.
One more observation worth making …
I forgot to mention, yesterday I had the realization that I wasn’t waking up in the morning filled with low-level apprehension. In the past I had noticed this was a constant issue: feeling this sense of dread and apprehension to the point it took real effort on my part to get myself out of bed.
I’m not waking up feeling like I can’t wait to get up and get going which for me is my ultimate goal (every day is like summer vacation) but it feels a lot better not to wake up feeling a sense of dread. I feel a lot more lightness in the mornings.