HOW WE GIVE OUR POWER AWAY

AND HOT TO TAKE IT BACKS

This article got published in the North Shore Magazine of December 2007/January 2008 in a shortened version

HOW WE GIVE OUR POWER AWAY

And how to take it back  

“You make me mad”; “the weather makes me feel low”; “you make me so happy”…Most of us speak like that and actually mean it. If it was true that other people or circumstances create our feelings, we would be their puppets, their victims, and they would be the cause of our distress or joy. There would be no hope for us to heal and be peaceful because we would always depend on other people and outer circumstances for our happiness. And that is what we somehow like to believe. We like it because we can take the responsibility, the blame off ourselves and project it onto the outside world. “If only my boss was more understanding”, “if only I got this exciting job, then I would be happy.” We all like to think like this, don’t we.

Thankfully, it is not true that events or other people create our feelings and therefore our experiences. It is our own thoughts about events and other people, which create our feelings. “Our world is an outward picture of an inward condition” (A Course in Miracles). In other words, our interpretation of the world creates our life experience. It is our mind which affects us, not the world. With this statement, all responsibility, power, choice and freedom is given back to us.

An example illustrating how our beliefs create our experience is the placebo effect: If we believe a drug will help us, a little sugar pill (without medication in it) can help us alleviate pain. On the other hand, if unconsciously we don’t want to get rid of pain, no medication in the world will be able to take the pain away from us. That is the power of our mind!

However, you may interject, do we not all have spouses, parents and friends who drive us nuts sometimes?

Let’s look at an example: Our partner may be coming home late at night after a party. We may have thoughts like: “He/she is so selfish; he/she is being disrespectful with me; I am less important than his/her friends; maybe he/she doesn’t love me!?”etc. Of course such thoughts create feelings of hurt, self-doubt and anger. So there we go, feeling miserable and blaming our partner for it. His/her reaction will likely be self-defense, and we create a fight. In this scenario we want our partner to behave differently. We want him/her to change in order for us to feel good. In other words, we mean to tell him/her: “I love you if you behave in a certain way; if you don’t, you make me suffer, and then I don’t love you”. “Love” here depends on the fulfillment of our perceived needs; it is merely conditional, and conditional love is not love. We do this all the time, don’t we? Let’s not blame ourselves for that, let’s just become more aware of it and be gentle with ourselves.

The alternative to this way of operating is to know that we can choose to think differently about the fact that our partner is late. We could think that he/she must have a good time, that this is fun, that we too go out sometimes and have fun, etc. In this case we may feel peaceful inside, not needing the partner to do anything specific to “make us feel better”. We are not taking it personal, but see it only in respect to the other person. It is easy to see how different of an atmosphere this scenario creates in a relationship. Instead of having a fight we will feel accepting and peaceful. When we can allow our partners (or anyone else) do be and do however they want to be, then we can love them unconditionally. (I do not mean to recommend that you stay in an abusive relationship). We are then free inside, knowing that we can feel good independently of others. As we all know from experience, this attitude does not come automatically, on the contrary: The blaming attitude often shoots forth like a knee jerk reaction, before we even can think. And even if that’s what we do, if we are aware that we have a choice of how to think about an event, then we may still choose to see it differently.

Let’s remember that our true essence is peace and wholeness, it is not conflict or victimization. In our minds, we are not dependent on others; we just may believe we are. And therefore we can choose to feel peaceful instead of angry or hurt. To recognize that we ourselves create our feelings is clearly one of the goals in true healing. That’s what it means to take our power back – because it has never left in the first place, we only believed it did.

Copyright 2007

Marlise Witschi, M.Psych., RCC