Joanne was an attractive woman in her early thirties, married to an engineer and has two small children. For many years after her marriage she had been harboring the urge to divorce her husband and abandon her family.
Logically Joanne cannot find any good reason for the divorce – she has a kind and attentive husband who is doing a fine job supporting the family financially, and the role of a stay-at-home mom was most agreeable with her personality. But every day the urge to leave her beloved family grows stronger and stronger, until she thought she would go crazy with the intense anxiety she was feeling. It was at this point that she decided to seek professional help to deal with her bizarre emotions.
During her first coaching session, her coach instructed her to focus on her intense urge of abandoning her loved ones. Employing a goal chain technique known as Aspectics, this compulsive drive to forsake her family reduced from a scale of 10 to 4 (Subjective Unit of Discomfort) within 15 minutes.
While the coach continued to engage her in a discussion of her problem, a new layer of emotion emerged from her subconscious mind. She became aware of a persistent sense of guilt that she had been harboring for many years since childhood.
Accompanying this guilt was a deep sense of unworthiness, which brought to mind many memories of Joanne’s childhood where she had been a witness of numerous fights between her parents over her father’s extra-marital affair.
With her parents constantly engrossed in their own problems, Joanne’s basic needs for love and attention were grossly neglected. Unaware to Joanne, she had formed the conclusion that she was unworthy of love and did not belong to anyone she cared about.
As these realizations were too much for a child to bear, they were deeply suppressed until she was strong enough to deal with them. So as it is, these suppressed fears surrounding Joanne’s lack of belonging and issues of self-worth resurfaced many years later when similar conditions in a familial setting brought them into conscious awareness once more.
Joanne’s coach proceeded to walk her through the steps again to dissolve these issues one by one. At the end of 20 minutes, Joanne was amazed to find that the urge to leave her family were no longer there. In fact the very idea of it felt foreign, as if a spell had been cast on her without her awareness.
From this experience, Joanne came to understand that the reason for her illogical desire to run away from home came from the misplaced guilt she held towards her mother. In every aspect, from her blissful marital life to the adoration of her children, Joanne’s life was a stark contrast to that of her parent. To have a more successful life is a form of betrayal.
The desire to abandon her family came from her irrational belief that if she had none of these signs of success, she would finally gain acceptance from a mother who had always been secretly jealous of her daughter’s ‘blessed’ life. Note that this desire is not born out of conscious choice, but rather an unconscious drive created by a very low self-worth.
One may then ask, what do we make of Joanne’s lack of belonging and self-worth? How do these fit into the picture if her main driving force for abandoning her family stems from misplaced guilt towards her mother?
Coming from someone where important elements of a healthy psyche are missing, her actions are perfectly understandable. A person with a healthy sense of self would take positive actions to ease the guilt he or she has towards others.
You could even say that someone like this would tend to feel compassion towards another suffering human being instead of guilt. He or she may give money, a sympathetic ear, or do anything other things she deems fit to make the life of the other better. But someone with similar emotional wounds like Joanne cannot see options beyond lowering her sense of happiness in a futile bid to make someone feel better.
People are often driven by unconscious forces that they are not aware of. You may spend your whole lives striving towards happiness, only to throw it away the moment you receive it. The papers are abound with reports of the destitute who suddenly won a million dollar lottery overnight, only to lose it the very next day in casinos. Or aspiring entrepreneurs who walked away from a million dollar contract at the second they were going to sign it.
What unconscious forces are driving you away from your dream life this very minute? Do you know what they are? More importantly are you aware that you do not have to be controlled by your unconscious self-sabotaging beliefs?
With cutting edge beliefs modification processes you will recognize and remove those negative beliefs that are sabotaging your happiness in the shortest time.
(The names and details of the character in the above case study have been changed to protect her identity.)
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