A reader shared the following article with me this week. It is a perfect description of what I call the state of Victimhood and what a healthier alternative looks like. My reader could not remember the original source, but said he thought it came from somewhere within the NLP/Hypnosis world. I feel compelled to share it with you since it is so applicable to the work I teach!
Blessings, Lynne
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THE CODEPENDENT’S CULTURALLY APPROVED TRANCE
1) My feelings are caused by what you do. Everybody knows this.
2) In the beginning you seem loving, and so I feel love for you
as my predominant emotion.
3) Because I feel love for you, you feel love for me, and love
is our predominant emotion.
4) However, if I feel bad for any reason, I enter a culturally approved
trance, from which I perceive that my bad feeling is your fault.
5) For me to feel good, I enter the culturally approved belief that you
have to change. Everybody knows this is how relationship works.
6) I therefore enter the culturally approved behavior of
devoting my efforts to get you to change, including marshalling all
of my friends, who let me know I’m right and that you are wrong.
7) To attempt to change your behavior, I enter the culturally
approved state of anger, and implement the culturally approved use
of judgment, guilt, fear, and pain to attempt to get you to change.
Since you are simultaneously doing the same thing to me, I
alternately manipulate you, and am manipulated by you.
9) Whatever love remains slowly disappears as our relationship
spirals downward into a steady state of continuous warfare, with
anger, guilt, fear and pain as the predominant emotions.
HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP
1) My feelings are caused by my internal strategies,
by what I say when I talk to myself.
2) I take full responsibility for my feelings.
3) I have learned how to relax and tap into the loving part of
myself, and so I feel love for you as my predominant emotion.
4) If I feel bad for any reason, I realize I did this to myself.
Even if my bad feeling was triggered by something you did, it wasn’t
what you did, it was my response to what you did that caused my pain.
5) What you think about me is none of my business. The only
thing that is my business is what I am thinking.
6) For me to feel good again, I realize that happiness is an inside
job, and that I must do something inside myself to feel happy again.
In NLP terms, I need to change my state to a more resourceful state.
7) This has nothing to do with you. Changing your behavior isn’t
possible anyway, and so I don’t even consider this as an option.
As a fully functioning person, I train myself to find the
dysfunctional belief trapped within my pain, and to neutralize it with
whatever techniques I have learned, such as meditation and self-hypnosis.
9) Once I have isolated myself from you long enough to move
back into a resourceful state, then I remember my love for you.
10) Having healed my pain, all is well, and then I can rejoin
you without your having to change in any way. What a relief!
