Your Manifestations Are Hiding Behind Your Unresolved Pain
Integrate the negative to infuse the power into your better interpretations
The capacity to re-frame circumstances so that you arrive at an interpretation that inspires ease, trust, and motivation is a super power. Re-framing discouraging thoughts into insights that are forward moving is synonymous with the ability to re-experience reality.
However, re-framing, like all powerful tools, must be wielded carefully. The re-framing impulse is useful only when it’s paired with the willingness to integrate the negative emotions you want to re-envision.
Without the desire to understand your darker emotions, they persist in the background and generate resistance that slowly but surely corrodes those positive re-frames you’re attempting to cultivate. Here’s why.
Agreeing to one emotion is an agreement with its inverse
Embedded within every experience, emotion, or perspective is its opposite. For instance, a relationship wouldn’t be meaningful if you didn’t feel the sting of disagreement about consequential subjects. The desire to pursue a particular path or subject is potent to the degree that its absence is painful, and so forth.
The notion that every experience holds the seeds of its opposite originates from the ancient book of enormous wisdom, the Tao Te Ching. According to the text, reality is governed by yin and yang, or chaos and order, two opposing forces whose balance is necessary for universal harmony.
Every victory is a funeral;
when you win a war,
you celebrate by mourning. — Tao Te Ching
When you re-frame a situation, the initial frame doesn’t simply disappear. It has to go somewhere.
This isn’t meant to suggest that re-framing isn’t necessary or useful. Rather, it’s an invitation for you to make sense of your negative interpretations through cause and effect reflection.
NLP expert Dr. David Snyder says that the conscious mind is always the least informed and the last to know. For every conscious thought, there’s an underbelly of unconscious assumptions. This is why there’s more to the law of attraction than simply having thoughts that are in harmony with what you want to create.
If you balance your positivity with an understanding of the opposing forces within you, namely, that shadow material you’re trying to re-frame in the first place, your positive visualization will actually be effective. When you address anxiety, you work through it. You resolve it. When you get resolution, your positive affirmations won’t be burdened by the energies of avoidance or denial.
Your intuitions are your only true source of support
Have you ever agreed to a project or experience despite an instantaneous feeling that it wasn’t for you? If the conscious mind is always the least informed, the subconscious mind is always the most informed, and it’s the voice inside you that recognizes right away what’s worth pursuing.
The programming within your subconscious determines the paradigms you uphold, the degree to which you trust yourself, and many other matters that characterize your life experience.
When you reject your intuitions, you’re closing the door on a phylogenetically older part of you, or an aspect of your physiology that developed long before the conscious mind.
When you get an intuition that something isn’t right, in the past you might have ignored it, regarding it as a meaningless nudge. You might have even decided to layer over it with motivational content, affirmations, actions that made you feel better in the moment. However, if you don’t excavate your subterranean layers, they will gradually but surely dilute those positive interpretations.
To avoid this tendency to overlook sometimes subtle yet corrosive interpretations, I’ve learned to be weary about the word “should,” whether it falls from my mouth or someone else’s. The superego deals in the currency of should statements. The superego is the internalized judge, the repository of societal standards to which we’ve failed to measure up.
When you find yourself thinking in should’s, ask yourself what wounds may be linked to your assumptions. This can lead to some interesting revelations — patterns repeat, and the troubling dynamics of adult life are likely harbingers of unresolved childhood pain.
Examining that pain may very well be the path you need to traverse to understand the original wounding that’s not yet finished with you.
Saying no means saying yes to your purpose
In the classic Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill repeatedly alludes to having a definite chief aim as the core ingredient to success. He also blames the lack of one as the primary cause of failure. If you say yes to a project, a relationship, or an event while another part of you screams no, this is a manifestation of your lack of clarity in purpose.
If you’ve got wounds like mine, wounds that tell you that your worth is inextricably linked with achievement, saying no to potential opportunities is going to be a challenge. You might apply the principles of success consciousness to activities and projects that turn out to be tangential to your real burning desires.
If you’re in the habit of re-framing and seeing opportunities everywhere, this is indeed an advantage, but not when it encourages your saying yes to even those pursuits that cause you to detour from what you recognize as truly meaningful.
The first and most critical step in distinguishing the meaningful from the tangential is articulating exactly what you want. If you don’t, instead of manifesting ease, playfulness, and a brand new piano, you may end chewing your nails and slamming your fists against a desk at war against all the tasks preventing your progression on the goals that really speak to you.
Opportunities are everywhere, yes, but you have a finite lifespan. You have inclinations and visions that are unique to you. Don’t squander your ability to re-frame limitations on the tasks that don’t provide a clear and definite path to where you want to go.
Resources, though abundant, ask that you use them wisely
Here’s the danger: without reflection on the parts of you that are prone to waging war against uplifting interpretations, it’s inevitable that the energy you’re infusing into your positive re-frames will be deluded by your refusal to look at their opposite.
Don’t become, in the words of author Jordan Peterson, a walking cacophony of un-integrated experience. In your attempts to bring forth inspiring interpretations of your life, don’t simply deny those parts of you that want to scream or lay around instead of write your book or build your business.
Understand that your shadow material consists of layers of defense designed to protect you. Maybe there are complexes you need to address before it’s even possible for you to move forward.
When you reject the opportunity to embrace negativity along with positivity, you’re deluding the real power of re-framing and even using it against yourself.
If you don’t resolve your underlying pain, your manifestation will go blind and wither away in some dark corner. Success is on the other side of your willingness to sit in a quiet room and unravel what happened to you 10 years ago.
“The cave we fear to enter holds the treasure we seek.”-Joseph Campbell
