Overcoming Our Ingrained Patterns

These past few weeks I’ve had several women email me about problems they have been having with other women.  These cases were interesting because they each involved a generational imprint that was passed from mother to daughter.  While the imprint causes problems and misunderstandings in the mother-daughter relationship, it also leads to those problems being projected onto other relationships with women. 

When I work with my clients long term, I have my clients get to know their imprints or patterns intimately.  The reason for this is so that they can gain enough consciousness to change at least one little action in the pattern the next time it arises.  Each change little by little leads to a dismantling of the pattern.  Catching ourselves before we can take the actions that lead to the unhappy outcome becomes a practice.  It’s a difficult, confusing practice because our intuition and our instincts are inaccurate when it comes to navigating the pattern—otherwise we would have mastered it long ago and we wouldn’t need to consult a shaman.  Deliberately questioning our instincts when we’ve worked especially hard to accept our intuitive side can be highly confusing.

This is why each of us must get to know our patterns and how we tend to project those onto our relationships.  The place to start when we notice a pattern (an outcome that has repeated three times) is to ask ourselves when we first experienced the pattern or felt the feelings in the pattern.  Usually it stems from early wounds in childhood—many times because of a misunderstanding or a trauma inflicted by one of our parents, intentionally or not.  Many times these traumas are handed down generation after generation, so that energetically, emotionally, and mentally they carry the extra force of our lineage.

In one case this week, one woman had worked hard on a mother issue that manifested as her giving her power away to other women she thought of as peers.  Somehow the relationship would turn from one of peers to one with her in the one-down position as either lowly apprentice or mentee.  The outcome of this pattern was that she rejected the woman who put her in the one down position while feeling betrayed and embarrassed.  To prevent this pattern from manifesting the same outcome of suffering and a broken relationship, we had to look at where it came from.

This client had a withholding, selfish mother.  As a consequence my client consciously and unconsciously sought approval but was usually shot down by her mother.  Without knowing it my client put these other woman peers in the mother-position.  Usually what would happen is that she would ask for advice in an area especially dear to her heart, expecting to be treated as a peer.  But the advice hardly even felt like it came from a peer.  Somehow the other woman wound up in a more powerful position than my client and abused that power.  Part of this is vibrational, (after all, she unconsciously came to these relationships as a supplicant for her mother’s approval), but we also looked at how my client asked for and received the advice.

She had to assume that she was going to set the situation up unconsciously to unfold so that the other woman would belittle her.  While an important and essential part of healing this pattern was to work directly with her own relationship with her mother with soul retrieval and underworld work, my client had to carefully look at how she operated within peer relationships with other women at the literal level as well.  With these deeply ingrained patterns, ones that we’ve been living out for several decades, we have a sort of body-memory that we must overcome.  We must also look at what we do, think, and feel as the pattern unfolds.

My client had to assume that when she felt betrayed, annoyed and confused the pattern was in play and that she wasn’t seeing the other woman clearly.  Walking away from the relationship was the last step in the pattern.  Did she really want that outcome this time or could it be avoided?  Much of the time the pattern came about because she was asking for advice as a peer, but the advice came back with her in the one down position.  She had to look at how she was asking for advice.  What language did she use?  Was her subtext one of supplicant asking for a favor?  Was she inviting a shift from peer to mentee?  Changing her language so that she remained in a strong peer position also helped.

One aspect of the mother-daughter relationship that my client didn’t see without outside help from her shaman was that her mother had her own insecurities that she projected onto her daughter.  Because these patterns have a strong energetic component, my client’s pattern meant that unconsciously my client would pick a peer that was likely to project her insecurities onto my client and then put my client down, just like her mother did.  To be on the receiving end of this would be no fun for anyone, so it wasn’t a big surprise that my client ultimately walked away from these relationships.  However, before she walked away she spent considerable time wondering if she were imagining the abuse of power when everything had begun so nicely.

However, walking away without consciousness around the pattern only set up the next iteration to manifest in the same way.  Unconsciously my client was looking for perfect advice from a perfect mother-substitute, but was doomed to disappointment because no one can give perfect advice and no one can be a perfect mother.  The rejection of her mother took place through other women but wasn’t a resolution because the original wounds and unconscious beliefs weren’t healed.  Doing the soul retrieval and underworld work helped to heal those wounds and beliefs, but now she had to work on taking different actions when the pattern unwound itself again.

The same feelings and thoughts arose when the pattern came up again, but the difference that next time was that my client could say to herself, “This is the pattern.  I’m in a peer relationship with a woman that I really like.  At some point I’m going to set this up so that she’ll project her insecurities on to me, and then I’ll have reason to reject her.  I’m going to be aware for each of these stages.”  As my client practices she catches herself at the last stage and can avoid rejecting the friend but sets better boundaries about asking for advice. 

In the following iteration she catches herself feeling those feelings of betrayal but notices in time that in a peer relationship she can take advice or leave advice, but she shouldn’t shoot the messenger and so manages to not act on those hurt feelings.  In a later iteration she might catch herself asking for advice but then notice that she herself has set herself up as a mentee instead of a peer.  In a later iteration she might notice that she’s picking insecure women to be peers with even though they might be highly qualified in their fields.  She might then choose not to get too close to them or she might not be completely taken by surprise when those women project those fears and insecurities outward.  Each iteration of the pattern is an opportunity to master the pattern until finally it is broken and my client has taken her power back.  She’s also managed to grow up a part of herself that still needed approval from her mother.

Sometimes we have experiences with soul retrieval and underworld work that are so spectacular that the energywork session clears everything up on the emotional, mental, and literal levels.  I love those.  But, with an unhappy pattern that’s become well ingrained by taking action again and again in the literal world, it usually takes several practice attempts at the pattern to fully unwind it.  Staying conscious, giving ourselves a break for having to practice at it, and making those small changes again and again means that we heal our lives and give ourselves freedom.

Next blog post, an example of a mother-daughter imprint shifting to the next generation and how to prevent that outcome.