Bad Karma or bad choices?
Frequently people facing difficult circumstances in life, whether it is financial, career, relationships or legal, often cite the reason for their problems as “bad karma, bad luck or bad breaks.” When they attribute their problems to bad karma, they’re overlooking the fact that they initially made a choice or choices putting things into motion that would have unforeseen, unintended and undesired consequences.
These bad choices have consequences that can haunt a person for the rest of their lives. Often, these people don’t even connect the end result with their original choice or decision. Many times they find the consequences, if not impossible to extract themselves from, are extremely painful, costly and will consume enormous amounts of energy trying to reverse things. They have put themselves in a place where they are continually in a defensive posture trying to control damage. When a sports team loses the initiative they must stay on the defense and cannot conduct an offense – therefore they cannot win!
Let me tell you of two young adults, one is 22 and one is 24. One young man was awarded a full scholarship to Pepperdine! Everything paid for. He turned it down because his eighteen year girlfriend of four months who he thinks he’s “madly” in love with, could only get into a junior college. So… that’s where he’s going. He will deal with the consequences of his choice in one way or another for the rest of his life. The reduced income for his working life, will determine what kind of house he will live in, what kind of car he will drive, if and where he can vacation, his life style and even the kind of education that he can provide for his children. It’ll cause him to make other decisions and choices that he wouldn’t have needed to make.
The other person was enrolled in Emory Medical School. She’s dating a boy that likes being alone, and loves spending his time, in the woods. He’s going to a small college in North Georgia to get a degree in forestry. By the way, she hates the great outdoors; she likes urban life, the arts, fine dining and all that it has to offer. She made the choice to drop out of Emory in order to live with this young man. Her choice will have long range effects on how she will live and the future choices that she will have to make.
Whether these choices were the right ones or not, those choices will affect them for the rest of their lives. If they stay together, one of them will live in a way that is diametrically opposed to how they wanted life to be. Remember, the initial choice was one that they wanted to and chose to make!
Many many people knowingly make a choice that isn’t wise for them, and then execute it and hope that somehow things will work out. Often, like marrying someone that has different interests and habits that they hope to correct in the other person, it’s because they don’t want to step out of the familiar zone. Others call it the comfort zone, but since I see so many people in my practice, that are quite miserable in their so called comfort zone, I refer to it as the familiar zone.
When one assigns something other than the choices that they’ve made in life as the cause for the disasters that they must deal with, they’re ducking personal responsibility.
In most instances, the person that was executing the wrong choice knew it; again, they hoped that somehow things would work out. Why did they do it anyway? It’s because human beings are slave to the cognitive maps of their subconscious mind. These maps are our auto pilot. Once we start doing things in a certain way, most often we will continue to function in that manner forever! The only way to change one’s performance is through behavioral change. Long term behavioral change cannot be made in with the willpower and discipline of the conscious mind, it can only be made in the subconscious mind. And hypnosis, is the bridge to the subconscious mind
If you feel that you are stuck and continue to make decisions that are wrong for you, feel free to call me. My name is Bob Crow and I am a behavioral therapist utilizing the therapy of clinical hypnosis.