Next we will examine the three (3) parts of a Life Pattern:
- what we believe happened during the event,
- what meaning we assigned to that event, and
- how we decided we would respond to the event.
We can’t always trust our eyes, ears or minds. There are experiments that show how our minds automatically fill in the blanks when they don’t have enough information to complete the picture. They fill a gap with what they expect to go there. So even when we are looking directly at something, we still cannot trust that what we see is what we get.
Look at the below image. What do you see? 4 black circles with a white square in the center of them. but there is no white square. There are simply 3/4 black circles, but our mind inserts a white square into our vision.
That is why we can read misspelled words and still complete sentences. Our brains fill in the blanks with what we have already stored in them when faced with an empty space.
It is the same way when we don’t pay attention to what someone is saying. We hear part of their words and fill in the portions we missed with whatever we thought they said. Think about people who use one word instead of another, like “go for the goal” instead of “go for the gold”, or a phrase I used until I learned it correctly – “doggy dog” instead of “dog eat dog”.
Everything we see and hear is filtered by what we have already heard and seen, which always initially limits our understanding of newly encountered situations. Therefore, when we see something for which we have no previous reference, we may mistake it for something else, or be able to make no sense of it at all. My point is simply that we can’t necessarily trust our memories of what happened to us.
Why is it so important to remember that? Because everybody has their story to tell. Their narrative reveals what they believe happened to them as well as their place in the world. If it is possible your narrative is based on the recollection of an event that you initially misinterpreted, you will have to admit that your entire worldview, including who you are and how you evolved, may not be what you originally thought.
Now think of the immensity, the gravity of that statement. Your entire life story melts away and you are left with…NOTHING. Everything you thought you knew…GONE. THAT is scary.
But it isn’t the end of the story – it’s not like you just die on the spot. You just have to find out what really happened to you and re-write your narrative to find out who you really are.
For me, in regard to my initial story about the angry boss, I connected the initial feelings of helplessness from the childhood event, and belief that I was not allowed to respond, to my current aggressor’s behavior. In childhood, I learned that I have no recourse when someone in authority is angry with me, and that they can do whatever they want to me and I am helpless to protect myself or remove myself from the situation.
I was like that grown elephant that willingly stays connected to a small stake in the ground because it has been connected to it since it was a baby, and it learned that trying to pull away when it was young was futile. It doesn’t know that it is now a powerful adult that could simply pull away at any time. So I just allowed that mistreatment to continue because that was the moral of the story I learned so long ago. I did not realize that I was a grown woman who had the right to defend herself and refuse mistreatment.
Unless you are willing to give up your certainty of your current narrative, you will cling to your old Life Pattern, because you truly have become who you’ve told yourself you are. However, you need to find out who God uniquely created and intended you to be. He will reveal that to you if you will diligently seek His wisdom and revelation through this process.
RESET ASSIGNMENT:
- Write out your “narrative”, a paragraph about who you are, the highlights of your origin story and the most important things to know about you.
- How did you become who you are? What important events shaped your life?
- Is it in the realm of possibility that SOME of what you believe happened to you did not occur exactly as you recall, and you may have filled in the blanks?