Unworthiness, shame, and guilt are a painful one-way mirror that turns every experience on yourself, whether the story is true or not. They make you take on every experience and use it as a weapon against yourself. Not only is this incredibly painful, it makes you avoid your life because you're afraid that everybody will see it the same way you do. It's a self-created pain that simply isn't true and isn't part of the experience itself.

The experience is just a thing that happens outside of you. It's neutral and it has no inherent meaning of its own. You're going to create the meaning through your perspective of it. What lens are you filtering that perspective through? Is the lens a one-way mirror - which isn't a lens at all? Is the lens just warped or skewed by pain and previous experience? Or can you see the experience clearly?

Unworthiness makes you think you're the problem all the time. It makes you decide that you deserved that thing that happened to you. It makes you punish yourself for every problem you have in your life. Unworthiness is the poster child for "coulda, woulda, shoulda".  It looks at the experience and immediately picks out the problem, which is immediately internalized, whether you had control over it or not.

The way to shift this is by simply recognizing the one-way mirror. Is the story true? The short answer, 99.9 times out of a 100,  is that you didn't have control over it anyway, so the story can't be true. It just wasn't yours to fix or do anything about. You didn't deserve the pain the other person offered you. You just happened to be convenient at that particular moment - nothing more. Their pain is not your responsibility. It is not your job and it's not anything you can control. Taking that experience and reflecting it back on yourself only offers you pain that isn't part of the experience. The one-way mirror wasn't in the experience - you put it there. 

Spirituality offers us the idea that we create our own reality. When we first start trying to understand this concept, it sometimes gives us the idea that this is how we control experience. For example, if I don't want to be cut off in traffic, then I have to shift myself as a means of controlling the experience. It gives us a false sense of control over our experience and it can be very frustrating when we can't get control over it the way we want to. This perception of how we create our own reality comes from pain, usually a sense of unworthiness that most of us carry around in one way or another. The question I sometimes hear people ask themselves is, ""What's wrong with me that this thing is still happening?". That question is born out of unworthiness. That's the one-way mirror showing itself to you so that you can let it go.

The way we create our own reality is not by controlling external experience but by what we choose to pay attention to and how we perceive what we decide to pay attention to. We can't make people stop cutting us off in traffic, but we can stop being bothered by it and that'll make it seem like it's not happening anymore. Our sense of control comes through how we respond and react to experience - it comes through our perception - not through controlling whether or not the experience ever happens.

Unworthiness makes everything feel like something we need to get control over. We feel like we need to control the experience to stop the pain. The reason we feel that way is because for us, every experience includes a one-way mirror. We create a lot of pain when we use broken one-way mirrors to perceive our experience. It offers isolation and loneliness. Every relationship offers guilt and pain. We're never good enough. We're never deserving enough, until the bad things happen, then we absolutely deserve that. Unworthiness becomes a weapon we use on ourselves and instead of dropping the weapon, we drop the experience by isolating ourselves from the world around us.

The way life and experience works is that you will inevitably have experiences that will try to show you your own worthiness.  You will find that people who feel the most unworthy have two groups of people around them - those that reflect their unworthiness back to them along with some of those amazing people who will show them how worthy they truly are.  The whiplash this can give a person can be intense sometimes. Usually what happens is they isolate themselves from everyone that doesn't reflect their pain back to them. The pain is so normal that anything that isn't that must be a lie.

These patterns are broken the same way all other patterns are broken. Teach yourself to see it differently. Slowly open yourself up to new experiences and challenge your own thinking. Learn to see the one-way mirror. Did I really have control over that? Probably not. So why am I using it against myself? Make it a logical process at first because it'll be easier. The feelings you feel are a result of the old way of thinking. The feelings are showing you the old pain. They are showing you the pattern. What you want to do is not get swallowed up by your feelings or try to understand where they came from (you know where they came from). You want to challenge yourself to create a new perspective of the experience first. If you can successfully take on a new perspective the old feelings will fall away on their own.

It's not something that happens quickly. When I first started using these strategies on myself, it would take weeks to get a new perspective that I could deal with so that I could let go of some of the old pain. That's normal. It's hard to shift your brain out of old ways of thinking. The way you perceive experience is a habit. To change it you have to break the habit, but to break the habit you have to know you have the habit to begin with. You can't change thinking you're not paying attention to. 

This brings us back to the fundamental truth about how we create our own reality. It is simply that we create our reality through what we pay attention to. The more you shift your focus to paying attention to how you think and feel about experience, the better your reality will be. What you will learn is that if you can manage your internal reactions to the world around you, shift your focus to your own internal well-being, and stop trying to control the experience, you will feel better. Why? Because you've learned to manage the thing you have control over all the time - yourself. 

Unworthiness is nothing more than the inability to see what's yours and what's not in a way that's actually help to you instead of harmful. It can be healed. It'll take some work and a lot of patience, but you can fix it if you want to.

When you're ready I'm offering a new beta coaching program called, Radical Self-Mastery Coaching. It starts with daily accountability around your perspective. It focuses you on managing your own perspective through daily check-ins with me via a Google Form. If you're interested you can check it out by going to link at the top of the page.

Love to all.

Della