You’ve heard about people who have success after success. You probably also know people who continuously make the same mistakes. We all have an uncle Joe who has been divorced five times, or know a cousin Vinny who cannot k a job. Why do people continuously attract the same unwanted situations and problems year in and year out, decade after decade? It happens because they are in an unconscious creative process.
You are always creating and recreating your life through your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Most people are not aware of how this is happening; they are unconscious to their personal creative process. This unconscious process is pervasive and rooted in the stories we tell ourselves soon after we are born. They control our lives and affect every decision. Uncle Joe and cousin Vinny can change their lives by considering a new story.
These stories grow with time like mold in a basement, becoming bigger and more toxic year after year. Consider a rewrite; decontaminate the basement, clean out the attic and put your creative house in order. It’s time for you to generate a compelling story, one that is consistent with who you are and what you want to attract. To help you create a new narrative, let’s explore how we’ve created our current story. To do this, we must begin by understanding the unconscious creative process.
Your unconscious creative process starts when you are very young and controls your life until you become aware of it. Your destiny was predetermined by meaningless events when you were two, three or four years old. Events which you unconsciously assigned a meaning to, and then retold yourself for the next 10, 20 or 30 years. Only when you become aware of this process and its effects, will you make a change.
A quick review of the creative process will help us understand the unconscious creative process. You create your life through the interaction of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. These three components of creation are present in every aspect of life. This interaction is how you obtain all your results. Here are a few examples of these interactions in everyday applications:
- Human beings create their life through the interaction of: mental-emotional-physical, or thoughts-feelings-actions, or mind-spirit-body.
- Religions are created through the interactions of father-holy spirit-son.
- Government functions through a process of legislative-judicial-executive.
The problem with the unconscious creative process is that without your conscious and deliberate participation, things will go astray. It is unpredictable and organic. You create your life haphazardly due to interactions with your parents, the environment, and random events. The unconscious creative process also has three components and works like this: event-story-drama. Emotionally charged events accelerate the creative process, and relationships are typically the most emotionally charged aspect of your life. The following describes your unconscious creative process in detail.
Step One
The unconscious creative process begins with the event or what happened. What happened can be any minor or major life event. No event has any intrinsic meaning, until you attach a meaning to it; the meaning you attach to these events can be devastating. The ideas we form in our head to interpret events are potentially debilitating. When we draw some unhealthy, inaccurate conclusion about an event, it can have negative consequences which impact our ability and potential. In your own life, if your interpretation of an event is not scrutinized, you can shut down the creative process and end up with the effects of these past events indefinitely.
Step Two
What happened (the event) holds no power over you until you take step number two, which is the most dangerous step. You make up a story about what happened. This story, especially if it is negatively and emotionally charged, brings debilitating results your way. The quality and intensity of the emotion gives energy to the unconscious creative process. Your story, with no basis in reality, creates consequences when you unquestionably believe it to be true (superstition). When what happened is combined with your emotionally charged story, you take the third step in the unconscious creative process.
Step Three
This final step includes the automatic results from your made-up story; it is your personal drama. You will unconsciously act out this drama for the remainder of your life until you become aware of this process. This drama leads to the unhealthy thoughts, feelings, and actions that create unwanted results.
These unconsciously created dramas control your thoughts, feelings, and actions. This process is limiting, especially when it’s an event that happened when you were young, and your mind was open. Your story develops a life of its own. You develop a belief system around this story to justify your results. You attract all the circumstances in your life to remain consistent with your personal drama; this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The following is an example of a drama that can develop from a small life experience. Let’s explore the story of a boy at his first middle school dance. This event has the potential to control the remainder of his life. Remember back to your first seventh-grade dance and all the emotions surrounding this occasion. Our young protagonist courageously walks across the gym to a group of girls while his buddies are watching. The classic adolescent drama slowly unfolds as he gradually builds up the nerve to ask his beautiful classmate to dance. He strolls across the gym floor and pops the question. There is an uncomfortable, pregnant pause, to which she replies, “No.”
That is what happened – there is no intrinsic meaning, not good or bad, nor right or wrong, it is just a simple meaningless “no.” He has no idea why she said no. But the meaning he attaches to this event has the potential to be devastating. His world comes to a screeching halt. He painfully, excruciatingly, seemingly in slow motion, walks back to his group of friends while she and her girlfriends giggle. He feels as though everyone in the gym is watching him. His courageous advance has been brutally rejected.
His friends laugh that exaggerated kid laughter (the kind that hurts your ears to this day). He is demoralized. Feeling foolish and embarrassed, he stands there and begins to think. He creates a story in his mind to explain what happened, one that is forever damaging.
The boy says to himself, I am ugly, fat, too short, not attractive, or I am stupid for thinking she would dance with me. These stories have no bearing on reality. The story he tells himself becomes more real than what happened.
Perhaps her feet hurt, she was shy, didn’t know how to dance, or was intimidated. Never knowing the truth, the boy plays and replays his version of what happened. His story will have negative consequences for the remainder of his life, or at least as long as he is unconscious to the process. In the future, he will choose not to approach women, act withdrawn or avoid social situations altogether. He could miss the relationship of a lifetime 20 years later because of his seventh-grade dance!
If I had not witnessed this numerous times myself, I would not believe how common it is. I attended many personal development seminars that sought to expose this process. I saw dozens of 60 and 70-year-old adults crying like babies at what happened to them in a school yard 50- 60 years earlier (no exaggeration). I think they were most distraught when they calculated how it affected their lives over the ensuing decades. These dramas are real, painful and present until you wake up to them.
This brief adolescent story illustrates how covertly devastating the unconscious creative process can be. This middle school drama in the context of his entire life is relatively minor. Imagine some of the more devastating events that can shape our stories. Abuse, neglect, physical harm, or the loss of a loved one. These are all events that you could draw meaning from that could permanently control your life
in painful and debilitating ways.
My mother had a series of challenging events happen to her. Her mother abandoned her when she was three, leaving her to be raised by her father and his family. When she was nine, her father died in an industrial accident trying to save someone’s life. Her grandfather died two years later of a broken heart. Her grandmother, who then became her guardian, went into a deep depression for years and wore nothing but black until she died at age 92. Her uncle died at age 42 on the same day her son was born. She went through a bitter divorce at the age of 42. Her daughter died of lung cancer at age 42 having never smoked a day in her life. The story she tells herself is that everyone she cares about leaves her, difficult to talk her out of that one.
Any emotional life event can adversely impact a person’s concepts and beliefs about life forever. Experiences at a young, innocent and vulnerable age will follow you and control your life if you allow them. Waking up to this process is what some have called being “born again.”
No one consciously hurts themselves or chooses to believe things to limit their life. They are seeking protection from another disappointment. Unfortunately, this process continuously attracts and creates the circumstances you do not want, the opposite of what you desire. Insight reverses this and allows you to take control of your life. These events have power over you because of the made-up story you keep telling yourself. The drama ends now. Tell yourself a new story, a story you have createion so compelling that the past and all its unpleasant stories are irrelevant. “Let the dead bury the dead” or “Thou shalt be born again.” At a certain point, you must choose to stop reliving the dramas from the past and become the conscious creator of your life.
We have the greatest number of stories around relationships, money, and health. Relationships, unlike other aspects of our lives, remain emotionally charged for life. How many divorcees obsess about their divorce and discuss it ad-nausea years later? How many singles discuss their past relationship tragedies in detail on their first date? How many people recreate one relationship drama on top of another? They confirm the stories they’ve accumulated in their sub-conscious and live out the drama on a daily basis.
When you believe you cannot have what you desire, these beliefs can always be traced to a story you are telling yourself. The creative process will make it easy for you to leave the past where it belongs – in the past. This insight gives you a deeper look into Uncle Joe’s and cousin Vinny’s behavior, and the dramas they play out over and over again. What we eat, our relationships, our professions, the amount of money we earn, and our overall level of happiness is controlled by these stories and the images these stories have created in our subconscious minds. With your awareness, you will write a new story, one of your choosing – a story that shows everyone the greatness of who you truly are.