Anyone who has dealt with weeds knows that unless you can dig up the taproot, the weed comes back. And anyone who has gotten a splinter, knows that until you get it all out, the pain continues. Get only part of it out, and it becomes inflamed and perhaps infected. Thinking positive, ignoring it, or trying not to think about it only prolongs the problem and make it worse.

 And so it is with negative repeating patterns. Any time there is a negative pattern of any kind, you can bet that the root cause has not been addressed. The only way to change things and stop the same problem occurring over and over again is to find and clear the original issue, which will be the unhealed trauma and the negative belief or judgment about the experience.

If you are successful, you will probably not get any more such experiences, or at least, less of them. But should something similar happen again, it’s effect upon you will be greatly mitigated, and you will much more quickly, and with greater effectiveness, grace and ease handle it in a better way. While the annoying people in your life may not have changed, you will have. Therefore, your experience of it will be different. Because you think differently about things that used to bother you, you feel and respond differently.

Getting to the bottom of issues can be tricky and time consuming.

The original event and the interpretations about it may be unknown, long forgotten or repressed. And instead of just one traumatic event, it may be a layering of multiple events, each reinforcing the detrimental judgment that with a self-fulfilling prophecy that tends to 

• • either attract more experiences of like kind,
  • Or you just react and feel as if they are the same type of event even if they are not. In other words, you perceive and feel ____(slight, insult, prejudice, etc.) because you are sensitized, not necessarily because it was intended or actually happened. 

Healing requires not only taking corrective action in the moment, but learning from the experience. Through strong intention, you can decide that the very experience that upsets you will enhance your personal and professional growth, adding to your wisdom, your maturity, and your greater value to others as a leader, counselor, mentor and role model. I call this ‘finding the blessing’.

It is not enough to just neutralize the negative emotions.

Learn and grow through them as well. 

But then go further. 

Ask yourself, “has anything like this happened before?” 

If you get a ‘yes’, then your current problem is alerting you to the need to heal these earlier issues now, and perhaps other related additional ones that you don’t remember. If you do find and heal the root cause, the negative pattern will stop. And if that happens, then go and personally thank the person who is your current ‘pain in the butt’, the one that brought the issue to your attention and motivated you to address it.

Layering of memories

We are hard wired as part of our survival mechanism to put meaning to experience – to interpret it as good or bad, threatening or not. It is the interpretation, not the event itself, that determines the emotion that follows. Perhaps you had an upsetting experience and then made a judgment about it, an interpretation of what it meant to you that you forgot or repressed. Perhaps it was never verbalized, or didn’t register consciously because it happened at a young age, in the womb, or in a past life.

We now have scientific evidence from studies done with mice and children of Holocaust survivors that issues and emotions such as fear are being passed on the DNA to the generations that follow. This may be part of the survival mechanism for the species.

But not only can you pick up things up unconsciously from your ancestors in that way, any vividly imagined events especially those with high emotion can register on an unconscious level as if they actually happened to you even if they did not. This includes the stories you hear from your family, your culture, group, or witness in the media. It can include those experiences of book or movie characters that make a deep impression. All of these elements become part of the soup making up your beliefs and judgments, which go on to create or at least influence your future experiences and it’s impact upon you.

Regardless of where or when it originated, it and others like it are stored internally and can effect you until you process or reframe them. Reframing is changing your interpretation of the event.

For example, after a bad accident, you might continue to shake with fear thinking “I almost died”, but you could also interpret it as “if I’m still here, I must have a purpose,” or “I survived and I’m going to celebrate every day because you never know how long you have”, or ”I was protected” or “help was there precisely when I needed it.”

As more and similar experiences occur over time, they are added to the previous ones making the event, the emotions and judgements around them more pronounced like a toe that keeps getting stepped on until it becomes very sensitized and you become over zealous in protecting it.  The one-time judgment about someone stepping on your toes then becomes a generalized global judgment, such as “everyone keeps stepping all over me”, or a sensitivity or issue as in “I have constantly be on the alert that no one steps on me again.” 

Triggers and other factors

But along with the experience that is logged into your memory bank, so are the various elements of that experience – the sounds, colors, location, season, date, and the various people and other things present. Each element is capable of triggering the entire memory and the emotion connected to it. Such elements are labeled triggers. But in addition to the elements present at the time of the experience, you can also react to other things not involved in the bad experience itself, but merely associated with the person, places or things that were involved.

For example, if you have a bad breakup with your boyfriend, you can understand why you to feel uncomfortable should you bump into him again. But now you may very well experience discomfort upon seeing one of his friends or relatives, or hearing one of the bands that both of you enjoyed, your favorite song, or being in a place that you used to go to together. Everything you associate with that boyfriend can awaken all the painful emotions and reasons for the break up. These are triggers too.

With some triggers, you clearly know where the emotion such as the fear comes from. But with other emotions, fears, tension or uneasiness, you may not remember the connection. These are more properly labeled as phobias. The fear seems irrational because the connection to the event that caused it has been lost. So it is not just the upsetting event that needs to be cleared, but also all of the triggers, many of which you may be unaware of until they are activated.

Multiple modalities help to find and process the issue.

1. Meditation

One way a person can get clues is through meditation. Just still your mind and let a question roll around in your mind. For example: 

• “where does this ____ (emotion/ issue/ problem of ____) come from?”
• Or, “what do I need to know or let go of to heal this issue fully and completely now?”
• Or, “how can I look at this experience so that it doesn’t bother me nearly as much?”
• Or, “why does this problem/issue of ___ keep happening over and over again?”

2. The Infinite Intelligence Process 

The Infinite Intelligence Process is a 3-prong modality that I developed. It can be used with meditation, formal hypnosis, self-hypnosis, or dowsing. I use it daily to clear my mind so that I have a restful sleep, quickly process the events of the day, relieve stress, chip away at issues, access internal resources, and, in general, speed up problem solving and make life go smoother. You can learn it through my book Accessing More – Tapping into the Eternal, Unlimited Self with the Infinite Intelligence Process.

You could utilize phrases like:

 “There is a part of my Being that knows where this ___ (emotion/ issue/ problem of ____) comes from and is bringing everything that I need to know into my awareness so that it can be healed/resolved now.” 

Or “There is a part of me that knows how to heal/resolve this in a way in which I am really pleased, and is doing so now.” 

Or after installing the Process Program that is activated with trigger words of process followed by go, you could say:

“From the perspective of my High Self, process and resolve everything to do with the problem of ____ in a way in which I am really pleased. Go.”

3. Hypnosis

Hypnosis has multiple methods of regressing to cause and then resolving the issue. In age regression, the information is brought up into awareness, verbalized in the hypnosis. The client is then guided in reframing or otherwise resolving the issue until it seems complete. My favorite hypnotic techniques are called ‘unconscious healing modalities’ because they operate below the level of conscious awareness and do not involve any verbalization by the client. The hypnotherapist creates depth of trance, establishes an ideomotor response, gets the agreement of the unconscious mind to locate and resolve the issue by itself. The instructions include to resolve the issue “in a way in which ___ (name) is ‘really pleased”.

4. Neural Linguistic Programming (NLP)

Time Line Therapy outlined in a book by the same title is a specific technique within NLP developed by Tad James and Wyatt Woodsmall. It is very helpful to quickly clear issues for which you don’t know the origin. It works below the level of conscious awareness. The instructions include “find the positive learning and release the upset.”

5. The Emotion Code

This method was developed by Dr. Bradley Nelson and works with muscle testing. But I use pendulum dowsing instead to locate the issue and determine the degree to which it is involved. Even if I use a magnet or running my fingers along the governing meridian as he suggests, I will also use dowsing to clear it further, and then check the degree to which I was successful.

6. The Emotional Freedom Technique 

7. Dowsing