The Conscious Parent

things. You can’t trust anyone because human beings are untrustworthy.
The world is a hellish place to live.”
Some of us blame ourselves for our misfortune, which only
compounds our misery. “It’s all my fault,” we tell ourselves. “I attract
bad things into my life. I deserve this fate.” Or we may turn our sense
that we are being victimized outward, telling ourselves such things as,
“They never really loved me. They should have paid more attention to
me. If only they would have cared more. They set me up for this failure.
Why don’t they listen more?”
With such a mindset, life’s challenges are met with a constriction of
feeling rather than a sense of expansion. The anxiety that results then
fuels a sense of despair and distraction, which in turn leads to failure,
which results in lowered motivation, which then spirals down into yet
more anxiety and the paralysis that accompanies such anxiety. Out of our
fear of committing to life because of our fear of failing at it, we create
one obstacle after another. Confronted with a tough situation, we see
only problems, not solutions.
Many of us repeatedly create situations in which we sabotage
ourselves in order to feed our “I can’t” mindset. For instance, we start
preparing for examinations late. When we fare badly as a result of our
procrastination, we translate this into a belief that we are “incapable.” Or
we start projects but don’t finish them because we not only succumb to
distractions but also place hurdles in our way, which feeds our belief in
our incompetence. Even if at some point we initiate positive change in
our life, we experience such change as discordant because of its
unfamiliarity, which generates so much anxiety that we abandon the