A message from a subscriber about her experience doing the Self Mastery Series Exercises.

Gary,

I wanted to circle back with you on this newest installment of the Self Mastery program on forgiveness. I must say that it could not have been more timely. Over the weekend my preteen daughter was assaulted by another girl at a sleep over. There are few things that a parent or a mother can go through when a child tells you something of this magnitude that is as hurtful as this. 

At first, I had an understandable emotional response, and then the Ego’s Judge came out about the other person and people needing punishment. Then the Ego’s Victim in my mind showed up and proclaimed that I was powerless to do anything about it. I did approach the parents of this other child and held in my mind the expectations that I had thought would be upheld at a trusting scenario like a sleepover. When that didn’t turn out as I had expected, the Judge and Victim voices of the Ego started another vicious cycle. I had put myself in Emotional Hell. Actually, I was there, rented an apartment and had started charging rent. 

 I started to punish myself over the next week and suffering. Working out and sleeping less, not eating. waking up early, and mentally abusing myself without any consideration. Then today I heard your message of how to forgive from the Self Mastery series. It was hard to listen to, I’ll admit. Mostly because the Ego Judge wanted to continue terrorizing everyone and the Ego Victim accepting it. But then I did as you said from the other exercises. I stepped outside of the argument these NON-personas in my head were having and said, “Who is it that we are angry with” and they all shrieked, ” YOU!!” we’re ALL angry at YOU because (filling in blank)…SOMETHING must be done…. So I asked, “Exactly what is it that can be done??” And they paused and said, “Well, honestly we don’t know, but this seems like a good idea to continue harassing you and   It seems to FEEL like we’re doing something, so maybe we should just keep doing this? 

It was actually really, really funny and I started laughing.  Here I was, nearly in tears over this admittedly unfortunate situation with my daughter and the Ego voices in my head, with their own personas leaped on to my emotions like a pack of ravenous wolves. They were very loud, very certain about doing something, or that I wasn’t doing enough. But when I really looked I saw that they had nothing of value to add.

Finally, I became the forgiver and it was like a dimmer switch in my head was turned down. They became less and less visible, less and less noisy. They aren’t all the way gone, but it’s much better to an extent.

I will continue to monitor how I do over the coming weeks. .
Thank you.  A. K. 

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