Copyright 2001, Colin C. Tipping

Don’t Take Life So Personally
Who comes into our lives to help us accomplish this
task is actually irrelevant. If one particular person does
not take the job, somebody else will. The tragedy is
that, as the victim, we seldom understand this.
 
We
imagine that we just happened to be the unlucky recipi-
ent of a particular person’s harmful behavior. It does
not occur to us that we might have (at the soul level)
attracted the person and the situation to ourselves for
a reason, and that had it not been this person, it simply
would have been someone else. We mistakenly feel
that, but for this person, we would not have had the prob-
lem. In other words, we see the problem as entirely
with the other person, whom we now feel justified in hat-
ing and resenting for 
causing 
us pain and unhappiness.
Blaming Our Parents
We often hear this type of blame when people talk about
their parents. “If I'd had different parents, I'd be whole
and complete today,” people say. Wrong. They could
have chosen a different set of parents, that’s true; but
the new set would have given them the exact same ex-
perience, because that’s what their soul
 
wanted.
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Repeating Relationship Patterns
When we see ourselves as victims, we think 
only about
killing the messenger. We miss the message. This
explains why people today go from marriage to mar-
riage recreating the same relationship dynamic each
time. They do not get the message with the first spouse,
so they go on to another who continues trying to relay
the message the last spouse tried to relay.
Co-dependency And Mutual Projection
We also find others onto whom we project our own self-
hatred who will not only accept it but reciprocate by pro-
jecting theirs back onto us. We call this kind of agree-
ment a co-dependent or addictive relationship. That
special someone compensates for what we feel is
missing in ourselves by continually telling us we are
okay, so we avoid feeling our shame about who we are.
We do the same thing for them in return; thus both
people learn to manipulate each other with highly con-
ditional love based on the underlying guilt. (The ste-
reotypical Jewish Mother is a wonderful example of this
archetype.)
The moment the other person withdraws approval, we
are forced to confront our guilt and self-hatred again,
and everything collapses. Love turns immediately into
hate, and each partner attacks the other. This explains
why we see so many faltering relationships that once
seemed supportive and loving, turn into a cauldron of
hate almost instantaneously.
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