Often when I meet with clients for Hypnosis they are normally experiencing some sort of habit that isn’t helping them reach their goals. Yet sometimes it’s something much deeper than that, a limiting belief. Limiting beliefs occur by compounding multiple limiting decisions about ourselves. Normally these are formed and taken on during the ages of 2-12 years of age. After a certain number of confirming situations, the limiting decision can become a belief. Discovering the root cause of a deep seeded belief can often be revealing to clients, and in fact often the root or cause event isn’t even readily memorable. The initial event can be so unmemorable that the conscious mind does not readily recall them and when the unconscious mind presents them they are amazed at the vividness. Although much of the time it doesn’t seem like a situation they would currently deem as more than just a small setback in the road to adulthood. It can be shocking to find that what happened at such a young age could impact them deeply as an adult.
Allow me to share a breakthrough in my belief system about the relationship I have with money and how it took me way back. I mean way, way back and it brought me to my knees. The memory and pain fresh as ever spilled out, 20 plus years later.
It started with an answered prayer and then a betrayal.
My parents did something rare. They decided to take a trip with just themselves and no kids. It had been a long time since they had done that. So I was to stay with trusted friends. When I came to stay their older two children were gone for the weekend. I was lonely, but it was pleasant outside, a nice summer day in S.E. Alaska. Next door to their home was a beautiful playhouse. I missed mine. My sisters and I would play in our playhouse on our front lawn together for hours. I wondered who lived next door. I was soon to find out that it was an older couple but they had their granddaughter over for the weekend! She was my age and so smart and pretty. We became inseparable that weekend. I shared with her how much I wanted to be beautiful like my mom and she shared with me how her parents had just bought a new home and she was scared to move. The weekend flew by and in tears we said our goodbyes.
About a month later I was playing out in front of my house. Someone was walking up my street. That someone was small like me. As they came into focus, joy flooded my heart! It was my friend! How? How did she find me I wondered?! It turns out, the house her parents had bought was the vacant one house across the street from my house. It was divine and started a wonderful friendship. I totally trusted her and loved her with all my heart. For many years, I knew she felt the same about me too.
Then something began to change. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly when it started to change, but I could tell she didn’t want to spend as much time with me. She made other “best-friends”. In fifth grade, she stopped sitting next to me at lunch or asking me to play with her after school. Then after about six weeks she sat next to me again at the lunch room table. She told me that she had a “special” apple juice for me.
Now let me take a moment to explain, my family was doing okay, but it was the early 80’s in Alaska, and we had been experiencing a mighty recession. My parents were doing all they could to raise three kids and provide a lifestyle where we could spend summer weekends at a cabin. Even though money was tight, they made sure we were wealthy in experiences. Well, one of the items cut were non lunch essentials. My friend didn’t much care for apple juice or she felt sorry for me, either way when she’d ask if I wanted some, I inhaled it. In fact sometimes, she’d say, you can only have a sip, and I was kind of jerk and would drink as much as I could in a gulp. Just being honest.
So back to that “special” apple juice. I was so excited that she chose to sit next to me again, and she brought me an over-sized apple juice! I was so happy, she had missed me! She even wanted to make up and be my friend again. I was so relieved. I had been pretty lonely. I opened the juice and she encouraged me to gulp it down. I took a mighty swallow and then turned about green. It was sauerkraut juice. I spit it out in the garbage can. The table she’d been sitting at for the last few months all were staring and started laughing and pointing at me. My friend sat laughing about it and the next day went back to sitting with her other friends at lunch time. I was devastated, embarrassed and humiliated. I left school with a stomach ache that day, but really it was heart ache. Over the rest of fifth grade she would give me the scraps of her time, which I eagerly would cling onto with the hope my friend would come back to me.
In sixth grade I actually had to avoid her on the playground, her new friends got physical pushing me into a corner calling me names, telling me she didn’t want to play with me and she did nothing to stop them. Although after they let me go she asked me if I was okay and said she’d talk to me after school. I realized then that as much as I cared about her and wanted to be her friend, she was not being a friend to me. It was a hard lesson to learn.
I made friends with another girl. She was not popular, but she was kind, a good and loyal friend. In sixth grade we would write notes to each other each night so that we could read them after school the next day. We would include art or pictures, sometime sticks of gum or hair ties. She was my new best friend. In seventh grade, I would betray her, break her heart, and it haunted me for many years.
Seventh grade came, instead of a new blissful school year I faced the pack of bullies. In hallway in between class, a popular girl complimented my jeans, I said thank you as a ring of her friends encircled us. Then she asked where I had gotten them, I explained they were hand me downs from my former best friend. The joke was on me, the ring of girls already knew that I realized as they laughed and told me I had no style.
It didn’t end there, I continued to be bullied, instigated once again by this crowd. This time however, I stood up to them, not on purpose mind you, inadvertently, thinking that the councelor at school was someone I could just talk and vent to. It turns out counselors in schools actually take corrective actions. By the end of the day the principle and I sat at a table and each and every participant was handed detention or lunchroom clean up duty for defiling my locker. This was how I the loner, the person people didn’t sit by unless you were my new best friend, ended up in one day being popular. Literally as word spread, I ended up having over twenty some kids who wanted to sit and hang out with me at lunch. Looking up to me and thinking I was cool. Boy did I let that go to my head!
A few weeks later some of these new friends approached me and asked me why I was hanging out with someone so “unpopular”. I was like who is unpopular? They pointed to my new best friend. I was horrified, dumbfounded. Yet instead of defending her and risking my new social status, I did the unthinkable. I abandoned her. I told her we could no longer be friends. I was cruel and hurt her feelings. I did to her what my earlier best friend had done to me sans the bullying. I abandoned her for being deemed “unpopular”. As a result, each time I saw her, or passed her in the hallway I felt as lousy as I had before in fifth grade, but this time with guilt. I didn’t know how to fix what I had broken, she couldn’t forgive me could she? Would I lose all my new found friends? I was too filled with insecurity and guilt to apologize and I never found out. It has unfortunately been my loss.
The pattern of friendships and trust and being abused or abandoned went on in my friendships until the end of my thirties. Yes, my thirties. Not everyone treated me badly, it was the minority, but it certainly was a pattern that kept showing up in my life, a reoccurring cyclical event. That’s normally a clues left by these unseen limiting beliefs. Same theme different players.
As an adult, let me tell you I’m not proud of that decision in seventh grade, I often have wished that I could go back in time and fix it. In fact as my children began in school, I vowed to never put up with anyone bullying them or vice versus.
I’ve said all of this to say this led me to a significant breakthrough. I prayed that I could find the root cause of a financial abundance block that had plagued me and damn if my unconscious mind and the spirit didn’t take me back in my childhood to this time frame.
It was fifth grade, I was eleven, standing at J & J Deli in front of an enormous wall of candy and I didn’t have money to spend on it. I hadn’t had any extra money to pay for gum for weeks. My “best friend” at the time would purchase her goodies along with her other friends and I knew I wouldn’t be offered anything. I just said I didn’t want any. I felt shame. I felt poor. I felt I wasn’t good enough. Because I didn’t have money, I wasn’t cool enough. I made a decision back in that deli aisle that didn’t serve me, but the universe is waiting for our orders. Thus the universe then delivered to me what was in alignment with my thoughts.
You see since that time frame I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with money. At times I would have it and it would be plenty, but much more often it would be just out of reach. I could see it, but it didn’t seem to want to hang around me anymore. It always found its way to the cool kids table.
That morning after reliving those painful memories of an eleven to thirteen year old girl, I gave and received forgiveness. Giving forgiveness to my first best friend and those involved. I sought forgiveness and forgave myself of my treatment of my second best friend in seventh grade. I then allowed myself to make a new decision, an empowering new money mindset. One not comprised of competition and abandonment fraught with insecurity, but one of overflowing abundance for all of us.
That day I crafted a new definition about my relationship with money that rather than being based on my worthiness, it is based on the service I provide others. Today, I offer private sessions that deliver personal breakthroughs to others
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Sometimes the truth is bitter sweet, yet a blessing in disguise is still a blessing.
In Love & Light
Jill Dell
It’s Your Life, Own it, Design it, Live it!
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