Do You Believe This?? - from "Pink Hair & Chocolate Cookies"
Posted: Monday, December 22, 2008
by Laura Lavigne
TreeHouse Coaching
Until the age of seven, my life was fairly normal as I grew up in France with a mom, a dad and a sweet polka-dotted dog. Our home was in the country and the smells of fresh mown grass and roasted chicken wafted in the background.
My dad was nurturing his calendar publishing company and when she was not working with him, my mom spent a fair amount of time with me. The woods behind our home were my kingdom and skinned knees did not scare me.
That was a lot of changes to absorb in one short drive and I did my best.
A few months later, we were settled into the big, beautiful house, not two but three housekeepers / cooks / cleaning ladies were living with us, I had a baby sister and my mom was expecting our baby brother.
My dog, on the other hand, never made the move. I was told later on that, she had preferred to go live on a farm. There had been no goodbyes.
The years that followed saw an enormous increase in financial wealth and an enormous decrease in family life.
My dad sold his company to a national corporation for what I believe was a huge amount of money. Both he and my mom remained on the payroll at an astronomical salary.
My brother and sister were being raised by nannies, my parents seemed to get swallowed up in a social cyclone. I saw my mom cry a few times, and I spent a lot of time alone on the third floor of the Big, Beautiful home.
The truth is, I liked it there. I do not remember feeling lonely, nor do I remember feeling sad.
However, and it took me years to realize it, in a very short time, I had made an Agreement. I had allowed one big subconscious belief to come in: money was the opposite of love. The opposite of family.
Money had come in, warmth had left.
Years passed and I became an adult. Having inherited a strong entrepreneurial gene, I headed, unleashed, into the world. No wall was tall enough to keep me down and at the age of 20, I found myself charging an hourly rate of $75 as I applied makeup on movie sets.
Money came in and I made sure that it left just as quickly.
You see, while my conscious mind was busy creating what seemed to make sense, my subconscious was frantically protecting me from what it knew to be the coldness of money.
Because that is what the subconscious does: it takes The Agreement - even if we made it at the age of six - and it runs with it. Possibly forever.
Eventually, I got married and created a family of my own. My most precious accomplishment. Still committed to protecting me, my subconscious remained hard at work, keeping me rich in love and poor in funds. I was priding myself in raising my babies in a warm, warm home, even (or should I say especially) as we scrambled for diaper money.
By that time, I had a pretty good understanding of what was going on. I had read enough books, talked to enough people to know that I was in the middle of a silent and deadly battle.
On one hand, knowing helped. On the other, it made the whole thing even more frustrating as I knew that the solution (as is most often the case) lived deep inside of me. I wrote, I visualized, I meditated, I paid attention. Things were slowly getting better as the light of my awareness shone on the darkest spots. There were vacations abroad, new clothes, nice schools for the kids it was starting to feel as though maybe I had beat it.
And then, my parents lost all their money.
And just like that, my dad, who had been traveling a whole lot of my childhood on business, was home with my mom again. They were broke and they were together.
Bam!
My subconscious, who had been on a sleepy sabbatical popped right up. You see, it screamed, money WAS the problem.
Oh boy.
It was almost back to square one for me. The darn initial agreement got a new dose of juice. It was BACK.
As I watched my parents struggle with house payments, I saw them become closer to one another. In fact, they might have turned into one person for a few years. Struggling together and holding hands. Until my dad died, in my moms arms, having cashed in his life insurance policy to pay the mortgage.
It was not long before my own marriage dissolved and before I found myself in the depth of a financial abyss.
Three young kids, a whole bunch of broken dreams and a Thanksgiving turkey from the food bank.
No money for ice cream cones and no money to go to the movies together.
A few months of that lifestyle and then it occurred to me on a deep, deep level that money would actually be GOOD for my family; that money would NOT take away the love we had and very possibly that it might even enhance it.
For the same reason that the 6-year old little girl had instantly internalized a belief and made it hers, the mom was finally able to let it go.
From then on, things evolved rapidly. While my conscious was still operating on its entrepreneurial mode, my subconscious supported it. As money came in, it no longer frantically ran for the door. Instead, it turned into road trips, a nice home, a great car, beautiful food and creative endeavors. It was allowed to meld into my family life and make it sweeter.
My belief had finally shifted.
So, thats it. The story of how a belief can live quietly inside of us and do its work, diligently, steadfastly and unbeknownst to us. The story also, of how, by paying attention to the things that just dont work in our lives, no matter how much actual work we put into them, we might be able to identify one of those beliefs - and eventually part with it.
Does anything ring familiar, in those words, for you?
And if so, are you ready to get to the other side?
There are many ways for us to get our subconscious and conscious aligned - and I suggest not waiting until you are in line at the Food Bank.
This is big, painful and definitely crucial work. I highly recommend it.
(excerpt from Pink Hair & Chocolate Cookies)
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)Hi Laura.This is very well written and if the rest of "Pink Hair & Chocolate Cookies" is anything like it, it must be doing very well.Much of what you wrote rings true for me. At nine years of age I made the decision that "B's" were good enough, that "A's" were too much work for so little "reward." All I got from my dad when I busted my nether regions and got all A's was a solemn, "Well now, let's see if you can do that again." I've wondered off and on over my life how this might have effected the whole of it. Maybe I will be giving it a closer look in the next couple of months.Thank you for your excellent illustration.DianneHi DianneWow... this is another great illustration. Thanks for sharing it.Yes, Pink Hair & Chocolate Cookies is doing well and I was actually looking for you email address last night as I posted this last article because I want to send you the ebook - along with my thanks for encouraging me over the last couple of months. How do I do this???
The sad part of this reality is many draw apart, unable to cope, no foundation for true love they hung togetehr on materialism and wealth. Once gone there was no glue. Broken homes, lives, destruction and doom in its path. You are very fortunate and one of the few. Great article.
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