Secondary Gains

Secondary Gains

A lot of people feel like they're victims in life, and they'll often point to past events, perhaps growing up with an abusive parent or in a dysfunctional family. Most psychologists believe that about 85 percent of families are dysfunctional, so all of a sudden you're not so unique. My parents were alcoholics. My dad abused me. My mother divorced him when I was six . . . I mean, that's almost everybody's story in some form or not. The real question is, what are you going to do now? What do you choose now? Because you can either keep focusing on that, or you can focus on what you want. And when people start focusing on what they want, what they don't want falls away, and what they want expands, and the other part disappears. -Jack Canfield

I work through my past in order to live more fully in my present

I will work through the pain of my past with the clear intent of allowing myself to live more fully in the present. When I work on my past simply to relive it over and over again, I strengthen its grip within me, I overempower it. I become preoccupied with reliving it under the guise of working it through, I become mildly obsessed with it. Talking about it has secondary gains for me; maybe it lets me off the hook when it comes to moving forward in my own life, maybe I use it to manipulate others into feeling sorry for me, maybe it's just gratifying to go over it again and again, or maybe it's just habit. When I work with my past in order to understand it, in order not to repeat or reenact it, I am speeding up my karma, I am living consciously, I am working something through in my conscious mind so that I do not have to live it out as "fate".