Cut Cords of Attachment (28 page)

8. Actively
make new friends,
rather than expecting them to appear by magic.

“With your new beginning, are you interested in making new friends? How could you seek out new people in your life?”

9. Recognize that each adult is his
own responsibility,
not your client’s job to fix.

“What needs to happen for you to allow a Higher Power to take care of this person instead of you?”

10.
Set goals,
then follow up with daily action. It isn’t enough, just thinking a goal.

“Now you can stop reacting and start acting. So what is one goal you could set for yourself? Name one action that you can take to bring that goal closer.”

Social Skills Follow-Up

How can you tell for sure if your client lacks a social skill from this list?

Who says you must know for sure? All you really need is a hunch. Observe your client’s reactions as the two of you discuss how life might change. If you suspect a particular skill might be missing, gently ask a question about it.

Depending on how a person was raised, or how the relationship in a cord was defined, even an otherwise super-sophisticated client could lack some basic social skill. How can he proceed to develop that skill? He could:

• Identify other troubling relationships related to the missing skill, and make these relationships the focus of future sessions with you.
  
• Make developing this skill a new priority in life. (Once your client starts paying attention, he may easily develop the skill on his own.)
  
• Work with a friend to practice the skill.
  
• Join a support group.
  
• Meet with a psychotherapist, social worker, spiritual counselor, or life coach.
  

Note that only the first of these options would necessarily be done with your help. All those other resources will work better now, with your client has been freed from the cord items.

As an example, let’s go back to Wayne and his relationship with his mother.

CORD SAMPLE: An interesting habit

Near the start of Wayne’s session, he mentioned that he still lived at home. The man was 35 years old, successful in his career, and unmarried.

During Step 11, I asked him, “Why do you still live with your mother?”

He said, “I keep hoping to make her life better.”

Soon as the words came out of his mouth, Wayne did a double take. Fresh from removing that cord of attachment, he could reconsider that old assumption. Before, the pattern of trying to fix his mother kept repeating 24/7. Now Wayne could think more objectively about how he chose to live.

Social Skill 1, on our previous list, involves whether your client has learned to
enjoy life on his own.
Usually this comes up in sessions with clients who jump from one bad love relationship to the next. But sometimes a client simply hasn’t learned to separate from a parent.

Following a hunch, I asked Wayne, “When you were a teenager, did you ever go through a rebellious stage?”

He looked shocked. “Of course not!”

Teenage rebellion serves a purpose. Wayne didn’t need much reminding to get the point. The habit of being a good little boy no longer served him. Actually, changing that habit could be fun. If he chose, he could consider this a logical consequence of cutting the cord of attachment to his mother.

Encourage Assertiveness

Assertiveness
means advocating for yourself without being unduly aggressive. Most of your clients will have heard of it. Not many necessarily know how to do it.

How can they? So often a cord of attachment endlessly exerts its push-pull in ways that compromise personal power.

Depending on the nature of a particular cord, your client may be doomed to failure no matter how hard she tries to stick up for herself. With Step 11, that can start to change. Just a logical consequence.

TECHNIQUE: Assertiveness Based in Objective Reality

Once a cord of attachment is gone, your client can stand up for himself in ways that had previously been unavailable. I have developed a formula for assertiveness based squarely in objective reality. Try it. Teach it to clients too, as appropriate.

1. When we are in this situation in objective reality,

2. You do X.

3. Please do Y instead.

You can teach this Assertiveness Formula quickly, based on what was in the cord of attachment. Let your client play with it like a game during Step 11. For example, Wayne could tell his mother:

1. I am vacuuming the carpet.

2. You complain that I don’t do enough to clean the house. You’re complaining while I am cleaning it!

3. Next time, I’d like you to do the vacuuming.

How can a client have missed out on such a basic social skill as speaking up for himself?

Your client may be a loving person like Wayne, well trained to serve others but discouraged from sticking up for himself.

Or your client may be used to the idea that, if only he shares his deepest subjective feelings, this will magically solve all problems. (Maybe in session with a trained psychotherapist. The rest of the time? Not likely.)

Once a cord of attachment is cut, a simple reminder from you during Step 11 can make all the difference. Even if assertiveness never developed, a willing adult can catch up quickly.

Name the related logical consequence. Summarize the technique for “Assertiveness Based in Objective Reality.” Then expect wonderful benefits for your client.

The following technique can help, too.

TECHNIQUE: In the Context of Healing, Describe the Concept of Life Contracts

Some clients turn wistful during Step 11. Often, they’ll agree that some very basic aspect of life has been missing. For example, a grown woman may realize that she never received the basic nurturing she needed. I’ll tell such a client a variation on the following— not just to make her feel better, but because I believe it to be the truth:

If things in your life had gone smoothly, this piece of your development would have happened automatically. By the time you were five, you would have had this basic kind of nurturing.

But consider the possibility that all major events in a lifetime, up to age 21, are part of a person’s
life contract.
This is a design you made for your life before incarnating here at Earth School. After age 21, basics of the contract remain in place but much more about your life is negotiable.

Depending on how you have responded to that early script, using your free will, you set in motion new consequences. That’s how most of us learn here at Earth School.

Why would you write such a painful lack of nurturing into your life contract? If all had gone smoothly, you would have been nurtured. Still, you wouldn’t have learned much about the process. Instead, look at what’s going to happen now:

As an adult, you’ll be able to fill in that gap, bit by bit. Consciously, you’ll start to choose relationships that nurture you. Consciously, you will learn to recognize them.

Consciously, you can awaken your ability to trust someone who really cares about you.

All this amounts to some immense learning. Since you will earn the knowledge consciously, you can help others learn the same thing. Painful though the process may be, it can become a means for your soul to gain deep wisdom that couldn’t be acquired by any other means.

New Stories Can be Another Logical Consequence

To skeptics, cords of attachment seem unreal.

In my opinion, cords of attachment are definitely real. Moreover, their presence can influence people to believe plenty of other things that aren’t real at all. How ironic is that?

Cords re-circulate false ideas about the self. Then these illusions become
self-fulfilling prophecies.
As people subconsciously believe limiting stories about who they are, they act in such a way as to make these false stories come true. So long as a cord circulates its energy patterns, no amount of psychological inquiry can eliminate self-fulfilling prophecies.

Another popular term for destructive inner programming is
negative self-talk,
where people constantly berate themselves inwardly. Sure, it makes absolute sense to change that inner conversation – but how successful will a client’s efforts be, so long as that chronic badmouthing repeats endlessly through a cord?

In Step 7, you have used Rosetree Energy Spirituality to initiate permanent change. At Step 9, you wrote the Dialogue Box, providing evidence of destructive self-talk. As you expand your client’s understanding in Steps 10 and 11, you help the client to overcome illusions contributing to self-fulfilling prophecies.

Whichever logical consequences you have discussed so far in Step 11, maybe it’s time to raise this hopeful possibility as well. Your client can start telling better stories in personal self-talk. Cord cutting makes it easier to believe, subconsciously, in positive and new self-fulfilling prophecies.

TECHNIQUE: Separate Strengths From Illusions

Many cord items give rise to illusions. Each time you encounter an illusion or destructive idea in a Dialogue Box, here’s what to do at Step 11:

1. Discuss the illusion involved in a cord item. It may have given your client a false sense of being weak, unlovable, or otherwise defective. Or maybe it is a weird, horrible idea about the nature of life, what it means to be a good person, etc. Read out that particular cord item for evaluation with conscious common sense.

2. Invite your client to question whether she wants to continue living on the basis of that old illusion.

3. Ask your client how she thinks that cord item might have distorted her sense of self.

4. Explain the concepts of self-talk and self-fulfilling prophecies. Now that the cord is gone, how does the client think her self-talk might change, with no effort needed?

5. Encourage your client to start acting outwardly as the strong person she always was, deep down.

The specifics you discuss, related to that particular cord idem... ta da! Likely improvement in an important direction, another logical consequence from this particular session of healing.

CORD SAMPLE: Awakening from the Enchantment

June looked exhausted. Even before she spoke, I saw such fatigue in her eyes. It looked as if her soul was numb.

When we got to Step 4, I asked for her candidate for cord cutting. In a pleading voice she said, “Please cut the cord to my mother.”

And no wonder June felt so bad! Here is the pattern I reported from the cord, which she verified down to the finest detail:

1. June: Criticism is constant. It’s heard. It’s felt.

2. Mom: I try so hard to be good to my daughter, but my anger and rage leak out. When that happens I feel guilty.

3. June: I feel her guilt as though it is my own.

4. June: I feel ashamed, disapproved of.

5. June: What’s the point in my trying anything? Whatever I do turns out wrong.

6. Mom: I feel threatened by June’s exuberance. Ever since she was a baby I’ve been embarrassed by her, from toilet training onward.

7. June: I will stay in this numbing enchantment until she, or the universe, releases me.

Perhaps when making her life contract, June’s mother hoped that she would be able to learn from the joyous soul who would incarnate as her daughter. But sometimes we fall short of the ambitious goals in a life contract.

Was June’s mother too proud to learn from her own child? Too stressed? Whatever the cause, this mother felt threatened by her daughter’s natural joy. Ironically, this caused the mother to live with something at least as difficult, her daughter’s resulting depression.

Since June felt too bad to work, she still lived at home, dependent and sad.

Initially, the mother had trapped her daughter. Then the mother became trapped in turn.

Perhaps this sad enchantment could finally end for them both.

The logical consequence to be named in particular? With Cord Item 5 gone for good, June might find herself showing more initiative in life, experimenting with speech and action.

No-Win Relationships

Sometimes your client will be attracted to the kind of relationship that can never bring happiness. Online forums are buzzing about narcissists, sex addicts, abusers, and other troubled souls who cause misery for their loved ones. Intellectually, your client might know better than to choose one of these no-win relationships. Yet, somehow, she might find herself drawn to the same no-win pattern again and again.

Marionettes, it turns out, aren’t the only ones pulled by strings. Cutting cords of attachment helps to loosen the attraction of no-win relationships.

Don’t people have something to learn from every relationship? Sure. But sometimes the Cosmic Lesson is simply learning how to wave bye-bye.

How do I define a
no-win relationship?
It’s being involved with someone who has such a serious personality disorder that, by definition, he will always blame others rather than being willing to change himself.

Your client may keep giving her no-win relationship just one more chance... until she understands that some relationships can never be set right. Superman couldn’t do it. Even God couldn’t do it, not without that person’s request.

How can you tell if a cordee qualifies as a no-win relationship? Any one of the following characteristics would constitute a Keep Out sign to the wise:

• Verbally abusive
  
• Physically violent
  
• Sexually demanding, yet incapable of intimacy
  
• A pathological liar
  
• Jealous repeatedly, and for no reason
  
• Heavily involved with sexual promiscuity or pornography
  
• An alcoholic or drug addict who refuses treatment
  
• Emotionally draining, yet never satisfied
  
• Always the center of attention, deeply uninterested in others
  
• Narcissistic
  
• A sociopath or psychopath
  

TECHNIQUE: Lotto for Grownups

As a child, you played Lotto, didn’t you? Picture recognition games are fun for a kid, matching a lion with a lion, a lamb with a lamb.

When you facilitate cutting a cord of attachment, you can help clients play a version that relates to emotional intelligence: Lotto for Grownups.