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Two Sisters Part 2: The Shield of Blame

The Blame Game

If it is the younger sister’s fault for personalizing events and seeing everything that happens as a contest with her older sister, is she then not responsible for her recurring wounds and her ongoing anguish? By habitually blaming her older sister, she has shielded herself from facing her own demons and has failed to take responsibility for improving her life. The irony she cannot bear to see is that as long as she hides behind her shield of blame, the hidden demons of her nature will continue to possess her. In deflecting her conscious attention from confronting these demons, she has ceded to them the power to shape her life as they see fit. In effect, by not taking responsibility for her dilemma she has abandoned herself to the most destructive aspects in her nature. As long as she continues to abandon herself by failing to take responsibility for her predicament, her jealousy and hatred will continue to diminish her and destroy her life. This is where taking things personally takes us in the end.

The Path of Most Resistance

As long as the younger sister insists on taking things personally and viewing everything from the perspective of conflict with her older sister, the darkness and jealousy within her nature will not be challenged. The negative emotional blocks in both her body and soul cannot be cleared; her will remains broken, and her life will be unchanged. By taking things personally, she has chosen the path of most resistance, a path on which she will struggle mightily against her better self, pitting her basest instincts against her true potential. The path of most resistance leads to a life of increased suffering. This is the life path she has chosen for herself,although she lacks the clarity to see that she has chosen it. How could anyone be so foolish? Yet people choose the path of most resistance all the time.

Two Sisters Part 1: Closed vs Open Systems of Consciousness

sisters victimization

The Power of Limiting Beliefs

A closed system of consciousness is one in which we believe there is a limited amount of power, success, money, attention, or access available to us. When we invest our consciousness in the belief of limitation, someone else’s success becomes our loss, and we feel diminished by their accomplishment.

Three Key Themes

There are three key themes in closed systems thinking that have a strong impact on our behavior. These three themes are an overriding belief in limitation, an overwhelming tendency to take things personally, and an ever-increasing sense of victimization. In a closed system of consciousness, we end up feeling wounded and victimized by things that in reality have little or no relationship to us.

Two Sisters

As an example of a closed system of consciousness, let us imagine a relationship dynamic involving two adult sisters who are both married. The older sister has two beautiful and bright children who do well in school, have many friends, and are popular with their respective peer groups. The younger sister has one child who takes drugs, gets failing grades, and is a loner with few friends.
The younger sister has been jealous of her older sibling since they were little children. Over the years her jealousy has hardened into hatred. While success comes easily to her older sister, it comes rarely to her. The same pattern of success and failure that has complicated the sisters’ relationship with one another has taken root in the lives of their children. The older sister’s children are far more successful and better adjusted than is the younger sister’s son.

Jealousy and Competition

The younger sister’s jealousy causes her to see everything that happens in her life in terms of competition with her sister. She takes everything personally, even when it has nothing to do with her directly. Every new success of her older sister’s family wounds her deeply. Every new failure of her son, every bad grade, every run-in with authority, deepens her anguish. She has always seen her older sister as a winner and herself as a failure. No matter what she does to pull even or go ahead, she knows she is doomed to fail. No matter how hard she pushes herself to outdo her sister, she knows deep down that she will continue to lose. With every perceived loss, her sense of victimization grows.
Exactly who is responsible for her anguish? Is it her sister’s fault, as she would like to believe? Does her sister’s success really diminish her? Is their relationship a zero sum game where only so much success has been granted to the entire family and her older sister has greedily usurped it? Or is it her fault for taking everything so personally and seeing everything that happens in terms of a contest with her sister?

To be continued tomorrow. Please Share and Like.