The Original Decision
The Original Decision
Somewhere in your life, something happened.
You felt it.
You understood it from the position you were in.
And inside that moment, you made a decision.
Maybe:
I will never let this happen again.
I have to do this alone.
It is safer not to speak.
I cannot be that part of myself anymore.
At the time, the decision made sense.
But some decisions do more than solve a moment. They change the track.
You begin making later choices from them. You organize relationships around them. You avoid certain experiences. You stop using certain aspects of yourself. And after enough repetition, you forget there was ever a decision at all.
It simply becomes:
This is who I am. This is how life works. This is what is possible for me.
But the original decision is still there.
And when you can find it, understand the whole event in which it was made, and allow every part of that experience to finally be lived through, something changes.
The decision becomes visible again.
And what became a decision can become a choice.
That is what this page is about.
Finding the moment where the track changed — and making choice available again.
1. The Event
Something happens.
Someone says something.
Someone leaves.
You lose something.
You are rejected.
You are frightened.
You are praised.
You succeed.
You fail.
Something happens that you did not expect.
The event is what takes place in your life.
But the event itself does not determine the track you will follow.
What changes the track is the decision you make inside the event.
You are originally free.
And then, in response to what is happening, you decide something.
About yourself.
About another person.
About life.
About what is safe.
About what you can or cannot be.
The decision may happen so quickly that you never consciously hear the words.
But the body responds.
An emotion appears.
In the way I understand it, emotion is a pointer. It shows the relationship between the decision you have just made and the freedom you originally came from.
The further the decision takes you away from that original freedom, the more painful the emotion becomes.
A decision such as:
I am not wanted.
I am powerless.
I must never be this part of myself again.
I cannot trust anyone.
can therefore create an enormous emotional response.
And sometimes that emotional experience is simply too much to hold in that moment.
You may be a child.
You may have nobody with you who can help you stay with what you are feeling.
Or the same kind of event may happen again and again until the decision becomes stronger each time.
So you step over the emotion.
You continue.
You behave as though nothing happened.
But the experience has not been completed.
The emotion that could not be fully experienced remains part of the unfinished event.
And the decision continues with you.
Sometimes there is one clear moment where everything changed.
Sometimes the same message has been repeated so many times that the original moment is harder to see.
But the mechanism is the same.
Something happened. You made a decision. And that decision changed what came next.
2. The Decision
The event happens.
Then you make a decision about it.
Sometimes the decision is clear and almost verbal:
I will never trust anyone again.
I have to do this alone.
I must not show this part of myself.
I am not safe when I speak the truth.
I am not worthy of this.
Sometimes it happens so quickly that you never consciously hear the words.
You simply know.
This is what this means.
This is who I am.
This is how life works.
And then the body answers that decision with emotion.
The emotion is the pointer.
The further the decision moves away from your original freedom, the more painful the emotional response becomes.
A decision such as:
I am not allowed to be fully myself.
is much further away from freedom than:
This person does not understand me right now.
The event may be the same.
The track is not.
Because the decision is what determines what you carry forward.
A decision can also exclude an aspect of your psyche.
You may decide:
I must not be angry.
And your capacity to use anger cleanly becomes less available.
You may decide:
I must not disappoint people.
And the part of you that can choose your own direction while somebody else is unhappy begins to disappear from your range of choice.
You may decide:
What I know causes trouble.
And the part of you that knows becomes something you stop trusting.
The aspect itself is not gone.
You have decided not to use it.
At first, this is still a decision.
But then life continues.
You make another choice from it.
And another.
The same kind of situation appears again, and the original decision seems to be confirmed.
Eventually you stop experiencing it as something you once decided.
It becomes:
This is just who I am.
That is when a decision starts becoming a track.
And sometimes there was not one dramatic moment.
The same message may have reached you again and again.
A parent tells you you are too much.
A teacher repeatedly makes you feel incapable.
A relationship teaches you that honesty leads to conflict.
The decision may be made once and then reinforced many times, or it may form gradually through repetition.
Either way, the result is the same:
a possibility that was once available to you becomes harder and harder to choose.
And because the decision has disappeared from sight, you no longer realize that another choice was ever possible.
3. The New Track
Once a decision has been made, life begins to organize around it.
Suppose the decision was:
I must not become angry.
Perhaps there was an earlier moment in which your anger was followed by rejection, conflict, loss of connection, or somebody else’s anger.
Inside that event you made a decision:
I must never do that again.
From that moment on, anger is no longer simply one response available to you.
The possibility of using it becomes connected to fear.
Years later, somebody crosses a boundary.
You know what you want to say.
You can feel the part of you that wants to stand up, become firm, perhaps even become angry.
And immediately, fear appears.
This is where the old track can become extremely convincing.
Because the fear appears while another person is standing in front of you, you naturally connect the two.
This person makes me afraid.
I am afraid of him.
It is dangerous to stand up to her.
I should keep quiet.
The fear is projected onto the present situation.
But sometimes the present person is not the source of the fear at all.
Something about the situation has simply touched the same ingredients that were present when the original decision was made.
Someone is angry.
You are about to disagree.
You may lose approval.
You may risk connection.
You are about to use a part of yourself that you once decided was dangerous.
And the old emotional experience becomes active again.
In my own life, I saw this many times. I could feel fear while standing up to someone and conclude that I was afraid of that person.
Later I could see that the fear was much older.
The person in front of me had touched an old track.
The fear underneath the fear
Over time, I found that many of these emotional reactions pointed back toward a small number of basic fears:
Am I safe?
Am I worthy?
Do I still belong?
A situation in the present may look completely different from the original event, while touching the same underlying fear.
Someone disagrees with you and suddenly belonging is at stake.
Someone criticizes you and worth is at stake.
Someone becomes angry and safety is at stake.
The present situation becomes mixed with the unfinished experience from the past.
And because the feeling is real, the conclusion feels real too.
That is why we so easily obey it.
The unfinished experience returns
But there is another way to understand what is happening.
The fear is here.
That means the part of the original experience that was never fully felt has become available again.
In my experience, this is not a mistake in the system.
The psyche keeps moving toward wholeness.
An aspect of yourself that became excluded is still part of you, and the unfinished emotion connected to that exclusion keeps returning when life contains the right ingredients.
This is why similar situations can appear again and again.
Different person.
Different place.
Different year.
Same ingredients.
The situation changes.
The emotional pattern does not.
And every time the old emotion becomes active, there is another possibility:
this time, the feeling can be fully experienced.
What usually happens instead
Most of the time, we do not recognize this.
We feel fear and act on it.
We become quiet.
We withdraw.
We apologize.
We make the other person comfortable.
We abandon the response that was beginning to arise.
And then the emotional intensity falls.
That feels like relief.
The mind concludes:
Good. I avoided the danger.
But look at what has actually happened.
The original emotion was activated.
You acted from the original decision.
The emotion was not fully experienced.
And the decision was confirmed again.
The loop closes.
Next time the same ingredients appear, the fear arrives even faster.
The old track becomes easier to follow.
Eventually you may no longer see a choice at all.
You simply say:
I am afraid of confrontation.
I cannot stand up to people like that.
I am not an angry person.
I have to keep the peace.
The decision has become identity.
And the person or situation in front of you appears to be the reason you cannot choose differently.
The possibility never disappeared
But the excluded possibility is still there.
The anger is still there.
The ability to speak is still there.
The capacity to stand your ground is still there.
What stands between you and that aspect of yourself is the unfinished experience attached to the old decision.
And that is why simply forcing yourself to behave differently does not necessarily change the track.
The old emotion still needs to be experienced.
When it is allowed to move all the way through instead of being turned into another automatic action, something different becomes possible.
The present situation stops having to carry the weight of the past.
The person in front of you becomes the person in front of you.
The old fear becomes recognizable as the old fear.
And the aspect of yourself you once excluded begins to come back within reach.
The possibility never disappeared. It became guarded by an unfinished emotion.
And once you can see that, the track is no longer invisible.
4. Finding the Original Decision
Finding the original decision is rarely a matter of sitting down and forcing yourself to remember.
You follow the trail.
Start with what you already know.
There are memories from childhood that somehow stayed with you.
They may seem important.
They may seem completely ordinary.
You may even wonder why you still remember them after thirty or forty years.
Pay attention to those memories.
In my experience, when a memory has remained remarkably clear for decades, it is worth looking at.
When I began doing this, I simply wrote down the difficult events from my life that I could still remember.
I did not try to understand everything immediately.
I made a list.
And something interesting began to happen.
Once I deliberately turned my attention toward those memories, other pieces started becoming available.
One memory reminded me of another.
A forgotten detail suddenly appeared.
I would be doing something completely unrelated and suddenly think:
Wait. There was that other time.
So I wrote that down too.
Little by little, the map became larger.
Use what is already there
Old photographs can help.
So can diaries, notebooks, letters, school reports, objects you kept, stories family members have told you, or things you wrote when you were younger.
Sometimes they reveal something you had completely forgotten.
I once found a photograph of myself as a child wearing a tracksuit that was much too big for me.
Looking at that photograph brought back the position I had occupied then:
the fragile girl.
And behind that seemingly simple identity was a much larger story.
The photograph did not give me the whole answer.
It opened a door.
That is often how this works.
One piece leads to another.
Start with what is happening now
You can also begin with something recent.
Perhaps something happened last week.
Or last month.
Someone said something and your reaction was much stronger than the situation seemed to require.
You became frightened.
Angry.
Small.
Powerless.
Rejected.
You wanted to disappear, defend yourself, please somebody, run away or shut down.
Go back to that moment in your mind.
Feel the structure of it.
And then ask:
Where have I felt this before?
Not:
When did exactly the same thing happen?
The circumstances may be completely different.
The person may be different.
You may have been in another house, another relationship, another decade of your life.
What you are looking for is the same emotional structure.
Perhaps today your partner becomes angry and you become quiet.
Twenty years earlier it was a teacher.
Before that, a parent.
Different people.
Different events.
But inside you:
the same movement.
The same fear.
The same conclusion.
The same urge to respond in the same way.
Follow that.
Move backward through the repetitions
Sometimes the first memory you find is not the original one.
It is simply another repetition of the same track.
So ask again:
Where did I know this before?
And again.
A memory from last year may lead to one from your twenties.
That may lead to adolescence.
That may eventually lead to something from childhood.
Sometimes the original decision was made in one very clear moment.
Sometimes the same conclusion was repeated so often that it became stronger layer by layer.
Either way, you keep following the emotional structure backward.
You are looking for the point where something changed.
The moment before which a possibility was still available—
and after which it no longer felt available.
Let the memory come to you
This does not always happen while you are consciously searching.
You may ask the question and get nothing.
Then later, while showering, driving, gardening or sitting on the toilet, a memory suddenly arrives.
Oh.
That.
In my experience, once I had clearly pointed my attention toward a pattern, pieces often continued to surface afterwards.
I learned to write them down.
I did not need to solve them immediately.
I was gathering the trail.
And eventually there would be a moment where something clicked.
You recognize the emotional structure.
You recognize the old decision.
And suddenly a reaction that has followed you for years starts to make sense.
This is where I learned it.
This is where I decided.
You have found the place where the track changed.
And then the next question becomes possible:
Can I look at what happened there without immediately deciding that it was wrong?
4. Finding the Original Decision
Finding the original decision is rarely a matter of sitting down and forcing yourself to remember.
You follow the trail.
Start with what you already know.
There are memories from childhood that somehow stayed with you.
They may seem important.
They may seem completely ordinary.
You may even wonder why you still remember them after thirty or forty years.
Pay attention to those memories.
In my experience, when a memory has remained remarkably clear for decades, it is worth looking at.
When I began doing this, I simply wrote down the difficult events from my life that I could still remember.
I did not try to understand everything immediately.
I made a list.
And something interesting began to happen.
Once I deliberately turned my attention toward those memories, other pieces started becoming available.
One memory reminded me of another.
A forgotten detail suddenly appeared.
I would be doing something completely unrelated and suddenly think:
Wait. There was that other time.
So I wrote that down too.
Little by little, the map became larger.
Use what is already there
Old photographs can help.
So can diaries, notebooks, letters, school reports, objects you kept, stories family members have told you, or things you wrote when you were younger.
Sometimes they reveal something you had completely forgotten.
I once found a photograph of myself as a child wearing a tracksuit that was much too big for me.
Looking at that photograph brought back the position I had occupied then:
the fragile girl.
And behind that seemingly simple identity was a much larger story.
The photograph did not give me the whole answer.
It opened a door.
That is often how this works.
One piece leads to another.
Start with what is happening now
You can also begin with something recent.
Perhaps something happened last week.
Or last month.
Someone said something and your reaction was much stronger than the situation seemed to require.
You became frightened.
Angry.
Small.
Powerless.
Rejected.
You wanted to disappear, defend yourself, please somebody, run away or shut down.
Go back to that moment in your mind.
Feel the structure of it.
And then ask:
Where have I felt this before?
Not:
When did exactly the same thing happen?
The circumstances may be completely different.
The person may be different.
You may have been in another house, another relationship, another decade of your life.
What you are looking for is the same emotional structure.
Perhaps today your partner becomes angry and you become quiet.
Twenty years earlier it was a teacher.
Before that, a parent.
Different people.
Different events.
But inside you:
the same movement.
The same fear.
The same conclusion.
The same urge to respond in the same way.
Follow that.
Move backward through the repetitions
Sometimes the first memory you find is not the original one.
It is simply another repetition of the same track.
So ask again:
Where did I know this before?
And again.
A memory from last year may lead to one from your twenties.
That may lead to adolescence.
That may eventually lead to something from childhood.
Sometimes the original decision was made in one very clear moment.
Sometimes the same conclusion was repeated so often that it became stronger layer by layer.
Either way, you keep following the emotional structure backward.
You are looking for the point where something changed.
The moment before which a possibility was still available—
and after which it no longer felt available.
Let the memory come to you
This does not always happen while you are consciously searching.
You may ask the question and get nothing.
Then later, while showering, driving, gardening or sitting on the toilet, a memory suddenly arrives.
Oh.
That.
In my experience, once I had clearly pointed my attention toward a pattern, pieces often continued to surface afterwards.
I learned to write them down.
I did not need to solve them immediately.
I was gathering the trail.
And eventually there would be a moment where something clicked.
You recognize the emotional structure.
You recognize the old decision.
And suddenly a reaction that has followed you for years starts to make sense.
This is where I learned it.
This is where I decided.
You have found the place where the track changed.
And then the next question becomes possible:
Can I look at what happened there without immediately deciding that it was wrong?
See what you decided about yourself
As you follow the pattern backward, something else becomes visible.
You are not only finding what happened.
You are finding what you decided about yourself because of what happened.
The later events help you see it because every repetition adds another layer.
One event may tell you:
I should keep quiet.
Another:
People become angry when I speak.
Another:
It is safer when I make myself smaller.
And underneath all of them may be one deeper decision:
There is something about me that is not safe to be.
Or:
I am not worthy.
Or:
I do not belong when I am fully myself.
This is why following the repetitions matters.
Each later decision contains part of the picture.
Together they begin to reveal the identity you built.
And that identity can be very different from what was originally available to you.
You began with possibility.
With many aspects of your psyche available.
You could speak.
You could know.
You could become angry.
You could be soft.
You could steer.
You could change direction.
You could love.
You could say no.
You could say yes.
Then something happened, and inside your understanding of that moment you concluded that one or more of those possibilities could no longer be safely used.
The decision was real.
The conclusion did not necessarily have to be true.
That is the distinction you are looking for.
The decision was made from a limited view
Especially as a child, you do not see the whole event.
You see from the position you occupy.
Someone else may be frightened, angry, ashamed, disappointed or trapped inside their own beliefs.
They respond to you from that position.
And you may take their response as information about you.
He rejects this part of me, therefore this part of me is wrong.
She becomes angry when I speak, therefore speaking is dangerous.
They do not see me, therefore I must be unworthy of being seen.
The other person’s perception becomes material for your own conclusion.
And because you do not yet see that they are responding through their own perception, the conclusion feels like truth.
Years later, when you find the original decision, you can finally separate the two.
This happened.
And:
This is what I decided it meant about me.
Those are not the same thing.
Look for the deepest conclusion
In my experience, the strongest decisions often lead toward a few very basic conclusions:
I am not safe.
I am not worthy.
I do not belong.
They hurt so deeply because they remove enormous parts of what was originally available to you.
But once you can see that these were conclusions, rather than unquestionable truths, the decision begins to loosen.
At the level of who you are, worth is not something another person can give or remove.
Belonging is not something that has to be earned by abandoning yourself.
And being here does not require permission.
You are here.
That fact comes before somebody else’s judgment about whether you should be.
This is the moment where the original decision becomes visible as a decision.
You can finally see:
I built part of my identity around something I concluded in one particular experience.
And now you can ask a different question:
Was the conclusion actually true?
Very often, that is where the first crack appears.
But seeing that the conclusion was mistaken does not automatically mean you can accept the event in which it was made.
You may still be standing in front of it saying:
What happened was wrong. It should never have happened.
And as long as that verdict remains fixed, the whole event is still difficult to receive.
5. The Corner of Wrong
We live in a reality of contrast.
Up and down.
Warm and cold.
Light and dark.
Yes and no.
Contrast gives us something to choose between.
And as we grow up, another kind of contrast is added:
right and wrong.
We learn ideas about what a good person does and what a bad person does.
Those ideas come from everywhere.
Family.
Religion.
Culture.
School.
Gender.
The time in which you were born.
The people around you.
Some of those ideas may be useful.
But they are still ideas.
And when an aspect of yourself gets placed firmly in the corner of wrong, something important happens:
you stop allowing yourself to choose it.
When an aspect becomes wrong
Imagine that as a child you have the capacity to become furious.
You can shout.
You can swear.
You can use the full force of yourself when something crosses your boundary.
Then you repeatedly receive the message:
Good children do not behave like that.
Swearing is wrong.
Anger is bad.
You must be nice.
Eventually you may no longer simply prefer another way of responding.
You decide:
That part of me is wrong.
And once an aspect of your psyche has been placed there, you cannot use it freely anymore.
Even considering it may produce fear, shame or guilt.
The capacity still exists.
But it has been removed from your available choices.
That is very different from preference.
Preference says:
I could choose this, but I prefer something else.
Judgment says:
I cannot choose this because choosing it would make me wrong.
Freedom requires the first.
Taking something out of the corner
To make an aspect available again, the judgment around it has to be neutralized.
That does not mean you suddenly have to use it.
I have many capacities available to me that I may never choose to use.
That is not the point.
The point is that they are free.
I can curse.
I can become angry.
I can walk away.
I can disappoint somebody.
I can become extremely firm.
And I can also choose tenderness, patience, silence or compromise.
None of those possibilities has to be excluded beforehand.
Then I am choosing from preference instead of prohibition.
The corner of right
There is another side to this.
We can also lock possibilities away by putting something else so firmly in the corner of right that everything associated with it becomes painful to look at.
Imagine growing up in a home where there is very little warmth.
Then you spend time with a friend whose family seems to have everything you wanted.
Caring parents.
Warmth.
Attention.
Safety.
Support.
Perhaps you feel jealousy.
And perhaps that feeling is so painful that instead of recognizing what it is showing you, you begin to make that family wrong.
They are fake.
They think they are better than everybody.
People like that annoy me.
Now something very strange can happen.
The very thing you long for becomes something you repeatedly reject.
Later in life, you may avoid people who carry that kind of warmth.
You may mistrust partners who come from close families.
You may diminish people who have what you once wanted.
You may even struggle to create the same warmth in your own home, because every time it appears it touches the old experience.
Different scenery.
Same structure.
And without recognizing it, you can build an entire life around keeping something away that you actually wanted.
From judgment to preference
This is why the corner of right and wrong matters so much.
As long as something is trapped there, you are not completely free to look at it.
You are already deciding what it means before you see it.
To regain choice, the fixed judgment has to soften.
You begin looking for what your original view excluded.
If something has been placed completely in the corner of wrong, you look deliberately for the other side.
What did it make possible?
What did you learn?
What did it protect?
What came from it that would not otherwise have existed?
What could the other person see that you could not see from your position?
You continue until the mind can no longer maintain the simple verdict:
This was only wrong.
The same applies in the other direction.
Something you idealized may also have consequences you did not see.
The purpose is not to turn wrong into right or right into wrong.
It is to loosen the fixed judgment enough that both sides become visible.
Then something changes.
You no longer have to say:
This is good.
or:
This is bad.
You can say:
This is what it is.
And from there, preference becomes possible.
I understand that this possibility exists.
It is available to me.
And now I can decide whether I want to choose it.
That is a very different position from:
I must.
or:
I must never.
Why this matters when returning to an old event
When you find an original decision, you may discover that the event in which it was made is still sitting firmly in the corner of wrong.
My father should never have done that.
My mother should have protected me.
That should never have happened.
And as long as the event remains there, part of you is still arguing with the fact that it occurred.
You cannot yet see the whole event.
Before acceptance becomes possible, the judgment has to loosen enough for you to look again.
Not to approve.
Not to excuse.
Not to pretend that you would choose the same thing.
But to arrive at something much simpler:
This happened.
And now that the event is no longer trapped entirely in right or wrong, you can begin to see it from more than one position.
Next: The Three Positions
And honey, I think we just found the clean distinction that makes this section work:
Judgment removes possibilities. Preference leaves possibilities available.
Acceptance requires an open view
There is another reason something has to come out of the corner of right or wrong.
You cannot fully accept something while part of you is still insisting:
This should never have happened.
Or:
This had to happen exactly this way.
Both positions keep the event fixed inside a judgment.
Acceptance begins when you can finally see:
This happened. This was the choice that was made. This was what I decided inside it.
Not good.
Not bad.
Not something you have to approve of.
Simply what was.
Only then can the whole experience become available.
Because as long as you are fighting the event mentally, part of the experience is still being held outside your awareness.
When the judgment releases, you can finally meet what is left.
The emotion that was never fully felt.
The physical experience that was never completed.
The decision that was made inside the event.
And that is why neutralizing right and wrong is not the end of the process.
It creates the position from which acceptance — and therefore completion — becomes possible.
6. The Three Positions
Once an event has begun to come out of the corner of right and wrong, you can start to see what actually happened.
For that, I use three positions:
the victim the perpetrator the bystander
The purpose is not to decide who was right.
It is to understand the event so completely that judgment can collapse into recognition.
The victim position
First, understand your own position.
What could you see at the time?
What did you believe?
What were you afraid of?
What did you need?
What choices seemed available to you?
And what did you decide about yourself inside the event?
When I return to something that happened to me as a child, I also have to remember that I was a child.
I did not have the understanding I have now.
I did not know my parents’ histories.
I did not understand their fears or belief systems.
I responded from what was available to me then.
And sometimes, when I see that clearly, I realize:
Of course I made that decision.
From the position I occupied at the time, I could not see another one.
The perpetrator position
Then you move into the position of the person whose action affected you.
This requires more than imagining what they might have been thinking in that single moment.
You may need to understand their life.
Their childhood.
Their family.
Their fears.
Their own old decisions.
The ideas they had learned about what was right and wrong.
The things they were trying to prevent.
The things they simply did not know.
Becoming a parent myself made some of this much easier for me.
I began to understand that my parents were not standing above life with all the information available and deliberately choosing the worst possible response.
They were living through their own perception.
They believed what they believed.
They reacted from the aspects of themselves that were available to them.
And many of the tools I later developed simply were not available to them.
When I could really see that, something changed.
I no longer had to reduce their behavior to:
They should have known better.
I could see:
Given what they knew, what they believed, what they feared and what they had lived through, this was the choice they were able to make.
That does not make the consequences disappear.
It makes the event understandable.
The bystander position
The third position gives you the wider view.
Sometimes there was a literal bystander in the original event.
Someone who watched.
Someone who did not intervene.
Someone who supported one person.
Someone who looked away.
Then their position also has to be understood.
What could they see?
What had they learned?
What did they believe?
What made their response possible?
In my own life, I sometimes had to understand not only my father’s position, but my mother’s position in doing nothing.
Her response also came from somewhere.
Her childhood.
Her position inside the family.
Her fears.
Her own unfinished experiences.
Until I understood that, part of me could only say:
She should have done something.
And that kept me in judgment.
The bystander does not always have to be in the original event
Sometimes the third position appears much later, in a completely different situation.
The people can be different.
The circumstances can be different.
What matters is that the emotional structure is the same.
You may suddenly witness another version of the pattern from the outside and understand something you could never see while you were inside it.
I had this with my daughter as she became a teenager.
Her choices began changing, and from my old position I could think:
This does not make sense. This is not who you are.
Then one day I stood in a school hallway surrounded by teenagers.
I saw the same clothes.
The same makeup.
Rows of similar black jackets.
And suddenly I could feel the enormous pull toward belonging.
From the outside, the structure became obvious.
Of course.
I understood something about my daughter that I had been unable to understand while looking only at her individual choices.
And because I could recognize the structure there, I could recognize that same structure elsewhere in my own life.
That is what the bystander position can do.
It lets you see the pattern without being caught inside one of its roles.
It could not have been any other way
When all the positions become understandable, something can click.
You see your decision.
You see the other person’s decision.
You see the wider structure around both.
And eventually you may arrive at:
Of course this happened this way.
Not because it was good.
Not because you would choose it now.
Not because nobody was responsible for their actions.
But because, in that moment, each person acted from the perception, beliefs, fears and possibilities available to them.
You stop demanding that the people in the past should have possessed an awareness they did not possess.
You stop demanding that the child you were should have made a choice she could not yet see.
The event becomes what it was.
From judgment to recognition
This is the difference between the judgment layer and the it-is-what-it-is layer.
Judgment says:
He should not have done that.
She should have stopped him.
I should have responded differently.
This should never have happened.
Recognition says:
This happened.
This is how it happened.
This is why each person responded as they did.
And this is what I decided inside it.
That does not erase the event.
It lets you finally see it.
And this is where the first movement of the process becomes possible:
Recognition.
Then you can acknowledge what the whole experience actually contained.
And from there, acceptance can become real.
Recognize. Acknowledge. Accept.
Only from the it-is-what-it-is layer can you fully receive the event that already happened.
And once the event can be received, whatever was never fully experienced inside it can finally become available.
7. Complete the Experience
Understanding what happened is not yet the same as having fully experienced what happened.
You may have found the original decision.
You may understand why you made it.
You may understand the other people involved.
You may even have reached the point where you can look at the whole event and say:
This is what happened. It could not have unfolded differently from the positions we occupied then.
That is an enormous shift.
But something may still remain unfinished.
An experience has different layers.
There is what happened mentally — what you perceived, understood and decided.
There is what happened emotionally — what you felt in response to that decision.
And there is what happened physically — what the body experienced while all of this was taking place.
For an experience to become complete, all of it has to become available.
Finding the decision is not always enough
For years, I could find events mentally.
I could understand exactly what had happened.
I could see the decision I had made.
Sometimes I found the same decision again and again.
And still nothing changed.
That was incredibly frustrating.
I can see it. Why doesn’t it shift?
What I eventually understood was that recognizing the mental layer did not automatically mean I had completed the whole experience.
In some of my own most important events, the emotional layer had never been fully experienced.
As a child, the feeling had simply been too much.
So I continued.
I stepped over it.
Life moved on.
But the emotion did not disappear simply because I was no longer consciously feeling it.
It remained part of the unfinished experience.
What was unfinished becomes available
Once I could recognize the event, understand it from the different positions, and genuinely accept:
This is what happened,
something changed.
I was no longer using all my energy to resist the event itself.
And then the part that had never been fully experienced could come forward.
For me, this was often emotion.
Sometimes I would suddenly cry with the intensity of the child I had been when the original event happened.
It could feel surprisingly young.
The circumstances were decades old.
I was an adult.
But the emotion itself had never travelled those decades.
It was simply the emotional part of the original experience that I had never been able to fully feel.
Now I could.
Acknowledge what is actually here
This is where acknowledgment becomes different from understanding.
Understanding says:
I know what happened.
Acknowledgment says:
I am willing to experience what this actually contains.
If fear is here, feel the fear.
If grief is here, feel the grief.
If anger is here, feel the anger.
If the body trembles, tightens, heats, softens, cries or needs movement, let the physical experience become conscious too.
There is nothing to manufacture.
You are not trying to produce the correct emotion.
You are meeting what is already here.
And sometimes only one layer was unfinished.
You may have cried at the time but never understood what you concluded.
You may have understood everything mentally while never allowing the anger.
You may have felt the emotion while remaining completely disconnected from what was happening physically.
The question is simply:
What part of this experience never got to be fully experienced?
Stay with the experience instead of acting from it
This is also where the old loop can easily repeat.
The unfinished emotion appears, and because it is intense, you may immediately want to do something with it.
Call someone.
Leave.
Fight.
Apologize.
Explain.
Make another person change.
Return to the old protection.
But if the emotion belongs to the unfinished event, acting from it can simply create another version of the same track.
The work is to stay present long enough to experience what is here without automatically turning it into another action or another story.
The fear gets to be fear.
The grief gets to be grief.
The anger gets to be anger.
The body gets to have its response.
And you remain with yourself while it moves.
This was something I had to learn.
I had to learn that I could feel an enormous emotion without abandoning myself inside it.
And once I could do that, experiences that had remained unchanged for years finally began to shift.
Recognition. Acknowledgment. Acceptance.
For me, these three movements belong together:
Recognize what happened and the decision that was made.
Acknowledge the full mental, emotional and physical experience that is actually present.
Accept that this is what happened, this is what you decided, and this is what the experience contains.
Acceptance does not mean agreeing with an old decision.
It means you are no longer refusing reality.
And when reality no longer has to be fought, the unfinished part of the experience can finally be lived through.
Completion
You do not have to erase the memory.
You do not have to make the past different.
The event happened.
What changes is your relationship to what happened.
The old emotion no longer has to keep returning in order to become available.
The body no longer has to keep pointing toward the same unfinished experience.
The original decision can be seen from where you are now instead of from the limited position in which it was first made.
And then you can ask:
Do I still need this decision?
Very often, the answer is no.
The experience is complete.
The old decision has lost its job.
And that means the aspect of yourself that was once excluded no longer has to remain outside your available range.
Completion can have layers
An unfinished experience is not always connected to one moment or one emotion.
Sometimes the same decision has been repeated through many different events.
You may find yourself grieving something that happened when you were seven, and then discover the same emotional structure in something that happened at fourteen, thirty or forty.
The circumstances are different.
The underlying structure is the same.
Each event may contain something that was never fully experienced.
So completion can happen layer by layer.
One emotion may also reveal another.
In my own experience, anger has often had to become fully available before the grief underneath it could appear. At other times I have eventually reached fear underneath several other emotional layers.
I do not try to decide beforehand what should be there.
I follow what is actually present.
And sometimes understanding another person’s position opens an entirely different layer of emotion.
When I finally understood parts of my father’s life, I found myself grieving for him too. It could feel almost as though I was crying his cries.
What mattered was not deciding whose emotion it technically belonged to.
The grief was there.
I could understand why it was there.
And because it was there, it had to be allowed to move.
Then clarity comes
There is another part of completion that is rarely comfortable.
Once the emotion begins to clear, you can see.
You may suddenly understand how strongly an old decision shaped your life.
You see the relationships you entered.
The choices you could not make.
The aspects of yourself you did not use.
The tracks that were unavailable because you did not know they existed.
That clarity can bring its own grief.
And anger.
Sometimes enormous anger.
Because it is genuinely painful to see what an old decision has cost you.
That too belongs to the experience.
You do not have to make the loss smaller in order to move forward.
You can grieve what was unavailable and, at the same time, recognize:
It is available now.
I am here now.
I can choose now.
The past does not have to become less painful before the present can become free.
When the pattern did not end with you
And sometimes clarity shows you something even harder.
You see how your own unfinished experiences affected other people.
If you are a parent, you may see how something you carried became part of your children’s experience too.
For me, this was one of the hardest layers to accept.
The first impulse can be to undo it.
To protect them from every consequence.
To somehow make the past different now that you understand it.
But the same principle applies here.
What happened has happened.
You can understand it.
You can acknowledge your part in it.
You can feel what seeing it brings up in you.
And eventually you can accept that this too belongs to the reality that already exists.
Acceptance does not mean becoming indifferent.
It means you stop trying to change what cannot be changed and become available for the choice that exists now.
And then I’d add one sentence right before the next step:
Completion is not always one passage through recognition, acknowledgment and acceptance. Sometimes you move through those three again and again as each new layer becomes visible.
8. The Aspect Becomes Available Again
And then something happens that is difficult to explain until you experience it yourself.
After the recognition, the understanding, the acceptance, and the processing, there is often a period of integration.
For me, that very often meant sleep.
The body was tired.
Something had moved, and it needed time.
And then there would be another day.
Nothing dramatic had happened on the outside.
But I was different.
Not a completely different person.
Simply more of myself was available.
You notice it in real life
The clearest evidence usually came later.
Someone would say something.
I would be in a social situation.
Something would happen that, in the past, would have activated the old reaction.
And suddenly I responded differently.
Without preparing it.
Without forcing it.
Without reminding myself what I was supposed to do.
It simply came.
And there would be this moment:
Hey.
That was new.
That moment is extraordinary.
Because now the change is no longer something you understand intellectually.
You have evidence.
An aspect of yourself that used to be unavailable has entered your range of choice again.
Maybe you can speak where you used to become quiet.
Maybe you can remain present while somebody else is angry.
Maybe you can say no.
Maybe you can ask for what you want.
Maybe you can receive love without immediately pulling away from it.
Maybe you can take up space without apologizing.
And you realize:
I can do this too.
Let yourself see the change
I found it helpful to express these moments.
Write them down.
Tell somebody.
Talk them through.
Sometimes I would explain the whole thing simply because saying it out loud helped me recognize what had changed.
Look what just happened.
That matters.
Because the first new response can still feel unusual.
Then something similar happens again.
And you remember the first time.
Then it happens again.
And slowly, evidence begins to accumulate.
Your trust changes.
What initially felt surprising starts to become familiar.
Eventually you stop thinking:
I used to be this kind of person.
And begin to realize:
I am also this.
The identity expands.
The old choice does not have to disappear
This is an important distinction.
Integration does not mean destroying the person you used to be.
The old response can remain available too.
What changes is that it is no longer the only response available.
For much of my life, I had access to the sweet, accommodating girl.
The girl with the braids.
The one who could avoid conflict.
Later, I regained access to another aspect of myself:
the one who could become firm,
create conflict if necessary,
say no,
and remain standing even when somebody else disliked my choice.
That did not mean I had to stop being accommodating.
It meant accommodation became a choice instead of an automatic protection.
Later, I found myself in a situation where I deliberately chose the response that looked very much like the old braided girl.
From the outside, someone might have thought:
Nothing changed. She is still adapting.
But internally, everything was different.
I could see several possible responses.
I could have said no.
I could have created conflict.
I knew I was capable of doing that.
And I deliberately chose another response because I could see an outcome that worked better for everyone involved.
The behavior looked similar.
The position from which I chose it was completely different.
Before, the choice had been driven by avoidance.
Now it came from preference.
That is freedom.
Integration changes the chooser
This is why you cannot always judge a choice from the outside.
Two people can do exactly the same thing for completely different reasons.
You can even make the same choice you made twenty years ago and have it mean something entirely different.
The important question is:
Was I free to choose something else?
If the answer is yes, the choice is no longer being dictated by the old track.
The aspect has become available.
And the more often you experience that, the more trust grows.
You begin to know yourself differently.
Not because you have convinced yourself with affirmations.
Because life keeps giving you evidence:
Look. This is available now.
Becoming more whole
This is the part I can describe, but the description will never quite contain the experience.
When an aspect of yourself becomes available again, there can be a very particular feeling of recognition.
Something that was once excluded is no longer outside.
It belongs again.
And your world becomes larger because you have become larger in what you are able to choose from.
The old track still exists.
The new track exists too.
And now you are standing at the switch.
You choose.
That is integration.
And for me, every time it truly happened, there was something almost magical about it.
Not because something foreign had been added to me.
Because something that had always belonged to me was finally available again.