Do I choose to be tormented?

Q:  I don't get it Mike... Do I choose to be "tormented"? Do we choose this??? If someone is upsetting me... it's my "will"? I’ll have to think long and hard to decide why I could love and trust a man only to find he had been cheating on me all these years with other men… and then discover I created this reality! Mike, help me see this.  


A: This is a kind of question I get a lot of… people not understanding how or why they’d ever create hardships, or even horror stories, with their life. My answer is this, generally, no one sets out to create a horror stories before their life begins… but many of us do choose challenging circumstances, along with leanings and inclinations that may well get us into some hot water when combined with all the other choices we make. So while no one would, say, choose to marry an axe murderer… they could well choose to marry a deeply disturbed person, knowing what some of the consequences may be. And why would anyone want to find and fall in love with a deeply disturbed person… there’d be countless reasons… and first among them would be a recognition of the divinity within them and a desire to be part of their healing. But these decisions aren’t just made before a life begins… their remade in every moment of every life… so that nothing is pre-destined… and no one is at the mercy of past decisions.

To give you another example, I’ve been in several relationships, that let’s just say, ended very badly… and let’s also just say, I was the one withering in pain when all was said and done… thanks to my deeper misunderstandings I have to add. But today, with hindsight, I can see those experiences a lot more clearly, and have taken from them two great lessons. First, being honest with myself, I was well aware in each case, of the potential for the kind of problems that arose long before they actually arose… yet I still allowed myself to stay in the relationships, and, still allowed myself to be totally shocked and dismayed by their unhappy endings. Kidding myself all along, I guess you could say, that such potentials didn’t exist. But here, the old adage applies… if you play with fire, you’re gonna get burned… and it does no good once you do get burned, to cry out your innocence.

Like I’ve said before, we all know what’s going on in our lives, and in the lives of those we love. We’re all intuitive, psychic, and just plain intelligent enough to usually guess pretty accurately about what our probable futures will hold… but for a variety of reasons, and often, for some very good reasons, we don’t like to admit what those futures may be… and besides, our feigned naivety adds to the drama… and we all love drama.

The second realization I’ve had in looking back… was that, while I chose to play with fire, subliminally or not, I NEVER THE LESS CHOSE TO PLAY… and I chose to play for some really excellent reasons, reasons so compelling, that even having been burned, those relationships were well worth it. What happened in the end was a small price to pay for all the good and fun that came from those very same relationships… truly some of the higher points in my life. All in all I chose not just the ending of the relationship, but the entire package… and as a package deal… they were well worth the ride.

If you look at any incident in your life as an isolated incident, you’re really taking it out of context, but by looking at the bigger picture… at the events preceding and succeeding the incident… your entire life… or bigger still… understanding that it may have a place in the reincarnational mosaic of your experiences… at some point, you’ll always be able to find its value and therefore realize that it resulted from your choices.