Here's something I see in almost everyone I work with, and saw in myself first. The same kind of trouble keeps turning up in different parts of your life, and you deal with each one as it comes, as if they had nothing to do with each other.

Mine looked like this. I didn't say what I needed. I didn't ask. And I gave more than I had, because giving was safer than wanting anything back. Three problems, three parts of my life, worked on separately for years — and I never once put them side by side.

When I finally did, they weren't three problems. They were one. I was the youngest of eight, and I learned early that wanting something and getting it were unrelated events, so I stopped wanting out loud.

That's the picture I use now: one root, many branches. The branches are the patterns you can see. The root is a belief you've held since before you could talk, which is why it doesn't feel like a belief. It feels like how things are. Nobody starts by finding the root. You can't see it. What you can see is a branch: the pattern.

This is the part I most want people to know, because it's where discouragement can creep in. You made some changes. You did some real work on your life. And six months later the same belief turns up somewhere else, just wearing different clothes. And the conclusion is: it didn't take. All that effort for nothing.

It wasn't for nothing. The work mattered. You pulled a branch, not the root. Whether you call it a branch or a root, we work on what the body is ready for, one layer at a time.

If the same thing keeps turning up in different rooms of your life, that's information. It isn't failure.

Talk soon,

Christi