Trauma causing trouble in paradise
How blame creates enemies
Today I sat down at a table at one of my favorite local seaside restaurants. A few moments after I ordered food, a young woman in her 20s approaches me after emerging from a swim in the ocean. With no other introduction, she bluntly says to me, “That’s my table.”
I looked at her quizzically. She went on to explain that she was the one that had placed that table there, in the shade of this tree. And that she had directed staff to deliver an orange juice to her there.
I said, “Oh. Well, the table was empty when I got here, so I sat down.”
She repeats her stated claim on the table that I am sitting at, and starts to get red and flushed because I am not getting up to move. She continues to insist that I have to move because I am in her space.
I calmly tell her, “Sorry if you think it’s unfair. I get that you wanted to sit here and you are disappointed that I am here. But I’m not going to move. You’ll have to find another place to sit.”
She will not take no for an answer. “But you don’t understand,” she says.
“I do understand. You are upset because you feel entitled to this table. But there was no sign with your name on this table. There was no food here, no towel, no bag, no belongings. Nothing.”
“Well, I just told you what happened,” she says, “That’s not very nice.”
I say, “It has nothing to do with being nice. We have different opinions about whether or not I should move for you. You think you have more rights to this table than me, and I disagree with you.”
“I was creating my space here,” she whines. “And you just took it from me.”
I tell her it’s not personal: “I haven’t done anything to you. I don’t even know you. I have nothing against you. I just sat down at an empty table. I created my space here. Why is your space more important than mine?”
“Oh, you’ll see.” Her petite frame looms over me, vaguely threatening. “I am going to tell the staff, and they will tell you that you have to move.”
“Okay,” I shrug. She stomps away. Soon I see a staff member carry an identical table to the beach for her, placing it a few meters to my left.
“See how easy that was? There are plenty of tables.” I gesture to the beautiful beach and say, “No need to be upset. Here we are in paradise and you are making problems because you’re angry, but there is nothing wrong.”
A couple behind me start speaking to her in another language (not English). I cannot understand what they are saying, but after having a brief exchange with them, the young woman seems to calm down a bit.
She leaves her beach bag and water bottle sitting on the table that had just been brought for her and then disappears out of view.
After she steps away, the restaurant manager comes over to apologize to me. He seems pretty embarrassed. He is stuttering, trying to share a story about this same woman from the day before. I gathered that this was not the first time that she’d caused a scene over her rights to a specific table. It seems that a very similar incident had happened a day earlier.
I reassure him that it’s okay. “I am fine. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault.”
The young woman comes back. Her tone was more subdued but she still wanted to argue. “You know it wasn’t about you moving tables. I just didn’t like the way you were speaking to me. It wasn’t very nice.”
“I could say the same about you.” I replied, “I didn’t like the way that you came up to me. It was very aggressive.” She huffed and puffed and muttered something under her breath. Eventually she sat down at her new table, put her headphones on and turned her back to me.
I share this story because it is such a stark example of: You get what you expect.
Our minds are incredibly powerful tools of creation.
We might have an internal program running narratives such as: Everyone is against me so I constantly have to defend myself. I am entitled to things that are taken from me. I feel deprived of what is rightfully mine. There is not enough space for me so I have to fight to have a place. The world is unfair and I always get the raw end of the deal.
Such toxic narratives can make our lives extremely difficult, because the more strongly embedded these underlying beliefs are, the more they color and shape our experience.
Because of her victim mindset, this young woman recreated the experience of being taken from while becoming an aggressor herself. In fact, this belief was so strong in her that she participated in re-enacting a similar scenario over a table, two days in a row.
This is the mechanism that trauma uses to replicate itself. If we hold onto an idea that reality is stacked a certain way – unfair, unsafe, unkind, whatever – that actually leads us to experience it that way because it reinforces the behaviors that generate matching feelings.
That is to say, our subconscious mind creates experiences to validate our pre-existing beliefs.
Beliefs beget behaviors. Behaviors shape our shared reality.
My question for you, dear reader, is: What beliefs do you still hold that uphold a version of reality that you no longer want? Are you ready to let that belief go, and believe in something better?
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Incredible breakdown of how self-fulfilling prophecies actually work in real time. The way the woman literally re-enacted the same conflict two days in a row is fasinating proof that we're often more invested in validating our worldview than in actually solving the problem. I've seen this play out similarly when someone on my team kept insisting they were being ignored in meetings, but they'd arrive late and immediately chekc their phone. Belief really does become behavior becomes proof.