The Fruit and the Tree

One of my all time favourite authors is Iyanla Vanzant. I'd like to share an excerpt from one of her books -- my favourite -- called In the Meantime: Finding Yourself and the Love you Want:

There is a very good chance that most of us will go through life having one relationship experience after another-- some pleasant, some not-- without any real awareness of how we got locked into a pattern of moving and hurting, hurting and hiding. We believe we are responding to what has just happened or what was just said. We believe that the people we have just met have influenced the negative or positive experience we have just had.

Few of us understand that who we are and what we feel are what we have been and felt for a very long time. It's our stuff. Stuff is what the meantime is made of. All the stuff you need to know, need to feel, need to sort out, and heal comes to life in the meantime. This is the stuff that makes us overly aggressive or passively self-destructive in the search for love.

Our passive/aggressive behaviour patterns are born when we are born. Largely, they are set by the patterns of our birth. Otherwise known as the birth pattern. As we move through life we unconsciously re-create the incidents, energy and environment that existed before and at the time of our birth. Our responses to our birth patterns are often unconscious, which is the very reason we can't recognise what we do, why we do it, when we are being passive, or why we are being aggressive. If we took just a little time for self-reflection and examination, we could easily connect what goes on in our relationships with the pattern of our birth. While we are unaware, we become fixated on trying to figure out what just happened and why it is affecting us so deeply, and often painfully, in the meantime.