Why Is "That" Person in Your Life?

The mysterious ways we attract people into our lives, and the divine purpose of challenging relationships.

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of two books, Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com.

Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash

As noted in my last article (Releasing Childhood Wounds), I made five weekly appointments with a therapist who offered past-life regressions. His name was David. I never went into a past life with David during those appointments. Instead, I underwent the most extraordinary experiences that allowed me to shift and heal deep-seated challenges in my life. Today’s article is about another one of those sessions.

In this article, rather than transcribing the transcript of my session (as in last week’s article), I arrived home from my session and wrote about the insights I gained as if sharing them with a friend. This is what I wrote after my experience. I began by describing the big-picture lesson I learned in my session and then explained how it relates to me.

The people in our lives—our friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, employees, and employers—are mirrors to us. They reflect to us where we need growth and healing. They will continue to do this until we heal the part of us that they’re mirroring. The alternative is that they grow (before we do), so they are no longer a match for us. If they grow and move on before we’ve healed what they have been mirroring to us, someone else will fill their place until we no longer need that part of us to be healed.

Relationships don’t exist without divine influence. In other words, because every person helps everyone in their life to grow, learn, and heal, the significant people in our lives exist to teach us something. This may happen through their example. It might occur through something they say or do to us. It might even stem from how they react to something we say or do to them.

It all begins with our families since these are our earliest relationships. These are the people God set up for us so that we have childhood experiences to set us on the path He chose for us. When I use the word God, I’m referring to Divinity as a whole, which encompasses our soul’s plan in coordination with our spirit guides and Infinite Intelligence. Our higher self (our soul) chooses our parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

I don’t believe every parent-child relationship is what we might consider healthy. Still, I think every parent-child relationship is such that it sets us on a path to learn valuable lessons and information we will know for the rest of our lives and all eternity.

Some of our familial relationships are painful, requiring us to heal. The lessons God intends for us to learn often stem from this pain. If we separate from those painful family relationships before we heal, who do you think we attract into our lives to help us continue to heal that pain? Other people: friends, coworkers, employers, business partners, lovers, or spouses.

We attract friends, for instance, who are like energetic puzzle pieces that fit perfectly with our energetic puzzle pieces. If I’m needy, I’ll attract someone who likes to be needed. If I’m weak, I’ll attract someone who likes being the strong person in a relationship. If I’m a caretaker, I will attract someone who needs to be cared for. If I’m not good at having fun, I’ll attract a friend who teaches me to play.

As mentioned, not all family members or friends will fit into this scenario, but most will have something to teach us. Or they may need to be taught by us. Knowing this, we can recognize the most challenging relationships as some of the most critical connections in our lives.

For example, I ran my own odd job business as a teenager. I would mow lawns, wash windows, clean leaf gutters, and do basic handyman work. I made decent money at it for my age. I wasn’t wealthy by any stretch, but I earned more than most teenagers my age.

My father had struggled financially for years, so my success reflected his limitations, probably without him even realizing it. The consequence was that he felt jealous of my financial success. Regrettably, he couldn’t recognize that my success triggered negative feelings within him about himself. Instead, these negative feelings played out subconsciously.

Let me give you an example of how this looked in our relationship. One day, I bought a car with the money saved from my hard work. I was a teenager. It was a used car, but it was new to me. And I loved it. It was a black Subaru BRAT, which was sort of a car with a pickup truck bed.

When I brought my Subaru BRAT home from the dealership to show my family, my father wouldn’t come outside to see it when the rest of my family came to look at it. Once I became aware of this behavior, I noticed other signs that he had become competitive with me. Suddenly, he was comparing how many chores he had finished compared to me or how much better the lawn looked when he mowed it.

Having my father be competitive with me instead of being happy for my success felt weird. The worst part was that rather than being supportive of my accomplishments, he seemed to withhold his love when he felt threatened by the attention I was getting over just about anything.

Worse than withholding his love, my father often got mean when he learned about my successes. He would give me more chores, criticize what I did, and not allow me to do things I wanted, like going to a party I wanted to attend on Saturday night.

The damage in response to his behavior was that I unconsciously withheld myself from succeeding anymore. First, I stopped talking about my successes. Later, I pulled myself back from achieving success in various areas of my childhood. In a sense, I diminished myself to make my father feel better about himself and to avoid giving him a reason to withhold his love.

My father died when I was thirty-four, and I had not yet healed that part of our relationship. Consequently, years later, someone new came into my life to fill his place. I didn’t know it then, but this person showed up to help me heal the damage caused by my father’s inability to be proud of my successes.

Three years after my father passed, I made a new friend. We had a lot in common. We had a lot of fun together. And he became very dear to both Melissa and me. Nonetheless, he got competitive with me relatively early in our relationship.

Within a few short months, I learned that he was the type of person who was highly competitive with others. He liked to surround himself with underachievers, which seemed to make him feel better about himself. I believe he was attracted to me because I had this automatic trigger inside to shrink to make others feel superior to me, which I learned to do because of my father.

I knew I did it but never saw this as a weakness or flaw. I viewed it as helping others feel better about themselves. But diminishing oneself to lift others isn’t healthy. There needs to be a balance in relationships. Nourishment needs to go in both directions.

About a year into our friendship, this friend became increasingly competitive with me. He could never feel happy for my career successes, yet he always expected my support for his own. In truth, I was genuinely happy about his achievements. Nevertheless, this became a continual thorn in our relationship.

I eventually recognized his constant competitiveness and felt angered by it. It felt so unnecessary and unproductive. The History Channel once wanted to create a TV series about my work as an afterlife investigator, and his only response was, “Oh great, now the show I was hoping to get will be competing with yours.” His show had nothing to do with being an afterlife investigator, nor would it be on The History Channel, yet that was his knee-jerk reaction. In the end, neither show got on the air.

Twelve years into my relationship with my friend, I went to see David for one of those five weekly appointments. David is the therapist who uses hypnosis in his work from last week’s article. After discussing my friend’s competitiveness with David to better understand it, we set the intention for the session to heal the relationship.

David guided me into a hypnotic state, which is something we did in every session. Then he instructed me, “You got sad when you talked about your friend. Rise above that sadness to view it from above. I want you to gain a higher perspective of what is playing out in that relationship.”

My awareness heightened, and my understanding of our friendship came into focus. I suddenly had a big picture of everything going on between us. I recognized that my friend was providing me with an opportunity to heal the wound that I had never been able to heal with my dad.

What this bird’s-eye view from my hypnotic state provided me was the ability to see my father’s behavior and my friend’s behavior for what it was. Their jealousy and competitiveness were related to their personal demons. They were not a reflection of me.

This higher viewpoint helped me to understand that their behavior didn’t occur because they didn’t love me. They loved me very much. They both had past wounds of their own that triggered them to feel poorly about themselves when other people around them succeeded, even if those other people were family members or friends. It wasn’t about how they felt about me. It was about how they felt about themselves. And that paradigm shift made all the difference for me.

Thanks to that simple exercise, I now recognized how my father’s and friend’s energies were like puzzle pieces that fit perfectly with my own energetic puzzle. We each needed to heal a wound and were a perfect match to help one another with that healing. I needed to learn that it wasn’t healthy to diminish myself to make others feel better about themselves. And they needed to understand that other people’s success does not diminish their success—competitiveness in this way is an illusion.

When I got home from that therapy session, Melissa happened to be talking to this friend on the phone. With divine coincidence, he was being competitive with me at that very moment, and it was upsetting Melissa because she knew how much it hurt me when he did it.

I walked in from my incredible therapy session just as Melissa hung up. She was so frustrated. As she told me what he had said, I was completely aware that his competitiveness with me and lack of support for my achievements had no emotional effect on me. I knew at that moment that I had released the need to heal my father’s competitiveness with me. My perception had shifted. I now understood that their behavior was all about how they felt about themselves. My torment about this challenge was over.

I was also intuitively aware that the transformation would change our relationship. I still loved my friend, but I knew the energetic cords that held us together for twelve years had broken. I no longer needed someone I loved to be so fiercely competitive with me. I no longer needed to be in a one-sided relationship, with me supporting him but not the other way around.

Even on the drive home from the session, the inner feeling I had about our relationship changing caused me to grieve the loss. And, in fact, the friendship as I had known it had changed. It was such a profound, energetic shift that I was sure my friend felt it, too. Without any discussion between us, we slowly drifted apart after that day. It was a natural transformation, smooth and graceful, without being a confrontational event. Our get-togethers changed from monthly to every three months, then twice yearly. Eventually, we exchanged texts but rarely saw each other anymore.

During that time, I profoundly grieved the loss. Yet I knew it was healthier not to be around him. I still loved him, and I knew he loved me, too. Nonetheless, after that day, some unseen shift occurred, and I healed. My father healed. And I’d like to believe that, on some level, my friend healed, but that’s his story to tell.

After this experience, I consciously stopped diminishing my accomplishments and hiding my talents and abilities to make others feel better about themselves. It doesn’t help other people to do it. Neither my father nor my friend ever felt better about themselves because of my shrinking.

There is no better representation of this than Marianne Williamson’s passage “Our Deepest Fear” from her book, A Return to Love. It reads: “You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking, so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

This is the third experience of this nature that I have shared with you. In the first experience, I overcame a life-long obstacle to abundance. In the second experience (from last week), I overcame a childhood belief that it was unsafe to show or use my talents. In today’s example, which could be described as a new layer of the issue from last week’s article, I overcame an unconscious instinct to be a smaller version of myself to not make others uncomfortable about themselves.

The first experience was accomplished using guided meditation. The second and third experiences were similar, although most would label the technique hypnosis. It’s not the techniques that matter. It’s the point that our minds have the potential to pull this insight and higher perspective from the realm of the metaphysical.

There are multiple pathways toward the same results. One might prefer meditation, while another might prefer hypnosis, while others might gravitate toward channeling, dreaming, divination, or intuition. If there’s anything I’ve learned in experimenting with dozens of experiences like these over the years, it’s that there isn’t just one way. More importantly, we are drawn toward the best technique or modality to help our growth and healing. There’s an inner knowing or guidance system that leads us toward the experience that will best help us. We must trust that whatever pathway we’re drawn toward is best.

With love,
Bob

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com. His latest venture is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.

Bob’s Subaru BRAT

If you missed last week’s article, check it out here.