"Life will always prove your beliefs right."

"Yes," I said. "Had you seen it then, you wouldn't be going through this now. No matter. Now is fine, too. This is perfect, and you won't have to produce a life-threatening illness to understand this, like so many people do. You're getting it now; you're beginning to understand and to heal.

"Let me explain to you exactly what happened and how it has effected your life up until now," I said, wanting her to understand clearly the dynamics of her current situation. "As a little girl, you felt abandoned and unloved by Dad. For a girl, this is devastating. From a developmental standpoint, it is necessary for a young girl to feel loved by her father. Since you didn't feel that love, you concluded that there must something wrong with you. You began believing you were unlovable and inherently 'not enough.' That belief anchored itself deeply in your subconscious mind and, later, when it came to relationships, began to run your life. In other words, as a way of mirroring your subconscious belief that you were 'not enough,' your life always has included actual situations that seemed to prove that you were, indeed, not enough. Life will always prove your beliefs right.

"As a child, the pain of not getting Dad's love was more than you could bear, so you suppressed some of the pain and repressed a whole lot more. When you suppress emotion, you know its there, but you stuff it down. Repressed emotion, on the other hand, gets buried so deeply in the subconscious mind that you lose awareness of it.

"Later, when you began to realize that your father was not a naturally loving man and probably couldn't love anyone, you began to rehabilitate, or heal, yourself somewhat from the affects of feeling unloved by him. You probably released some of the suppressed pain and maybe began to give up some part of the belief that you were unlovable. After all, if he couldn't love anyone, maybe it wasn't your fault at all that he didn't love you.

"Then, along comes the bombshell that knocked you right back to square one. When you observed him loving my daughter, Lorraine, that triggered your original belief. You said to yourself, 'My father can love after all, but he doesn't love me. It is obviously my fault. I am not enough for my father, and I will never be enough for any man.' From that point on, you continually created situations in your life to support your belief that you are not enough.

"How have I done that," Jill interrupted. "I don't see how I have created myself not being enough in my life."

"How was your relationship with Henry?" I responded. She had been married to Henry, the father of her four children, for 15 years.

"Not bad in many respects, but he was so unfaithful. He was always looking for opportunities to have sex with other women, and I really hated that."

"Exactly. Plus, you believed he was the villain and you were the victim in that situation. Truth be told, you attracted him into your life precisely because, at some level, you knew he would prove your belief about not being enough. By screwing other women, he would support you in being right about yourself."

"Are you trying to say he was doing me a favor? I sure as hell don't buy that!" she said laughingly, but with some not-too-well-disguised anger.

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