Flawed Recipes

When I first started cooking, someone gave me a meatloaf recipe. It wasn’t particularly tasty, nor was it healthy. Yet, it was fairly simple to make, and it required very few ingredients. So I kept repeating it—it was one of my quick, no-brainer recipes that I kept on hand when I didn’t have time to go grocery shopping or the energy to think or plan ahead. After a few years, I realized that there were much healthier alternatives.

Similarly, many of us operate under flawed paradigms. These unhealthy assumptions have become so habitual that we rarely question them. We repeatedly go back to familiar thought patterns, even though we know there are much better alternatives.

Here are a few commonly-held, flawed assumptions:

--Nice girls don’t say no.

--If someone is discontent, then it is probably your fault.

--Taking care of yourself is equivalent to being selfish.

--Personal boundaries are unfriendly.

--If you don’t try new things, you won’t fail; if you don’t fail, you won’t look stupid.

--If I manage my relationships properly by contributing, maintaining, nurturing—even if I have to do all the 'relating' myself--then I can protect these relationships from disintegrating. Thus, I can control my relationships and not be abandoned or neglected.

--It is your responsibility to rescue those in trouble.

Whether it is these or some other bad assumptions that are replaying in our subconscious minds, they influence our reactions, choices, and behaviors. Like a computer with malware imbedded in it, our operating system is now controlled by this malicious code of thinking. If these bad assumptions are not removed, we become ineffective—living under the rule of our oppressors, captives in the kingdom of flawed paradigms.