FEATURE - October 2016 - Kansas City

The Energy of Change

by Stephanie Red Feather

 

 

Have you noticed that when you go through great personal change, everything around you seems to be in chaos for a period of time? Ever wonder why?

 

There are several energetic principles at work that can help us understand why our world—and especially our relationships—go through so much upheaval when we are in a process of transformation.

 

First, it’s important to remember that everything in the world carries a unique energetic frequency. If you put anything under a large enough microscope, it’s just a particle vibrating at a rate of speed. So, too, you carry a distinctive frequency. When you change, your frequency changes. And this sets off a whole sequence of reactions in your personal ecosystem.

 

Whatever is in your environment that is no longer in resonance with your new frequency is now in dissonance. And just like in music, dissonance is not sustainable. It builds tension, and everything in nature is always seeking a state of equilibrium. Be it your job, relationships, wardrobe, or daily routine, things that are no longer in harmony with your new self will begin to fall away as a new state of balance and harmony is sought.

 

It is human nature to desire feeling safe and one of the ways we attempt to create this is to establish routines—do our best to make our world predictable. We drop into a comfort zone in relationships, and we begin putting each other in a box as a way to categorize and predict one another. Inside your box, people have a good idea of what you think, how you’ll respond, what you like and don’t like, your daily habits, what they can expect from you, and so on.

 

But when you change, you leave the box. This disrupts their world. As a preservation reaction, which has nothing to do with whether or not they actually support the changes you are trying to make, they will do everything possible to put you back in your box. This behavior is a reflection of their own discomfort. And, no matter how conscious or evolved a person is, they will demonstrate this reaction to some degree. They want you back in your box (i.e. acting, speaking, and doing as you always have) so they can maintain the comfort and predictability they’re used to.

 

The term cognitive dissonance lends clarification to this phenomenon. Cognitive dissonance is mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. Introduced in the 1950’s by psychologist Leon Festinger, he and later researchers showed that when confronted with challenging new information, most people seek to preserve their current understanding of the world by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding the new information or by convincing themselves that no conflict really exists.

 

This is why the people in your life—especially the ones closest to you or who have been in your sphere the longest—get enormously upset when you change. Your change disrupts their homeostasis and they want to restore order. As the book Who Moved My Cheese? says, “The more important cheese is to you, the more you want to hold onto it.”

 

What’s more, it doesn’t matter where someone lands on the consciousness spectrum, we are all energetic beings and our nervous systems register and process hundreds of thousands of stimuli every day. When your vibration changes, make no mistake, it will register in the energy field of every person you are close to, whether they are aware of it or not. Often times people will exhibit unusual behaviors or amplified reactions to the changes they subconsciously perceive in you without realizing they are doing it—or understanding why.

 

For example, a friend of mine knew her relationship with her husband was over. She did an energetic cord-cutting ceremony and, from hundreds of miles away, her husband who practically never called to check on her immediately called her. He was extremely concerned and uncharacteristically clingy. He felt the change.

 

When we react from this place of “Go back to how it was; I felt safer and more comfortable there,” we almost always act from a regressed state. If you think about the people in your life with whom you spend the most time, they probably have a go-to move when they are trying to manipulate you to get what they want. When you so “brazenly” choose to come into the relationship with an agenda of change, they will turn the volume of their go-to move up to 11.

 

One of my clients had created a home climate of doing everything for everyone else, over care-taking, and putting herself last. When she made the decision to start caring for herself and asking her family to do more, she got met with, “You don’t care about me anymore” and accusations of selfishness.

 

Another client made the commitment to start saying no and establish clearer boundaries with his mother. Her go-to move? Guilt. She turned the guilt dial all the way up, regressing to the point of childish whining and passive-aggressive goading. Anything to get him to acquiesce. He held his ground and over time she finally backed off and adjusted to the new parameters of their relationship.

 

This is not meant to scare you off from making change! The desire is for you to be equipped with the knowledge of what can happen in reality so if and when it does show up in your life, you will understand what is occurring at an energetic level. This knowledge will hopefully give you the resolve and courage you need to make it through those vulnerable times of change when you desire extra emotional support and are met with the exact opposite.

 

And by the way, your friends and family will eventually adjust. A new equilibrium in each relationship will be established. And if not, you might consider if that relationship is worth preserving. Not everything in our world is meant to accompany us on our path of evolution. Change is our nature.

Kansas City