House of Cards Effect

Many people think that their effort to change is like building a house of cards. The moment a setback occurs they assume the house of cards has come down collapsing, and their effort towards the change was wasted. After a few attempts at rebuilding the house of cards, they finally give up and assume that they cannot change. They cannot be further from truth.

The truth is that nobody can go back to square one ever. Any person working to resolve a personal problem is constantly moving forward. Each and every effort we put in counts, it makes us wiser and is never wasted. Of course, the pace of change depends on how ready is the person to learn from a setback, how deep the problem is, and other factors.

The real setback comes when we think we that we have gone back to square one and all the effort that we invested has gone waste. That becomes a convenient excuse for our subconscious to give up and sink back into the problem deeper than ever. The subconscious is very reluctant to come out of its comfort zone and the resistance increases when we start venturing into a previously unknown territory. So when we start working on a particular problem, we are training our subconscious to move out of usual known behaviour to a new behaviour pattern. So it does its best to stop us from getting out of our comfort zone.

The moment we think all our efforts have gone to waste, we quickly become convinced that we are naturally flawed and we can do nothing to change it. This gives our subconscious the perfect opportunity to revert back to its old behaviour. And the very negative thought becomes a self-suggestion for us and helps us settle deeper into our problem.

But as I said, no effort of ours is wasted and we need to develop an attitude of continued effort until we succeed. This attitude will keep us barging ahead in spite of setbacks and challenges. In fact after a few setbacks, with this attitude, we will actually be looking forward to challenges because we would have realized every challenge is an opportunity to learn and grow.

I found this approach very helpful in my practise. Clients quickly find this attitude encouraging and there is also a renewed acceleration in healing.