Rearranging furniture in imaginary houses

When I was 8 years old, my parents discovered that I had $42 in my piggy bank.

“An eight year old shouldn’t have forty-two dollars!” they said, as if I had somehow come into possession of a stolen painting.

And with that proclamation, they took my $42.

Over the next 30 years, I attended all manner of workshops, saw all sorts of therapists and healers, and performed countless methods for resolving the issue that had been born in that moment, the issue that “I can’t have what I want.”

No matter how much I hyperventilated until I saw visions, had astral entities removed from the 3rd level of my aura, or cried at… well, the injustice of it all… I still had the thought that I couldn’t have what I really wanted.
Sometime past my 38th birthday, I retired. I was making more money per month doing nothing than I had made in my first year or two out of college. And, at some point, I started to recount — as I had done thousands of times in the past — the story of my issue.
Except this time, it was clear that reality — I had much more than I had wanted — was putting up a good fight with my issue. I still believed I couldn’t have what I wanted, but reality was hinting that I was, oh, full of crap.

It was in that moment that it occurred to me to ask a question that I had never asked myself. A question that had never been posed to me during the countless hours of healing work I had done about this issue, by any of the brilliant aids I had employed (don’t even get me started about the fact that I could have retired years earlier had I only taken all the money I spent to resolve the issue and put it in an average mutual fund).

I asked myself, “Hey, what did my parents do with the money?”

And as if I had said “Open Sesame,” the memory instantly appeared:

They put it in my bank account

By 8, I was well aware of my personal bank account. And I vividly remembered the savings account passbook and seeing the balance increase by $42 after my parents “TOOK” my money.

No wonder none of the therapy worked to resolve the “issue.” The issue wasn’t real because the event NEVER HAPPENED!

How did nobody ever think to ask the simple and obvious question?

I had a client who, during one session said, “I’ve worked with other people who are good compassionate listeners. They validate me and what I’m saying and are very accepting of whatever I’m going through. You… don’t do that.”

“Well…” I replied, “I’m not interested in helping you redecorate an imaginary house.”

Now, look, I’m not saying that if you have “an issue,” it’s all a lie and your own history never happened (though maybe what happened isn’t quite what you think)… but it’s certainly worth pondering that the idea “I have problems now because of something that happened when I was a child (or fetus, or blastocyst, or gleam in my parents’ eyes),” is just an idea that was most famously popularized by a goatee-wearing coke-head in Vienna about 120 years ago.