Sometimes it seems that you want to suffer, as though you have no responsibility for your own suffering. Odds are that whatever you are suffering now, you have suffered before. The characters in the drama have changed. The costumes. But the basic themes remain. Perhaps you find yourself the odd-man-out, so to speak. You are left out. This is not a new experience for you.

Bear in mind, no matter how divisive someone else may be, you are the one leaving yourself out. You recalled an iceberg from earlier years, and you recount it now. You like to think that the iceberg turned itself in your direction, yet you are the one who turned to it. Ah, yes, this is familiar. This is how you practiced life before and are taking another turn at it again now. You haven't yet stepped out of the past. You named yourself victim. You were wounded, and now you are quick to take the knife again.

It feels as though you are riding an escalator and can only move along as the escalator moves, and, yet, who stepped on the escalator? Who, then, is responsible?

Again, do not mix up responsibility with blame. You may be blameless. Indeed you are blameless, yet you saw signs that seemed to point you to an impending drama and you took them personally. I have to tell you that you staged the drama. Would that you had been able to ignore all the warning signs. The signs are a harbinger from the past. Be wary when you want to prove the error of another's way.

You didn't do well with this script originally, and you may do no better now. To you, this situation is calamitous. Yet it is a rerun. You don't have to play this movie again, and yet you feel compelled to. You have hypnotized yourself into believing one way when, without hypnotizing yourself, you could believe another way, a way much better for you.

I am not suggesting exactly that you ignore the heaviness something holds for you, yet I am suggesting something like ignore. Ignore in the sense that you don't make much of it let alone too much of it. Weather changes without effort from you. Relationships can too. Let go of effort.

You may have been trying to control a sequence of events. You have, haven't you? You kept the idea that something has to work out one way and not another. How do you know? Admit that you don't know. Save your energy. Or play racquetball instead.

When you find yourself in the doldrums, it is you who steered yourself into the shoals of life called the doldrums. Something inside told you that you had to go that way. You were hearing an old tune from the past. The past has impinged upon you far more than you had realized.

You are able to see in other people how they replay their scripts again and again. You can see clearly how this one or that one would often see someone as an opponent and how they had transfixed their image of their mother, for instance, upon the one before them whom they saw as opponent. The other may be an opponent, but this person never was your mother. Your mother was someone else. You have recast this person in the Broadway play known as Your Life. You substituted another for your mother. You added dimensions to the role of this person. However perverse this person may be, you cast the wrong spotlight on this person. You added a stature to his role that makes him difficult for you to deal with. Will you end this now once and for all?