Q&A: Whose Fault Is It Anyway?

If you would like Dinny’s advice, e-mail your letter to Forgive@HBMag.com.

DEAR FORGIVE COACH:
I need your help! I am a dietician at a hospital and I love my work, but I hate my job! The situation there is horrendous. There is so much gossip going on and I feel like it’s all about me, behind my back. Every time I walk into a room, my coworkers suddenly become very quiet and I know they are all talking about me. There is a new girl who was recently hired and even she is standoffish, like she has been warned to stay away from me. I don’t get it! I have been dating this guy who has a reputation of being a real player and I recently found out that he is also dating someone at my work, but that doesn’t mean I have done anything wrong. You’d think I was stealing someone’s husband or something. Why are people so mean? It feels like I am back in high school. I’m so upset; I can’t stop thinking about it and now I hate going to work. Can you help me turn my brain off with this situation? TA

DEAR TA:
It sounds like you are obsessing so heavily over this situation that you are digging yourself into a hole you won’t be able to climb out of! I suggest you back away for a minute and take a look at a larger picture of what is happening. 
As I think you must know, my focus as a Radical Forgiveness Coach is to find the perfection in every situation, not to help find the blame and then justification for resentment. Without knowing your details, I am confident that this is something that has come up for you before.

Maybe you are from a large family and always felt like you were being picked on. Or perhaps since you reference high school you did have some run-ins with your friends over your boyfriends, or theirs? You see we tend to keep repeating situations that bring up this kind of discomfort until the discomfort becomes so painful that we want to break it down and figure it out! In this process of breaking it down, I encourage you to look for some patterns and with those patterns you will begin to see that you have attracted recurring situations to yourself in order to have a break through. We often pick up a “core negative belief” early in life and then continue to affirm that belief by the experiences we attract. How often have you had the 
thought: “I am always last or left out?”

Try and remember your first experience of feeling like that and then identify other situations that continued to come up reinforcing that feeling. Hopefully you will discover that your coworkers aren’t out to get you or separate from you. They are helping you discover a story about yourself that you have repeated so many times that even you are tired of hearing this story. Bust yourself, if you are willing, by taking responsibility for how you see yourself in relation to others. Something happened a long time ago, you believed it and continued to create it. Let it go. It has everything to do with how you see yourself, not how they are seeing you. I believe you will have a huge shift in your experience at work and in your life!
Love and blessings to you, Dinny

Dinny Evans is a Certified Radical Forgiveness and Radical Manifestation Coach. She has been working with the Institute for Radical Forgiveness and Colin Tipping since 2007. To find out more about her coaching practice, her workshops and support groups, visit www.forgivecoach.com.