From the upcoming book, 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It

It’s easy to blame all the lying, cheating, mean bastards out there, but if they’re not bringing us down every chance they get, don’t worry: we’ll do it to ourselves.  There’s a little bit—or a lot—of the Saboteur archetype in all of us.  Few of us can defy our past overnight and shift into a different vibration, or pattern.  That means that old wounds are repeatedly re-opened or new ones formed, thanks to our very own self-sabotage of the great and wonderful things we want to bring into our lives.

Let’s say that we recognize the error of our ways.  We’re tired of the bad stuff.  We want to bring a certain something good into our lives and we set the intention to do so.  We make lots of changes in our lives to get to a better place to bring it to us.  Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try or want, we can’t get into the vibration of that certain  something good.  We really want it, and we really do understand the Law of Attraction and how to get it.  The problem is, we just can’t manage that last step we need to bring that certain something good to us because we’re stuck in the past where a certain something good never came to us or, if it did, turned out to be a certain something not-so-good.    So even though we now adhere to the Law of Attraction, we still can’t make it happen for us I the way we want.  Oh, it happens for us all right—but it’s just a miserable repeat of the past.  We are still vibrating away at the frequency of oh-please-screw-me-over while yearning for sweet princes on white horses.

It’s taken a rather powerful new influence in my life to help me see this, and I’m actively working to change my vibration to one of perpetual buoyancy by focusing on trust.  I’m honestly fascinated with the situation and the lessons I’m learning from it, and I’m determined to correct my course.

I’ve dated over a dozen terrific men in the past year, and a couple who weren’t exactly terrific but, for the most part, didn’t send me scrambling for a window in the Ladies’ Room while at dinner.  Even from the less-than-wonderful, I learned more about what I wanted and didn’t want.  My intention, set back at the Winter Solstice of the previous year, was to enjoy one or more romantic partners who were happy, vibrant, young, drama-free, kind, interesting, sincere, good men.  Oh, yeah, and hot, too.

The Universe certainly delivered!

There’s only one of these men that I continue to see after a year, and I’m rather fascinated by what I’ve learned from him.  Namely, that it took me a solid year to trust him. I’m not sure whether to be surprised that it took so long or that I was ever able to trust again at all.  But I’ll come back to that.

Looking back, I know now that I had a similar situation in my life with platonic friendships.  During and after my divorce, I was terribly hurt by the lack of emotional support from the people I considered my closest friends.  Five years ago this month, I cleared my slate of most of my 50 closest friends and allies because I was making a big change in my life and they represented the negativity and inertia of my past.  Energetically, they felt like a physical anchor dragging me down, trying to control my actions and thoughts, and constantly telling me what to do.  Within the next year, I parted company with the last of my closest friends from my “old” life.

In that year’s time, even though I said goodbye to almost all my former friends, many of whom were really terrible friends to me who lied to me or used me, I didn’t want to become jaded about friendships and relationships.  I wanted to trust again.  I wanted to have friends again—just not the control freaks, users, and liars of my past.  So I made big changes in my life and made a conscious effort to bring new friends into my life.  Too bad I was still vibrating that my friends were control freaks, users, and liars…because that’s exactly what I attracted to me yet again.

I was so used to being disappointed by my old friends that it was an underlying expectation.  It didn’t take long for my new friends to disappoint me in ways that could not be mended.    Within six months,  I was being blamed for the break-up of a long-term marriage because my friend had told her husband she was out partying with me when she met her new boyfriend, even though I was never one to go out clubbing and was intentionally celibate at that time while I healed from my divorce.  She was seldom home, and she usually gave my residence or “Lorna needs me” as her reason for her  extended absence from her home and children.  There were lots of lies told, and I never really got the closure I needed that would have come from defending myself.  As soon as I discovered the truth and refused to cover for her or let her use me, she dropped our friendship.

There were other new friends who disappointed me also, but it was the betrayal of this new best friend that hurt the most and bothered me for years afterward.  By the time my other significant friendships ended, I drew inward for a while to work on myself and make sure that I had changed my vibration enough that, instead of bringing more users into my life as best friends, I would bring in friends who genuinely cared about me and weren’t users by nature.    That transition time was very hard for me, very lonely.  I literally had no friends for  many months while I rebuilt my life to reflect the kinds of friends I wanted.  I built a new social network, brought back a couple of old friends who’d been through changes of their own, and grew lush new friendships.

I needed that downtime to transition from someone whose friends were users to someone whose friends were sharers.  There’s no way I could attract happy, caring friends into my life when I was still stuck in the vibration of what I’d experienced repeatedly in my past.  Even though I took the right actions to find new friends after clearing out the old ones, I still had an underlying belief that I couldn’t trust my friends to back me up when things got rough.  I had to change my own beliefs and vibration, and that took time and some careful deliberation on my part.

Which brings us back to my fascination with a man I’ll call “Bear,” thanks to his stature.

It has taken me a year to trust him.  Not that he’s given me any reason not to trust him, except thanks to the Saboteur we all have in us.  For a year, I have observed his interactions with me, with my daughters, with his child, with his colleagues, with his friends.  All of his actions have been consistent with his words to me.  I have seen things I didn’t quite understand and felt those old pangs of fear that it was evidence of a deception, that it was just history being repeated…and then, before I could even ask or before he knew that I knew, he would offer up that information as well as the reason for it.  No deception.  No using and abusing.  And then, as if the Universe was telling me here was something important to pay attention to, someone unrelated would unwittingly corroborate the information he’d given me.

The fascination I have with this epiphany is that for the past year of not trusting him, it’s not been about anything he’s done or hasn’t done.  It’s been because, while I brought him into my life with solid intentions of spending more time with men who really are good men, I have been vibrating  my belief that good men are too good to be true, that a seemingly good man will eventually be discovered to be either a lying user or a gutless coward…because that’s been a prevalent pattern in my life.  (Pattern equals vibration.)  That has been my true belief about men, and as a result, I’ve attracted men of that type to me again and again.

So my challenge now is to stay in this vibration of being joyful that there are some great guys out there whom I enjoy and who have been good for me…and just continue to enjoy the hell out of my time with him and anyone else like him.