Something has been bothering me for a while, and it's taken me some time to tease out what it was. Today, at 5 am, I figured it out: I have known one of my clients before,(past life) and I feel somewhat responsible for their pain. Guilt from something from the past that I can't do anything about takes "guilt trip" to a whole new level. Can't find enough in this life to feel bad about? Just reach back a ways, you're sure to find a whole lot of stuff to beat yourself up over. Maybe it's just a way to beat myself up, or maybe it's just an acknowledgement of what is. You can't heal what you can't or won't admit. I will process this through, now I know what's going on, but it brings up an interesting question: What do you do when you realize you've met someone before, that you have a history?
My rule of thumb is that I don't say or do anything. If the other person figures it out on their own, there's no reason that I can think of to not acknowledge it, but I think it throws a burden on someone to hand them something like that out of the blue. Especially if they are not intuitive. It makes them feel a bit weird, and they don't know what to do. Would you? Do they owe you something, are you just messing with them? I think they have to have a certain level of openness for this kind of knowledge to be useful.
I read recently about a woman who found out her life's purpose, then found a few years later that she was quite unhappy with that path. What? Was the information wrong? No, but it turns out that the purpose she found was only a possible purpose. Since her life had not gone in a particular direction, that path was no longer the best one for her, and, once she learned that, she was able to give up the first path and be happy in another choice. Interestingly, this was only a problem because she had been told what her purpose was. If she hadn't known, she would have continued down the different path, none the wiser that she had originally planned a different future for herself.
I look at this in two ways. One way is to say that poking around in someones psyche can cause problems, and since you can't know whether what you uncover will be helpful or hurtful, you should just leave it all alone. I don't buy that 100%, but I'm pretty sure that regression is not for everybody. I have read cases where people with significant cause to believe that something very unusual happened to them, just don't care to find out what it might be. There's no un-opening a can of worms, so if it's not bothering them, why not leave it alone? Some people really need to know, others, not so much.
On the other hand, things happen for a reason, and there seems to be a strong, self corrective mechanism at play in matters like this. In the example above, the woman found out something that made her life more difficult, for a while, but then she received new information allowed her to change direction and be comfortable with that life choice. If that hadn't happened, would she have spent the rest of her life second-guessing herself? Always wondering if she'd made the right choice? Maybe. You could suppose that all this was planned from the git-go, but I like to think that, since she was open enough to get the information in the first place, she was self-aware enough to realize that something wasn't right, so she could get what she needed to do a course-correction to a happier path. All in all, I like to think she was more satisfied after the correction than before, so I caulk that up as a win.
Knowledge can be helpful or confusing. I think that if someone is open enough to ask, the deserve to know what's what. If they don't ask, leave them alone. You don't want to send them down some rabbit hole they are not prepared for, or saddle them with some perceived obligations that are simply not necessary. If you want to share, look carefully at your motives: Is there really a need for them to know, or are you just trying to show off or manipulate them in some way. Yes, it happens, so be honest.
So, what would I do if you sang out of tune? If I was comfortable that what I told you would be of value to you, I would say something. Otherwise there is no need to trouble you with something you don't want to know or don't know how to handle. Unless you ask, of course.
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