Have you ever noticed that sometimes life can be a little like a broken record? Have you ever repeated the same life pattern over and over again? Have you ever noticed that the same type of negative experience occurs repetitively with different people and in different forms? Most of us have. This is quite common and the reason is that we attract into our lives, like a magnet, the circumstances, people and events that we need to continue to grow and to expand our life experiences.

When we fail to inquire deeper and find the lessons contained in the experiences that we label as bad or negative, we repetitively attract the same experiences into our lives until we do. This law of life makes it impossible for us to avoid our lessons. We are continually presented with the same lessons in different forms, with different people, until we learn and grow from them. You will find that even if you remove a person or situation from your life that you think is the problem, you will run into a similar person or situation again if you haven’t dealt with the issue and received its intended blessings. You can run but you can’t hide from your lessons. You can go to the other side of the world to get away from people and situations you dislike, they will find you again – the people and situations will be different but the same old scenarios repeat themselves.

I observed this law in action in my own life from my late teens to my late twenties. I constantly attracted people who would take advantage of me and push my boundaries. For a while I was frustrated, angry and upset at these particular people and I wondered why it was continually happening, especially since I had always made an effort not to treat people that way. I changed my friends, changed my job but no matter what I changed, the issue seemed to follow me. Eventually, I realised that it was not the outside world that needed to change but the inside. I realised that I had a big lesson to learn and that I was attracting those people into my life as my teachers.

You see, I used to be a quiet and reserved guy and I would go along with everything, even things that I didn’t enjoy doing. I was never able to stand up for myself, assert myself or say what I needed to say. Wanting so hard to be seen as the ‘nice’ guy, I would avoid any type of conflict or confrontation. I was extra-sensitive to everyone else but I wasn’t respecting and loving myself. The problem with that was that all the little upsets I was repressing turned into anger and rage that kept building up inside me until I was full to the brim and couldn’t contain it anymore. Every now and then, something would tip me over the edge and I would erupt like a volcano. At these times, all my built-up anger would spill out and some unlucky persons would be on the receiving end.

Eventually, I couldn’t live with myself operating that way any longer. It had become too difficult, a nightmare. I hated myself. It was obvious that I was repetitively attracting the situations so that I could learn something very important, something that I had always refused to learn, which was to love and respect myself enough to speak up, be assertive and create clear boundaries. I finally made the decision to change. Instead of being a ‘yes’ man who pleased everybody, I would express myself constructively when I didn’t agree. I became more assertive and wouldn’t hesitate to voice my displeasure. The more I expressed myself in this way, the more constructive my expressions became, the old anger created by repressing issues dissolved and eventually I stopped attracting the type of situations into my life because I had finally discovered the hidden lesson.

We need to understand that all qualities, both positive and negative, have a place and are necessary. The more we try to repress the qualities we see as negative, the more they build up and the more destructive they become. We will not be able to repress these qualities forever – they will always be expressed in some ways. By repressing them, all we do is ensure that they become more severe. When we don’t deal with situations as they arise, we are left with unresolved issues and their resulting emotions which would cause us to end up either taking it out on ourselves or somebody else. People, who are not comfortable expressing their negative sides to friends and colleagues, often end up off-loading their repressed negativity on the people closest to them. Those who are unwilling to express any negativity towards anyone outwardly would often end up expressing it inwardly against themselves and beating themselves up.

If, on the other hand, we allow ourselves to express both sides of our nature, rather than express the positive and repress the negative, we are able to become balanced and constructive more often. When we refuse to learn and grow from our life experiences, we cause them to repeat until we finally get the intended message and lesson. And when we do, there is no need for us to repeat the same experiences but to move on to our next lesson and to grow to a new level.