AGREEMENTS AND HOW THEY FUNCTION
by
Mary MacNab ©
2000-2008 MatrixChange, Inc. All Rights Reserved
What is
an Agreement?
Agreements
form the foundation of our personality structures. We make these agreements
as part of our childhood conditioning / socialization process.
One
example of such an agreement is the ‘burned child’. The child
touches fire or a hot stove for the first time and pulls their hand back
from the heat in shock, or a parent, filled with fear, grabs the child
away from the heat, or the child is actually burned and experiences both
the shock of the burn and the fear of it happening it again. The child
then makes an unconscious agreement to avoid the experience of being
burned to prevent it ever happening again.
An
example agreement is; “ I will never touch the stove again” so
later in life food preparation becomes an issue but the person never
really knows why. Or, the child could make an agreement to dislike heat
or fire leading to later physical phobias or heat-related symptoms.
The examples
used here are simple ones. Many of our agreements are much more complex
and pertain to larger life issues than whether to touch a hot stove or
a fire or not, but they function in exactly the same way.
When and
Why do we make these Agreements?
We make agreements
in response to the experience of shock or fear. The bigger the shock
or the more intense the terror, the stronger the agreement we make. These
agreements form the rules that we live by, quite literally.
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