Why Do Bad Things Happen to Me?

In my career as a dating & relationship expert, I often receive emails from women bemoaning their disastrous luck with men.

"Why did it have to happen to me?"
"Why do things never seem to work out like they should?"
"Why do some women seem to have all the luck and I don't?"
"Am I cursed or something?"

It's not just in the field of romance that we have these questions. Anyone who's ever experienced tragedy asks themselves the same thing.

"Why was I the one to get into a car wreck when I've always been the most careful driver?"
"Why did I get burgled when the neighbor next door always leaves their house unlocked?"
"Why did I get cancer when I've never smoked or done anything harmful to my health?"

It's easy to dismiss these questions as rhetorical, but they hint at a very deep truth:

Understanding Cause and Effect

In the material world, we expect every effect to have a cause.

In other words, being a bad driver causes people to get into accidents. Leaving your house unlocked causes you to get burgled. Smoking, drinking, and being careless about your health causes you to get sick.

But is that really the case?

Look at the evidence. Do only bad drivers get into accidents? Of course not; everyone makes mistakes. Do only people who are asking for it get burgled? Of course not; if a burglar wants to get in your house, he will. Do only unhealthy people get sick? Of course not; some smokers and drinkers live to a ripe old age, while some health freaks catch serious diseases.

Case Study: Chronic Disease

I found this out through a very difficult personal lesson.

Ten years ago, I was happily travelling the world and working on sheep farms. I loved being outside in the fresh air. I loved tramping over mountains all day long. I loved using my body and feeling it get stronger every day.

Then, one day in March 2001, everything changed.

I thought that I'd done something to my knees. They were hurting and hurting and hurting. Walking in heels was excruciating. The nurses gave me some anti-inflammatories and told me to rest for a week.

I rested for a week, but my knees didn't get any better. If anything, the lack of exercise made me feel worse. My body was going into fits, every muscle clenched in pain. I went back to the nurses, and they referred me to a specialist.

Thus began months of going to every treatment under the sun in hopes of finding a cure. I was in and out of hospitals and private clinics. TENS, water therapy, transdermal patches, knee surgery … I had it all.

But the pain never stopped.

Had I Brought This on Myself?

When the doctor told me that I'd never work on a farm again, I felt like my soul was being ripped out of me.

Doing physical work with animals in the great outdoors was one of my life's greatest pleasures. It was what I had wanted to do ever since graduating from college. I had all these plans of working with hair sheep in Mexico, stud breeding in South Africa, and visiting the great herds of Mongolia. Now, this doctor was telling me that my dream was over?

The doctor continued. I'd never be able to run again, either. Or wear heels ever again. My knees were too damaged to cope with those activities. Perhaps when I was sixty or seventy I could get a total knee replacement, but until then I should avoid doing anything that would put stress on my knees.

With every word, I could feel myself retreating into a place where none of this was happening. This had to be a dream. I was imagining all of this, or the doctor was mistaken. Of course I'd farm again. Of course I'd run again. There'd be no reason to live if those things were taken from me.

What I didn't know then was that he was right.

Medicine in a Material World

In the material world, medicine operates by strict laws of cause and effect.

If you get sick, there is a reason you got sick. Maybe you were exposed to a germ, or maybe your immune system was weakened.

If you're feeling pain, then there is a reason you feel that pain. Maybe the problem is muscular or skeletal. Maybe you tore something and need to rest to give it a chance to heal.

Modern medicine has one thing right:

But the one thing modern medicine consistently gets wrong is cause and effect.

Modern medicine can't explain why some people get sick and others don't when exposed to the same germs.

Modern medicine can't explain why some people continue to experience pain even when there's no obvious cause.

Modern medicine can't explain why alternative therapies that fail clinical trials still manage to help so many.

That's where we need to turn to the spiritual.

When Medical Explanations Fall Short

In the material world, the reason for my chronic pain was obvious.

I had been very hard on my knees over the past decade, and the cartilage had gone soft like a sponge. It no longer worked as it should to cushion my joints. As a result, I experienced pain whenever I put stress on my knees by climbing stairs, walking uphill, carrying something heavy, or wearing heels.

But why did my whole body hurt when this was just a problem with my knee joints?

I felt like I was going crazy. I experienced so much pain that my personality changed. I became depressed, short-tempered, and curt. I flinched when my small cousins hurled themselves at me for a hug, bracing myself for the impact against my knees. I didn't like having anyone touch me, because even the gentlest human touch hurt. I spent a lot of time with my legs up and ice on my knees. I couldn't work full-time and wondered if I'd ever be able to support myself again.

Five years after the original injury, I was fortunate enough to meet an extraordinary sports medicine doctor who diagnosed the real problem.

I had fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia is a condition that's little understood by modern medicine. A doctor at the pain clinic described the condition to me as a disease of the nervous system, where pain signals get messed up on their way to the brain. It may have the same roots as post-traumatic stress disorder in the physiological changes that occur in the HPA axis.

So, if being too hard on my knees was the cause of my knee pain, what was the cause of my fibromyalgia?

Was it the trauma of the knee injury?

Was it some kind of virus I'd picked up while working in the third world?

Was it lying hidden in my genetics, waiting for something to trigger its onset?

I had more and more questions, and it seemed that modern medicine couldn't give me the answers.

Spiritual Cause and Effect

Encouraged by my new doctor, I pursued various alternative therapies, including acupuncture and nutritional supplements. I became a certified Reiki practitioner so that I could give myself Reiki for pain relief.

But the real turning point in understanding my illness was when someone loaned me a copy of Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life.

Louise opened my eyes to the truth of dis-ease.

I had indeed created my own illness, but I had created it as a result of errors in thought rather than physical injury.

From a spiritual perspective, all illness is a result of being ill-at-ease with some part of yourself.

Feelings like guilt, shame, and anger are all signs that you need to work on accepting and loving yourself unconditionally.

If left unaddressed, these negative feelings become embodied in various forms of dis-eases, such as cancer or chronic illness.

Chronic pain, she explained, is a result of feelings of guilt. Guilt demands punishment, and pain fills that role.

I understood what she was saying.

My employment on sheep farms around the world was about more than having a career in the great outdoors.

It was about the shame I felt about being university-educated and upwardly-mobile when so many of the people I went to school with were stuck in low-paying jobs back home with no way out.

I became a Peace Corps volunteer in part because I felt guilty that I had received so many opportunities to learn and further myself, opportunities that peasant farmers in the third world just didn't get. I felt that I needed to pay the universe back for all the good I'd received by giving back to the less fortunate.

It sounds like I was doing the right thing. If knowing that you've led a privileged life inspires you to help others who haven't been so privileged, then it's a good thing … right?

Sometimes it seems like guilt is a necessary part of being white, liberal, and educated.

But that very guilt is proof that we haven't accepted the good we've been given. We feel like we don't deserve it. Thus, we feel guilty … and create dis-ease in our lives.

I didn't feel like there was anything special about me that deserved all the advantages and opportunities I'd been given. Why did I get to go to a good university and travel the world when so many of my high school colleagues stayed back home and got knocked up by a local boy? Was I being elitist for even thinking that? Who was I to say that my life was any better than theirs?

My guilt was chronic. And so was my pain.

Every Problem Has a Spiritual Cause

Getting back to the clients who ask me…

"Why does this always have to happen to me?"
"Why do I never get asked out when I'm basically a nice person with a lot to give?"
"Why do my relationships never work out when I put so much effort into them?"

…I hope you can see now why the problem is never what they think it is.

They think that the reason nothing ever seems to go right for them is that they've been singled out, maliciously, by the universe.

They think that they've been the victim of a run of bad luck, or that the real problem is a culture that values superficial attractiveness over being a good person.

It's much easier to be a victim of bad luck than to accept that you've created everything in your life, including the bad things.

But the bad things that happen to us … happen to us for a reason.

They're signals that something needs attention. Something isn't right inside ourselves. There's an error in thought that needs to be corrected.

You could even say that every bad thing that happens to us is no different to contracting a dis-ease: uncomfortable, unpleasant and frightening, certainly…

…But ultimately an important wake-up call to shift something in our lives.

You can choose to heed them or ignore them. But if you choose to ignore them, they'll keep happening over and over again.

Bad things don't happen to you because you're a bad person or you've done something wrong.

Rather, "bad things" happen because we haven't evolved enough to understand that it is our own belief system that makes them bad.

If you change your belief system to incorporate the belief that everything happens for a reason and every situation is an opportunity for growth, then nothing will seem "bad" to you. It will just seem like another opportunity, albeit a challenging one, to learn and grow as a person.

This belief has been a great comfort to me as I've learned to live with fibromyalgia. I know that fibromyalgia has been a gift, not a burden. Because of it, I've changed my life in ways that I wouldn't have even contemplated otherwise. I wouldn't be a dating and relationship expert today if fibromyalgia hadn't changed my career direction so many years ago.

There is a gift in every problem we face...

...But it's up to you to unwrap it.