Why Understanding The ‘Karmic Backlash’ Can Prevent You From Sabotaging Your Transformation
You may remember a time when you embarked on changing an aspect of your life that had been troublesome for a while. Giving up an addiction. Ending a toxic relationship. Moving out of a mould-infested house. Quitting a high-paying but soul-sucking job.
You thought that since you “did the right thing”, everything in your life would become better from then on. Hence, you were surprised, and quite honestly, disappointed when ‘bad things’ still happened. Your car broke down. Roof started leaking. Pet got sick. Energy still sucked.
In the personal transformation sphere, nobody tells us that when we take steps to change, often what follows is a period of time when we contend with what I call a ‘karmic backlash’. This is not punishment, though it’s easy to feel that way, but energy correcting itself as part of the change.
Instead, we’re likely to expect that it will all be sunshine and rainbows the minute we step out of the old situation. When things do not develop as such, the disappointment, fear and shame it can trigger due to a lack of awareness can sabotage our path of transformation.
But this karmic backlash, when understood, can be very empowering and facilitate a long-lasting transformation.
Why Karmic Backlash Happens – Is It My Karma?
A common reaction when something unpleasant occurs after we’ve made a change is feeling we’re being punished for having done something wrong. Or we deduce that we have a self-abusive pattern that has us creating more dramas – which may or may not be true. Regardless, karmic backlash is a separate concept that needs to be considered on its own.
Rather than a punishment, it is a natural part of the process of Change when your energy is readjusting and balancing out. You see, the state you were in before the change… for whatever reason you tolerated pain, discomfort, conflicts, toxicity, abuses and non-integrity. While you were in that situation, you might not have realised it but a lot of your power and resources were bled out of you in the background. The karmic backlash is simply your energy correcting itself in the movement of change.
I call it “karmic” because it is a reaction of causation and effects in line with Universal energy flow. While staying in the undesirable situation, you misdirected your energy. For example, suppose you remained in a highly-unhealthy relationship for a number of years; all the justifications you made to stay in it alone would have required tremendous energies on your part. When you finally stop the justifications, the redirection of the course may entail all that you have hidden from yourself coming up to the surface. Anything that is suppressed and hidden from the light of truth has a way of festering overtime. With change being initiated, the suppressed energy may expose itself through different manifestations.
It is also a way for the energy to be expressed to the fullest. Any energetic build-up will be discharged as it runs its course. A small accident. Mini medical issue. Anger outburst. Finding out your friend betrayed you. Usually they are small enough but enough to irritate you.
You Are Changing
As we clean up our act from any self-abusive behaviours (staying in any unhealthy situation has an element of that), part of the correction is the clearing-out of the abuse template in us. Sometimes, it needs to be released in the physical level. This is why we often go through a phase when something dark and unpleasant happens to us, as we readjust.
In recovery from addiction, one is taught that when you “do the right thing, the right thing will come to you”. Do not be mistaken, however; the “right thing” may not come immediately, it’s more likely to arrive after a period of dedicating to the new path and doing the necessary work. The work is not over when you decide and take action to change. The real work begins then.
This adaptation and readjustment period is when most people ‘relapse’ and choose to go back to their places of dysfunction. For as darkly-chaotic and toxic as it is, it’s at least a predictable and known hell – and that is preferable to some. The torment of not-knowing can be a real enemy.
But with the renewed understanding you now possess, not only can you temper your expectation to accommodate the possibility that things might continue to suck for a while, you can be encouraged by knowing that deep growth is happening in your system and at the same time develop those muscles you neglected through years of avoidance by putting up with that toxic situation.
What it translates to is more strength, solidity and stability in your foundation.
Going Deeper
For those who might be put off making a change for fear of karmic backlash, let me give you a perspective of why you do not want to postpone your change.
When you tolerate something toxic, it is karmically-imbalanced. You do suffer the effects, even if it is silent and inconspicuous. The karmic backlash is akin to the pus being cleared out of a boil, after enduring a wound that has become inflamed, eventually causing a fever. In all that time, you had a sensation of something not right but you ignored it, letting it eat at your soul, a haunted feeling that never goes away. All this, you are already suffering from, and it may be the very cause of the chronic and stubborn issues you’ve been trying to resolve.
While the backlash can be difficult, you will also feel that something is shifting and aligning to a better place. It is sacred. In this era of “truth revealed, lies exposed”, seeing the truth of what has been masking as good or normal when it is destroying you, slowly killing you, is the obvious direction to take.
Amidst the apparent darkness, there is brightness. In fact, the majority is brightness once you have embarked on the road to transformation; you just don’t see it as readily as the surface-level stuff. What you see right in front of you is the crumbling of old structures; you bearing witness to it is concurrently powerful and graceful. If you sense beneath it, you will see that everything is restoring itself to health and wholeness. You can only win from here.
