Recognizing & Healing Our Creative Imprinting
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Defining Creative Imprinting
Children look to their parent(s) for guidance. What they seek is affirmation and acceptance. Most individuals attribute some degree of their behavior to gaining the approval of their parents. Due to this, we adopt patterns reflecting all the Compatibility Factors that are not our own. This imprinting process is motivated and reinforced by parents who seek to see themselves in their children. The more we are unclear about who we are, the more pressure we place on our children to be superficially like us. For example, this means if our parents are faster pace, we will naturally try to respond quickly. If our parents are Think First, we try to remember to check in with our Thoughts before we act. Imprinting as a whole is very confusing because we end up losing our sense of self in others’ ideas about us, which increases our need to be reassured by them. This is why Imprinting is a trap. The more we are caught, the more we need reassurance about who we are.
As babies, most of us are looking for support and guidance. We are trying to learn how to get our needs met without overwhelming our parents. We may have a sense of our own possibilities, but we have no concept of how to actualize these ideas. It is no wonder that we become entranced by our parents’ behaviors, because they are the only real examples we have of actualized individuals. New parents also have a learning curve, as they are typically unsure how to care for their children on every level. Parents seek guidance from their parents, aunts, uncles and whomever else they can to do the best job they know how. When they look at their child, they see the best in them, which is, naturally, what they conceive of as the best. For many parents, they have not yet considered how different their child may be from their (the parent’s) natural way of being. This is why parents are typically indifferent about their child’s difference, believing that raising their children is their main focus, not adapting to the child’s creative needs. As a result, it is easier for parents to see a child as a simple extension of themselves where they can install their values without consideration.
The main way out of imprinting process is to find a way of being that increases the child’s sense of flow and joy in being Alive. The main way to reinforce an imprinting process is to keep trying to do behavior that previously made someone happy but now does not. Finding our own natural expression ends with joy, while doing another’s expression ends with pain. This points out that much of the angst we carry was actually not only the patterns and conflicts we absorbed from our parents, but the fact we did not think we were sufficient in our natural way of being. When our parents imprint us, it is more than what we say or do, because we are actually attempting to imitate them and live up to their standards. This means, as children, we take on the Excitement, Intensity and Anxiety of our parent’s thoughts and then react to it, which creates inner turbulence. The more we are confused and feel trapped, the more hopeless it seems about releasing ourselves from our imprinting. We end up absorbing the imbalances of our parents that go along with their patterns of engagement. Even if we have the same Creative Expressions as our parents, their emotional, intellectual and sensory distortions will still create a conflict within us (and therefore, between us and others). This is amplified in differences in Motives, Attractions and Relationship Skills.
We consider Imprinting successful when we lose our sense of self and attempt to gain approval by patterns of behavior which are not naturally our own. This ’success’ is amplified when parents pay attention to us, at least initially, when we do an Imprint. Sometimes mirroring our parents’ patterns can seem much safer than being our Self. It is interesting to note that many new parents are stimulated to engage new processes around their newborns. When parents become engrossed in our Creative Expression, we could come to believe that doing this imprint engages parents in being more authentic or seeing themselves on a deeper level. This can lead to a justification that our imprints help our parents. The problem is that we are compromising ourselves by doing their imprinting and, in effect, cutting ourselves off from a path of Authentic Self Expression. Our parents feel justified giving us the patterns of their success, because they believe it is their job to help us survive and succeed in the world. Unfortunately, mutual good intentions cancel each other out and end up creating damage to the relationship between the child and parents. Until the imprinting issues are addressed, this damage is hard to heal.
Confusion about who we are arises when we realize that our internal beliefs or expectations are not consistent with our outer experience. Imprinting disconnects us from our reality by convincing us we have to be someone we are really not. In this way, the more we take on imprinting, the less we can trust the experiences of life to make sense. Our thoughts about what is happening are isolated from our experience. We become attached to the idea of another’s acceptance rather than seeing what we are doing no longer works. The more we impose a false sense of who we are on our reality, the more difficult it is for others to connect to us. More importantly, the greater our imprinting, the more frustrated, irritated and agitated we become when others do not preemptively accept us as we present ourselves. This is why individuals who need to be accepted feel compelled to accept others as they are. Imprinting rewires us, so what we consider to be acts of kindness actually creates more damage that we imagine. In our effort to treat others as we would like to be treated, it does not take into account the differences between us and others. On investigation, the act that seems kind to us may actually discount and disregard someone in his or her own self perception. This is how the act of believing our Imprinting creates a disconnect within ourselves, so we cannot see our disconnect with others when we engage them. Imprinting creates greater separativeness because we come to not trust our own perceptions.
Imprinting is a sore spot in our psyche where we end up constantly reacting to others’ perceptions about us. We are always off-balance and agitated when someone does not cleanly perceive our intentions. This is why we end up needing more reassurance, because the reality of the interaction does not make sense to us. In effect, what we are doing is acting out of a predefined pattern of belief between who we are and how others respond to us. Over time, certain patterns of behavior become viewed as the way we need to compromise ourselves to be accepted. Imprinting focuses us on filling stop-gap measures so others do not become upset with us. Ironically, the more we do our imprinting, the more we end up creating the opposite effect of what we want.
The process of becoming more authentic requires releasing our imprinting so we do not invest in false perceptions and desires. Paradoxically, Imprinting reinforces self-doubt and allows us to hide who we really are. The point is that by healing our imprinting we become more fluid in expressing our Creative Self. This makes us more adaptive, flexible and fluid in our approach, which might challenge any role-playing fixations we create. This can create a fear that things may go wrong and we may not be safe. This is why going against Imprinting takes the high road and is not initially comfortable. Healing our Imprinting means reprogramming automatic assumptions by asking if our current way of being is true. If we are being true to ourselves, we do not take on others’ perceptions of us and react to them. We also do not need reassurance about who we are.
The source of imprinting is how others’ ideas become imposed upon us. Initially, our parents want to help us be more like them to resolve issues in a way they think will work best. Our inability to convey our own sense of what is natural causes us to accept their perceptions about what is needed in order to gain approval. What makes this so difficult is that if we knew then how to communicate our experience, and they knew how to recognize our way of being, the situation could have turned out much better. Unfortunately, being put on the spot without the ability to be seen leads us to accept our parent’s reality over our own, which traumatizes us around our own natural Creative Expression. We then become programmed to attempt to be what they want us to be, which not only distances us from our Creative Source; but, guarantees we will be in pain when others do not appreciate our self-presentation. A great example of this is when a child decides they want to do something different in a career path (than was planned for them). Some of us are never able to break out of our parents’ orbits.
The more we become identified with our Imprinting, the less we invest or accept our own Authentic Nature. It is ironic that the pain of our Imprinting causes us to avoid engaging our real, Authentic Nature because we are afraid to add more pain to our existing interactions. This creates a hardening or deadening of our natural openness and availability. It creates a negative cycle, where we become increasingly crystallized and locked into imprinted patterns. Eventually, we do not even see any other options. It is important to distinguish that Imprinting operates on an Instinctive level so this full framework is usually not conscious. This is different than our defensive framework, because it has more intellectual decision-making and can be figured out, given enough time. Imprinting triggers many of our reactions with other people, without a conscious understanding as to why. It is also very hard to identify what others are reacting to in us. Rest assured, we can assume at least half the reactions of others have to do with Imprinting issues. If we were to heal our Imprinting, we would not only possess greater clarity about our Creative Nature (so we could invest in who we are), but we would greatly reduce the friction we experience in meeting others.
Since our society is composed of seven different creative expressions on three different levels, there is much opportunity for confusion. Even if we happen to have parents with the same Creative Expressions as us, there are still differences is how we do things that they may not approve of. This is particularly true around Pacing, Communication Process and Decision Making Approach. Creative Expression imprinting is also accentuated by our imprinting around Goals, Modes and Attitudes. Finally, our cultural setting can also dramatically affect our Imprinting and how well we fit into our communities. Each community has expressions it both accepts and rejects. In order to have greater congruence, many communities could be described in terms of authentic expressions they accept and the imprinting they expect. This creates cultural differences, not only in different countries, but in different regions or cities within a country. For example, Boulder, Colorado amplifies and accepts all Visionary and Inventor expressions, but neutralizes Storyteller expressions at the imprinting level and rejects Implementer at the authentic level. It is important to recognize that most of what we identify as feeling accepted and comfortable in a community is, in fact, a reflection of how congruent our imprinting is compared to the local norms. When we do not fit into a particular group, a good percentage of the tension experienced is the difference in perception around beliefs that are either accepted or discounted in the community.
Usually, we are unconscious of the behaviors that reflect our imprinting. If we do become conscious of them, it is because someone has pointed this out to us. A general theorem of this work is that whenever we become tired, stressed out, or upset, we automatically begin to behave in a way that matches our parents more than ourselves, i.e., ‘doing our imprinting.’ Imprinting is how we have learned to fake it to gain the approval of our parents, teachers, or society. When one of the seven Creative Expressions shows up as imprinting, we are usually acting, not being authentic, and not being seen for what we are doing, no matter how hard we try. This distinction of being authentic or doing imprinting can most clearly be seen when an individual authentically doing their Creative Expression interacts with a person doing an imprinted version. It creates repulsion, reaction and a judgment that imprinted person is phony or unreliable. Many of our choices in relationship have to do with these kinds of reactions to others.
The ‘Cost Of Imprinting’ graphic focuses on the constant effort required to show up in our imprinting. We become quickly exhausted and are not able to process events in the moment. The more imprinting we do, the more it distracts us from being able to focus on our Authentic Life Expression. Most important, we do not trust we can move forward and be resourceful because the imprinting has always distracted us. When we do imprinting we are not whole beings, but objects, subjects and fixated ideas of who we should be. This means we do not allow ourselves to fully experience our Light, Life and Love energies. The more we do Imprinting, the more it encourages others to do their imprinting. This means we attract mediocre individuals with no desire for growth or improvement. When we begin to release our Imprinting, we know it is working by the quality of those individuals who are attracted to us.
Imprinting can also confuse us around Pacing, Approach and Communication Process. If a low-paced boy has difficulties with his father, and receives support primarily from his mother (who is fast paced), he will learn to associate that women require him to speed up his pacing. This guarantees he will be attracted to fast-paced women who exhaust him. This can be validated by how much this man has places he goes to where no one can disturb him, or he can take a nap without interruption. Until he learns the impact of choosing a fast paced partner, he will unconsciously seek them out without questioning how they impact him. We also see situations where a very feminine girl grows up with a highly Convergent Decision Making mother, who teaches her to focus and prioritize her activities. In this case, the girl may become very effective at breaking down problems, analyzing what she needs and coming up with an action plan that gets here where she wants to go. Unfortunately, this will not make the girl happy or joyful, because her natural process will be to do the opposite so she can openly explore options while moving at her own speed (to engage possibilities). Her Decision-Making Imprinting keeps her from options that would work for her.
Many boys and girls in the United States grow up with a degree of emotional repression. This often confuses their natural Communication Process sequence. Instead of trusting in their CP, they become overly sensitive and either preemptively attempt to describe everything or minimize their descriptions and refuse to engage when others ask questions. This confusion teaches some children to copy their parent’s action plan by pushing activities, while other parents teach their children to think about everything before making a decision. The result is a denial of key qualities in the Decision Making process that are needed for us to effectively connect to others. We each have seven options for Goals and Attitudes, but many of us are imprinted into acting as though our parent’s goals and attitudes are our own. This affects our direction, particularly in the early part of life, and also distracts us from our Authentic Life Expression.
It is important to remember how much effort it takes to maintain these appearances. Doing these behaviors automatically generates resistance in others because it is not natural for us. The reactions are particularly strong if others have a natural expression where we are doing the imprinted version. Most imprinting is caught up in doing something to prove us capable in a certain way. When others resist our actions, we usually put more effort into the act until they back off or explode on us. If our imprinted expression is mirrored back to us we are repulsed because we see our parents patterns in us. This is one of the main reasons imprinting is not studied or explored, because many of us are choosing partners who have the same Expressions and Imprinting as our parents. Due to this familiarity, we are also initially attracted to people because we can predict their behaviors. Unfortunately, it gets old quickly and what was once attractive can quickly become repulsive. It does not encourage us to study imprinting if it will reveal how similar our partners are to our parents.
In the graphic above, we can see how the imprinting of the young woman matches the expression patterns of the two parents. This creates a desire in her for Safety, which is met by her husband (at right) who has the same patterns as her father (including most of his same imprinting). Most individuals choose instinctive partners at least in their teens and twenties. The important thing to remember about these distinctions is that we are the only ones who can validate them. We do this by choosing where to take risks and step into new possibilities where we have no pre-existing patterns of behavior. While we may be unsure about what will happen, it will be freeing, affirming and generate a sense of Aliveness within because we are expressing ourselves authentically. If we are caught in our imprinting, we are repeating patterns, hoping the Excitement, Intensity and Anxiety within us will be submerged into the Excitement, Intensity and Anxiety of those we are with. Through unconscious merging, we think we do not have to be responsible for the results.
While initially it is valuable to have a Coach or Facilitator profile us to quicken our self-examination process, we actually need to explore and discover our own truth. While it may be difficult to accept, there is a reason for having children with different patterns in our life. First of all, if we have not completed our own parental patterns, we tend to have children who will help us do this. Second, we select individuals with the same Compatibility Factors that express themselves in different ways so we do not recreate the same patterns again. Unfortunately, this seldom works, as the more fear we have about something, the more likely the universe will give us another opportunity to resolve it. Imprinting is a way of demonstrating we can learn to be a certain way to please our parents. Our attachments to proving who we are can seem more real than just being ourselves because it is exciting to pull off this deception. One of the challenges of dealing with imprinting is that we feel enabled to pull the wool over others eyes because we believe everybody does it. We do not realize that we can only pull the wool over the eyes of people who are compromised and caught in their own imprinting. Any individual who is on a creative growth path would be able to see these imprints if they knew what they were looking for.
We remake our view of ourselves when we invest in our Authentic Creative Expression. It is helpful to have a guide in the process so they can reflect our nature back and we can step into a possibility without past imprinted perceptions interfering with our own creativity. This is because agreement generates hope, and the more we accept ourselves, the more likely we will expand into a possibility when it is congruent with us. Compatibility Assessments are more about releasing ourselves from our past perceptions so we can become clear and present in this moment. The effective use of a Creative Assessment is to explore options, so the process becomes one that deepens and enriches our understanding of ourselves. Some individuals believe that identifying people’s behavioral patterns somehow minimizes their creative versatility. Actually, we assess individuals so they can examine their own truth and release themselves from the compromised patterns of their childhood. By deepening into our Self and prioritizing what is true, we come to embody our creative essence. We are only predictable to the degree when others do not accept their Creative Nature and rely on their Imprinting, Pretenses and Defenses.
Intergenerational Imprinting is when a grandparent pattern is the same as their grandchild’s. We commonly see reinforcement around certain issues in alternate generations because each generation tends to rebel against its own parental pattern. This means children grow up seeing the limitations of their parent’s patterns and adopt opposite ways of dealing with these issues, which are then repeated in their own children. This is what makes Conditioning and Defenses entirely predictable. Of course, who we are is beyond any superficial behavioral study.
This process will repel some individuals because they are not ready for it. Others will be repelled because of their negative associations of being classified, particularly by an authority figure. Usually this is due to the fact that we are still caught up in childhood patterns of Objectification and Subjectification. When parents try to make us something like themselves, they objectify us. It is up to us to step beyond an object status and express our Authentic Creative Nature. Another childhood pattern is waiting to be told what is true for us. This creates defensive patterns where our parent’s interpretation of who we are can become who we are when we accept their views over our own. The opportunity is to claim our truth, independent of our parents, which requires knowing what our truth is. Judging others and our self makes the identification of Compatibility Factors more of a projection on others rather than an invitation to explore authentic qualities. These projections, particularly when combined with imprinting, are called Idealization, which is the third defensive distortion. This is because our discomfort is frequently used to make others wrong. When we cannot own our imprinting it separates us from others. When we struggle to validate our Creative Nature, we do not want to fall into patterns that reinforce more imprinting.
At the Instinctive level we have expressions we naturally embody and imprinting which we pretend to be so others will accept us. Our main imprinting can actually cover up our Mental Body Expression, making us doubt ourselves. Instead of being our Mental Body Expression, we can get caught up in doing a version of the expression differently in order to avoid being considered similar to our parents. This is especially true when our parents are not actualized and expressing their creativity clearly or cleanly. Individuating ourselves from our parents is a part of the healing process. Realizing that we do not need to take on their patterns is another step in the healing process. Ultimately, it is breaking pre-established conditioning where we believe we must define ourselves in terms of others so we will not be attacked. We must clarify our Imprinting to prevent attacks from our parents and others.
Types of Imprinting
Every Compatibility Factor has the potential to be imprinted on our children. The real issue is how the imprint is anchored emotionally. If our imprint is anchored in Safety and Excitement we use it to divert attention into safe ways of being appreciated. Our focus is mainly about appearances and looking good, which we call ‘Covers.’ The compromise is not to challenge others perceptions of us. If our imprint is anchored in Security and Intensity we use it get others to agree with us. Our focus is mainly about not letting others define our creative options, which we call ‘Taking Back Our Ground.’ The compromise is that we get caught up in rebelling and forget to be our Self. If our imprint is anchored in Personal Self Importance and Anxiety, we attempt to find points of leverage, which will artificially distinguish ourselves from our partners called ‘Diversions.’ The compromise is that if we confront our Imprinting, we would have to become mush more accountable about accepting who we are. Diversions are the most self sabotaging aspect of imprinting, because we deny the joyful inner motivation that comes with Authentic expression.
Imprinting reflects simply what we determined was needed to do to survive our childhood. It is a coping pattern that has outlived its value when we have become more conscious. The primary impact of Imprinting is how it diverts us from our own Primary Expression. Diversions keep us from focusing on who we are as contributors to the world. The more we do imprinting, the more our energies are tied up attempting to be what others want us to be. We can recognize imprinting by the degree of pain we experience when others resist, ignore or distrust us. Feeling this pain should be an incentive that focuses us on what we could do effectively. We do not want to get lost in the pain, but use it to clarify what we need to do to recover our passion. Passion is what gets lost when we believe our Imprinting is who we are. The more we eliminate imprinting by neutralizing these beliefs, the more effectively we will be able to engage a greater diversity of people. It is recommended to not begin with parents, because they will be the most difficult relationship with whom to gain clarity. Otherwise, we act out the patterns of our parents at the cost of our true nature (without learning how to individuate from them). If we do not confront our imprinting, we limit ourselves to a small segment of the population who will accept our diminished Creative Expression and imprinting. The more we seek familiarity and comfort the less likely will we find a partner who is creatively aligned and can support our Authentic Life Expression.
This requires that we release the tension about being seen in a particular way, so we can reinvest this expression in honoring our authentic Creative Being. Otherwise, the tension in the difference in imprinting can distract us from the creative opportunities to grow with others. Any attempt to convince someone we are somehow different than how we joyfully experience ourselves is likely imprinting. When we are being authentic there is no need to prove ourselves. Imprinting is essentially a performance or role we believe will gain us acceptance. It reinforces a superficial fantasy that we think will garner love and acceptance. It does not even occur to us that these patterns actually keep us from experiencing Radiant Self Unifying Love. When we are fully identified with our parents’ patterns and no longer receive praise, acknowledgement and attention, we feel abandoned and lost. In our families, if we do something unexpected, others try to encourage us to go back to our imprinting, assuming that we are the imprinting. This is how we become locked into our family of origin patterns.
Taking Back Our Ground is a reflection that we lost our footing while growing up. This means we lost the ability to define what we needed and when it was needed by accepting another’s priorities over our own. It reflects a power imbalance that eventually needs to be neutralized or we end up becoming the person our parents imposed upon us. Some would say we become just like our parents, but in reality, it is more descriptive to say we become a person with a superficial toughness and opposition to people telling us what to do. It is interesting to notice that we take on imprinting with all the compromises our parents have made and then use the conflicts within the imprint to fight the imprint from the outside in. For example, if we adopted a poorly expressed Inventor imprint from our father and it contained a lot of self-loathing, resistance and intensity, we would naturally gravitate to expressing our self loathing, resistance and intensity whenever someone triggered us to respond in this imprint. We can further say that an Inventor Imprint who did not take himself or his Creative Expression seriously, would display a lot of jadedness, self-reliance and indifference to the opinions of others. This would mean that whenever an Inventor imprint was triggered, we would use it to shrug off how others do not see or accept us. This is an example of an imprint, which could be valuable in certain situations where repression is dominant. Overall, we tend to believe that imprints are coping mechanisms with some inherent value because they helped us solve some problems in the past. The key issue is that we never had a choice about how we responded.
The simplest types of Imprints are called Covers, because we attempt to match an outer appearance, but do not usually believe we can survive scrutiny, so we simply deal with everything superficially. Covers can also be imprints of our parent’s Imprints. When a parent believes we need to be a certain way to survive, they can get very driven to make sure we know how to respond to certain problems and resort to patterns of behavior that make us seem more flexible and capable (than we may be in that moment). Our Mental Body is the Expression that provides a sense of Safety for us. This creates a choice between doing our Authentic Mental Body Expression (to feel safe) or falling into a Cover Imprint to create the illusion of Safety. Sometimes we get so caught up in creating these illusions for ourselves, we end up buying into the illusions of others. Covers promote greater Objectification, where appearances are more important than the substance of a circumstance.
What this tells us is that the patterns of imprinting can be seen as good or bad, but that the underlying compromise to our way of being is what mainly does the damage. Imprinting creates pockets of compromise, where we are emotionally turbulent, coalescing into attachments of Excitement, Intensity and Anxiety that cannot be easily resolved. This is why some individuals use more than 25% of their total expression dealing with issues of imprinting. This is a lot of investment when the only payoff is rejection, denial and a general discounting of who we are. The real cost is the lack of energetic integrity, where we are constantly being thrown off-balance by the issues of others. Many of us who have begun the healing process report that releasing these patterns helps them regain a set of priorities that gives them more options to set a course about where they want to go. When we are imprinted, our larger context is diminished and we flit from thing to thing without committing to anything.
In response to not being seen in our natural Creative Expression, survival fears impel us to imitate our parents’ patterns and we learn to fake an identity for their approval. The important thing to know is that at the base of every imprint is a pattern we feel compelled to do or act out in a particular way. The more we become identified with this pattern or role, the more we need to prove our value by acting it out whenever others question our value. This is why imprinting, at its core, is purely reactive and has no inherent value other than to make us realize that we do not need to compromise ourselves. We are the ones who create the illusion that what we are doing has a socially redeeming value. Simply stated, our pattern was established at an early age that confirms we can connect in a certain way, but we do not realize this may not be supporting us now (at all). The first step to healing this process is to notice what compels us to react, so we can clarify the effect of the conditioning and choose to not engage it. The more conscious we are about the process, the less compelling Imprinting becomes and eventually we release it. This is accelerated when we see the downsides of the Imprint and come to the conclusion that it is in the way of our Growth. When one of the seven creative energies is expressed as imprinting, we are acting, not being authentic, and we are not being seen for what we are doing, no matter how hard we try.
In summary, there are three types of Imprinting: Covers, Taking Back Our Ground, and Diversions. Covers are imprints on the Instinctive level, where our Intent is compromised. They drive us to hide out and keep us from causing reactions with others. They are reconciling by nature because they attempt to maintain our safety. One of the main giveaways is that when we are caught in this type of imprint we want others to like us and we keep seeking Excitement as a way to confirm that we have value to them. Ironically, this type of imprint minimizes our Pleasure. Taking Back Our Ground is where the imprint is mostly intellectual and compromises our Content. One main indicator of this is our argumentative nature because we have decided we are not going to go quietly into the night. Instead, we are going to be noticed and taken into account. We want others to be Intense to meet us in our Intensity on a particular topic. This imprint minimizes our Power because we are not able to see the big picture and include others to build a larger synergy. The last type is a Diversion. This type of imprint is where we lose ourselves in others’ ways of being and never get around to being ourselves. The key indicator here is we are always distracting ourselves so we never end up getting what we want. Some people would say we are afraid of asking for what we really need. This type of imprint minimizes Passion because we are always defining ourselves in terms of what others want us to be rather than what we want to be.
Levels Of Imprinting
Imprinting has consequences. Many of our reactions are based on our level of imprinting. This is because Imprinting Levels define the nature and direction of our reactions. On Level 1 the reaction is about seeking approval. It is about going along and attempting to be seen in a way that can be validating. Unfortunately, it is rarely successful, which drives us to make greater efforts. The cost of this imprinting is that individuals in imprinted patterns cannot connect to us easily. On Level 2 the reaction is about pushing our self and others to conform to our desires. We react against anyone attempting to override our truth or experience. The problem is that our over-reaction only increases our intensity, pushing others away from us. As a result we become more isolated. The cost is that they see our distain and aversion and will not trust us with activities that could trigger them. On Level 3, our reaction is to switch to some other issue to distract our Self from our imprint problem. What we are avoiding is the perspective that we are impotent, falsely believing that we need to find a way to be successful which others have already pioneered. The cost is that we do not want to work with these individuals because there is always some reason things do not work out. This is why franchansing is one of the most ‘diverting’ ways to be successful.
Imprinting has three levels of increasing depth. What makes these levels of imprinting important is how much Imprinting we received, not only over Primary, Secondary or Mental Body differences, but how many of us had Expressions at different levels. Each level of Imprint has either Excitement, Intensity or Anxiety as its core feature. This is because the Objectification, Subjectification and Idealization of our parents end up energetically compromising our Life, Light and Love energies. The Imprint becomes a mixture of an Intention, a pattern of behavior and the trigger that sets it in motions when certain events occur in our lives. The more we, as children, look to our parent for guidance, the more we unconsciously take on these energetic compromises and replicate them within ourselves. This is how their coping mechanisms are translated into our coping mechanisms. The more our parents were incomplete or not successful in their own expressions, the more it creates a burden on their children to either push through these patterns and become successful or accept the turbulence of the world without a sense of being able to do anything about it.
The more feminine our natural Expression is, the more likely we take on greater imprinting overall. There are additional factors, such as a Goal of Acceptance, a Disarming Defense Style or Spiritualist Attitude, which could lead to greater imprinting as well. On Level 1 we take on certain patterns, word choices and behaviors to get approval and acceptance. These are mostly Covers. On Level 2 we take on the belief we need to learn more about specific things to be sufficient in the world. This is mostly about Taking Back Our Ground. In Level 3 we take on the role of the pattern, in terms of Intent, Content and some degree of Context. In so doing, we lose ourselves in the process. This is called a Diversion. Imprinting can become more important to individuals than being who they actually are. If we reach this level, it indicates we likely have been highly Objectified and Subjectified by our parents.
Level 1: Early in our development, we decide that our parents do not fully accept us as who we authentically and naturally are. By interacting with them, we formulate ideas of what we must do to survive. These ideas then tell us how to interact with others and how other should behave with us. Most level one imprinting relates to how we wish things could be better or different. We wax romantically and keep expressing ourselves in stories about how we want others to accept us, but do not have the guts to actually request acknowledgment. We commonly feel we are victims of our circumstances, and that only through fortuitous events will someone actually see and accept us for who we are. Over time, we unconsciously build these ideals into standards about how to act, which paradoxically become substitutes for our sense of loss at not being able to be ourselves. We become actors in a drama not of our own creation. We overcome these role-playing processes by becoming conscious of them.
Level 1 Indicators: We think we are helping others, but, in fact, we feel discounted and denied by them. When people do not honor our Level 1 imprinting, we feel irritated. We keep trying to make things better until they accept us in a particular way (which never seems to be a factor in the relationship, creating frustration).
Level 2: Imprinting involves losing ourselves in trying to anticipate what others expect from us so we can prove ourselves. This imprinting is deeper than level one in that it seeks specific ways to get seen, recognizing that other areas will not be acknowledged. In a way, this level reflects that we have given up hope that others will get us in a natural way. Ironically, it means that imprinting becomes work or a job to get done in order to maintain the status quo. It is primarily generated from family interactions, including older siblings. We believe that it is clever to get attention by adapting to others’ ways of being, but the more we try to provide what we think they need, the less we see that they do not want what we are trying to provide. The result is doing the best we can without believing it will make a difference. This can be validated by the degree we know things are not working, but we do them anyway. This level of imprinting promotes codependence, as each person attempts (for his/her own security) to match their own strengths with their partner’s perceived weaknesses. This hopeless perspective hinders the engagement of our imprinting. We heal this imprint by using humor to recover displaced frustrations and anger. We gradually invest in being true to ourselves rather than getting caught up in what others think about us.
Level 2 Indicators: Needing to be needed. When people do not honor our Level 2 imprinting, we feel powerless. We feel reassured when our partners have the same amount of pain around their imprinting. It disturbs us when others do not take our imprinting seriously.
Our deepest imprinting, Level 3, occurs only with parents, caretakers or other major authority figures in early childhood. Level 3 imprinting is where we lose ourselves completely in the identification of the imprint. In other words, we cannot see that we are not ourselves, or admit that it is any kind of performance or compromise. We create our own inner reality about how others appreciate us and become emotionally attached to this belief about how we should be. We defend our beliefs in this role, blind to the fact that it is not our true self when someone reflects we are not doing this role well. Ironically, we are oblivious to how the imprint is not working and keep making excuses based on the faults of others for why nothing seems to manifest. In Level 3, we are so disassociated that we do not even experience the pain of not being a contributor to life. This reflects how we were traumatized and fearful for our own safety and security to a degree where we mandated that we lose ourselves in how others wanted us to be. Level 3 imprinting reflects how traumatized our parents were and how they displaced their Safety and Security issues on us as a way (in their minds) of protecting us. In so doing, we inadvertently took on their lessons with the belief that those lessons were our own. We heal imprinting at this level by affirming our authentic expression so the imprint locked in these patterns can be redeployed in a way that acknowledges our truth.
Level 3 Indicators: Disassociated and unacknowledged pain. When people do not honor our Level 3 imprinting, it feels intolerable because everything in our life revolves around others agreeing with who and where we are.
Healing Our Imprinting
Of the three levels of imprinting, Level 1 is the most common, Level 2 is more entrenched and Level 3 is the most fully expressed, yet dissociated. In this discussion, we offer a variety of solitary, interpersonal and group processes to engage the imprinted parts of our self. We invite you to examine your own imprinting levels and transform them from a substitute identity into a meaningful part of your self-realization. We come to be self-realized through the process of Centralization (bringing together all the separate aspects of ourselves into a unified whole) and De-Centralization (where we release attachments to any particular way of being). Healing our Imprinting is the first step in reconciling who we are versus who others want us to be. Until we become conscious of how our Truth gets subverted to serve others, we cannot be effective in expressing ourselves authentically. This requires reconstructing how our life expression was denied in how we accept superficial roles and imitation as substitutes for our natural contribution.
It is not just our imprinting that is the problem. We also become entangled by reactionary anti-imprinting beliefs that appear to counteract the imprinted beliefs of others. In other words, when we discover how limited we are being impacted by our imprinting, we usually attempt to distance ourselves from it by adopting opposite beliefs. The problem is, this increases internal fragmentation and sabotages any centralization efforts. One indicator of anti-imprinting is excessive daydreaming or dissociation by living in a fantasy world. Another is being unable to take effective action to get something done. While we have previously discussed that imprinting is the imitation of others to get approval and acceptance, we now see this can occur in both negative and positive ways. We have previously focused on the three levels, where we adopted the expressions and beliefs of others to get approval and acceptance. These are called positive imprinting beliefs. Positive imprinting is a desire to gain acceptance. Negative imprinting takes the opposite view, where we seek to feel rejected in order to affirm we have a choice about how to present ourselves.
This means that having anti-imprinting is a step toward the consciousness-building process where we start to engage healing. We can view it by expanding our context by shifting to an opposite perspective than that our parents provided. Examples of this abound every time we see somebody proving how bad they can be or how they can do what they want despite our best intentions. We need to eventually come to a middle ground where we have choices about how we want to show up. Others may not know how to positively connect to us, yet are also discovering how not to compromise themselves. These negative anti-imprinting beliefs also form and justify choices around the reactions we have to the imprinting of others. By doing either positive or negative imprinting, it prevents us from being seen. We still have the illusion that we are contributing through our reactions. The negative imprint contribution teaches us that we can survive disagreement. The positive imprint contribution teaches us we can meet others in ways that make them feel more comfortable. Of course, being our Creative Self is ultimately the best way to neutralize any reaction.
Now we are going to look at the unconscious ways we learned to deny others. It is harder to accept the negative side of imprinting because it reflects the collective unconsciousness of our society, as well as between our parents and us. We adopt counter-beliefs in the hope that this will maintain a separation between our reality and that of others. We believe that differences of opinion will create boundaries between our perceptions, which will help us individuate ourselves. Unfortunately, the more we adopt views that do not reflect our inner Truth, the more likely we become confused and create more pain around not being seen by others. In effect, each counterbalancing belief needs to be examined and released to get to our authentic Truth in order to centralize our understanding of ourselves. The goal, therefore, is to recognize that there is no absolute truth, but an ongoing process where our Truth can be revealed through Self-observation and Self-discovery.
To facilitate this process, we will present many different perspectives and ask the reader to examine their resonance with each. Some beliefs will feel comfortable, others will be discomforting. This is an indication that the process is working. Until we peel the onion of our Imprinting, it is important to not fall into the trap of believing we now understand it, when in fact, we have only revealed a few of the layers of our beliefs. Healing Imprinting is about letting go of any attachments to our Beliefs. What we discover is that our imprinting taught us to willfully ignore differences of opinions. The more we were trained to seek safety, the more we have a prescribed range in which differences of opinions can be dealt with. The more we heal our imprinting, the greater tolerance we develop about these differences. Otherwise, differences in opinions create anger, where we falsely believe others are trying to believe others are trying to impose themselves on us. This is a reaction to the compromise we experienced when we originally took on the beliefs of our parents. Any reaction to positive or negative imprinting is, in fact, a residual denial of ourselves.
Individuals who successfully neutralize their imprinting speak of a shift in awareness where they can honor their truth without needing to be comforted or reassured by others. The more we can step into the discomfort of opposing beliefs and truths and know we will not be damaged by the differences, the easier it will be to neutralize our Imprinting. We no longer define our reality in terms of a need to have others agree with or protect us. This permits us to move out of the zone of familiar interactions into an unknown field where our reality is still being discovered. Individuals who are committed to maintaining their past perceptions of self at the cost of growth are advised, therefore, to not proceed with this process if they do not have a heartfelt desire to honor their truth. For many of us it is easier to live in a world of beliefs as provided by others than to confront the terrifying reality that we have not only an obligation to validate our own experience, but the need to express ourselves in ways congruent with our Truth. The bottom line is when we know and accept our Truth, it is no longer something we need to prove or push on others.
Those who successfully neutralize their imprinting report that it takes time to recreate and understand the motivations of their parents. It is easy to get caught up in blaming our parents for what is not working in our own reality than to confront the possibility that their imprint on us will eventually be a useful and tool of comparison in knowing and recovering our creative identity. We recommend that individuals in this healing process acknowledge that their parents did the best they could, given the circumstances. The more we get caught up reacting to our parents’ intrusion into our reality, the more counterproductive the self-discovery process will be. In other words, instead of being a victim of circumstances, we can find a way to actively recognize that we took on this imprinting in a misguided attempt to demonstrate our love. One example is the statement “We choose our parents based on what we need in order to fully implement our Life Expression.”
While this is one way to describe this process, a more powerful way is to convey the opportunity that we choose our parents for the imprinting they provide so we can be stimulated to discover our Authentic Truth. This approach shifts the power from our parents back to us. It makes us the center of our own process. Of course, this means we need to be able to heal and neutralize the unconscious or ‘bad’ side of our parents’ Creative Expression to take charge of our lives. When we look at this process as an opportunity to clarify our differences with them, we can see that we can now contribute back to them! When we seek to acknowledge their positive motivations, it increases our own creativity and resourcefulness. We can then see how our parents’ Creative Expression was self-limiting, particularly as it applies to our own process. It then becomes possible to recognize and acknowledge how our parents unconsciously sabotaged their own Creative Expression by being at the effect of their parent’s imprinting. Without this insight, we are trapped in a world where we cannot go beyond our heredity.
Self-healing begins with recognizing how our parents could not do any better than they did. We took on their patterns even when we realized those patterns were sabotaging their life expression. Confusion was passed down to us because they/we did not know any better. It is time now to break the cycle of placating others into believing that imprinting somehow protects us and them from uncomfortable truths. With imprinting we create comfortable stories that distort what really occurred. This type of Objectification kept us from directly taking action to fulfill our life path. Before we go deeper into this process, it is important to let go of any judgments about how our parents were or were not successful in life. Just as Outer Success does not equate with Inner Success, we can see how we may have taken on our parent’s conflicts and made them our own. This is often reflected in the kind of work we do to insure security. It may also be reflected in our choice of partners. In both situations, because we expect certain conflicts in our lives, we tend to put ourselves in positions where these conflicts are repeated. This makes us comfortable with the familiar, but creatively denied and discounted by the absence of our Authentic Nature.
The more we think we need a career that establishes us uniquely, the more likely we are being driven by safety and security needs. The image of who we should be drives us, rather than just being who we are. We get trapped in defining ourselves in terms of others. We operate in unconscious patterns on Instinctive, Intellectual and Idealized levels that interfere with our ability to act and think naturally. We are also unaware how previous traumatic experiences interfere with our ability to interact with others. These negative experiences create prejudice and bias within us that is not seen or acknowledged. While most of this is Objectification, which is part of a Defensive pattern, our Imprinting becomes the outer representation of what we think we should be. As we go through the seven Creative Expression in this discussion, we will experience the different ways each engages different energies in sub-optimal ways.
For example, some of us have had negative experiences with Compassionates who we do not consciously understand. When we engage a Compassionate who is doing Compassionate imprinting, there are two impressions we typically note: 1) this person is extremely controlling and demanding about how things should be managed (fearing things will fall apart), and 2) they are driven because of a lack of Self acceptance, which is manifested by the inability to receive support.
From the Compassionate’s point of view, we typically feel less powerful than others because we cannot manifest our outward capabilities at a level that matches this control and/or focus. We then unconsciously distance ourselves from others by making ourselves right and them wrong. This projection process is called ‘displacing our fears on others to make us feel better.’ The negative imprinting we project is not even conscious.
Imprinting is often experienced as adapting to others when, in reality, it is a discounting of our Selves. We will now discuss the three levels of negative imprinting each expression type employs. It is important to remember that these are inner beliefs that we are projecting on others to keep ourselves from feeling less than them.
Anti-imprinting beliefs reflect the degree to which we have accepted the imprint of our parents. In a way, these beliefs were how we inoculated ourselves against feeling controlled by the fact that we had to be accepted this way. Until we accept and neutralize these inner beliefs, we are unconsciously projecting past issues on people in ways that discount and deny our current creative connection with them. This is due to the fact that we are identifying with the beliefs as who we are, rather than seeing the beliefs as a way to organize ourselves. We need to release our attachments to the belief as a part of our identity in order to take ownership as an expression of our Being. Until we own these beliefs, we unconsciously place others into categories without knowing their real intentions. This is because we project on them the way other people project on us. Anti-imprinting beliefs are rationales for maintaining our vigilance in the face of a traumatic past. The key is to acknowledge which beliefs are operating so we can release any attachments to them when they arise. These beliefs are buried in the way we treat others who are different from us. When people are creatively tuned in to themselves, they can read these beliefs very easily in us and others.
Just because we know what the issues are does not solve the problem. We need to eliminate or replace our beliefs with less exclusive ones on both creative and energetic levels to prevent attracting counter-imprinted people. In other words, until we release our own imprinting, we will naturally attract those with counter-beliefs and opposite imprinting. This creates unnecessary friction and distance because we get caught up trying to comfort others when we do not even know how to comfort ourselves. Until we recognize we do not have to protect ourselves from differences, we will continue being entangled in imprinting discussions that never go away. Others are often confused when we confront their imprinted beliefs because they are not conscious of how they have over-identified with them. This means they cannot move or flow, because anyone questioning their beliefs recreates the original incident where they made the decision and created the protective belief.
The most frustrating thing about this is that the discussions never get resolved unless we take proactive steps towards forgiving others and ourselves. It is also helpful to bring humor to the situation, and perhaps even act out our imprints when they are recognized. By letting go of attachments, we establish a reality that others can be different from how we perceive them and still be fun. The goal is to open our self up to just being with what is now, rather recreating our imprinted past. It is also important to see how impotent these beliefs are in how they affect us externally or internally, once we see them for what they are. We need to stop taking them as serious mandates or believe that they are red flags that keep us from dealing with people. Otherwise, we are giving them the power to dominate our life choices.
The more we see that our beliefs are only default assumptions from which we operate (when we are not engaging others consciously on a creative level), the more others will be able to engage us with less of their ‘stuff’ coming up. This is because imprinting, judgments and negative beliefs can actually trigger and interact with our perceptions, causing greater confusion and creative denial on all levels. We tend to make our imprinted beliefs more powerful when we feel people are in opposition to us. It is important to note, that whenever people challenge our imprints, it makes us fearful and feel small. It is like we have gone back to our childhood and we are being lectured about something.
The more we re-create the experience of people working with us, and can see ourselves clearly for who we are, the less reactive or polarized we will be with others. In other words, beliefs only become powerful when we identify with them in order to protect us from other people’s beliefs. What if we did not need the protection of Beliefs? From our perspective, Beliefs are, at best, temporary perceptions that need to be constantly regenerated to continue to have value. As a child, every time we took on an imprint, we decided how we needed to be to gain acceptance and we formulated a Belief to guide us in operating this way consistently. Unfortunately, now we are at the effect of these past guidelines and now need to upgrade them so they are more consciously consistent with our true, Creative Nature. Any disagreements between our imprinting and Creative Nature means we either have not processed through our imprinting, or that we have not accepted our Creative Nature.
One of the most effective processes for healing beliefs is to put ourselves in situations where we are extremely uncomfortable being with people who represent our polarities. We then tell the truth about how we feel, harmlessly, without projecting on them. The more we deal with this issue in ourselves by talking about our concerns with others, the more we release our energetic imprints. The result is a more natural relationship with less ‘unconscious stuff’ defining it. Becoming conscious about our patterns does not mean we will not go unconscious and act them out again at some point. When we are tired or stressed or afraid, we may fall back into the imprints from our parents. But as we become more conscious of our patterns and notice them occurring again and again, we can neutralize their effects by recognizing their origins and knowing they do not reflect a true intention of how we wish to connect with someone in the moment.
Another way of healing our imprinting is to identify higher Motives that we want to implement or engage in our life and take action to do so. What immediately arises is all of our safety and security imprinting, which wants us to compromise ourselves to operate on a smaller level. Higher level Motives trigger all of our imprinting, so that we can start to address each imprint one at a time and remake the beliefs and decisions behind them. The highest levels of Motives are Universal Dominion, Mutual Accomplishment and Conscious Participation. When we are operating on this Intuitive Level, there is little or no room for unconscious imprinting. The more we clarify what our Intent is, and then align ourselves to taking action to make it so, the less imprinting we will confront. Clearing our imprinting requires perseverance and dedication because it will release in layers. The more we get down to the core Motives that we have previously compromised, the more we will see how much Life energy we have blocked. Let us renew our Life energy flow by healing our imprints!
Seven Imprinted Quality Beliefs
The following seven forms of imprinting reflect seeing our self from our parents’ perspectives. These qualities are false unless we also possess the Authentic Expression on one of three levels (Primary, Secondary and Mental Body). When we have the same qualities imprinted over our natural expression, it creates doubts and confusion about what to do and when to do it. Usually the way our parents are implementing their expression does not feel right to us, causing us to discount it. The more imprinting we have, the greater our attachments to predefined beliefs. This greatly limits any creative exploration and discovery. It also amplifies our defensive Objectification, increasing the drive for pleasure, but paradoxically minimizing our ability to experience it. Each imprint has its own way of distracting us from being present in the moment.
1. Orchestrator Imprinting
If we are doing the Orchestrator expression at the imprinting level, we believe that only we can see the larger picture and only we can insure that plans are implemented. We believe that our ability to discriminate, differentiate, and not accept ‘second best’ is what attracts people to us. We believe in our capacity to effectively oversee others and effectively delegate tasks to them. Our courage and sense of what is right drives others to imitate us, which we encourage. We like to torque people who are inflexible, haughty and arrogant by outdoing them. We believe that we were born to express our will in ways that others will be attracted to and conform to. However, we hate do-gooders with high intentions who only get in the way when the chips are down. Everything is negotiable, and only we know how to do it. The only thing we demand from people in our projects is deference. Unfortunately, we frequently make mistakes in assigning others to tasks they cannot complete. Our assumptions and perspectives, in terms of the sequencing of activities, frequently proves to be inappropriate or ineffective. It is recommended that Orchestrator imprinted individuals not create jobs or take on too many new projects (or spread themselves too thin) without strong financial backing.
Level One Orchestrator Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
When we have Level One Orchestrator imprinting, we are known for our assertiveness and for our attempts to have people defer to us. The experience others have around us when we are a Level One Orchestrator imprinted person is that we are a tightly wound spring that could unravel at any moment and that, therefore, they need to pay constant attention to us. Other people experience level one Orchestrator imprinting as being condescending and arrogant. What is actually going on is that we feel we are suppressed in our natural creative expression and therefore we attempt to be seen as being capable and in charge. We always experience this in level one. In this process, whatever action we use to distract ourselves and control a repressed experience will be projected onto others and will be reflected back to us.
While Orchestrators expect the deference and respect of others, paradoxically, we do not like “yes people.” This reminds us too much of how others compromise themselves to appear interesting to us. Level one Orchestrator imprinting makes us believe we are more influential and powerful than we are. We try to appear to be self-generating and as though we are the best ones to be in charge. We release ourselves from this imprinting when we realize our true power to influence others is not based on external control.
Level Two Orchestrator Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Orchestrator imprinting is best identified by a more outgoing, selfish and “separative” relationship framework. Operating from the assumption that the world owes us a living, we believe that people should perform to meet our needs. Many people react against this imprinting because they feel it is vain and heartless. Actually, a second level Orchestrator imprint is trying to regain an emotional connectedness and feels isolated and impotent. We are try to confirm our importance by getting others to follow our advice but then feel impotent when they don’t.
Behind this level of imprinting lies our desire to hold ourselves accountable to a higher level of connectedness with people, while feeling incapable of getting people to like us. Because secondary Orchestrator imprinted children typically had domineering parents, it feels to the child that the only way they can recover their power is to be domineering in return. Therefore, as adults we believe that our being in control makes others feel more safe and secure. We use this viewpoint to imagine that we contribute to others by dominating them. We just don’t get how badly others feel about how we work with them. We heal ourselves when we realize we can be sensitive and creatively powerful, simultaneously.
Level Three Orchestrator Imprinting (Lost In Our Imprinting)
Level Three Orchestrator imprinting is operating when we believe in our own greatness to the extent that we want others to agree with it. We want others to reinforce and acknowledge our impressiveness, not realizing how much of it is actually made up. We believe our grandiosity of spirit should be acknowledged, which paradoxically is what we are trying to suppress in others. Consequently, we are threatened when others have Orchestrator imprinting or primary or secondary Orchestrator expression. This level of imprinting is identified by our illusions about our skills and capabilities. Real Orchestrators, even in their worst moments, do not have to overstate their past accomplishments.
We want others to fall in love with our unique power to implement projects. We then lose our inner distinctions between personal and divine will and believe that everything we do is divinely sanctioned. Anyone who questions us is threatening and we counterattack to put that person in their place. While we think we are charismatic, actually people have a hard time being around us, tending instead to avoid us. How we heal this process by discovering our true humility and sensing what can help ground our truth in a way that helps others to want to engage us.
Anti-Orchestrator Beliefs
- We turn “defer to me” into I will never defer to you. By being afraid to lose ourselves in others, we tend to make any authority over us wrong and we cannot honor that there may be a naturally appropriate way of interacting with authority. In this circumstance, we find it difficult to work for others because we believe they are going to ask us to compromise ourselves in a way that would be destructive. This belief keeps us from actually learning and growing with others and even denies our ability to find our place in the world. Instead, our beliefs push us into being apart from everyone, which ends up creating immense isolation and loneliness.
- “Perform to meet my needs” becomes You will never meet my needs and I will never meet yours. In this situation we end up denying the possibility of having creative engagement with others in any way that deepens us. Instead, we limit our contribution to them and their contribution to us so that we can safely neutralize the impact they could have on us. We end up believing that if someone has an influence on us, it will be automatically negative because it will deny or compromise something that we feel is critical to us. The challenge is to remember that who we are is not deniable and that we can never lose anything that is real in us. Only the unreal can be attacked.
- “Exaggerated self-importance” becomes No one will ever see me for my own importance. This means that others always have the upper hand. This is the one of the deepest issues that we deal with in organizations. We believe that somehow our importance increases the higher the position we have in the organization. Another way of looking at this is to recognize that the higher we go, the more people we have to serve or the more we have to be responsible. When people arrogantly believe that this means something, that it sets them apart from others, they create a repression where people aren’t creatively engaged with them. As we become able to see the difference between being important and being creatively powerful, we start to understand how it is not outer issues that make us feel important, but our inner ability to connect to others. Therefore, true importance is determined by our internal creative connections and how this enables us to connect with those outside of us.
2. Compassionate Imprinting
If we are doing the Compassionate expression at the imprinting level, we most likely are trying to convince others that we love them by acting sentimental, easy-going, or patient to hide our rigidity. We often encourage people to underestimate us, so we can surprise them with our strength. Also, we make sacrifices by caretaking others without really being committed to the situation. We try to be simple and pure, and it is very important to us to appear to be doing ‘the kind thing.’ We also overprotect people so they value our desire to support them. Unfortunately, while we attempt to do these things, our actual success at making others feel comfortable is extremely limited because we are not comfortable doing our own imprinting. It is recommended that Compassionate imprinted individuals not take jobs where they cannot express their authentic feelings and emotions.
Level One Compassionate Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Compassionate imprinting is our self-defined need to be considerate and caretaking of others. This means we have to do what is considered nice and appropriate under all circumstances and not express any unpleasant emotions or be confrontational in any way. It is most important that we are consistent in the nurturing way we are operating so that others will not be scared or intimidated by the way we are. This imprinting is typically seen in the mothering we try to do to show others that we like them. This process can be expanded into trying to be protective of others and sensitive to them when they are in pain. The more we can anticipate the needs of others, the more we believe we are demonstrating our love for them. Overall, it is difficult for others to be with us when they are being with us in this way. This is because the empathy and/or sympathy we have tend to preoccupy us. We need to realize there are limits to caretaking because ultimately it is self-defeating.
Level Two Compassionate Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Compassionate imprinting can be identified by mediator and peacekeeper role-playing where we attempt to unify others that are having difficulties being with each other. In this situation, we feel compelled to become the “buffers” because we are not able to deal with the conflict in the situation. We end up being caught in the middle, which we hate. We persevere because we believe that conflicts have to be neutralized and that our family and friends have to be nice to each other or it reflects on us. Ironically, we are unwilling to let sleeping dogs lie, which causes us to take on and try to resolve the conflict that no one wants to deal with. We attempt to get others to agree with our middle ground as a way of hopefully bringing them together.
Unfortunately, this is rarely successful and generates reactions from both of the individuals we are trying to bring together because it does not reflect their beliefs. Ironically, our demanding that they accept our middle ground is a unilateral action, which typically compromises their autonomy. This means that eventually they will build up resentment about us. One way to heal this is to hold a Common Neutral Ground where both energies could be entertained, so that we can be present with the process without intervening in any way. We know we are beginning to release this imprinting when we start demanding that others wake up and solve their own problems.
Level Three Compassionate Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Level Three Compassionate imprinting can be identified when we keep commitments to others even though we know they compromise us. At this level, we end up doing what is expected or needed at the cost of ourselves on a regular basis. We don’t think we have the right to say “no” when people need us. Of course we consciously rebel against this by trying not to be “selfish,” which, of course, keeps us trapped. The ironic aspect of this imprint is that we typically idealize the commitments we make, believing that others will appreciate us for the attempt to keep them. Usually we are surprised at the reactions we get from others when we share how much we had to compromise to make these commitments happen. When others are shocked by our perseverance they start to wonder about our sense of balance. This has the opposite effect that we intended, which is to have them love us for our follow-through. We know we are operating in this level when we believe whole-heartedly that we just have to do what is right no matter what the cost. We know we are releasing ourselves from this imprinting when we take action instead of complaining about how things are not working.
Anti-Compassionate Beliefs
- “Proving our consideration and consistency” becomes Establishing our own self-discipline about what works for us. When we rebel against others caretaking us, we try to keep them from doing things that make us feel obligated. This forces us to be on top of the situation and let them know clearly what we don’t want more than what we do want. Otherwise, they try to anticipate what we need and give it to us before we can do anything about it. It seems ungracious of us to reject their offer after they have already prepared it. We believe that they should never do anything for us without our having requested it. In fact, we find it rude that they are insinuating themselves in our lives by trying to anticipate our needs without even asking us.
- “Being a peacemaker by buffering conflicts” leads to Being a person who doesn’t want anyone to interfere with us. The more we see how ineffective it is for other people to represent us in any way, the more it drives us to define our relationships on our own terms. Taking responsibility for ourselves eventually allows us to be clearer about the beliefs and perspectives of others around us. This allows us to show up with people in ways that take their perspective into consideration without compromising us. Ultimately, the goal is to be an example of how we can be autonomous so that we are not at the effect of others. Usually this degrades into unilateral actions where we are not able to interact with anyone.
- “Overdoing the ways in which we keep our agreements” becomes Telling the truth about our agreements when they don’t work. We end up attacking people who stick to agreements that are not working just because they like to complain. We are repelled by the fact that they seem to love this negative attention when we feel it can be easily dealt with if discussed. We end up making these people wrong by believing they are drama Orchestrators or queens. We believe this process comes from their lack of clarity about who they are creatively, so that they need to be needed in these exaggerated ways.
3. Implementer Imprinting
If we are doing the Implementer expression at the imprinting level, we believe we know how to get things done better than anyone else and that our organizational skills put other people to shame. Others should respect our ability to streamline processes and procedures. Once we build up steam, nothing will stop us. We are completely committed to following through on everything we do and believe that without pain there is no gain. We are loyal and demand loyalty in return. We also believe that we are not attached to the way things are, but we do not believe in changing things without a good reason. We like to appear to be making decisions quickly even when we are not. Unfortunately, all these aspirations are challenged by an inability to prioritize tasks in a way that works. It is recommended that Implementer imprinted individuals not take jobs where their performance will constantly be judged.
Level One Implementer Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Implementer imprinting can be identified by our exaggerated capacity to prove our capability. The more others doubt our capability, the more we feel the necessity to prove we can do it ourselves. We act like doing something the “right way” is a sacred trust that we cannot leave to someone who is not committed to doing it the right way. Being told the “right way” is irritating. The problem is that we do not necessarily believe that we are capable and therefore we think that doing this behavior will put people at ease around us. Actually, the reverse is true because people are not at ease when they see that we are disconnected from what we are doing. At this level, Implementer imprints are highly opinionated and hate lazy, stupid or indolent people.
Level Two Implementer Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Implementer imprinting is easily identified by our attempts to be certain or clear about our commitments. This causes us to restate our commitments frequently to make sure others are not changing their expectations of us. Typically, it makes people feel inadequate, stupid or like children. Our condescending attitude frustrates others because we make them conform to our way of doing it. At this level, Implementer imprints want to keep things stable and assured because we are afraid of the changes others are attempting to introduce. Level Two Implementer imprints can be easily identified by how we protect our territory and position. While we act like we are open to examining other options, we actually believe that our superior understanding of our own “reality” is better than anyone else’s. Therefore, we feel that others should automatically defer to our expertise and our ability to make things happen.
Level Three Implementer Imprinting (Lost In Our Imprinting)
Level Three Implementer imprinting is operating when we become systematic in our approach to change. At this level, we allow others to introduce a certain amount of change as long as they give us adequate advance notice. We do not allow too much change, as it would be distracting and inefficient. While others are frustrated when we demand to go slower, we feel more powerful because we are setting the pace that works for us. In this level, we accept a degree of movement, believing it also gives us a degree of freedom to demand change in return. At this level, if we have a problem adjusting to the demands of others, we just request that they confine their change to one variable at a time. Our argument is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” At this level we believe we are good at changing, but actually, change is a very slow process for us.
Anti-Implementer Beliefs
- “Didn’t you know I could do that?” becomes You never accept what I’ve done. Anti-Warrior beliefs about taking unilateral action in a situation allow us to invalidate what has been done and to deny its value to others in the situation. We become trapped in the paradox of wanting others to accept what we do without accepting the way they do it. We could even feel that “might makes right” by forcing others to accept what we do while not accepting what they do. We enjoy putting others down when they make exaggerated claims, believing that we are the final judges for what they actually accomplish. This affirms the notion that there is one right, best way to do things: our way. We end up distancing and denying others with ideas, especially ideas that would change the foundation of what we built.
- “Certainty and clarity only” becomes Never trust the experts. Our beliefs that anyone who is arrogant really doesn’t know anything encourages us to discount anybody who knows anything. This overrides our ability to use their services. This typically leads to situations where we try to fix everything ourselves and get into more difficulty. We can end up believing that other people are just trying to take advantage of our ignorance because there are tricks to the trade that allow them to get away with things that we, not knowing these things, cannot get away with. This creates a love-hate relationship with knowledge. Actually, we are seeking people who are open to exploring options and don’t have pre-established ideas about the way things are. When we see somebody who is certain and set, we attack them.
- “Planned change only, please” becomes Play it by ear. The more others try to control us to do things in a systematic way, the more we rebel by trying to attack the whole structure. In other words, if the bureaucracy doesn’t work for us, we loudly complain that it doesn’t work for anyone. The challenge of this dilemma is that total anarchy doesn’t work for anyone either. This means that having some expectations in general about a circumstance or situation can actually facilitate us in making choices and embracing the possibilities. If everything were up in the air, then our days would be more complicated and difficult. We need to learn how to deal with change in a systematic way that comes from our being clear about the priorities of all the people involved in the process.
4. Inventor Imprinting
If we are doing the Inventor expression at the imprinting level, we will not compromise our freedom in any way and like to be seen as unpredictable or unique in the way we do things. We like to keep people guessing. We are great at avoiding external commitments in order to honor our inner commitment to being free. Sometimes we hide our fears of commitment by attempting to look like we are very committed. We pride ourselves on never finding a problem that we cannot solve. We have a flair for the dramatic and love to rebel against the status quo. We pretend we are listening to people even when we are not, and pretend to love chaos even if it works against us in a situation. We believe we are incredibly sensuous and need constant stimulation. Actually, our superficial desire to be seen prevents us from going to our Creative source and being the resource we want to be. It is recommended that Inventor imprinted individuals not take jobs where they are always being told what to do.
Level One Inventor Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Inventor imprinting can be identified by our temperamental ambivalence about being seen by others. We attempt at this level to demonstrate that we don’t care that others don’t see us, and that in fact we don’t expect to be seen by others. This means acting like our opinions and others’ don’t matter. This covers up our highly sensitive nature around not being seen and hurt in our childhood. What we want most is to be seen and acknowledged as not being a pushover. We accomplish this by challenging others about their beliefs and playing the role of devil’s advocate. We believe the game is all about getting attention and therefore feel that the more confrontational and questioning we can be, the more we can be the center of attention, which is what we really want.
Level Two Inventor Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Inventor imprinting is an impulsive desire to do anything to change the fact that we are not being seen. As our perceived value is providing customized solutions, we attack any “Mindless Standardization” where others don’t take the time to make sure what is being done is appropriate to the situation. When we feel misunderstood when others do not agree with our way of engaging a situation, we simply seek to escape their judgment and our own fear by taking any form of action to distract them.
Typically, this is by being impulsive in some way that surprises them. It is also our typical response when someone wants to standardize a way of being that we believe is dehumanizing. Our “rational inconsistency” drives them to avoid trying to place us in a box or to standardize our activity in a way that is predictable. What we want most is to be seen as unpredictable, spontaneous and able and willing to break all expectation frameworks. What we want is not to be bored or boring to others. The message of Inventors is: ‘Don’t try to figure me out— because you never will.’
Level Three Inventor Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Level Three Inventor imprinting is about being different than what people believe we are to prove that we can’t be hurt by their evaluations of us. We instead, are lost in our creative needs, believing we will be short changed if we don’t prove our value and usefulness. This level reflects the fact that we have taken a preemptive stance that no matter what they think, they don’t really know us, so it is best not to be with them. In this situation we have taken our fixation about being unique to the ultimate level because we believe we are common. When others don’t agree that we are different from them, we have to prove them wrong even if it requires that we attack them or make them angry about some way that we are being with them.
One aspect of this imprinting is always switching to a different level of connection than how they are trying to engage us. In other words, if they are engaging us intellectually, we shift to an emotional way of engaging; if they are engaging us emotionally, we shift to an intuitive way of being. We operate from the belief that not introducing new ways of doing things in each and every moment will end up trapping us into a way of being where we are severely compromised. The effect of this can also be very negative when our parents are not willing to honor their creative expression and imprint us with the need to be different without supporting our capacity to be different. Another negative expression of this form of imprinting is putting other people down for their differences because they are not real in them. In this situation, we try to prove our differences by making other people’s differences seem less important.
Anti-Inventor Beliefs
- “Acting like no one’s opinions matter” becomes Demanding that others take us seriously. The more we Inventor imprinted individuals are ambivalent about the way others interact with us, and the more we feel denied by them, the more we seek to have others acknowledge and affirm that our answers, ideas and actions have merit and can actually resolve the current situation. We hate ambivalence in others because it seems to state that they don’t have to be involved in the situation deeply. We resent it when others act like things don’t matter because they do matter to us.
- “Attacking mindless standardization” becomes Attacking ingenuity and uniqueness. While Inventor imprinted individuals want to affirm their ingenuity and uniqueness, other people take issue with their perceived right to make things work in a common way. They believe that doing everything uniquely is an impossible dream and rail against people attempting to impose this on them. They feel that it is appropriate and effective to standardize a whole range of things so that people know what they are getting and when they are getting it. What others are resentful about is having to adapt to the constant differences and demands made by those with Inventor expression.
- “Lost in our creative needs” becomes Transcending our neediness by being present with ourselves. Many creative energies associate neediness with defensiveness and like to promote a sense of independence by believing that people with needs are weaker. This cuts us off from the ability to receive support. Others do not believe we really want it because of how we don’t accept it when it is offered. Since the goal is to protect ourselves from the needs of others by denying our own needs, it become problematic to interact with others in open ways. We unconsciously avoid attempting to support others believing that we will become lost with them in their needs. What we want most is to avoid codependence by avoiding the whole subject of needs. This undermines our ability to co-create.
5. Investigator Imprinting
If we are doing the Investigator expression at the imprinting level, we believe that our ability to conceptualize and analyze makes us stand out from the crowd. We love using logic to wake others up to their inconsistencies. Our desire for knowledge pushes us to show others how much they do not know. When other people need us for information, we feel great. We often try to impress people with our intelligence by the way we answer their questions. We believe that the more intellectual content we create, the less likely others will dispute our findings. We collect large libraries to reassure ourselves that we can put our hands on information whenever we need it. We also believe in constant on-going learning and respect academics for their depth and specialization. We demonstrate our superiority by not arguing with inferior minds. Unfortunately, it does not matter how much information we collect if we cannot apply it wisely. It is recommended that Investigator imprinted individuals not choose positions where they get lost in the information.
Level One Investigator Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Investigator imprinting has to do with being seen as having the information at our fingertips. When others acknowledge our expertise we feel acknowledged and valued even if we know on a deeper level that it is all a façade. We fall in love with the structure of knowledge and use our deductive and logical skills to appear to be more intellectually developed than we are. This is identified by needing to tell others what we know just because we know it. Over time this becomes irritating to others as it takes time and expression better used elsewhere. Many times Investigator imprinting can be defined by being able to access the information we want at our fingertips. For this reason, we collect libraries and stacks of magazines, believing that the information we read will eventually be used in some way. At this level of Investigator imprinting individuals have the appearance of being Investigators by the way we analyze things externally and our ability to index all the things we know about.
Level Two Investigator Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Investigator imprinting can be identified by our intellectual mistrust of others. At this level, we doubt the validity of the ideas of others, looking for weaknesses in their ability to access the information we want at our fingertips. For this reason, we collect libraries and stacks of magazines, believing that the information we read will eventually be used in some way. At this level of Investigator imprinting, individuals have the appearance of being Investigators by the way we analyze things externally and our ability to index all the things we know about.
Level Three Investigator Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Finally, Level Three Investigator imprinted individuals who are unwilling to be questioned about our thoughts represent the deepest level of imprinting. In these circumstances, some of us become attached to our thoughts, believing that these will provide a sense of safety and security, not realizing that our thoughts are expressions of our creativity and not the creativity itself. When any of our thoughts are beyond self-examination and personal questioning, it indicates that we possess no freedom or inner creativity in this area. Typically, Investigators with this deep intellectual imprint live a life that is defined by the thoughts we have. Many times in this situation, the thoughts of others become our refuge, and our belief in them connects us with the people we idolize. Unfortunately, we become trapped in these thoughts, forcing others to use them to reach us. As a result many give up on us, believing the effort is not worth the pain we experience when others are not present. The way we know that it is imprinting is that no matter how much we do it, we don’t get the attention we seek. People do not trust us for what we know even though we continually prove to them that we know a great many things.
Anti-Investigator Beliefs
- “Information organizers” and librarians become Information clutterers and contrasters. We discount the purveyors of information as a way of discounting our own ability to move anything forward. Individuals who hate the power of information to establish a framework of thinking, challenge the notion that anything can be known through information. We become agents for chaos as we seek to free others from the tyranny of thought processes. Because we hate regimented thinking the most, we feel compelled to throw a monkey wrench into the situation whenever things are getting too clear or too focused. This is our way of expressing our resentment that people are too predictable. We also typically attack people who are organizers as being unemotional robots who have the mind of an elephant. They never forget, but they never do anything about what they know.
- “Constantly questioning another’s thoughts” becomes Accepting only the common sense of the masses. Believing that the common truth of society is more valid than our own truth sets us up to deny others in order to not deny ourselves. The challenge is that by denying others we do not allow any growth in ourselves. This is similar to the fact that by judging others we invite them to judge us. By denying the growth of others we are unconsciously denying our own growth. This has to do with the fact that to deny others effectively we have to be denying ourselves inwardly in the same way. The more we cut ourselves off from others, the harder it is for us to identify what works for us. While autonomy is where we honor our own truth, the paradox is that it requires us to honor the truth of others for it to work. Although we feel made wrong by others, this should not be an excuse to make them wrong, for two wrongs don’t make a right. The result of this process is confusion because we do not really want to define ourselves either in opposition to others or in acceptance of others. The tragedy is that we cannot have any constructive dialogue.
- “Lost in our thinking” becomes Lost in our doing. When we think others are thinking more deeply than we are, we try to find some way to be better than they are through our doing. When they become identified with their thoughts, we become identified with our actions, believing that someone who can’t implement their plan, even though they thought it through, is worthless. In this way we can attack all the eggheads in the world because we believe that they are impractical dreamers or stodgy academics that wouldn’t know life if it bit them.
6. Visionary Imprinting
If we are doing the Visionary expression at the imprinting level, we most likely believe that we are role models for transformational growth and that others should follow our example. We want to be recognized for our martyrdom and are frustrated when we’re not. We use our insights to show people how much we care about them and seek to be adored for our wisdom, presence and high-mindedness. We also believe that we are more connected to the sacred mysteries than anyone else we know, and that we know what is best for others better than they do. By seeing the highest potential in others, we hope that they can see the highest potential in us. Unfortunately, our attachment to doing the right thing typically polarizes others because they do not feel they have a choice in engaging us. As a result, others resist our suggestions, although they may hide that they are doing so. It is recommended that those with Visionary imprinting not take jobs where they get lost in caretaking behavior.
Level One Visionary Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
In Level One Visionary imprinting we believe that uncompromising self-sacrifice is a saintly endeavor. At this level we cannot accept that some selfishness is actually necessary to maintain our ability to give to others. Unfortunately, we become trapped in doing what we believe is best at the cost of our being able to continually serve others. This is particularly difficult when we have Visionary imprinting on top of a Visionary primary or secondary. It reinforces the fear that we will never actually be able to support others enough. Whenever we are imprinted we cannot accept the support of others, so, paradoxically, the more we are supportive, the less we can accept that we are supportive. This is because our Pretenses (how we try to get others to like us) are separated from who we are as creative beings. We escape this paradox by being present in our heart’s knowing and by making conscious choices to engage people in specific ways in which we know they are engaging us as much as we are engaging them. This is how we release ourselves from unconscious caretaking.
Level Two Visionary Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Priests in Level Two imprinting are known for our attempts to be seen as special because of our unique contributions and commitments to others. We attempt to be exclusive, believing we are different because of our suffering and sacrifice. We wear our pain as a badge of honor. In this level of imprinting we separate ourselves from others believing that only we know the real truth of the situation. Sometimes this is so uncomfortable that we reverse the role. We try to put others on a pedestal so that we do not feel so elevated and above everyone else.
The unconscious purpose of this imprinting is to keep ourselves from feeling the pain and problems of others. As long as we think we know why others are having the problems they are having, and that we would never have such problems, we can remain detached and aloof. We can best neutralize this by moving from exclusive ways of relating to others to inclusive ways of connecting. This means seeing both the good and the bad within ourselves in every situation. The more we can truly feel the pain of others without displacing it, the more we can hold open a space where they can meet and grow with us.
Level Three Visionary Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Level Three Visionary imprinting is feeling called to support others in being “good.” At this level of imprinting, we want to go beyond just being good ourselves by believing our role is to help others do the right thing despite their fears or concerns. Unfortunately, we usually do not know what is best for them, even though we think we do. At this level, we tend to discount people’s creative energies entirely in our belief that they should do what is “good” or “right.” In other words, we believe there is a common good everyone should be accountable to. Unfortunately, this belief denies creative differences.
The more we are trapped in society’s perception that everyone should conform to a certain common good, the more resistance we will experience from others because we are not taking the situation or circumstances into account in a way that honors them. In this level of imprinting, we attempt to “fix” everyone. This creates tension, anxiety, resentment and anger. These reactions confuse us because we intend to fix others for their real good, and we wonder why they cannot understand this. Actually, they are feeling not seen, valued or heard for who they are as creative beings, which reinforces their defensive wounding. We heal this level of imprinting by recognizing true creative differences and simply being with people so that they know that any comments we make are not going to be made in a negative personal way. When they know we are energetically connected to them in a way that honors them, it does not matter what we say.
Anti-Visionary Beliefs
- “Proving our value through self-sacrifice” becomes Attacking those who are trying to fix us. We come to associate self-sacrifice as something that is covertly controlling and manipulative of others because there is always the expectation that the other person will sacrifice themselves for us in the same way. We are repelled by the very notion that sacrifice for somebody can actually be a good thing. This is because we have seen so many cases where individuals sacrificing themselves are actually denying their own creativity and not taking care of themselves. Therefore, we try to keep our boundaries strong and we tell others not to sacrifice for us if we do not request it. We heal this by recognizing that we have to be getting more out of a sacrifice than others if it is really to work for us. This means the sacrifice needs to have the potential of transforming us and our own growth more than others.
- “Being special at helping others” becomes Embracing the ordinary and denying help. When we feel that others are attempting to help us, this connotes to us that there must be something wrong with the way we are. Therefore, we rebel against their help, believing it puts us in a subservient position. We judge the individuals doing the helping because we see that it makes them feel better and more powerful. We are then repelled by the judgments we feel and therefore seek to become ordinary and more commonplace in order to feel connected. We don’t trust anyone who is trying to help others in a way that is denying themselves. We expect them to have covert needs about being seen in a particular way. We end up wanting to escape the whole idea that we need others to be there for us. In this way, we deny the higher possibility that relationships can uplift us.
- “Lost in our attempt at being good” becomes Embracing how bad we are. We playfully think of ourselves as “bad” to offset the way we feel pulled down and smothered in how we “should be good.” We seek out Ugly Pleasures where we are getting what we want at the cost of others as a way to offset the belief that we should be evolving and growing. We want to acknowledge that we have a choice to totally mess things up and regress, especially when there have been needs we haven’t honored. Our beliefs about being “good” and doing the “right” thing become boring and difficult to maintain, especially when we are in denial about what we really want. While we recognize that a lot of these impulses are due to past issues not long forgotten, we keep thinking that we should be better anyway. We keep thinking that there is someplace to be where we won’t have those issues arising anymore. Unfortunately, it is not likely that these choices will ever go away.
7. Storyteller Imprinting
If we are doing the Storyteller expression at the imprinting level, we are great talkers and believe ourselves to always be the life of the party. Being the center of attention is the most important thing in the world to us. We believe that our power is in keeping groups working together, and that our words shape people’s experiences. We also believe that people never get bored with what we have to say, and that dogs and children adore us. The most important people we know are people who can influence others. We see ourselves in this group. We believe that we can sell anything to anybody anytime, and that people cannot exclude us when we wish to be included. Unfortunately, our self-absorption with the need to communicate keeps us from listening and being present with others, which ultimately drives them away. It is recommended that Storyteller imprinted individuals not take jobs where they have to be liked to be successful.
Level One Storyteller Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Storyteller imprinting is about becoming identified with our ability to speak without really saying anything. We call this process oration because we fall in love with our own voice and feel compelled to fill any uncomfortable silences with words. What we need to do to overcome this is learn to embrace the silence within us and be able to be silent with people around us. Even Storyteller imprints feel that others do not listen to them and therefore we have to overcome the resistance others have to hearing us. So we feel justified in raising our voices, talking with intensity or even demanding people shut up and listen to us. This is very ironic because usually we are the ones who are not listening to them. Overall, it would be good for us to learn to hear what we are saying in the way they are hearing it so that we can become more effective at saying things in a way that others can hear.
Level Two Storyteller Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Storyteller imprinting comes from the belief that we have to be entertaining. In this level, we feel we have to be doing things to keep people happy around us or else they will leave us. We become attached to how others are interacting with us and if there is not a superficial way that they are interacting, we feel insecure. This is because we don’t want others to think of us as being dull or boring. Therefore, we make sure that they are busy engaging some process with us all the time. Level two Storyteller imprinting commonly shows up as feeling we have to take people to the movies, dancing, or to other interesting activities when they come to visit us. We feel compelled to treat our guests in the way our Storyteller parents would have treated them on their best days. This standard is difficult to maintain because of our unrealistic expectations about it. No matter what people say, we tend to believe that in the end they will find us wanting if we did not entertain them in every way possible.
Level Three Storyteller Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Finally, in Level Three Storyteller imprinting we become attached to doing things with pomp and ceremony, believing we have to mark special events by making them stand out in our minds. This behavior can be seen in our attention and attachment to birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. If there isn’t a holiday, we want to make one up. This is where people who are not Storytellers attempt to keep up with the Storyteller party ethic by being more outrageous than Storytellers are. While Storytellers use ceremony to empower and enrich an energetic connection, Level three Storyteller imprints use it to justify being distracted. In this way, the imprinting is exactly the opposite of the original intent. Overall, level three Storyteller imprints seek to escape the mundane by being in our fantasies of how things would be if we didn’t have to work. We are driven to act this way in order to offset our dreary, unsatisfying and repetitive way of entertaining ourselves.
Anti-Storyteller Beliefs
- “Loving our own voice” becomes Hating others who love the sound of their own voice. We resist others by making excuses about why we can’t hang around or interact with people who trigger our fears that we won’t be heard. In other words, we make it difficult for ourselves to spend time with people who seem to be greater talkers and listeners. We probably have past associations where this type of individual has overwhelmed and denied our creative expression, thereby wasting much of our time with them. It could also be true that we actually want to express ourselves more and have felt unable to step into this possibility. Our resentment can become more conscious when we realize that there is a natural balance between speaking and listening that is appropriate to everyone in every situation. Until we accept this possibility, we can feel at the effect of others around us.
- “Loving our ability to entertain” becomes Denying our need to entertain others. In order to protect ourselves from feeling lost through entertaining others, we can become polarized so that we deny the humor and irony of any situation. We become serious and critical when any humor comes up because we feel it does not deal with the problems in front of us. This can lead us to becoming obsessed that things are not being taken care of or completed in a way that denies that we have an ability to define our reality the way we do. As a result, we try to discourage others from defining their reality in a way that is open-ended, believing that to do so would cause us more pain in the end.
- “Loving ritualistic ceremony” becomes Denying pomp and ceremony. The more we feel ourselves having to conform to a pre-existing way of doing something, the more it can remind us of how we are defined by the protocol of the situation rather than our creative expression in it. When others are going through the emotions and we do not detect a creative connection with them, it concerns us that something is being lost in the situation and that we just need to loosen it up. This can bring out our rebellious nature to try to destroy the ritual because it does not reflect our true creativity within it. We feel that the expectations of others compel us to follow the outer form at the cost of our spiritual and creative expression.
Conclusion
In relationships, we instinctively seek our parental patterns, where our partners have similar Compatibility Factors as our parents. In our pursuit of safety, we seek not only individuals with the same factors but individuals with similar imprints. The key issue driving this choice is familiarity and initial understanding of what this person is doing and why. Since all imprinting is on the Instinctive level, it is conditioned by instinctive Motive choices. This means when we understand when another person is doing a particular thing, it makes us feel safe. We feel most comforted by those who behave in ways that are most familiar. Unfortunately, these types of patterns increase the likelihood of enmeshment and feeling suffocated by our partner. This is because we have not yet defined our own, personal boundaries, and instead, believe it is up to others to set boundaries for us. Imprinting is a set of artificial boundaries based on different beliefs. When individuals have different beliefs it is easier for us not to be enmeshed in them. A true boundary, on the other hand, would be a limit we created where we did not define ourselves in terms of how another relates to us. When we become conscious about our imprinting and begin to eliminate it, it assists us in creating better boundaries with others.
In business, parental imprints can be found in our bosses and co-workers because we are most used to working out issues with these types of individuals. We initially think we will have much more of an impact on these individuals because we think we know exactly what they need. Like our romantic partners, these individuals always seem to be stimulating and fun initially. We are later dismayed by the possibility that they do not see us, just like our parents did not see us. This increases our separation and promotes the growth of more defenses. Over time, the relationships become more hardened and require greater energy because they irritate us. The problem is that by being around our parental types it minimizes our initiative, engagement and our ability to respond authentically. The graphic below represents a younger woman who works for an individual who is her mother pattern. This creates greater performance stress, so that she rarely believes she is doing well for her manager. When we choose teams that minimize parental imprinting, we can typically double the productivity of the team.
Imprinting is a collection of beliefs that we treat as the truth, even though it causes us tremendous pain and grief. The more we unconsciously accept the assumptions of others, the more reactive we become because we cannot be ourselves. The more we compromise ourselves to please others, the more polarized we are, especially when we realize they are not impressed. The answer is to be authentic and release these patterns so we do not do them to gain reassurance. We come to see that our truth is a sacred trust that we need to honor. When we do so, we no longer need to push our truth on others to be accepted by them. Instead, we come to appreciate that our truth is self-evident and needs no validation. Only when we come to the awareness of this inner resolution to be ourselves and nothing else, will we experience the freedom we seek. Let us endeavor to unfold and unpack the many layers of our experience so we can become more integrated and present with our own Truth.
Defining Creative Imprinting
Children look to their parent(s) for guidance. What they seek is affirmation and acceptance. Most individuals attribute some degree of their behavior to gaining the approval of their parents. Due to this, we adopt patterns reflecting all the Compatibility Factors that are not our own. This imprinting process is motivated and reinforced by parents who seek to see themselves in their children. The more we are unclear about who we are, the more pressure we place on our children to be superficially like us. For example, this means if our parents are faster pace, we will naturally try to respond quickly. If our parents are Think First, we try to remember to check in with our Thoughts before we act. Imprinting as a whole is very confusing because we end up losing our sense of self in others’ ideas about us, which increases our need to be reassured by them. This is why Imprinting is a trap. The more we are caught, the more we need reassurance about who we are.
As babies, most of us are looking for support and guidance. We are trying to learn how to get our needs met without overwhelming our parents. We may have a sense of our own possibilities, but we have no concept of how to actualize these ideas. It is no wonder that we become entranced by our parents’ behaviors, because they are the only real examples we have of actualized individuals. New parents also have a learning curve, as they are typically unsure how to care for their children on every level. Parents seek guidance from their parents, aunts, uncles and whomever else they can to do the best job they know how. When they look at their child, they see the best in them, which is, naturally, what they conceive of as the best. For many parents, they have not yet considered how different their child may be from their (the parent’s) natural way of being. This is why parents are typically indifferent about their child’s difference, believing that raising their children is their main focus, not adapting to the child’s creative needs. As a result, it is easier for parents to see a child as a simple extension of themselves where they can install their values without consideration.
The main way out of imprinting process is to find a way of being that increases the child’s sense of flow and joy in being Alive. The main way to reinforce an imprinting process is to keep trying to do behavior that previously made someone happy but now does not. Finding our own natural expression ends with joy, while doing another’s expression ends with pain. This points out that much of the angst we carry was actually not only the patterns and conflicts we absorbed from our parents, but the fact we did not think we were sufficient in our natural way of being. When our parents imprint us, it is more than what we say or do, because we are actually attempting to imitate them and live up to their standards. This means, as children, we take on the Excitement, Intensity and Anxiety of our parent’s thoughts and then react to it, which creates inner turbulence. The more we are confused and feel trapped, the more hopeless it seems about releasing ourselves from our imprinting. We end up absorbing the imbalances of our parents that go along with their patterns of engagement. Even if we have the same Creative Expressions as our parents, their emotional, intellectual and sensory distortions will still create a conflict within us (and therefore, between us and others). This is amplified in differences in Motives, Attractions and Relationship Skills.
We consider Imprinting successful when we lose our sense of self and attempt to gain approval by patterns of behavior which are not naturally our own. This ’success’ is amplified when parents pay attention to us, at least initially, when we do an Imprint. Sometimes mirroring our parents’ patterns can seem much safer than being our Self. It is interesting to note that many new parents are stimulated to engage new processes around their newborns. When parents become engrossed in our Creative Expression, we could come to believe that doing this imprint engages parents in being more authentic or seeing themselves on a deeper level. This can lead to a justification that our imprints help our parents. The problem is that we are compromising ourselves by doing their imprinting and, in effect, cutting ourselves off from a path of Authentic Self Expression. Our parents feel justified giving us the patterns of their success, because they believe it is their job to help us survive and succeed in the world. Unfortunately, mutual good intentions cancel each other out and end up creating damage to the relationship between the child and parents. Until the imprinting issues are addressed, this damage is hard to heal.
Confusion about who we are arises when we realize that our internal beliefs or expectations are not consistent with our outer experience. Imprinting disconnects us from our reality by convincing us we have to be someone we are really not. In this way, the more we take on imprinting, the less we can trust the experiences of life to make sense. Our thoughts about what is happening are isolated from our experience. We become attached to the idea of another’s acceptance rather than seeing what we are doing no longer works. The more we impose a false sense of who we are on our reality, the more difficult it is for others to connect to us. More importantly, the greater our imprinting, the more frustrated, irritated and agitated we become when others do not preemptively accept us as we present ourselves. This is why individuals who need to be accepted feel compelled to accept others as they are. Imprinting rewires us, so what we consider to be acts of kindness actually creates more damage that we imagine. In our effort to treat others as we would like to be treated, it does not take into account the differences between us and others. On investigation, the act that seems kind to us may actually discount and disregard someone in his or her own self perception. This is how the act of believing our Imprinting creates a disconnect within ourselves, so we cannot see our disconnect with others when we engage them. Imprinting creates greater separativeness because we come to not trust our own perceptions.
Imprinting is a sore spot in our psyche where we end up constantly reacting to others’ perceptions about us. We are always off-balance and agitated when someone does not cleanly perceive our intentions. This is why we end up needing more reassurance, because the reality of the interaction does not make sense to us. In effect, what we are doing is acting out of a predefined pattern of belief between who we are and how others respond to us. Over time, certain patterns of behavior become viewed as the way we need to compromise ourselves to be accepted. Imprinting focuses us on filling stop-gap measures so others do not become upset with us. Ironically, the more we do our imprinting, the more we end up creating the opposite effect of what we want.
The process of becoming more authentic requires releasing our imprinting so we do not invest in false perceptions and desires. Paradoxically, Imprinting reinforces self-doubt and allows us to hide who we really are. The point is that by healing our imprinting we become more fluid in expressing our Creative Self. This makes us more adaptive, flexible and fluid in our approach, which might challenge any role-playing fixations we create. This can create a fear that things may go wrong and we may not be safe. This is why going against Imprinting takes the high road and is not initially comfortable. Healing our Imprinting means reprogramming automatic assumptions by asking if our current way of being is true. If we are being true to ourselves, we do not take on others’ perceptions of us and react to them. We also do not need reassurance about who we are.
The source of imprinting is how others’ ideas become imposed upon us. Initially, our parents want to help us be more like them to resolve issues in a way they think will work best. Our inability to convey our own sense of what is natural causes us to accept their perceptions about what is needed in order to gain approval. What makes this so difficult is that if we knew then how to communicate our experience, and they knew how to recognize our way of being, the situation could have turned out much better. Unfortunately, being put on the spot without the ability to be seen leads us to accept our parent’s reality over our own, which traumatizes us around our own natural Creative Expression. We then become programmed to attempt to be what they want us to be, which not only distances us from our Creative Source; but, guarantees we will be in pain when others do not appreciate our self-presentation. A great example of this is when a child decides they want to do something different in a career path (than was planned for them). Some of us are never able to break out of our parents’ orbits.
The more we become identified with our Imprinting, the less we invest or accept our own Authentic Nature. It is ironic that the pain of our Imprinting causes us to avoid engaging our real, Authentic Nature because we are afraid to add more pain to our existing interactions. This creates a hardening or deadening of our natural openness and availability. It creates a negative cycle, where we become increasingly crystallized and locked into imprinted patterns. Eventually, we do not even see any other options. It is important to distinguish that Imprinting operates on an Instinctive level so this full framework is usually not conscious. This is different than our defensive framework, because it has more intellectual decision-making and can be figured out, given enough time. Imprinting triggers many of our reactions with other people, without a conscious understanding as to why. It is also very hard to identify what others are reacting to in us. Rest assured, we can assume at least half the reactions of others have to do with Imprinting issues. If we were to heal our Imprinting, we would not only possess greater clarity about our Creative Nature (so we could invest in who we are), but we would greatly reduce the friction we experience in meeting others.
Since our society is composed of seven different creative expressions on three different levels, there is much opportunity for confusion. Even if we happen to have parents with the same Creative Expressions as us, there are still differences is how we do things that they may not approve of. This is particularly true around Pacing, Communication Process and Decision Making Approach. Creative Expression imprinting is also accentuated by our imprinting around Goals, Modes and Attitudes. Finally, our cultural setting can also dramatically affect our Imprinting and how well we fit into our communities. Each community has expressions it both accepts and rejects. In order to have greater congruence, many communities could be described in terms of authentic expressions they accept and the imprinting they expect. This creates cultural differences, not only in different countries, but in different regions or cities within a country. For example, Boulder, Colorado amplifies and accepts all Visionary and Inventor expressions, but neutralizes Storyteller expressions at the imprinting level and rejects Implementer at the authentic level. It is important to recognize that most of what we identify as feeling accepted and comfortable in a community is, in fact, a reflection of how congruent our imprinting is compared to the local norms. When we do not fit into a particular group, a good percentage of the tension experienced is the difference in perception around beliefs that are either accepted or discounted in the community.
Usually, we are unconscious of the behaviors that reflect our imprinting. If we do become conscious of them, it is because someone has pointed this out to us. A general theorem of this work is that whenever we become tired, stressed out, or upset, we automatically begin to behave in a way that matches our parents more than ourselves, i.e., ‘doing our imprinting.’ Imprinting is how we have learned to fake it to gain the approval of our parents, teachers, or society. When one of the seven Creative Expressions shows up as imprinting, we are usually acting, not being authentic, and not being seen for what we are doing, no matter how hard we try. This distinction of being authentic or doing imprinting can most clearly be seen when an individual authentically doing their Creative Expression interacts with a person doing an imprinted version. It creates repulsion, reaction and a judgment that imprinted person is phony or unreliable. Many of our choices in relationship have to do with these kinds of reactions to others.
The ‘Cost Of Imprinting’ graphic focuses on the constant effort required to show up in our imprinting. We become quickly exhausted and are not able to process events in the moment. The more imprinting we do, the more it distracts us from being able to focus on our Authentic Life Expression. Most important, we do not trust we can move forward and be resourceful because the imprinting has always distracted us. When we do imprinting we are not whole beings, but objects, subjects and fixated ideas of who we should be. This means we do not allow ourselves to fully experience our Light, Life and Love energies. The more we do Imprinting, the more it encourages others to do their imprinting. This means we attract mediocre individuals with no desire for growth or improvement. When we begin to release our Imprinting, we know it is working by the quality of those individuals who are attracted to us.
Imprinting can also confuse us around Pacing, Approach and Communication Process. If a low-paced boy has difficulties with his father, and receives support primarily from his mother (who is fast paced), he will learn to associate that women require him to speed up his pacing. This guarantees he will be attracted to fast-paced women who exhaust him. This can be validated by how much this man has places he goes to where no one can disturb him, or he can take a nap without interruption. Until he learns the impact of choosing a fast paced partner, he will unconsciously seek them out without questioning how they impact him. We also see situations where a very feminine girl grows up with a highly Convergent Decision Making mother, who teaches her to focus and prioritize her activities. In this case, the girl may become very effective at breaking down problems, analyzing what she needs and coming up with an action plan that gets here where she wants to go. Unfortunately, this will not make the girl happy or joyful, because her natural process will be to do the opposite so she can openly explore options while moving at her own speed (to engage possibilities). Her Decision-Making Imprinting keeps her from options that would work for her.
Many boys and girls in the United States grow up with a degree of emotional repression. This often confuses their natural Communication Process sequence. Instead of trusting in their CP, they become overly sensitive and either preemptively attempt to describe everything or minimize their descriptions and refuse to engage when others ask questions. This confusion teaches some children to copy their parent’s action plan by pushing activities, while other parents teach their children to think about everything before making a decision. The result is a denial of key qualities in the Decision Making process that are needed for us to effectively connect to others. We each have seven options for Goals and Attitudes, but many of us are imprinted into acting as though our parent’s goals and attitudes are our own. This affects our direction, particularly in the early part of life, and also distracts us from our Authentic Life Expression.
It is important to remember how much effort it takes to maintain these appearances. Doing these behaviors automatically generates resistance in others because it is not natural for us. The reactions are particularly strong if others have a natural expression where we are doing the imprinted version. Most imprinting is caught up in doing something to prove us capable in a certain way. When others resist our actions, we usually put more effort into the act until they back off or explode on us. If our imprinted expression is mirrored back to us we are repulsed because we see our parents patterns in us. This is one of the main reasons imprinting is not studied or explored, because many of us are choosing partners who have the same Expressions and Imprinting as our parents. Due to this familiarity, we are also initially attracted to people because we can predict their behaviors. Unfortunately, it gets old quickly and what was once attractive can quickly become repulsive. It does not encourage us to study imprinting if it will reveal how similar our partners are to our parents.
In the graphic above, we can see how the imprinting of the young woman matches the expression patterns of the two parents. This creates a desire in her for Safety, which is met by her husband (at right) who has the same patterns as her father (including most of his same imprinting). Most individuals choose instinctive partners at least in their teens and twenties. The important thing to remember about these distinctions is that we are the only ones who can validate them. We do this by choosing where to take risks and step into new possibilities where we have no pre-existing patterns of behavior. While we may be unsure about what will happen, it will be freeing, affirming and generate a sense of Aliveness within because we are expressing ourselves authentically. If we are caught in our imprinting, we are repeating patterns, hoping the Excitement, Intensity and Anxiety within us will be submerged into the Excitement, Intensity and Anxiety of those we are with. Through unconscious merging, we think we do not have to be responsible for the results.
While initially it is valuable to have a Coach or Facilitator profile us to quicken our self-examination process, we actually need to explore and discover our own truth. While it may be difficult to accept, there is a reason for having children with different patterns in our life. First of all, if we have not completed our own parental patterns, we tend to have children who will help us do this. Second, we select individuals with the same Compatibility Factors that express themselves in different ways so we do not recreate the same patterns again. Unfortunately, this seldom works, as the more fear we have about something, the more likely the universe will give us another opportunity to resolve it. Imprinting is a way of demonstrating we can learn to be a certain way to please our parents. Our attachments to proving who we are can seem more real than just being ourselves because it is exciting to pull off this deception. One of the challenges of dealing with imprinting is that we feel enabled to pull the wool over others eyes because we believe everybody does it. We do not realize that we can only pull the wool over the eyes of people who are compromised and caught in their own imprinting. Any individual who is on a creative growth path would be able to see these imprints if they knew what they were looking for.
We remake our view of ourselves when we invest in our Authentic Creative Expression. It is helpful to have a guide in the process so they can reflect our nature back and we can step into a possibility without past imprinted perceptions interfering with our own creativity. This is because agreement generates hope, and the more we accept ourselves, the more likely we will expand into a possibility when it is congruent with us. Compatibility Assessments are more about releasing ourselves from our past perceptions so we can become clear and present in this moment. The effective use of a Creative Assessment is to explore options, so the process becomes one that deepens and enriches our understanding of ourselves. Some individuals believe that identifying people’s behavioral patterns somehow minimizes their creative versatility. Actually, we assess individuals so they can examine their own truth and release themselves from the compromised patterns of their childhood. By deepening into our Self and prioritizing what is true, we come to embody our creative essence. We are only predictable to the degree when others do not accept their Creative Nature and rely on their Imprinting, Pretenses and Defenses.
Intergenerational Imprinting is when a grandparent pattern is the same as their grandchild’s. We commonly see reinforcement around certain issues in alternate generations because each generation tends to rebel against its own parental pattern. This means children grow up seeing the limitations of their parent’s patterns and adopt opposite ways of dealing with these issues, which are then repeated in their own children. This is what makes Conditioning and Defenses entirely predictable. Of course, who we are is beyond any superficial behavioral study.
This process will repel some individuals because they are not ready for it. Others will be repelled because of their negative associations of being classified, particularly by an authority figure. Usually this is due to the fact that we are still caught up in childhood patterns of Objectification and Subjectification. When parents try to make us something like themselves, they objectify us. It is up to us to step beyond an object status and express our Authentic Creative Nature. Another childhood pattern is waiting to be told what is true for us. This creates defensive patterns where our parent’s interpretation of who we are can become who we are when we accept their views over our own. The opportunity is to claim our truth, independent of our parents, which requires knowing what our truth is. Judging others and our self makes the identification of Compatibility Factors more of a projection on others rather than an invitation to explore authentic qualities. These projections, particularly when combined with imprinting, are called Idealization, which is the third defensive distortion. This is because our discomfort is frequently used to make others wrong. When we cannot own our imprinting it separates us from others. When we struggle to validate our Creative Nature, we do not want to fall into patterns that reinforce more imprinting.
At the Instinctive level we have expressions we naturally embody and imprinting which we pretend to be so others will accept us. Our main imprinting can actually cover up our Mental Body Expression, making us doubt ourselves. Instead of being our Mental Body Expression, we can get caught up in doing a version of the expression differently in order to avoid being considered similar to our parents. This is especially true when our parents are not actualized and expressing their creativity clearly or cleanly. Individuating ourselves from our parents is a part of the healing process. Realizing that we do not need to take on their patterns is another step in the healing process. Ultimately, it is breaking pre-established conditioning where we believe we must define ourselves in terms of others so we will not be attacked. We must clarify our Imprinting to prevent attacks from our parents and others.
Types of Imprinting
Every Compatibility Factor has the potential to be imprinted on our children. The real issue is how the imprint is anchored emotionally. If our imprint is anchored in Safety and Excitement we use it to divert attention into safe ways of being appreciated. Our focus is mainly about appearances and looking good, which we call ‘Covers.’ The compromise is not to challenge others perceptions of us. If our imprint is anchored in Security and Intensity we use it get others to agree with us. Our focus is mainly about not letting others define our creative options, which we call ‘Taking Back Our Ground.’ The compromise is that we get caught up in rebelling and forget to be our Self. If our imprint is anchored in Personal Self Importance and Anxiety, we attempt to find points of leverage, which will artificially distinguish ourselves from our partners called ‘Diversions.’ The compromise is that if we confront our Imprinting, we would have to become mush more accountable about accepting who we are. Diversions are the most self sabotaging aspect of imprinting, because we deny the joyful inner motivation that comes with Authentic expression.
Imprinting reflects simply what we determined was needed to do to survive our childhood. It is a coping pattern that has outlived its value when we have become more conscious. The primary impact of Imprinting is how it diverts us from our own Primary Expression. Diversions keep us from focusing on who we are as contributors to the world. The more we do imprinting, the more our energies are tied up attempting to be what others want us to be. We can recognize imprinting by the degree of pain we experience when others resist, ignore or distrust us. Feeling this pain should be an incentive that focuses us on what we could do effectively. We do not want to get lost in the pain, but use it to clarify what we need to do to recover our passion. Passion is what gets lost when we believe our Imprinting is who we are. The more we eliminate imprinting by neutralizing these beliefs, the more effectively we will be able to engage a greater diversity of people. It is recommended to not begin with parents, because they will be the most difficult relationship with whom to gain clarity. Otherwise, we act out the patterns of our parents at the cost of our true nature (without learning how to individuate from them). If we do not confront our imprinting, we limit ourselves to a small segment of the population who will accept our diminished Creative Expression and imprinting. The more we seek familiarity and comfort the less likely will we find a partner who is creatively aligned and can support our Authentic Life Expression.
This requires that we release the tension about being seen in a particular way, so we can reinvest this expression in honoring our authentic Creative Being. Otherwise, the tension in the difference in imprinting can distract us from the creative opportunities to grow with others. Any attempt to convince someone we are somehow different than how we joyfully experience ourselves is likely imprinting. When we are being authentic there is no need to prove ourselves. Imprinting is essentially a performance or role we believe will gain us acceptance. It reinforces a superficial fantasy that we think will garner love and acceptance. It does not even occur to us that these patterns actually keep us from experiencing Radiant Self Unifying Love. When we are fully identified with our parents’ patterns and no longer receive praise, acknowledgement and attention, we feel abandoned and lost. In our families, if we do something unexpected, others try to encourage us to go back to our imprinting, assuming that we are the imprinting. This is how we become locked into our family of origin patterns.
Taking Back Our Ground is a reflection that we lost our footing while growing up. This means we lost the ability to define what we needed and when it was needed by accepting another’s priorities over our own. It reflects a power imbalance that eventually needs to be neutralized or we end up becoming the person our parents imposed upon us. Some would say we become just like our parents, but in reality, it is more descriptive to say we become a person with a superficial toughness and opposition to people telling us what to do. It is interesting to notice that we take on imprinting with all the compromises our parents have made and then use the conflicts within the imprint to fight the imprint from the outside in. For example, if we adopted a poorly expressed Inventor imprint from our father and it contained a lot of self-loathing, resistance and intensity, we would naturally gravitate to expressing our self loathing, resistance and intensity whenever someone triggered us to respond in this imprint. We can further say that an Inventor Imprint who did not take himself or his Creative Expression seriously, would display a lot of jadedness, self-reliance and indifference to the opinions of others. This would mean that whenever an Inventor imprint was triggered, we would use it to shrug off how others do not see or accept us. This is an example of an imprint, which could be valuable in certain situations where repression is dominant. Overall, we tend to believe that imprints are coping mechanisms with some inherent value because they helped us solve some problems in the past. The key issue is that we never had a choice about how we responded.
The simplest types of Imprints are called Covers, because we attempt to match an outer appearance, but do not usually believe we can survive scrutiny, so we simply deal with everything superficially. Covers can also be imprints of our parent’s Imprints. When a parent believes we need to be a certain way to survive, they can get very driven to make sure we know how to respond to certain problems and resort to patterns of behavior that make us seem more flexible and capable (than we may be in that moment). Our Mental Body is the Expression that provides a sense of Safety for us. This creates a choice between doing our Authentic Mental Body Expression (to feel safe) or falling into a Cover Imprint to create the illusion of Safety. Sometimes we get so caught up in creating these illusions for ourselves, we end up buying into the illusions of others. Covers promote greater Objectification, where appearances are more important than the substance of a circumstance.
What this tells us is that the patterns of imprinting can be seen as good or bad, but that the underlying compromise to our way of being is what mainly does the damage. Imprinting creates pockets of compromise, where we are emotionally turbulent, coalescing into attachments of Excitement, Intensity and Anxiety that cannot be easily resolved. This is why some individuals use more than 25% of their total expression dealing with issues of imprinting. This is a lot of investment when the only payoff is rejection, denial and a general discounting of who we are. The real cost is the lack of energetic integrity, where we are constantly being thrown off-balance by the issues of others. Many of us who have begun the healing process report that releasing these patterns helps them regain a set of priorities that gives them more options to set a course about where they want to go. When we are imprinted, our larger context is diminished and we flit from thing to thing without committing to anything.
In response to not being seen in our natural Creative Expression, survival fears impel us to imitate our parents’ patterns and we learn to fake an identity for their approval. The important thing to know is that at the base of every imprint is a pattern we feel compelled to do or act out in a particular way. The more we become identified with this pattern or role, the more we need to prove our value by acting it out whenever others question our value. This is why imprinting, at its core, is purely reactive and has no inherent value other than to make us realize that we do not need to compromise ourselves. We are the ones who create the illusion that what we are doing has a socially redeeming value. Simply stated, our pattern was established at an early age that confirms we can connect in a certain way, but we do not realize this may not be supporting us now (at all). The first step to healing this process is to notice what compels us to react, so we can clarify the effect of the conditioning and choose to not engage it. The more conscious we are about the process, the less compelling Imprinting becomes and eventually we release it. This is accelerated when we see the downsides of the Imprint and come to the conclusion that it is in the way of our Growth. When one of the seven creative energies is expressed as imprinting, we are acting, not being authentic, and we are not being seen for what we are doing, no matter how hard we try.
In summary, there are three types of Imprinting: Covers, Taking Back Our Ground, and Diversions. Covers are imprints on the Instinctive level, where our Intent is compromised. They drive us to hide out and keep us from causing reactions with others. They are reconciling by nature because they attempt to maintain our safety. One of the main giveaways is that when we are caught in this type of imprint we want others to like us and we keep seeking Excitement as a way to confirm that we have value to them. Ironically, this type of imprint minimizes our Pleasure. Taking Back Our Ground is where the imprint is mostly intellectual and compromises our Content. One main indicator of this is our argumentative nature because we have decided we are not going to go quietly into the night. Instead, we are going to be noticed and taken into account. We want others to be Intense to meet us in our Intensity on a particular topic. This imprint minimizes our Power because we are not able to see the big picture and include others to build a larger synergy. The last type is a Diversion. This type of imprint is where we lose ourselves in others’ ways of being and never get around to being ourselves. The key indicator here is we are always distracting ourselves so we never end up getting what we want. Some people would say we are afraid of asking for what we really need. This type of imprint minimizes Passion because we are always defining ourselves in terms of what others want us to be rather than what we want to be.
Levels Of Imprinting
Imprinting has consequences. Many of our reactions are based on our level of imprinting. This is because Imprinting Levels define the nature and direction of our reactions. On Level 1 the reaction is about seeking approval. It is about going along and attempting to be seen in a way that can be validating. Unfortunately, it is rarely successful, which drives us to make greater efforts. The cost of this imprinting is that individuals in imprinted patterns cannot connect to us easily. On Level 2 the reaction is about pushing our self and others to conform to our desires. We react against anyone attempting to override our truth or experience. The problem is that our over-reaction only increases our intensity, pushing others away from us. As a result we become more isolated. The cost is that they see our distain and aversion and will not trust us with activities that could trigger them. On Level 3, our reaction is to switch to some other issue to distract our Self from our imprint problem. What we are avoiding is the perspective that we are impotent, falsely believing that we need to find a way to be successful which others have already pioneered. The cost is that we do not want to work with these individuals because there is always some reason things do not work out. This is why franchansing is one of the most ‘diverting’ ways to be successful.
Imprinting has three levels of increasing depth. What makes these levels of imprinting important is how much Imprinting we received, not only over Primary, Secondary or Mental Body differences, but how many of us had Expressions at different levels. Each level of Imprint has either Excitement, Intensity or Anxiety as its core feature. This is because the Objectification, Subjectification and Idealization of our parents end up energetically compromising our Life, Light and Love energies. The Imprint becomes a mixture of an Intention, a pattern of behavior and the trigger that sets it in motions when certain events occur in our lives. The more we, as children, look to our parent for guidance, the more we unconsciously take on these energetic compromises and replicate them within ourselves. This is how their coping mechanisms are translated into our coping mechanisms. The more our parents were incomplete or not successful in their own expressions, the more it creates a burden on their children to either push through these patterns and become successful or accept the turbulence of the world without a sense of being able to do anything about it.
The more feminine our natural Expression is, the more likely we take on greater imprinting overall. There are additional factors, such as a Goal of Acceptance, a Disarming Defense Style or Spiritualist Attitude, which could lead to greater imprinting as well. On Level 1 we take on certain patterns, word choices and behaviors to get approval and acceptance. These are mostly Covers. On Level 2 we take on the belief we need to learn more about specific things to be sufficient in the world. This is mostly about Taking Back Our Ground. In Level 3 we take on the role of the pattern, in terms of Intent, Content and some degree of Context. In so doing, we lose ourselves in the process. This is called a Diversion. Imprinting can become more important to individuals than being who they actually are. If we reach this level, it indicates we likely have been highly Objectified and Subjectified by our parents.
Level 1: Early in our development, we decide that our parents do not fully accept us as who we authentically and naturally are. By interacting with them, we formulate ideas of what we must do to survive. These ideas then tell us how to interact with others and how other should behave with us. Most level one imprinting relates to how we wish things could be better or different. We wax romantically and keep expressing ourselves in stories about how we want others to accept us, but do not have the guts to actually request acknowledgment. We commonly feel we are victims of our circumstances, and that only through fortuitous events will someone actually see and accept us for who we are. Over time, we unconsciously build these ideals into standards about how to act, which paradoxically become substitutes for our sense of loss at not being able to be ourselves. We become actors in a drama not of our own creation. We overcome these role-playing processes by becoming conscious of them.
Level 1 Indicators: We think we are helping others, but, in fact, we feel discounted and denied by them. When people do not honor our Level 1 imprinting, we feel irritated. We keep trying to make things better until they accept us in a particular way (which never seems to be a factor in the relationship, creating frustration).
Level 2: Imprinting involves losing ourselves in trying to anticipate what others expect from us so we can prove ourselves. This imprinting is deeper than level one in that it seeks specific ways to get seen, recognizing that other areas will not be acknowledged. In a way, this level reflects that we have given up hope that others will get us in a natural way. Ironically, it means that imprinting becomes work or a job to get done in order to maintain the status quo. It is primarily generated from family interactions, including older siblings. We believe that it is clever to get attention by adapting to others’ ways of being, but the more we try to provide what we think they need, the less we see that they do not want what we are trying to provide. The result is doing the best we can without believing it will make a difference. This can be validated by the degree we know things are not working, but we do them anyway. This level of imprinting promotes codependence, as each person attempts (for his/her own security) to match their own strengths with their partner’s perceived weaknesses. This hopeless perspective hinders the engagement of our imprinting. We heal this imprint by using humor to recover displaced frustrations and anger. We gradually invest in being true to ourselves rather than getting caught up in what others think about us.
Level 2 Indicators: Needing to be needed. When people do not honor our Level 2 imprinting, we feel powerless. We feel reassured when our partners have the same amount of pain around their imprinting. It disturbs us when others do not take our imprinting seriously.
Our deepest imprinting, Level 3, occurs only with parents, caretakers or other major authority figures in early childhood. Level 3 imprinting is where we lose ourselves completely in the identification of the imprint. In other words, we cannot see that we are not ourselves, or admit that it is any kind of performance or compromise. We create our own inner reality about how others appreciate us and become emotionally attached to this belief about how we should be. We defend our beliefs in this role, blind to the fact that it is not our true self when someone reflects we are not doing this role well. Ironically, we are oblivious to how the imprint is not working and keep making excuses based on the faults of others for why nothing seems to manifest. In Level 3, we are so disassociated that we do not even experience the pain of not being a contributor to life. This reflects how we were traumatized and fearful for our own safety and security to a degree where we mandated that we lose ourselves in how others wanted us to be. Level 3 imprinting reflects how traumatized our parents were and how they displaced their Safety and Security issues on us as a way (in their minds) of protecting us. In so doing, we inadvertently took on their lessons with the belief that those lessons were our own. We heal imprinting at this level by affirming our authentic expression so the imprint locked in these patterns can be redeployed in a way that acknowledges our truth.
Level 3 Indicators: Disassociated and unacknowledged pain. When people do not honor our Level 3 imprinting, it feels intolerable because everything in our life revolves around others agreeing with who and where we are.
Healing Our Imprinting
Of the three levels of imprinting, Level 1 is the most common, Level 2 is more entrenched and Level 3 is the most fully expressed, yet dissociated. In this discussion, we offer a variety of solitary, interpersonal and group processes to engage the imprinted parts of our self. We invite you to examine your own imprinting levels and transform them from a substitute identity into a meaningful part of your self-realization. We come to be self-realized through the process of Centralization (bringing together all the separate aspects of ourselves into a unified whole) and De-Centralization (where we release attachments to any particular way of being). Healing our Imprinting is the first step in reconciling who we are versus who others want us to be. Until we become conscious of how our Truth gets subverted to serve others, we cannot be effective in expressing ourselves authentically. This requires reconstructing how our life expression was denied in how we accept superficial roles and imitation as substitutes for our natural contribution.
It is not just our imprinting that is the problem. We also become entangled by reactionary anti-imprinting beliefs that appear to counteract the imprinted beliefs of others. In other words, when we discover how limited we are being impacted by our imprinting, we usually attempt to distance ourselves from it by adopting opposite beliefs. The problem is, this increases internal fragmentation and sabotages any centralization efforts. One indicator of anti-imprinting is excessive daydreaming or dissociation by living in a fantasy world. Another is being unable to take effective action to get something done. While we have previously discussed that imprinting is the imitation of others to get approval and acceptance, we now see this can occur in both negative and positive ways. We have previously focused on the three levels, where we adopted the expressions and beliefs of others to get approval and acceptance. These are called positive imprinting beliefs. Positive imprinting is a desire to gain acceptance. Negative imprinting takes the opposite view, where we seek to feel rejected in order to affirm we have a choice about how to present ourselves.
This means that having anti-imprinting is a step toward the consciousness-building process where we start to engage healing. We can view it by expanding our context by shifting to an opposite perspective than that our parents provided. Examples of this abound every time we see somebody proving how bad they can be or how they can do what they want despite our best intentions. We need to eventually come to a middle ground where we have choices about how we want to show up. Others may not know how to positively connect to us, yet are also discovering how not to compromise themselves. These negative anti-imprinting beliefs also form and justify choices around the reactions we have to the imprinting of others. By doing either positive or negative imprinting, it prevents us from being seen. We still have the illusion that we are contributing through our reactions. The negative imprint contribution teaches us that we can survive disagreement. The positive imprint contribution teaches us we can meet others in ways that make them feel more comfortable. Of course, being our Creative Self is ultimately the best way to neutralize any reaction.
Now we are going to look at the unconscious ways we learned to deny others. It is harder to accept the negative side of imprinting because it reflects the collective unconsciousness of our society, as well as between our parents and us. We adopt counter-beliefs in the hope that this will maintain a separation between our reality and that of others. We believe that differences of opinion will create boundaries between our perceptions, which will help us individuate ourselves. Unfortunately, the more we adopt views that do not reflect our inner Truth, the more likely we become confused and create more pain around not being seen by others. In effect, each counterbalancing belief needs to be examined and released to get to our authentic Truth in order to centralize our understanding of ourselves. The goal, therefore, is to recognize that there is no absolute truth, but an ongoing process where our Truth can be revealed through Self-observation and Self-discovery.
To facilitate this process, we will present many different perspectives and ask the reader to examine their resonance with each. Some beliefs will feel comfortable, others will be discomforting. This is an indication that the process is working. Until we peel the onion of our Imprinting, it is important to not fall into the trap of believing we now understand it, when in fact, we have only revealed a few of the layers of our beliefs. Healing Imprinting is about letting go of any attachments to our Beliefs. What we discover is that our imprinting taught us to willfully ignore differences of opinions. The more we were trained to seek safety, the more we have a prescribed range in which differences of opinions can be dealt with. The more we heal our imprinting, the greater tolerance we develop about these differences. Otherwise, differences in opinions create anger, where we falsely believe others are trying to believe others are trying to impose themselves on us. This is a reaction to the compromise we experienced when we originally took on the beliefs of our parents. Any reaction to positive or negative imprinting is, in fact, a residual denial of ourselves.
Individuals who successfully neutralize their imprinting speak of a shift in awareness where they can honor their truth without needing to be comforted or reassured by others. The more we can step into the discomfort of opposing beliefs and truths and know we will not be damaged by the differences, the easier it will be to neutralize our Imprinting. We no longer define our reality in terms of a need to have others agree with or protect us. This permits us to move out of the zone of familiar interactions into an unknown field where our reality is still being discovered. Individuals who are committed to maintaining their past perceptions of self at the cost of growth are advised, therefore, to not proceed with this process if they do not have a heartfelt desire to honor their truth. For many of us it is easier to live in a world of beliefs as provided by others than to confront the terrifying reality that we have not only an obligation to validate our own experience, but the need to express ourselves in ways congruent with our Truth. The bottom line is when we know and accept our Truth, it is no longer something we need to prove or push on others.
Those who successfully neutralize their imprinting report that it takes time to recreate and understand the motivations of their parents. It is easy to get caught up in blaming our parents for what is not working in our own reality than to confront the possibility that their imprint on us will eventually be a useful and tool of comparison in knowing and recovering our creative identity. We recommend that individuals in this healing process acknowledge that their parents did the best they could, given the circumstances. The more we get caught up reacting to our parents’ intrusion into our reality, the more counterproductive the self-discovery process will be. In other words, instead of being a victim of circumstances, we can find a way to actively recognize that we took on this imprinting in a misguided attempt to demonstrate our love. One example is the statement “We choose our parents based on what we need in order to fully implement our Life Expression.”
While this is one way to describe this process, a more powerful way is to convey the opportunity that we choose our parents for the imprinting they provide so we can be stimulated to discover our Authentic Truth. This approach shifts the power from our parents back to us. It makes us the center of our own process. Of course, this means we need to be able to heal and neutralize the unconscious or ‘bad’ side of our parents’ Creative Expression to take charge of our lives. When we look at this process as an opportunity to clarify our differences with them, we can see that we can now contribute back to them! When we seek to acknowledge their positive motivations, it increases our own creativity and resourcefulness. We can then see how our parents’ Creative Expression was self-limiting, particularly as it applies to our own process. It then becomes possible to recognize and acknowledge how our parents unconsciously sabotaged their own Creative Expression by being at the effect of their parent’s imprinting. Without this insight, we are trapped in a world where we cannot go beyond our heredity.
Self-healing begins with recognizing how our parents could not do any better than they did. We took on their patterns even when we realized those patterns were sabotaging their life expression. Confusion was passed down to us because they/we did not know any better. It is time now to break the cycle of placating others into believing that imprinting somehow protects us and them from uncomfortable truths. With imprinting we create comfortable stories that distort what really occurred. This type of Objectification kept us from directly taking action to fulfill our life path. Before we go deeper into this process, it is important to let go of any judgments about how our parents were or were not successful in life. Just as Outer Success does not equate with Inner Success, we can see how we may have taken on our parent’s conflicts and made them our own. This is often reflected in the kind of work we do to insure security. It may also be reflected in our choice of partners. In both situations, because we expect certain conflicts in our lives, we tend to put ourselves in positions where these conflicts are repeated. This makes us comfortable with the familiar, but creatively denied and discounted by the absence of our Authentic Nature.
The more we think we need a career that establishes us uniquely, the more likely we are being driven by safety and security needs. The image of who we should be drives us, rather than just being who we are. We get trapped in defining ourselves in terms of others. We operate in unconscious patterns on Instinctive, Intellectual and Idealized levels that interfere with our ability to act and think naturally. We are also unaware how previous traumatic experiences interfere with our ability to interact with others. These negative experiences create prejudice and bias within us that is not seen or acknowledged. While most of this is Objectification, which is part of a Defensive pattern, our Imprinting becomes the outer representation of what we think we should be. As we go through the seven Creative Expression in this discussion, we will experience the different ways each engages different energies in sub-optimal ways.
For example, some of us have had negative experiences with Compassionates who we do not consciously understand. When we engage a Compassionate who is doing Compassionate imprinting, there are two impressions we typically note: 1) this person is extremely controlling and demanding about how things should be managed (fearing things will fall apart), and 2) they are driven because of a lack of Self acceptance, which is manifested by the inability to receive support.
From the Compassionate’s point of view, we typically feel less powerful than others because we cannot manifest our outward capabilities at a level that matches this control and/or focus. We then unconsciously distance ourselves from others by making ourselves right and them wrong. This projection process is called ‘displacing our fears on others to make us feel better.’ The negative imprinting we project is not even conscious.
Imprinting is often experienced as adapting to others when, in reality, it is a discounting of our Selves. We will now discuss the three levels of negative imprinting each expression type employs. It is important to remember that these are inner beliefs that we are projecting on others to keep ourselves from feeling less than them.
Anti-imprinting beliefs reflect the degree to which we have accepted the imprint of our parents. In a way, these beliefs were how we inoculated ourselves against feeling controlled by the fact that we had to be accepted this way. Until we accept and neutralize these inner beliefs, we are unconsciously projecting past issues on people in ways that discount and deny our current creative connection with them. This is due to the fact that we are identifying with the beliefs as who we are, rather than seeing the beliefs as a way to organize ourselves. We need to release our attachments to the belief as a part of our identity in order to take ownership as an expression of our Being. Until we own these beliefs, we unconsciously place others into categories without knowing their real intentions. This is because we project on them the way other people project on us. Anti-imprinting beliefs are rationales for maintaining our vigilance in the face of a traumatic past. The key is to acknowledge which beliefs are operating so we can release any attachments to them when they arise. These beliefs are buried in the way we treat others who are different from us. When people are creatively tuned in to themselves, they can read these beliefs very easily in us and others.
Just because we know what the issues are does not solve the problem. We need to eliminate or replace our beliefs with less exclusive ones on both creative and energetic levels to prevent attracting counter-imprinted people. In other words, until we release our own imprinting, we will naturally attract those with counter-beliefs and opposite imprinting. This creates unnecessary friction and distance because we get caught up trying to comfort others when we do not even know how to comfort ourselves. Until we recognize we do not have to protect ourselves from differences, we will continue being entangled in imprinting discussions that never go away. Others are often confused when we confront their imprinted beliefs because they are not conscious of how they have over-identified with them. This means they cannot move or flow, because anyone questioning their beliefs recreates the original incident where they made the decision and created the protective belief.
The most frustrating thing about this is that the discussions never get resolved unless we take proactive steps towards forgiving others and ourselves. It is also helpful to bring humor to the situation, and perhaps even act out our imprints when they are recognized. By letting go of attachments, we establish a reality that others can be different from how we perceive them and still be fun. The goal is to open our self up to just being with what is now, rather recreating our imprinted past. It is also important to see how impotent these beliefs are in how they affect us externally or internally, once we see them for what they are. We need to stop taking them as serious mandates or believe that they are red flags that keep us from dealing with people. Otherwise, we are giving them the power to dominate our life choices.
The more we see that our beliefs are only default assumptions from which we operate (when we are not engaging others consciously on a creative level), the more others will be able to engage us with less of their ‘stuff’ coming up. This is because imprinting, judgments and negative beliefs can actually trigger and interact with our perceptions, causing greater confusion and creative denial on all levels. We tend to make our imprinted beliefs more powerful when we feel people are in opposition to us. It is important to note, that whenever people challenge our imprints, it makes us fearful and feel small. It is like we have gone back to our childhood and we are being lectured about something.
The more we re-create the experience of people working with us, and can see ourselves clearly for who we are, the less reactive or polarized we will be with others. In other words, beliefs only become powerful when we identify with them in order to protect us from other people’s beliefs. What if we did not need the protection of Beliefs? From our perspective, Beliefs are, at best, temporary perceptions that need to be constantly regenerated to continue to have value. As a child, every time we took on an imprint, we decided how we needed to be to gain acceptance and we formulated a Belief to guide us in operating this way consistently. Unfortunately, now we are at the effect of these past guidelines and now need to upgrade them so they are more consciously consistent with our true, Creative Nature. Any disagreements between our imprinting and Creative Nature means we either have not processed through our imprinting, or that we have not accepted our Creative Nature.
One of the most effective processes for healing beliefs is to put ourselves in situations where we are extremely uncomfortable being with people who represent our polarities. We then tell the truth about how we feel, harmlessly, without projecting on them. The more we deal with this issue in ourselves by talking about our concerns with others, the more we release our energetic imprints. The result is a more natural relationship with less ‘unconscious stuff’ defining it. Becoming conscious about our patterns does not mean we will not go unconscious and act them out again at some point. When we are tired or stressed or afraid, we may fall back into the imprints from our parents. But as we become more conscious of our patterns and notice them occurring again and again, we can neutralize their effects by recognizing their origins and knowing they do not reflect a true intention of how we wish to connect with someone in the moment.
Another way of healing our imprinting is to identify higher Motives that we want to implement or engage in our life and take action to do so. What immediately arises is all of our safety and security imprinting, which wants us to compromise ourselves to operate on a smaller level. Higher level Motives trigger all of our imprinting, so that we can start to address each imprint one at a time and remake the beliefs and decisions behind them. The highest levels of Motives are Universal Dominion, Mutual Accomplishment and Conscious Participation. When we are operating on this Intuitive Level, there is little or no room for unconscious imprinting. The more we clarify what our Intent is, and then align ourselves to taking action to make it so, the less imprinting we will confront. Clearing our imprinting requires perseverance and dedication because it will release in layers. The more we get down to the core Motives that we have previously compromised, the more we will see how much Life energy we have blocked. Let us renew our Life energy flow by healing our imprints!
Seven Imprinted Quality Beliefs
The following seven forms of imprinting reflect seeing our self from our parents’ perspectives. These qualities are false unless we also possess the Authentic Expression on one of three levels (Primary, Secondary and Mental Body). When we have the same qualities imprinted over our natural expression, it creates doubts and confusion about what to do and when to do it. Usually the way our parents are implementing their expression does not feel right to us, causing us to discount it. The more imprinting we have, the greater our attachments to predefined beliefs. This greatly limits any creative exploration and discovery. It also amplifies our defensive Objectification, increasing the drive for pleasure, but paradoxically minimizing our ability to experience it. Each imprint has its own way of distracting us from being present in the moment.
1. Orchestrator Imprinting
If we are doing the Orchestrator expression at the imprinting level, we believe that only we can see the larger picture and only we can insure that plans are implemented. We believe that our ability to discriminate, differentiate, and not accept ‘second best’ is what attracts people to us. We believe in our capacity to effectively oversee others and effectively delegate tasks to them. Our courage and sense of what is right drives others to imitate us, which we encourage. We like to torque people who are inflexible, haughty and arrogant by outdoing them. We believe that we were born to express our will in ways that others will be attracted to and conform to. However, we hate do-gooders with high intentions who only get in the way when the chips are down. Everything is negotiable, and only we know how to do it. The only thing we demand from people in our projects is deference. Unfortunately, we frequently make mistakes in assigning others to tasks they cannot complete. Our assumptions and perspectives, in terms of the sequencing of activities, frequently proves to be inappropriate or ineffective. It is recommended that Orchestrator imprinted individuals not create jobs or take on too many new projects (or spread themselves too thin) without strong financial backing.
Level One Orchestrator Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
When we have Level One Orchestrator imprinting, we are known for our assertiveness and for our attempts to have people defer to us. The experience others have around us when we are a Level One Orchestrator imprinted person is that we are a tightly wound spring that could unravel at any moment and that, therefore, they need to pay constant attention to us. Other people experience level one Orchestrator imprinting as being condescending and arrogant. What is actually going on is that we feel we are suppressed in our natural creative expression and therefore we attempt to be seen as being capable and in charge. We always experience this in level one. In this process, whatever action we use to distract ourselves and control a repressed experience will be projected onto others and will be reflected back to us.
While Orchestrators expect the deference and respect of others, paradoxically, we do not like “yes people.” This reminds us too much of how others compromise themselves to appear interesting to us. Level one Orchestrator imprinting makes us believe we are more influential and powerful than we are. We try to appear to be self-generating and as though we are the best ones to be in charge. We release ourselves from this imprinting when we realize our true power to influence others is not based on external control.
Level Two Orchestrator Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Orchestrator imprinting is best identified by a more outgoing, selfish and “separative” relationship framework. Operating from the assumption that the world owes us a living, we believe that people should perform to meet our needs. Many people react against this imprinting because they feel it is vain and heartless. Actually, a second level Orchestrator imprint is trying to regain an emotional connectedness and feels isolated and impotent. We are try to confirm our importance by getting others to follow our advice but then feel impotent when they don’t.
Behind this level of imprinting lies our desire to hold ourselves accountable to a higher level of connectedness with people, while feeling incapable of getting people to like us. Because secondary Orchestrator imprinted children typically had domineering parents, it feels to the child that the only way they can recover their power is to be domineering in return. Therefore, as adults we believe that our being in control makes others feel more safe and secure. We use this viewpoint to imagine that we contribute to others by dominating them. We just don’t get how badly others feel about how we work with them. We heal ourselves when we realize we can be sensitive and creatively powerful, simultaneously.
Level Three Orchestrator Imprinting (Lost In Our Imprinting)
Level Three Orchestrator imprinting is operating when we believe in our own greatness to the extent that we want others to agree with it. We want others to reinforce and acknowledge our impressiveness, not realizing how much of it is actually made up. We believe our grandiosity of spirit should be acknowledged, which paradoxically is what we are trying to suppress in others. Consequently, we are threatened when others have Orchestrator imprinting or primary or secondary Orchestrator expression. This level of imprinting is identified by our illusions about our skills and capabilities. Real Orchestrators, even in their worst moments, do not have to overstate their past accomplishments.
We want others to fall in love with our unique power to implement projects. We then lose our inner distinctions between personal and divine will and believe that everything we do is divinely sanctioned. Anyone who questions us is threatening and we counterattack to put that person in their place. While we think we are charismatic, actually people have a hard time being around us, tending instead to avoid us. How we heal this process by discovering our true humility and sensing what can help ground our truth in a way that helps others to want to engage us.
Anti-Orchestrator Beliefs
- We turn “defer to me” into I will never defer to you. By being afraid to lose ourselves in others, we tend to make any authority over us wrong and we cannot honor that there may be a naturally appropriate way of interacting with authority. In this circumstance, we find it difficult to work for others because we believe they are going to ask us to compromise ourselves in a way that would be destructive. This belief keeps us from actually learning and growing with others and even denies our ability to find our place in the world. Instead, our beliefs push us into being apart from everyone, which ends up creating immense isolation and loneliness.
- “Perform to meet my needs” becomes You will never meet my needs and I will never meet yours. In this situation we end up denying the possibility of having creative engagement with others in any way that deepens us. Instead, we limit our contribution to them and their contribution to us so that we can safely neutralize the impact they could have on us. We end up believing that if someone has an influence on us, it will be automatically negative because it will deny or compromise something that we feel is critical to us. The challenge is to remember that who we are is not deniable and that we can never lose anything that is real in us. Only the unreal can be attacked.
- “Exaggerated self-importance” becomes No one will ever see me for my own importance. This means that others always have the upper hand. This is the one of the deepest issues that we deal with in organizations. We believe that somehow our importance increases the higher the position we have in the organization. Another way of looking at this is to recognize that the higher we go, the more people we have to serve or the more we have to be responsible. When people arrogantly believe that this means something, that it sets them apart from others, they create a repression where people aren’t creatively engaged with them. As we become able to see the difference between being important and being creatively powerful, we start to understand how it is not outer issues that make us feel important, but our inner ability to connect to others. Therefore, true importance is determined by our internal creative connections and how this enables us to connect with those outside of us.
2. Compassionate Imprinting
If we are doing the Compassionate expression at the imprinting level, we most likely are trying to convince others that we love them by acting sentimental, easy-going, or patient to hide our rigidity. We often encourage people to underestimate us, so we can surprise them with our strength. Also, we make sacrifices by caretaking others without really being committed to the situation. We try to be simple and pure, and it is very important to us to appear to be doing ‘the kind thing.’ We also overprotect people so they value our desire to support them. Unfortunately, while we attempt to do these things, our actual success at making others feel comfortable is extremely limited because we are not comfortable doing our own imprinting. It is recommended that Compassionate imprinted individuals not take jobs where they cannot express their authentic feelings and emotions.
Level One Compassionate Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Compassionate imprinting is our self-defined need to be considerate and caretaking of others. This means we have to do what is considered nice and appropriate under all circumstances and not express any unpleasant emotions or be confrontational in any way. It is most important that we are consistent in the nurturing way we are operating so that others will not be scared or intimidated by the way we are. This imprinting is typically seen in the mothering we try to do to show others that we like them. This process can be expanded into trying to be protective of others and sensitive to them when they are in pain. The more we can anticipate the needs of others, the more we believe we are demonstrating our love for them. Overall, it is difficult for others to be with us when they are being with us in this way. This is because the empathy and/or sympathy we have tend to preoccupy us. We need to realize there are limits to caretaking because ultimately it is self-defeating.
Level Two Compassionate Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Compassionate imprinting can be identified by mediator and peacekeeper role-playing where we attempt to unify others that are having difficulties being with each other. In this situation, we feel compelled to become the “buffers” because we are not able to deal with the conflict in the situation. We end up being caught in the middle, which we hate. We persevere because we believe that conflicts have to be neutralized and that our family and friends have to be nice to each other or it reflects on us. Ironically, we are unwilling to let sleeping dogs lie, which causes us to take on and try to resolve the conflict that no one wants to deal with. We attempt to get others to agree with our middle ground as a way of hopefully bringing them together.
Unfortunately, this is rarely successful and generates reactions from both of the individuals we are trying to bring together because it does not reflect their beliefs. Ironically, our demanding that they accept our middle ground is a unilateral action, which typically compromises their autonomy. This means that eventually they will build up resentment about us. One way to heal this is to hold a Common Neutral Ground where both energies could be entertained, so that we can be present with the process without intervening in any way. We know we are beginning to release this imprinting when we start demanding that others wake up and solve their own problems.
Level Three Compassionate Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Level Three Compassionate imprinting can be identified when we keep commitments to others even though we know they compromise us. At this level, we end up doing what is expected or needed at the cost of ourselves on a regular basis. We don’t think we have the right to say “no” when people need us. Of course we consciously rebel against this by trying not to be “selfish,” which, of course, keeps us trapped. The ironic aspect of this imprint is that we typically idealize the commitments we make, believing that others will appreciate us for the attempt to keep them. Usually we are surprised at the reactions we get from others when we share how much we had to compromise to make these commitments happen. When others are shocked by our perseverance they start to wonder about our sense of balance. This has the opposite effect that we intended, which is to have them love us for our follow-through. We know we are operating in this level when we believe whole-heartedly that we just have to do what is right no matter what the cost. We know we are releasing ourselves from this imprinting when we take action instead of complaining about how things are not working.
Anti-Compassionate Beliefs
- “Proving our consideration and consistency” becomes Establishing our own self-discipline about what works for us. When we rebel against others caretaking us, we try to keep them from doing things that make us feel obligated. This forces us to be on top of the situation and let them know clearly what we don’t want more than what we do want. Otherwise, they try to anticipate what we need and give it to us before we can do anything about it. It seems ungracious of us to reject their offer after they have already prepared it. We believe that they should never do anything for us without our having requested it. In fact, we find it rude that they are insinuating themselves in our lives by trying to anticipate our needs without even asking us.
- “Being a peacemaker by buffering conflicts” leads to Being a person who doesn’t want anyone to interfere with us. The more we see how ineffective it is for other people to represent us in any way, the more it drives us to define our relationships on our own terms. Taking responsibility for ourselves eventually allows us to be clearer about the beliefs and perspectives of others around us. This allows us to show up with people in ways that take their perspective into consideration without compromising us. Ultimately, the goal is to be an example of how we can be autonomous so that we are not at the effect of others. Usually this degrades into unilateral actions where we are not able to interact with anyone.
- “Overdoing the ways in which we keep our agreements” becomes Telling the truth about our agreements when they don’t work. We end up attacking people who stick to agreements that are not working just because they like to complain. We are repelled by the fact that they seem to love this negative attention when we feel it can be easily dealt with if discussed. We end up making these people wrong by believing they are drama Orchestrators or queens. We believe this process comes from their lack of clarity about who they are creatively, so that they need to be needed in these exaggerated ways.
3. Implementer Imprinting
If we are doing the Implementer expression at the imprinting level, we believe we know how to get things done better than anyone else and that our organizational skills put other people to shame. Others should respect our ability to streamline processes and procedures. Once we build up steam, nothing will stop us. We are completely committed to following through on everything we do and believe that without pain there is no gain. We are loyal and demand loyalty in return. We also believe that we are not attached to the way things are, but we do not believe in changing things without a good reason. We like to appear to be making decisions quickly even when we are not. Unfortunately, all these aspirations are challenged by an inability to prioritize tasks in a way that works. It is recommended that Implementer imprinted individuals not take jobs where their performance will constantly be judged.
Level One Implementer Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Implementer imprinting can be identified by our exaggerated capacity to prove our capability. The more others doubt our capability, the more we feel the necessity to prove we can do it ourselves. We act like doing something the “right way” is a sacred trust that we cannot leave to someone who is not committed to doing it the right way. Being told the “right way” is irritating. The problem is that we do not necessarily believe that we are capable and therefore we think that doing this behavior will put people at ease around us. Actually, the reverse is true because people are not at ease when they see that we are disconnected from what we are doing. At this level, Implementer imprints are highly opinionated and hate lazy, stupid or indolent people.
Level Two Implementer Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Implementer imprinting is easily identified by our attempts to be certain or clear about our commitments. This causes us to restate our commitments frequently to make sure others are not changing their expectations of us. Typically, it makes people feel inadequate, stupid or like children. Our condescending attitude frustrates others because we make them conform to our way of doing it. At this level, Implementer imprints want to keep things stable and assured because we are afraid of the changes others are attempting to introduce. Level Two Implementer imprints can be easily identified by how we protect our territory and position. While we act like we are open to examining other options, we actually believe that our superior understanding of our own “reality” is better than anyone else’s. Therefore, we feel that others should automatically defer to our expertise and our ability to make things happen.
Level Three Implementer Imprinting (Lost In Our Imprinting)
Level Three Implementer imprinting is operating when we become systematic in our approach to change. At this level, we allow others to introduce a certain amount of change as long as they give us adequate advance notice. We do not allow too much change, as it would be distracting and inefficient. While others are frustrated when we demand to go slower, we feel more powerful because we are setting the pace that works for us. In this level, we accept a degree of movement, believing it also gives us a degree of freedom to demand change in return. At this level, if we have a problem adjusting to the demands of others, we just request that they confine their change to one variable at a time. Our argument is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” At this level we believe we are good at changing, but actually, change is a very slow process for us.
Anti-Implementer Beliefs
- “Didn’t you know I could do that?” becomes You never accept what I’ve done. Anti-Warrior beliefs about taking unilateral action in a situation allow us to invalidate what has been done and to deny its value to others in the situation. We become trapped in the paradox of wanting others to accept what we do without accepting the way they do it. We could even feel that “might makes right” by forcing others to accept what we do while not accepting what they do. We enjoy putting others down when they make exaggerated claims, believing that we are the final judges for what they actually accomplish. This affirms the notion that there is one right, best way to do things: our way. We end up distancing and denying others with ideas, especially ideas that would change the foundation of what we built.
- “Certainty and clarity only” becomes Never trust the experts. Our beliefs that anyone who is arrogant really doesn’t know anything encourages us to discount anybody who knows anything. This overrides our ability to use their services. This typically leads to situations where we try to fix everything ourselves and get into more difficulty. We can end up believing that other people are just trying to take advantage of our ignorance because there are tricks to the trade that allow them to get away with things that we, not knowing these things, cannot get away with. This creates a love-hate relationship with knowledge. Actually, we are seeking people who are open to exploring options and don’t have pre-established ideas about the way things are. When we see somebody who is certain and set, we attack them.
- “Planned change only, please” becomes Play it by ear. The more others try to control us to do things in a systematic way, the more we rebel by trying to attack the whole structure. In other words, if the bureaucracy doesn’t work for us, we loudly complain that it doesn’t work for anyone. The challenge of this dilemma is that total anarchy doesn’t work for anyone either. This means that having some expectations in general about a circumstance or situation can actually facilitate us in making choices and embracing the possibilities. If everything were up in the air, then our days would be more complicated and difficult. We need to learn how to deal with change in a systematic way that comes from our being clear about the priorities of all the people involved in the process.
4. Inventor Imprinting
If we are doing the Inventor expression at the imprinting level, we will not compromise our freedom in any way and like to be seen as unpredictable or unique in the way we do things. We like to keep people guessing. We are great at avoiding external commitments in order to honor our inner commitment to being free. Sometimes we hide our fears of commitment by attempting to look like we are very committed. We pride ourselves on never finding a problem that we cannot solve. We have a flair for the dramatic and love to rebel against the status quo. We pretend we are listening to people even when we are not, and pretend to love chaos even if it works against us in a situation. We believe we are incredibly sensuous and need constant stimulation. Actually, our superficial desire to be seen prevents us from going to our Creative source and being the resource we want to be. It is recommended that Inventor imprinted individuals not take jobs where they are always being told what to do.
Level One Inventor Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Inventor imprinting can be identified by our temperamental ambivalence about being seen by others. We attempt at this level to demonstrate that we don’t care that others don’t see us, and that in fact we don’t expect to be seen by others. This means acting like our opinions and others’ don’t matter. This covers up our highly sensitive nature around not being seen and hurt in our childhood. What we want most is to be seen and acknowledged as not being a pushover. We accomplish this by challenging others about their beliefs and playing the role of devil’s advocate. We believe the game is all about getting attention and therefore feel that the more confrontational and questioning we can be, the more we can be the center of attention, which is what we really want.
Level Two Inventor Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Inventor imprinting is an impulsive desire to do anything to change the fact that we are not being seen. As our perceived value is providing customized solutions, we attack any “Mindless Standardization” where others don’t take the time to make sure what is being done is appropriate to the situation. When we feel misunderstood when others do not agree with our way of engaging a situation, we simply seek to escape their judgment and our own fear by taking any form of action to distract them.
Typically, this is by being impulsive in some way that surprises them. It is also our typical response when someone wants to standardize a way of being that we believe is dehumanizing. Our “rational inconsistency” drives them to avoid trying to place us in a box or to standardize our activity in a way that is predictable. What we want most is to be seen as unpredictable, spontaneous and able and willing to break all expectation frameworks. What we want is not to be bored or boring to others. The message of Inventors is: ‘Don’t try to figure me out— because you never will.’
Level Three Inventor Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Level Three Inventor imprinting is about being different than what people believe we are to prove that we can’t be hurt by their evaluations of us. We instead, are lost in our creative needs, believing we will be short changed if we don’t prove our value and usefulness. This level reflects the fact that we have taken a preemptive stance that no matter what they think, they don’t really know us, so it is best not to be with them. In this situation we have taken our fixation about being unique to the ultimate level because we believe we are common. When others don’t agree that we are different from them, we have to prove them wrong even if it requires that we attack them or make them angry about some way that we are being with them.
One aspect of this imprinting is always switching to a different level of connection than how they are trying to engage us. In other words, if they are engaging us intellectually, we shift to an emotional way of engaging; if they are engaging us emotionally, we shift to an intuitive way of being. We operate from the belief that not introducing new ways of doing things in each and every moment will end up trapping us into a way of being where we are severely compromised. The effect of this can also be very negative when our parents are not willing to honor their creative expression and imprint us with the need to be different without supporting our capacity to be different. Another negative expression of this form of imprinting is putting other people down for their differences because they are not real in them. In this situation, we try to prove our differences by making other people’s differences seem less important.
Anti-Inventor Beliefs
- “Acting like no one’s opinions matter” becomes Demanding that others take us seriously. The more we Inventor imprinted individuals are ambivalent about the way others interact with us, and the more we feel denied by them, the more we seek to have others acknowledge and affirm that our answers, ideas and actions have merit and can actually resolve the current situation. We hate ambivalence in others because it seems to state that they don’t have to be involved in the situation deeply. We resent it when others act like things don’t matter because they do matter to us.
- “Attacking mindless standardization” becomes Attacking ingenuity and uniqueness. While Inventor imprinted individuals want to affirm their ingenuity and uniqueness, other people take issue with their perceived right to make things work in a common way. They believe that doing everything uniquely is an impossible dream and rail against people attempting to impose this on them. They feel that it is appropriate and effective to standardize a whole range of things so that people know what they are getting and when they are getting it. What others are resentful about is having to adapt to the constant differences and demands made by those with Inventor expression.
- “Lost in our creative needs” becomes Transcending our neediness by being present with ourselves. Many creative energies associate neediness with defensiveness and like to promote a sense of independence by believing that people with needs are weaker. This cuts us off from the ability to receive support. Others do not believe we really want it because of how we don’t accept it when it is offered. Since the goal is to protect ourselves from the needs of others by denying our own needs, it become problematic to interact with others in open ways. We unconsciously avoid attempting to support others believing that we will become lost with them in their needs. What we want most is to avoid codependence by avoiding the whole subject of needs. This undermines our ability to co-create.
5. Investigator Imprinting
If we are doing the Investigator expression at the imprinting level, we believe that our ability to conceptualize and analyze makes us stand out from the crowd. We love using logic to wake others up to their inconsistencies. Our desire for knowledge pushes us to show others how much they do not know. When other people need us for information, we feel great. We often try to impress people with our intelligence by the way we answer their questions. We believe that the more intellectual content we create, the less likely others will dispute our findings. We collect large libraries to reassure ourselves that we can put our hands on information whenever we need it. We also believe in constant on-going learning and respect academics for their depth and specialization. We demonstrate our superiority by not arguing with inferior minds. Unfortunately, it does not matter how much information we collect if we cannot apply it wisely. It is recommended that Investigator imprinted individuals not choose positions where they get lost in the information.
Level One Investigator Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Investigator imprinting has to do with being seen as having the information at our fingertips. When others acknowledge our expertise we feel acknowledged and valued even if we know on a deeper level that it is all a façade. We fall in love with the structure of knowledge and use our deductive and logical skills to appear to be more intellectually developed than we are. This is identified by needing to tell others what we know just because we know it. Over time this becomes irritating to others as it takes time and expression better used elsewhere. Many times Investigator imprinting can be defined by being able to access the information we want at our fingertips. For this reason, we collect libraries and stacks of magazines, believing that the information we read will eventually be used in some way. At this level of Investigator imprinting individuals have the appearance of being Investigators by the way we analyze things externally and our ability to index all the things we know about.
Level Two Investigator Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Investigator imprinting can be identified by our intellectual mistrust of others. At this level, we doubt the validity of the ideas of others, looking for weaknesses in their ability to access the information we want at our fingertips. For this reason, we collect libraries and stacks of magazines, believing that the information we read will eventually be used in some way. At this level of Investigator imprinting, individuals have the appearance of being Investigators by the way we analyze things externally and our ability to index all the things we know about.
Level Three Investigator Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Finally, Level Three Investigator imprinted individuals who are unwilling to be questioned about our thoughts represent the deepest level of imprinting. In these circumstances, some of us become attached to our thoughts, believing that these will provide a sense of safety and security, not realizing that our thoughts are expressions of our creativity and not the creativity itself. When any of our thoughts are beyond self-examination and personal questioning, it indicates that we possess no freedom or inner creativity in this area. Typically, Investigators with this deep intellectual imprint live a life that is defined by the thoughts we have. Many times in this situation, the thoughts of others become our refuge, and our belief in them connects us with the people we idolize. Unfortunately, we become trapped in these thoughts, forcing others to use them to reach us. As a result many give up on us, believing the effort is not worth the pain we experience when others are not present. The way we know that it is imprinting is that no matter how much we do it, we don’t get the attention we seek. People do not trust us for what we know even though we continually prove to them that we know a great many things.
Anti-Investigator Beliefs
- “Information organizers” and librarians become Information clutterers and contrasters. We discount the purveyors of information as a way of discounting our own ability to move anything forward. Individuals who hate the power of information to establish a framework of thinking, challenge the notion that anything can be known through information. We become agents for chaos as we seek to free others from the tyranny of thought processes. Because we hate regimented thinking the most, we feel compelled to throw a monkey wrench into the situation whenever things are getting too clear or too focused. This is our way of expressing our resentment that people are too predictable. We also typically attack people who are organizers as being unemotional robots who have the mind of an elephant. They never forget, but they never do anything about what they know.
- “Constantly questioning another’s thoughts” becomes Accepting only the common sense of the masses. Believing that the common truth of society is more valid than our own truth sets us up to deny others in order to not deny ourselves. The challenge is that by denying others we do not allow any growth in ourselves. This is similar to the fact that by judging others we invite them to judge us. By denying the growth of others we are unconsciously denying our own growth. This has to do with the fact that to deny others effectively we have to be denying ourselves inwardly in the same way. The more we cut ourselves off from others, the harder it is for us to identify what works for us. While autonomy is where we honor our own truth, the paradox is that it requires us to honor the truth of others for it to work. Although we feel made wrong by others, this should not be an excuse to make them wrong, for two wrongs don’t make a right. The result of this process is confusion because we do not really want to define ourselves either in opposition to others or in acceptance of others. The tragedy is that we cannot have any constructive dialogue.
- “Lost in our thinking” becomes Lost in our doing. When we think others are thinking more deeply than we are, we try to find some way to be better than they are through our doing. When they become identified with their thoughts, we become identified with our actions, believing that someone who can’t implement their plan, even though they thought it through, is worthless. In this way we can attack all the eggheads in the world because we believe that they are impractical dreamers or stodgy academics that wouldn’t know life if it bit them.
6. Visionary Imprinting
If we are doing the Visionary expression at the imprinting level, we most likely believe that we are role models for transformational growth and that others should follow our example. We want to be recognized for our martyrdom and are frustrated when we’re not. We use our insights to show people how much we care about them and seek to be adored for our wisdom, presence and high-mindedness. We also believe that we are more connected to the sacred mysteries than anyone else we know, and that we know what is best for others better than they do. By seeing the highest potential in others, we hope that they can see the highest potential in us. Unfortunately, our attachment to doing the right thing typically polarizes others because they do not feel they have a choice in engaging us. As a result, others resist our suggestions, although they may hide that they are doing so. It is recommended that those with Visionary imprinting not take jobs where they get lost in caretaking behavior.
Level One Visionary Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
In Level One Visionary imprinting we believe that uncompromising self-sacrifice is a saintly endeavor. At this level we cannot accept that some selfishness is actually necessary to maintain our ability to give to others. Unfortunately, we become trapped in doing what we believe is best at the cost of our being able to continually serve others. This is particularly difficult when we have Visionary imprinting on top of a Visionary primary or secondary. It reinforces the fear that we will never actually be able to support others enough. Whenever we are imprinted we cannot accept the support of others, so, paradoxically, the more we are supportive, the less we can accept that we are supportive. This is because our Pretenses (how we try to get others to like us) are separated from who we are as creative beings. We escape this paradox by being present in our heart’s knowing and by making conscious choices to engage people in specific ways in which we know they are engaging us as much as we are engaging them. This is how we release ourselves from unconscious caretaking.
Level Two Visionary Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Priests in Level Two imprinting are known for our attempts to be seen as special because of our unique contributions and commitments to others. We attempt to be exclusive, believing we are different because of our suffering and sacrifice. We wear our pain as a badge of honor. In this level of imprinting we separate ourselves from others believing that only we know the real truth of the situation. Sometimes this is so uncomfortable that we reverse the role. We try to put others on a pedestal so that we do not feel so elevated and above everyone else.
The unconscious purpose of this imprinting is to keep ourselves from feeling the pain and problems of others. As long as we think we know why others are having the problems they are having, and that we would never have such problems, we can remain detached and aloof. We can best neutralize this by moving from exclusive ways of relating to others to inclusive ways of connecting. This means seeing both the good and the bad within ourselves in every situation. The more we can truly feel the pain of others without displacing it, the more we can hold open a space where they can meet and grow with us.
Level Three Visionary Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Level Three Visionary imprinting is feeling called to support others in being “good.” At this level of imprinting, we want to go beyond just being good ourselves by believing our role is to help others do the right thing despite their fears or concerns. Unfortunately, we usually do not know what is best for them, even though we think we do. At this level, we tend to discount people’s creative energies entirely in our belief that they should do what is “good” or “right.” In other words, we believe there is a common good everyone should be accountable to. Unfortunately, this belief denies creative differences.
The more we are trapped in society’s perception that everyone should conform to a certain common good, the more resistance we will experience from others because we are not taking the situation or circumstances into account in a way that honors them. In this level of imprinting, we attempt to “fix” everyone. This creates tension, anxiety, resentment and anger. These reactions confuse us because we intend to fix others for their real good, and we wonder why they cannot understand this. Actually, they are feeling not seen, valued or heard for who they are as creative beings, which reinforces their defensive wounding. We heal this level of imprinting by recognizing true creative differences and simply being with people so that they know that any comments we make are not going to be made in a negative personal way. When they know we are energetically connected to them in a way that honors them, it does not matter what we say.
Anti-Visionary Beliefs
- “Proving our value through self-sacrifice” becomes Attacking those who are trying to fix us. We come to associate self-sacrifice as something that is covertly controlling and manipulative of others because there is always the expectation that the other person will sacrifice themselves for us in the same way. We are repelled by the very notion that sacrifice for somebody can actually be a good thing. This is because we have seen so many cases where individuals sacrificing themselves are actually denying their own creativity and not taking care of themselves. Therefore, we try to keep our boundaries strong and we tell others not to sacrifice for us if we do not request it. We heal this by recognizing that we have to be getting more out of a sacrifice than others if it is really to work for us. This means the sacrifice needs to have the potential of transforming us and our own growth more than others.
- “Being special at helping others” becomes Embracing the ordinary and denying help. When we feel that others are attempting to help us, this connotes to us that there must be something wrong with the way we are. Therefore, we rebel against their help, believing it puts us in a subservient position. We judge the individuals doing the helping because we see that it makes them feel better and more powerful. We are then repelled by the judgments we feel and therefore seek to become ordinary and more commonplace in order to feel connected. We don’t trust anyone who is trying to help others in a way that is denying themselves. We expect them to have covert needs about being seen in a particular way. We end up wanting to escape the whole idea that we need others to be there for us. In this way, we deny the higher possibility that relationships can uplift us.
- “Lost in our attempt at being good” becomes Embracing how bad we are. We playfully think of ourselves as “bad” to offset the way we feel pulled down and smothered in how we “should be good.” We seek out Ugly Pleasures where we are getting what we want at the cost of others as a way to offset the belief that we should be evolving and growing. We want to acknowledge that we have a choice to totally mess things up and regress, especially when there have been needs we haven’t honored. Our beliefs about being “good” and doing the “right” thing become boring and difficult to maintain, especially when we are in denial about what we really want. While we recognize that a lot of these impulses are due to past issues not long forgotten, we keep thinking that we should be better anyway. We keep thinking that there is someplace to be where we won’t have those issues arising anymore. Unfortunately, it is not likely that these choices will ever go away.
7. Storyteller Imprinting
If we are doing the Storyteller expression at the imprinting level, we are great talkers and believe ourselves to always be the life of the party. Being the center of attention is the most important thing in the world to us. We believe that our power is in keeping groups working together, and that our words shape people’s experiences. We also believe that people never get bored with what we have to say, and that dogs and children adore us. The most important people we know are people who can influence others. We see ourselves in this group. We believe that we can sell anything to anybody anytime, and that people cannot exclude us when we wish to be included. Unfortunately, our self-absorption with the need to communicate keeps us from listening and being present with others, which ultimately drives them away. It is recommended that Storyteller imprinted individuals not take jobs where they have to be liked to be successful.
Level One Storyteller Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)
Level One Storyteller imprinting is about becoming identified with our ability to speak without really saying anything. We call this process oration because we fall in love with our own voice and feel compelled to fill any uncomfortable silences with words. What we need to do to overcome this is learn to embrace the silence within us and be able to be silent with people around us. Even Storyteller imprints feel that others do not listen to them and therefore we have to overcome the resistance others have to hearing us. So we feel justified in raising our voices, talking with intensity or even demanding people shut up and listen to us. This is very ironic because usually we are the ones who are not listening to them. Overall, it would be good for us to learn to hear what we are saying in the way they are hearing it so that we can become more effective at saying things in a way that others can hear.
Level Two Storyteller Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)
Level Two Storyteller imprinting comes from the belief that we have to be entertaining. In this level, we feel we have to be doing things to keep people happy around us or else they will leave us. We become attached to how others are interacting with us and if there is not a superficial way that they are interacting, we feel insecure. This is because we don’t want others to think of us as being dull or boring. Therefore, we make sure that they are busy engaging some process with us all the time. Level two Storyteller imprinting commonly shows up as feeling we have to take people to the movies, dancing, or to other interesting activities when they come to visit us. We feel compelled to treat our guests in the way our Storyteller parents would have treated them on their best days. This standard is difficult to maintain because of our unrealistic expectations about it. No matter what people say, we tend to believe that in the end they will find us wanting if we did not entertain them in every way possible.
Level Three Storyteller Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)
Finally, in Level Three Storyteller imprinting we become attached to doing things with pomp and ceremony, believing we have to mark special events by making them stand out in our minds. This behavior can be seen in our attention and attachment to birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. If there isn’t a holiday, we want to make one up. This is where people who are not Storytellers attempt to keep up with the Storyteller party ethic by being more outrageous than Storytellers are. While Storytellers use ceremony to empower and enrich an energetic connection, Level three Storyteller imprints use it to justify being distracted. In this way, the imprinting is exactly the opposite of the original intent. Overall, level three Storyteller imprints seek to escape the mundane by being in our fantasies of how things would be if we didn’t have to work. We are driven to act this way in order to offset our dreary, unsatisfying and repetitive way of entertaining ourselves.
Anti-Storyteller Beliefs
- “Loving our own voice” becomes Hating others who love the sound of their own voice. We resist others by making excuses about why we can’t hang around or interact with people who trigger our fears that we won’t be heard. In other words, we make it difficult for ourselves to spend time with people who seem to be greater talkers and listeners. We probably have past associations where this type of individual has overwhelmed and denied our creative expression, thereby wasting much of our time with them. It could also be true that we actually want to express ourselves more and have felt unable to step into this possibility. Our resentment can become more conscious when we realize that there is a natural balance between speaking and listening that is appropriate to everyone in every situation. Until we accept this possibility, we can feel at the effect of others around us.
- “Loving our ability to entertain” becomes Denying our need to entertain others. In order to protect ourselves from feeling lost through entertaining others, we can become polarized so that we deny the humor and irony of any situation. We become serious and critical when any humor comes up because we feel it does not deal with the problems in front of us. This can lead us to becoming obsessed that things are not being taken care of or completed in a way that denies that we have an ability to define our reality the way we do. As a result, we try to discourage others from defining their reality in a way that is open-ended, believing that to do so would cause us more pain in the end.
- “Loving ritualistic ceremony” becomes Denying pomp and ceremony. The more we feel ourselves having to conform to a pre-existing way of doing something, the more it can remind us of how we are defined by the protocol of the situation rather than our creative expression in it. When others are going through the emotions and we do not detect a creative connection with them, it concerns us that something is being lost in the situation and that we just need to loosen it up. This can bring out our rebellious nature to try to destroy the ritual because it does not reflect our true creativity within it. We feel that the expectations of others compel us to follow the outer form at the cost of our spiritual and creative expression.
Conclusion
In relationships, we instinctively seek our parental patterns, where our partners have similar Compatibility Factors as our parents. In our pursuit of safety, we seek not only individuals with the same factors but individuals with similar imprints. The key issue driving this choice is familiarity and initial understanding of what this person is doing and why. Since all imprinting is on the Instinctive level, it is conditioned by instinctive Motive choices. This means when we understand when another person is doing a particular thing, it makes us feel safe. We feel most comforted by those who behave in ways that are most familiar. Unfortunately, these types of patterns increase the likelihood of enmeshment and feeling suffocated by our partner. This is because we have not yet defined our own, personal boundaries, and instead, believe it is up to others to set boundaries for us. Imprinting is a set of artificial boundaries based on different beliefs. When individuals have different beliefs it is easier for us not to be enmeshed in them. A true boundary, on the other hand, would be a limit we created where we did not define ourselves in terms of how another relates to us. When we become conscious about our imprinting and begin to eliminate it, it assists us in creating better boundaries with others.
In business, parental imprints can be found in our bosses and co-workers because we are most used to working out issues with these types of individuals. We initially think we will have much more of an impact on these individuals because we think we know exactly what they need. Like our romantic partners, these individuals always seem to be stimulating and fun initially. We are later dismayed by the possibility that they do not see us, just like our parents did not see us. This increases our separation and promotes the growth of more defenses. Over time, the relationships become more hardened and require greater energy because they irritate us. The problem is that by being around our parental types it minimizes our initiative, engagement and our ability to respond authentically. The graphic below represents a younger woman who works for an individual who is her mother pattern. This creates greater performance stress, so that she rarely believes she is doing well for her manager. When we choose teams that minimize parental imprinting, we can typically double the productivity of the team.
Imprinting is a collection of beliefs that we treat as the truth, even though it causes us tremendous pain and grief. The more we unconsciously accept the assumptions of others, the more reactive we become because we cannot be ourselves. The more we compromise ourselves to please others, the more polarized we are, especially when we realize they are not impressed. The answer is to be authentic and release these patterns so we do not do them to gain reassurance. We come to see that our truth is a sacred trust that we need to honor. When we do so, we no longer need to push our truth on others to be accepted by them. Instead, we come to appreciate that our truth is self-evident and needs no validation. Only when we come to the awareness of this inner resolution to be ourselves and nothing else, will we experience the freedom we seek. Let us endeavor to unfold and unpack the many layers of our experience so we can become more integrated and present with our own Truth.
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