Relationship stress

I came across a word "Paradigm" and it's meaning. It is a new way of seeing ourselves and the world. I got this passage from my coda material: for many years we thought other people held the key to our happiness, then we found out we held the key to the prison where we'd been held captive. We might have started out as legitimate victims of others but then we became victims of ourselves. Thus was very eye opening in the literature I'm reading and studying