Big difference, I’d switched off my consciousness, I’d fallen back into old habits and allowed myself to get stuck on that negativity treadmill.
I knew this, I felt it and despite all the neuroscience, behavioural psychology and personal development stuff, I just got stuck there.
I started having those horrible, dispiriting dialogues in my head that help and support no-one, especially not the one who needs that support and encouragement the most – Me!
So, to start pulling myself out of the mire, I took myself out for a walk with the dogs. All the way out and around the park, I kept having the same CRAP go round and round in my head.
Enough!
Walking home, I had had it with this CRAP!
I took a couple of deep breaths, and I did what I keep telling you to do, I put myself in the present moment and I got mindful.
I was wrapped up warm and I was able to appreciate my warm hands and body, thanks to my hat and coat and gloves.
Another breath and I looked to my left and there was my lovely Reilly, trotting along beside me, his black coat so shiny and soft and inviting like deep velvet.
I felt the tug of the leash in my right hand and there’s Amelia, always wanting to go faster than I’m going, wanting to dash off to explore the sights and scents of the path.
Another breath and I was able to feel the stillness of the sheltered path I was taking between the park and my home, the rain had stopped, the wind had died down, it was peaceful and still.
I splashed through the puddles in my wellies and listened to the soft gentle noises of the dogs and I as we walked back home after our walk.
Do I feel better now?
Yes, I do. I have all I need here and now, everything is great.
Yes, I have stuff to sort out, and I’ll get it done, piece by piece, by staying conscious, stress free and appreciating the good I have right now, and not being swept up in the CRAP.
I’m a Work in Progress, but I believe that so long as some progress is being made, you stay ahead of the circumstance you think is dragging you down. So keep working on your ‘changing your life tactics’, and they surely will.
Perhaps the biggest advice I can give you, trust yourself.
Now, when I say trust yourself, I don’t mean the voice of fear that holds you hostage and keeps you stuck in situations that do not serve you. No, we’re going to get past ever listening to that nonsense ever again.
I mean that knowing, that gut feeling, that little voice that might have been squashed and pushed and shoved into a dark corner that you’re going to have to quieten down to hear, because its gotten used to you not listening to it and only whispers now.
It’s also time to stop listening to other people. Its time to stop taking polls on whether you should or should not take a certain action.
I really think this is true in terms of our health more than anywhere else. Because we’re sitting there in front of the doctor, and based on your symptoms he says you’ve got this, and you’re screaming inside your head ‘No, I don’t have that, I’m miserable, my work sucks, my relationships are falling apart and I just need someone to hold me and listen to me, and tell me its going to be okay.’
And yet, we take the prescription and we go back into our lives, and we go, ‘Yeah, the doctor says I have ‘X’ and I have to take these pills and I’ll be fine.’
We give away our responsibility in looking after our physical and mental health and swallow the doctor’s opinion and his pills and never deal with the stuff that created those symptoms in the first place.
You have all the answers you need within you. They might scare you, but its time to allow yourself to be exhilarated by the thought of following your dreams rather than frozen in fear, and hiding from what might be the greatest adventure of your life.
You won’t break under pressure. You’ll go through things in this life, you’ll be disappointed, you’ll be betrayed, you’ll be picked up and dropped a few times. But remember this, you were built to last.
So, today, trust yourself. Tell your fear thoughts to shut up and stretch to hear that little voice, and get on with living in the moment, guided by the part of you that knows what you must do for your and our highest good.
We resist change, we scream and kick and fight and we hurt ourselves in order to try and avoid it.
and yet……
….its unavoidable. Change happens, always. We have to deal with it.
One of the reasons we don’t like change is because it forces us to experience sensations in our body that we’ve never felt before and we may or may not like these sensations.
I heard John Assaraf once say, ‘ The only human being who likes change is a wet baby.’
The rest of us want to stay in our comfort zone, to live out our lives from that ‘safe’ place.
We want in live with the familiar in all of our experiences, the food that we eat, our temperature, our finances, our relationships. Any deviation can set off an emotion we don’t know how to deal with.
What makes change hard is that we are experiencing new physical sensations that we haven’t experienced before and are not yet acclimated to. The emotions we know are caused by physical sensations in our body that help our thinking brain know what we’re feeling.
When we experience change, when we are faced with something we didn’t expect, or was difficult, or was really positive, or simply a stretch in a different direction, we don’t know what it will feel like in our bodies.
The good news is that once we have an opportunity to go through repeated experience of that new thing, then we acclimate to it and it starts to feel stable and safe.
If we can handle the new and/or unpleasant sensations that come with change, once we adapt and accept these new sensations for a long enough period, it no longer feels like a change.
This comes with practice, repetition, emotional flexibility and curiosity.
Behavioural psychologists describe this adaptation to change as a process: feel, think, sense, observe, do, know. With practice, we learn not to suppress our emotions but to express them.
With practice you get better at handling the different feelings we all have, the different emotions, the different situations we have that cause us to feel uncertainty, insecurity or a lack of confidence.
One of the keys to feeling more confident about handling change is to remember how resourceful you are, to recall how you overcame obstacles in your past.
Start to see yourself as a resourceful person, think of all the various life experiences you’ve been through, whether good or bad, pleasant or vile and think about what enabled you to get through those experiences. Recalling your past life challenges and celebrations helps you develop a renewed, stronger sense of your resourcefulness today.
When you are about to step into new situations, it can be easy to forget how resourceful you were in the past. Remember and allow yourself to see this new situation as one you can easily overcome.
Your renewed sense of your own resourcefulness also increases your resilience and emotional flexibility as you look for solutions instead of just resisting the change and fighting it.
Use everything you ever used in your life to get you where you are today. Be creative, be playful, and above all, be open to possibilities that changes are for your good.
Not able to occur, exist, or be done: “an impossible task”; “impossible to keep up”.
Very difficult to deal with: “an impossible situation”.
Neuroscientists prefer to think of the definition of impossible as ‘The inability to think of or conceive of a situation.’
Did you notice the big difference from the traditional dictionary definition?
It’s that its within our control to decide what’s possible or impossible, its all about our minds and our potential to imagine an idea or situation.
Why do things seem impossible?
Because it’s never been done before. Because its not been in our prior experience of living. Because we’ve been trained not to think of what is possible.
How do we change this? How do we change how we think so possibility becomes, not just an inspiring idea but something we can act into and make happen?
Can we find a way to think differently about possibility to make an exceptional life our reality?
Most of us want to live an exceptional life, filled with love and success. Yet if we look around at family and friends, it would seem that goal is highly improbable, since very few are living such extraordinary lives. So, if we want to live that exceptional life, we have to throw out rational thought concerned with probabilities and start thinking in possibilities.
And once you start to believe something can happen, you’ll work harder to make it happen. As you you get closer and closer, the vision starts to get clearer and brighter.
The magic is the state of possibility we can access in our brain. How do we gain access to that state and stay in it throughout our days?
First, let’s identify what neuroscience tells us pulls us out of the state of possibility.
Burn Out: When you’re burning out, you have no energy for possibility, you believe its impossible and can’t be done. How can you have a consciousness of possibility when your circuits are blown by the daily stress of your life?
Being Lost: You truly don’t know where to go or what to do anymore, you make choices that forget about what’s good for you and your brain experiences conflicting forces as you put yourself in stressful situations. How do you start to feel less lost and more accepted?
Giving Up: Your efforts are always frustrated and it all seems hopeless, with your brain experiencing mental and emotional pain. Maybe its time to just give up?
Conditioning: We get stuck in the ditches we’ve dug in our brains, the habits that don’t serve us, we believe it can’t be done, that we can’t change anything, we’re just not that effective. What’s worse, habit pathways in the brain deepen as stress perpetuates habits.
Depression and Anxiety: Your mood disrupts your brain’s ability to think of solutions and you come right back to ‘It’s impossible, it can’t be done.’ Depression prevents new changes taking place in your brain.
Biased Attention: This is where your brain looks for threats due to fear, and life looks like what you are looking at. What are you paying attention to? Which emotions are drawing your attention and can you give them up? Do you talk about and bond with other people over your wounds? That’s comforting but not helpful in changing your brain to see new possibilities
Imagery Difficulty: Your brain can’t see a positive imagining, a visual with you in it, in your own body, not watching from outside. First person visualisations activate the brain more strongly, so how do you feel your way into a 3D imagining?
What are you to do, if you suffer from one or more of the above conditions that pull you from the state of possibility, into a state of impossibility, where it just can’t be done?
We have to deal with each of these things to get ourselves into a state of possibility and practise staying there.
In case of Burn Out, you simply must treat the cause of overload.
With Being Lost, be gentle with yourself and the messages you give to your brain. You may not know where you are right now, but its okay not to know. You may have given up, buts its time to start again. Believe in the possibility, take a time out, re-evaluate your direction and change direction if necessary.
To combat the effects of Giving Up, surrender. Surrender to the forces of the Universe and allow them to be aligned with your goals. Start doing something that is in the direction of your goals, that is the biggest challenge in human behaviour. Thinking is easy, its harder to take action, yet in taking action it becomes easier.
To overcome Conditioning, you must repeatedly practise your new habits and reduce your stress so you don’t drop back into your old programming.
In the case of Depression and Anxiety, you must treat the mood, as it is stopping you from creative new thinking. Develop anti-stress strategies and get clinical help if required.
To get past Biased Attention, start redirecting your attention, away from your wounds to your strengths, your achievements and your goals. Find a community that supports you in your new outlook and learn to live in optimism.
To get over Imagery Difficulty, think about how you see and interact with the world in the physical and then transplant those sensations into your visualisation. Make your imaginings believable from your eyes out, practice 3D effects with all your senses, and you will stimulate your brain’s motor neurons so you have the capacity to act.
Once you have dealt with the stuff that’s been pulling you out of possibility, you’re free to embrace the impossible and make it possible in this highly improbable world. That’s the stuff dreams are made from.
I have already spoken about RWID here, but I wanted to go back to it because its so important as an emergency mental health tool.
I got a call a few days ago from someone who was extremely distressed and after spending some time talking them down from the heightened emotional and anxious state they were in, a state in which they were afraid of hurting themselves and even considering suicide, I was able to talk about changing the focus of their thinking.
Thinking about suicide is frightening, and that thought starts to take over our mind, and its hard to think of something else. But if we don’t, then because of how much of our attention is on that thought, due in part to the fear it generates, it becomes more likely that is the action that will be taken.
Instead, think of 3 words that mean something to you, words the represent something that makes you feel great, that fill you up with love and kindness.
Repeat those words as a mantra. Usually people start off saying them really fast, but as they distance themselves from the fear thoughts, they slow down.
I also ask that people remember to breathe, to take long slow deep breaths and repeat your 3 core words that release those feel good hormones and chemicals inside your brain.
I left my friend with the same advice as I’ve outlined above and when she came to see me the next day for some more structured support, she was calmer and had much more emotional control.
So much so, that she was able to phone her clients and make plans to get back to her work in the next couple of weeks.
She’s still repeating her mantra and still breathing, long, slow and deep, as she keeps bringing herself back to living in the present, where her pain is less.
The change your life tactics I share work, both in the bigger grand scheme of life and in the day to day nitty gritty, as well as in trauma and emergencies. Try them and see for yourself.
We have this weird idea in our culture, especially in the UK, that emotional strength is stoicism, the ‘stiff upper lip’ cliché: where no matter what life throws at you, you don’t react, you don’t get upset, you don’t show your emotions, you must never ‘wear your heart on your sleeve’. The strong don’t show their feelings, especially their pain and fear.
We live unconsciously; disconnected, distracted; suppressing what we know of ourselves with addictive behaviour, denials, questioning, diminishing, doubting, all of it to avoid our truth and to avoid feeling our feelings.
It’s the emotions, feelings and thoughts that feel unpleasant that we seem to most deny, we don’t want to know them or even acknowledge them at all.
We shut them down flat, as fast as we can, and when you do that, you’re actually shutting down that which will give you your core emotional strength.
Real emotional strength is not burying your feelings, hiding from fear, pain, grief, anger or loss, because you can’t be strong when you’re denying part of yourself.
We have to know and accept all our thought, feelings and emotions, those that feel amazing; filling us up with love and joy and those that feel unpleasant, and make us uncomfortable and give us pain.
When you disconnect from what you know, then you lose that which will help you feel strong.
Are you willing to allow yourself to become aware of what you’re thinking, feeling, sensing, observing? These are what you know.
All of your thoughts, feelings, senses, perceptions and intuitive knowing need to be recognised and acknowledged by you. Be as in touch with as much of your moment to moment experience as you can bear.
When you do that, you are able to be present to the entirety of being, the entirety of experience, and you can use this to make better choices, decisions, to express yourself or take action.
Psychologists and neuroscientists have found that people who keep denying themselves start to feel more vulnerable and feel no control, less control or even out of control, manifesting body symptoms of dis-ease.
Overtime, people start to feel a ‘split self’, where people know they should be feeling certain things but can’t access that feeling because they have cut themselves off from their feelings.
You end up numb, disconnected and dead inside.
When this continues, studies show it can lead to feeling alienated, isolated and ultimately to despair and feeling suicidal.
Start to think of emotional weakness as anything that has to do with disconnecting, suppressing or distracting.
Not expressing how you feel leads to the death of your body and soul.
Expressing your emotions puts you at ease.
The key is to know that they don’t matter; simply be aware of and know the thoughts, feelings, needs, perceptions, beliefs, memories that come into your mind and body. You don’t need to do anything with them, just know them all.
When you allow yourself to be aware, you can be more present, more vulnerable, then you can make an empowered choice.
Being present and vulnerable in our experience is where true emotional strength comes from, then you can choose to use what you’re aware of to make your decision, to express yourself or take a particular action.
Awareness starts in the body, become attuned to what you are experiencing in your body.
When we have a feeling; we feel it in our body first. The sensation travels faster through our bodies than our thoughts can travel, so we feel the sensation first and then we give it a name, when our brain catches up.
Identify the physical sensations that comes with a feeling.
Notice what is happening in your body when you have a certain experience, whether it is pleasant, unpleasant or one with needs like hunger or thirst.
See if you can take an action now, in response to that feeling. If you would normally keep it to yourself, turn to the person who provoked the feeling and tell them about it, ‘that really upset me,’ even if it creates conflict.
I’m not encouraging conflict just for the sake of it, but we usually shy aware from conflict, and the main reason we shy away from it is because of the discomfort it creates in our own bodies.
I have to own this one, because I’ll walk a mile out of the way to avoid someone rather than have a straight word with them if I think they might go off on me!
What’s worse is, we’re not only afraid of our own emotional discomfort, we’re also afraid of someone else’s emotional discomfort and don’t want to make them feel bad either.
We do more to avoid pain than we do to gain pleasure and we’ll suppress pain to avoid feeling it.
We think we’re letting go but we’re really creating a state of dis-ease that gets bigger and bigger and worse and worse.
Claim your inner power and confidence by stepping into your greatness, become aware of your uncomfortable feelings and get better at managing them.
As we know ourselves more, we connect better with our innermost feelings. By becoming aware of, sensing, perceiving and observing our emotions, we can manage them better and start making different choices, taking different actions.
This makes us stronger and less vulnerable, we are able to stand in our power and know ourselves and always behave authentically. That is emotional strength.
Thanks to Dr Joan Rosenberg. These notes were taken from an interview she did with John Assaraf.
What really moved me was the thought, ‘I am a perfect, divine creation.’ We are so used to living from our flaws, leading with them into every encounter and conversation, telling anyone and everyone what’s wrong with us, especially in the insane world of mental health, where everyone lives from their diagnoses.
That’s one of the reasons why I love Peter Breggin so much, an esteemed psychiatrist and whistleblower on the psych/pharma industries and the harm they do. This is from a recent blog of his:
There are solutions to madness, psychosis, and personal crises. What I mean by madness is an experience of overwhelming emotional distress that leaves us feeling isolated, abandoned, frightened and helpless. Sometimes we feel it as demoralizing guilt, at other times burning shame or terrifying anxiety, and sometimes all three at once. We may escape into frustration, anger and rage, but beneath always lies fear and helplessness. We may hear voices or see things that others don’t experience, or more mundanely tie ourselves in knots with obsessions and compulsions. At the root is always the core human experience of fear and helplessness. In my book Toxic Psychiatry I call it “emotional overwhelm.”A psychiatrist may diagnose madness as psychosis, schizophrenia, depression, panic disorder, or bipolar disorder, and then insist that it needs a medical fix. From the other side of the human spectrum, saints in the midst of madness have felt they were being tortured by the devil and tempted by evil, and they turned successfully to faith. Some of us think madness is an inevitable part of the human experience, especially if we open ourselves to discover our true nature and purposes in life and to transform ourselves in new directions.
I don’t think any of us should be living from a psychiatric disgnosis, and I’ve been trying to write a blog on this for the past week, but its so important to me that I haven’t got near to it. However, I want to say this much today, we don’t need to be ‘fixed’, or ‘cured’, there’s nothing wrong with anyone of us. And those who have endured emotional, mental and physical distress and trauma need love and support not harmful drugs and judgement.
One of my favourite pictures that does the rounds on Facebook is this one: that shows a cracked bowl that’s been repaired and is now more beautiful and valuable for having been broken. That’s how I feel about surviving great trauma in life, we are more beautiful and precious because of what we have gone through.
I’m going to spend the weekend scribbling and hope to put my thoughts on why we accept and indeed start to live from our psych diagnosis, rather than doing the hard work of living and healing. I hope it’ll be worth reading.
I feel like we’ve been conditioned into not voicing our needs and wants, ‘it’s selfish’ for us to even think about putting ourselves first. I sometimes think we’ve reached a stage of supressing our needs so much that we’ve conditioned ourselves to almost not notice them, never mind to voice them out loud.
School, society, families all teach us to share and put other people first, especially as women, we should put our children’s needs before our own, our parents, our partners, and we put our employers needs before ours, our friends, our colleagues, even our hairdressers!
Have you ever gone in for a trim and come out with a fringe and short hair? I have, simply because I couldn’t say ‘No, that’s not what I want!’
And by the time we’ve allowed everyone else to have the best of us, there’s no time or energy left for what we want.
I truly don’t know that I have the ability to ask for my needs to be met by my friends, my family, my lover. I don’t know what that would look like or feel like.
I agree to other people’s wants and needs: I end up on night’s out that I didn’t want to go to because someone just wouldn’t go without me; I watch films at the cinema that don’t interest me because that’s what someone else wanted to see; I eat at restaurants that don’t cater for vegetarians because its another person’s favourite place; I watch tv shows that bore me rigid when I’d rather be at a philosophy group.
Sometimes, we agree to do things we really don’t care for, we still agree to go along. and if we voice any dissent, it’s usually a diffident, hesitant ‘Oh, I’m not sure I really want to’, kind of protest that usually means our point of view gets overlooked regardless. And never do we hear our own voice ask for what we want.
You deserve to have your thoughts, your needs and your wants valued, not least of all, by you. You deserve to live out in the open, not hiding your opinion, not afraid to voice your like of something others might consider weird, able to speak up and say no, even if you’re going against your whole culture, you deserve and have the right to ask for what you want.
Be unafraid of judgement, of not fitting in, of not being considered cool. Accept the labels of outsider, weirdo, loner. If someone doesn’t want to give you what you ask for, they have the right to say ‘No.’
Think about this, if one of your friends asked you for something or wanted to do something you didn’t like, would you judge them, would you label them, would you think they are somehow lacking? Would you decide they are no longer fit for your company?
No, you’re not that superficial or fickle. So do your friends and family and loved the same honour and consider them steadfast in their love and admiration of you.
Then I want you to honour yourself, honour your choices, your preferences just as much as other peoples.
Don’t hide what you want, what you need. Ask for it, be vulnerable, be open, be authentic, be you.
Stop just existing, going through the motions days by day, start living – Today!
Embrace everything that comes along, see life as a great big adventure.
We so often see every potential change in our circumstance as something to fear, a trial to be endured, we’re always looking for the downside.
Stop judging and instead adopt an attitude of curiosity, be like a child wanting to investigate and see what happens.
Don’t attach to outcomes, we have no idea what may or may not happen, if so and so does this or that, or if you do that instead of this. Let go of trying to control and allow events to develop while always looking for the good in it all.
One of my all-time favourite teachers, Louise L Hay uses this mantra when a situation comes up that challengers her or triggers her fear;
All is well, all is well, everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this situation, only good will come and I am safe.
Sometimes, we don’t even know we’re acting out of fear. I’ve learned through watching myself that my initial fear response is to run to sugar. When I catch myself stuffing chocolate or cake down my throat, then I know there’s something I’m avoiding!
So I catch myself, I become aware first that I’m avoiding something, then I set to figuring our what that is.
I get still, quiet, I sit and go deep into mindfulness or meditation. Or, I walk the dogs. Or, I clean the house. These are my three main therapeutic practises and I always feel better after a session doing any one of them.
And then, with an adjusted sense of self, I explore what triggered me, what the circumstance was and I’ll say Louise’s mantra, make an action plan to solve the difficulty and move forward, saying simply ‘What else is possible here? Let’s see what happens.’
Like me, you can’t control external circumstances, nor anyone else, heck I can’t even control my dogs! But, I am able, when I practice, to control me.
Cynthia Curry 