Have you ever heard the concept that your thoughts are not you?
In yesterdays “Thought for Sunday” post, I posed the thought there are times in our lives when our minds can work against us and lead us into more trouble in its quest to protect us.
I gave these three examples and covered point one yesterday.
Today I’m covering point two.
1. When a persons mind is organised for survival and not happiness?
2. When a person believes what their mind is saying to them.
3. When a person creates a bias and sees it as the whole truth.
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2. When a person believes what their mind is saying to them.
Our minds can throw up all sorts of thinking. Some of the thinking is enjoyable, and other thinking can create worry and stress.
The biggest challenge is the persistent worrying or stressful thinking, either about past events or problematic perceived future ones.
What if you discovered that the thinking that popped up was not you, so you don’t have to trust that what it is saying is true?
If I’d have known this growing up, it would have saved me a lot of trouble.
You see, when a person is stressed today about what their mind is saying, it’s because it’s likely the feeling they are trying to avoid today has appeared somewhere in their life before.
In other words, they are identified with the pain that thinking creates.
So it’s like the bad historical thing is happening at that moment when of course, it isn’t.
It was like a gentleman that came into a session, and his thinking was there was no point in the sessions because his wife would never love him.
He was clearly playing the victim, a well-used historical pattern for him.
So I asked him to write down that thought.
He wrote, “my wife will never love me, so there is no point”!
I asked him if that sentence was true?
He sighed and said “No”!
“So what is true”? I asked
“She can’t love me if I’m like this”!
You see, without me there to challenge the thinking, this man could have given up, that thinking wasn’t him, it was an outdated pattern.
He was so identified with being a victim in his life he never questioned it, he just accepted it and reacted accordingly and it was crushing his marriage.
The thinking can come in many forms, from the CEO who is convinced he is an imposter and someone will discover he’s not good at his job.
To the person who is convinced they don’t find their partner attractive because they have put on a bit of weight.
This thinking must be challenged so the root of the thinking can be addressed.
The most challenging thinking is when the person is “crazy in love”.
It’s called “crazy” for a reason.
People that think they are falling in love can make the strangest decisions as their chemical responses change their feelings which changes the thinking that they don’t challenge.
So imagine meeting someone we are attracted to, and that creates an inexplicable sense of wellbeing and comfort.
We are then bombarded with chemicals designed to create connection, attraction and excitement.
It’s such an addictive cocktail of chemicals that nature has brilliantly designed to drive the survival of the species.
The persons’ thinking believes it’s true love, it isn’t of course.
So on a backdrop of feeling so bad in a marriage, it’s not difficult to see why people can become so addicted to the feelings an affair brings.
Affairs create thinking that is irrational and dangerously life-changing.
In fact, you don’t have to look further than the 5% success rate of marriages that resulted from an affair to see the truth.
You see, the chemicals that affairs create will provide the person with the illusion based thinking that they have found something special.
Again poor reactive thinking.
Every person I have spoken to who is having an affair is blind to their danger and convinced they know what they are doing, and their emotional drivers are real.
They are unaware they are in a chemical bias heading for rapids.
The mind has the power to create thinking in relationships that help them believe the relationship is wrong for them.
All they have to do is consistently misunderstand their partners’ words and actions and self-protect themselves from their own perception of their marriage.
This process naturally deletes all the good in their connection, and connects them to everything that’s wrong.
This then creates the thinking that they need to be free of their marriage.
This situation is based on a bias, ineffective thinking and pain that has, on the one hand, been very real, but on the other hand of their own making.
The mind is a powerful tool and should be studied as it’s the creator of the universe you live in.
I’ll expand on point three tomorrow.