Archive for April 22nd, 2012
Negative thinking
It’s easy to destroy. It’s easy to allow all kinds of negative thought run rampant within your mind. It’s also just as easy to consciously turn the table, and transform the flip side of the negative comment you have made about yourself. It only takes conscious awareness, and practice. If you never played tennis, and went on the court for the first time, I would wager to say that you might not have a game that would take you to the national tennis championship. It takes practice, and a lot of practice at that! If anyone puts you down, in any manner, in any way, it is not about you! It is about the other person’s perceptions! Now, if you put yourself down, then somewhere along the line you bought into the false belief that if only you were such and such, then you would be worthy. If only you had this or that, then you would feel whole and complete. Guess what? Such and such and this and that will never make you feel worthy, whole and complete. Because once you attain whatever “it” is, your mind would find yet another reason to feel worthy, and the vicious cycle would go on.
The same is true of your view of Self. If you have placed a certain criteria to feel worthy, then you have placed a lie into your mind. If you are overweight, and put yourself down because of it. Your self-respect has taken a beating here. You can’t respect anyone so “stupid” as to let this disaster happen, who failed to see it coming, who failed to take appropriate remedial action, who didn’t even know what that might have been and it’s too late now. Your anger at yourself is turning into poison in your veins. The problem is not the offender’s behavior, the problem is your immature, non-rational reaction to it. He is not the problem, you are. “We have met the enemy and he is us,” as Pogo used to say in the cartoons. It was the combination of anger, stress and negative attitudes in a context of self-doubt, worthlessness, and inferiority that did you in. Each of these components of your problem needs to be identified properly and put in a manageable perspective.
When a problem frustrates you, you should either do something constructive about it or learn to accept it. Negative thinking leads to exaggerated emotions and keeps you from feeling calm and content to confronting problems in constructive ways. Instead of seeing problems as normal, tolerable, manageable, challenges to overcome, people with habits of negative thinking often overreact and blow things out of proportion. Negative thoughts continually create bad feelings and cause insecurity or anger over present and future events.
Lets say you get a phone call and your told you have been rejected for another potential job. You feel worthless; you feel it is hopeless; that you will never find a job. Your worry about how your gonna pay you bills and provide for your family. You feel worthless and inadequate. Yet when your operating out of this emotional thinking you, if you feel stupid or adequate, then you must be stupid and adequate. If you feel like a failure, then you must be a failure. The problem with emotional thinking is that you cannot separate how you feel from who you are.
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