Stories We Tell Ourselves & Destructive Behaviors
It must have been during a Landmark Education seminar I went to in around 1998 where I learned to look at the stories we tell ourselves about our feelings and about situations. What am I making this mean? This helps to examine our thoughts, feelings, and perspectives; and perhaps doing so will prompt us to also to look at alternative options and choices.
I listened to a video by a psychotherapist who explained this practice so well—especially related to trying to change destructive behaviors—that I just want to quote her here:
"[We need to address] changing our relationship with our painful emotions. One of my painful feelings that I couldn't bear was that of despair and hopelessness. I had deep, deep bows of feeling despair and hopeless. So there's the feeling of despair and hopelessness; but there's also the story about it.
It's the story that's so frightening because the story is that despair and hopelessness feels like it's just going to go on forever. 'There's no hope. Nothing's going to change, so what's the point in even trying to look after myself? It's never going to get better.'
Once that story took a hold, there was no way I wasn't going to [do whatever destructive behavior].
I now see how it's possible to experience despair and hopelessness and recognize it as an experience. [I can say to myself,] 'I recognize I am experiencing hopelessness right now. This is what I'm experiencing.' So it's the capacity to doubt the story around it.
‘How do I know if nothing's going to change? How do I know what the future holds?’ Hopelessness and despair tells us we know what’s going to happen because it's using our emotional state right now to predict the future. With [healing destructive behavior,] I don't think it's just figuring out how to not [do destructive behavior] when you feel these things.
I really think it's about changing how we're experiencing our emotions. That comes from our relationship with ourselves, noticing the stories that we are believing about our feelings, and how we judge our feelings and judge ourselves for having certain feelings.
You might think your feelings are too big. Maybe you've been called over emotional or too sensitive. So now when you have big feelings, you just feel shame because you were shamed for them. And now you continue to shame yourself instead of maybe saying, 'I'm somebody who has some quite big feelings. Maybe I feel them intensely.'
We don't know how anyone else is experiencing their emotions. If you're somebody who uses [destructive behavior] to try to feel okay about yourself, to try and keep shame at bay, [you might think,] 'If I am good enough, if all these external things in the physical world are as they should be, then I can relax. And then I'll feel okay.'
What if the version of you that you are today is absolutely fine? What the version of you today is just enough? Maybe it's quite human, maybe it's our ego, Maybe it's our conditioning, that's going to want to say, ‘That's not enough. I can do better. I can be better.'
None of us live up to our potential, I believe, because we're human beings. We get tired. We get fed up. We get rebellious. We feel hopeless sometimes. We feel an anxious and we feel paralyzed--all of these experiences. When you are experiencing them, it can feel like you're the only person in the world feeling like this and you're really not.
[How we deal with healing] is we look at our mental and emotional health around [the destructive behavior] first; and then when we get that into a healthier place, behavior change starts to feel more possible.
These two blog posts I wrote can further dig into our feelings and thoughts: Letting Go of Painful Thoughts and Why We Thing Painful Thoughts.
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