So Much Happier Blog
Taking the Leap
“Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something’s time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings.”
Sometimes, your only job in a situation is to let go and allow a thing to exit your life. Depending on the circumstances, actually accomplishing this can be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. There can be numerous reasons why we struggle with letting go, and it’s worth taking a look at them, because shining a light on the resistance usually helps us to find some clarity about what we’re doing and why. Once we have clarity, it’s easier to see what we need to do, and commit to doing it. When the task makes sense, we tend to feel better about taking action.
Here are the most common reasons we resist letting go of something (or someone):
Fear. If this is the best we’ve had yet, wouldn’t we be crazy to let it go? What if it’s our last chance? What if never find something this good again, let alone better? What if this was a fluke, a once-in-a-lifetime chance? This is fear talking. While it’s true that change is one of life’s only constants, and nothing will ever be exactly the same as this opportunity, just think about this for a minute. If you’re reading this, you live on a planet that is home to roughly seven and a half billion people, every one of those unique. Each of them wants roughly the same thing—safety, love, understanding, acceptance, validation. Each of them is constantly having new ideas about how they can be most successful at, and have the most fun in the process of, getting those things. Doesn’t it make sense that there are a lot of other people out there who want to go about those things in ways that you would appreciate? Let’s recall that seven and a half billion is a LOT of people. Some of those people you’d really like have available jobs to offer or recommend, they have hobbies, they want to be in relationships, they want to find ways to make the world a better place. When you’re holding on tightly, desperately, to something that isn’t right for you, you’re not out there finding your people where they are right now.
Deserving. On some level, not always immediately conscious, you may think you still need to “fix,” understand, or resolve something about your situation before it’s ok to let it go. Now, sometimes that’s a great idea. Feeling complete with a situation before you move on is a beautiful thing, and sometimes with a little thought and consideration, you can gain skills and wins for everyone involved. Honestly, though, in my experience, this is rare. Often we hope for concurrence from and peace with all parties involved in a situation, and getting to this may not be possible, because the only person you’re in control of is you. It takes two (or more) to tango, and to make peace holistically with a situation. Sometimes the best thing for everyone is for you to exit despite collective discomfort. In this case, you can be as clear and loving with your behavior as possible while still staying firm about your intentions, and then vote with your feet. The rest is not up to you. As far as the understanding piece, understanding and wisdom accrue in layers. Don’t you find that your understanding of situations from your past is exponentially more dimensional now because of the life experience you’ve amassed since then? This process will continue throughout your life. If there’s some key information you feel you need in order to make a good decision, fine, but you’re never going to resolve every possible loose end before it’s time for a change. And you deserve to make the best possible decision for yourself. Everyone does as long as they are not hurting others or violating their basic human rights—that’s what the concept of free will (balanced with a few moral considerations) is all about.
Disappointment. We tend to resist processing the reality that things we wanted did not materialize in the way we hoped, because if we really let that sink in, we’d have to feel the resulting sadness and loss, and then reimagine the future. It can be exhausting to go through all of this. On the other hand, it’s also exhausting to repress these feelings, we’re just not trained to notice this kind of energy drain and appreciate how it is aggregating over time! The answer is to learn tools that can assist you with breaking your discomfort into manageable chunks and handle releasing it in an appropriate manner. Enter EFT! This is my absolute favorite tool for the job. Not only does it help you get the job done efficiently, but it can also make the process more enjoyable and empowering than you might think. It can also facilitate better creative problem solving and faster leaps to new insights.
Beliefs. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we tend to encapsulate what we learn from a situation as a belief or two that we will hold as guiding principle going forward. If the new or reinforced beliefs are positive, as in, “I can and do choose to be in relationships only with people who are kind,” this is helpful to our development. If they’re limiting, as in, “People are jerks when you really get to know them,” we can wind up having big problems with trust, building new relationships, and having a social life that feels supportive. Often, these beliefs sneak by our conscious minds such that we don’t even realize that we could change our experience by rewriting them. Affirmations and mindfulness are excellent tools for working with mental habits and beliefs, but to address the deep emotional reasons why you formed those deep beliefs in the first place, we need tools for interacting with the subconscious, like Tapping, hypnosis, or NLP.
Real change takes work, but in my world, it’s always worth it! When you’re willing to do the work of becoming aware of, and releasing, the internal clutter produced by past events, the return is clarity, relief, increased energy, and greater wisdom. You may still need to go through various steps in transforming your relationships to the past, the present, and people (because no one’s development is ever complete), but you’ll be able to get unstuck and see more clearly along the way. Once you’ve handled your resistance to allowing positive change to happen, greater possibilities open up for you, and life stays fresh and interesting.
Pushing the Eject Button On Fear
“There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.”
As we finish the first week of 2019, you may be fully invested in New Year’s resolutions; you may be already resisting yours; or perhaps you didn’t make them at all. Whatever you choose to do around this tradition, I believe that the most important thing is always to pursue your goals in a steady flow of self-acceptance, calmly learning and readjusting all along the way. If this sounds “soft” or unlikely to produce, that’s because we’ve all been so indoctrinated with the idea that we’re inherently lazy that we may think we have to ratchet ourselves up into a state of mania in order to make any progress; that we have to constantly channel our inner drill sergeant if we’re going to motivate ourselves; that nothing but constant a$$ kicking will get the job done.
Sadly, for most people, this is a terrible idea, born of an extremely cynical view of human nature and thousands of years of raw fear seeming to be the best life preserver in a harsh world. From a purely evolutionary standpoint, this idea may have served us well, but as modern humans we suddenly find ourselves in the opposite of our traditional state—rather than fighting the elements to survive on a daily basis, we now inhabit an overpopulated planet on which the most valuable skills are intellectual and social—the more able we are to learn quickly as technology changes, and to negotiate and de-escalate violence in favor of fair long-term solutions, the more equipped we are for life in today’s world. It turns out that turning harshness and shame on anyone, including ourselves, tends to foment anger and resentment. Inspiration and genuine excitement about creating a better future are exponentially more powerful as an engine for getting us up and going each day, and for moving us through blocks and setbacks that will arise in the course of any project; they also tend to naturally motivate others around us in positive ways without any additional effort, because enthusiasm is infectious!
One of the reasons people tend to resist working with specific goals is that they don’t feel up to dealing with disappointment—which, by the way, will be a part of any process. Sorry, but that’s life on this chaotic planet! Unfortunately, many of us learn from observing adults around us when we’re young that disappointment=impending failure and doom, and it means that we’re stupid/cursed/incapable, or whatever other counterproductive adjective may have been on the menu. The truth is that disappointment may come and go, but it doesn’t have to mean anything except that you’re still learning about how to succeed. Handling negative emotions as they arise, and moving on when you’ve absorbed the helpful message in the feedback you’ve received (and had a chance to rest and renew), is the name of the game. Anytime you take an underwhelming result as a referendum on who you are or what’s possible for you is when you begin a downward spiral that will cost you a lot of time and pain. Falling back into fear and harshness as a hard-wired self-preservation habit is understandable, since throughout so much of human history we didn’t have a lot of time or mental and emotional space in which to consider and practice the best ways to do things. Now, though, we have a lot more access to the higher mind, and we can choose to come off autopilot by noticing our self-talk, and how we’re feeling as we go about our days. Shining a light on our own patterns and being willing to address the ones that don’t serve us through Tapping or some other method that accelerates change will allow us to grow far more quickly and easily in the directions we choose for ourselves.
Whether you’ve made specific resolutions or not, remember that it’s rare for any project to speed forward to the finish line without impediments. One of the most valuable skill sets you can ever acquire is the discernment to note challenging emotions and the patience to follow a process that will resolve them, help you build experiential knowledge, and get yourself moving again. This skill set renders you basically unstoppable! On the other hand, if you don’t build it, you’ll keep repeating the same patterns over and over without understanding why you can’t ever seem to get out of a confusing loop you can’t even see. It sure can seem like there’s just something wrong with you if this is where you are, but that’s not it. You’re in the groove of some pretty ancient wiring that needs attention and replacement. It may not happen overnight, but you can change the way you operate and break out of the old, constrictive ruts. When you do, you’ll see the tendency to rail at yourself for your imperfections for what it is—an old, outdated habit that you can replace with far more effective and happiness-inducing mental software.
Year in Review
“Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.”
Despite the fact that this month is a whirlwind for many people, most of us are still managing to find odd moments to judge ourselves against the hopes and goals we had for ourselves in 2016. We may feel good about our achievements, but we’re also quite likely to be dealing with disappointment about where we may have missed out on things we wanted very much. No matter how good life is, some part of us is aware of the ways in which things could be better, and it prowls the corners of the mind resenting this gap and grumbling about the injustice of it.
Perhaps now is a good time to actually tune into that voice and see what it has to say. Periodically assessing where you are is an important part of continually moving forward, and the voice of discontent can be valuable. Taking a few quiet moments to write down how 2016 went for you personally can help orient you as you naturally begin to think about the approach of 2017. Much of this past year, you were likely doing the best you could. If you weren’t, the constructive thing is not to berate yourself, but to gain understanding about why. Ask yourself: Where do you feel you got stuck this year? What are you disappointed and frustrated about that maybe you’ve been avoiding admitting? Stuffing down these feelings won’t help you resolve anything emotionally, and it also won’t support your learning and growth going forward. What would you do over if you could and why? How would you like to be able to handle a situation like this in the future if it comes up again? And what skills will you need to work on in order to become the kind of person who can easily handle it that way?
Doing this before you get drawn into the annual storm of New Year’s resolutions peer pressure will reveal the desires that are most important to you. If you must resolve to change something, let it be supportive of your movement toward the goals that are authentic to you. If you are having trouble figuring out why something is so hard for you, it might be time to call in an expert or a trusted friend for a perspective check. You might need to get a little creative about working with your subconscious to clear out problems that have been dogging you (Tapping, NLP, and hypnosis are great ways to address this kind of issue, and there are plenty of others.) Even though recurring patterns can be extremely galling, know that you can make progress on these if you are willing to keep working on them and trying things until you find something that works for you. Everyone gets exhausted sometimes. When you do, it’s ok to step back, renew yourself, and then get back to it.
So, give yourself a break already. Nothing in life ever goes exactly according to plan. That’s the nature of the human experience. Enjoy any holidays you celebrate this month with zest, and celebrate what went right for you this year with every fiber of your being. In fact, that would be a helpful resolution for 2017—I will celebrate everything that goes right! I will acknowledge something that brought me joy at the end of every day, and celebrate the happiness of others as well! If you acknowledge where you are discontent, and then keeping moving back toward focus on what’s working, it will be easier to keep yourself feeling happy and enthusiastic throughout the new year. If you can do that, all your hopes and dreams become more possible.
When You Feel Like You're Just Done
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.”
Further to my blog from last week, this week I’d like to discuss out how the aftermath of disappointment can bear strong resemblance to grief. The need to grieve when we lose a loved one may seem self-evident; the idea that losing out on something we’ve hoped and worked for may send us into similar emotional territory may seem like an indulgent overstatement. Yet, depending on the intensity of our desire and the perceived scarcity of what was lost, the similarities can be striking.
Let’s think for a moment about how the five stages of grief, as conceived by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying, apply in the case of disappointment. I’m sure you’ve been through an event that you can think back on to remember how you may have gone through these stages even if it was a relatively quick process, in the case of something less intense. (Of course, not everyone does go through all five stages in a noticeably, and they can occur in a non-linear or simultaneous way sometimes, but each of the experiences probably seems at least somewhat familiar to you.)
· Denial: In this stage, we may say things like, “How is this possible? How did that even happen?” We feel shocked, confused, disoriented, and unable to wrap our minds around an event. We may downright refuse to believe that the apparent result is true because we desperately want it not to be. We may be overwhelmed by the enormity of the change we will experience if the result is indeed true. If we don’t move beyond this, we are doomed to remain out of step with the reality that others perceive, and that can create a wide range of problems in daily living and relating to others.
· Anger: An activating emotion, anger tends to make us want to do something, anything, to feel less hurt, even if our chosen action isn’t rational or helpful. We want to lash out, blame others, blame ourselves, and rant about the injustice of it all. We want to feel that we have the power to steer our own lives when we feel out of control, so we look for something to dominate. If we don’t find a way to move through this, we become one of those perpetually grumpy people who no one really wants to be around. We may also seem arrogant in our apparent belief that bad things should never happen to us. Others, sure, but not us.
· Bargaining: We look for someone who seems like they might have power to help and beg them to do something, since our own attempts at control through anger weren’t effective, or we assumed they wouldn’t be. This is another attempt at regaining a sense of power over our life circumstances; that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can mean a lot of energy expended in trying desperately to avoid dealing with our very natural feelings of sadness and loss. If we don’t move out the other side of this pattern, we become chronically tense because of a vigilant need to ignore how we really feel, and we represent to ourselves that we can’t handle our own lives and emotions. We don’t have to do everything alone, and with appropriate help, most people are capable of regaining balance, even if the idea of trying seems scary.
· Depression: Here we come face to face with the reality of our loss and the new normal that now presents itself. Our grief, sadness, and hurt become more fully apparent. It’s hard to imagine being happy again, or experiencing better results in the future, because we feel downcast and all out of faith. We may become afraid of experiencing other losses because it’s so hard to process this one, and/or we have leftover emotions from past experiences that we’ve never processed, and it all groups together and seems to overpower us. The negative stories we habitually tell ourselves about our patterns and potential may keep us spiraling downward even if, at moments, we’d really like to feel better. If we don’t resolve this state of affairs, we stay listless and unable to experience joy, and that’s obviously not a great way to live.
· Acceptance: At some point, it may become easier to acknowledge the new normal and feel resigned to it. Even better, it’s possible to come to a new understanding of the richness inherent in the upsetting experience we’ve had, or at least put it into a healthy perspective that allows us to return to a satisfying life. It takes work to find the strength, resolve, and creativity to make sense of loss, since it can so often seem senseless—I don’t think many people go around claiming that being human is easy! Without the application of earnest effort, though, it becomes all too easy to become embittered, in which case you’re a consistent downer to yourself and those you interact with. It’s generally a lot more satisfying to feel like you’re contributing to positive outcomes for yourself and others, so it’s important to keep reminding yourself that you can choose to do that even though life is messy and often difficult.
In case you haven’t read any of my previous blogs, at no point do I mean to say that emotions are to be ignored, “powered through,” or denigrated. Emotions are absolutely an important part of a healthy relationship with oneself as a functioning person. They give us immediate and compelling feedback about what’s out of alignment in our lives, as well as what’s wonderful and right. Moving through emotion means, at least to me, admitting the emotions, finding a way to express them that won’t trample on the rights of others (without acting on them, in other words, at least not at first), and then being willing to allow them to transform so that the energy wrapped up in them can be released back to you. While this can all happen in numerous ways, including less conscious ones, the most satisfying way I know to do this is with EFT/Tapping. Its use can be deeply comforting, and provides a framework for clearing out emotional detritus that is not serving you. You don’t lose the memories and the experience you gained when you let the emotions release and transform, but you do gain a wonderful sense of freedom that I, and my clients, find to be a tremendous relief.
When you find yourself experiencing disappointment, remember that it’s a normal part of being human to go through this sometimes. Life can be pretty chaotic, and we definitely don’t always get what we hope for. That doesn’t have to make life futile or uninteresting if you have ways to express how you feel in a healthy manner and are willing to learn tools for creating balance after loss. There’s no standard timeline for finding equilibrium, so try to be patient with yourself; sometimes you’ll have to go back over the same territory numerous times. That’s ok too. Extending care to yourself until you’re able to feel more normal again is worth it, because anything else will erode your quality of life as you fight against yourself. Hang in there, kid. Give yourself some time and space, ask for help if you need it, and remember that your enthusiasm has eventually returned after other difficulties and losses. The human spirit is a resilient thing.
When the World Breaks Your Heart
“There’s always failure. And there’s always disappointment. And there’s always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.”
Tomorrow is Election Day here in the U.S., and on the following day we will know the result of the races so many have been running and working on for well over a year. The time, energy, and money spent on these campaigns amount to a massive investment, and passions are running hot about who the winners will be. Anytime we commit to a goal and pursue it with abandon, we run the risk of being sorely disappointed, and one thing that’s clear from late-breaking polls is that there will be large numbers disappointed in the aftermath of most races. These feelings will only be intensified by the convictions many hold about the dire importance of their candidates’ victories; political policy is one of the things that gets at our most strongly held worldviews about what is right and good.
This blog, then, is for everyone who will be disappointed in some way on November 9th, but also for anyone who has worked for a deeply significant goal of any sort, only to miss the mark in a heartbreaking letdown. No one can escape moments of disappointment and loss in life—this is part of what it is to be human—so how do we cope and regroup on the other side of such loss?
Before I address this question, let’s take a moment for a side trip to review some relevant principles found in many traditions of thought:
· Nothing that happens to us has only a single possible interpretation. We get to decide what the events in our lives mean. This truth gives us the opportunity to learn, grow, and become empowered by everything we experience if we so choose
· Even if you don’t believe that things happen for a reason, your choices about how to react to life events can allow all experience to serve your own and others’ highest good
· In the face of difficult, even awful, events, we can uphold what is best about humanity just because that is the kind of person we choose to be. We only have the power to govern our own actions, so that is where we can most effectively focus our efforts
· On a planet that now sustains billions of people, and more every day, we cannot avoid other people, or the natural differences of opinion that result from the interaction of billions of unique viewpoints. Cultivating compassion for others means challenging ourselves to appreciate our common humanity even when our differences irritate us
· The vast majority of people are basically after all the same things: A safe, peaceful environment and the prosperity to take care of their families so that they can enjoy long, happy lives
· People who are violent, selfish, and fearful are not happy, healthy people. (People who feel loved, safe, and secure, and who are able to receive necessary health care in the case of serious imbalance, do not behave this way.) Such people deserve our compassion and help, at the same time that everyone else deserves to be protected from their violence
· Nothing is permanent. In order to live a happy life, it helps to work on the ability to let go of rigidity about what should happen at any given moment; instead, we can strive to maintain a sense of humor, being present in the here and now, and appreciating what is good already even when our eyes are on an attractive goal
Now, on to our question. When the battering ram of a major disappointment knocks us down, we’re likely to confront a wash of emotions, including confusion, anger, sadness, and possibly jealousy or resentment, among others. Because we’re not generally taught how to process emotions, sometimes the best we know how to do is to stew in those emotions until the intensity subsides a bit and we’re better able to sweep them under the rug. They’re then hidden, but still gnaw at our faith and sense of self for as long as they remain undealt with. We then jump to mental decisions about what our experience means, and these are likely to follow what we learned by observing family members’ thinking patterns. You may do this without even noticing, thinking that the interpretation is obvious, whether that’s “The world is going to hell in a handbasket,” or “Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and corrupt and ruining everything,” or simply, “I can never get what I want.” It’s normal to experience disappointment sometimes and have difficulty reimagining life without the hoped-for results. However, if we don’t make an effort to be conscious and constructive with our thinking about what happened, we’re likely to spiral downward into the swamp of those hidden feelings every time the subject comes up again.
Feelings follow thought, so if you want to feel better about something, part of doing so is elevating your mental game. Challenging yourself to find the good that has, or might, come out of an upsetting loss can make space for awareness of new potential paths that will both honor and build on your experience. When you find yourself mentally harping on the negative aspects of the situation, mistakes you made, ways in which you feel you were victimized, work to redirect your thinking to how going through that made you stronger or deeper, and make note of the ways in which that remains difficult. You may need to talk through things with a friend, or find a book about someone who endured disappointment to become someone you admire, in order to find new ways to mentally frame your experience. Unlearning old mental habits takes time and effort, so don’t be surprised if it’s harder than it seems like it should be. There’s a lot of great work being done on positive thinking, but don’t misunderstand—this is not all we have to do to work out of disappointment. It’s not a replacement for feeling, expressing, and allowing the transformation of your emotions.
The emotional side of things is where I see a lot less work being done and made available to others, but it’s absolutely essential to our health and well being, as well as our ability to return to effectiveness in everything we do. If we don’t deal with the lingering emotional effects of disappointment, it’s all too easy to let them fester and shape our sense of identity. So here’s a process for clearing out old emotional stuff that isn’t serving you:
· As mentioned above, first you give yourself license to feel it. We’re so often taught through the words and actions of others that emotions are weak, useless impediments to be steamrolled so that we can live life on our own terms. I find this to be horribly inaccurate, and dangerous in the long term, as repressed emotions have very real effects on our health. Feeling uncomfortable emotions is not the point, but it is a necessary step in the process. Emotions have messages for you that will help you, but you have to buck common thinking and be willing to tune into them in order to receive and leverage those messages.
· Next, you need to express your emotions. I find that the most helpful way to do this is by speaking out what you feel while Tapping. Doing so helps your body to relax and let go of the stressful effects of difficult emotions until they’re far less bothersome. Expression while Tapping also helps to enable new insights and thinking that will be more helpful. It can greatly accelerate your ability to let go of those old negative thought loops that are otherwise extremely difficult to disrupt.
· Lastly, you need to reach for a willingness to allow change. Even if you’re not sure how it could come about, just the openness to finding comfort and positive transformation will allow your body and emotional system to continue to release old, stuck impediments and poor thinking patterns, particularly if you continue to use EFT throughout this part of the process.
All of this can sound pretty foreign in the beginning, but with a little practice it becomes such a relief to be able to actually admit and transform how you feel, and free up your thinking so you can make real progress. Disappointment and loss need not define how you think of yourself or what you can achieve in the future. There is actually a process you can follow that will lead you upward and onward toward better things. You can learn to work with and customize it until it works well for your unique needs. Periodic heartbreak at disappointment is something you may continue to experience throughout your life, since there will always be injustice, mistakes, accidents, and clashes. Learning to honor and eventually transform it can make you a better, more compassionate, more sane human being.
Since we started within the context of political elections, I’ll round back with a few parting thoughts for when your disappointment is a matter of a goal missed or postponed (though of course these apply beyond the political sphere as well). It’s fine to want what you want, but let’s recall that no one can know everything, or clearly see all the future effects of any event; it’s helpful to have the humility to acknowledge that your interpretation of what’s best for the world is just that—an interpretation. Of course you’re important! You’re also one of billions of people on this planet. Sometimes your ego is going to want to be able to dominate the whole world, but I’m pretty sure that’s never going to happen, so let’s maybe try to have a sense of humor about that! Even the most famous historical figures never commanded absolutely everything in creation, and there’s more competition now than ever before! On the upside, though, there’s also more cooperation than ever before, and exciting possibilities for future solutions in which you can take part. Give yourself some time to recover, address your thinking and your emotions, and you can find a new path forward to pursue whatever excites your interest next. A world of opportunity will be waiting for you when you’re ready to rejoin it.
It's Not You, It's Me
“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”
In last week’s blog, we looked at how disappointments large and small, sustained over time, can tempt us to take on limiting and destructive beliefs about ourselves and the world. This week I want to focus on a related tendency I’ve observed, equally as problematic and possibly even more pervasive. This is the tendency that many of us have to feel disappointment or frustration, and then turn it quickly and harshly back against ourselves as anger.
In her excellent book Tapping into Wealth, Margaret Lynch includes some great work on how to notice what you’ve decided certain experiences mean about you, who you are and what is possible for you. Uncovering the beliefs about yourself that came about in response to difficult events can be a real eye-opener, because while the beliefs may seem quite familiar when you think about it, you may have no idea where they came from or why they’re there. They probably just seem true, the way things are. Working with these beliefs and reshaping them is a revolutionary experience that can change the entire tenor of your life. However, it’s just as important to look forward and find ways of not forming brand-new limiting beliefs every passing day, and this can be even more tricky. You have to notice how it happens to stop doing it.
I recently had an experience through which I realized very clearly how vicious my self-talk can become when I’m upset or disappointed about something. It wasn’t even triggered by anything all that important, just something that was causing me some garden-variety stress and annoyance that I was tapping about, and I suddenly had a vivid memory of being a young child that seemed connected to the problem at hand. I was probably under ten years old in the memory, and I was so angry and frustrated at myself because there was a skill I was trying to learn that I just could not do correctly yet. All the feelings of frustration, and a seemingly disproportionate sense of rage, as well as feelings of being trapped, welled up. (I never cease to be amazed that such a volume of emotion can be stored and flare with a vengeance when an old memory is triggered, even one you haven’t thought of in years, and that now seems unimportant from an intellectual standpoint!) In this memory, I was just so angry at myself, and I felt that anger in the present as a physical burning sensation all throughout my torso. I remember telling myself that I couldn’t do anything right, and that I’d never learn the new skill because I was just hopeless.
I’m not sure where I got all this, because my parents really tried to encourage us to be positive, persistent, and to put in the work when we were trying to learn something. Who knows? We all get angry and frustrated, and maybe I was just tired and burned out that day. Whatever the reason for the pattern, I recognized this as something I do from time to time internally to this day, and I barely even notice it happening. I generally don’t stop to think about it, and I’ve never seen it so clearly as I did in this memory. I kept tapping on the anger, frustration, and the feeling of being trapped until it all subsided. I was left with a resolve to watch for this habit of thought in the future and work to arrest negative self-talk when I get frustrated by something. I also felt much less concerned with the thing that was contributing to my original stress and annoyance in the present day.
It’s obvious to me in retrospect that when we’re learning new skills, we always have to endure a period of rank incompetence, which really isn’t any fun, but is completely normal. No one is born with skills at, really, anything. Learning is always a process; just because we can’t do something on the first try, that doesn’t mean we’re not able to learn it at all, or that we’re stupid, or useless, or anything else dire. But in the moment, when emotion overtakes us, we’re not thinking logically. We’re far more likely to overreact and decide that our current difficulties “mean” something about us that they don’t actually mean at all. Boy, did I ever do that in that childhood memory! If we can gain clarity about some of the formative experiences that set a negative pattern for us, that creates a path toward undoing them by targeting those experiences with tapping, or NLP, or hypnosis, or some other technique that involves both the memories and a physical element. Techniques that involve the body have proven to be the most successful in creating positive emotional change that sticks.
Next time you find that you’re ranting at yourself when you’re angry or frustrated, ask yourself what this feeling of self-recrimination reminds you of, and think back to the earliest time you can remember feeling something like this. You might be surprised at the answer you get from the old memory banks, and the outdated anger at yourself you might still be holding onto. If you haven’t learned how to tap, hop to it! It’s easy, and I know I’m grateful for it every day that I use it to ease my stresses, whether old or new. When you diminish the power of old emotions, it can be astonishing how your current emotions will calm as well. And keeping your current emotions from spiraling too far out of control diminishes the likelihood that you will reinforce habits of reflexive anger at yourself that have no earthly use in the creation of a happy life.
Slings and Arrows
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
It’s normal to experience disappointments in the course of your daily life. These can stop you short many times each day, if we’re talking about small disappointments such as just missing a green light, finding that your grocery store is out of one of your favorite items, or having a friend cancel an outing you had planned together. Now, while they might be jarring, most of these don’t make much of an impact on your overall picture—but larger disappointments certainly can. In fact, they can be the genesis of negative beliefs that don’t serve you at all, and that may run your behavior for decades after they’re created. An event that may have seemed insignificant to others can start you down a path of fear and limited thinking, whittling the cornucopia of possible choices you have in any given moment down to a handful of uninspiring options.
Let’s look at a few ways in which this can play out:
· Most of us have a memory of a parent, even the most excellent one, overreacting to something we did when we were relatively small. Perhaps we were playing happily and decided to add a work of art to the wall of the family home. There was a sense of excitement in the idea of making something beautiful (at least to us) and sharing that with a parent. When it came time for the big reveal, we displayed the opus proudly only to be faced with the fury of someone who now had to find a way to clean it up, and thought we should have known better. That feels like a slap in the face when our intentions are innocent and happy. An unfortunate memory like this can impress us in ways that last a lifetime. We may come away from it with beliefs such as, “I can’t do anything right,” “No one wants what I have to give,” or “My family doesn’t understand or appreciate me.” And such beliefs can corrode one’s enthusiasm, creativity, and confidence in subconscious ways that are powerful, but can remain mysterious, because you may not even remember the event as you get older.
· The first few years of school usually hold some difficult social situations. Kids start relating to each other in more complex ways, and experience the results of others learning through trial and error. Most of us experience at least a betrayal or two, fights, resentments, and competitions for attention. While everyone learns, so many disappointments and hurt feelings proceed from these social experiments. If patterns emerge, we may come away with beliefs like, “No one likes me,” “Everyone is mean and it’s not even worth trying,” or even just “I hate school.” There’s often little formal instruction at educational institutions on general communication, conflict resolution, negotiation, sharing, and other essential skills, and these beliefs can remain ingrained if we don’t figure out better ways of relating and coping on our own.
· In high school, most kids experience life with a high degree of angst in the areas of identity, social acceptance, and achievement, whether academic, athletic, or artistic. Popularity is often the coin of the realm, so everyone jostles for position both through both attempting to prove their own worth and attempting to disprove others’ worth in order to seem more important. It’s normal for kids to play with dominance tactics, including those designed to provoke or humiliate others. Less competitive, more naturally cooperative kids can have a hard time dealing with these status games, and end up feeling stung and embittered by confrontations. Most of us rack up more experiences of betrayal, embarrassment, and disappointment during these years; these memories can remain particularly painful because we’re experiencing many things for the first time. We may assume that this is how all such situations will go in the future. We don’t realize that our peers will continue to grow and mature, as well as gain experience, confidence and clarity, and so will we. A humiliation experienced at this time of heightened hormones and emotions can seem like death and destruction on a scale that adults find hard to understand. We may begin to believe that, “I’ll never get what I want,” “I’m not attractive,” or something general like “People are horrible.”
· As we enter adulthood, we understand that we are now more responsible for our own choices. We start having to sink or swim, making decisions independently about relationships and leisure time, life direction, health, diet and fitness, and financial matters, and bear the consequences. Mistakes made here can quickly color our faith in our own abilities, since we’re “supposed” to be able to handle ourselves by now, but in reality may still have many gaps in understanding of basic mechanics, and a lack of supportive habits, which must be built over time. Beliefs like, “I can’t keep up with everything I need to do,” “I’ll never be able to support myself financially,” or “I’ll never be able to get where I want to go in life” may result from early failures.
· At any time, we can experience life-changing disappointments such as the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, or the sudden loss of a job. Unfortunate beliefs like, “I’ll never recover,” “I’ll never find love again,” or “I’m a loser” may spring into being.
Did any of those beliefs sound familiar to you? Disappointments affect all of us, and yet there isn’t much help available for actually processing the often overwhelming emotions and the negative beliefs that result from them in everyday life. Most people either talk things through with family or friends, or see a psychological professional to gain perspective on the situation, but usually neither of these addresses the trauma we may be holding in the physical body or the emotional patterns that keep us limited. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know what I’m going to say here—techniques with a somatic (meaning involving the body) element seem to be the most helpful for supporting rapid change in these areas. In my world, there’s just nothing like EFT/Tapping for shaking limitations loose and helping us to shift our understanding of past events and their role in shaping who we are. Using it helps us to gently but effectively let go of the adverse effects of painful events that are now part of the distant past. Once you have a chance to lighten the emotional load you’ve been carrying from past disappointments, a new world of possibility opens, and that, to me, is one of the most exhilarating experiences there is.