04/04/2024
You're a slave to your emotions :)
But you don't have to be.
I've talked a lot lately about the behaviours that are hints you might not be your authentic self. These are the behaviors that are likely to damage your relationships with yourself, the people around you or your environment, give you undesirable thoughts, and hence give you an undesirable life (lying stealing gossiping hurting $3x misconduct drugs alcohol etc).
Maybe you've been paying closer attention to those lately. It doesn't have to be blatant behaviour with intent to harm - it can be as easy as staying as taking one of the many cheeses out of the staff lunchroom fridge, or being late for an appointment (stealing time), or using harsh words to shut someone down, or giving a little white lie to protect yourself (no I didn't eat that chocolate bar) or doing all the talking in a conversation.
Let's go deeper. What motivates behaviour? Your thoughts. Next time you catch yourself doing something not in line with your true self (ie something OUT of line) catch the thought that lead to it. "There's so many there, no one will notice" "I paid _____ for _____" "I've been here on time every day and no one cares" "Well they're the ones who _____." We often associate these thoughts with our personality or identity. We see these thoughts as fact when they pass through our head, but they are simply not. There are actually an infinite number of thoughts you could have in face of the same situation. If you catch these thoughts, they might sound unfortunately identical to the way your parents or adult figure spoke to you as a child (probably in relation to emotions you experienced as a child).
That brings us deeper. So what triggers different thoughts? E-M-O-T-I-O-N. In childhood based on what ever our experience is, the mind is conditioned to react to each emotion in a particular way. There are five major ones Anger, Joy, Fear, Worry and Sorrow.
In terms of behaviour - you feel something, then you think something and then you do something. What you think and what you do are usually exactly the same based on the last time you felt that emotion.
As a kid, you would feel emotions. Your parent would react a certain way to your emotion and intentionally or unintentionally provide feedback.
An example: Rachel was sad she can't make friends. She remembers a hard time in school either making friends too. She remembers telling her mom about it once. She realized her mom's reply "maybe if you do xyz differently that will help you." She never made the connection until adulthood, but forever more, when she felt sorrow or related to being left out, she manipulate herself to try and try again, never felt like herself in social situations, and found herself overriding every conversation only talking about herself in an attempt to impress. She thought she was giving people what they needed to connect with her, but in reality she was stealing people's time with a one sided conversation and thus unintentionally pushing them away. She caught the pattern and decided to match her own energy - she had a lot of love to give, but her magnet was turned the wrong way and sent people the other way. Instead, in response to sadness/loneliness instead of scrolling through social media hoping for likes, she started writing a blog. If she was in conversation if she wanted to speak, she decided she wanted to know more about the people she was talking to as decided to ask more questions that made her feel curious. She still let herself speak when she wanted to, but this change transformed her relationships. She honoured herself, while giving her emotions space to move in a new direction.
Emotions that are stuck, or not moving freely, are what lead us through the same cycles over and over again for possibly YEARS. I consider these stuck emotions the Infected Wound of your authentic self. The deeper the trauma, the larger the infection. It can all be healed.
