Don’t Believe Everything You Think
One of the things that can often trouble us as humans, is what some cultures refer to as “monkey mind”. If you’ve ever been to a zoo and had the opportunity to watch Colobus monkeys, this description is quite accurate. Constantly, moving, jumping, swinging, chattering, running, they seem to have endless energy. It all seems quite chaotic.
An endless stream and cacophony of thoughts that never stop, never quiet, circling, spiraling, keeping us awake at night and occupying too much energy during the day. Many of my clients describe this feeling as a hurricane, a tornado, a storm in their head.
Monkey mind…
The human subconscious is very powerful, and our subconscious parts understand exactly what messages to tell us to keep us “safe” and “protected”. The problem is that many of these messages simply do not serve us. These can take two forms, Limiting Beliefs, or Trauma.
Limiting Beliefs
Limiting Beliefs are generalizations, stereotypes, or ideas that we learned and ultimately accepted about ourselves, the world around us, or others. These beliefs ultimately limit us in some significant way.
My job as a coach is to help you explore what beliefs are no longer serving you.
However, challenging someone’s beliefs, (whether the client ultimately believes those thoughts or not), can be tenuous. It is important for me to be curious, respectful, un-opinionated and non-judgmental. We might explore the following questions: How true is that belief for you… really? How might it limit you? Where did you learn that? What evidence do you have to support that?
How would your life be different if you believed something else…?
Frozen in Time
The study of trauma in humans has revealed that we are often “frozen in time” when traumatic events occur in our lives. The word “trauma” literally means wound, shock, or injury. There are three main types of traumas, Acute, Chronic, or Complex. Acute trauma is the result of a single incident. Chronic trauma is repeated and prolonged as in the case of domestic violence or abuse. Complex trauma is exposure to varied and multiple traumatic events, that are often invasive and interpersonal.
When we experience any kind of trauma, we can respond to the threat in various ways to cope. We are all familiar with the fight, or flight response, but research has shown there are four, fight, flight, freeze and fawn.
Flight - Run
Fight - Protect yourself at all costs.
Freeze - Staying in place (i.e., frozen in fear)
Fawn - Heavily focused on others, to pacify, or please.
Beside the trauma we often think of as adults. There are 10 types of childhood trauma.
Personal — physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect.
Other family members - a parent who’s an alcoholic, a mother who’s a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, experiencing divorce of parents.
There are, of course, many other types of childhood trauma; bullying, racism, watching a sibling being abused, losing a caregiver, homelessness, a severe accident, etc.
When we experience a traumatic event, we tend to think neurologically of that experience and we tend to feel the emotions from the event, so our entire state of being – how we think and how we feel – becomes biologically stuck in the past.
Downward Spiral
Why is it important to understand how destructive our thoughts can be? Fueled by traumatized parts of our subconscious, or influenced by limiting beliefs, our thoughts can trigger a trauma response. Our bodies cannot distinguish between the physical experience of trauma and reliving that trauma in our mind.
When a traumatic, or near traumatic event occurs, the chemicals, Cortisol and Adrenaline are introduced into our system to help us survive. Those chemicals were incredibly helpful when we needed to run from a predator and decide whether to fight, run, or hide. In today’s world, that response can be triggered by a phone call, an email, a text message. Strong emotions such as anger, frustration, fear, anxiety, sadness, guilt, suffering, or shame can cause the same primitive response. It has been shown these chemicals stay in our bodies for up to 36 hours. If we experience just one triggering event each day, we are living in chronic stress.
When the fight-or-flight nervous system is switched on and stays on due to chronic stress, the body uses all its energy to deal with the constant threat it perceives from the outer world. The body has no energy remaining in its inner environment for growth and repair and will eventually compromise the immune system (I’ll talk about this more in a future blog).
Does it Serve You?
These two areas can introduce a lot of unhealthy messages from our subconscious that simply do not serve us.
I previously worked with a client who was struggling with self-doubt and an intense fear of “being in the spotlight”. This fear manifested itself in nearly every part of their life. As we began to explore the origins of this fear, they recalled an event from early childhood when they were nervous about giving a book report in front of their class at school. To calm them, their mother said, “you know, the world doesn’t revolve around you.” The fact that my client recalled that moment so clearly, even seeing herself in the kitchen, decades later, demonstrates the power of trauma. A seemingly, well-intended comment by mother, caused that little child to respond. Since that day, that little version of themself was frozen with self-limiting messages and a fear that grew in intensity with age. That little person reacted to mom’s well-intentioned comment with the message, “Be small. If you don’t put yourself out there, you won’t get hurt.”
One of the most useful tools in self-management is the ability to recognize that we are not our thoughts. Our thoughts can mislead us, give us false information. Circumstances can trigger parts of our subconscious that still follow limiting beliefs or are frozen in time with messages from past traumas.
Don’t believe everything you think
I will often kid when I first start working with my clients at the first opportunity and introduce them to a concept that often catches them off guard. “Don’t believe everything you think”.
This is one concept I believe I have introduced to every one of my clients.
For all the reasons I’ve shared in this blog, the ability to isolate and question one’s thoughts, is probably one of the most useful tools I can teach a client to utilize.
The concept is quite simple. When you find yourself troubled with a persistent thought. Question the thought internally by asking it the following questions:
Is it true?
Do I know, without I doubt, this thought is true?
Is it Important?
If it IS true, is it important?
Is it Useful?
If it IS true, does it serve me?
If you cannot answer YES to all three questions, dismiss the thought as untrue. If the thought comes back, challenge it again (and again). Over time the thought will lose its power and its message will gradually fade in its power over you.
One final thought, and an idea for another Blog.
How you respond to that thought.
Say for example, you are challenged with thoughts of fear, and you discover that fear is rooted in trauma you experienced as an 8-year-old. How would you talk to an 8-year-old about fear? Would you be critical, judgmental, and dismissive, or would you be loving, compassionate and understanding? That is how we need to defuse our destructive thoughts.
That is true self-care.