Battling my negative thougts
Today I had a great session with my life coach, yes they are a real thing, and we discussed certain events in my life that caused me stress and hardship in my life. Some of these events were started back in High school, a place where kids are notoriously evil, and they stuck with me from that time forward. Silly I know, but it’s amazing when you are blindsided by kids like that.
Growing up, I lived in a small beach community with MAYBE less than 100 people who lived there year round, and most were elderly or grown-ups. From what I can remember, there were a total of 6 kids there year round. I remember, I never saw an African-American person until I was 7. Mayberry. But I loved it. It helped me have an amazingly great imagination and my sister and I played together and formed a tight bond.
In High school, it was a blend of many schools in our district into one, was my first time meeting different clichés that I was not used to. Call it Naïve or call it just being a good guy, I just assumed that everyone was nice like we were raised. I saw many types of “rich” kids that know what to say to break down a person and begin to look at their own life. It was foreign to me to think anything other than be nice and happy. Then there were the ‘smart’ kids, Well that was like a kick in the gut for me. I was smart. I am smart. I had ADD along with a learning difficulty of comprehending what I read and since learning issues as that were not talked about much, I was just labeled as ‘slow ‘ or ‘dumb’ and that can cause stress for a young mind. I know I’m not yet it wasn’t until I was older and correctly diagnosed for ADD and a learning challenge was I able to fully understand I wasn’t all of those things yet the damage was already done to my self-thinking.
People don’t fully understand that negative thinking can help pave the road to further decision making. The need of feeling acceptance, in retrospect, could have allowed me to fall into the grasp of my first ‘love’ that turned mentally and physically abusive. I did get a wonderful son out of that and for that I’m happy. I was never raised with abusive relationships or people in my life so how could I have stayed? That’s a question many people aren’t able to answer and may never and it’s that question that is so hard for me to answer; ‘Why have I stayed with those negative thoughts for so long?’
WORDS
Those thoughts are just words much like reading a test or email. They are just words but it’s the inflection and context we decide to hear them in. That’s how fights get started. We ‘hear’ what we want from words. “I said I don’t like pizza” is that someone getting snarky and stressing the words I SAID or is that someone telling me what they told someone else or telling me what they may have said but I didn’t hear it? So many possibilities from one phrase. Similarity to the words someone said to young me. I had the power to decide how I interpret them. Easy right?
So as life progressed, I can only imagine how I acted and spun words in my favor. Well the ‘good’ news is, since my stroke, my thinking is more positive however, the old me is still hidden inside my head and acts as my rope holding me back sometimes. And that’s where today comes in. My life coach gave me a simple activity to do to release those negative thoughts. “They are just words”. Write them down and close my eyes and imagine someone with whom I hold in high regards, and imagine what they would tell young me and me today. When finished, tear them up or burn it and release those silly ideas. You know it helped. It’s a process so it’s not going to change overnight.
But it will change because I’m worth it!!
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