Whenever I work on myself, I don’t reframe things in my mind in an attempt to heal from them. That doesn’t work for me. No matter how much I’ve told myself that the situation isn’t that bad, that I will soon feel better, that my anxiety is lying to me, or that what I did doesn’t make me a monster, it has never made me feel better. Here’s why.
For me, emotions create thoughts. I know this to be the case since my emotions can be running wild while I have no thoughts whatsoever. Further, in states of deep presence, I can notice when the energy from an emotion is beginning to turn into a thought; I usually laugh when I notice this. Because emotions come before the thoughts, attempting to fix things on the level of thought doesn’t do anything for me. Even though I can understand any perspective, I can’t accept it or benefit from it without first working through my emotions.
As you might have guessed from my many blog posts about surrender, allowing my emotions to run their course without resisting them is what has made all the difference for me and constitutes the vast majority of my inner work. When the emotions have run out, one of two possibilities occurs. First, my perspective on the situation will automatically change without any effort from me. I’ll then be able to fully accept a viewpoint that I was unable to accept when it was still blocked by a lot of unprocessed emotions. The other possibility, and the one that seems to occur more often than the first, is that I forget about the situation entirely. That is especially nice because I don’t have to have any particular perspective on it; it’s completely gone, as if it never happened in the first place. Should it cross my mind again, it will arrive and leave quickly with a sense of peace. “Yeah, that happened” is how I can best describe my outlook at that point; simple statement of fact without any emotional attachment. I’ve experienced this firsthand as some things that once used to occupy my mind almost nonstop rarely come up now that I’ve fully let them go. With either possibility, I arrive at a place of peace without having to question, challenge, or otherwise attempt to forcibly change my thoughts.
This is by far the most helpful approach I’ve found on my healing journey. I learned it from the book Letting Go by David Hawkins and I suspect that it will also work well for many other people. If your brain works differently than mine, this approach may not work for you. If, however, attempting to reframe things or forcibly change your thoughts hasn’t done it for you, then I would highly recommend this approach. It may be exactly what you need.