Всего за 869.15 руб. Купить полную версию
Think of a more mundane example snow. For some people snow means snowballs, sledges, skiing, and snowmen. For these people, snow is cause for great celebration! For others, however, snow means dead batteries, a slushy mess, cold weather, and so on. In short, the snow is cause for a lot of complaining. Take note, however, that the snow itself doesnt care how you think about it. The snow is neutral. It just exists and goes on being snow. It doesnt cause the positive or the negative reactions and feelings you may have. Only your thinking can do that for you. I hope this illustrates how you use your thinking to create emotional responses which give you an experience of life. Your thinking, not the events themselves, cause your emotional responses.
Your Thoughts Arent Real
If you could understand that your thoughts arent real you could stop reading right now, because you would feel a tremendous sense of relief and you would have realized how to create happiness in your life forever. And even though it is going to take some explanation on my part, the statement is true. Think about it: your thoughts arent real. They are real thoughts, but theyre not the same thing as concrete reality.
When you think, you are using your imagination to create an image or picture in your mind of an event rather than the real thing. If you are driving home from a football match, reviewing the game in your mind, you are merely imagining what the game was like. The game is no longer real, its now only in your mind, in your memory. It was real once, but not any longer. Similarly, if you are thinking about how bad your marriage is, you are considering it in your mind. Its all in your imagination. You are literally making up your relationship. The thoughts you are having about your relationship are just thoughts. This is why the old saying, Things arent as bad as they seem is almost always true. The reason things seem so bad is because your mind is able to recreate past events, and preview upcoming events, almost as though they were happening right in front of you, at that moment even though theyre not. To make matters worse, your mind can add additional drama to any event, thereby making that event seem even worse than it really is, or was, or will be. Even more important, your mind can review the imagined event dozens of times in a matter of seconds! This is very important to understand, because while an actual event such as an argument with a friend can last a minute or two, your mind can recreate that very event, magnify it, and make it last three hours or an entire lifetime. But that argument is no more real now than an argument you had with your father ten years ago. The point is that now, when your life is really happening, that remembered argument is just a thought, an event being created within your own mind.
If you can begin to see that your thoughts are not the real thing theyre just thoughts, and as thoughts they cant hurt you your entire life will begin to change today. I have witnessed many times this very same realization transform someone from a life of fear and depression into a life of happiness.
What would you say to a nine-year-old child who was convinced that a nasty witch was behind her door? Would you have her come to your home weekly to describe the witch to you in great detail? Would you have her think about it constantly? No, you would probably tell her that the witch wasnt real, that it was only an imagined witch. With your help, eventually the child will understand that the witch was only real in her mind. Once this happens, she will no longer be frightened.
Taking this same understanding one step further, what would you say to the same child if she said to you, My life is a failure, no one likes me, I never have any fun, I dont want to live? Wouldnt you also try to teach her that the thoughts she was having about herself were just thoughts? I hope so. There is nothing holding those ideas in place other than her own thinking, her own internal dialogue. If the nine-year-old were able to see what you were trying to teach her, if she were able to establish a different type of relationship with her thinking, wouldnt she be better off than if she believed that her thoughts were real? She certainly would be. Wouldnt it be nice if she could relate to all of her thoughts in the same way?
Understanding that You Are the Thinker
You are the thinker of your own thoughts. Sounds obvious enough, but read on and I believe you will discover that, until now, you may have lost sight of this important fact.
Thinking is something that you are doing, moment by moment, to create your experience of life. But because your own thinking is so close to you, its easy to forget that you are the one using your own thoughts against yourself. Here is an example. A gentleman came into my stress-management office and said, Im mad at my boss. I dont like my job. I dont like the people that work with me. No one appreciates my work. Im really angry. When I began teaching him about how his own thinking creates his angry feelings he said, With all due respect, Dr Carlson, Im angry almost all the time, but I almost never think angry thoughts. Do you see where he was being fooled? Until that moment, he believed that thinking meant the same thing as pondering. Even though he may not have dwelled on his misery for hours at a time, he was nevertheless continually thinking negatively, a moment here and a moment there. He spent nearly all of his time thinking about the little things that irritated and annoyed him. It was almost as if the unstated goal of his life was to analyse it and to give his opinions on how various things affected him. His negative thoughts were creating his negative feelings and emotions and he didnt even know he was thinking them. He was a victim of his own thinking.
Because my client didnt even realize that he was thinking, he had no way of knowing that his feelings were coming from his thinking. He thought his feelings came from his job and from the people he worked with. Until we spoke, my client had never realized that he was the thinker of his own thoughts and that those thoughts were the source of his unhappiness. He believed that his thoughts were being generated by what was going on around him, rather than from within him. He didnt realize at a deep enough level that he is the author, the producer, and the creator of his own thinking, that his thinking is something he is doing all day long, and that his doing it is the cause of most of his emotional suffering. Once he realized this he had a very inspiring insight that I have since used over and over again with clients: Being upset by your own thoughts is similar to writing yourself a nasty letter and then being offended by that letter! This insight came from a man who had spent most of his life depressed.
You are the manufacturer of your own thoughts. You are the one doing the thinking that is upsetting you; you are doing it to yourself. Once you understand this important point, its silly to go on being angered, annoyed, frightened, or depressed by your own thinking. If you are thinking negative, pessimistic, sceptical, or angry thoughts and not realizing it, its understandable and predictable that you will be depressed. And this will happen each time you lose sight of the fact that you are thinking depressing thoughts.
There is only one way out of this negative loop, and that is to understand that you are the one doing the thinking and that it is your own thinking that is creating your pain. Once you start to see that your thoughts are just thoughts, that they are not reality, you will be able to dismiss them and not allow them to depress you. Any thought or series of thoughts can be dismissed, but to do so effectively you must first realize that you are the one creating them. All of us will accumulate thousands of thoughts about ourselves throughout our lifetimes. Very few of us, however, remember the fact that these thoughts, regardless of their content, are just thoughts.