Are you hungry for new advice, tools, techniques, and information to help end your emotional pain and bring emotional healing?
I know I am, and like you that’s what drives me to look up podcasts, read books, check out blogs and watch YouTube videos. I have a thirst for knowledge that I think you share as well.
Today I will be sharing some advice with you on one of the best tools or skills I have ever found. In fact, it is a tool that precedes all other tools and is what makes different interventions work to their potential.
If you are here listening in to our podcast ANXIOUS or reading our blog at the Gathering of Good People, it is because you are looking to stop your emotional pain and bring some emotional healing. Some people need to make massive changes, and others of you are wanting to make simple improvements.
Whatever the level of change you seek the first thing that needs to occur is to have you disassociate or disconnect from what you want to change. If you are your feelings, then shifting them will be difficult because change will feel like death. Therefore, to make the shifts in your emotional pain you will need to see your emotions without being your emotions.That’s the tool you will learn about today, it’s called DISCERNMENT.
Hi, I am Brett R. Williams, psychotherapist and Chief Executive Director (CEO) of the Gathering. The Gathering of Good People is a nonprofit that is dedicated to helping you with personal growth and emotional healing. In addition to sharing mental health advice and free content we also provide support to anyone and everyone who needs help, through our self-care groups.
We have created this new series called ANXIOUS, to address the angst, worries, and overwhelming fears that have been created by the coronavirus.
This global pandemic may be stressful for people. Overwhelming fear about the disease can cause strong emotional pain in adults and children. Several protocols, public health advisories, such as social distancing and quarantine measures can make people safe, but also make us feel isolated and lonely. This can increase our angst, nervousness, fear, and worries.
Today I am sharing advice about: Discernment- the Most Powerful Tool You Have Never Heard About.
When I graduated with my bachelors I was working any job I could find in the field of psychology. I needed experience because I was going to start my Masters and get my license as a therapist. One job was working as a School Ten counselor.
When someone gets a DUI in California, they are required to take a class on alcoholism as well as attend 10 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings. The class is called “School Ten”, and I got a job as one of the instructors.
My own mother was an alcoholic and cocaine addict when I was growing up, so I enjoyed going to AA meeting myself and learning what I could about addictions. What I found interesting was listening to my student’s reactions to having to go to AA meetings.
“That wasn’t for me.” “I didn’t fit in and they didn’t understand my situation.” These were the remarks everyone said.
Even the guys who were working the 12 steps and attending AA, said the same thing when they first went to meetings. No one going to AA meetings for the first time feels like they belong.
I found that so interesting that most AA meetings were filled with people who were all thinking the same thing, namely that they didn’t fit in and were not understood. If you have everyone thinking they don’t fit in, then it seemed to me they were all the same. All of them were exactly the same in their resistance. All of them were in denial about needing to go to AA.
So what was happening? Even as a novice in psychology I could understand what was happening. It was their addiction talking. Their addiction would tell these people anything to keep them drinking.
The statistics showed that someone will drive 200 to 2000 times under the influence before they get pulled over for a DUI. Yet, when I would take the history for these people in our class, most would tell me that it was the first or second time they were driving intoxicated when they got arrested.
These people were lying to me and to themselves all to keep drinking. If these people could not hear their addiction lying, there was no change for them to become sober.
Until the addict could sept outside their addiction and begin to discern the lies, there could never be any change. The advantage of AA is that it allows us to share stories and learn how deceptive our thoughts have become. Hearing the lies in others helps people in recovery begin to hear the lives that live within their own head.
I wasn’t an addict so tell the difference between rational thoughts and addictive thoughts. But it made me wonder if I had distorted thinking patterns that I was not recognizing. I had anxiety all my life. Was my anxiety lying to me?
The answer was yes! Anxiety was an old friend. His voice I know well. “It’s not going to work.” “I can’t.” “I’m not good enough.” “Everyone thinks I’m a failure.”
My self-doubts were familiar but I had never separated the voice as that of my anxiety. It was my voice, it was what I was always telling myself. These were my truths. I felt them as my anxiety but my anxiety was who I was and therefore these doubts were me.
To change my anxiety started with me embracing a new idea, maybe I have anxiety, but the anxiety is not who I am. Being able to separate me from my fears would be the first step in my change.
This is discernment. Being able to distinguish between our own thoughts gives all of us the ability to take control and then change our thoughts. All of us have multiple voices in our head. Some of our internal dialogues come from our history. You may have had a negative parent tell you, “you’re no good, you’re stupid.” Then you over time internalize that voice and it becomes a part of you.
Different parts of our brain also communicate in different ways. Your emotional mind thinks differently than your logical mind. That’s why you can often catch yourself having a fight within your own brain. Learning to hear or discern all of our distinct elements is what is required before we can truly change.
Just the other night my thoughts were racing, I kept looping on how to write a post for my anxiety support group. “I want to share that I have anxiety.” That thought continually replayed again and again. “How stupid. I know what I want to say, now stop thinking about it.”
If I see myself as my thoughts I would be irritated at thoughts but unable to stop myself, because I couldn’t stop being me. But what if I am not my thoughts. Then I could change my thoughts because I could separate myself from my thoughts.
“Alright Leo STOP.” Leo is what I call my Left Neocortex, my thinking mind. My thinking loves to talk and getting it to stop talking can be difficult. By being conscious I can separate myself from my thoughts. Once I have separated myself then I can shift my intention and focus and choose what to think.
When I separate myself from my thoughts, feelings, and actions, then I can make changes.
Here is another example. My body does not want to get up and go to the gym. But when I get outside of my body, I can make different choices. “Get out of bed, we are going to the gym.”
Too often, we don’t go to the gym, because we go back to listening and identifying with the body. So when the body says it’s tired we go with our body’s desires and we go back to bed.
How do you see you, or even more to the point how do you see your problems? Most of us OVER IDENTIFY WITH OUR PROBLEMS. Meaning, we see our problems as a part of who we are. “I am depressed. I am a sad person” “I am anxious. I am unsafe.”
What if you took a step back and thought a little differently. “I have depression, but I am not my depression.” “I have anxiety, but I am not my anxiety.”
When you identify with your patterns, feelings, or thoughts, they become difficult to root out. Just as we saw with the alcoholics I was working with in my School Ten class.
I have overwhelming fears. When I see my angst as a problem, something that’s wrong with me, my fears are even worse. However, when I see my angst as simply feelings of being unsafe anxiety and not a problem with me, then I can deal with it.
Is your overwhelming fear becoming persistent and beginning to interfere with your daily life? You can learn to manage your emotional pain and emotional healing by discerning between you and your feelings. Learn to discern.
Here’s a homework assignment I want you to consider. This week I want you to play with the idea, “What if today I am not my feelings?” Yes, I know you have anxiety, but what if you separated yourself from your feelings of being unsafe. This week consider a new idea, that you have anxious thoughts, but those thoughts are not who you are. “What if today I am not my feelings?”