The source of all your pain

I had a very interesting, turned beautiful, experience with my teenage daughter tonight. We were in conflict. She had not followed through, which created a logistical problem, and I was frustrated. It led to a conversation of several areas she was dropping the ball and how this was unlike her. Her pain increased as we spoke and she finally blurted out several thoughts she had spinning around in her brain for months. Among them was “You took away my cell phone because you don’t trust me”, “No one likes me” and “I just don’t matter around here.”
Have you ever heard these or even felt something similar yourself? Me too. In fact that is the source of our pain, believing these thoughts.  Stay with me for a minute.
I began with the first one, my daughters belief “You took away my cell phone because you don’t trust me”. I asked her how that felt to think that. She said it hurt, she was frustrated because she was trustworthy and sometimes it made her feel unloved. I asked her how she acted because of this thought and she began to see how she was resentful, withdrew at times and occasionally didn’t obey because she was mad at us. Then I asked her if that thought, “You took away my cell phone because you don’t trust me”, was true. She was surprised but guessed it actually wasn’t. I asked her how she felt now and her pain had gone away about that.
We did the same exercise on each of her thoughts. She began to see how as she believed she wasn’t very important in our family it led to her being mean sometimes or not engaging. She recognized how her fear of not fitting in with friends caused her behavior to be exaggerated sometimes and how when she worried about being liked she didn’t seem to fit in and was always on guard whereas times she was just herself she had a great time and people wanted to be around her.
The examples go on and on but the bottom line is for the last several months my daughter had been having a variety of thoughts and was believing all of them and most of them were causing her pain. The reality was we totally trust her and choosing for our kids not to have cell phones had nothing to do with trusting her; people actually really like her; and of course she matters in our family.

Her thoughts were actually the source of her pain. It’s true for all of us. As soon as she questioned her thoughts she was able to see another possibility.
So how does this apply to you? Consider one of your dominant thoughts. Maybe it’s one of these that I hear often from mentoring clients: “I have to take care of everything, no one else will.” “I never have enough time or money.” “No one understands me.” or “I’m afraid I really am just not good enough.” Whatever your thought is I know it feels true and I know there is even a lot of proof it’s true but ask yourself how does believing this thought feel? How do you act when you believe this thought? What results does it get you? Can you absolutely know for sure it is true? And my personal favorite… “How would you feel without that thought?”
You see we all have a lifetime of experiences telling us who we are and how we should be, yet we tend to grab hold of the negative ones and believe those when in truth those are who we are not. Consider someone who was abused. Commonly they would deal with feeling unsafe, not lovable and even unwanted, even if they stopped the abuse and chose to themselves be loving parents. We often grab the negative about what happened to us and let it define us when in reality the truth about that person would more likely be they are brave, powerful, forgiving and a force for good in their family line. They overcame, survived and created an entirely new reality. That is actually the truth!
If we are hurting it’s a sign we’re believing a thought that just is not serving us…and the great news is we can simply choose a new thought and believe that and “poof” our pain goes away and our reality changes for the better!
Give it a try, what have you got to lose? Oh yeah…pain!

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