It’s easy to feel as if you’re stuck in a rut after experiencing significant trauma. Even if you haven’t gone through a traumatic event, your mind is constantly being flooded with negative thoughts and fears, solutions for how you’d react in a worst-case-scenario situation. Add another layer, and this easily compounds.
Because we’re built to continuously moderate the flow of toxic patterns, it seems counterintuitive to stop and reframe whenever negativity invades our thoughts. In fact, it happens so often that it would be impossible to simply relax and enjoy life if you paused to reconstruct every fleeting whim.
However, since most of what we fear never comes true, it’s easy to feel bogged down by what-ifs and possible to redirect those most important to building self-efficacy. Taking control of toxicity and removing the most significant pieces will enable you to naturally begin learning to think more positively.
As a general guide, you’ll want to focus on those thoughts that directly limit your potential to achieve your goals, reduce your confidence, or minimize positive experiences. For example, you may really want to pursue your dream job, but your thoughts tell you, without basis, you’re under-qualified. Or you have an awesome stay-at-home date night with your spouse but are left discontented when you see on social media your friends had a great night out without you. These common patterns belittle the positive experiences you’ve been afforded and leave you feeling icky inside.
In this day and age, we’re so used to turning to apps to simplify our lives. It would be great if someone were able to develop the software to auto-reframe every negative pattern that enters our stream of consciousness. Of course, this isn’t possible, and we’re left with the burden of doing so manually. This is why it is important not to overwhelm yourself and focus only on those limiting and disrupting beliefs that cause you to continue feeling stuck post-trauma.
How is this done? The fears you wish to consciously adjust will depend on your own life experiences and reasons for feeling bogged down by negativity. You may wish to make a fervent effort to sit with each fear that makes happiness intangible and figure out why it’s there and what you can do about it. Or, if this seems too daunting, you may opt to focus on just a few.
Here are some things to consider to get you started:
Every event you experience in life is simply that – an event. You are responsible for assigning meaning to it. So, if you get passed up for a promotion, for example, you can either over-analyze why and tell yourself you didn’t deserve it, or you can simply adopt an “everything happens for a reason” mindset and move on. Of course, it is easier for the ego to feel deflated than the mind to reconstruct the narrative, focusing only on the positive. But reframing gets easier with time, and once you begin to let go of self-inflicted toxicity, you will physically feel the shift.
Building upon this, every meaning you assign to an event is instilled in your mind because of your own value system and your own previous life experiences. For example, let’s say you have a friend whose getting married. While this is generally a positive event, there are different approaches each person who finds out about this will take based on their own personal perceptions. Some will be over the moon and ask to help plan, some will automatically believe it will never last, some will be saddened by the reminder of a failed marriage, some will say he or she can do better, etc. Every reaction is unique to the person who hears the news and it is based on their own individual journey.
Ever hear, “We learn from our mistakes”? This is true. But, it’s not always a positive learning experience. Our mistakes can limit us if we let them, leaving behind inherent beliefs that we’re not good enough or we’ll never reach our goals. Flipping the narrative on our own self-defeating patterns will enable us to see a clearer picture of what occurred, why, and grow in the process.
When you make a mistake and realize you’re beating yourself up over it, stop and consider the why – the real reason you’re allowing yourself to feel so icky about it. Then, reframe the situation to consider the positive. Okay, so this happened and it’s not great, but next time you’ll know better, right? Or, this happened for a reason, even if you don’t quite know what that is yet.
A big part of this process is also learning to let go. Life happens, and the majority of the time, what happens is external to us and we have no control over it. In fact, you only have control over your reaction to these things. And, the way you react is entirely up to you. You always have a choice. You can either allow negativity to become all-consuming or you can train the mind to let go of what you cannot control and focus only on what can be extracted from the occurrence to move forward effectively.
Over time, choosing to think negatively about everything that happened will induce feelings of irritability, depression, anxiety and helplessness that are hard to shake. We all know “that person” who audibly reacts with hostility over every little thing. This energy is difficult to be around – it is even more difficult when it is part of who we are. Changing the way in which you think systematically will not happen overnight, but it will change your life for the better over time. Taking baby steps, day by day, will eventually get you to that place of peace you so deserve.