“Yeah, steam's invisible!”
It's my wife. Partly empathising with me; partly chastising me for being such a total idiot.
The kettle's too close to the teabags and today, half asleep, I absent-mindedly reached across a plume of super-heated, just-boiled kettle-steam and received the ultimate wake-up call.
The speed with which I reacted was eye-opening in itself. Our evolved reflexes are primary and we're so attuned to removing ourselves from damaging physical stimuli, it's quite amazing.
And yet…
Even though mind and body are all part of the same self-healing system, we've somehow de-volved, or lost the reflex of doing this with damaging psychological stimuli (if we ever had it in the first place).
So often a painful mental stimulus enters our consciousness, and what do we do – say Owwwwwww!!! and remove ourselves from it, immediately?
🤔
No, we welcome it in, treat it as gospel, give it the royal treatment, examine it from every angle, add more fuel to the fire with layered meaning and consequence, and then find ourselves wondering…
- where this mental health diagnosis we've been given came from?
- why we have trouble trusting others and having fruitful relationships?
- why we comfort eat, or drink so much?
- why we feel immobilised by decisions?
- why we lose our rag at the drop of a hat?
- why we can't focus for more than 5 seconds at a time?
And all of it can be traced back, ultimately, to this one thing:
(#justsayin’)
We might not have a built-in reflex to let painful thoughts go that's quite as effective as the physical one, but the signal's there nonetheless – consistently, reliably.
All we need to do is stay attuned to our feelings, and when we sense the pain or heaviness of the mind jumping on that train of thought… get off.
Drop it like the burning object it is and let the healing commence.
❤️🔥
Giles
Struggling with one of those bullet-points above? Had enough of reading and now ready to sort the problem out once and for all, with 1:1 support?
I help you get the change you need, in a way that's just right for you.
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Giles P Croft
It's not denial. It's a timing thing.