No I’m not referring to Schizophrenia, a very serious condition, I’m talking about all those inner voices we hear when anxiety, worry, fear are at home, and what to do about them.
I had this awful realisation after doing some inner work on myself, that for years and years, I’ve been doing the wrong thing to ‘cure’ myself of my anxiety, and that is I’ve been treating it as a problem. And because I was treating it as a problem I was throwing solutions at it, in my case the wrong solution hoping that that was how to cure myself.
And I was wrong.
Patience Is More Than a Virtue, It Stops You Feeling Worse
Typically when a client comes to see me, they are ill at ease, because no matter what is going on in their life, their inner life is creating turmoil for them and making everything seem worse than it is. So I help them calm it all down, much like putting a salve on a stinging sore, eventually all is well again and it’s just a case of leaving the sore to do what it does and get better.
What I was doing though was not being patient enough and expecting that when I planted a seed, or seedling, that within a couple of hours at most it should be a fully fledged plant bursting with blooms, and smelling as sweet as scented flowers smell.
Again I was wrong
My impatience created more problems for me than I realised, and maybe even you realise.
Watching Paint Dry Would Be Boring But It Would Teach Us The Value Of Time
But here’s the shocker that took me ages to understand, when we are in angst of any kind, all we should be doing is
WAITING…….
WAITING…….
WAITING…….
waiting until our mind is clear and we can tackle the problem head on.
We Don’t Have Problems We Just Exercise Our Thinking Muscles Too Much
And talking of problems, here’s another realisation that got me stunned. We don’t have problems, or at least some of what we say or think of as problems aren’t problems, some are just over used thinking and some are genuine problems.
How To Tell The Difference Between A True Problem And Over Thinking –(Which Isn’t A True Problem)
Person A is feeling angry, or irritated about something that happened to her the other day. She couldn’t do anything to stop it happening, but now two days later it’s still on her mind and she’s feeling worse about the whole thing. Over the last two days she’s felt a myriad of emotions such as annoyance, sadness, powerlessness and the like, and now she’s in a right state.
Person B similarly had something happen to her the other day, which left her feeling puzzled, irritated and annoyed. Again she could do nothing to stop it, and found herself shouting at her co-worker, being impatient with her daughter, snappy at her mother in law and rude to the checkout girl. She was so distracted by her feelings of annoyance about what had happened, that she forgot to post an important letter, which meant she got fined for late response. She then felt even angrier which led her to shouting at her colleague again, so she found herself having a ‘talk’ with her manager who put her on her second warning.
Can you see who has the problem here?
Hopefully you said person B. And why not person A?
Feeling Bad Isn’t As Bad As It First Seems
Person A doesn’t have a problem, she is just over thinking and that overthinking is creating feelings. All our feeling can only be created by thought and isn’t in and of itself a problem. To illustrate, imagine you’ve been to see a play at the local theatre. In it are actors who need to be in character. One of them plays an angry teenager.
In this context, being angry was created by the thinking that makes anger appear and because it was a play, it was fine.
Lashing Out Is Understandable, But It Will Still Get You In to Trouble
Why Acting Under The Influence Doesn’t Work
I know this might be a stretch but over thinking in and of itself isn’t a problem, it all depends on what you do because of, as a result of that feeling. So now we turn to Person B.
Person B felt all the same feelings as Person A, but she reacted from those feelings and it was that which created the problems. If she had realised that it wasn’t the colleague who was necessarily doing anything wrong, then she wouldn’t have shouted at her, she only shouted because she was in an angry mood about something that happened a few days back, that she could do nothing about.
Are you following me here?
Person B reacted to events through how she was feeling and that’s what creates problems.
I know this is tricky to get your head around, it foxed me for a while too. But go with me here.
We don’t have problems because we ‘feel’ any of the hundreds of different emotions we could feel, we have problems because of the actions we take whilst under the influence of those feelings.
So in Person’s B’s case, she lost her temper, was impatient, became less caring wasn’t present and hadn’t learnt from earlier events that shouting at people was and is not the way to let off steam and frustration.
So this is why we have to wait, and wait, and wait…. until we are clear and then proceed to take some action.
Where It All Goes Wrong
- Not knowing that you are in a mood and that will colour how you react
- Thinking that you can do something external to calm you mind, such as eat, drink or spend
- Not realising that a mind problem just requires time and a mind solution to calm it down
- Not being patient enough with yourself to wait
- Acting under the influence of powerful negative emotions expecting things to go as well as if you were in a positive mood.
Wait Long Enough and The Bus Will Come, and So Will Calm Clarity
Anxiety is a funny thing- not literally, as I’m sure you know, it’s just what we think would be a solution isn’t, and what is, is jolly hard to do. The real ‘cure’ if there is such a thing is time. After a while, like a small child, your mind will get bored if it’s not stimulated and changes the focus to something more jolly.
Our minds, we as people, don’t really want to spend time feeling bad, and the only reason we do is because we haven’t other strategies at hand, we all want to feel good, but sometimes it’s about learning how to feel good again because we forget how.
And though this is really a hard one for you to do, the next time you are feeling anxious try and do one thing, and that’s NOTHING, and eventually if you don’t feed your angry monster any more anger, it will give up and your calm critter will come out instead.
Here’s to calming the critter inside of us.
Speak Soon
Elaine
