“It’s just going to be that kind of day,” my friend said as he got in my car. “Everything’s gone wrong.” He started on a litany of all the bothersome things that had happened since he got out of bed.
“Well,” I said, “I’m glad you got all that out of the way! Used up all your bad luck first thing. Now you can let it go and have a fine rest-of-the-day.” And he did. But if I hadn’t steered him to look at the possibility of a good day ahead, he might have gone on and on about his little clashes and misadventures.
Painful events produce mental movies of what happened, replays of the situation. They’re daydreams our minds create to help us realize that it was true, that it really happened and that it hurt. That’s a pretty common response to pain. It’s the first step toward accepting things, to getting to the point where we can say, however reluctantly, “It is what it is.”
The next step is figure out what you need to do next. What are some of your options? What’s most urgent? What direction do you want to go? You might still feel the raw pain, but it, too, is what it is—an injury of some kind, and injuries take time to heal. You let it sit there, acknowledging it, but accepting it as a part of your current experience. In the meantime, take a survey of your resources and start moving in the direction that your better self most wants to go, the one that makes the most sense.
But first, you’re in that place where you’re remembering what happened, trying to get a grasp on it and somehow make it different. There’s a trap here, though. If you play the movie over and over and over, you can get stuck in it. You can get so stuck that it becomes the focus of your reality. That’s when our daydreams become living nightmares.
Remember the phrase, “What you focus on expands?” It applies full force here. Your mind will always search for information to bring you when it knows you’re interested in something. If you’re looking at nothing but your mental movie about the hurtful thing that happened, your mind will bring you more and more ways that you were hurt like this in the past or might be hurt in similar ways in the future. That generates fear, anxiety, and avoidance strategies–none of which are helpful. In fact, your fear makes your brain think that looking out for danger is now a priority matter. It will point out all the signals it can find that you might be risking another blow. And there you are, stuck in the nightmare.
Now here’s the good news. You are the one who’s in charge of what’s playing in the theater of your mind. You’re running the projector that beams the movie onto the screen of your mind. If you can see that this movie has played over and over, you can look for a different movie to play. That lets you break the nightmare’s spell.
You might not be able to switch movies instantly. The nightmare one has dug itself into the screen of your attention and its drama has you hooked. But you can interrupt it as often as want by asking yourself a simple question like “What’s good about her/him/this mess?” or “What’s good about this present moment?” Questions like that take your brain by surprise. “A new game!” it says, happy to have a new assignment. And it will start looking for answers to your question. Robert Maurer, Ph.D,,says in his book One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, that you can start by asking your little question at leaset once a day, and keep it up every day for a couple weeks. Link asking it to brushing your teeth or drinking your morning coffee, or when you go to bed. You could also jot down the answers you get if you’re so inclined.
Gradually, looking for the good will become a habit, quieting and eventually replacing your nightmare. Your world will expand and brighten, your moods will shift to the enjoyable end of the scale. And it starts by asking a simple question: “What’s good here?”
Remember, what you focus on expands. Focus on asking yourself one little question at least once a day about what’s good, and see how the goodness grows.
Wishing you a week of surprising smiles.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay