I have been through a lot over the years, and I’ve navigated a lot of uncertainty and darkness in my time. Sometimes I didn’t think there would ever be an end to my suffering. And life proved to be, repeatedly, a drag. It hurt being in my brain on a regular basis.
Over the years I struggled to find new ways of existing and being myself, rebuilding who I knew myself to be from the ground up. A lot of that was building habits and finding new ways of dealing with internal and external conflict. But on the other hand, a lot of it was something that I can only think to call “thought work”.
The shift
I realized that while some of my pain was due to external factors or factual events, a lot of it was due to my thoughts about the situations I was in. These thoughts inevitably creating feelings, which led to beliefs and conclusions about the world around me, many of which weren’t true or helpful. I never would have known it, but I was causing myself much of the pain that I was in, even though I blamed it on other things.
It was in therapy I began to explore the inner narrative. A lot of our thoughts are implications of things that we never say out loud, largely subconscious. But we’re still thinking them, and repeating them, all the same. And some mental scripts can do massive amounts of harm to us, our viewpoints, our relationships and just our moods. As I became more aware of what I was thinking and affirming to myself on a daily basis, it became clear to me that I had a big problem. This problem would end up killing me if I let it.
I’m stuck in my thoughts
After being in therapy for a while, I was reaching for a way out of the thought prison I had built for myself. And as I began to dig around on the fringes of psychology and philosophy, I found different influences that suggested to me that I didn’t have to keep perpetuating the same awful thoughts and patterns, that I had some control over the matter after all.
I know it’s controversial to say that you can choose your thoughts. I’m not saying that you have complete control over your state all of the time, but you do have two tools against feeling crappy. 1) You can intend to feel better or intend to feel worse. 2) You do not have to believe your thoughts. (I intend to make posts about these two practices in the near future on this site, so look out for that.)
It’s not an overnight transformation. It took me years to learn how to redirect my brain away from guilt, fear, and agony, and I still slip sometimes. But with practice, you can become better acquainted with a healthy, relatively happy mindset, despite challenges you may face along the way. This isn’t to invalidate any feelings you may have. This is to respect your feelings and acknowledge that you want to be feeling good, if possible. And although it may take you years if you’re particularly stuck in misery (like I was), I promise you, building more positivity in your inner being is worth it.
