Hi Maria

You appear to be very self aware as you already know that you need to deal with your anger. Believe it or not that is a big step. The clinginess and childishness that you experience as a negative is likely linked to the anger.

Something that struck me in your post was your relationship to the concepts of forgiveness and patience. Reading between the lines it seems to me that you are making the mistake of attaching your idea of forgiveness and patience to your mother. Forgiveness does not require you to repair or engage in a relationship with the person that hurt you. Sometime ‘Love’ requires a relationship to end.

Foremost forgiveness is about and for the person who was hurt and may not even require the evolvement of the person who hurt us. Following this path of forgiveness allows us to let go and detach ourselves from the experience and find patience for ourselves. You are not your experiences, you are not your memories, you are not your past….

It is very important to note that detachment is not the same as indifference. What happened to you happened, it hurt and has influenced your experiences, you are not indifferent, and you do not have to forget. (though you may want to practice ‘forgetting’ as in not dwelling which is different’) Detachment is part of the practice of detaching the sense of self, ego, identity from our experiences and or memories. You may experience the emotion of sadness or anger when a memory pops up but ‘You’ are not your emotions. You experience emotions, you are not the emotion and in this way the emotions flow through you vice getting dammed up to a point everything burst forth in a fit of anger. Does any of that make sense?

Heal your relationship to forgiveness and you will heal yourself.

Hi Lauren

From what you have written I don’t think you are over reacting.  Its possible that he is doesn’t realise the uncomfortable situations he often places you in however that is not an excuse as it suggests he is taking your friendship for granted.

As a guy, and ashamed that I have also done something similar to a friend in the past, its also possible that a part of him likes not quite letting you go and keeping you guessing.  A kind of ego power trip thing. Either way he is not “seeing” you.

If you truly don’t have any romantic feelings for the guy, or any expectations as a friend you could try to just maintain a work relationship. Let him know you are not willing to talk about personal matters, and you may want to find someone else to car pool with.

Your story especially as it relates to the self-help movement propensity to focus one-sidedly on the positive reminds me of the story heard of a sparrow trapped in an empty grain silo.

There was enough grain and water to survive but the sparrow was stuck and wanted out. Each morning the sparrow would look up and see light shining though various cracks in the silo. Frantically the sparrow would fly towards some light coming through the crack hoping to find a way out, however they where never big enough for the sparrow to find freedom. Flying from one light to the next, at the end of the day the sparrow lay exhausted and frustrated on the floor of the silo.  One morning instead of look up the sparrow looked down and noticed air coming through a hole in the floor. Though afraid as it was very dark, the sparrow entering the hole which required going down a ways but at the bottom the tunnel started going upwards until the sparrow from itself free of the silo and out in the open air.

This has matched my experience.

The movement to improve oneself is great however its important to remember that sure it’s the tree branches and leaves that reach upwards to the light that reveals its beauty, but it is its roots that drive deep into the darkness that also bring in nutrients but more importantly stability, especially in times of bad weather.

Just one thing about the experience of purpose. I am convinced that the experience of purpose is about what you do but being seen. It is when we are ’seen’ by others and or by ourselves that we experience purpose and meaning. After a divorce it would be natural to feel that we are not seen and so feel life as lacking purpose and meaning. So in my opinion Purpose isn’t about looking upwards but downward, looking first to see ourselves and then open up to allow others to see us.

Sometimes the way out isn’t up but down.

Hi Mary

Of course our relationship to our idea and experience of love has many layers.. family , friendship,  romantic, self… Universial

The commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, at first glance seems straight forward, yet what does it mean to love ourselves and how does that relate to how we love others. When you look at what it means to love how fortunate we are that the command was not to like our neighbor as ourselves. We can love someone we do not like, even those that who hurt us (even if that means the relationship end… and if we understand love) so much more difficult to like someone we do not love.

I feel that is what we work for in the practice, I feel that is how we love ourselves even when we don’t  always like ourselves.  In such a state of being we are “nice” because that is who we are, our authentic selves, and being authentic enough.

Just finished a book called -Touching the World A Blind Woman Two Wheels 25000 Miles – about a motorcycle road trip around the world. Everywhere they went they were told to be careful, the people in such a such nation were bad and yet they found that everywhere they went people were people just like them.

Taped to the bikes windshield was a note: What you see  depends on what you look for.  By  the end of their travels they added the word mostly, the were not blind to the reality of the road, yet at a personal level it proved true over and over. When they needed help, help was their, when they needed kindness, kindness was their. Crossing the world it was a authentic smile, a wave and good hummer more then anything helped them navigate their way through.

My experience has been the same, the car goes where the eyes go.

What are the odds…  I like the idea of Synchronicity.

“Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” – “ “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related”   – Carl Jung –

In the Hermetic riddle: as above so below, so below as above… which I’ve taken to mean that, as above so below, we are influenced as much (most) of our lives are determined by outside factors.  But, as below so above, we also influence as in co-creators. (this idea of co-creation appears in most wisdom traditions in some for or another. The idea of synchronicity is about how it is that we might influence co-create reality.

In his book Synchronicity Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event:

My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results

What you describe is normal, in that most people at some point in their lives have experience of such negative self-talk, if not a daily occurrence at some level.  You are correct that such negative self-talk can become a habit.

You’re on the right track by noticing and asking yourself what the payoff of such self-talk has for you.

Its interesting that at a phycological symbolic level the ‘step mother’ in the hero journey often represents negative self talk and inability to positively nurture themselves that the hero needs to overcome.

As we transition into adulthood one of the tasks is to come to terms with the mother/father complex. This may or may not have anything to do with our parents but instead is about taking ownership nurturing/protecting ourselves. Positively connecting to the mother/father archetypes.

3 Reasons to Stop Worrying About Your Negative Thoughts

I do not know anyone who has not struggled with coming to terms with Cognitive dissonance/distortions at some time in their life.

Particularly during the transition from one stage of life to another. During these transitions what we were taught, how ‘life should be’ comes in into conflict with our experiences. In many cases we will work very hard to deny that any dissonance exists and admitting any dissonance threatens our sense of identity and belonging to our community. (Equals sadness, depression, existential angst) As Socrates suggests coming to terms with such dissonance and distortions require the life long purist to “Know Thy-Self”

For me the study of how the stories we tell ourselves influence our experiences has been a great help. How much do the stories we tell ourselves create our experiences and how much do our experiences create our stories? Its always a bit of both I think, so its important that we become conscious of when which is happening and in this way,  we become the master of our stories.

A book I found that help a great deal with this idea of mastering our stories was ‘Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High‘ by Kerry Patterson

You might be asking yourself how a book about communication could help with CMT to which I would answer that Conversation is not just about how we talk to others but also how we talk to ourselves. Becoming the master of how you speak with yourself and you are well on the way to mastering your stories and recognising any dissonance before they take you for a ride.

Another exercise that I found helpful with CMT is becoming aware of the most common cognitive distortions. In this way when I hear myself telling a story I am better able to identity any distortions I may be creating. This creates a space to where I can respond to a experience vice react.

15 common cognitive distortions

1. Filtering. We take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. For instance, a person may pick out a single, unpleasant detail and dwell on it exclusively so that their vision of reality becomes darkened or distorted.
2. Polarized Thinking (or “Black and White” Thinking). In polarized thinking, things are either “black-or-white.” We have to be perfect or we’re a failure — there is no middle ground. You place people or situations in “either/or” categories, with no shades of gray or allowing for the complexity of most people and situations. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
3. Overgeneralization. In this cognitive distortion, we come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of evidence. If something bad happens only once, we expect it to happen over and over again. A person may see a single, unpleasant event as part of a never-ending pattern of defeat.
4. Jumping to Conclusions. Without individuals saying so, we know what they are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, we are able to determine how people are feeling toward us.
5. Catastrophizing. We expect disaster to strike, no matter what. This is also referred to as “magnifying or minimizing.” We hear about a problem and use what if questions (e.g., “What if tragedy strikes?” “What if it happens to me?”). With practice, you can learn to answer each of these cognitive distortions.
6. Personalization. Personalization is a distortion where a person believes that everything others do or say is some kind of direct, personal reaction to the person. We also compare ourselves to others trying to determine who is smarter, better looking, etc.
7. Control Fallacies. If we feel externally controlled, we see ourselves as helpless a victim of fate. For example, “I can’t help it if the quality of the work is poor, my boss demanded I work overtime on it.” The fallacy of internal control has us assuming responsibility for the pain and happiness of everyone around us. For example, “Why aren’t you happy? Is it because of something I did?”
8. Fallacy of Fairness. We feel resentful because we think we know what is fair, but other people won’t agree with us. As our parents tell us when we’re growing up and something doesn’t go our way, “Life isn’t always fair.” People who go through life applying a measuring ruler against every situation judging its “fairness” will often feel badly and negative because of it. Because life isn’t “fair” — things will not always work out in your favor, even when you think they should.
9. Blaming. We hold other people responsible for our pain, or take the other track and blame ourselves for every problem. For example, “Stop making me feel bad about myself!” Nobody can “make” us feel any particular way — only we have control over our own emotions and emotional reactions.
10. Shoulds. We have a list of ironclad rules about how others and we should behave. People who break the rules make us angry, and we feel guilty when we violate these rules. A person may often believe they are trying to motivate themselves with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if they have to be punished before they can do anything. For example, “I really should exercise. I shouldn’t be so lazy.” Musts and oughts are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When a person directs should statements toward others, they often feel anger, frustration and resentment.
11. Emotional Reasoning. We believe that what we feel must be true automatically. If we feel stupid and boring, then we must be stupid and boring. You assume that your unhealthy emotions reflect he way things really are — “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
12. Fallacy of Change. We expect that other people will change to suit us if we just pressure or cajole them enough. We need to change people because our hopes for happiness seem to depend entirely on them.
13. Global Labeling. We generalize one or two qualities into a negative global judgment. These are extreme forms of generalizing, and are also referred to as “labeling” and “mislabeling.” Instead of describing an error in context of a specific situation, a person will attach an unhealthy label to themselves.
14. Always Being Right. We are continually on trial to prove that our opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and we will go to any length to demonstrate our rightness. For example, “I don’t care how badly arguing with me makes you feel, I’m going to win this argument no matter what because I’m right.” Being right often is more important than the feelings of others around a person who engages in this cognitive distortion, even loved ones.
15. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy. We expect our sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if someone is keeping score. We feel bitter when the reward doesn’t come.

Hi Zita

“There is a lot of chaos inside me and I keep searching for that stillness”

If you have ever read anything about chaos theory you might see that there is order in chaos. If you can learn to breathe through this paradox you may find that within chaos there is also stillness.

Stillness is a paradox. Even when we are still we are moving at amazing speeds through the universes. From which point then can we measure that we are still? The word Seeking is a verb, life is karma (action) cause and affect / movement. As long as someone is seeking stillness as separate from movement it will never be found.

It is when your mind can be calm within movement, the center of the hub of the spinning wheel, that you will discover what you seek and what you seek you already possess.

Here is a riddle for you

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” – TS Elliot