Ask them. People are not mind readers.

The first thing to do here is to realize that your thoughts are creating this reality for you, not what actually happened. The evidence for this is here: Are there moments when you are not thinking about this, you’re distracted from you’re thinking, e.g. watching a movie, listening to a song etc., and you feel fine? If so then you can see that it’s not what happened that’s creating these feelings, you’re actually feeling the effects of your thinking in the moment. To give you another example, could somebody else feel differently about this? Yes, there are people that kill animals all the time and they don’t feel bad. Therefore killing an animal doesn’t actually make you feel bad for years – it’s your thinking in the present moment that creates the feelings. If killing animals made people feel bad for years, then everybody would feel bad after killing animals, and also you would feel bad all the time after having done so. Are those things the case? No. Therefore can you accept it isn’t what’s happened that creates your feelings, that it is actually instead the effects of your thinking in the present moment?

Once you can realize that it is your thinking creating the feelings, i.e. you are feeling the effects of your thinking, the solution is to see the thoughts for what they really are: mental projections, not reality. For example, a thought you might have from time to time could be, “I am a bad person because of what I did”. To dispute this, you could ask yourself, do bad people feel bad for 4 years after killing an animal? Does thinking I’m bad make me bad? On this last point, if you like a song, is that song actually objectively better than other songs, or do you just think it is? If you think a painting is bad, is that painting actually objectively bad, or do you just think it is? Similarly, if you think you’re bad, does that objectively mean you’re bad, or is it just a thought you have about yourself in the moment? Can you actually “be” “bad” when “bad” is a humanly generated concept? A conceptual construct in your mind? In reality things just “are”, there’s no good or bad.

To get even deeper, how do you know what you did is “bad”? It was a perfect lung shot. What if you saved that animal from a worse fate? Maybe if you hadn’t done that, it would have suffered a really brutal, savage death the next day that was extremely painful and prolonged. Maybe you actually rescued it from suffering. Now this can’t be proven but the point is: it disputes the thought you have that what you did is definitely “bad”. How can you know it was bad? I’ve already given you one example of how that could be the case. Another example is, maybe if you hadn’t have done it and felt bad for all these years you never would have reflected upon your experience of life so much. Maybe this experience will lead you to becoming much more conscious of how your thoughts create your feelings which could enable you to be happier in the future. So that is also an example of how maybe what happened wasn’t actually definitely “bad”. I’m not saying any of this is “true” in reality, it’s just perspectives to help you dispute the thought that you have done a bad thing.

It’s worth noting here that my response here is heavily, HEAVILY influenced (if not borrowed) from Noah Elkrief. Check out his YouTube videos. Check out Eckhart Tolle – his book “The Power of now” is a good one. Check out Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Also, “You can be happy no matter what” by Richard Carlson will be great for you. MINDFULNESS MEDITATION will likely be a huge help for you. And if you do get somebody to help you through this, get somebody really good and solution focused. A lot of therapists just go over the past and problems and don’t actually like solving problems and creating solutions! So make sure you get somebody good.

If it helps oskarpe, I have no negative judgements about you in this moment and you are 100% ok to me. You are feeling the effects of, and believing in, the judgements you are making about yourself in the moments you feel bad.

Of course it is lovely not to want to kill animals, but the natural feelings of the grief would have passed pretty quickly, that gut sensation of “this is horrible” which you can experience on a purely feeling level. These feelings you’re having now are ok but are unrelated to that immediate primal gut feeling. They are thinking-induced. Nothing to do with what happened. It’s time to move on my friend!

Huge fan of the idea of getting a really good lock for your door. That is definitely the way to go.

But of course this isn’t just about preventing this happening again and solving the situation at face value. As you say yourself “it’s just objects that i don’t matter”. Because on a deeper level – as you’re well aware – this is about trust and the relationships you have with your family.

My first advice: Stop trying to be peaceful, trying to control yourself etc. Instead, accept absolutely every feeling that comes up. Meditate. By doing this you will achieve peace but via different means. When you try really hard to be peaceful and calm down you end up becoming more tense because you create a distance between where you are and where you want to be, in your mind. When this distance evaporates (which happens by accepting what IS now – tension and all) this has the effect of you eventually becoming more relaxed, peaceful etc. in the face of whatever you’re experiencing. In other words the frustration, anger, disappointment, negative thinking etc etc…it’s all ok, it’s all fine, allow yourself to experience it. When you really feel all that without blocking it, the acceptance is so healing in and of itself. Note here that accepting the presence of thinking isn’t the same as believing the thinking. In other words, accept thoughts like “she’s a bitch” are there in your mind and don’t need to disappear, but you don’t need to buy into that thought, if that makes sense!

Avoiding confrontation here is not serving you or your family. It may seem like the kind thing to do but it isn’t because this whole situation is creating far more suffering than openness ever would. Just having a real conversation about this with your niece – you don’t need to be rude or blaming, just state your truth and the facts as you see them, that is that you feel hurt and upset and you feel you can’t trust her easily because of this – is so much kinder to all of you. It is so much less horrible to do things this way. I’m not saying she’ll like it. In the short term – that is in the moment of confrontation – she will likely be offended, hurt , angry etc. Humiliated even. Or just denial and not display any of this, acting childishly. What you gotta remember is, it’s not her response that matters but the fact you have at least tried to reconcile things in this way. In the long term though, your relationship may be much better for this short-term discomfort. On the other hand, if she really doesn’t respond well to this at all then maybe it’s time to just accept she’s a 16 year old girl with issues that she’ll hopefully grow out of. Stick that lock on your door, put any possessions you want to keep in that room and be done with it. Maybe in the future when she’s a bit more mature you can feel a bit better about each other. But remember she’s not the only one with issues. You for example have been avoiding confronting her, which in itself could be argued is dysfunctional communication. It’s easy to blame everybody else for what they do, but once you accept you yourself are not so infallible you may find it easier to be compassionate. We all have our problems. I for example can be pretty narcissistic at times. I can be a bit horrible at times. It’s no excuse and we still have full responsibility over our own behaviour, but it’s at least worth bearing in mind when it’s compassion you want to feel.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by Rock Banana.
• This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by Rock Banana.

Glad to hear it Cianna. I’m working on this too, made enormous breakthroughs though and the transformation is pretty unbelievable, yet there’s still a way to go before I really couldn’t care less about people’s judgements in every moment. (Will I ever get to that place? Who knows, but you have to keep reminding yourself of the new place you want to come from.)

@inky said:The attitude I go with for myself is this: “Well, I’m not for everyone!” with a mental shoulder shrug.

I love it. Seems a very healthy attitude to me… 🙂 .

Just read some stuff by Richard Carlson which I’m sure you will find interesting:

“Happiness is a state of mind, not a set of circumstances. You can never find happiness by searching because happiness is not found outside yourself. When you attach conditions to your happiness, you won’t experience it… Excessive thinking about your past and your problems will convince you that you have good reasons to be upset and unhappy. You can learn from your past, but it is a mistake to continually go into your past or overanalyze life in a search for happiness… Happiness requires no effort at all. It is more of a letting go of unhappiness than it is a striving for happiness.”

“I almost feel like it’s because I’m afraid of judgement, but I feel like that just doesn’t make sense. It’s irrational for me to fear the judgement of people who love me.”

– On a very deep level it makes no sense whatsoever, because their judgements about you are totally irrelevant to who you are. If they think you’re great that doesn’t make you inherently great and if they think you’re stupid that doesn’t make you inherently stupid. But on a more superficial it makes a lot of sense because you have something to lose with these people, i.e. a close friendship. When you speak to a stranger you have nothing to lose and everything (potentially) to gain. When you are speaking to a close friend you might lose their friendship. They might start disliking you.

The way out of this is to stop caring whether or not they like you and to prefer to have the friendship rather than feel you need to have it. This is a shift in perspective and your ‘way of being’ in life. Easier said than done of course but it gives you an idea of what to work on.

Once you come to realize that you can be happy with or without these close friendships, then you will know you have nothing to lose. How comfortable are you being alone? Can you be alone for long periods without believing lonely thinking? If not work on this – start spending more time alone, maybe in nature, maybe going to concerts etc. Why? Because when you are 100% comfortable being alone, you won’t ‘need’ close friendships any more, you will simply desire them. So you will be able to handle the thought of losing your friendship. In addition when you realize that it doesn’t matter what anybody thinks of you, because their thoughts don’t define who you are, then you will stop fearing them disliking you and so this neurosis will also dissipate.

Here’s a quote from Keith Johnstone’s book “Impro”: “The brain constructs the universe for us, so how is it possible to be ‘stuck’ for an idea? The student hesitates not because he doesn’t have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that come uninvited.” In other words you are probably rejecting possible conversation ideas and saying “No that’s too boring” or “No they might think this of me if I say that” and that means you have no ideas at all. Just say whatever pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be interesting. Why would you need people to find you interesting? Have you signed a contract saying you will definitely be interesting all the time? Do you think this would even be ‘preferable’? What about things you find ‘boring’, the other person finding ‘interesting’, and vice versa? If it’s so subjective why are you worried about finding the “right” idea for a conversation? Have you also considered that boring conversations can turn into interesting ones, the idea that you start off with small talk and then turn it into something deeper? A lot of conversations begin with “How are you” but quickly become more than that. Would they become more than that without the opening “How are you”? But is the “How are you” inherently interesting on its own?

Even better, next time you have no idea, say nothing and be 100% ok with it. Sit there entirely comfortable with your not saying anything. I notice you take 100% responsibility for the conversation, why? A conversation happens between two or more people, so why are you trying to be the one who makes it interesting? Why shouldn’t the other person have this role? It would be a bit weird of you to assume that the other person must ALWAYS be the interesting one, so why are you burdening yourself with this unrealistic expectation?

Be comfortable with silence. Sometimes sitting with another person and saying nothing can be deeper than anything else. Your presence alone is powerful, you don’t need to fill up every dull second with another bit of speech. The people who are really comfortable in their own skin can have much silence.

If you want better conversation ideas, become very interested in what the other person is saying. Ask them questions about what they’ve said. One of the most powerful questions is “What kind of X?”. So if they say, “I’ve got a new dog!” you say, “What kind of dog?” They say, it’s a spaniel. “What kind of spaniel?” They might tell you its colour and size and age. You can use the “What kind of X?” question a lot. As long as it isn’t the only thing you say then it sounds normal and is great for eliciting more information. Become GENUINELY curious with what the other person is saying and time will fly. People love talking about their own lives. Once you get them started and keep asking questions they will never stop!

All best. Good luck. You have loads of perspective and ability to be introspective about your experiences so change will be very possible for you indeed. But maybe the real power comes in knowing you don’t have to change anything, just become more comfortable with what happens.

The stories you are telling about yourself aren’t real. “I am worthless” doesn’t make sense. It is unscientific and all it is, is you making up an idea about yourself in your head and then looking through it. You admit as much when you say that you want to change it. But the mistake you make is to think it is real, so it needs to be changed. It needs to be changed to “I am great”, right? But the truth is, “I am great” is just as meaningless as “I am worthless”. How can you “be” “great”? Are you the embodiment of the concept ‘great’? Do you equal everything great means and vice versa? What would that even mean? How would you test for greatness? WHERE is this “Great”? Can you find it? Where is it? point to it! Where is it?

The point I’m making here is, none of these stories you tell about yourself are real in the same way that your hands are real. Your hands are there whether you think about them or not. But when you stop thinking about your stories about yourself, they don’t seem to exist at all. That’s because they’re thoughts about reality – not reality itself.

If you like a song, is that song ACTUALLY better than any other song? Or do you just like it? If you like a person, are they FACTUALLY better than other people, or do you just like them? If you think you’re great, does that ACTUALLY mean you’re great, or does it just mean you think you are? If you’re worthless, does that ACTUALLY mean you are, or does that just mean you think you are?

What you need isn’t to change the self image, it’s to go beyond self image. Transcend self image. When you understand thoughts and concepts of self for what they really are, you don’t need to stop the thoughts. The thoughts will lose their hold over you.

Positive thinking is all about telling yourself how good you are. How is this any more “true” than you telling yourself how worthless you are? Seriously?

The reality is…you are. That’s it. You exist. You are here now. You are alive. You can tell yourself stories about who you are, but none of them, NONE OF THEM, will ever be accurate. Language will never describe the essence of you. It will always be judgement, it will always be thinking.

Say you had a girlfriend and you thought she had cheated on you. You get really angry and it affects you for that week. Then a week later you find evidence that it’s not true, she never did cheat on you. Now your thoughts change and so does your feelings, you feel love again and apologetic. In this scenario, was it the REALITY that made you angry or affected, or was it your THOUGHTS about the reality? Clearly it was your thoughts that affected you. It was only when you thought something that it affected you. But it’s worth noting here that what actually happened isn’t what you thought happened.

What you think you are is never actually what you are. You’re not who you think you are, AND you’re so much more besides. Once you have this realisation then you’ll see why positive thinking is just as meaningless as negative thinking (and in fact, that positive and negative are meaningless judgements to begin with!).

I would say it is useful to rationally dispute the negative beliefs about yourself, CBT would be good for that, yes as would be meditation, I mean look at positive thinking if you really want. Here’s how I see it: believing bad thinking is worse of all for your emotions. Better for your emotions is believing good thinking (but it still is as illogical as believing bad thinking – so on a scientific / logical level, neither of these orientations make sense). But best is to understand the nature of thought and to align with who you really are – that is, the observer of thought. To realize that thought isn’t who you are at all, and to have no reason to believe the thinking at all. This is not only the best for your emotional wellbeing (walking around telling yourself how goddamn awesome you are is exhausting and creates problems of its own – it needs maintenance to stay there as a held belief, especially if you’ve spent your whole life thinking and believing the opposite!) but it is also, by far, the most logical option. Scientifically the judgements you tell yourself about yourself are meaningless. All they tell you, the only information they give you, is what thoughts are arising in this moment, what stories about reality. But what does that have to do with

?

“I am an introvert” – a story, a judgement. not reality. dispute this cognition with CBT. not to believe its opposite, but to drop it as a belief.

“when it times to crunch times, I just falter” – another story, this time a generalisation about the whole of your life. generalisations like that don’t make sense, dispute this cognition with CBT. not to believe anything else, but to drop this particular belief.

“People have quite often told me that I’m quite negative” – Cool story. What people think of you has absolutely nothing to do with who you are. If even YOU don’t actually get to dictate who you are using thoughts, do you seriously think other people are qualified to do this? But what you do have is some useful feedback – not about who you are, but about the way people are judging you. This can be useful if everybody is saying it, there might be something in it. Looks like you got the message. Remember, what they said has nothing to do with who you are, it’s some feedback to let you know how negative they judge you to be. When I say that, I’m not doing a cute little mind shift to make everything sound nice. I’m being scientific. I’m being rational. That is the REALITY. People who judge you are not experiencing you and then telling you who you are. This is impossible. They are experiencing you and then judging you, and then telling you who they THINK you are. The difference is seismic if you can see it.

“It’s slowly dawned on me in the last couple of years that they are right – I’m not very positive at all.” – Story. Blah blah blah. They’re not right, actually. it’s a judgement. dispute this cognition using CBT. I’ll give you a bit of help: Some people might see you as positive, say they’re very depressed, they’d say you were more positive than them. Sometimes you would admit you’re being positive in certain moments. So therefore this belief is a meaningless generalisation. But dont take my word for it, actually dispute the belief. Not to replace it with another belief (“I am a positive person” – just as randomly and weirdly imposed onto reality for no particular reason; just as illogical; just as meaningless) but to drop it altogether. You could work on being more optimistic. But notice I’m using the word being, that’s a choice you make in every moment, to see the bright side. It’s not who you are at the identity level. Chuck out all of your ideas of who you are at the identity level, you don’t need them.

“The fear I have is that I try these things & they don’t work because I don’t truly believe them, or that I have to do them forever and that if I stop I’ll be negative again.” – Firstly this is thinking about the future so you can just tune out and stop listening to it. Why believe it? Are you a fortune teller? If not why keep predicting the future? Unless you’re an actual clairvoyant you’ll be wrong a lot of the time so it’s rather pointless to worry about your predictions. Secondly you will now realize that the whole point is not to believe the affirmations at all, positive or negative, and to align yourself with something deeper within you. And clearly you’ll never “be negative again”, because you never “were negative”. That was never who you were. It was just who you told yourself you thought you were. Big difference.

I’m using this tone to just be matter of fact and clear with you hoping that helps you as much as possible. I’m just being realistic here, I’m not dressing anything up but nor am I being cynical. (You’ll notice I’m using the phrase “I’m being (this and that)”, well, it’s a figure of speech and I don’t actually believe I am LITERALLY “being” realistic. It’s a judgement I have about myself which I will happily own – not the reality, but a judgement about myself. But for human interaction it is very useful to have these shortcuts of language. The problem only begins when you start to actually believe that the way we phrase things in a conversation like this is the way things actually are.)

Hope this helps. All best. Check out as much as you can and keep going with the discoveries. It’s a real journey!

• This reply was modified 9 years, 8 months ago by Rock Banana.