I’ve been noticing of late the tendency for people to attribute the source of pain and suffering to be outside of themselves. It may be a person they find difficult to relate to, or events they fear may happen to them, or events that have already happened that they blame others for.
Oftentimes, difficult things do happen, and others and the situations we together are in are significant factors in this. It can be important to talk this through, and to be with the troubling emotions that arise from it. Once this release has been given though, the reality will be that we can’t change things that are outside of us. This is a challenging truth at times, but it is nonetheless how it is.
Consciousness seems to be some kind of prediction model, where we use past experience to predict what it is that is currently happening. We make sense of now based on our prior experiences, for good or worse. Becoming more and more aware of the assumptions, beliefs, ideas and thoughts we have around what is happening is therefore a fruitful path to changing the nature of our experience.
None of us could function without many, many biases and shorthands, we need them to be able to make sense of the vast quantities of stimulus that come at us. It is working with the deeply held ones that change the way we experience things now. Sometimes this work is cognitive, and we can simply challenge the ideas. Sometimes we need to work with the body, with sensations and emotions, and process out things that have become stuck or distorted. One size does not fit all.
What is the same, however, is the need to work with our own experience. After all, that is all we really have. When we can dare to look inside and notice what we can flex and change, then we can find ways to live differently, in a way where the pain and suffering are less, and the situations we find ourselves in are different.
For help in discovering and transforming your deep patterns of experience, why not find a psychotherapist experienced in outcome oriented or NLP approaches?
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