15. It's All in Your Head

 

NOTE: Each alter’s name has a number after it the first time

it is on the page to show which group s/he belongs to.

See the right of this page for the group.

Continuing to read Marshall Rosenberg’s book on nonviolent communication and Othel (1) has come to making a hypothesis. Is it possible, he asks, that thought comes before emotion and behaviour. Is it possible that everything we feel and do comes from a thought first? In this culture, this society, we have been taught well how to judge ourselves and others and we are so good at it don’t you think? I’m a failure, a loser, I shouldn’t have done that, I’m so stupid, etc. But the damage from these thoughts is far-reaching and devastating to our well-being.

One of the trickiest things is that those thoughts can be so well embedded within our psyche that we don’t even notice they are there. When they do appear, it may be so fleeting, so subtle, so quick. We don’t even realize we thought it. And then the emotion follows on its heels. Is it possible that depression is not the illness but the thoughts that cause us to feel depressed is the real culprit. And the enemy is all that we have been taught growing up.

There are times when we Webers feel so down. Ariel (1) says she doesn’t do depression and gets us out for a walk or to the library. But something else happens in our mind then too. We agree with her. We are not doing this folks. We are climbing out of this hell hole. And we do just that --- snap out of it. No, we are not telling you that people should just snap out of their depression or anxiety or whatever ails you. The point is that it’s possible to change our thinking and thus change the way we feel about ourselves. If we are judging ourself harshly then we could be going down that old worn out trail of depression. Sigh. Here we go again.

The biggest problem is that our judgements are taken for truth, taken for fact. There’s the conspiracy. We believe at a core place in our being that we are flawed and that there is little we can do about it. But if we could get a handle on that and understand that it is our thinking that is flawed well maybe, just maybe, a change can come. There is hope on the horizon. And it’s not our fault either. Let us repeat that - the fact that our thinking is flawed is not our fault. We haven’t done anything wrong. In fact the opposite. We have been trained, well trained. We have learned well what we have been taught. And the only thing we can do is fight like crazy to climb out of that deep and ugly place.

Well, it’s a theory, a hypothesis. Maybe it is not as simple as that. But we Webers are able to pull ourself out of depression. We shake our head, get those terrible ideas out, and set new goals – going to meditate, going to walk every day, going to eat well, going to start today to change things no matter what has been going on.

Someone in the support group said, and I hope he doesn’t mind us using his quote, but it’s delicious and very appropriate here – DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU THINK. That about sums it up for us.

Today we will fill in more on the second original group, The More Others.

Thanks for listening folks