When you have suffered trauma, when you have intense feelings that are difficult to manage, when you’re a parent, or when you’re just trying to get along, life can be an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes you want to crawl in bed and not come out. Sometimes you are sure you are just too sensitive for this difficult world we live in. Whether you are sent sliding down into the black pits of doom by anger, rejection, abandonment or some other experience, reacting to that same troublemaker in the same way, over and over, does not help you. It’s like being surprised how quickly Christmas comes, even though it happens on the same day of the same month year after year. In AA the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. How does that happen? Part of the issue is we don’t want to pay attention to those experiences. Just getting through them is difficult enough and when they’re over, we like to think they will never recur. We certainly want as much time as possible before the misery returns. Why would we think about the anxiety, the sadness or whatever led to those feelings when we are feeling content or even joyful? I think there’s a very good reason. If you understand exactly how something happens, how you walk down that same street, then you can change what you need to change in order to not have the same result. It may be a slow change, one step at a time, but it will lead to a bigger change. If you are consistent, you can even change the automatic neurological reactions in your brain. That’s pretty powerful! If you have your owner’s manual, then you can remind yourself when you are in the emotional agony that feels like mental labor pains that you know this place and you can do something different. You have even written this pattern down in your owner’s manual as something predictable. In your owners manual you will have alternatives to the behaviors that don’t work and be able to look them up. Ah, yes, when this happens I need to do that. Maybe you’re not ready to make any changes. That’s okay and that’s a good reason to not do it. Stop here, don’t read any further. Changing any behavior is very, very difficult. If you try to change before you are ready to make a real commitment to that change, then you will probably feel worse about yourself when you don’t follow through. You’ll forget or ignore the fact you weren’t really committed to change and just beat up on yourself. Well, some of you will do that. Others won’t. But if you do that it makes the situation worse. So wait until you are committed to making a change. This is my suggestion. I propose you consider writing your own owner’s manual. This manual would be similar to the instruction manual for your computer. Push C + w and the speech application will read the highlighted material–that kind of instruction but for your emotional well being. I’ll help you do it. So consider your commitment. Are you ready to work? Ready to make some changes, even just the first step? If so, come back. Next week I’ll post the first step.
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