self esteem course: 10. some immediate help

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A Course in Self-Esteem 

10. Some Immediate Help

by Channing Grigsby

A Handy-Dandy Kitbag of Tools, Gadgets and Ideas

for Immediate Self-Esteem Help

Here are some real tools to help you gain immediate relief and some power over your low self-esteem.
Start from here.
This place, where you are right now. We can always find reasons why we can't or shouldn't start.We are always embedded in various inconveniences, like frustrating jobs, or problematical relationships, not enough time, not enough money. So what? What else is new? Here is where you are. Start from here.

Start right now.

Thinking about it may prepare the way, but thinking is only thinking; it doesn't do anything. We easily put off things we think will be difficult or uncomfortable until some magic time in the future when it will be easy and convenient. Which times never comes. Don't wait until after your diet has succeeded, or your period of mourning is over, or you get the promotion, or move to that new place, or after the vacation, or the car gets fixed. Don't wait. Start now!

Get help.

If you need it. If you're confused, depressed, or pessimistic, you could probably profit from help. Allow yourself not to have all the answers at least long enough to ask someone for help. Read this material, maybe take a class, join a group, find a therapist you can talk with, work a twelve-step program if that seems right for you. Do whatever works for you, but realize you don't have to do this all by yourself and that you are not alone.

Take the Time.

It takes time to change head and heart and soul. If it doesn't happen as fast as you want it to, let that tell you about how badly you want it. Let it remind you that maybe you need to re-define success: the most successful baseball player of all time, Ty Cobb, had a lifetime batting average of .366, which means he succeeded in hitting the ball only three-and-two-thirds times out of every ten tries at bat. That's only one out of three! Yet he was an enormous success and great baseball hero.

Be gentle with yourself.

Treat yourself with loving kindness. Have the courage to treat yourself as you would like others to treat you, and as you would treat them. It is unfortunately true that much of the time we are kinder to others than we are to ourselves. Give yourself a genuine break. Allow yourself the time and space to create a genuine opportunity for success.

 

Remember:

Courses and course materials don't change peoples' lives.
Other people won't and can't change your life.  
But you can.
 

Get Information

Some people call it a "cognitive liferaft," real information and ideas about this subject that nobody talks about. The mere information that you are not alone can help turn things around. If you feel you're drowning slowly, or there's water up to here, grab hold. Climb on. Hold on. Start with resources compatible with the major problem-solving tool you possess: your brain. Get accurate information. Find out what other people have been through. Find out what other people have discovered and thought about this problem. It helps a lot to realize that while you may feel crazy, you're not crazy. It helps even more to realize it isn't all your fault. Find out how it happened.

Suspend Your Judgments

Get off the judge's bench. Life isn't a courtroom, you're not on constant trial, and you can stop being judge, jury and executioner. Everyone is entitled to a defense. Judgments only express approval or disapproval. Many people feel that judgments should possess the weight of justice somehow  -- they do not. If you were on trial for your life (and if you have low self-esteem, you are) you'd hate to be tried by a biased judge who keeps frowning and scowling and expressing profound disapproval at you. If you had such a judge, you might think the verdict of guilty a foregone conclusion. You would want that judge to suspend judgment until all the evidence is in, weigh the evidence, evaluate it, and then come to a conclusion about whether in fact you did something but not whether or not you are a total asshole. It is appropriate for you to do no less for yourself. Suspend your judgments.

Disengage.

Just observe. Just listen to what happens.

You may have noticed how the idea of judgments, yours and others', thickly permeate most of the material we've been dealing with here -- the origins of our self-esteem, our defenses, the barriers that get in the way. Those judgments contributed to a belief system we have about ourselves that we hold with primary certainty. Such beliefs, which are in fact only beliefs -- something in our heads -- seem to describe the way things are and are the things we take for granted. They are the things we assume about the world. Such beliefs constitute our assumptions about things, in this case, our assumptions about ourselves. One of the really useful ideas from conservative American philosopher Ayn Rand was the statement: "Challenge your assumptions."

Consider the possibility that you're wrong. Consider the possibility your belief system about yourself is false. Consider the possibility that your own judgments are not true  --  that they are false and that their major purpose is to support the false belief system you hold. And consider the possibility that you need to shift into neutral for a while so you can get the real information you need.

To get that real information, suspend your judgments. All they do is get in the way. Become aware of your judging. See how you do it. Watch how often you do it. Try to perceive its purpose. Start with watching how often you judge  --  by which I mean, how often do you register your approval or disapproval about something, someone, or some event? Observe how you judge yourself. Notice that you judge yourself.

Listen to the tirades that come from your "inner critic" and notice how negative and nastily critical they are. Also notice how unmerciful. Imagine how you would sound if all those words directed at you were being said out loud by someone else. Imagine, for instance, that I had access to those thoughts and arguments and I walked around, about six inches off your left shoulder, speaking insistently and persistently in your ear all those things that you say to yourself. Then tell me how long it would take you to tell me to go to hell.

So, you stop doing that for a while. And notice what a difference letting go of the need to judge makes in how you feel.

Manage Your Language

Whether it feels like it or not, you are in charge of the words you use. And the language you use makes a difference. Make your language work for you and not against you. Make it accurate and precise. Make it honest. Make your language reflect the facts. Simple example: you incorrectly add a column of figures. You discover your mistake. The question is, how do you describe it to yourself? "That was pretty stupid -- I'm such a jerk. I never could do math." Or, do you say, "I made a mistake."

Is it true that a mistake in addition reflects ultimate intelligence and character and capability? Or is a mistake in addition simply a mistake in addition? All the statement "I'm such a jerk" expresses is disapproval and derision. Further, there is no defense against the label. What can we say? "Oh, no, I'm not really a jerk?" That's the kind of statement everyone believes, isn't it?

On the other hand, "I made a mistake" accurately describes what occurred. The language we use and how use it makes a huge difference, and we can be in control of managing it.

Bust the Cycle

Something happens  --  an event occurs or we make a mistake, say. We see it. Then we interpret it. The seeing part is fine  --  it's the interpretation part that gets us into trouble. Built into the interpretation is a judgment about whether or not what has happened is good or bad, and if its bad, how bad it is. If it's bad, we look around for someone to blame. This tendency is so strong you may have noticed either yourself or someone else hit an inanimate object in blame and punishment. In our pasts, when bad stuff happened, we were often blamed, and so we may have gotten into the habit of assuming responsibility for bad stuff, whether it was our fault or not. But then, having taken the blame, we begin to feel guilty.

Psychologist Albert Ellis, the father of what is now called Rational-Emotive Therapy, calls guilt an absolutely useless emotion that changes nothing. He argues guilt serves only to make us feel badly about ourselves, and it doesn't help us learn from our mistakes and not do the same thing again. In other words, guilt stops learning. Dead in its tracks. All it does is tell us how bad we are. He is not arguing it's okay to do bad things, or that we don't have any feelings about it afterward. What he wants to see is not guilt but remorse and regret, both of which allow us to accept that the thing has happened and to do something different in the future. Regret doesn't define us as bad, which is what guilt tends to do.

So something bad happens, we take responsibility for it and begin to feel guilty, and the because guilt makes us feel bad, we feel guilty about that, which is guilt about feeling guilty, or what I call guilt on guilt. That in itself is a bad thing that happens, so we make a judgment about it, and around and around we go one more time.

What we can do is bust that cycle. Bad things happen. Let it be. And then do not make a judgment about it. Don't decide you deserve it, or that's the way things always are, or you should have known better. And don't take the blame for it. Try not to blame anyone else. If you can step into this cycle early, between the event and the judgment, you can prevent yourself from having to go along for the whole ride. You have the option to thwart this pattern.

Acknowledge Your Fear

Fear is one of the mainspring motivators of human behavior. It's okay to be afraid. Being afraid is not the end of the world. If you can acknowledge that fear is as common as dirt, if you can recognize that everyone has fears, whether they look like it or not, you can reduce the power fear has for driving your behavior. If we feel it, if we allow ourselves to experience it, the fear goes away and we are still here. See the Song Against Fear

 

Make the Choice and the Decision

Regaining our lost self-esteem cannot happen until the choice and the decision is made to pursue it. It won't happen by itself; it happens through effort and will and intention.

In his book Honoring the Self,* Nathaniel Branden puts it this way:

"Of all the judgments that we pass in life, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves, for that judgment touches the very center of our existence....
The first act of honoring the self is the assertion of consciousness: the choice to think, to be aware, to send the searchlight of consciousness outward toward the world and inward toward our own being. To default on this effort is to default on the self at the most basic level....
To honor the self is to be willing to know not only what we think but also what we feel, what we want, need, desire, suffer over, are frightened or angered by -- and to accept our right to experience such feelings. The opposite of this attitude is denial, disowning, repression -- self-repudiation....
To honor the self is to be in love with our own life, in love with our possibilities for growth and for experiencing joy, in love with the process of discovering and exploring our distinctively human potentialities."

Challenge the conviction

People with low self-esteem tend to utter a number of negative thoughts as refrains in their heads; chief among them is "I cannot handle this. This is simply too much. I can't handle this." This refrain of powerlessness is almost a reflex: something challenging occurs and the immediate thought is "I can't handle this." This refrain constitutes a conviction  --  a felt sense of things --  which is clearly and patently a lie: it is not true. It is blatantly false to the facts: look at your life. In the past, you have handled things, many difficult, uncomfortable things, and mostly you've done okay. Maybe you didn't do perfectly, but you did okay. Maybe you didn't like it, but you did okay.

This felt-sense conviction is worth challenging because it is primarily based on fear and a fear response to the situation. It tends to control your experience when dealing with the problem. Challenge the conviction: Instead of "I can't handle this," say "I d rather not mess with this, but I can handle it."

If you were a child standing with your friends, and one of them dared you to do something, how did you react? Did you agree with them that they were right, and you really didn't dare do it? Most people respond strongly (sometimes too strongly) to a dare; they don't tend to withdraw. You can get access to that energy that carries through a dare. Imagine a difficult situation as the same kind of dare issued to you by the world. Rephrase the problem as if it is the world speaking to you and saying "I dare you to respond well to this trouble."

Switch Metaphors

Our thinking tends to control the possibilities in our lives. And our thinking tends to be dominated by the metaphors we use. The way we think one thing is like or different from another. Metaphors can be very simple but also hugely controlling: when we're happy, we're "up," and when we're sad, we're "down." Such meanings are critically important in how we experience both the world and our experience of it.

As I've written this material, I began to notice how often I resorted to mechanical images and analogies -- broken fuel pumps, for instance. And I further realized that we are encouraged, by many forces in our culture, to think of ourselves as machines or in machine-like terms: as robots, say, or computers, or automobiles.

There is a serious problem with such thinking. Certain kinds of things automatically follow acccording to the metaphor. A machine that isn't functioning properly is supposed to be easy to repair and to fix -- all we need to do is to identify the badly working part or find an adequate set of instructions. Replace or repair the part. Replace or repair the instructions. Abracadabra, presto-changeo, everything is fixed, everything is okay at last. Easy.

BUT a person is not a machine. Transplant surgeries notwithstanding, there are no handy replacement parts. Although there appear to many replacement sets of instructions, there is little evidence they work. Fixing ourselves is nowhere near as easy as removing the broken fuel pump from an engine and relacing it with a new one. Yet, we get annoyed when our efforts don't pay off that easily, as if simply reading a book should fix us, or going to a weekend seminar, or even taking a class should do the trick.

We need to change the metaphor that controls our thinking. We are not machines. We are growing, dynamic biological organisms and entirely different principles are at work in our changing process  --  slower biological processes, as opposed to simple mechanical processes based on physical principles. We are far more like gardens than machines, and gardens, for one thing, operate on entirely different time-scales than a machine does. While a rose plant blooms every year, it doesn't suddenly bloom overnight. Nurturing helps: sunlight, warmth, water, fertilizer, some judicious pruning and weed-pulling  --  some people say even talking to plants helps them grow.

Change your metaphor. Think of yourself as a dynamic growing biological organism, and treat yourself accordingly. While healing can be speeded up, it still takes time. Changes in growth or direction take time to become permanent. A friend of mine, a minister, uses the metaphor of planting seeds in a garden  --  we can't run out the next day and dig up the furrows to see if the seeds have sprouted yet, nor can we stop watering because none of the new plants have come up yet. Impatience when dealing with dynamic and growing biological organisms and processes is fatal for a garden and a program-for-failure for the gardener.

Dis-Identify

We tend sometimes to identify too completely with only some part of ourselves, like our thoughts, or our feelings, or our behavior. For example, if I feel an angry feeling, I may think I am angry. If I think a hateful thought, I may think that I am hateful. We reduce ourselves when we do this to a simplistic present reality  -- a thought or a feeling, "Yes, that's me, that's who I am." Wrong. We are much more than that. Such a statement is simply dishonest. We are complex and multi-faceted. We are larger than that.

I have always valued Roberto Assagioli's comments on this subject. See "I Am More." As one of my students said of this coda, "read when feeling bummed."

Mind Management: A Major Tool for Self-Esteem First-Aid

We manage a great deal in life, sometimes well, sometimes badly.
We manage our homes, our bank accounts, our money, our businesses, our cars, our careers, and so, in a sense, we manage our lives. Sometimes our self-esteem is based in large part on the feedback we get from others about how well we are doing that. And sometimes we are doing that very well and the feedback is great but our self-esteem is still the pits and our lives still don't feel right. The problem may be very close to home, inside our heads, right between our ears. The problem may be our own minds.

Invariably, when I suggested to my students they might manage their own minds, they argued against it, as if that were neither possible nor desirable. We have this sense of heaviness associated with "management," as if it is hard and undesirable work that requires an expert's knowledge. And, hey, who wants to work all the time? When can we just relax and take it easy? To answer the last questions first: presumably, you've had a lot of time in your life to relax and take it easy -- how's it going? And all the first questions usually mean is that they don't know how to begin to think about managing their own minds. So I provide them with some information devloped in the approach called Neuro Linguistic Programming, or NLP.

NLP was orginally the work of two men, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, in late 70's and early 80's, who developed concepts and techniques for human problem solving. It has been adapted and used successfully by many, including Anthony Robbins, whose success seminars are largely based on NLP principles.

Imagine this. In the dead of a very cold winter, you must do something to repair your automobile in your garage, Let us say the faulty part is a fuel pump and you have the part, the tools and know exactly how to do it. You complete the repair and in order to see if your work has solved the problem, you start the car and feel a great wave of satisfaction as it starts and idles nicely. You stand there for a moment admiring your work, and then realize the car is spewing out toxic carbon dioxide fumes in a closed garage. What do you do? One good idea is immediately to open the garage door and let in gales of fresh air. A second good idea is to shut down the engine by turning off the ignition. But what if you went to the car and the ignition switch was simply gone and you couldn't turn it off?

In his book, Using Your Brain for a Change, Richard Bandler points out that our brain, a truly major organ of our body, has no off-switch. Like our heart, our brain is always going. Even when we're asleep, electro-chemical discharges are happening in our heads, and sometimes what happens in our heads at night is as exhausting as a day's work. But unlike an automobile engine, our brains never idle and they are never in neutral.

More importantly, Bandler points out, if our brain doesn't have something to do, it will find something to do.People who have been subjects in sensory deprivation experiments  --  sitting at length, blindfolded, in an anechoic chamber (a room that deadens all sound) or floating in shallow and dark tank of body temperature water  --  report that after a short period during which their brains were receiving no sensory input, they started seeing and hearing things that weren't there.

In other words, their brains found something to do by hallucinating sights and sounds. In the absence of instructions or input, the brain will do something. Our brains are terrible masters but good and loyal servants. If you tell your brain what to do, it will obediently follow your wish. Think of a zebra. Now think of a pink elephant. Try to remember your fifth birthday. Etc. etc. etc.

If you wish to change the level of your self-esteem, you must do two things. First, you must stop the bad habits that maintain your low levels of self-esteem. The second thing is to look at the origins of that low level of self-esteem. Your brain participates in both of those, so to stop maintaining a low level of self-esteem, begin to manage your mind. That is, be in charge of what your mind is doing. Left to itself, your brain will follow old habits. If the old habit is to put you down or to predict failure, your brain will continue to do that until you take charge and make it follow a different habit. If your mind works to put you down, stop it by telling it to cut it out. If you're having negative, unproductive thoughts, change those thoughts to positive and healthy ones. Oh, sure, you may think, that's easy for you to say. How do you do all this good stuff?

Here's how. In fact, I've created a control board for your mind. Since I did some work in radio broadcasting in my past, I've made it look like a control panel in a radio broadcast studio. Because this control board is official and important, I originally called it an Internal Representation Modification Control Panel -- it's really a mind management control board.

What we call reality "out there" is really in here. And in here, in our brains, is an elaborately constructed and inter-connected representation, a gorgeously intricate model, of what's out there. Everything we know  --  our entire knowledge of the outside world  -- is a representation we have created in our minds based on the information we have received through our senses. We have heard it, seen it, touched it, smelt it, felt it, tasted it, and that also includes all the information we have ever gotten from anyone else.

Two relevant points about this: first, the larger part of what makes up the representation of reality in our heads was created from language and provided by others. It is, therefore, received information and it needs validation and confirmation. Second, we have probably favored one sense over another. As in everything else, we come to depend on that sense which is easiest or most congenial for us and so we favor one source of sensory input over the others. We become literally oriented in the world to receiving the bulk of our information about that world through our sight. Or through our hearing. Or through our body and how it feels. NLP identifies these three orientations or ways of receiving information as Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic.

Our orientation controls how we learn and how eaily we learn. It also makes a difference in how we can change what we know or think we know. If you are visually oriented, and learn best thtrough images, movies are great, but listening to someone talk, as on a tape or at a lecture, is not likely to be especially helpful to you. If you're kinesthetically oriented, just seeing something won't be especially helpful. All of us use all three means of receiving information, but one of these modes tends to dominate and we "sense" it as the right way. Ideally, we would all have a balance of the three modes and be equally able to receive and process information visually, auditorally, and kinesthetically. And while we can work to strengthen those modes we use least well, it is important to identify our dominant mode so we can effectively use our own strengths on our own behalf.

Finding out which is your dominant organization is not difficult. Which do you prefer? To watch, to listen, or to do? In general, would you prefer to go to a movie, to a concert, or for a walk? How have you achieved your "Aha!" experiences? When someone asks you a difficult question and you close your eyes to find the answer, are you looking for the answer, listening for the answer, or feeling for the answer by trying to recapture a bodily sensation? In my family, I am visiual (I see movies in my head), my stepson is auditory, and my wife is kinesthetic. Perhaps you can see the potential for communication difficulties among people with three different orientations. A great deal of so-called learning difficulty in schools may be based on the fact that schools historically teach in the watch and listen mode. For a person kinesthetically organized, learning by watching and listening is inneficient at best and usually difficult.

Your orientation will also tell you how you store your memories in your brain. You will remember past events visually, auditorally, or kinesthetically. In other words, that is the information you have to work with: what it looked like, sounded like, or felt like. It is important to note that the past  --  our memory of all our yesterdays  --  exists as a series of electro-chemical discharges among the biological cells of our brains. That is all it is and the only way it exists. While these facts don't make our memories any less real, it's important to remember that our memory of experience is not unlike a video-tape with a capacity for evoking an emotional response. We can replay that tape over and over again, and sometimes we do.

Things to remember:

1. Memory is a replay -- it is not the original experience. This reality is well expressed in the title of a kid's book called That was Then, This is Now.

2. Our memory consists of arbitrary neural discharges that can be falsely connected. Our memory can be inaccurate, or it can become, over time, inaccurate. A simple example: how tall are you and how do know? When was the last time your height was measured? When I was growing up, my physical growth was measured on a door-jamb with small pencil marks and dates. Back up to the doorway and a pencil laid as level as possible across the crown of your head made a mark. Then the distance from the floor to the mark was measured. I'll bet you have a number in your memeory about how tall you are, maybe confirmed by the sliding metal rod on some scales in doctor's offices.

My wife had the number five-three in her head. I'm over six feet tall, and when we hugged she seemed taller than that to me. When I suggested maybe she was taller, she argued for the five-three memory. It was, after all, a fact. Until we measured. It turned out she is five feet five and one-half inches tall. The difference is two and a half inches, hardly a big deal, but it did help her to make sense of a few things, like how clothes fit (or didn't), etc. It also mildly altered her self-image. Size in this culture is something people make judgments about: while five-three is moderately small for a female, five-five plus is moderately tall.

Although they can be false, our memories are powerful. We can be terrorized or dominated by our memories of the past. They can be painful, unpleasant to remember. And the lessons we learned from the original experience can get reinforced every time we recall the experience in our memories. It would be really useful, really helpful if we could alter those connections and associations.

Guees what? We can. The following discussion refers to the Mind Management Control Panel below:

You can require that every memory, every lesson from the past, must go through this control panel. Now look at the panel and first note that there is an on-off switch. You do have the option of not turning it on in the first place. You don't have to remember if you don't wish to.

Please note that below the on-off switch, there is an Attach/Detach switch. When the attach switch is on, your ego, your sense of yourself, is involved in the outcome of the event you are remembering. You care desperately about what happened and how it turned out. When the Detach switch is on, you have separated yourself from the experience and its outcome: you are more neutral and non-judgmental. When you are re-living experiences in your memory, you can be attached or detached, and what this switch does is offer you the option. You can choose to detach. You can choose to rerun the tape without suffering.

Acrosss the top of the panel, on the ritght, are three buttons. The fair-right button is the erase button. You can simply choose to let go of the memory or thought that's bothering you and to erase it from your consciousness. What this means is not that it miraculously disappears, but that you destroy the power of that memory to bother you. Instead of seeing it as profoundly signifcant and consequential, you can decide it is in the longer view basically trivial and not worth bothering with. Erasing is not about expunging experience but about throwing away stuff you don't need anymore.

Much of the power of the past to bother us and control us today is premised on the fact that the memory is intact from back then. The Edit button give you the option literally to alter your memory of the past even by chopping it up and rearranging it, in the same way editors create films out of one piece of film and another. For instance, you can change the sequence of events. Simple example: you did something your mother didn't like (broke a glass, say) and she got angry with you and you remember that fearsome, hostile expression on her face. Now remember another event, a positive one, when her expression was full of love and concern. Paste that image into the first memory, so that the sequence is first broken glass, then loving expression, and the power of that other memory to bother you will be reduced.

The Rewrite button is similar. We all have had the experience of a conversation or encounter that has upset us. Afterwards we think of something we would have liked to say in our own defense. It is possible to re-imagine the conversation that upset you, but this time include the thing you "should have said," and have the other person hear it and respond to it. In other words, re-write the memory. If you do, its power to embarrass you or make you uncomfortable will lessen.

Below the dial on the control panel are three sets of buttons, grouped according to mode and representing only a few of the possibilities for each one. Each group is labeled, starting on the left with Auditory. Take, for example, a memory in which someone shouted at you and now, in your mind, just turn down the volume of that shout until it is a whisper and the memory will be changed and so will its power to affect you. If someone said something to you that hurt, you can keep the words but change the tone of their voice -- from sarcastic nastiness, say, to a seductive wheedling. Or, you could make the person sound like one of the chipmunks in that high-pitched, accelerated-tape voice. You can also change the tempo of the sound, from fast to slow, or you can speed it up. All of these will alter the memory for you.

Intense visual memories tend to be in close-up and tight frames. To reduce the power of such a memory, imagine you are running a camera with a zoom lens that allows you to reverse zoom, back and away, making the close-up portion shrink, opening up the frame to include a whole lot more of the scene. When you do that, what was happening in the close-up loses some of its centrality.

Bad memories tend to be dark, so use the Bright button to put it in bright sunlight, like the light on a beach at high noon. You can also increase the speed at which events occur to make it look like one of those old Keystone Kops silent movies in which everyone seems to be jerkily running around, looking kind of silly and therefore amusing. Or you can slow it down, reducing the speed at which things happen to slow motion. If the memory is fast, slow it down; if it's slow, speed it up. If you are a person with a visual orientation, not only are your bad memories in close-up, dark, and agonizingly slow, they are also on a giant wall-to-wall screen. So, reduce the screen to the size of a postage stamp and you will reduce its power over you.

Kinesthetic memories have to do with bodily sensations, especially touch and feel  --  a felt sense of things. If you have a bad memory, it is likely to be dense, full to bursting, and to have a strong force or push behind it and a stiff, hard, unyielding feel to it. To change it, use the Intensity button to dilute it, as if you were adding water to thick syrup, to weaken it, lighten it, soften it as in a feather pillow. Such memories are felt as rigid, as hard like steel, instead of flexible and able to bend like a willow stick, so reduce its rigidity  -- make it soft and plastic, like Jello. Similarly, bad kinesthetic memories tend to be cold, chilling  --  they make us shrink inward to preserve our life and our heat, so simply raise the temperature. Imagine that frosty event occuring in the hot and humid tropics or during a heat wave.

As often as not, the very suggestion that we can have power over our minds and meories reduces the power that unpleasant thoughts or memories can have over us. If you think of something and find yourself responding badly to it -- in other words, if you are beating yourself up, think of this control panel and modify what's going on in your head. Modify what you are reacting to and the experience you're having.

It is also important to realize that we are not our experiences. Our experience is only a part of us and who we are consists of much more than just what has happened to us. We are also much bigger than our memories. We do not have to victimized by them.

 


(1)Nathaniel Branden: Honoring the Self, Bantam, 1985, p. xiii

(2) Richard Bandler: Using Your Brain for a Change,  


 

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© 1997, C. Grigsby, All Rights Reserved. 2 Aug 1988

Comments? E-mail to: Channing