Minds engage with pain……..painful engagement – We can overcome negativity, bitter memories with the help of good memories and positive approach
As a human being at some stage we all feel down and out of life. We suffered from depression, hopelessness, feared, anxiety, guilty, shame and whole life seems a complete failure.
These all negative thinking can be caused of mental pain and just keep going round and round
Likewise: There is nothing I can do, I am falling apart, I have no future, I am completely defeated, I have lost something I’ll never find again, I am not my old self any more, I am worthless, I am a burden to others, something in my life has been damaged forever, I can’t find meaning in my life, I am completely helpless, The pain will never go away…….etc.
We carry around the dead weight of past failures, unfinished business, relationship difficulties, unresolved arguments, unfulfilled ambitions for ourselves and others. This kind of thinking always engage our minds with pain and sometimes it’s so difficult to disengage the mind from this painful thinking. This state of mind has been called ‘Painful engagement’.
According to many researches we all carry two types of painful thinking in our heads. One is guilty; shame which is related to past, other is fear about future and then all negative feelings, thought and emotions developed in our minds. As I have mentioned above.
It is not hard to see why any and all of us might feel guilty for much of the time. It’s all around us. We can feel guilty for not being able to cope; guilty for being a bad person or a poor husband, wife, mother, father, brother , sister, daughter or son; guilty for not achieving our potential. We can feel shame for not living up to our expectations, or for feeling anger, bitterness, jealousy, sadness, meanness and despair. Guilty for enjoying life. Guilty for feeling happy….
And the foundation for much of this guilt and shame is fear. Fear that we are not good enough; fear that if we relax we will begin to fail; fear that if we let ourselves off the leash, all hell will break loose; fear that if we don’t maintain our defences we will be overwhelmed…..And if we fear that others will criticise us, why not play safe and attack ourselves with a few homemade criticisms first.
One fear leads to another, which feeds into another, in an endless debilitating cycle that saps our energy, leaving us like a hollow shell drifting through life.
Any of us fall into the same mental trap. We can carry with us a hidden assumption that, because of what has happened to us, nothing at all can ever be the same again.
But why does this happen? The answer lies in the way we remember events from the past. Scientific research has made great progress in understanding how memory for events in our life works; and how it can go wrong. In experiments conducted over many years by Mark Williams and colleagues, volunteers recall an event in the past when they felt happy. It does not necessarily have to have been an important one, but one lasted less than a day from any time in the past. Most of us find easy to recall something. Perhaps we can remember some good news or walking in the hills and seeing a dramatic view, a day out with a good friend. Notice that the memory has worked smoothly, retrieving specific events-something that happened on a particular day and time and place (even if you cannot recall exactly when it took place).
We can overcome negativity, bitter memories with the help of good memories and positive approach. We all have lots of blessings by nature. We should compose ourselves, look deep into our heart and think there are so many beautiful things has been part or are part of our lives. This thought will make us bit more relaxed and bit more positive. With the help of positive approach anyone can defeat hardship of life.
