Move From Emotional or Physical Pain into Joy

We need to decide if we want to exist, survive or thrive.

Imagine: It’s Monday morning. The week is ahead of us. Life is ahead of us. What do we see a) pain, b) survival or c) thriving?

What do you want from life?

It’s a simple question but each of us will give a different answer. We are all different. One size doesn’t necessarily fit all.

But life’s not random either. There are patterns to how our bodies and our minds work, and how we behave. Even those things that keep us trapped are just patterns. Understanding and changing them enables us to create the life we want.

The cream tea approach to making life better

Let me explain. Generally a cream tea involves a scone, jam and cream, there’s the pattern; a flexible pattern. Some people prefer to put the jam on first, others put the cream on first. Some prefer a plain scone, others, a fruit scone. Then there are those who like butter too. No one method will be right for everyone, all the time.

The same goes for making our lives better.

• For some people a few sessions will be fine, others will want longer.
• Some people will be able to get the change they want from working from at the conscious level (training and coaching), others will need to do subconscious work (therapy and hypnosis).
• Improvement is often achieved with light subconscious work, sometimes we need to go deeper into more emotional change.

Am I broken?

Some psychotherapists believe that when we’re not thriving we need fixing. I don’t. I think we need to keep on learning.

When we’re born, usually, our brains maintain our breathing and blood-flow, our digestive system and our senses. Our learning starts from that moment onwards. We learn how to get food and warmth, coordinated movement, language, making friends, where to go to the loo. We keep learning all the way through school and every day of our lives. All of these lessons are stored as patterns in our minds and influence the way we are today.

How much is genetic?

Research shows that our environment has 10% influence on our lives (my lungs are fairly healthy because I grew up in the UK where the air quality is fairly good and I stopped smoking easily over 20 years ago). Our genetics have 10% influence (I have blue eyes). The other 80% of our lives is determined by our psychology, the way we learned to be (I speak English and I learnt to overcome depression and anxiety).

Moving forward

Creating a more helpful psychology for ourselves is an individual process that follows some fairly predictable patterns. We can choose the pattern that’s best for you. Sometimes:

• the past provides the context that helps us make the change.
• recognising and understanding today’s unhelpful beliefs helps us to make the change.
• we need to be supported as we learn, through experience, that we can handle painful emotions and grow stronger as a result.

We can all learn to have the confidence that we’ll thrive even in a difficult situation.

Thriving allows us to focus on the present and the solution, confidently moving forward all the time; celebrates what is right and going well; enables us to identify our needs and find a way to meet them; builds resilience, empowerment and well-being; identifies strengths, and builds empowering habits; enables human understanding, personal influence and achievement.

Whatever situation you start from, thriving is possible.