One of the lessons we have all learned is that the cause of my feelings is not me; it’s something out there that’s not me. It’s a piece of learning that would benefit by some updating of the facts.

Reminds me of a story I relearned . . .

I learned in my History class, along with you, that there was a battle during the Civil War between two ships - The Merrimack and The Monitor. It made it into the history books that way because the reporter who chronicled the event didn’t have his facts entirely correct. The Merrimack was actually The Virginia but that fact wasn’t reported and didn’t make it into the history books until many years later.

Your emotions belong to you, no one else. They are yours and they are generated by you. It’s only by poor reporting that we have learned otherwise. It’s our conditioning that is the culprit. Our conditioning is the way it is because our conditioners, our personal history teachers, thought it was that way and taught it that way. They were misinformed and so are we because no one along the way stopped to think it through.

Reminds me of another story . . .

Richard Bandler, co founder of NLP, was having a conversation with a client. Here is a paraphrase of that encounter:

CLIENT: He pushes my buttons.

BANDLER: Those buttons that he’s pushing, are they on the inside or the outside? And before you answer, I want you to know that if you say outside, I will have to call men in white coats to take you away. And if they are inside, how would he have access to push them?

Moral of the story: We are pushing our own buttons through conditioning and making someone else the scapegoat. We don’t want to own these feelings and our solution is to pretend that someone else caused them.

When we scapegoat our feelings, we justify them and keep them in place much longer. If you justify your anger, unhappiness, depressed state, etc. by saying it was caused by something or someone else, you keep those emotional reactions well past their shelf life.

What would happen if you just said, “I’m unhappy”? What if you stopped right there and didn’t add the word “because” to your unhappiness. You would be taking ownership of your unhappiness. You would know it was yours and yours alone. This would cause you to process it much more quickly by taking the time to feel it rather than reassign it.

When you reassign it, you keep it in play and have to deal with it again another day. The ever present temptation is to not feel the feeling. Each time we deny ownership, we elongate the emotion.

It’s the conditioned second step of assigning blame that keeps us from doing what’s necessary - fully feeling the pain.

It’s our pain and we can metabolize it by taking ownership and feeling it in our body. The minute we make feeling our pain a head game, we will make something or someone else responsible for it and stop the feeling process in its tracks.

Scapegoating your pain is to complain and remain insane. Taking ownership of your emotions is the quickest way to flush your pain down the drain.

 

All the best,

John