Endless WHY's as you search for causes and WHO's to blame keep you glued in the past. The RIGHT questions can lift you over old obstacles and pull you forward ... Ella spent her days, exhausted, on the sofa. She’d been a dynamic businesswoman. Then a suspenseful family problem had given her two years of anxiety. It was the most stressful type of situation … matters were completely out of her control. She could only watch, wait and worry.
Now, the issue was resolved. The outcome wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d feared. But she was still slumped on the sofa. Her drive, great self-confidence and self-esteem, appetite for life … all gone.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked. “Why do I feel like this? Will I ever be better?”
“What’s wrong with you,” I told her (only rather more tactfully!), is that you keep worrying about what’s wrong with you. You feel like that because you’re continually looking for reasons why you feel like that. And you’ll get better when you stop wondering whether you’ll get better.”
Ella’s depression was sparked, as is usually the case, by stress, upset and anxiety. But what was keeping her stuck in it were her non-stop, churning thoughts as she agonised over the way she felt and sought desperately to find some “cause”, some magic key in her past which would unlock the door to a brighter future. If you feel trapped … by a painful state of mind, an unsatisfying life or an empty relationship, dragged down by layers of excess fat, continually tripping over your limitations and old fears … this sort of thinking is normal and understandable. The problem is, as with Ella, it is so unlikely to help things change. And so likely to bring you down even more into helplessness.
The idea that somewhere in your past or personality there’s a cause or reason why you can’t move on -- and that finding it is the key to getting better – is very tempting. Analysing yourself, dredging up the past, finding people to blame can give you the feeling that you’re tackling a situation when actually, all you’re doing is sitting on the sofa, like Ella, self-indulgently and even self-obsessedly stuck in your own mind. A great excuse for not actually DOING anything. But unfortunately, even if you do know why you’re the way you are, it’s usually not likely to change anything in the here and now.
For example, people with phobias can often remember only too well how they started. A dog attacked them. They got stuck in a lift. There was a terrifying turbulent plane flight. They still are just as petrified about dogs, lifts and planes, in spite of knowing why. Others can see clearly, for instance, that a disastrous relationship has left them untrusting, or that being bullied at school has sapped their confidence. That insight doesn’t make them any less scared of intimacy or social situations.
I’m not saying that your upbringing and life experience have no bearing on the way you are today. Of course they do. But, very often, much less than you’d expect. People can be very resilient and adaptable. The way ahead for Ella, as it is for so many of us when we get stuck is asking the RIGHT questions, not indulging yourself with the wrong ones.
Just as asking the wrong questions can get you deeper and deeper into a rut, so the RIGHT question can sometimes have dramatic results. I remember a woman who came to see me about bingeing. She’d been doing it for ten years, and had been off work with it for several weeks. A binge one day, a binge ‘hangover’ the next. She’d been in Eating Disorders Units, had lots of therapy.
“The problem is.” she said, “that no-one has ever been able to find the problem!” She got on well with her parents, had managed, in spite of the bingeing, to get a degree and a good job, had a supportive partner. Her past had been endlessly delved into for a deep psychological cause – without success. If all these experts hadn’t found the problem, I thought, maybe they’d been asking the wrong question! So I asked what she binged on. Bread, biscuits, cakes, she told me. Chips? Chocolate? No, they didn’t really satisfy the craving. I looked at the dark circles under her eyes, so often a giveaway for food intolerance, explained about the allergy/addiction cycle and suggested she stop eating wheat. When she came back a couple of weeks later, she’d given up wheat (I was impressed with her determination) hadn’t binged once and was back at work. She didn’t need, had never needed therapy – just a referral to a clinical nutritionist.
For another woman, WHAT she binged on wasn’t a useful question. But WHEN she binged, and WHEN NOT, was. She pigged out whenever she was forced to face the fact that she needed to make a difficult life choice which she’d long been avoiding. Other times, she could control it. Knowing that for her, the binge craving was a signal that there was unresolved stress in her life, was the key to getting herself back in charge.
Say you want to lose weight. It’s so easy, and so damaging, to focus on failed diets, half hearted attempts, times the weight poured back on, criticisms and putdowns and low self-esteem … don’t! DON’T ask yourself WHY you’ve failed at dieting, or find it difficult … instead, ask WHEN things have gone smoothly, and WHEN NOT. WHEN it’s been easy to keep to a weight loss program, and WHEN NOT. WHAT are the features which make the difference, and HOW can you arrange things to minimise temptation and maximise your chances of succeeding at losing weight this time, and keepimg the weight off. Perhaps WHO or WHERE hold clues -- maybe things went better in the past when you teamed up with someone, or went to a gym or health club.
So DON’T ask yourself what’s wrong with you but – what’s RIGHT with you. What are your successes and achievements, difficult times you’ve got through, things you’ve coped with – WHAT strengths and skills do these memories demonstrate, and HOW can they be brought into play as you aim for a richer, more satisfying life.
Simple questions, but the answers can lift you out of negativity and light the way forward. As long as you focus on what’s right, not what’s wrong.
|
