Emotional Attachment

Yesterday we delved into one of the biggest obstacles I've had to overcome in my life, my Father.  What I learned from the experience & the process that I went through to remove this baggage from my life is called "emotional attachment".

What is emotional attachment, for me, the easiest way to explain it is this; have you ever wondered why a song brings certain feelings to you or a movie or a picture.  The reason we instantly fall into an emotional state when we hear a song or see movie or picture is because we attached an emotion with them the 1st time we experienced the song, movie or photo.  This emotion can be good or bad but we save it in our memory & we always go back to it, that's the way the mind works.

So, if we expand this idea to events in our life it's easy to see how we can fall into old patterns quickly.  The proof of this to me, coming from a big family, is that each of my sisters can recite a event that happen when we were young but because it wasn't an important event for all of us, some of us don't remember anything about it.  Yet the one reciting the story can give you every detail still like they were living through it again right now. 

The problem with this is that if we've had difficult things happen to us in our lives, like my Dad saying "You could have done better".  We attach emotions to anything similar that reminds us of those words & instantly you can be pulled down to a very bad place.  It works kind of like this for me; 20 years ago I was fired from a job, I had no idea it was going to happen in fact I did a lot of good things for this place but in my head rather then thinking about the good I did, I went immediately to "I'm not good enough"....."I can never be good enough".  Thus what followed was weeks of trying to get out of this depression that was caused by this "old emotion" which really didn't have to do with the job situation.

The way we get past this is to recognize the emotional attachment & choose a different reaction.  This takes work but the rewards are great because just as the mind remembers the the original event once we re-attach the event to something different the mind will remember the new feeling.  This change in thought is what will help us get past anything that has happened to us in our past.  If we move our "old" destructive thoughts to "new" positive/joyful thoughts we can truly change our lives.

I hope this helps & I hope you all have a great weekend.

Till Monday,

Bill

Quote of the day "Find an old thought or feeling, change it to a joyful new thought & you'll never fear the past, again."