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
and 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 a movie or picture is because we attached an emotion to 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, and 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 happened 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 and
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 than 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 and choose a
different reaction. This takes work but the rewards are great because
just as the mind remembers 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 and 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 and you'll never fear the past, again."
In this blog I share what I have learned in my life to be a more positive/joyful person living each day to the fullest & staying connected to my soul.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Emotional Attachment
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