PsychotherapyHELP

Dr. Paul

Catching Yourself          

You've gone negative! Listen to your internal grumbling and griping. You're bugged and probably angry at someone - your spouse, kids, employees, co-workers, boss, friends, etc! Whoa! Your mind has gone negative and negative behavior is about to follow the context of your thinking. To withdraw, complain, find fault, give negative feedback - that is the question. But, hold everything. Stop waiting for the other person to do something positive. Take the initiative. Catch yourself before you vibe someone with negativity. There are consequences for being negative and if you espouse and choose to live positively, you will catch yourself and ...

Normalize:     

Seek to normalize yourself and your relationship to the other person. What are you like when you are your normal self? Are you positive, friendly, loving and warm? I take it that you like this normal state of youness. Well, if you catch yourself being negative and of course you have justified yourself for being this way, then you can make the ...

Conscious Choice:     

Utilize conscious choice to normalize yourself and your relationship. If you get stuck in the negativity, it could become chronic and the end of the relationship will become inevitable. Conflict between people and nations is a dilemma and staying stuck in conflict perpetuates, rationalizations, justification, anger, punishment, and retaliation. The cure for conflict is catching yourself, normalizing, conscious choice and ...

Reversing:

Reverse the trend. Choosing to normalize your own thinking and your relationships leads to peace and productivity. The peacemaker chooses to mend relationship wounds and learn from each experience.

 In Conclusion         

A student/client once asked me, "How do I learn from an experience?" I said, "You study it, feel the feelings, observe your own thinking reactions, make positive choices based on higher principles, write extensively on it, read what you write and teach it to others." If you don't do this type of processing you will repeat the same negative thinking pattern again and again. Mistakes not learned from, condemn one to keep making the same mistakes.

Another student/client asked me to give a personal example. I said, "I'm a talker. I love to talk. I also listen fairly well. When I'm with someone who needs or loves to talk more than I do, I can feel myself going into competition with that person for airtime. If I feel that I can't get enough air time, I start getting annoyed. When I catch myself, I interrupt the possibility of going negative, and I then consciously choose to listen better. The other person may dominate the airwaves, but I am forced to be more effective in the content of what I have to say and I take myself out of destructive verbal competition."

The Goal     

The ideal state would be to be able to listen and absorb good helpful incoming data and then be able to express oneself with brevity, power, meaning and effectiveness.