How Do You Deal With Situations In Your Life?

How do you deal with situations in your life?

We deal with things that happen in our life in many different ways.  Take anger for instance, some people yell, some cry, some lash out physically, some go silent and retreat.  The way we deal with anger is often how our parents dealt with anger without us even being aware of it.  My Mother did the silent treatment, when she went silent; we knew we were in trouble.  I also find I use the silent treatment and need to find another way of dealing with situations.  It is my inability to speak out for myself.

As you know all the things we learn happen in the first seven years of our life.  It is in this time that we learn how to behave, taught to us by the adults around us.  We learn to use emotions to get what we want, a child putting on a tantrum to get the lolly, or pouting and going away sulking to get the same result.  As a result we take that emotion into our teenage and adult lives and use those same emotions to get what we want.  We become abusive or submissive.  Usually we are one or the other, but at times we can also slip from the submissive to the abuser depending on the situation and people around us.

As part of our upbringing and preservation instinct within us we have learnt to control others by our behavior/emotions.  Our physical or Ego mind wants to be in control.  We have all been submissive at some stage in our lives just as we have been in control, and we prefer to be in control.  There is an element of power in control that the ego mind likes.  It justifies the control by saying it has to protect itself in this big bad world we live in and needs to be protected, and also protect those around us.

We use control in all of our situations.  We manipulate others to our opinions, our desires, our way of doing things so that the ego mind can feel powerful or safe.  This is done on a level in our consciousness that we may not even be totally aware of, because we do not connect in with our thoughts.  We have approx 2,000,000 thoughts each day.  Wow, no wonder we have lost control of ourselves.  To stop overload of our brains a lot of these thoughts are not in our awareness, they just happen.  As different situations arise, our consciousness just reacts the same way it always has, no need for conscious thought.  The emotional body has always reacted that way so it just continues the process.  That is why sometimes we find ourselves deep in the emotional destruction and wonder how we got there.  It is our processes working efficiently for us or as it has been previously programmed.

How do we re-program ourselves so that we stop reacting negatively every time situations come up.  What I do is when I feel the emotion rising, I stop and tune into my thoughts.  Then I ask the questions: Why am I feeling this way? What has happened to make me feel this way?  Do I need to feel this way?  Do I need to express my opinion, or is it not important?  Why am I reacting to those words?  Is it the emotion, tone of voice or words?  Then once I realise what has triggered the response I had, I then acknowledge it and push it away as I no longer have to feel that way, I can make better choices etc.  I have even gone to the stage of physically stepping to a new position to stand, because that reminds my ego mind that I am making a change to the way I am behaving or thinking.

This process takes some time but is so worth the effort that you put into it.  The more you do it, the less it will happen until it completely disappears from your thought processes.  At first you might be in the middle of an argument and then realise that you need to stop.  If that happens just excuse yourself and go away quietly and process and release.  The more you do that, the quicker you will realise that you need to step out of the emotion instantly even before words can be spoken.  Take control of your own thoughts and emotions and don’t control others thoughts and emotions.

This is such a freeing exercise.  It takes a lot of energy to control others and situations, when you let go of the control it is as if a great burden is lifted from you and you can experience peace.

Have a fantastic day.