“There is nothing that isn’t true if you believe it and there’s nothing that’s true, believe it or not.” – Byron Katie
This post follows on from two key articles exploring the interrelated nature of thought and emotion — ‘The Secret to Understanding and Mastering Your Emotions’ and ‘Clean Pain and Dirty Pain: The Two Types of Emotional Suffering’.
To recap, there are two types of emotional pain: clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is what you experience when something intrinsically hurtful or stressful happens to you, such as a bereavement or the loss of a job or relationship.
Dirty pain is not the result of an objective event, but your thoughts about that event, whether real or imagined. This kind of suffering is, therefore, caused by the thoughts, judgements, assumptions and stories you’re forever spinning in your own mind.
Much of our suffering stems from the latter.
When you can’t let go of a negative story in your mind — which is almost always a story in which you cast yourself either as victim or judge — it causes a feedback loop.
The story triggers an emotional response, which then influences your behaviour, which in turn reinforces the thoughts that you’re thinking. This cycle then perpetuates itself.
There are two ways to break this vicious thought/emotion loop.
You can either release the emotion or dismantle the thought or story that caused it. Because I’m a super nice guy, I’m going to show you how to do BOTH. I’ve already shared a powerful Taoist technique for dissolving painful emotions. It’s simple and it WORKS.
Now I’m going to share a simple yet highly effective process for eliminating any kind of limiting or negative thought or belief at the very root.
The Nature of Thought
If you were to ask me to list the most important things I’ve learned in life, it would probably include the following:
- Thoughts are just thoughts. They aren’t real. At best, they’re crude, second-hand interpretations of reality, distorted by all manner of mental filters (such as personal and social/societal conditioning, past experience, prejudices, limited understanding, ignorance and lazy thinking, etc).
- Accordingly, we don’t see reality as it is, we see it as we are (coloured by our thoughts, beliefs, opinions and stories).
- If we unquestioningly believe our thoughts, we’re going to suffer.
- We are not our thoughts. We are the observer of our thoughts.
- We have the intellect and the ability to determine which of our thoughts are true and which are untrue; which of them cause harm and which bring peace.
- If we want to be at peace, we need to quit indulging the thoughts and stories that cause us to suffer.
How do we do that?
We question them!
It’s actually easy as pie.
Find the Thought Behind the Suffering
First of all, you need to determine which thoughts, beliefs and mental stories are causing you to suffer. There’s a quote from A Course In Miracles that says we’re never upset for the reason we think we are. There’s a lot of truth to that.
Remember, situations and events in themselves are largely neutral. That’s why a dozen different people might react in a dozen different ways to the same situation.
It’s always your interpretation that determines your response, both in terms of your emotional reaction and any subsequent action you take (or don’t take). This is a really important understanding.
I recently read a really cool definition of emotional disturbance as being the result of “being at friction with a fact”. It’s not so much the fact that brings the pain as it is your reaction and response to that fact.
Whenever you’re upset, you can identify the real reason you’re upset by asking:
“What would I need to think or believe in order to be upset about this?”
Let’s say you’re feeling upset because Sally was nasty to you.
Well, Sally’s a bitch quite frankly. She’s nasty to everyone. That’s the way she is. It’s her programming. If you were to inquire using the above question, you might realise that the real reason you’re upset is “because I think Sally should be nice to me”. Or perhaps “because if people aren’t pleasant to me, it means I’m not good enough as a person”, or “other people’s behaviour toward me either validates or invalidates me”. To use internet coding lingo, that’s a faulty script. It’s no wonder errors are appearing on screen.
Some of the commonest scripting errors stem from our resistance to life as it is: ie., our beliefs that:
“This situation or person shouldn’t be this way.”
“This shouldn’t have happened.”
“I should be better or different to what I am.”
“This isn’t good enough.”
“I’m not good enough.”
Once you’ve pinpointed the thought, belief or story causing the emotional disturbance, the next step is to employ some self-inquiry.
Instead of unquestioningly believing the thought — as you most likely have been up til now (hence your suffering) — you use your intellect to dissect it and see if it really is true. If it’s not (and it rarely is), you’ve been suffering over nothing but a misapprehension.
It’s impossible to hold onto a thought or belief once you know that it’s false. You only think it because you believe it’s true. The only way to get rid of it, therefore, is to question it and prove it to be nothing but the misconception, assumption, or outright lie that it is.
Dismantling Thoughts With Self-Inquiry
This technique is based upon the process of self-inquiry taught by Byron Katie. I’ve modified it by adding a couple of additional questions.
Byron Katie explains:
“As you inquire into your own thoughts, you discover how attachment to a belief or story causes suffering.
The mind’s natural condition is peace. Then a thought enters, you believe it, and the peace seems to disappear. You notice the feeling of stress in the moment, and the feeling lets you know that you are opposing what is by believing the thought; it tells you that you are at war with reality.
When you question the thought behind the feeling and realise it isn’t true, you become present outside your story. Then the story falls away in the light of awareness and only awareness of what really is remains.
Peace is who you are without a story, until the next stressful story appears. Eventually, inquiry becomes alive in you as the natural, wordless response of awareness to the thoughts that arise.”
The Process for Dismantling Negative Thoughts and Beliefs
Right. Grab a pen and paper — and prepare to be astonished!
First of all, you need to identify the troubling thought or belief that’s causing you to suffer. Holding the thought in mind, ask yourself the following questions and be very honest and open as you answer.
1. Is it true?
(To begin with you’ll probably think, “yeah, of course it’s true! I wouldn’t think it otherwise”. Fine. Move on to question 2)
2. Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
(For something to be absolutely true it has to be true ALL the time, and it has to be irrefutably true. If you’re completely and totally honest with yourself you’ll see that there are actually very few things we can be absolutely certain about in life.
How the heck can you absolutely know that you’re not good enough, or that it shouldn’t be raining today, or that you shouldn’t have lost your job or spilled that cup of tea?
Whether your answer is yes or no — and if you’re really, really honest most the time you’ll have to concede that you can’t be absolutely certain it’s true — move onto the next question)
3. How do you react when you believe that it’s true?
(Be very honest and go into detail here. When you believe “____” how do you feel emotionally? How does it affect the way you live your life, interact with others, feel about yourself? It’s probably not a pretty picture)
4. What would the cost be if you continued holding onto that thought?
(Project ahead for a moment: If you continue believing “____” what will be the cost to you personally, in terms of your relationships, emotions, your job/career, your friends, even financially? How will it negatively impact your life in all areas?)
5. Would you impose this very same thought/belief on someone you loved?
(Would you be happy if your son or daughter or someone close to you were to internalise this thought or belief?)
6. How would you be without that thought?
(If someone pressed a button and the thought/belief was erased from your brain and could never come back, how different would things be? How would you feel, and how would your life be different?)
The final step is called the TURN AROUND.
You’ve probably come to see that you cannot prove the truth of the original thought. You’ve seen how harbouring this thought adversely affects you, and how much better off you’d be without out.
You’re at the stage where you can now let it go.
You wouldn’t hold onto red hot coals from a fire. They’d burn your hands horribly. You’d be in immense pain. So what do you do? You don’t even have to think about it — you just drop them immediately!
Similarly, you don’t want to hold onto harmful thoughts and beliefs that you can’t even prove are true — or that are patently untrue. They’ll hurt you just as badly. So what can you do? You can just drop them as well!
To it turn around, take the original thought or belief and reverse it. Adopt the exact opposite thought and then see if you can find three ways in which this new statement is as true or truer than the original thought.
The thought “I’m not good enough” becomes “I am good enough”. Then you find at least three ways, and preferably more, to support that statement. You can if you try.
Try on this new, opposite thought. See how much better your mind and body feel. See how much freer you feel almost immediately.
It may take some time to properly re-educate your mind.
If you’ve been thinking a certain way for the best part of a lifetime, it’s unlikely that you’ll overwrite the thought or belief immediately. In that case you need to consistently apply this process until the original thought completely loses its power. Consistency and persistence are key.
Change Your Thoughts and You Change Your Life
This technique WORKS. A very similar approach is employed by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), so I may have just saved you a fortune in therapy bills!
It does necessitate a degree of openness, honesty and willingness to question thoughts or beliefs you may have been carrying for many years. Try not to clutch onto your thoughts and beliefs for dear life (as many people do).
Apply this process to any thought, judgement, belief or assumption that causes you to feel upset or disturbed.
Again, it’ll most likely take some time to rid yourself of the more deeply-rooted thoughts and beliefs. The more you think a thought, the more likely you are to think it again. They become what in Vedantic psychology is called ‘vasanas’, which is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘grooves in consciousness’.
The moment you form a belief about something, the mind starts looking for ‘evidence’ to support that belief. Courtesy of confirmation bias, it also filters out anything that contradicts it. That’s why someone who believes they’re not good enough will ignore ten compliments and fixate on one piece of criticism.
Together with the dissolving meditation, this is an invaluable tool and one you can use at any time. My friend Regan has written a great post about the power of keeping the heart open as a way of then accessing unconditional happiness.
When doing inquiry I find it helpful, at least initially, to use a pen and paper to write out the answers. This helps you maintain focus.
Stay motivated as you work on dismantling all the thoughts and beliefs that are causing you stress and suffering.
Be aware that indulging and holding onto negative thoughts and beliefs is the direct cause of your emotional suffering. If you’re unwilling to let go of them you’ll keep suffering. It’s as simple as that.
As the great sage Ramana Maharshi once said:
“Misery is only unwanted thought.”
I don’t believe for a second that you were born to suffer. You were born to be free, and you can be free — by letting go of any thought that holds you back and causes you pain.
