Find your balance
When we are emotionally balanced, our lives will have more of a flow and become less of a struggle.
As we reduce unhealthy negative emotions, and increase the presence of healthy emotions, mindfulness and awareness become more accessible.
When experiencing unhealthy negative emotions such as depression, anxiety, guilt, shame and anger, there tends to be a rigid and extreme belief that we hold about ourselves, others, and the problem situation.
I can help you identify Unhealthy (rigid and extreme) thought patterns and develop Healthy (flexible and balanced) belief systems.
In sessions, we will examine your thoughts and beliefs, and help you gain new perspectives.
When our minds are at ease, our problem solving skills improve and we become better equipped moving towards our goals and aspirations, resulting in happier and more meaningful lives.
“People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take on them.”
~Epictetus
Most of us are conditioned to constantly compare ourselves with others, thereby triggering thoughts that we are not where we “should” be.
These comparisons leads us to think rigidly such as “I have to do better and achieve improved results in the future.” There is nothing wrong with wanting to do better, the problems arise when we translate what we want to happen to “it has to happen.”
We then easily add one or more extreme evaluations to these rigid beliefs, which may sound something like this:
I have to do better and achieve improved results in the future. It would be awful if I didn’t reach this goal. It would mean that I’m a complete failure and that I’ll never be able to succeed and reach my goals.
Thinking and believing this way will elicit Unhealthy Negative Emotions such as anxiety, shame, depression and anger, which emotions are not helpful in moving forward towards our goals.
When we instead train ourselves to think with more flexibility and balance, the same scenario may sound something like this:
I would like to do better and achieve improved results in the future, and I will do my best to reach this goal. However, it’s possible that I won’t succeed in reaching my goal this time and that would be bad, but it wouldn’t be one hundred percent awful. My abilities and efforts may fail, but that wouldn’t mean that I’m a complete failure. I could learn from what went wrong and strive to do better next time.
Thinking and believing this way will elicit Healthy Negative Emotions such as concern, disappointment, sadness and annoyance, which emotions are less extreme and more helpful in moving forward towards our goals.
We are often triggered as we look back on our past and less fortunate events with an image of what could have been.
Thinking about what could have been is not problematic in itself and will not cause unhealthy negative emotions.
It is when we take it a step further and think that our past “should be” different than what it is that we become emotionally unhealthy and lose our balance.
There is a saying that when we argue with reality, we lose.
There is a truth in that as we lose our emotional balance when we fail to acknowledge reality for what it is.
When we instead view our situations and circumstances realistically, we will see that the future has many possibilities while the past has only one.
We will come to recognize that we’re just as powerless guaranteeing certain outcomes in the future as we are changing the past.
We may learn from the past, and strive to do better in the future, but we can neither rewrite the past nor “guarantee” certain outcomes in the future.
There is a sense of empowerment as we let go of the belief that we can control that which we cannot—the past, the future, and other people; and instead, shift the focus to control what we can—our own thoughts and behaviors in the present moment.
As we make these internal shifts—letting go of what we cannot change while changing what we can—emotional balance may be restored. As emotional balance is restored, our judgment improves and we may lead more qualitative lives.
