You are more powerful than you know
It never ceases to amaze me when I’m working with a client and we discover exactly how their thoughts are creating their results. It’s especially fascinating when we see how their effort to prevent something is creating the ver y thing they want to prevent.
Take my client, I’ll call her Angela, for example. We were working on her relationships and how she felt as if something was missing in each of her friendships. She didn’t feel deeply connected to anyone.
As we explored, she shared how when she was younger, because of an autoimmune disease, she always felt like an outsider. It was a dif ficult experience for her and as a result, she developed a strong aversion to feeling like she didn’t belong. Because she was desperate to never feel like an outcast again, she was showing up in her friendships and only shared things that she believed would be relatable and acceptable. She would silence whole par ts of herself, hiding the things that felt like they were “too much” or “might cause conflict.”
In essence, she was not showing up as herself. And because of that, she never felt truly connected to anyone. Her attempts of avoiding feeling disconnected from others were creating the experience of never being connected.
In another example, my client, who I’ll call Victoria, came to me because she was struggling in her relationship with her boyfriend. They loved each other
immensely, but they were fighting constantly. She had been betrayed in the past by previous boyfriends and had been deeply hur t. She was terrified of being hurt again, so she was attempting to control his interaction with other women. She felt overly jealous and irrationally scared. There was no evidence that he was cheating on her, but she couldn’t stop reacting in ways that led to ugly fights ending in them wounding each other, deeply.
Her fear of being hur t creating a scenario in which she got hurt.
Both situations are a case of “what we resist persists.” Or, we create that which we focus on.
When our main motivation is fear of something happening, more often than not, the result we create is the ver y thing we’re most afraid of.
Our brains are hooked on being right. When we have a belief that something is going to happen (and a fear of something happening is a belief that it will), our brains will find evidence to prove that we are right. And if it can’t find the evidence, it will create it.
In the case with Victoria, an instance of her boyfriend gaining an Instagram follower who was an old female acquaintance became proof that he was likely going to cheat on her, and so she responded as if that were true. Her ner vous system would go in fight or flight and she would attack, in an effort to protect herself from the perceived threat. This reackept tion created disconnection and distance, and required her boyfriend to defend himself. They were fighting about him cheating without him ever having cheated.
I worked with Victoria to create new thoughts that would create different results. Focusing on things that were in her control, we talked about how she wanted to show up in her relationship. She wanted to be loving and be at peace. Rather than spending her time thinking about how she could avoid being betrayed, she began to think about how she could be more loving. We worked on creating a feeling of peace, by her asking the question, “How is it true that I am safe, no matter what?” When we task our brains with finding new evidence, they will.
Both Angela and Victoria felt empowered realizing that most of their experience was created by their own thoughts. When we understand the power of our minds, we realize we can use them to work for us, and the possibilities for change become infinite. Rebecca Stark Thornberry is a mastery certified life coach and the owner of Rebecca Stark Coaching. Contact her at 720412-6148 or visit rebeccastarkcoaching.com. If you have a question you would like answered in this column, or would like to inquire about coaching, please submit to rebecca@rebeccastarkcoaching.com. Anyone submitting a question to this column will remain anonymous.