Our Minds Tell The Worst Stories

How come our minds don't tell the happily ever after versions?

Stories my Mind wanted to tell me all before noon:

They Had to Hire Someone Because Your Work Sucks: Tales of Woe from a Writer’s Dungeon Brain

You Wasted All That Money on Black Friday: 2024 aka My Ramen Noodle Life

If Only You’d Done or Not Done: A Comprehensive List of All My Loser Choices Over the Last 12 Months

If you listen to your Mind, you’ll soon realize you live with a raving lunatic who babbles the worst about you on repeat 24/7. No one speaks to us worse than we speak to ourselves.

It’s an act of courage to set the alarm every hour to start tracking your thinking patterns. I want to say - not recommended - 1 star - staff is horrendous, and the food is wretched - except that setting that hourly alarm is one of the most powerful methods to set yourself free from conditioned responses leading right to your Familiar Bad Feeling Place.

Once you hear the complete garbage stories your Mind tells in response to external cues, memories, and future projections, it becomes easier to detach from them.

It allows you to really explore the path of compassionate curiosity because underneath that incessant babbling is generally intense fear.

Fear resides deep within our animal natures. It's primal and, to some extent, normal.

I lived in the mountains of North Georgia for six years. I got to observe the wild things out in the woods up close. My small cabin had a large porch with a glass window in the door. I got to be within a foot or less of black bears, possums, raccoons, feral dogs, and cats coming up to get leftover dog food if I didn't bring it in before bed.

Slightly further out in the yard, coyote, fox, deer, and an occasional bobcat traveled through.

What struck me most was the constant motion. I could see the watchfulness as bears would dip down to grab a bite, then head up, eyes scanning back and forth, noses twitching, their bodies rocking back and forth on padded paws.

All the animals were always on alert, or at least when I could see them. A few times because of the angle of light I was able to look deeply into a bear’s eyes without it seeing me. It stopped my breath when I truly perceived the wildness present in that gaze and those experiences made me let go of trying to make my Mind be any different than it was/is.

Our minds are still every bit like those wild animals.

They have not forgotten the struggle for food, water, and a safe place to sleep. They do not live in the present. They're still guarding territory, watching for dangers approaching the babies, snapping at those who come too close to the food we're standing over.

They tell us scary stories, so we remember to stay alert and assess everything for safety.

Can we be mad at Mind for that? Should we continue shouting back at ourselves to drink a nice hot cup of shut the fuck up? Should we keep on numbing the chatter with various addictions and escapist habits?

None of those methods are working anyway, have you noticed?

What if we stop running and recognize our Minds are doing their prehistoric best in a present-day world that scandalizes and shocks us by the hour?

What if we held our own hand and simply stayed present with our panic, just as we would be with a friend who was losing her shit?

What would it be like to listen to the lunatic with love?

What if we showered our fears with compassionately curious questions?

Oh honey, you're telling some pretty painful stories right now.

Did something scare you?

Does this situation remind you of that person in the past?

Where is the pain living in our bodies?

Do you want to paint this pain, walk it out, sing a sing loudly?

When we take this validation approach and create options, emotions can flow freely, unencumbered by judgment, scorn, or even worse, self-contempt.

When we validate ourselves, the emotions will settle, and then we can practice reframing, redefining, and rewriting our stories. When we try to handle stories without first validating the truth of our experiences, no matter how illogical, we harm ourselves even more. In those moments, we speak like our original wounders did: sit down, shut up, your opinion doesn’t matter, I don’t want to see your face, etc. Maybe we can stop doing this to a Mind that quite literally can’t help doing what it does - try to survive.

Over time, we teach ourselves new patterns and rewire our neurology so that Happily Ever After stories become our go-to and we can close the doors to our Familiar Bad Feeling Place forever.

XO,

LMW