08-19-2008, 11:43 AM
I will start the discussion regarding this topic by describing a situation taken from the “Sense and Sensibility” novel by Jane Austen.
Marianne felt miserable. The reason for this was that the young man she fell in love with, Mr. Willoughby left. And he gave her no concrete promise regarding the day when he would come back. Marianne was “in the depth of the most violent sorrow; and her romantic nature would consider it a duty to feed and encourage her misery”.
Yes, negative thoughts are often too strong to be simply dismissed. But they can be replaced with the positive thoughts. The way negative thoughts can be replaced by positive ones is illustrated by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, who states: “When your phonograph is playing music you don’t like, you do not try to force it to do better. . . . You merely change the record being played and the music takes care of itself. Use the same technique on the ‘music’ that comes out of your own internal machine.”
When we fell in these kind of situations similar to that of Marianne, our mind, regardless to the reality, “tries” to force the situation to change, and so we go deeper in our misery. Why? Because by allowing our mind to force the situation to change, we “feed and encourage our misery”. Instead we should change the “thoughts” we focus on, we should “switch to other channel”.
To cope with negative thinking is not easy. Like losing weight, learning to control our emotions takes time and persistence. The key in coping with negative emotions is found in controlling our thinking. And the good news is that we can do it!
Marianne felt miserable. The reason for this was that the young man she fell in love with, Mr. Willoughby left. And he gave her no concrete promise regarding the day when he would come back. Marianne was “in the depth of the most violent sorrow; and her romantic nature would consider it a duty to feed and encourage her misery”.
Yes, negative thoughts are often too strong to be simply dismissed. But they can be replaced with the positive thoughts. The way negative thoughts can be replaced by positive ones is illustrated by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, who states: “When your phonograph is playing music you don’t like, you do not try to force it to do better. . . . You merely change the record being played and the music takes care of itself. Use the same technique on the ‘music’ that comes out of your own internal machine.”
When we fell in these kind of situations similar to that of Marianne, our mind, regardless to the reality, “tries” to force the situation to change, and so we go deeper in our misery. Why? Because by allowing our mind to force the situation to change, we “feed and encourage our misery”. Instead we should change the “thoughts” we focus on, we should “switch to other channel”.
To cope with negative thinking is not easy. Like losing weight, learning to control our emotions takes time and persistence. The key in coping with negative emotions is found in controlling our thinking. And the good news is that we can do it!
