October 2022

Deborah Horton

Positive Focus

Most people in therapy do not react positively when it is suggested that they focus on the positive. To many, it seems like an oversimplification and that combatting life long trauma and negative beliefs cannot be that simple. It is not simple, but it is absolutely effective in combatting negative beliefs and trauma conditioning.

It is not simple, nor is it fast. Many people who come to therapy want both. A simple and quick solution to their problems. Likely, it is a combination of our society now where everything is easy and quick to get with just a click of a mouse or an app on our phones. The other part of the combination is that people just want their issues to go away like magic. Processing trauma and conditioned responses from trauma is work and nobod wants that.

The one thing people forget in all of this is that your thoughts are your life.

Whatever you think is how you will live your life. If you think you are not valued, not worthwhile, not lovable, not smart, not pretty, not able to love yourself this is exactly how you will live your life. It will be how you engage in every relationship from those points of view. It will be how you experience everything.

Negative thoughts and beliefs will impact every aspect of your life. Not only do they impact how you feel, but they also impact how you think others feel about you. Your responses will be guided by your thoughts and beliefs. Every decision will be based on what you think that gets translated into how you feel that gets translated into what you do.

Every negative thought and belief has an equal, absolute positive opposite you just have to be aware and find it. You have to be aware of the negative things you think and believe about yourself. The things you say to yourself repeatedly every day. If you stop and think about them you will know what they are. Your brain is intimately familiar with them. Ask yourself, what negative things do I believe and repeat to myself. Write them down just as they come to you word for word.

For each one also write down the absolute positive opposite. The brain works in absolutes. It absolutely believes you if you say I am not valued enough. It cannot differentiate between a lie and the truth or in this case conditioning and the truth. It will only believe what you tell it. If what you believe and think is I am not valued then the absolute positive is I am valuable. Absolute positive opposite.

You must come up with these for every negative thing you think and believe. Write them down. The next step is to incorporate them into your life. The incorpoation involves saying them, repeatedly and often. Saying them when the negatives are there. Putting them where you can see them repeatedly every day. Where you brush your teeth, on the refrigerator, at your workspace, as reminders on your phone. Say them often and with belief in them.

How long will it take for you to replace negatives with positives? There is no measurement to fit every person. For each person it is different, and it depends heavily on that person’s investment in doing the replacement. How long did it take you to get where you are right now with the negatives? A long time I would guess. But by being aware and noticing the differences that happen when your brain starts to incorporate and believe the positives, you will be able to move the process along.

Positive focus is a powerful force that can change your life forever if you are willing to invest the time and energy.

Until next time be well,

Deborah

Deborah Horton

Never Too Late

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash

Many times my clients will feel and say that they think it is too late to change their lives. They can be younger or older but because they have lived in conditioned states from trauma for years of their lives they feel that it is too late to do anything about it. They feel that it will just be too hard and take too long to change anything.

It is never too late, unless you no longer are breathing. If you are alive, there is still time to make changes in how you think, feel, respond in your life. Change can take time and it can seem like progress is very slow but every small step forward is progress.

The first piece of change is deciding that you want to change things in your life. That is a huge step forward. It is the step that propels us to all others. Deciding that living as you have always lived is no longer acceptable to you.

The next step is to seek out ways to start building in those changes. Changes in what you think, feel, believe, and the ways in which you respond to events and people. How can those be accomplished? Sometimes, we can find those ways ourselves and other times we need help to find them. Help through mental health counseling, life coaching, behavioral therapy, addiction treatment and more.

Reaching out for help can be one of the scariest things we can do. To talk to someone we do not know about the most personal things in our lives can be very frightening. To push past those fears and keep moving forward is one of the bravest things anyone can do. And it can be crucial in affecting the changes people seek in their lives.

Once people are on the path of help, moving through the changes of acknowledgement, awareness, and acceptance can take time. Sometimes, it can take a lot of time, but it can be done as long as you are still alive and breathing.

It is never too late to live free of the conditioning of past trauma. It is never too late to replace negative beliefs about yourself. It is never too late to start building a new life of positive beliefs. It is never too late as long as you are alive and breathing and there is no day like today to start.

Until next time be well,

Deborah

Deborah Horton

Magic Fix

Photo by Cristian Escobar on Unsplash

It is not often that I have clients who think therapy will be a quick magic fix for their problems. Many times, clients come in thinking this but after a few sessions they quickly realize this is not the case. Every now and then though I do have one who finds it hard to let go of this belief and that can make things even more difficult for them.

Many of the clients who cling to the quick magic fix are those who have spent the majority of their lives in control mode or avoidance mode by way of control. They often believe that they can “fix” any problem by controlling everything around it or by applying control so that they can avoid the problem and pretend it does not exist or affect them.

They can spend years of their life thinking that they are strong and that all the trauma they have experienced has no affect on their decision making or responses. In fact, just the opposite is true. Their control mechanisms and avoidance is a response albeit one they have chosen and reinforced.

However, control and avoidance does nothing to process through the problems. They continue to affect them whether they realize it or not or more to the point choose to acknowledge what they know to be true. The only way to let the past stay in the past is to process through it, accept that it happened, and then retrain the mind to think and believe differently in order to awaken who they truly want to be.

If however, they continue to hold on to the idea that a magic fix can happen or that they can somehow just magically fix the issue without the actuall processing part, they will be very disappointed. Sometimes even angry and depressed at the realization that this is not possitlbe. That all the years they spent believing they can fix or control anything has been a lie.

They typically do not want to do the processing work and find it extremely uncomfortable. They think that to acknowledge and accept that they cannot control or fix makes them weak and vulnerable something they believe they must avoid at all costs to protect themselves from further trauma.

The only way is through with acknowledgement and acceptance and then work on changing long held beliefs. It is the only way to real freedom from past trauma. A magic fix is not possible.

Until next time be well,

Deborah