Releasing negative beliefs, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and conditions can be marvelously exhilarating! However, changing one aspect of your life (or many aspects) brings about other unexpected changes. Some might be welcome and others quite surprising.
Methods of Letting Go
It might take a bit of trial and error to find ways of release that are effective for you. Some of the following have been useful for many others as they apply CBT methods to the improvement of their lives:
- Meditation-Imagine the unwanted condition floating away.
- Prayer-Ask your supreme being or higher self to release what has to go.
- Written affirmations-Repeatedly state the opposite of what is troubling you.
- Verbal affirmations-Say out loud the opposite of the negative
Situation. - Change the action-New actions in harmony with new goals are freeing.
Secondary Benefits
It might surprise you to hear that many people believe holding on to particular negative thoughts, emotions, and actions has some kind of benefit.
For example, some people discover that they can get attention and sym-
result for having something negative to talk about. They don’t believe that internalized motivational system, it seems like they are getting a positive pathy from others when they always have a crisis to report. In their deeply others will listen to them unless they have bad news to deliver. This type of perceived reward is called a “secondary benefit.”
Some people keep themselves poor and sick in the hopes that others will eventually take care of them, as they obviously cannot do it themselves.
Over and over again, they suffer business losses and experience a series of illnesses, sometimes without awareness of the hidden motivation of getting others to take care of the situation as well as the person. Sometimes such a role is learned as a child when, in a dysfunctional family, the only way to get any attention was to become ill.
Changing Circumstances
Letting go will precipitate change, which often turns out to be needed and eventually positive, if somewhat unnerving at the time it happens. For example, a person starts using CBT methods and discovers that two of her closest friends never encourage her in her life aims. They pull on her emotional resources for their own benefit, but never reciprocate the effort. Those friendships will possibly die.
Perhaps a person discovers from examining core beliefs that he has made a disastrous vocational choice. Through family influence and misplaced loyalty, college degrees were earned and the favored profession seemed the logical, next direction. However, it does not make him happy.
There is no passion associated with the work. Upon deep self-examination, other, truer loves come to the forefront, and a plan is made to change pro-fessions. This change is quite positive for the individual, but elicits criticism from the family and former colleagues. Pressures and threats may ensue, along with laments of betrayal and doom. However, new colleagues and alliances always form, especially if the new direction is in deep alignment with the person’s values and talents.
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