I love your posts and it’s easy to be passionate about comments on them.

Sherri

OK. OK. I’ll do it.

Will you bail me out of the funny farm when they take me in?

I love your comments. You put your whole heart in them.

You’re welcome for the tweet. I find I’m getting more traffic from there now, so I tweet and stumble. Both are in my toolbar so it’s a breeze. If you have a button for RT, I use it instead.

I have to ask you to tell yourself to yell STOP when you start in on beating yourself up about things you can’t go back and change. Sometimes you have to close your eyes and yell as loudly as you can in your mind to drown out the tape playing in there. Don’t do it out loud or you’ll scare the heck out of everybody. You can do it out loud if you’re far enough away from others that they won’t call 9-1-1 for you. If STOP doesn’t work, just scream inside your head until that’s all you here. When you stop, there should be total silence in your head and that’s when you can tell yourself “I have had enough of this!!!”.

I’m no expert, but it works on my students who suffer extreme test anxiety. It doesn’t take all the anxiety away, but it shuts down the racing, self-defeating thoughts enough that they can start reading the test and start thinking. When they start thinking, they tend to overcome the anxiety temporarily to function well on the test. I’m talking from Ds to setting the curve. If you do it as often as you can in any situation, it should help stop the thoughts a lot more, or at least change their context, conscious vs. subconscious where you can talk back to them.

Understanding why they happened is fine, but hitting yourself with your own stick over them is just painful and accomplishes nothing constructive. It just makes you feel worse.

We start out teaching what we most need to learn, but after awhile we learn it so we teach from a position of experience. When we can teach from a position of strength rather than need, we do a better job. I only say this because I don’t need to learn math or science, but I teach both from the position of actually having been a scientist who used math as a tool. It changes how you approach things. Nothing beats experience because experience brings wisdom.

You’re a real pal, too, so please stop beating yourself up!

Sherri
.-= Being the Change I Wish to See – Sherri´s last blog ..Judge Sotomayor and Senate Stalling Tactics =-.

We all have that closet! It is a decision to keep the door closed and not wander in.

You said -

“The thing I haven’t done? Stop getting angry when other people lecture me about what I should have done in the past to avoid where I am now. I can’t go back in time and undo making poor decisions. I have to start where I am and move forward. Could have, should have, and would have are useless places to go.”

My problem is that I AM THE ONE who says these things to ME!

As someone wise once said, “You teach what you most need to learn!”

Thanks for the tweet, by the way. You are a real pal.

Wow, this is what so many spend years and thousands of dollars in therapy to figure out how to do, me included. Not only do we hang on consciously, we do it subconsciously. We may never realize what is holding us back until we recognize we have a closet full of baggage. I found the hardest part was to realize I have a closet and that I needed to quit going in there. Leaving it behind finally allowed me to be comfortable in my own skin.

The thing I haven’t done? Stop getting angry when other people lecture me about what I should have done in the past to avoid where I am now. I can’t go back in time and undo making poor decisions. I have to start where I am and move forward. Could have, should have, and would have are useless places to go.

Sherri
.-= Being the Change I Wish to See – Sherri´s last blog ..Judge Sotomayor and Senate Stalling Tactics =-.

Liara Coverts last blog post..How do you chart your life?

I join you in remembering my own article. We teach what we most need to learn.

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?