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your inner
DEMONS
I used to think that taming your inner demons was a matter of
transcending them. I used to believe that the gnawing notion of “not
good enough” would be silenced when I was able to move past my
mind’s eye, because of course, our inner demons do not base their
case in reality.
Our inner demons strike us at our sore spots. They recite to us all
the things that we fear people will interpret us to be. They keep us
stuck in the place where what other people perceive is reality, though
of course, those perceptions are extensions of those people, and
these ones are ours.
I thought they would dissolve as soon as I stopped looking at my
life analytically and started going through the motions as the person
experiencing my thoughts and feelings, not the person who is my
thoughts and feelings. But what I came to realize is that every part of
you must work in tandem. And as soon as I needed to do something
requiring thought and process, I was back to square one.
It’s nothing to get over and it’s nothing to disregard. It’s only
something to acknowledge and understand and then cultivate
differently. Because mindset is a cultivation, and to that end, it is
ultimately a choice. We can change it. If we don’t, we will remain at
the whim of other people’s actions and our own irrational gremlins
that do nothing but prevent us from living out what we know to be
true. And when these two forces collide and disrupt one another,
we’ll find ourselves in the pits of anxiety and depression, because
something is trying to make its way out of us, and something else is
preventing it from doing so.
The antidote here is awareness. As soon as you realize your
thought is coming from a place of irrationality and fear, you’ve taken
a step toward silencing it. As soon as you discover that you don’t
have to listen to that voice and that you are not that voice, you no
longer have to be controlled by it.
You’ll start to understand that having self-doubt is human. Irrational
fears are, too. There’s no part of this that’s weird or strange or
wrong. It’s simply nature. But if we want to step beyond it, we have
to reach beyond it and start choosing. Choosing what we consume,
how we structure our days, and what we give our time to. What we
assign value and meaning to, and how much.
Our natural, default setting isn’t the one we have to operate on for
the rest of our lives. The longer we stay in allowing ourselves to be
completely overtaken by every deprecating thought that runs through
our minds, we’ll continue to cement ourselves beneath those beliefs,
and they’ll become real.
Because this isn’t about believing that one day, we’ll never have
passing thoughts of judgment toward ourselves. This isn’t about
thinking we’ll ever not care what other people think, even just a little.
These aspects of humanness are universal and unchanging and
programmed for a reason. But those reasons have little to do with us
finding happiness. And we have to make the choice for ourselves.
We’ll never not care and we’ll never not hear them. It’s only a matter
of whether or not we’ll act based on them.
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WHY WE REJECT
positive
THINKING
A large reason why people write off self-help or positive psychology
as “fluff” is because of how impossible it seems to accomplish.
Positive thinking seems simple enough, so why is it that we have
such a difficult time with it?
Well, the answer is simple, and it’s not: There’s a lot of
subconscious bias against positive thinking, and that accumulates
after long periods of time reinforcing your negative beliefs. To shift to
a more positive mindset requires getting past that first period of
angry disbelief. Here, a few other reasons why we reject positivity:
01. We see it as naïve.
We falsely associate “negativity” with “depth,” and so to be
aware of the negative (or to be unenthused, under-emotional
or passive) is to also be “cool.” (This is why we think of the
“cool kids” in school as not caring much.)
02. We’re constantly reinforcing our subconscious belief in the
negative.
The very nature of personal belief is “that which experience
has proven true to us.” This is impossible, however, when we
are subconsciously seeking out evidence to support the
negative ideas we are constantly entertaining.
03. We are more inherently fascinated by the negative in the
world because we do not understand it.
Because we do not understand the purpose or reason for pain and
negativity, we find it unknown and mysterious, therefore, more
crucial to attend to. We’re fascinated by the intensity of something
we don’t understand, so we end up fueling it more and more simply
by paying attention to it.
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THE PHILOSOPHY
OF NON-RESISTANCE:
THE DIFFERENCE
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