Stress Center Peer Support

For the longest time I beat myself up because I wasn't doing it good enough (replacing, etc.) and I recently realized that of course my expectations are wacky, but I wasn't giving myself room to "not like it". I don't have to like the idea of replacing and working at it every other minute. It IS annoying and IS disappointing at times and that's NORMAL!
That has opened it up a bit for me to not be so desperate in my efforts. The desperation doesn't help anything, so I'm trying to be easier and roll with it. My expectations still have a long way to go to improve, but I'm on my way.

Another thing that I recently read that's helping is to think of our negative vs. replacement thinking as dialogue. We hear the negative/scary/obsessive thoughts and then without desperation, we gently talk back to it like in a conversation. I think my coversations were fights too often where I was scared to speak up.

Hope this helps someone. You know how God sometimes leads you to just the right thing to help that day...He IS good.

I thought of the dialogue aspect during Session 3. I did write down negative thoughts, but also tried writing down the whole negative dialogue, and using positive replacement dialogue. Thought I was the only one who did that

Pecos:

I am still on session 3 and doing the same. Instead of a neat little (or large, lol) list of negative things with a tick mark and then a replacement quote next to or under it, I am finding the negative "noise"; the only way for me to pinpoint certain things is to journal; the actual process of writing everything down allows me to circle round and go back to events/thoughts that caused the "cycle" to begin with. I am finding I need to untangle a string (More like a blob. heh) of thoughts to get to the root of it. All of the thoughts are relevent, however. make sense?

I've even stopped journalling in my regular the program notebook because everything is said in my journal that i've titled "negative to positive".

enjoy the day..


Shelby

Hi Shelby, I just read your reply on another post. Excellent advice. As for the negative noise and circling round, here is what I discovered on Session 9, and one of our Session 8 and 9 homework items about Circular Thinking: My negative thoughts had patterns. One negative theme would reappear in my thoughts and dialogue, over and over and over. I realized I'd learned to say the same negative thing to myself in at least a few dozen different creative ways. When I spotted the theme, I wrote out the theme, and found a replacement theme which began to unravel the circle ... kind of like your blob :p

Do you find that it helps to find the theme? For me, it really made Session 3 much easier than I originally found it to be.