habitual thoughts - groundhog day

habitual thoughts eventually translate into habitual behavior.

one of the topics that came up on a cyber forum i frequent raised the question concerning a member's tendency to see days as being 'good' or 'bad', and lamenting the fact that invariable, there appeared to be a pattern of one following the other in a sort of repetitive cycle.

here follows my response:

perhaps you may want to consider how the mind has a tendency to carry thoughts forward.

for instance, there was a time, when you did not have this recurring idea that

'I seem to inevitably have a bad day after a good one'

when did that idea being to take shape?

'I've noticed happening for a long time'

it seems that at some point, most likely without really making a decision to do so, that your mind established a reasoning process that resulted in this conclusion, that a history of good day/bad day was becoming apparent as a pattern in you life.

once this was established as a condition, it eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as you began to live out of the presumption of it being the case.

you are now invested in this belief that your emotional life has an 'on/off' cycle and so you begin to live as if this were true. in doing so, you disempower yourself to change the way you react, and actually have created an script which cues you to react in such manner automatically.

once the pesky mind confirms a perceived pattern, determining it to be the case, there is no longer a need to continue to gather evidence to make this case. since it has already been decided, it will now not need any further active involvement from you, and you become a mere pawn on the stage of your own mind.

how return to the state prior to your investment in this self-thought? from my experience, the key is to inhibit the cycle, rather than reinforce it; keep in mind this conclusion is not proven fact, and it is merely an assumption you have made about the situation.

so once inhibited, then you must be willing to stand in the feelings that arose which caused you to want to escape into a rationalization of them.

there are no good days or bad days, there are just days and we label them favorably or not, according to how they advance or impede us in a self-determined goal.

december 5th of the year you were three years old, do you recall having either a good day or a bad day? i would say no, not because you don't remember, but really because you had not yet developed a system for assigning value to the criteria that would contribute to determining a positive or negative assessment of the quality of your day.

so here we find ourself situated in today's december 5th of the year 2008, after spending years of making decisions and reinforcing them in terms of what is 'good' [chocolate, days without dark clouds] or 'bad' [tripe, days with dark clouds]

the key is to not despair and take heart that you still have the ability to change what seems to have become a life principle.

like many other survivors, i have done the scrupulosity dance most my life, and truthfully, i don't know if that is in effect a result of the cause of having been sexually abused or not; the fact remains that i have a tendency to do this, and if i want my life to be as efficacious as possible, i have to learn how to detach from those emotional gut reactions that arise in the course of my interactions with the events of the day. otherwise the feelings go to my head, and take on a life of their own, at which point, i am but living the script written by me, and portraying the character that i cast myself to play.