Other People’s Thinking

I notice that I can be very triggered by other people’s “negative” thinking. I experience this mostly with my parents (even though I am a grown adult). I have spent most of my adult life trying to undo unhelpful thought patterns that I learned in childhood. When I am talking with my parents (or another person in authority) and they start to drift into these negative or fear based ways of thinking, I don’t know how to respond. So my first question is how could I respond? And the second part of my question is how do I not internalize these thoughts that they share? I find that just hearing them gets them circulating in my mind, and I find myself thinking back on them frequently. Thank you in advance for your help!

 

Answer:

Such a keen insight here. If you haven’t done so already, I’d like for you to come up with a list of ways that you think you could respond and feel free to include ways that wouldn’t be excellent, or good, or that are ways that you know you wouldn’t respond (but they’re still options). Then, read through the list and identify the ones that create a hint of excitement and nervousness and ask yourself why? What do you notice comes up for you after having done this exercise?

The second question you ask is a wonderful one. Something we practice in TFC is identifying how we can create safety for ourselves and this is tied to our nervous systems. Maisie has a wonderful webinar in the Cycle Toolkit called Creating Safety and I 100% recommend watching it as soon as you have a chance to. In the meantime however, a way you can practice not taking on someone else’s model (because they’re just in their own world’s over there, expressing their thoughts that they believe to be true!) when you are triggered is to focus on where you feel the sensations and emotions you experience in your body. Give them 90 seconds of focused attention, describing them to yourself perhaps, talking to them, listening to what they’re trying to tell you, etc. And see how you feel afterward. This in and of itself can be very liberating because you are giving attention to something that needs to be processed instead of trying to shut it down.

Come back to us with what comes up for you from this exercise with a post titled, “Other people’s thinking pt. 2”.