Flip It

When I saw this graphic, I thought, ‘Yes, exactly. It’s the GOAL that you work toward, not the process that takes you there, that is the most important aspect to keep in mind.’

“…You are healing to be able to handle joy and to accept happiness back into your life.”

That IS the goal of working through old pain, trauma, and heartache. You might be doing therapy to remove the bad stuff, bad memories, and bad habits from your life, but the REASON you are doing it is to get to the GOOD stuff afterwards. You have to flip it in your mind—flip your perspective on why you work so hard to self-heal.

You aren’t just tired of feeling beat down and angry about your life’s direction—you actually want to feel joyful and happy about LIFE itself. We all do.

So how do you get there?

Flipping your perspective is a good trick to learn to improve both your overall attitude and your life situation. Try it. 

Let’s say you are feeling anxious over some event or situation in the near future. What would the opposite feeling be from anxiety? Feeling at peace? Feeling totally relaxed? Or depending on how capable you are of flipping your feelings, maybe you could actually become excited about the unknown possibilities that lie ahead.

Now by maintaining those flipped, alternative ‘feeling’ goals in mind, what would it take to get you there—to shift out of your lower-energy mindstate—to actually be able to pull that new, happier possible reality to you?

That “whatever it takes to shift your existing state of mind to feeling ‘at peace’ or ‘relaxed,’ or ‘eager and excited’ to view the future in a more joyful or happy way”—THAT’S what you need to do instead of sitting around and moaning about how miserable you feel about it all. You have to DO SOMETHING to change your current life situation into a more desired reality.

And what’s the first “something” you must do? First off, you have to flip how you are thinking about your life.

The goal isn’t to just eliminate the BAD stuff from your life—the real goal is to replace it completely with GOOD stuff.  The therapist is just showing you how you can do that very thing. She/he is showing you how to shift your focus on life—to shift your reaction to life, and to develop better life-response strategies than what you had previously been stuck using.

You might need to dig long and hard to find that hidden treasure of joy and happiness—might need to dump out all that old nastiness (memories and reactivity) that have previously kept you hostage in your mind; but that treasure of ‘finding joy and happiness’ is what you are really working toward in those therapy sessions. You are getting rid of the bad stuff first to get to the better stuff that life offers.

You are not as irreparably broken or as psychologically damaged as you might believe yourself to be.  That ‘happier you’ is simply hiding away undiscovered beneath all that ancient dirt and debris; but if you keep working hard to uncover it, you’ll eventually find your true self of higher light and divine love.  And that discovery is well worth any effort.   YOU CAN DO THIS!