My Facebook advice today was to change the way you think in order to change the way you experience life and I really wanted to elaborate on what I mean when I say that.
If you think about your own children and how innocent and pure they were when they were first born and how naive they were, then you will get a sense of how you once were as a child yourself.
In this infant/toddler/pre-school time of life, you were learning about your world and how to live in it. Your primary needs and priorities were to be loved, to fit in and to be safe.
You learnt how to do this from your environment and every individual learns this in different ways. Right in these very precious years you learnt how to view the world and operate within it.
If you were brought up with criticism, judgement, anger, worth-less statements, a strong sense of the 'right way' and the 'wrong way' or limitations on your capabilities, then you will have adopted these beliefs and are now living life through these lenses. This is an undisputable fact and a very scientific one. There are neural connections in the brain that have been formed through childhood as a result of your experiences from childhood and you have been programmed to think.
You learnt how to get approval, how to feel worthy and essentially - how to get life 'right', or your family's idea of 'right' anyway.
For many people these beliefs get them along in life just fine, not causing too much stress or worry, however sometimes an event may occur (like having children for example), where these beliefs are triggered and all seem to land on top of us unexpectedly, or become magnified. You suddenly find yourself feeling stressed, anxious, worthless and incompetent and your head is filled with judgements, guilt, anger and/or self-criticism.
I wanted to tell you today, in this post that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU! Your brain is working exactly the way it is meant to work, because what it is doing is accessing the very beliefs that have been set up in childhood.
The way to change these painful emotions that you have been feeling is to upgrade those limiting, programmed beliefs to change the way you view your life.
If you have been programmed to see what is wrong with you or your life, then your brain searches of evidence of this belief being correct, so you continue to see all the wrong in your life. If you have been taught that you can miss out in life, then you will be highly attuned to all the missing out going on in your life.
This is not to blame your parents for what they taught you, as they were only following the programming that occurred in their own lives. What you need to do, though is break the cycle and start to identify what you are saying to yourself, where your attention usually lies and start re-programming how you view life.
This is exactly what I teach in The Happy Mum Handbook, and while there are millions of resources out there that will teach you how to change your thinking, I teach you how to do it in the context of being a mum, right in the chaos of all the challenges that occur while being a mum too.
In the meantime though, while you are waiting for your book to arrive, or while you are finished reading the book and learning its five step easy-to-remember process, start to become aware of what you are thinking and the repetitive themes that occur in your mind (eg seeking out the 'wrong' in life, noticing all the stuff you are missing out on, noticing all the 'bad' behaviour of your children, seeing all the things you aren't getting out of your husband/partner, all of the ways you are worth-less, useless or hopeless in your mind).
Become aware of this pattern of thinking and release yourself from blame with the understanding that it is only your programming that makes you think this way, you are not wrong or useless, it simply couldn't be any other way.
Instead of blaming and criticising yourself for thinking this way, simply use it as an indicator that some education is needed to help you to retrain your mind to think differently and whether you use The Happy Mum Handbook as your resource to do this, or you find another means of teaching yourself this information, please know that you are perfect just the way you are, and this is simply another event in your life that serves to help you to grow as a person and learn some very empowering ways to experience life.
And remember, when you learn to look at life in this empowering way and have an accurate, real sense of your 100% worthiness, you will then go on to teach your kids this way of thinking, instead of handing down the same conditioning that is currently causing you to feel stressed, depressed, anxious, or simply seeing life as hard or challenging.
Good luck and I hope you have a fantastic day!!!