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Someone wrote a post on LinkedIn advising employers to be gentle with a new hire. Many were recently part of a traumatic firing and exhausting, insecure job hunt.
I shared: One of the lessons I learned in life is that suffering is optional. Thanks much for reminding me of that!
I was going to end this comment there- but it was pretty enigmatic. So I added:
Basically, we can influence our circumstances, but we can't control them. We're responsible for handling them, but they're not our fault. Often when they happen, our brain reacts by creating a bunch of meaning, about them, about us, about fault, about life being insecure, worries about the future, etc. Usually the worst feelings come from meanings we made up during past traumas and didn't process fully. They come back, haunting us.
It's good to remember those are all made up by the mind. There's a difference between what happened and what it meant and means to us. What happened was real. What it means is not- it's optional and actually can be a choice. In my experience with my own life and others, it takes work/learning/practice to make meanings be a choice.
I couldn't add more because posts are limited to 1200 characters, so I told people to contact me if they want to learn more.
I started learning about this in The Landmark Forum, a 3-full-day plus 1-evening course for around $1,000. They take you on a deep dive into all of this with an inquiry into how you created your identity as a kid, an adolescent, a mature teen, and how you still do it today.
It's an amazing course and I highly recommend it. I suggest doing it in a live event- in a large group, face-to-face with the leader and participants. It can also be done over the web, but you have to be very committed to focusing on it for 3 days straight. Don't go for walks with it or watch it while dining with others or doing errands- it takes full concentration.
Before taking the course, you'll need to come up with 3 things (or more) that you really want for yourself and your life. They should things that, the way your life has gone and is going, you probably aren't going to get them. And they should be so important to you that getting any of them would justify the cost of the course. You'll probably get impressive breakthroughs in one or more of these.
When I took the Forum, I was shy. My mind would freeze at parties. I got over that.
After the course, they offer 10-session "master class seminars", meeting 3 hours a week for ten weeks where you practice what you learned in the course and have more breakthroughs in life (these are under $200, online).
The Landark "technology" has been refined over the last 50 years to be highly effective and includese all sorts of powerful lessons and skills.
The particular lessons about meanings are also part of Cognitive Reframing, part of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). While, in general, therapy is much more expensive, there are books about it.
The world expert on CBT (IMO) is Dr David Burns. He has a number of good books, though they discuss all sorts of CBT techniques, not just cognitive reframing. Since I did many Landmark courses, I didn't need his books for myself, but I was curious about them and whether they could help friends. I read and found valuable his books "Feeling Good", "Feeling Great", and "Feeling Good Together."
You can read about Cognitive Reframing on Wikipedia as well as Cognitive Restructuring. Note that the latter often looks for errors in your thinking.
While this is helpful, it's also vital to look at what happened originally that started the stressful meanings, and distinguish what-happened from the meanings you made up.
For instance, you might think you ruined a relationship. That's not something that can happen. An assessment about it, that it's ruined, is a made up meaning. Probably you and someone else said and did some specific things in a sequence and then one or both of you concluded, that is, made up the meaning, that the relationship was ruined. Once you made that up, your feelings reacted to it, so it feels real.
CBT is about getting past it. Sorting out the particulars of it and seeing exactly where you created the meaning and why can be a hugely freeing process. Once you see the creative act you performed, the meaning becomes a meaning rather than the truth, so it's much, much easier to let go of.
If you don't thoroughly let go of that old meaning, it'll often surfacce and haunt you after you, even though you thought you were past it.
Mindfulness can add a lot to this process. By practicing meditation, you can start to experience your thoughts and emotions as thoughts and emotions instead of them subjecting you to their experience.
For instance, say you read about violent immigrants. You might start seeing a lot of immigrants in your community and start worrying about being attacked. This is how thoughts and feelings can alter your perception of the world so that your brain thinks it needs to worry, be on alert, and take precautions. Yet what happened is that you read something. And perhaps you now know about one or two things that happened in the world (that didn't bother you before you knew about them.) Mostly, you read something and then your mind created, a meaning about it. Perhaps the meaning was in the article or book you read, but still, you adopted it, you incorporated it into your beliefs.
Meditation, and other mindful practices, can help you quiet your mind so that when fears arise, they arise as fears, not actual dangers.
Meanings are optional. To experience them as optional, you have to learn they're created by you
What makes meanings seem real is our emotions. A rock is real because we can feel it. We think a danger is real when feel fear about it. Yet the fear is a reaction to an interpretation, not to the thing itself.
It's like seeing a horror film. You feel real fear even though the danger isn't real- it's just a story. We are trained to interpret emotions that we get from stories as being imagined rather than being about an actual danger, so after the movie we can relax. You can learn to treat your own emotions the same way.
I highly recommend the Landmark courses.