“Oh wow, I can just stop responding to my dad’s crazy texts? Like, I now realize I don’t have to engage with him if I don’t want to and this blows my mind. I felt trapped before and now I’m free.”
Like my client here, so many of us are feeling trapped in situations where part of the cage is not even real.
We catch ourselves in binds all the time, being stuck within our own mental constructs. Like, “oh I HAVE to respond. I can’t let them keep believing this about me,” or “we always get together on the holidays, so I have to be there (even though it makes me miserable).”
Credit: Pudgy Penguins
The changes we don’t realize are possible are the hardest to make happen.
I have a ridiculous example of how I recently caught myself stuck in an imaginary trap of my own making.
For years when I’ve gone to the hairstylist, I have admired their special water spray bottles…you know the ones where you don’t have to repeatedly pump the trigger, but that just spray a nice mist consistently. And I’ve thought to myself multiple times, “man, someday when I have a lot of money, I can finally buy myself one of those bougie spray bottles.”
And then the last time I went to the salon, I somehow became AWARE I was thinking this. Because in truth, I had no idea what this spray bottle cost, but it couldn’t be SO much that I needed to postpone getting one. Sure enough, when I looked up the product, it was less than $20.
I have no idea where I got the ludicrous belief that I couldn’t own that spray bottle until I was rich enough. But this is the kind of mental limitation we put on ourselves all the time, usually without being aware of doing so.
When we are not consciously aware of the thoughts we are thinking, we can’t critically engage with or examine them to see if they really are true.
You can learn to become aware of your own thoughts, using the Power Pause or other mindfulness techniques, or even just by sharing your thought process out loud with a friend or a therapist.
Then you too can free yourself from of these imaginary traps. You deserve to experience all of the freedom that is possible. Trust me, there’s so much more than you think.
