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July 11 - July 25, 2020
make our decisions and commitments while in a peak and heightened state—when our faith and expectations are high.
As trauma expert Gabor Maté, MD, says, “What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.”
Our true and authentic self isn’t who we currently are. It isn’t our limitations. Instead, it is our deepest-held aspirations, dreams, and goals. Rather than facing our fears, and rather than facing the truth, we avoid them. Rather than creating the life we want, we build the life that allows our problems to exist unresolved. Rather than becoming the person we want to become, we stay the person we are. Rather than adapting our personality to match our goals, we adapt our goals to match our current and limited personality.
psychology, a refractory period is the amount of time it takes to emotionally recover and move on from an experience.
Some events, though, may take months, years, or even decades to let go of. Indeed, some events are never outgrown.
Becoming psychologically flexible enables you to shorten the length of refractory periods—even when really painful or difficult experiences happen. You become psychologically flexible by being in touch with your emotions but not completely absorbed by them. You hold your thoughts and emotions loosely as you actively pursue meaningful goals.
The less you hold on to mistakes or painful experiences, the better you’re able to adapt to what the situation requires and perform in order to achieve your goals. What happened in the past doesn’t impact the next thing you do, or stop you from being entirely present in this moment.
The more psychologically flexible you are, the faster you can let things go. The less psychologically flexible you are, the longer you hold on to even small things.
When a person remains stuck in an emotional refractory period following a difficult experience, they continue seeing and experiencing life from their initial reaction to the experience. Therefore, day after day, they continue reconstructing the emotions of the experience. They don’t regulate and reframe how they see and feel about the event.
Molehills can become mountains if you don’t have an empathetic witness to help you process and reframe your experiences. A true empathetic witness encourages you to decide what you can do to move forward.
In the words of university president and religious leader Dr. Henry Eyring, “When you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble and you will be right more than half the time.”
Any trauma can be transformed. The past can be changed. Even in relationships that seem stuck and are disintegrating.
Trauma is at the core of who we are as people. If we transform it, we can become unstoppable in what we’re trying to accomplish. If we don’t transform our trauma, then our very lives become its by-product.
In order to move on from painful experiences, you can’t avoid them. You need to face them. Writing down and organizing your thoughts and emotions in your journal is essential and powerful. You can get your thoughts and feelings out of mind and onto paper. By facing your emotions and negative experiences, you change them.
A professional counselor is a good option for an empathetic witness.
when your “status” becomes more important than your “growth,” you usually stop growing.
“Always make your future bigger than your past.”
“I firmly believe you should never spend any of your time being the ‘former’ anything.”
Your authentic self is your future self. Who you aspire to be.
Our personality, in large part, is based on the meaning we’ve placed on former experiences. It’s based on the meaning we give to various goals or values. It’s based on what we focus on. Our personality is even based on the meaning we place on small things, like humor or music or style or interests.
Meaning-making can, if you’re not intentional, lead to a fixed mindset. Trauma, for instance, isn’t the event itself but a meaning you take or create from it. Something terrible happened, but what made it traumatic was in your interpretation.
The meaning you formed during former “traumas” is now driving your personality, your choices, and your goals. Until you change that meaning.
As Dr. Stephen Covey said, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.”
The world is viewed through the lens of your identity.
Your view of the world says more about you than it does about the world. Your view of the past says more about you than it does about the past.
Human beings are fundamentally meaning-making machines. We create meaning in order to comprehend our lives. When you understand this fact, you start to see it everywhere. We create meaning even in the smallest and most mundane of experiences, which have an impact on our identity and worldview. Every small experience counts.
When regulating challenging emotions, you can define the meaning of your experiences intentionally.
your thoughts, or, more specifically, your goals, should govern your emotions, even when the initial emotions triggered by the experience are difficult.
The more intentional you get about your life, the more you become the author of the story.
Shifting from the gap to the gain is how you strategically remember your experiences. It’s how you remember your past intentionally, not based on your initial emotional reactions but instead on your chosen identity and goals. You are the one who assigns meaning to your experiences. You’re the one formulating the story.
Re-remembering the past is about filtering your past through the lens of your chosen identity—your future self. How would a more evolved version of you view these events? How have these events enabled you to become who you are today?
Everything in your past has happened—or more accurately, is happening...
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What you choose to emphasize or ignore in a story determines the focus and impact of the story.
Your former self is not gone. They are alive and well. You carry them around with you wherever you go,
you’re probably carrying around a bruised and broken version of your former self, which is greatly limiting your current and future selves.
By looking at your past, you will change your past. Every time you look at your past it will change.
In psychology, “decision fatigue” is one way in which our willpower gets exhausted, using up our mental resources to weigh the pros and cons of every decision as we encounter them.
Decision fatigue can be avoided by making a committed choice.
The opposite of decision fatigue is making a committed decision.
“It’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.”
As it relates to yourself, having a three- to five-page printed document of your future self will help you more fully see and believe it.
Like memory, we tend to think of emotions as abstract, residing only in our minds. They are not. Emotions are physical.
Emotions and memories have physical markers in your body. According to the molecular biologist and neuroscientist Dr. Candice Pert, the surfaces of every cell throughout our body are lined with “receptors” that receive messages through neuropeptides, which are small protein molecules that relay information throughout our body and brain. Dr. Pert calls these peptides the “molecules of emotion,” explaining that the information relayed and stored throughout our brain and body is emotions.
The reason we subconsciously engage in repetitious behaviors is because our body has become addicted to the emotions that our behaviors create. The emotion is a chemical relayed and released throughout the body, recreating the homeostasis that is the physical body.
In his book The Big Leap, Dr. Gay Hendricks explains that when people begin a journey of personal transformation, they will subconsciously sabotage themselves in order to get back to their accustomed level: “Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.”
you don’t change your subconscious, then altering your personality will be difficult. If you change your subconscious, then altering your personality happens automatically.
To make powerful change in our lives, we need to change at the subconscious level.
Your body seeks homeostasis by leading you to behaviors and experiences that reproduce the emotional climate it is used to—not necessarily the behaviors that are best for you.
Putting yourself in new environments, around new people, and taking on new roles is one of the quickest ways to change your personality, for better or worse. Fully take on the roles you assume, and you’ll change from the outside in.
As a person ages, they tend to stop engaging in new situations, experiences, and environments. In other words, people’s personalities become increasingly consistent because they stop putting themselves into new contexts.
