I went to bed early last night, yet still feel tired and off. I use the word off quite a bit. I think I use that word because I don't know how to describe the actual feeling.
My counselor mentioned how feelings aren't reliable. I know this, but it's good to be reminded, because I can become so focused on how I feel. Depression makes me feel like crap, but it doesn't mean that all hope is lost, or that everything is going wrong. It's just a feeling, and doesn't have to represent the truth. The truth is that I have great friends, an incredible wife, family that loves me and who I love, a place to call home, a reliable car, a church community that I really enjoy, and many other good things going on that I should be/am thankful for. Yet I have days that I feel off. Feelings often lie. My counselor suggested that it was my thought patterns that need to change in order for my feelings to line up. He said it will take time, and even though at first I was inspired by the idea of change, it would be an up and down experience for a while. He also said that the real work begins when the honeymoon is over, and life settles back into an everyday routine...when the inspired feeling (which is unreliable) wears off.
So, I will continue to plug away.
Don't trust a feeling. Positive thought is much better.
2 comments:
I too am a "feeler" and I know that when I start to feel hopeless and helpless and down, it helps me to focus on what I know to be True (often from Scripture), and an accurate assessment of my situation (as you have done here). And to recognize that even though my feelings may not be trustworthy or accurately reflect reality, they are still my feelings and should at least be acknowledged, even if that means saying "Yes, I am feeling "off" or "down", but I also KNOW that I am loved, chosen, blessed, and have hope & a future. So I will make it through."
I know how that is, but at the same time, it was me ignoring my feelings and telling myself that everything was ok that led me into the emotional morass of last winter. So, I've taken active steps to figure out what it was that was bugging me and then made big changes to my life in order to feel "better". I dunno, my feeling off is largely attributed to being a square peg trying to happily fit into a round hole, because "everyone else was fine", but after 2.5 years of trying to fit, I finally realized that I couldn't keep going on like that. Once I made that realization a large part of the feeling off went away. So, I guess the moral of my jibberjabber is that sometimes feelings are your subconscious' way of telling you that change is needed on a more active level, as opposed to simply changing your thought pattern. Life makes it very difficult for a person to simply be who they are, because that person (at least me, anyway) takes on personality traits to make life easier for other people, and to "fit in", and so the real person kind of gets tamped down to what it believes it "should" be. Once I realized that it's ok to do things for myself, and it's ok to live a life that may not be the cookie cutter version of what my parents or my employer would, I felt so much better, and freer to be me. Discovering me, and having a spouse that is so supportive of me doing so, has been the most uplifting experience in my entire life. I can honestly say that once I felt more in control of me, the icky feelings largely went away. It took months of counselling to get there, but I really do feel so much better, and I'm still the old me, with pessimism abounding, but there's so much less weight and angst on me.
So, when trying to change how you think, don't tell yourself that your default mode of thinking is bad, because that's who you are, and you are an awesome person. It may just take something more than retraining your thoughts to reach your state of zen :).
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