Shift Hate
This Week in Shift Therapy®
Hello friend,
—
Hope you are well.
—
—
Take a long deep breath.
—
—
—
Here’s a beautiful (slightly edited) letter from a patient I first shared with permission in 2011.
I came across it again in recent research and it touched me.
It struck me as valuable too.
Thought I’d pass it along again as this week’s Presence Shift…
Dear Dr. Sullivan,
All week, I’ve been realizing that I am doing so much better since we began. You know why? I’ve actually changed something—something real and substantial. I was thinking about it all week. I came to see that I didn’t regain the dwindled happiness of my childhood until I recognized what was missing. I was on a walk in the park about six months ago. On and off during the previous few weeks, I’d caught a glimpse of that old happy state of being. And then, upon losing one long glimpse of it during that walk, I realized the scope of what was lost.
I realized that attending only to “right now,” this moment, without being distracted by “later” or by “the past” was what I had done so well as a child, without even trying. Having been pulled away from “right now” so many times over the years by insistent thoughts of past abuse, lost love, regret, money, or some future goal, I’d managed to lose “right now” all together.
It became always about the past or the future for me. And in the meantime, I sunk so deeply into my thoughts that I was considering killing myself only 12 months ago. As you know as well as anyone, I was lost in a sea of pain, and I almost lost my life completely. In that realization, I saw that unless I was willing to fight for it, to defend against it being hijacked by nonstop thoughts and images of worry, shame, or the anxieties of unfulfilled dreams; unless I was willing to fight for it with the relentless abandon with which I had been pursuing all those unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable dreams, it would remain lost to me.
I say unfulfillable because, of course, to me, my dreams not only included some initial achievement like graduating from college and making money, or gaining respect, or even doing good in the world. An even deeper reason for their pursuit was that they also harbored my hopes for all of the love and adulation that I imagined came along with the achievement of the dream—my unspoken payoff. That payoff, though, I’ve come to find, often did not come to fruition in any real way, even after I achieved the goal.
So, there and then on that walk in that park, I swore my allegiance to not only the observation of my silent dialogue, as I had learned to do from talking with you, but also to actually recognizing any thoughts I had that were responsible for beginning a cycle of emotional pain. These thoughts became my personal enemy. I decided to wage war against them. Yes, I actually took it a bit further than you suggested. I swore to hate those stressful thoughts so much that I would never not see them coming if they entered my mind to steal the peace of this moment from my life.
I know what you’re thinking. “Hate” seemed like a strong word to me, too, initially. But hating was the only motivator sufficient to the persistent call of the task. So, I resolved to hate those thoughts that stole my peace, my confidence, and in many moments of my days, my self. I hated them away by momentarily replacing their defiling of my mind with mental images of the vastness of space or the uniqueness of life found in the ocean or the infinity of the universe.
That worked for me. I’ve found that my mind was unable or unwilling to tolerate the hypocrisy of feeling anxiety about my small dreams or failures, or even my expectations, when presented in contrast to the vast mystery I meander through, as does every other living creature, each and every single moment of being alive. Taking just a moment to recall the profound fact of my existence within the mystery of life has the profound effect of putting my personal problems into a much more balanced and reasonable—I dare say, accurate—perspective.
Soon after this hate story began through my vigilant tracking of my inner conversation, I recognized that in any given day, week, or month, I had very few novel thoughts or novel patterns of thoughts at all. I imagine that I had more than most people do. I’m quite sure that is true because I am a creative person by nature. But, as it turned out, even I, in my creative peaks, had been thinking about very few things, in fact. And the patterned nature of my conversation and the moods that came out of them were strikingly simple. Really.
Still, as simple as they were, it was a challenge to track them successfully because they were concealing themselves under the auspices of being me. But really, they were just bad habits. They were lazy thoughts that I never noticed and that didn’t make sense anymore. And they had become bad habits, “addictions,” as you would say. But once I could identify them, it became clear that they amounted to predictable patterns of conversation that led to anxiety, anger, or outright depressed depression — and so, not feeling fully alive in this moment.
While you could probably tell me how or why they developed in the first place in my life, or why they made sense for me to cling to as my real stories because of some disjointed phase of my weird personal development, that really doesn’t matter to me anymore. By now, I can see that those depressing thoughts and conversations, wherever they came from in the first place, are not me. They may have been “me” in the past. But, understanding them as I’ve come to, they actually became, in a word, boring.
I am sharing what I discovered to thank you but also because it helps me remember. It will also be nice to have something in writing to refer back to when I need a reminder. And maybe my letter will help others too. So here is exactly what used to happen to me as far as I can tell:
A thought or image would enter my mind, perhaps because my eyes happened to catch a happy couple talking at lunch and then tenderly reaching out for each other’s hands. That image would move me toward a sense of nostalgia for some past love, which would, in turn, lead to a thought of an obstacle that needed to be addressed in my life in order to regain the conditions of the past, including that now absent love. The thought of the obstacle, in turn, generated anxiety about how to best overcome the obstacle in the most expeditious way—more work, more free time, etc., so as not to waste more time away from that “happy” time when I tell myself in the back of my mind that I used to be more lovable. or that I will become more lovable if I achieve X, Y, or Z— or something else ridiculous like that.
That last thought, of course, generated additional anxiety related to the fact that I was commanding myself to strive not to waste more time in getting to some better past or future version of me. Of course, the worry and the wasted time were made of the same substance—distraction from the present moment— illusion. Nevertheless, the feelings produced by the worry had been sufficient to drag me so far from the peace of the vastness of life in the present moment that I had dwelt in only moments before, that I could scarcely even recall my recent happy reality through the haze of freshly baked anxieties.
But now, so long as I escort my bad thoughts away when they come knocking at my brain’s door, my state of mind is peaceful.
It works every time.
What I found in each battle of my personal war is that since my mind produces conversations without ever resting, inevitably an upsetting image enters my mind and triggers some angry or pitiful or sad or jealous sequence of feelings. And that sequence can play out over and over. I gave the triggers to these sequences a name so that I could label them appropriately whenever one arises. I call them “Life Killers.” I know, I know. You prefer “Unwanted Emotional Patterns”. But I found that calling them “a thought that is here to f-up my otherwise perfectly excellent life” is a lot more effective (and, dare I say, accurate).
I had a number of different patterns that I came to recognize and to hate. They deserve to be hated. They were robbing the most precious possession of my lifetime—my life, my peace. I haven’t forgotten that I went through the difficult and perhaps necessary work of confronting these thoughts head on while working with you. Eventually they became old, useless, bad habits.
It was hating them that allowed me to rid myself of them, for the most part.
OK, deep breath, smile...what I am trying to say is that I finally identified the appropriate enemy to my life. It was the anxiety provoking inner conversations that I allowed to fester in my mind.
I’d been letting abusive thoughts feel welcome enough to return whenever they pleased. I’d been providing them sanctuary simply by not confronting or understanding them in the context of my life. Not any more. Now, I notice them and call them out for what they are—boring, juvenile, and no longer unconscious.
And in return, they evaporate and leave me in peace.
I did it.
I will live.
I will live in joy.
Thanks, Dr. Sully!