Reply To: Tangled web, where to start?
Peter BunyanHi DG
The things you mention in your post PTSD and financial worries have one thing in common that is your mind's pattern seeking and matching way of working. You (and everyone else) seek to make sense out of all the sensory information entering your brain. Everything you see, hear, feel, touch all go in and are matched up against previously stored memory patterns. If you reacted to a stimulus in a certain way in the past, that is a stored pattern of behaviour. If you come across the same or similar stimulus pattern again your subconscious will make you repeat the same pattern of behaviour, because your subconscious does the storing and matching and it works faster than your “critical” conscious. You might be familiar with smokers trying to “give up” reaching into a pocket for the cigarettes before they have even realised they are doing it.
All this so far to describe habits and why we have them. Hopefully you can see the PTSD connection but if you are constantly thinking you do not have enough money, then see this as a pattern in thinking, triggered by some stimulus. With me so far?
What to do about it?
Money worries give rise to a very basic fear for survival, possibly you imagine not being able to pay the rent/mortgage losing your home etc, you may even have had the unfortunate experience. The imagined event as real to your subconscious as the real past one. But a FEAR an emotion which unless reduced by Click Tracks will hold you back.
Once you have experienced some fear response to a stimulus this pattern is stored and as you go through life your mind is constantly seeking more and finding more of the same pattern response. This is the “glass half empty” way of living.
You want to change to a “glass half full” way of living life.
Once the associated fear is gone or reduced you also want to overwrite the memory pattern with a new one.
You need to imagine yourself in the future in a comfortable happy successful secure place. The better you can visualise this with colour sound smell feel the better. Your subconscious will respond to this as a real event in the same way that it would to an imagined disaster, only positively. The more you imagine this dream future and feel the JEEP in it the more your pattern seeking mind will find to support it.
Find things to be grateful for now. Actively look for them. Any little things will do. Just get into the habit of looking and the more you find the more you will find. It's a pattern. If you are feeling grateful for what you have you cannot be worrying about lack of things. You can't be stressed if you are grateful. In that dream future I mentioned imagine yourself feeling grateful and joyful for actually being there and feel it.
PSTEC Positive can be used to re-enforce some of these positive behaviours.
I have tried here to show you how the mechanism of the mind works so that you can use that information with PSTEC and become more in control of your life rather than at the mercy of events.
Our minds have evolved over millions of years to become highly successful hunter gatherer societies. We have not had time to adapt to modern overcrowded civilisation, hence things can go wrong, we still respond to things in a paleolithic way not appropriate to living today.
One more simple thing you can do is SMILE. It is an ancient even older than paleolithic behaviour. Not perhaps as old as fear but because it is so hard wired into us, it works. Smile at every one you meet even if you do not feel like it. It triggers other people to smile, they smile and feel better, they smile at you, you feel better. A win-win behaviour. You are creating another positive pattern.
Peter