The Most Important Thing I’ve Learned in the Last 5 Years (and maybe ever)
It’s been a weird few years, eh? I know it's not just for me. It can feel like the crazy shit the world throws at us is intensifying every year and we just can’t catch a break.
When I look back over the last 9 years or so, it makes me feel a little dizzy. In addition to every nutty thing we’ve all experienced together, I have had personal change after change after change, and I’m just now starting to feel like myself again.
And, hooooboy, have I learned a lot.
I’ve always been a sensitive creature and prone to anxiety, but following law school graduation this reached a new level. I was a mess. It affected everything, my ability to work, my relationships, and my health.
As a family lawyer (and human), I spend a lot of time thinking about how our relationships to other people affect our experience of life. We’re constantly acting out patterns with the participation of others and these interactions wire our brains. For me, this dynamic was completely below the level of my consciousness until I experienced a major change in my own intimate relationships.
When I ended one long-term relationship and began another about 6 years ago, my unconscious patterns got disrupted and it was extremely confusing. I had this experience of feeling like I had no idea who I was or how to interact with the world. The role I had been playing for the first half of my life was gone. I didn’t know my lines, I didn’t know where to stand, I didn’t know what to do.
It was exhausting, and I just constantly felt awful. My anxiety had reached new heights and I felt stuck. And to make matters worse, I was really hard on myself about it. I had no “reason” to feel this way. I had a wonderful, understanding, and patient (so patient!!) partner and a good job. What did I have to be worried about?
I tried a lot of things to feel better. I quit my job as a family lawyer and went back to school in a different field. That didn’t help and I needed money, so I went back to being a lawyer. I still felt like shit, so I quit again, and decided to be a life coach (as one does). This is actually what changed everything for me, including, paradoxically, the ability to finally commit to being a lawyer.
Through the experience of learning to coach others, I learned the one thing I needed: my thoughts create my feelings.
Okay, this is oversimplified life-coach-speak, but it’s true enough that if you apply it, it can change your life. Seriously. (If you want receipts, read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made.)
This simple truth shattered my feeling of being stuck and helped me finally tackle my crippling anxiety. My emotions are not caused by things that happen in the world, or even things that happen to me directly, they are caused by my brain and the meaning it makes of those things. This allowed me to shake my victim mentality once and for all and gain control over my life.
The whole model that forms the basis for life coaching, positive psychology, cognitive behavior therapy and other related practices looks something like this:
Circumstances happen and your brain creates thoughts about them.
Your thoughts (and other stuff happening in your brain) create your emotions (which are actually thoughts and nervous system activity working together).
Your emotions create your actions (or inaction).
Your actions create results.
Often, we look to this model because we want to create a certain result and see that the starting point is actually what we’re thinking about that result. This is why “thought work” and “mindset” are so important. “Thoughts become things” not through magic, but because they lead to taking action (or failing to take action) through the emotions they create.
My thoughts were dominated largely by catastrophizing, so it’s no wonder I was in a state of constant nervous system activation. And when my nervous system is activated, my default response is to freeze (thus, the “stuck” feeling) or flee (see, e.g., quitting all the things).
As soon as I figured this out, I was able to start questioning my thoughts and stories that were leading me to feeling so anxious and stuck. I started looking for evidence of more productive stories and found it. I felt empowered.
There are a few things that are important to me to clarify about this, because I’ve found some dark corners of the life coaching industry where this can be abused.
First, this model is not to be used to gaslight yourself. You don’t rewrite history with it, you use it to choose your current interpretation of the world. Shitty things happen and we don’t just erase them with thought work. For example, if someone treats you poorly, you might use thought work to decide it’s time for a boundary, not to talk yourself into ignoring or excusing someone else’s bad behavior.
Second, this model is not to be used as a tool to avoid feeling difficult emotions. Life is hard and it’s supposed to be that way. If you want to have a full experience of it, you’re going to have to experience the full spectrum of emotions. Also, I really believe the only way out is through, so learning to feel everything to completion is a critical skill. What it does do is help to keep you from dwelling and ruminating and feeling like a victim. When the shitty things happen, we fully feel the anger, frustration, fear, grief, melancholy, etc. without devolving into a paralyzing doom spiral.
To be clear, this takes constant vigilance and hard work. The low-energy state is to just believe all the bullshit your brain feeds you about the world. I still mess up and allow my brain to drive my decision making without me sometimes.
It is very easy to believe disempowering thoughts, and very difficult to trust ourselves. But if we’re willing to do the heavy lifting, it can feel like magic.
