DON'T JUST 'TELL YOURSELF'

In recent months I’ve been exposed to people in recovery who I tried to help, but could only watch them relapse again. I bring this up, because all of them (in my opinion) were using the same flawed technique as they began to try to change their lives. The saddest part about these relapses is that they seemed to truly want to change - that was not the problem. I can strongly identify with them, because I had made the same mistake a few times in my own recovery journey. Being aware and overcoming this problem was one of the major steps that I needed to make to find the current success that I have today. I find it important to write on this.
The crux of this revolves around the ‘head to heart’ paradigm. I’ve sure that you heard it in many recovery programs. It is basically about taking your changing thinking and moving it the ‘18 inches’ to having it felt in your heart. I have yet to hear a definitive description of how to do this, but I’ll give you my take here briefly (I‘m writing a long post on this, so you can get more detail soon). To begin to make real changes to what you believe in your heart it takes a 3 basic steps -

1 New thinking >
2 Action (to back up that thinking) >
3 Experience (as a result of these actions) =
New beliefs (in your heart)

The most import part of this is the ‘Experience’ part. The first 2 stages can be done alone and not lead to the experience needed to change the heart. You may ask “How can action not lead to experience?” Well, action taken by someone with a closed mind shuts the door to the awakening experiences needed.
Let me go back to these relapses I started with. The people were stuck in stage 1 (new thinking) They were working on the false belief that just by changing their thinking alone was all that is needed. Unfortunately new thinking is not the complete answer - even though it can fool you into thinking it is!
To maintain their new thinking, I could almost imagine their brains on a treadmill. For example they ‘knew’ that they needed to be positive about life and grateful, so what did they do? They would keep their brains running by telling themselves “I must be positive”, or “I must be grateful” hundreds of times a day. On top of that, they would put on a show to others trying to convince them that they are these things. It reeked of fake and insincere, but I could tell them that. Worse, other recovery people were telling me that it is a mistake to have these people question their new (thinking) feelings. To me these other mentors were on co-signing the BS the people were dealing with.
These struggling people didn’t move forward to action and then on to the experiences that should follow - they felt that they got it. This is another example of the ‘easier softer way’ we hear about.
I’m sure that we have all tried treadmill running before. You can maintain it for a while, but in the end you get tired and have to stop. That is what happened to each of these people. One day they each got tired of ‘telling themselves’ how they should feel and felt the reality of how they truly did still feel - since no real change moved into their hearts.