It would have been nicer to feel better sooner

Ellis’s research on irrational thoughts warns us to beware of the following assumption:

Perfect solutions exist for every problem and we must find them immediately.

His theory was that if we wait for perfect solutions, we often will miss the whole trip. And doing so will only lead to stagnation and frustration.

Have you ever gone down that mental road before? Twisting your guts into knots with this false notion that there was something out there in the world that would solve your life?

If only it worked that way.

Therapy is a common example. People sit down with shrinks and attend support groups and undergo treatment, demanding that those tools become overnight solutions to their soul’s restlessness.

For two hundred bucks an hour, this better work, we demand to ourselves.

But the reality is, we don’t do all these things to feel better, we do them to get better at feeling. None of our efforts alone will provide a psychological silver bullet. Only when we synthesize this overall portfolio of personal development capabilities do we begin to heal. Only when we strengthen the emotional muscles of noticing, naming, taming and reframing our feelings do we raise our psychological floor.

Moore’s book on the aging soul describes it beautifully:

The purpose of is not to come to a rational, logical solution to a problem, but to explore it in different ways so that eventually a new perspective arises and a solution appears out of the intense reflection.

Personally, it took me years of daily hypnosis meditation before my nerves finally loosened their grip on my racing brain. And that was only one of about twelve different habits in my anxiety management toolkit. Would have been nicer to feel better sooner, but like anything we do, it’s about the process not the result.

Believing that our little silver bullets are our saviors doesn’t actually help us grow. Embarking on another mission to fix ourselves isn’t the answer.

Besides, when did we decide that solving all of our problems would automatically mean that we’d have everything we want?

May as well focus on getting better at feeling and trust the process to do the rest.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
If you were smart enough to fix yourself, wouldn’t you have done it by now?