Gael Lindenfield - The Positive Woman

‘c’ – You have become depressed and cynical. You have lost your energy and enthusiasm for life. You see people as potentially exploitative, and are no longer able to trust. You have probably lost contact with your emotions. You may have resigned yourself to spending a lifetime ‘getting by’, licking emotional wounds and experiencing physical debilitation. You are in danger of forgetting what it is like to feel positive about anything and may end up feeling very lonely, even when surrounded by a crowd of warm friendly people. If you continue in this mode there is very little chance that you will be able to look back on your life with pride and a sense of achievement. In fact, you are in desperate need of some positive reprogramming and have everything to gain from giving the course in this book top priority!

One must learn to care for oneself first, so that one can then dare care for someone else. That’s what it takes to make the caged bird sing .

Maya Angelou

Once you have begun to get a clearer idea of the kind of person you are and where you want to go, you are ready to start the exciting process of reprogramming the auto-pilot of your unconscious mind so that it can help, not hinder, you to take your life in the positive direction you wish it to go. But before you can confidently glide along in top gear you must do some more preparatory work.

Without exception, every negative thinking person with whom I have ever worked has been suffering internally from what I shall call ‘emotional wounds’. Whether these are new, acutely painful, bleeding hearts damaged by some recent trauma, or ancient festering sores generated by childhood distress, they usually need healing attention before the person can become truly motivated to adopt a more positive outlook.

So, if your self-analysis revealed a considerable amount of negativity, it is likely that you could do with treating yourself to a strong dose of loving nurturing. ‘But how do I do that?’ is a question that I hear many times. It is amazing how many women there are who are superbly skilled at nursing and caring for others but simply do not know how to turn these skills inwards towards themselves! No doubt you’ve heard people say, ‘You’ve got to forget the past and get on with your life.’ Perhaps you even tell yourself that daily! But, of course, it is easier said than done and you know only too well that you would if you could. You obviously don’t enjoy feeling and behaving in a negative way, otherwise, I assume, you wouldn’t be reading this book.

Most probably, along with other deprivations you may have experienced, you were never taught how to express sadness or anger efficiently and healthily. Perhaps you have been taught that you should:

– grin and bear it

– take the rough with the smooth

– remember that there is always someone worse off than yourself

– not cry over spilt milk

– let bygones be bygones

or perhaps you were not encouraged to express and share feelings of pleasure, excitement and pride. Were these the ‘messages’ you heard?

‘You should never count your chickens until they are hatched.’

‘If you laugh before breakfast, you’ll cry before supper.’

‘Little things please little minds.’

‘Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.’

Of course this kind of stoical, stiff-upper lip philosophy has its uses. In the short term it frees our energy to cope with the practical problems which most crises inevitably produce. It may have helped our parents and grandparents win wars and survive many dreadful tragedies, traumas and injustices which their rapidly changing and increasingly competitive world had no time to deal with effectively – and, of course, it helped our mothers and grandmothers swallow the bitter pills of the discrimination and oppression in their patriarchal world.

But what about the cost of using such survival strategies on a long-term basis to cope with the most minor day-to-day problems? We can see the answer all around us. This strategy has produced generations of women who are today weighed down with buried pain and the debilitating physical and emotional symptoms of stress, and many thousands of others who are merely kept afloat by their addiction to mood-lifting pills, alcoholic tipples, chocolate cakes or the fantasy tales of the soaps. Even women who have managed to find fulfilment and happiness can still harbour feelings of guilt, a sense of foreboding about the future and a cautiousness about tempting the hand of fate by simply being too happy and successful!

Modern research has now revealed that repressed feelings do not simply melt away – they are stored as emotional or physical tension, which can play havoc with our health and ability to live harmoniously and happily. But we can learn more effective ways of managing our feelings on a day-to-day basis and this is a subject we will be discussing in some depth in Chapter 5.

You can take an important preparatory step in that direction by confronting and dealing with that buried emotional tension which you are probably harbouring in body and mind right now.

Using a large sheet of paper and some coloured pens, draw a series of pictures to illustrate typical scenes in your life which you remember with feeling. Don’t attempt a great work of art; you can use symbols and ‘pin-men’, but avoiding words will help you stimulate the right side of your brain, which deals with emotions, and prevent you from making too many clever intellectual interpretations as you remember! (See the following chapter for further explanation about right and left brain hemisphere activity.)

You have already spent some time reviewing your past history, but now is the time to dig just a little deeper into your personal ‘feeling bank’ and see whether there is any what we in the world of therapy call ‘unfinished business’. By this we mean past situations which gave rise to:

– feelings which were never satisfactorily expressed, causing deep-seated tensions which may still be inhibiting the free flow of emotional energy and perhaps hindering you from being as spontaneous and passionate as you would like to be

– thoughts which were not correctly assessed and evaluated and may therefore have replaced your capacity for rationality and impartiality with dogmatic opinions and prejudices.

To assist you in the unearthing of your own ‘unfinished business’, complete the following exercise, which will help you review your emotional life to date. Remember that:

1. In looking for material we are not necessarily looking for ‘the Truth’, i.e. what actually happened, but merely your emotional reaction to your perception of what was going on. For example, your mother may not have been actually baring her teeth and threatening to kill you when you knocked down your brother’s castle or came home late from the disco, but you may have thought she was and therefore felt the terror.

2. We are not necessarily looking for major events or traumas. It is often in the everyday common experiences that most unfinished business lies. Indeed, the very ordinariness of the experiences may have resulted in their not getting the attention that they needed. We say to ourselves:

‘Well, almost everybody has failed an exam in their life, haven’t they?’