Between Perception and Reality

Hello!

Last night I got to thinking how a lot of our problems are less about what happens to us and more about the lens through which we choose to use to view what happens to us. This can cause us to create feelings that we think are attached to these events when they really aren't. What happened to us happened to us, it didn't come with added anxiety, or worry, or fear, hate, anger etc. The events transpired exactly the way they were supposed to, even if we didn't like or appreciate the outcome.

The challenge comes in remembering that we always have the ability to choose our response in life's events. We have a response-ability. An ability to choose our response in any and every situation that takes place around us. Even in the ones we don't like or care for. They happened, they didn't bring any more emotion than we chose to add into our response.

Between Perception and Reality

I started thinking about the power that's in the position between our lens of perception to what's happening around us and the actual event itself. The event itself is truly incapable of making us feel a certain way, we have simply chosen that feeling as our response.

We can choose our feelings.

Now I know that's going to rub people up the wrong way and it may even cause you to stop reading right here. But for those that persist and want to know where I'm coming from, let me explain. If a feeling can create a colour through which we view our lives, but a feeling can only ever be a response to said life because we've chosen that over all the other ways there are to feel, then surely there's a connection between that colour, that lens, and the feeling that helped create it.

Putting "how many emotions are there?" into Google yields the discovery, from verywellmind.com, that there are around 27 distinct yet highly interconnected emotions. So if a life event happens and it stirs up some emotions in us leading us to respond in one way, there are another 26 ways we could have chosen instead had we desired and intended to.

The reason I'm trying to introduce this break between reality and our perception is to remind each and every one of us, myself included, that the toxic states of thought we get ourselves into from wrong thinking patterns and behaviours can be altered by exercising a conviction to view the event that happened to us as just that; an event.

An event.

Sans emotion.

Sans interpretation.

All so we can choose a better way to respond.

Strip It Away!

Stripping away how the event makes me feel and learning to view the event for what it is helps me see that I can choose my response to it if the one I'm choosing right now isn't helping my mental or emotional health. I can rotate it at any point in time to find a different point of view.

Imagine the six sides of a dice are six ways to respond to life's events and I don't like the results I'm getting from the number I'm currently on. That does not alter in any way, shape or form, the fact that there are still another five numbers on that dice; another five ways to respond.

Now take that to the 27 from verywellmind.com; not liking one response actually gives me a chance to find another, more healthier response that will reap the rewards I want to reap, namely not feeling a certain way about life.

27 more in fact!

This is not meant to be a quick fix, it's just the latest discovery I've made on my own journey through mental health struggles that helps me keep my perspective as broad as possible so I can wake up to the fact a response isn't helping when it isn't reaping the healthy results I want.

Now you could read this as a person on the internet's random musings and think it's a load of rubbish because we don't get to choose our responses in our feelings. That's fine, that's your opinion that you're entitled to.

I'm just trying to help you see another perspective if the one you're holding right now isn't helping you live well like you want to. It's the whole purpose behind The Write Dimension; to help people see there's always another way to live if the way you're living right now isn't helping you at all.

I may develop this some more at some point because it's just the tip of the iceberg of discovery in helping you interpret life's events in a healthy way that adds value and benefit to your life if you'll stop thinking life as happening to you and instead start viewing it as happening for you.

Until next time...

===TLP===