How can we help those who can’t put past bad things in perspective?

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Transcript

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their perspective, how can we help them? One of the common problems in today’s world is the victim mentality.
All of us, things have gone wrong in our life. I traveled across the world, I’ve interacted with many phenomenally successful people, and just grab a little below the surface, you find that everybody is working through their own tragedies. Life is tough for everyone.
Of course, not saying life is equally tough. For some people, it can be unbearably tough. But for everyone, it is tough.
So the victim mentality makes us feel sorry for ourselves. We all will be victimized in life. But we don’t have to self-identify ourselves as victims.
So often, when we feel ourselves to be victims, or when we feel ourselves overwhelmed by the things that have happened to us in the past, or maybe are even happening right now, one thing that happens is that we feel powerless. We feel helpless, we feel powerless. Oh, such a terrible thing happened to me.
What can I do about it? I’m powerless. Sometimes we feel that I’m in such a situation. I’m so trapped.
There’s nothing I can do about this. Have any of you been in a situation like that? When you felt powerless? Anyone? Yeah, almost all of us. Now, thank you.
Now we could turn and this sense of powerlessness is very dangerous. And to get ourselves out of it, we could do a counterintuitive thought exercise. No matter how bad things are, can I make them worse? What kind of question is that? Who would want to make anything worse? They’re already bad.
Of course, we’re not actually going to do it. But can we make things worse? No matter how bad things are, we always have the power to make them worse. Say, if I drive carelessly, and I get into an accident, and I fracture one foot of mine, I’m in the bed, all my plans are disrupted.
I feel helpless because I’m in the bed. I’m immobilized. But I can take a hammer and crack my other knee also.
So, no matter how bad things are, we can always make them worse. And if we have the power to make things worse, that means we are not as powerless as we think. That means we have the power to make things better also.
So, actually, I usually do this as a full one day workshop. And the second part to it, which I could not go into, but I mentioned this briefly, that we can always open a new tab in our life. Say if one sometimes some pop-ups come up, and they pop up and there is no you can’t auto-minimize only.
Where do you cross it? So, you just go to some other screen. So, like that, open a new tab in your life. Tab is an acronym TAB.
No matter how powerless we are, three things are always in our control. Our thoughts, our attitude, and our behavior. Our thoughts means, what do I think about? Say, somebody has betrayed me.
Somebody has wounded me. Somebody has violated me. Whatever.
Life can be horrible at times. But what we think about is always in our control. Some bad thing has happened to us, and to deal with it, we have to think about it.
But we don’t have to constantly keep thinking about it. So, especially our spirituality can provide us a satisfying, strengthening object of thought. So, what I think about, I got a fracture.
I can keep thinking about the fracture and feel sorry for myself. Or I can think, okay, on this bed, what can I do? Maybe I can read this. I have my phone.
I can access this. I can do that. Maybe I can do this course while I’m on the bed or whatever.
What we think about is in our control. That the world doesn’t control it. People can’t control it.
Second is attitude. Attitude means, how we look at what has happened. We can just say that, oh, this terrible thing has happened.
And my life, always terrible things keep happening. My life is rotten. The world is against me.
And I’m doomed. Or we can look at it as, yes, bad things do happen. But sometimes, bad things lead to something good.
Sometimes, when one door closes, that’s how another door opens. And if you look back in our own lives, we may see that what bad things happen to us. Sometimes that led to a better thing happening.
And this is where actually an awareness of the higher reality of the universe, that there is a higher organizing principle. There’s a deeper intelligence in the universe that can help. So things may not go according to my plan.
Things may not be in my control. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re out of control. They are under some higher control.
And if I just keep doing my part, things will be taken care of. So an attitude is, oh, this is terrible. And my life is doomed.
This is not an attitude. This is terrible. But maybe something good will come out of it.
Let me see what I can do. That’s attitude. And B is behavior.
Behavior means how we act is up to us. Sometimes some people get sick. And they behave in such a sick way that all their caregivers become sick of them.
Or sometimes some people are sick, and still they try to maintain a positive, cheerful attitude. And they create warmth around them. So they attract warmth also.
So behavior means what? How we act in the situation is up to us. And one way to behave in a constructive way amidst difficulties is to decrease our functioning frame of reference. That means if something terrible has happened to me from my past, and if I start thinking, I’m still reeling under the impact of that.
If I start thinking, what will happen to me after 10 years? What will happen to me after 20 years? Or what will happen to me after one year? At that time, the variables are too many. And thinking too much long term only overwhelms us. So decrease the functioning frame of reference.
For this one day today, can I act in a way that doesn’t make things worse? Can I act in a way that makes things better? Can I act in a proper way for this one day today? Or if one day appears too much, for the next one hour, can I behave in a way that would make things better? One way to do this is also, if I were counseling someone who were in this situation, if my friend were in this situation, how would I suggest that they act in the situation? There are many things in our life we know we should be doing, but we’re not doing them. The many things which we know we should not be doing, but we’re doing them. So behavior means just for the next one hour, can I act in the best way that is possible for me in this situation? And if you do that for one hour, at the end of the one hour, take a few deep breaths and appreciate yourself.
Not in an egoistic way, but in an encouraging way. Good job. Now you keep doing this.
You’re not as helpless as you thought. Now let’s do this for one more hour. And if we keep doing this, we’ll discover that we are stronger than what we thought.
Our spirituality especially can help us to discover layers of strength that we didn’t know we had. No matter whatever faces us, what graces us can always be stronger. And if we just keep moving forward in a small frame of reference, keeping steps forward, forward, forward, we may feel I’m in a dungeon, but we’ll discover that it’s not a dungeon.
It’s a tunnel. And we will come to the light at the end of the tunnel. Does this answer your question? Thank you.