I have noticed that a lot of troubled people have a positive mindset. I know, it’s supposed to be the other way around. By no means am I suggesting that you should not have a positive mindset either. It all comes down to whether you are in fact in control of your mind, or if you are simply trying to be so.
If a person has deep anxiety but is ignoring it, pretending that they feel great, for example, they are likely to be in denial. Being in denial is no way to resolve the anxiety. All that happens then is that your subconscious mind needs to speak up, even louder, with worsening symptoms, in order to get your attention.
If you remember that your subconscious mind is always trying to communicate with you, and symptoms such as anxiety are only a product of that communication, then you’ll see that there are different actions you need to take rather than pretend everything is fine.
Carl’s positive thinking disaster
Carl was an optimist. Despite being held at gunpoint, taken to court for something he didn’t do and losing his job, he told me that he was fine. He based this assessment on his positive thinking, “If I tell myself I’m fine, I will be” he stated.
“Oh” I said, “So why have you come in to see me?”
It seems that Carl had developed a habit of unexpected, spontaneous vomiting. It was embarrassing to him in public and it was really cramping his style. When we explored the feeling behind the spontaneous vomiting, he said he felt like he had no control. We explored this feeling of having no control, and guess what. Those landmark episodes around being held at gunpoint, being taken to court and losing his job, all showed up as having the same feeling.
After we resolved the trauma and anxiety over Carl’s past, he was able to move on from spontaneous vomiting. Car’s unconscious mind needed for him to resolve these issues so that he could put them firmly in the past. Until that happened, his unconscious mind would just keep showing him that there was something wrong, unsettled and out of balance, which is also how the vomiting felt to him every time it happened.
Powerful positive thinking
Positive thinking is really important, because it is empowering, and allows you to direct your own life, unless of course, it is masking a problem. In NLP there are many techniques I use to build positive thinking and to disarm negative thinking. An example of this is through utilising eye accessing cues, where NLP tell sus that the mind is correlated with particular eye directions. If you look in a certain direction and imagine certain things at the same time, you can wipe away negative thoughts and also build positive ‘realities’.
But you need to also address issues, when they become issues. In Carl’s case, his spontaneous vomiting had no medical cause. It was psychosomatic. It was a reaction to his unresolved emotions. These needed to be addressed. Positive thinking is highly beneficial, as long as it doesn’t camouflage an issue that needs to be dealt with.
If you are having emotional or physiological symptoms that indicate anxiety, we can help. Horizons Clinical Hypnotherapy Sunshine Coast.