Negative Thinking is Very Common

Do negative thoughts enter and consume your mind often? Do your thoughts leave you feeling negative about yourself? 

Possible reasons for negative thoughts if you are a survivor of abuse, combat or trauma experiences or just experienced hurtful situations. 

Negative thinking generally can be a result of your daily life. Events in your daily life can remind your subconscious of past traumatic situations.  

Negative thoughts can be a side effect of PTSD symptoms surfacing after a latency period. 

Elements of Memory

To deal on a daily basis with traumatic memories or flashbacks, you first have to understand the elements of memory and what gets attached to them. Memory has three compartments: content (what you saw), associated emotions (what you felt) and audio (sounds you heard or not). Separate from the memory in another part of the brain, a core belief about yourself forms in your subconscious mind and attaches to each memory recorded. Meaning an embedded core belief will surface each time along with a memory when that memory is triggered.

That being said, let’s look at how negative thoughts are routed into your thinking.

2 ways on how negative thoughts get into your mind: 

Route #1 is when negative thoughts surface as the result of a current situation stimulating a visual memory of a previous event. The memory would then causes an associated core belief to surface into and then be released from your subconscious mind into your conscious mind. You are not always aware that a core belief has surfaced or why. Then the surfacing core belief directly influences the content of your thinking unknowingly to you.  A negative core belief would generate negative thinking.

For example, something happens and a core belief is released such as “I am not good enough”, “I don’t deserve anything” or I am not worthy of anyone”.  The core belief then silently influences how you think like; “no one will ever like or love me” “I am not good enough to be successful and so on. Yet the thoughts seem like they come out of nowhere or you think you are just negative toward yourself.

Route #2 is when the current event stimulates the audio portion of a memory and releases the direct statement recording into your brain, like “You will never be any good at anything” in the voice of the person who said it. So you think you are bad, no good or negative because someone else says so.

Understand that both routes of delivery are extremely dis-empowering and self-defeating as well as generate influential content for negative thoughts. The sad thing is you have no idea where your negative thinking came from. 

Both routes heavily influence you and run quietly in the running in the background. Each route causes you to think in negative ways and as a result, you think you are going crazy or just simply hate yourself. You know nothing going on or happening in the moment to cause you to think so the negative about yourself, so you must be crazy. But be assured that you are not crazy. Nothing happens in your mind unless it has been written as a result of your life experiences

TakeAway

The positive thing is once you learn and understand the reasons why you are thinking negatively today, you won't feel like you are crazy anymore. 

Another positive thing is that it is possible to make a shift from negative thinking to positive thinking. It is also possible to neutralize the influence negative thoughts have on you, so the thoughts no longer dis-empower you or causes self-sabotaging thinking. 

Shifting negative thoughts can be as easy as changing your negative core beliefs. Once your core beliefs are changed to positive then the content your mind generates to your thinking process will be positive.

Check out the possibilities on my website and click here to download a free eBook as a gift.

    Coach Bill