Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 116
Relationships are not a thing.
When I say they're not a thing, it doesn't mean that I don't think they exist. It means it's not a tangible thing that you can hold in your hand or buy off the shelf, or frankly, that everyone has the same definition of. It's not something that you can hold in your hand and show to other people. Of course, there could be hand-holding involved, and you might be able to display what you think you would like to show to other people. But the relationship itself is not something tangible that you can hold out there in the world. And it is not the same for all people.
What on earth am I talking about? A relationship is a whole load of thoughts that you have about another person. And you might also agree that a relationship is also a whole load of thoughts that other people have about you.
When we have a thought about another person, or frankly, even a thought about ourselves, our thoughts create our emotions. When we have electricity firing off in our brain, it creates physical sensations in our bodies that we have quite a lot of stories about history about things that we associate it with culturally, personally, historically. And we call these sensations in our bodies our emotions. So our thoughts cause our emotions, and our emotions trigger our actions. So it is the way that we feel about stuff that drives the kind of things that we do and the things that we don't do.
So what does this look like in reality? Maybe I think that I really like hanging out with my new friend and so I feel really content. And so because I feel really content and I enjoy their company, and it makes me feel quite peaceful, I'm more likely to just drop them a breezy text and go, hey, what are you doing this afternoon? If my thought is, "Oh, my God, I wonder if they like me, they're really cool. Maybe I'm not cool enough to be hanging out with them." What I'm more likely to feel is something like anxiety, comparison, despair, those kind of things. The action that I'm likely to take from that place is not going to be to connect with them personally. Maybe somebody else might go, "Ah, no that's way more likely to make me send them a really angsty text going, like, it'd be really nice to hang out with you, but only if you want to. And then I don't. I mean, not if it's going to be an inconvenience, and I don't really want to bother people, be a bother" and overtalk and pad out the actual message of what you're actually trying to say, not really that likely to have a breezy afternoon with someone that you've just met.
So our thoughts trigger our emotions. Our emotions cause our actions. It's the way driving force behind everything. And this is really important to know because most of us believe, most of the time, that it is our actions that cause our feelings and our feelings, then if we have time for it, and when we sit down and we've got a moment, we assess what's been going on for us, and we draw terribly intellectual conclusions about what just went on there. We think that it's our actions that cause our feeling, or sometimes even the circumstances around us that cause the feeling. It's the stuff that happens to us that cause our emotions. And then, when we are the good mindful people, or we are trying to assess what's been going on, we have some thoughts about it.
The reason why that is a problem is because that is looking at external things to generate chemical responses in your body, and electricity to fire off in your brain, which gives you a complete lack of agency as to how your life pans out for you and how the things, the way that you interact with the world, it completely denies you any responsibility or any kind of agency to choose how you respond to the life that you're living.
The thing is that we want other people's actions to make us feel things. Quite often, when it comes to things like relationships, we think that, for example, in real terms, if you were to buy me flowers, then I would feel more appreciated. And then I could think that you, like me, would be an absolute hallmark, classic example. And if I were to take that a layer deeper, what I might srewrite that to be what I really hear if someone were to tell me that is, I would like you to show me a sign of affection so that I can feel appreciated, so that I can feel safe. And when I feel safe, then I'm going to be able to relax a little bit, live life a little bit more easily, and stop putting so much pressure on you to pick your socks up and do the washing up, because I don't feel like you're just about to run out the door any moment. And I can stop wondering who you're texting every time your phone goes off.
We think all of those actions come from someone buying us flowers.
And we know that that's not true, because that means that every time someone bought flowers, exactly the same emotions would arise in all people, and we would all take the same actions. I remember once speaking to a florist, and they said, that's what they did real living, that they delivered flowers. And I went, "Oh, that must be so lovely. You just get to give people joy every day!" And this guy was like, "I have things thrown at me every single day. Every single day someone throws a bunch of flowers at me and says, 'tell him I don't want them'. And all I get is the outcome of a whole load of people's bad apologies day in, day out." And it's one tiny example, but we know that it is actions don't cause the same responses in all people, and that's because we don't all think the same stuff about them, and we don't all feel the same stuff.
Now, if we're going back to the idea of relationships here, not that throwing flowers at people's heads isn't about relationships, but the thing is that we think stuff about people. We think stuff about everything, but let's just stay on the relationships. We think stuff about people, and that causes our feelings and that drives our actions. And when we think that it is taking the action that is going to cause the feeling for us, and then we can have some thoughts about it later and assess it. The reason why we do that is because it is, frankly, easier to look to other people to try and give us the validation that we seek, rather than having to untangle all of this noise and mess in our heads that tells us that we're not good enough. The reason why you would want someone to buy you flowers, quite frankly, is because you want to feel safe.
Now, we could just cut the chase there. And once we learn this methodology and we understand that it is that feeling of safety that we actually want, it isn't the flowers at all. It's the idea that we feel safe, then we can go, okay, what would make me feel safe? You could choose safety for yourself. You can work out what areas of your life you feel safe in, and then you can replicate and expand that out.
Now, you might be someone who's listening to this and going, mate, there's no areas of my life that I feel really safe if I'm unpacking all of this stuff, if you want me to go into it on a podcast. But actually, I bet there are some areas of your life that you do feel safe. Maybe you feel really safe in your own competencies. And if you don't think that there's something that you are particularly competent at, I bet if you spent two minutes digging around, you could probably find something that you're extremely confident at. You probably think that you are perfectly capable of putting a mug next to the kettle. You're probably quite capable of working out whether two pairs of socks go in a matching pair or whether they're an odd pair or not. You're probably quite capable of sending someone that you really love a message on their birthday, when you remember to do that. You're probably quite capable of looking at a toothbrush and knowing that is for cleaning your teeth.
All of these things you can identify and go, okay, so when I look at a toothbrush and I know that's what kind of things am I thinking about a toothbrush? Probably not very many things, because we put all of this stuff into patterns at the back of our head, which is what we're trying to untangle. You just stop and pause there and go, right. When I look at a toothbrush, I think about like, "I know what that's for", "I know what it's here for", "It serves a purpose.",
"I'm gonna use this in the way that it's intended", "I'm going to walk out this room with clean teeth".
All of these kind of things are just really what I would consider to be very factual things, but they're learnt thoughts that I have practiced so many times that they're just second nature to me. We can do this stuff with our emotions, we can do this stuff with our relationships, and frankly, we can do this stuff with the way that we talk to ourselves. What we do is we find the thoughts that work for us and we train ourselves and we repeat them until they become just a natural habit and they slip into the network of our brain as just something that has what we would consider probably phrased to be just part of our personality.
This is something you can do with your relationship with yourself, and this is something that you can do with your relationship with others. Relationships are not a thing. They are a whole collection of thoughts that we have about the person. And those thoughts are always trying to lead us back to the emotions that we want to feel in this situation. A
And those feelings can be brought on by ourselves, they can be discovered by ourselves, and they can be amplified by ourselves. And that is something that I teach people to do in www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk every single week.
It may sound like it is a whole load of excavating that you might not have time for or you don't really want to put the effort into because it sounds like really hard work. But honestly, what's really hard work is constantly undermining yourself and waiting for other people to give you the feelings that you want in your life. Handing other people the agency for you to be able to live the life that you want to, that you desire, to give you a sense of ease or safety or happiness or joy. Waiting for other people to take actions so that you can live your life is absolutely exhausting. You'd be amazed at how much time and energy you save when you take back control of your own brain and the direction that your life is going in, frankly, because our emotions and our thoughts drive everything that we do.
So if you want a life that is more on your terms and you want to stop feeling that weight, the weight of waiting, the exhaustion of just when are they going to do that thing? Or when am I going to be allowed to feel the stuff that I want to feel? This is something that you can learn and I'd love to share it with you. If you want to come and join over at www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk I'd be absolutely delighted.
If there's a takeaway from this lesson this week, I would say that we are waiting for all of these things so that you get to feel the thing that you want to feel. And actually, we could just give that feeling to ourselves.
If you want to know how, I'd love to see you inside.
Speak to you next week.
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