Healthy Living DIY

Without the fly, our natural human instinct is typically to react to troubling events (troubling, at least, to us) with a variety of strong emotions. As you scroll down this short list, see if you connect any of these feelings with past events from your own life. Have you ever felt...

• Betrayed
• Taken advantage of
• Hurt
• Manipulated
• Disappointed
• Cheated
• Excluded
• Vindictive
• Angry -- either with quick-erupting rage or with a slow-burning seething bitterness
• Despairing -- either from guilt or feelings of worthlessness
• Hopeless that your life will ever be "normal" again
• Fear for your own survival
• Abandonded, perhpaps even by God?

If so, then you have experienced the personal level of a very troubling situation. Welcome to the human race, because most of us have also been troubled and felt these things -- at least for a time.

Reacting with these feelings is normal. It's not a choice. It's what a troubled human does by default.

And yet...

There is a nifty little trick you can use to regain control over life in the aftermath of anything from an interpersonal slight at work or school to a significant tragedy. It's the trick of choosing your perspective.

Lenedra J Carroll, mother of the singer Jewel, describes how she used this trick as a teenager in her book The Architecture of All Abundance. She made a game out of it and called her game "Twelve What Else." Any time she felt troubled by something that had happened in her life, she'd challenge herself to come up with at least 12 different possible reasons it might have happened before she'd settle on an explanation for it in her own mind.

This practice has a couple of benefits. One of the main benefits is that it allows your mind to see that there is more than one reasonable explanation for what happens in the world around you. Just that is often enough to begin getting yourself back on track.

There is more than one possible reason why your boyfriend didn't call when he said he would, why your father yelled and scolded excessively, why your mother tried to control your behavior, why your pet turtle died, why your spouse was unfaithful, why that gal you met at the bar manipulated you into doing something you wouldn't have normally done, and on and on.

You know as well as I do that when you listen to two sides of the same story, you sometimes wonder if the parties involved were even in the same room. The difference is perspective.

I'll offer one real-life example. A number of years ago, I had a client named "Jane." (We all know this wasn't her real name, right?) She had developed a chronic pain problem after a workplace injury. In her desire to heal, she began to wonder if any underlying life issues might be a factor and we did some exploring. She was more than willing -- eager, in fact, to uncover something that might help.

One day it came out that Jane still felt the effects of an event that had happened when she was 7, some 30 years earlier. Her father, exceeding just about anyone's bounds of appropriate parenting options, had gotten angry and thrown her out of the house. With all her stuff. Right out on the porch. Naturally, she panicked.

Jane was taken in by a neighbor for a few days until dad calmed down. Eventually, she returned home, where things went pretty well throughout the rest of her childhood. She had made peace with her father's angry actions. But she had not yet been able to forgive her mother.

Jane had already told me that she was willing to consider other perspectives in her search for healing and peace of mind. So when she told me "Mom should have made him take me back in the house," I asked if she'd ever considered that, given her father's angry state, her mother might have thought she was safer with the neighbor than at home until after he'd calmed down.

"No," she replied. "I'd never looked at it that way. I suppose it's possible. But, she still was a terrible mother. She should have left him!"

"Jane," I asked, "This was the 60's -- right? Did your mother have the job skills to provide a nice home for you as your father did?"

"Well, no." she replied. As a matter of fact, her father had been a successful business owner who had provided for the family quite nicely.

"Then perhaps she thought she was making the best choice she could for you by staying right there."

Jane sat with her thoughts for a moment. Then her eyes went wide. "Oh my!" she exclaimed. "I've got to go home and apologize to my mother!"

Jane's "fly on the wall" became her ally that day. Sure, I'd coached her through it. But once she saw how it was done, Jane could take the objective perspective of that fly any time she wanted to on her own.

Did Jane's mother really go through the thought process I suggested? Who knows? It really doesn't matter. All Jane cared about was that there was another plausible explanation for why her mother had made the choices she did. Upon realizing that, she was able to choose for herself to let go of the panic that had engulfed her as a 7-year-old whose very survival was called into question on that painful day.

You can do the same. If you haven't done it yet, you can make an ally out of the "fly-on-the-wall" or "observer" perspective, a function of your own mind, that allows you to consider the events of your life more objectively.

This article offers a beginning, but of course the reality goes further than I've had the space to explain. Here are some book recommendations for those wish to explore further:

Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping
Sacred Contracts by Caroline Myss
The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron
The Architecture of All Abundance by Lenedra J Carroll
And of course, this also comes up in Word Cures.