There Are Two Parts to The Work
1. Identifying stressful thoughts
2. Questioning them
We spend a lot of time talking about the “questioning” part. But the “identifying” part is just as important. Here’s another way to go deeper when identifying stressful thoughts.
This can be used when writing a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet (especially Line 1). Or it can be used when identifying a “one-liner”—a stressful thought not connected to a worksheet. Or it can serve as a prompt for making a list of stressful thoughts to question.
Here’s How One Client Used it Recently
The situation for her was coming home from work and seeing her wife sitting on the sofa drinking a beer and watching TV. The situation immediately provoked an anger reaction for her.
So she started filling in Line 1 of a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet:
“I am angry, frustrated, confused and mistrustful of her because she is not working and I am.”
This Sentence Clearly Identifies the Reason Why She Is Stressed
And I regularly go right ahead and start questioning the thought, “She’s not working and I am, is that true?” It’s a perfectly good direction to take for inquiry.
But we decided to keep exploring it.
There are many ways to keep exploring a statement like this. For example, you can use the prompt, ‘and that means…” or you can make a list of proof of why you believe it’s true. These kinds of approaches keep probing as a way of identifying the stressful thoughts.
But We Used a Different Prompt
I simply asked her, “Why does that bother you that she’s not working and you are?”
And her answers came out in the form of a list:
Why does it bother me? Because…
She’s not making money.
She’s in debt with my credit card.
She’s robbing me of my dreams.
As soon as she spoke the last statement, she knew that this was the heart of the matter. This was the real reason why she was angry with her wife: “She’s robbing me of my dreams.”
She believed that she was in a job she didn’t like, and that she couldn’t leave to create her own business because her wife was not making enough money at her own start-up business. Trapped. Victim. Stress!
This Made it Easy to Work
Because she had identified so clearly why her wife sitting on the couch drinking a beer and watching TV bothered her so much.
But even if I hadn’t asked her, “Why does it bother you?” and instead we worked, “She’s not working and I am,” we would have probably gotten to the same place of questioning her attachment to her dreams through inquiry. That’s the beauty of inquiry. The whole story is contained in any thought you choose from a stressful situation.
That’s why I say, ‘All roads lead to Rome.” It doesn’t matter if you find the “perfect” thought to question. Anything in the neighborhood will get you on your way.
But if you do spend some time, and look a little deeper at why you’re stressed, you can often discover an unexpected super-highway to Rome.
Have a great weekend,
Todd
“A powerful way of prompting yourself is to add “and it means that _____” to your original statement. Your suffering may be caused by a thought that interprets what happened, rather than the thought you wrote down. This additional phrase prompts you to reveal your interpretation of the fact.” Byron Katie, Loving What Is
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