Many people experience their emotional suffering as something that is outside of them. Something over which they have no control. The fact is that suffering is really a choice. Say what? Before you get angry or think I’m trying to say everything is your fault, please consider the difference between reacting to feelings related to the experience of events and/or circumstances – abandoning your emotional control versus empowering yourself by realizing and becoming more aware of the many choices that you can make. Choices that don’t have to involve you reacting to what you feel based upon events or circumstance.
You might be wondering how it is that suffering is a choice. You might be wondering how you could possibly choose to think differently and create new and more positive experience for yourself in the face of events or circumstances that have left you with intense feelings and negative thoughts in your life.
It is important to note that the root of suffering is abandonment – unresolved abandonment. I will be blogging much more about this and have a couple of audios that will be available soon too. I also help and support people as a life coach and assist them in making this shift from what is essentially a perceived helplessness that has its roots in a victim mindset.
Most people actually have unresolved abandonment issues to one degree or another from the past. It can be very helpful to identify and become more aware of any such issues. For some these abandonment issues will mean mental illness and being diagnosed with anxiety disorders, depression, personality disorders, codependency, to name but a few of life’s challenges having to do with, among other things in some cases, unresolved abandonment.
A.J. Mahari’s Life Coaching Services
- General Life Coaching
- Abandonment Resolution Coaching
- Emotional Mastery Coaching
- Coaching for those with Borderline Personality Disorder or Loved Ones
- Mental Health Coaching
- Codependence/Toxic Relationship Coaching
Abandonment issues are the foundational touchstones of how people relate to each other. Relating to self and then to others can give you insight into the extent that unresolved abandonment is still a very active participant in your life and in relational breakdowns or break-ups. Relationships, even the most toxic and stressful are attempting to get your attention. Relationships, among other things, are teaching vehicles that will help you to learn how to create positive healthy change when you are ready and open to resolving abandonment issues. Unresolved abandonment keeps people stuck in patterns and often a series of toxic, dysfunctional, unfulfilling, and unsuccessful relationships. Relationships that while not providing what you may have wanted and needed from them, are teachers of lessons you may still need to learn. Lessons that can put you in touch with more enlightened awareness about the choices that you are making that are actually obstacles to personal growth and identifying strategies and coping skills embrace the growth opportunities that these obstacles challenge you to meet so that you can relate in more emotionally mature, healthy, and satisfying ways.
When someone is suffering emotionally and has been to one degree or another for some time the first indicator of unresolved abandonment often tends to be the way that one quickly abandons one’s own feelings. Are you someone who feels the need to escape and/or avoid your feelings? If you are, do you think there’s any relationship between this denial of your feelings and ways in which you are experiencing emotional suffering that you may have perceived as beyond your control?
Three facts to be more aware of:
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You are choosing your own emotional suffering
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What you think determines how you feel
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Being afraid of or not knowing how to cope with feeling your emotions leads to a victim mindset
Are you empowering yourself? Do you take personal responsibility for your actions and their consequences? Are you stuck in because you are overly concerned with whether or not things are fair? Is their an inherent separation between what you think and what you feel? Are you aware of wanting someone else to rescue you? Do you feel like you are not making a choice?
A choice not consciously made is a choice in and of itself. Denying your pain is a choice. Defining your experience based upon what you feel is a mental trap that will keep you stuck in a victim mentality that will increase your feelings of helplessness or hopelessness which contributes to your emotional suffering. Choosing, in effect, to not make choices, is in and of itself a choice.
The reasons for your emotional suffering are coming from deep within and are tied to unresolved abandonment. The reasons for your suffering are not being controlled by anyone else but you. Suffering is a choice.
Suffering may seem a circumstance beyond your control when really suffering is a choice. We cannot control all events or circumstances in our lives. However, we can learn to exercise empowering control over choices made in response to circumstance. This involves getting in touch with unresolved abandonment.
What do you think? Do you believe that your suffering involves choices? Are you willing to examine this further to better understand how you can empower yourself versus the ways in which you may well be disempowering yourself.
© A.J. Mahari, March 12, 2010 – All rights reserved.
