My world is crashing down around me. Not the first time; actually more what I'm used to than any other "normal." This is where I know exposure therapy has helped me, in all the madness I have done following the whispers of God - synchronicity as Carl Jung called the cognitive phenomenon - but therein, an underlying skill that has helped teach was how to reframe my reality.
I have been in utter dire straights. This poem I wrote then revised in my modern style shows how I dealt with these times:
You can be in Hell in Heaven and in Heaven in Hell. A self-immolating monk is a phenomenon which I often point to when trying to describe the nature of our realities. When I was a young boy, I would watch the TV with my feet on the heater vent when it was off. It would then turn on, and I would be able to resist the urge to remove my feet when I put my attention onto the show. I was practicing a form of meditation back then, acquiring early skill with focusing my inner world into alternate experiences of the same stimuli.
As I grew, and faced trauma after trauma, I learned to cope by pushing my feelings down while zoning out playing video games; my earliest escapism. This proved both advantageous as I got to observe many of the parts of my cognition in the disassociation of the moment, but ultimately, this harmed me further as I did not process the emotions properly.
An art would have helped me immensely back then, but so would a form of spirituality; some means of reframing my reality into a more beneficial form than the world I was constructing for myself amongst the trials of my life. Being able to repaint the nature of my experience would have lessened the blows of life as I had so little support in the ways that matter while dealing with so much pain.
I can't complain, I've learned. That just makes things worse. Your intention is what paints your reality. What you put out is what returns to you, so if you're always negative, you're priming your brain to generate negative at a greater rate. Choosing to remain positive in affirmations leads to those pathways firing and strengthening, meaning they're more likely to be what is used to manifest a happier reality for you.
I don't know what's going to come, but I don't worry for the same reason as above. You choose where you go. I choose to have faith while building towards the best future, and I am rewarded when the best outcomes come at a frequency amongst some bad moments, instead of the opposite.
