Changing your behavior requires an understanding of what is triggering you, causing your beliefs and behaviors, and leading to negative or positive consequences. Without this understanding, it will be hard to change what is causing the problem.

For example, if you are having marital problems because of always working and never being home for dinner, for conversation, or for family time but cannot identify the source of the problem (i.e, working too much), your beliefs around it (“I have to work”), and the consequences (i.e., getting into an argument with your husband).

Acceptance is the main key to dealing with our reactions and spontaneous emotions. This exercise is one way to help you learn to be more aware of what drives your emotions. Many people have a tendency to reject their emotions as bad or wrong.

 Unfortunately, this can lead to some very dangerous behaviors, such as deliberate self-harm, lower self-esteem, and submission to the Impostor Syndrome.

Curiosity:

What is the Impostor Syndrome, and what harm does it do to me? 

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? Like your friends or colleagues will discover you’re a fraud, and you don’t actually deserve their friendship, or even your job and accomplishments? 

Well, this feeling is driven by emotions. Emotions are driven by thoughts, and these thoughts can be very well hidden, appearing suddenly when we don’t even expect them. These thoughts could be created at a very young age because of something you experienced during your childhood, during some traumatic or memorable situation.

The brain registers these moments, and you create patterns that can only be broken and reframed if you go back to them, recognizing and accepting those thoughts, instead of neglecting and refusing to feel them. 

It’s important that you know: 

Refusing your emotions, and disliking the way your reactions are, is the WORSE way to cope with them. In order to have more control over your thoughts and emotions, you need to work on self-acceptance first of all.

How can you learn to be more accepting of emotions? The exercise in this handbook helps you to see your emotions from a little bit of a distance. Here, we don’t use emotional suppression. We remodel it. Check the Four Undeniable Steps To Understand Your Emotional Patterns by clicking here.