Permission to Love with Jerry Henderson

How to Overcome PAINFUL THOUGHTS and REPROGRAM Your Mind

June 17, 2024 Jerry Henderson Season 1 Episode 60
How to Overcome PAINFUL THOUGHTS and REPROGRAM Your Mind
Permission to Love with Jerry Henderson
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Permission to Love with Jerry Henderson
How to Overcome PAINFUL THOUGHTS and REPROGRAM Your Mind
Jun 17, 2024 Season 1 Episode 60
Jerry Henderson

In this episode of the Permission to Love podcast, we dive deep into understanding and overcoming negative and intrusive thoughts. 

Discover how to transform your mind from being your master into being your servant and learn the practical tools to reprogram your thinking for a healthier and more fulfilling life.

Key Topics:

  • The function and power of the mind
  • The impact of trauma on thinking patterns
  • Techniques to identify and replace intrusive thoughts
  • The importance of self-compassion and patience in the healing process

Key Takeaways:

  • Mind as a Servant, Not a Master: Understanding that the mind can become your servant rather than your master. Intrusive thoughts are not your identity.
  • Impact of Trauma: How trauma can wire our brains to be more susceptible to intrusive thoughts and how these thought patterns are formed.
  • Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to reprogram and develop new neural pathways.
  • Mindfulness and Observation: The importance of observing your thoughts without judgment and realizing their transient nature.
  • Replacement Strategy: Identifying intrusive thoughts and replacing them with positive affirmations and thoughts.
  • Patience and Self-Compassion: Being patient with yourself during the healing process and showing compassion for the experiences that have shaped your thinking patterns.

Key Moments:

  • Understanding Intrusive Thoughts
  • The Function of the Mind
  • The Power of Habitual Thinking
  • Observing and Understanding Thought Patterns
  • Reprogramming Your Thinking
  • Identifying Intrusive Thoughts 
  • Writing Down Positive Replacements
  • Practicing Replacement Thoughts 
  • Patience and Physical Therapy for the Mind



I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

1:1 Transformational Coaching:
Learn More Here!

Pick up your copy of my book:
Returning: Meditations and Reflections on Self-Love and Healing

Want to Change Your Drinking Habits?
Reframe App

How is your relationship with yourself going?
Get your free-self assessment guide

Watch On Youtube

Website:
www.jerryhenderson.org

Support the Show:

My Patreon

Get Your Free Weekly Healing Tips!

Free Guided Self-Love Meditation:
Get it Here!

Instagram: @jerryahenderson

Disclaimer

Show Notes Transcript

In this episode of the Permission to Love podcast, we dive deep into understanding and overcoming negative and intrusive thoughts. 

Discover how to transform your mind from being your master into being your servant and learn the practical tools to reprogram your thinking for a healthier and more fulfilling life.

Key Topics:

  • The function and power of the mind
  • The impact of trauma on thinking patterns
  • Techniques to identify and replace intrusive thoughts
  • The importance of self-compassion and patience in the healing process

Key Takeaways:

  • Mind as a Servant, Not a Master: Understanding that the mind can become your servant rather than your master. Intrusive thoughts are not your identity.
  • Impact of Trauma: How trauma can wire our brains to be more susceptible to intrusive thoughts and how these thought patterns are formed.
  • Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to reprogram and develop new neural pathways.
  • Mindfulness and Observation: The importance of observing your thoughts without judgment and realizing their transient nature.
  • Replacement Strategy: Identifying intrusive thoughts and replacing them with positive affirmations and thoughts.
  • Patience and Self-Compassion: Being patient with yourself during the healing process and showing compassion for the experiences that have shaped your thinking patterns.

Key Moments:

  • Understanding Intrusive Thoughts
  • The Function of the Mind
  • The Power of Habitual Thinking
  • Observing and Understanding Thought Patterns
  • Reprogramming Your Thinking
  • Identifying Intrusive Thoughts 
  • Writing Down Positive Replacements
  • Practicing Replacement Thoughts 
  • Patience and Physical Therapy for the Mind



I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

1:1 Transformational Coaching:
Learn More Here!

Pick up your copy of my book:
Returning: Meditations and Reflections on Self-Love and Healing

Want to Change Your Drinking Habits?
Reframe App

How is your relationship with yourself going?
Get your free-self assessment guide

Watch On Youtube

Website:
www.jerryhenderson.org

Support the Show:

My Patreon

Get Your Free Weekly Healing Tips!

Free Guided Self-Love Meditation:
Get it Here!

Instagram: @jerryahenderson

Disclaimer

Jerry Henderson:

We're giving way too much power to our mind, we're giving way too much authority to a chemical reaction, to neural pathways, and we're allowing that to become our identity. It's not your identity, my friend. It is not who you are and you can transform your thoughts and even though it seems like you'll never be able to overcome those intrusive thoughts, your mind can become your servant instead of your master. Listen, the mind makes a beautiful servant but a terrible master, and we can learn how to let our mind serve us instead of work against us. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'm so deeply grateful that you're here. I hope you're proud of yourself, hope you're proud of yourself, how you're continuing to do the work to heal and transform your relationship with yourself by learning how to love yourself, how to heal yourself, how to accept yourself all of those things. You should be really proud of yourself. This isn't easy work and that's why a lot of people don't do it. You are in a rare category. You're a person who cares about your relationship with yourself and others and you care about being the highest version of yourself. So, way to go, super, super proud of you. You know, just having gotten back from the Camino de Santiago, I feel like my head's spinning a little bit, but one of the beautiful gifts is that I'm catching up on some amazing time with my wife and I'm jumping back into an extremely busy schedule. Like many of you, I'm completing a master's degree in psychology at Harvard University, I'm working on completing some advanced certification in transformational coaching, and so there's a lot going on and that's beautiful. That's okay, because I think about where I was five years ago and that pit that I was in, to see how working on my relationship with myself and learning to prioritize myself and learning how to love myself, to see how that process has radically transformed my life, has been such a gift and I'm so grateful to be here, and I'm so grateful to be here doing this podcast.

Jerry Henderson:

Today, I want to discuss with you about dealing with intrusive or unwanted thoughts. It's something that we all deal with, but especially for those of us who've experienced trauma in our lives. We have all of these thoughts, right. We ruminate, we think about events in our lives. We wonder all of these thoughts, right, we ruminate, we think about events in our lives. We wonder why people treated us certain ways. We deal with our own regrets and our own sense of failure because of the things that we experience, and our brains got wired to be more susceptible to this type of thinking simply because of the experiences that we had, especially if we had them at a young age, right, because those are such formative years and we're developing all these connections in our brains and we're carving those neural pathways, and so if you're dealing with that, you're not alone, and I hope today's episode can give you some tools on how to deal with those intrusive or unwanted thoughts in your life.

Jerry Henderson:

Now I wanna start by acknowledging that intrusive thoughts, especially for trauma survivors, aren't a little thing. They are very painful, they're very frustrating and you can actually begin to feel helpless against them because you don't want those thoughts, right, they're the last thing that you want, and they seem to come at the worst times and they catch us off guard and once we think we've kind of got them under control, they come back. So I just want to honor you and I want to acknowledge that I know how painful and how frustrating it can be to deal with these types of thoughts, and that's why I wanted to do this episode To help you in your journey of making progress in this area. I also want to point out that dealing with our thinking, our thinking patterns, is one of the most important things of having a healthy relationship with ourselves. You know that this podcast show. One of the key things that we deal with is how to have a healthy relationship with yourself, and so much of that begins with our thinking, how we think about ourselves and the thoughts that we allow to occupy our mind. There's a beautiful proverb that says as a person thinks, so they are. There's also a book by that same title. There's been tons of books published about the power of the mind, and so it is an extremely important part of our lives and so much flows out of it. So we want to make sure that, in our journey of healing, we're not ignoring this crucial part of our healing process. So let's go ahead and jump in.

Jerry Henderson:

The first thing I want to talk about is the function of the mind. The mind is there to keep us safe, or our brain same words, but our brain is there to keep us safe. It's also designed to solve problems. I often think that if it doesn't have a problem to solve, it's actually going to create a problem for it to work on, and so even when we feel like life should be good, our brain kicks up a problem or something to panic about or be frustrated about, so it has something to do Now. It's also important to understand that the brain gets programmed. It begins to develop habits, and all of the latest research on neural pathways, neuroscience, all of that stuff is teaching us and showing us how that process happens, and the absolutely incredible news is that the brain still stays elastic, right, that we can reprogram our thinking.

Jerry Henderson:

I remember a time not too long ago where most of the school of thought was that when your brain gets hardwired, it's kind of that way. You know that thinking that you can't teach an old dog new tricks was pretty prevalent, and so what an amazing time that we live in to see the science behind how the brain works, what its function is, and to know that we can reprogram it. We can change it. We don't have to live with the stinking thinking that we have. We can actually transform the way that we think and allow our brains and our mind to actually serve us instead of working against us in such a frustrating way at times.

Jerry Henderson:

Now the research also shows that I think we have about 70,000 to 80,000 thoughts per day, the average person. And the crazy thing is it's like 60,000 to 70,000 of those thoughts are the exact same thoughts that we had yesterday, but they're just coming at us in a new form or a new way, a new angle. Right, we may be thinking about what a terrible person we are. We might be thinking about why did that person say this and you know, why did this happen in my life? Or fretting about the future, or trying to figure out a problem, and it's all the same kind of thinking patterns that we have. We just kind of approach that thought or that problem in a little bit of a nuanced way. So it seems different, but almost all of our thinking, day after day, gets pretty wired in us. It's a habit and it's the same thing.

Jerry Henderson:

Okay, now that may sound like bad news, but it's really good news because it means that if the brain can get that wired to get into that kind of groove, let's use it in the positive way. Let's use it to our advantage and say to ourselves if the brain and our thoughts have caused that much suffering for us, wow, that's great news. Not that the suffering's been there, but that the brain can have that type of power. And let's put it in the positive, let's think 70,000 positive thoughts a day, or whatever the math would come out to to where we can learn how to live a life where our brain is serving us, not working against us. Now, with that little foundation of what the brain's purpose is, I now want to move on and I want to talk about how the mind, or the brain, at times just makes no sense at all. What do I mean by that? Well, as many of you know, I just recently got back from walking almost 500 miles on the Camino de Santiago. That's 30 days of 15 to 25 miles a day of walking, give or take, based on if there was accommodations available, et cetera, et cetera.

Jerry Henderson:

So I had a lot of time to be alone with this brain and my thoughts, and that was one of the purposes of me doing this pilgrimage. And it was a very interesting process for me because I went through some different stages with my mind. The first stage was that, like everything was coming up, this thing wouldn't stop chattering, it just kept going and going and going and it almost flooded me with all the things that had been pent up for so long and were just waiting to come out, and so it was like the top or the surface of a storm in the ocean, all of the waves everywhere. And then after a while it felt like it kind of got some of that stuff out of its system. And then my mind quieted down some, right, and I just began to observe my mind and I just began to watch what it was doing, as I was alone with it for that long, every single day, and one of the things I did was I just began to have fun with it.

Jerry Henderson:

So I began to imagine somebody next to me, walking with me and almost taking my brain out of myself and putting it next to me in that person, and imagining what it would be like to be traveling with or walking with somebody who was saying all of the things that my brain was thinking. And I got to tell you it would have been exhausting and it would have been maddening, because at one minute the person would have been talking about how they were five years old and this happened. And then the next minute I mean the very literal next minute they're talking about the future and all their fears, and then the next moment they're talking about how their foot hurts and the moment after that they're thinking about their failures in relationships. And why did they do this and not that? They're thinking about their failures in relationships and you know why did they do this and not that? They're thinking about what they want to do for a career and talking about that and they're just ping-ponging all over the place with no real coherence to it.

Jerry Henderson:

I mean, if you were to take a day and I want to challenge you to do this take a day and mindfully observe your thoughts and look at how random, how much they ping pong all over the place, how there really never seems to be some coherent thread. Now, a lot of times we can trace back the fact that we're thinking about a pink elephant to when we were three and we were at a friend's house and we saw a movie and then, oh yeah, I love movies and I love the movie Dumbo, and oh, they had the pink elephants. I mean, we can do that, we can take that thread and that's how the mind works. But as we truly observe the mind, we'll notice that it's just all over the place. And let me ask you this how much confidence would you put in a person who doesn't have a coherent stream of thought. I mean, how much confidence would you put in a person who, in one second, is saying how the future's going to be bright, everything's going to be okay, and five minutes later, is thinking about how, or talking about how devastating the future's going to be and how it's just bleak and there's no hope in it? That's your brain, that's my brain, that's what it does. It's just on a constant cycle of thinking. And that's okay. There's no judgment in it. And I want you to know once again, you're not alone in that type of thinking or those types of challenges of dealing with the mind.

Jerry Henderson:

And that's one of the reasons why I found so much value in meditation is that it allows me to observe my mind, to observe my thinking and just to see how all over the place that it is. You know, as I was walking on the Camino, one of the thoughts that came to me is that if you leave a person alone with their thoughts long enough, they'll either go crazy or they'll realize how much of an illusion they are, how unreal they are at times. And one of the principles in mindfulness is to think about your awareness as the sky and to think about your thoughts as clouds. Well, they come and they appear and they go, and we don't attach to them and we just observe them and we realize just how all over the place they are, and that's such good news. It was so freeing for me when I began to realize that and to see that my mind just does what it does it thinks thoughts. That's its task. My heart's task is to beat and to pump blood through my body. One of my liver's tasks is to cleanse my blood, blood through my body. One of my liver's tasks is to cleanse my blood, and so I don't go around identifying with my liver or my organ of my heart as my identity.

Jerry Henderson:

But so many of us attach our identity to our thinking patterns, and I hope that by the end of this episode you can begin to see that you don't have to think that way. So let's go ahead and get into how do we begin to reprogram our thinking or stop those intrusive thoughts, because the intrusive thoughts are really not the problem. I know that they seem like they are, but they're the symptom of a mind that has been programmed to allow itself to run wild and also programmed to think in certain ways. So, once again, that's not a judgment statement. It's just the reality of how so many of us are wired, and we don't have to stay that way. Now, this is the first and the most important point about how do you reprogram your thinking, and it really connects with what we were just talking about, and it's this you are not your thoughts. I've talked about this before on this podcast, because it was such a transformative thing for me, because I always believed that I was the thoughts that I was thinking. If I was thinking bad thoughts, that must mean that I'm a bad person. No, the brain has just been trained to do things in a certain way, and so much of that once again came from the trauma that we experienced, and so let me just take a pause here for a second.

Jerry Henderson:

I want you to ask yourself the question do you want those thoughts coming in your life? Obviously no. Have you tried to stop them? Yes. Has it been a struggle? Yes. Do they just seem to come out of nowhere, without any control on your part? Yes. So all of that speaks to the fact that that's not something that you want to happen, and it's not you. It's just a part of your system, your design, your humanity that has a brain that thinks and the other thing. So I want you to take a moment and I want you to get some compassion for yourself. Okay, instead of beating yourself up about the way that you think, instead of beating yourself up for the fact that you can't control those thoughts coming into your mind, I want you to think about that little boy or that little girl that was experiencing that abuse that they experienced. I want you to think about the person that you were maybe in that relationship that was experiencing that abuse that they experienced. I want you to think about the person that you were maybe in that relationship that was so toxic and the things that happened to you that caused you to think the way that you're thinking. Have compassion on yourself. Be able to see that those things got wired in you as trauma responses, and the way that you think and the way that you react and the way that you think, in the way that you react, in the way that your brain is working, is a result of those experiences. Now, the great news is we can give ourselves new experiences, and we'll talk about that in just a second.

Jerry Henderson:

So the important part about this, of understanding that we are not our thoughts is to create some space between us and our mind. We're giving way too much power to our mind, we're giving way too much authority to a chemical reaction, to neural pathways, and we're allowing that to become our identity. It's not your identity, my friend. It is not who you are and you can transform your thoughts and, even though it seems like you'll never be able to overcome those intrusive thoughts, your mind can become your servant instead of your master. Listen, the mind makes a beautiful servant but a terrible master, and we can learn how to let our mind serve us instead of work against us.

Jerry Henderson:

Now the second thing that's really important in reprogramming your thinking is to identify the intrusive thoughts, or to identify the way that you think about yourself, that you don't want to think about yourself. Now, if your first thought, when I said that, became man I don't know if it's as simple it sounds like it's being overly simplified and going to be asked to kind of write them down, identify them, replace them. I mean, if you've done any therapy, you kind of know the process. I want to challenge you for a second that maybe that thought that just came up is an intrusive thought for you. Maybe that's a thought that you might want to work on reprogramming to think that it has to always be complicated.

Jerry Henderson:

Healing is not a complicated process. It's a hard process at times, but it's not as complicated as we make it. And we often make it complicated out of a safety mechanism because we're afraid to change. And if we can keep change or we can keep healing in this complex box, that's just so overwhelming for us. We never get started, we don't make the progress because we just keep telling ourselves it's just so complex, it's just so hard, I don't know how to do it. You do know how to do this. It's inherently in you to know how to heal yourself. It is a part of your nature. Just like your body knows how to heal itself when it gets cut, your emotions, your heart knows how to heal itself. We just have to give it the space and the safety to do so.

Jerry Henderson:

So I want you to identify, I want you to write down tactile however you're going to do it. Write it down and seed those thoughts right, Because a lot of times those thoughts are just zooming in and out of us and they're building up and they're stacking and we're not really aware of them. We just kind of know we don't want them to be there and then we medicate them away and then they come back later. You know, what we want to do is we want to call them out. We want to put them down on paper. We want to call them out. We want to put them down on paper. We want to be able to see them and say this is the thought that I don't want in my life anymore. Now, if it's an extremely painful moment it's hard for you to even go to, I want to let you know it's okay to work with somebody on that. Okay, find somebody who's safe, that you can sit with and work through actually writing that thought down, because I know how hard it can be to even write it out and to look at it.

Jerry Henderson:

I know when I was writing about my experiences of abuse as a child and going through the process of really putting down each thing that happened and naming it, no longer dismissing it. It wasn't easy and that's to say at least that it wasn't easy. It's like a major understatement Still working on understating the trauma in my life, but it was such an important part of my experience to be able to see it and to say I don't want that, I want to honor it. I want to know that it happened. I want to don't want that, I want to honor it. I want to know that it happened, I want to give it its place, I want to stop dismissing it, and then I want to be able to see it heal in my life instead of continuing to avoid it. And so that intrusive thinking or those thoughts that you don't want about yourself or that you don't want popping up in your life, it's important that you actually look at them and you see that they're there and you give them space to be identified, because they want to be heard, they want to be noticed, because they keep coming up, because we're not noticing them. So we're going to write them down. No-transcript.

Jerry Henderson:

Now, the third thing that we're going to do in reprogramming is we're going to write down the thoughts that we want to have. Now you might say, well, I don't know what thoughts I want to have, but I just know I don't want that thought anymore. Okay, so if it was a very painful time in your life and that thought keeps coming back up, or a person who hurt you and they keep coming back into your awareness, you're just like well, I just don't want that to happen. It's not that I need to replace the thought, I just don't want that thought to be there. Now, I want to challenge you on that, okay, because I want you to think about your mind once again as something that seems to want to just keep busy all the time, and we're going to need to feed it something. We're going to need to have something to replace it with, because just creating this void or this stopping of a thought, without anything to fill that gap, okay, is going to keep the thoughts that we don't want coming back up.

Jerry Henderson:

Okay, so if you can think of this exercise as what we just did earlier of writing down what we don't want, and then us writing down what we do want and identify that as kind of our gap right between what we wish we weren't thinking and what we do want, and identify that as kind of our gap right Between what we wish we weren't thinking and what we wish we were thinking, so if we just turn off what we wish we weren't thinking or what we wish wasn't coming into our awareness and we don't replace it with something else, what's going to happen? You're going to default to the way that you've always thought, because that's the way that your brain's trained, and so your brain's like a bucket that you've poured out the bad and you haven't filled it with anything good, and so what's it going to do? It's going to fill back up with the bad that it's used to having there. So it's so important to get ourselves something that we want to replace that with, to fill the gap with. So if it's an intrusive thought that you'd never want to think again about an event, we're going to replace that with something that you would like to think about, something that maybe you want to dream about for your future, or some positive memory that you had in your past as a child, or a moment in your life that you really connect with emotionally as a happy moment for you. And now, if it's something that you want to change about the way that you think about yourself or the way that you talk to yourself, then we're going to get a phrase that's going to be the counter to whatever that negative is right. So if you're saying to yourself I'm worthless, I'm not enough, you're going to replace that with a statement that resonates you like I am enough, I am worthy, or whatever the language is that resonates with who you are. So I want to invite you to work through what that thought might be the replacement for an intrusive thought or the replacement for a way that you think or talk about yourself and then I want you to write it down, and I would encourage you to do these exercises, either during this podcast, pausing this podcast, or immediately after this podcast. You would take the time to do that while it's fresh.

Jerry Henderson:

Now, once you've identified what those replacements are, I'm going to invite you to write them down twice a day, with emotion. I want to invite you to do it first thing in the morning and I want to invite you to do it before you go to bed. Okay, so writing them down with emotion so that you can connect with them. Now you might notice that I didn't ask you to simply take that phrase or that wording and use it when those thoughts come up that you don't want there. No, we don't want to wait until those things come up. We want to actually begin to prepare ourselves. We want to actually get used to this being in our system. So it's important that when we're in a state where we can connect with it without all those thoughts coming that we can actually connect with it emotionally, write it down and to begin to see that as our belief system and the way that we think. Now, finally, I'm going to invite you to do that for 21 days straight. Okay, 21 days.

Jerry Henderson:

You might be like, oh man, that's a long time. Well, how many years have you been dealing with intrusive thoughts? How many years have you been calling yourself certain names? How many years have you been stressing out and worried about the fact that you'll never be enough and you'll never be able to accomplish the things that you want to do in your life or you'll never be able to heal from the trauma that you've experienced? How many years has that been going on? Can you give yourself three weeks or 21 days to give this? Your best effort to say, every morning and every night, I'm going to write down my replacements, my replacements for that intrusive thought or my replacement for the way that I talk about myself, and I'm going to write it down with emotion. I know you can do this. I really do. I believe in you because I know I could do it, and that really is one of the key ways that I helped reprogram. The way that I see myself was this type of exercise, so I know that if I and others can do this, you can do it as well.

Jerry Henderson:

Now, the final thing about this replacement strategy is I also want to encourage you, throughout your day, take time to verbally say that replacement to yourself, okay. Or to mentally think about the scenario that you want to think about when that intrusive thought comes. Okay, that's going to be important because you're practicing, you're wiring. Once again, we don't want to wait until the intrusive thought comes. Okay, that's going to be important because you're practicing, you're wiring. Once again, we don't want to wait until the intrusive thought comes. We want to prepare ourselves. Okay, this is practice, this is wiring, this is developing new habits, response mechanisms, all of that. So we're loading all of that up into our systems by writing it out and then, throughout our day, saying it to ourselves and visualizing that scenario to ourselves, and so it becomes something that our brain just gets used to going to. So now we've got ourselves ready for game day. Right, we understand that we're not our thoughts, that our brain just does, that. We've identified the things that we don't want to be thinking so that, when it arises, we're aware of it, and now we have our replacement strategy.

Jerry Henderson:

So what do we do in that moment when that intrusive thought comes, or when we start to beat ourselves up or think negatively about ourselves or get so fearful about the future or so ruminating about the past? What do we do Now? My response might surprise you. I'm not going to ask you to get in there and fight with that thought. I don't want you to get in there and judge it and beat yourself up for thinking that way or saying, why do I always think that way? And really start to just condemn that thought or yourself. I just want you to take a moment, take a breath, don't panic about it, don't react to it, don't get all worked up about it, because all that is doing is giving it more energy. It's just allowing your brain to see that that's something that you give energy to, and so it brings it up and you wind up giving even more energy to it. You're feeding the monster, you're feeding the beast, and so what we want to do is we just want to step back. We want to take a mindful breath.

Jerry Henderson:

Okay, maybe take two or three mindful breaths and then just observe the thought, notice that it's there, just like you would notice a cloud going over the sky. You're not going to get all bent out of shape about it. That's how I eventually would hope that you begin to see your thoughts, that you don't get all bent out of shape about them. You observe them and then, while you're taking those breaths right, not spending all your energy on getting tangled up in the thoughts, taking those breaths and then insert the new thought or insert the new image. And it's very helpful at times to actually say it out loud, to let the words come out of your mouth, because as you begin to say something, it'll actually begin to disrupt your thinking.

Jerry Henderson:

It's hard to be saying something and thinking about something else. I mean, I'm able to do it at times, but it's still a difficult thing, right, because what it'll do is it'll actually disrupt that circuit, right. So you've already disrupted it by taking the breath. You've already disrupted your normal way of responding to your thoughts by not judging it, and now you're disrupting it with the words that you're saying and the thoughts that you're thinking, and you're letting it run through your mind in a gentle, peaceful way and just letting your system absorb the new truth that you want and then just letting those thoughts pass and focusing in on the new thoughts, and then, before you know it, you're going to begin to see that you've disempowered that way of thinking and your brain gets more used to accessing that new thought, and then something wonderful begins to happen. You begin to find that you're thinking that old thought and then something wonderful begins to happen you begin to find that you're thinking that old thought a lot less and then thinking that new thought about yourself or that new image begins to be a lot easier. Now, I'm not going to say it happens overnight. It does take work and that's why I'm inviting you to do it for 21 days as an initial get-the-system-jump-started, and then to realize that you're now in the process of building a new habit.

Jerry Henderson:

And it might be helpful to think of it just like physical therapy. If you injure your shoulder or you have a knee replacement and now I'm talking like an old guy here but if you have some issue, an accident, that you have to do physical therapy on, you know that it's going to take time, that you're going to have to do some work. For example, you might have injured your hand and you have to go through physical therapy to get it to work again and to have it actually do the things that it once did before. And you know that there's going to be some discomfort. You know there's going to be some challenges. There may be some habits that you have to develop in order to get it to function again.

Jerry Henderson:

It's no different in the emotional space. You know, it's so interesting how, when we look at the physical, we're like, oh, that makes sense, but when we look at the emotional, we complicate it so much. We make it this, you know, scary, hairy beast. The reality is there's so much that correlates with the two together. So be patient with yourself. You're rehabilitating your thinking patterns towards yourself, you're re-carving those neural pathways, you're disconnecting those synapses that automatically fire together in a negative way and you're connecting into new ones. So it's going to take time. Be patient with yourself. You got this. You can do this. I know that you can. All right Now you know, something that would be a blast for me as a part of this is that if you'd send me an email, my email is jerry at jerryhendersonorg.

Jerry Henderson:

That personally comes to my inbox it's not some person out there, or to some, you know folder that nobody ever sees. That is my personal email address that I look at every single day. It would be fun if you would send me an email about how you're doing with this, what challenges maybe that you're facing, what questions that you have about it, or the progress that you're making over these next 21 days. I would absolutely love to hear from you. You emailing me is not a bother. It's actually something that I get excited about, and so I would love to hear from you. Consider this your official invitation to email me. Okay, looking forward to hearing from you.

Jerry Henderson:

Now I want to give you a reminder. If you've not yet had a chance to pick up a copy of my book Returning a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing, I want to encourage you to do that. You can get that at Amazon or other places where books are sold, but Amazon's always the easiest way and there's actually a link in the show notes of this episode for you to be able to pick up your copy Now. Before I close out, I want to remind you, if you've not had a chance yet to follow or to subscribe to this podcast or turn on those reminders, I want to encourage you to do so. Also, if you're watching on YouTube, give it a big thumbs up. That's going to help it get in front of other people and then finally share it with other people. It's one of the primary ways that this podcast is going to continue to grow. That means so much to me when I hear from somebody that they heard about the podcast from one of the current listeners.

Jerry Henderson:

As I close out, I just once again want to say what a gift this community is to me personally. What a gift it is to hear from you, to hear how you're growing, to hear how you're transforming. I'm cheering you on and I'm rooting you on. I know that you got this. I know that you can transform your life. You can heal your relationship with yourself. Now, if you need any help on that journey, you can go to my website at jerryhendersonorg Now. If you need some help coaching one-on-one, I do offer that and I am offering some free discovery calls right now. So you can go to jerryhendersonorg forward slash coaching and sign up for a free discovery call. Just simply use the code discovery100 and that'll allow you to book a call with me. It's usually $95 for that call, but I'm offering that for free right now, during this season, so would love to be able to connect with you and see how we could work together in serving you on your journey. And finally, I want to remind you, as always, you are worthy of your own love.

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