So if you look at the other two videos I’ve made, the one on The Freedom Model, and the one on Choice and Responsibility, I think what starts to emerge – it does for me anyway, is this idea of needing to, wanting to have compassion for the Self that created those untrue limiting assumptions in the first place.
If we go back to the Freedom Model, you’ll remember that what often triggers the negativity bias based interpretations are moments of threat, moments of danger. And as we get to understand, more and more, that part of our brain that houses that threat system – the amygdala, there’s often very little choice in those moments of threat. We come up with something that is purely based on getting us through the moment, surviving it, getting through it, getting us out the other side.
We also know from psychology this strange, and I think deeply compassion-inducing fact, that – when faced with behaviour from adults that is threatening, the child will often come up with interpretations in which they blame themselves. They make it their fault that they are at the receiving end of the behaviour they are getting from the adult, who very often is someone upon whom they rely for their safety.
So, we choose things that get us through the situation and keep us so-called safe, we survive and then, because they worked in terms of surviving, we carry those assumptions with us into adulthood.
When we are doing the work that we are doing in thinking sessions, and I think that this is an important thing for us to connect to as thinking partners: when the thinker is doing that work of navigating the assumptions in the way of what they want to accomplish, and we are at that moment in the thinking session – and I often feel an enormous amount of tenderness at this point in the session – when we ask the thinker “do you think that assumption is true?” (when they have unearthed what they think is the key assumption that is standing in the way of this preferred future that they have articulated for themselves), we ask them “do you think that is true?”, we are right there at that moment in what I would call one of those existential moments of courage where the thinker is facing whether or not to retain that security- based, survival-based assumption which they have utilized all their lives, which has kept them going but which has probably also kept them small and limited and constrained.
And here they are now facing it as an adult and making a new choice.
There is something so hugely celebratory and liberating when we hear someone say “no, it is not true. I’m not going to hold that as true anymore and here are my reasons why……” and then we get to ask them “so if that’s not true, what do you think is true, and more liberating instead?”
Then we are there with someone else, in that moment, as they choose to liberate themselves and replace something untrue and liberating with something true and more liberating and continue to go on to be able to think about the ways in which they are going to accomplish their new future looking through this lens that they have just created: the lens of liberation. Which is the lens of freedom, and of responsibility.
It is a moment of shared humanity, in which both the thinker and their thinking partner are generating compassion for the human condition, and the triumphant power of the human spirit for choosing possibility over defeat.
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