Yo! Pollyanna…

22/10/24

I came across a technique for helping adjust mindset from negative to positive; it is a bit Pollyanna-ish but it’s simple, easy to practice, and I think it’s already having some effect.

So it basically works like this:

When I catch myself moaning about something – e.g. “Ah man, this rain’s been going on for days“, I add on a ‘but fortunately’ – e.g. “but fortunately the garden really needed it, and now I don’t have to palaver about with the hosepipe“.

It might seem like quite a trivial thing, particularly with that example, but it works with bigger things too. For example, “Since he left it’s shit coming home to an empty, dark house… but fortunately I know it will be exactly as I left it – nice and tidy and ready for me to cosy up and have whatever I want for dinner.”

It has been helping me to find a few plusses in my current sad and lonely circumstances; if for nothing else, I get so distracted looking for silver linings (and sometimes it’s really hard to find one), I forget to ruminate about the negative thing.

For me, negativity breeds negativity; I find it difficult to fend off other people’s negative attitudes, and once I’ve let it in it’s like it feeds on itself, until eventually I realise that pretty much all I do is moan. I’ll even find myself moaning about stuff I’m not even particularly bothered about. It’s horrible.

When there’s actually some shitty situation going on for me (like now), the sense of legitimacy around moaning can quickly become a miserable, spiralling mindset; everybody and everything is irritating to me on some level.

This is not who I feel I really am. In my life before meeting him, there were multiple occasions when people outright told me they’d never come across anyone else who had such calm belief in the goodness of the world, and my own ability to draw that to me.

That woman is still hanging around in the wings, waiting to be invited back to centre stage. The trouble we’re facing, is that she was in a very fledgling state when I met him. In fact, she was the me who’d emerged from the wreckage of my two prior relationships (plus all the rest of my past), and I guess you could say she wasn’t fully bedded in before being replaced by the understudy.

I need to go back over all the work I did to get her to emerge in the first place, and then sort out the shit that’s happened since. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, until it’s no longer a part we play, but the person we’ve become.

Bloody hell!

After twenty years being exposed to relentless negativity from him and the rest of his family, I realise there’s a whole lot of retraining to be done – neural pathways need to be weed whacked, ready for new thought patterns to flow.

I’m going to need a whole lot more help and tools than I currently have but I’m looking for appropriate resources. For appropriate, read ‘free’. I can’t afford therapy; I’ve searched and searched, but even with the discounts and stuff on offer for impoverished folks like me, I still can’t afford it.

So, I’m going to have to do this the self-help way; I’m currently searching out books, reading blogs and pertinent articles – the usual stuff. There are one or two potential books but I need to be pretty certain they’re going to give me something useful before investing actual money.

This ‘But fortunately‘ technique is already moving me a degree or two in the right direction and I’ve only been doing it just over a week, so that’s boding well.

I shall keep it up, even if at times it feels a bit forced.

JP