A therapist shares how ruminating on a single unkind incident spiraled into anxiety, then caught herself using her own advice to "cut the anchor" and let go. She noticed how one bad moment eclipsed the flood of support from friends and colleagues, and decided to practice gratitude instead.
Chapters
So it's Friday afternoon as I record this, and I decided after the week I've had, the only thing to really do was to come out and have a coffee. And as I'm sitting here in a local cafe, it's, um, it's time to really reflect on what's gone on this week. As a therapist, one of the things that is really important to me is I practice what I preach. That's my daughter in the background. Um, and I would never ask anyone to do something that I wouldn't do or haven't done myself in terms of therapeutic techniques. And it's a bit ironic because this week I've really had to put in place some of the things that I often talk about and to my clients. Something happened on Monday of this week that really put me in a spin. Someone did something that was very unkind that reflected quite badly on me, and I found myself really getting stuck with this all that afternoon and through the evening and into the next day. I was mulling it over. So I was literally stuck in the past, and when you're stuck in the past, you can't move on into the future. So I had to start doing what I tell people to do and let it go, cut the anchor free, and did that and managed to move on from it, which was great. But then a second thing came into play. Often when things go wrong or things don't work out in the way that we want to, we ignore all of the good things around. We focus on the negative, and actually it's part of our survival technique— focus on the bad because the good isn't going to hurt us. And I found myself really focusing on this one particularly bad apple in a very big bucket of other apples and not noticing all the brilliant ones that are in there. But what happened on— after this event is so many people, wonderful Wonderful people were reaching out to me, sending love, sending regards, offering help and support, and it was a really good reminder of me to focus on the positive, because often the positive is so much bigger, so much broader, and so much better than the really limited amount of negativity that's in there. So here we are Friday afternoon, uh, nearly 5 o'clock, nearly the weekend, And I'm going to spend my weekend reminding myself, focus on the positive, be grateful for all the good things that are out there because they are in abundance, and to let the bad things go and just stay in the past. And I wish you a wonderful weekend and an even better week next week. Bye-bye for now.
