Thursday, February 26, 2009

Chapter 10 - Removing Emotional Scars

Chapter 10 of Psycho-Cybernetics talks about emotional scars that prevent us from enjoying life.

Just like when you cut yourself and you form scar tissue to protect that area where you have been cut, when someone hurts us we form emotional scars to protect our emotions from being hurt again.

THREE RULES FOR IMMUNIZING YOURSELF AGAINST EMOTIONAL HURTS

1) Be Too Big To Feel Threatened

  • The people who become offended the easiest have the lowest self-esteem. These people need to build up their self-esteem so that they will not feel threatened by every chance remark or innocent act. A big strong person does not feel threatened by a small danger; only a little person does.

2) A Self-Reliant, Responsible Attitude Makes You Less Vulnerable

  • A person with a hard, gruff exterior usually develops it because inside he is so soft inside that he needs to protect his core (soft-core). A person who has little or no self-reliance is a person who is emotional dependent on others and is most vulnerable to emotional hurts caused by other people.
  • Develop a more self-reliant attitude. Assume responsibility for your own life and emotional needs. Send out love, approval, acceptance and understanding to others and you will find it coming back to you.

3) Relax Away Emotional Hurts

  • When you are tense or uneasy, it is much easier to get your feelings hurt. When you feel offended, the feeling is entirely a matter of your own response. When the body is in deep relaxation, it is absolutely impossible to feel or think about negative emotions

How To Remove Old Emotional Scars:

To remove old emotional scars, you must learn to forgive. You must give up grudges and see grudges as undesirable which serves no purpose but acts as a hindrance. There is a perverted sense of satisfaction that some people get in in pitying themselves. Remorse and regret are attempts to emotionally live in the past. You must forgive yourself of the past mistakes and failures.

One of the mistakes we can do is to identify ourselves with our mistakes. If someone says "I failed", he recognizes that he has made an error. But if someone says "I am a failure", that is what he thinks the error did to his identity. Identifying with a mistake will make that mistake permanent. YOU make mistakes. Mistakes don't make YOU---anything.

To live creatively, we must be willing to open up to be a little vulnerable. A lot of people need thick emotional skin--not a shell which closes you in completely. A person who is shut-in by a shell of his own making is like an oyster. The oyster has a thick shell so that nothing gets in or gets out.

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