Which of us has not felt the burden lighten when we forgive someone who has done us a disservice.
What about forgiving ourselves?
Remind yourself that you are only human; you will make errors of judgment; you will get things wrong or inaccurate; you will let yourself down.
If you forgive other people who do the above why not yourself.
Make a list
I forgive myself for:
looking stupid - either stammering or not!!
being worried about how others will see me
being too sensitive
obsessing rather than moving on
not being able to get out of a rut
etc etc etc
Do it live too. In the moment when about to speak or speaking, in the pauses, forgive yourself for being concerned or nervous. Forgive yourself for 'not being good enough'- whatever that is. Forgive yourself for being a perfectionist. Forgive yourself for attending more to your own problems than to the other person as an interesting human being like yourself. Forgive yourself for being worried about what the other person thinking of you.
Get the idea? But put it in print first to establish the pattern. Take one issue at a time.
This doesn't give anyone carte blanche for bad behaviour but there are unhelpful patterns that are best recognised and reassessed. Do this after forgiving yourself and others.
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About Me
- PM
- I am a middle aged medic who is interested in Modelling Behaviour. I have 12 yrs experience and attend trainings regularly with John McWhirter at Sensory Systems Training in Glasgow, Scotland. I am interested in stammering and I am convinced that in the majority of cases it is a behaviour and not an affliction. Rather than lurk on other sites I decided to share my thinking on a blog.
4 comments:
Peter,
Using these affirmayions with EFT could be quite powerful.
John
Thanks for that John.
While I am sure EFT has benefits for some folk I can't buy into it at all. I have read the books and I think it is simply a distraction / disruption technique - which has its place but is limited.
The underlying idea of 'energy' is metaphoric and to translate it into reality is fraught, but we find used it in all sorts of situations.
But, if you have tried EFT and found it helpful that is excellent and well done!
Thanks again
Peter
About forgiveness and stuttering. I was thinking that difficulty forgiving invariably is associated with difficulty moving forwards in life, not being able to let go and move on. And in this respect, it has something in common with stuttering insofar as (arguably) the defining feature of stuttering is difficulty moving forwards in our speech. So yes, perhaps there is a connection between the ability to forgive and the ability to speak fluently. Indeed, perhaps the (possible) connection between perfectionism and stuttering could be seen in this light… insofar as minor speech errors, that most speakers would not even notice, may become major stumbling blocks for a person who stutters.
So, if we agree that the ability to forgive… both others and ourselves… is a good thing, especially for us stutterers, the question then is… How might we become more forgiving?
This question has been of quite central interest to me for some time. Early on in my life I had a go at “affirmations” but found that, for me at least, just telling myself something over and over again did not work. It seems that, for myself, forgiveness is most likely to arise when I perceive that the person (who did the thing that needs forgiving) could not have done otherwise under those particular circumstances.
One belief that I have long held is that our actions, ultimately, are determined by the interaction of our understandings, our feelings and the situation we find ourselves in at the time. Yet we are rarely, if ever, in possession of a complete understanding of the situation we are in and, moreover, our feelings may make it difficult to access even what limited understanding we do have. Thus it’s hardly surprising that our actions are not always optimal. But a consolation for myself has always been that, at the end of the day, irrespective of the outcome… the motivation behind what I do has always been (on the deepest level) one of three things… love, peace or happiness (not necessarily in that order). So I try to pay attention primarily to my motivation… and not to worry too much about the adequacy or appropriateness of my actions.
Anyway, the second half of it had to do with our understanding of the nature of time. Does it go in a straight line… or does it go round in a circle? Perhaps the most powerful idea I have ever come across, was the concept of circular (or cyclical) time. The idea is almost unknown in the West, but forms the foundation of some ancient Eastern philosophies. Whereas, most people tend to think of time as moving in a straight line… in which the past has already happened and the future has not yet happened, if time is understood to be cyclical, it implies that if you could travel in an imaginary time machine into the distant past, you would end up in the future… just like if you go far enough in any particular direction on earth, you would eventually end up back where you started. In other words, the “past” and the “future” are one and thus, just like the past, the future has already happened. Indeed it “exists” eternally, and the things that happen in it already there, waiting to emerge… just like music is stored on a CD. And as for ourselves… we are, ultimately, no more than actors, playing out our parts in an eternal drama… the script of which has existed eternally.
Of course, this may all not be true, but I find it at least as believable as the “linear time” alternative. And I remind myself of this perspective every time I make a big mess up in my life… I just think… well, it was a part of the script. Situations change, and things move forward. If time is circular, nothing is ever really lost or gained. Things just emerge and pass away… and emerge again and pass away again. So how can we blame ourselves (or anyone else) for what happens?
How we structure time is interesting and can be useful to use developmentally. It is different both culturally and individually. Memory and conditions like dyslexia can be significantly helped by timeline work as can stammering. Lot of NLP type work is done with timelines and for those who want the source it is an anthropologist chap called Edward T Hall. The Dance of Life is about cultures and time.
I don't believe there is a script though and the Eastern notion of life as God playing out a drama with himself would be the lesser for one, I think.
I agree about the affirmations, they are difficult to work well. But negative ones can do a lot of damage and we can stop or interrupt them.
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