Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!

I just finished a wonderful Andy Andrews book entitled “How Do You Kill 11 Million People?” I highly recommend it to you if you're in any way interested in whats going on in our world today.

I'm not going to divulge the premise, but the book started me thinking about lies.

Andy talks about a paradox that he uncovered during his study of the Dark and Middle Ages that went something like this, “Simply stated, the past is what is real and true, while history is merely what someone recorded.”

So how does this impact the way we think?

I've done a lot of thinking about thinking lately. You've probably noticed that most of my posts say something about the influence of negative thinking in most emotional issues that we face.

We all have painful experiences that we've accumulated over the years. Many of them are unequivocally true. We can't deny that someone abused us, or neglected us, or shamefully treated us.

Other painful experiences may be described differently from different perspectives. Harsh words said to us or of us may be misinterpreted. Disappointments or rejections we felt may have had a compelling reason that we didn't perceive at the time that might have mitigated the pain had we known.

So like the paradox, we accept the things that happened as real and true.

And like the paradox, we discover that the history writers may have gotten it wrong.

Whoa!!! What's this about history writers and our personal painful experiences? Is somebody writing all this down to be read again and again? Of course, there's a history writer – It's YOU!

The vast majority of painful events are over and done with. They happened. They're done. They're not happening again; or are they?

Painful events happen again every time you replay the memory in your mind. The memory pops up and you relive the event again. The memory pops up again and again and again; and you relive it again and again and again.

The paradox is that you, the history writer, play the event a little differently each time you revisit the memory. The pain may be a little more intense; the hurt a little deeper than last time. It's an accepted truth that negative thinking grows with attention, so the pain intensifies.

The lie is this. IT'S NOT HAPPENING AGAIN!. You're lying to yourself every time you replay the painful event by accepting it as reality when it's nothing but an increasingly distorted memory of something painful that happened way back then.

My anger was nothing but a memory for years, but I relived it every day. When I learned how to deal with the negative thinking, it was like a final rewriting of the history of that part of my life. And it's more than that. The negative thinking was hurting my relationships, causing me stress, and maybe exacerbating some health issues. I don't have to deal with that anymore. What Freedom!

“Yes,” a painful thing happened at a particular time in my history. But, “No”, I'm not condemned to reliving that painful event for the rest of my life. By doing the same things I did, you don't have to let negative thinking about the past destroy your future.

Enjoy some peace in your life for a change! Think about it!



www.findingpersonalpeace.com

P.S. BTW, get Andy's book. It's a great 30-minute read.