How To Change Your Life

Someone once said that no one had taught him how to look at buildings. Those days, walking along one of the central avenues of the city, he realized that he always I walked looking at the ground, but not at the heights. This experience is very common. We walk through life avoiding stepping on dog droppings or looking for a lost coin and we forget the beauty of the domes. These two styles of looking do not have to be exclusive. There is an up and a down; one left and one right. However, despite the mobility of the head, our cervical spine, with its osteoarthritis, shows us that we have chosen rigidity.

On a psychological level, something similar happens to us: we find another type of hardening. It is the one that is caused by the passionate need to ignore ourselves in our desires. In the same way that osteoarthritis makes movement difficult and causes pain, the passion for self-ignorance puts obstacles in the way of our encounter with well-being. That is why in this Psychology-online article, we are going to talk to you about how to change your life to be happier and live better.

The desire to change and the fear of change

It is not easy to live in a state of calm and well-being. Both external and internal circumstances invite you, permanently, to feel unease, restlessness, restlessness, anxiety, disgust, annoyance, bad mood, intolerance, frustration, anger and depressive moments, among others. All of which leads you, like many, to synthesize those experiences with the well-known “I feel bad.”

There are many people looking for a manual to survive life. Other people look for gurus, mystics, prophets or place their trust in a psychoanalyst, doctor or lawyer. However, these people do not possess this type of wisdom. More and more people are choosing the so-called “positive thinking” or “positive mental attitude”which tries to face adversity with great optimism and fighting spirit, without denying reality at any time.

For now, let’s say that “feeling bad” is a way for your mind to let you know that things are not working the way you want. From the experience of discomfort we can question ourselves and realize what is happening to us. But know and admit our shortcomings and our mistakesit’s not pleasant at all.

How to change your life

To achieve significant changes in your life and create the conditions to live in a state of satisfaction, you need to meet these four conditions:

  • Self-awareness: you have to recognize your own shortcomings, difficulties, unfavorable circumstances;
  • Self-criticism: you must take responsibility for your own behaviors that produce and/or perpetuate poor state;
  • Desire for change: you have to feel, think and do what is convenient to generate transformations in your own life by evaluating the consequences of each decision made. All of the above must be lovingly wrapped up by your good or faith.
  • your good faith: that is, stop fooling yourself.

How to change your life - The desire to change and the fear of change

Find out what’s wrong with you

Sometimes we lack words to designate, explain or transmit what is happening to us. We feel that sensation of psychic discomfort and something within us prevents us from knowing what is happening to us. We say “I feel bad” and with this we can express great sadness or anger, a stomach ache or headache, eye irritation, tiredness, etc. This little word “bad” works for everything. Generally, it is a question of vocabulary. The fewer words we have incorporated, the less will be the possibility of expressing with some precision what happens to us.

As we stated in the previous section, the first condition To start a change in your life is to know what is happening to you. Sometimes, you don’t have the necessary parameters to start thinking. We suffer from shortcomings, problems, difficulties, but it is difficult to organize them in such a way that we not only know them better but also allow us to start looking for solutions.

Unlike those who look for magical solutions, there are people who know that the conflict is in themselves and they want to know him. They perceive it as something that they do not know exactly what it is, but that is felt by a sensation of emptiness, futility, indefinite anguish, a profound experience that life, as it is being lived, has no meaning. A “not feeling good” that cannot be talked about because, as we said, there are no appropriate words to define it.

At the beginning of the great adventure of self-knowledge There are more questions than answers. And when these answers appear, they provide us with the resources to make decisions.

Why does the same thing always happen to me?

Who most who least all of us have one braking, permitting and quasi-permitting structure. There are also those who have false permits that reinforce the brakers. They are disastrous, fateful, catastrophic orders that drive the person to commit an act that threatens their own well-being.

They are expressed in a friendly and in the form of approval often masked in a question: “It’s okay for you to smoke… everyone does it”; “Are you going to go to the doctor because of that pain?”; “What’s going to happen to you for betting a little money?”, “But marijuana is harmless… take it, try it,” etc.

This structure formed by these restraining, permitting, quasi-permitting and, sometimes, false permitting mandates constitutes a base from which we begin to perceive lifefeel, think and act about ourselves, about others and about the world in general. We call it the Initial Message Matrix (MIM). However, the thing is much more complex. It happens that this MIM is forming from nine months of pregnancy until approximately five years of age. It is confirmed up to the age of eight but, from the age of five to twelve, year plus year minus, an Internal Belief System (SIC) is configured which, associated with the MIM, gives rise to the so-called Life Argument (AV ), term coined by Eric Berne, Canadian psychiatrist, creator of a modality of psychoanalysis which he named Transactional Analysis (TA).

In each person, we observe the functioning and influence of the VA in those repetitive behaviors that makes the individual say to himself, in a tone of complaint, “The same thing always happens to me!”. Freud called it repetition compulsion, Adler, destiny neurosis, Berne, life argument. It is often confused with destiny, with that which we cannot change when, in reality, yes we can. We’ll see how.

How to change your life - Why does the same thing always happen to me?

Strategy to fail, strategy to succeed

The primary objective of this article is to become aware that your own life is based on an Argument foreign to your own desires as a person. If you came to recognize this through reading, the goal was met. If, in addition, you achieve your own goals, you must give yourself all the credit. We will say, then, that you have gone from a strategy of failure to a strategy of success. In short: you changed.

What is a strategy

We are going to define it as the ability one has to aim for a goal and achieve it. Strategy for failure is the aptitude, the capacity that you have to live your life in an inconsequential way, without pain or glory, lost, oblivious to your desires, melodramatically.

How do you become a highly skilled strategist to steer your life toward disaster? Simply obeying commands? In fact, no. The commands form the matrix of our Argument, but for it to be developed it needs other elements: parasitic thoughts that prevent clear and reflective thinking, imagination, sensations and emotions, the spoken word and physical action itself.

Unfortunately, during our lives, we give up a large part of our essence for the sake of what is expected of us. We dilute our own being in that amorphous mass of foreign speeches that inhabit us. We are being what others want. In that alienation we stop being the original beings that we were to be a copy of those who wrote our script. We will be unique in our physique, but in our behaviors we are repetitionuntil we decide to be ourselves.

How to change failure for success

In that alienation, in that absence of originality, in that not knowing who we are, we find the basis of every strategy to fail, the basis of all neuroses. Precisely, by having a strategy to fail, we can glimpse, by simple opposition, the existence of a strategy to succeed. If it is said that there is an Official History, it is because there is Another History. The same thing happens with the Life Argument which we can call “official”. Therefore, there must be another argument. This hidden argument is the basis of the strategy to succeed and we must make it known. Where is? Inside you and we call it “Adult Life Plan”.

Your task is investigate what you do to continue achieving failureinstead of success. To do this, write down the negative sequence of your personal strategy and then the positive one, imagining what your life would be like if you questioned the mandates and changed your strategy.

Body and mind

With the help of all these new notions that we have been explaining to you, you will be able to think about yourself in a different way than you have been doing until now. This, as we saw in the previous section, offers you a new life optionwhich allows you to choose to live according to what is dictated by your plot or to structure an adult life plan that places you outside the plot.

Man is body-mind. We do not have the mental on the one hand and the physical on the other. The body is mind and the mind is body. All our organs, our history, our appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, perceptions, sensations, memory, what we say and imagine, the transcendent goal, the family social network to which we belong, the political alternatives, etc., make up the human being.

Just like the simple light bulb whose separate elements cannot fulfill the function for which they were invented, the human being cannot function without the interrelation of all its components. The key word is interrelation.

Both positive and negative oriented attitudes are structured between the ages of 5 and 12, approximately, an evolutionary stage that is precisely known as the age of “establishing one’s own values”. One of the difficulties at this stage is that it is difficult for the child to decide his values ​​and goals. The attitudes that are chosen as rulers of life… do they respond to the authentic needs of the child or to the needs of others? And if different attitudes are chosen… is it because the boy is out of argument or because he is opposing, anti-argumentally, that is, in a rebellious, oppositional way, to what is expected of him? Let’s realize all this so we can make a change in our lives.

The power of imagination

Imagination is the ability of a person to represent an object in its absence. In what ego state would you place the imagination? Correct: in he ego state CHILD. According to its subdivisions, the theme of the imaginary will have variations. In this way, and making a first division, we will say that the themes to be imagined will have “pro-life” or “anti-life” characteristics. For example, faced with the prospect of an exam, a high school student imagines, with his Submissive Child, making a fool of himself and that everyone makes fun of him; another, with his Opponent Child, imagines challenging the teacher, responding haughtily and returning home to play with the computer without caring about having failed; another, with his Free Child, giving creative answers while seeing, in his mind, that the teacher smiles satisfied; The Educated Child imagines himself answering the questions accurately and the Righteous Child sees himself defending his rights in the face of any off-program question or unfair comment from the teacher. Everyone, in their own way, may feel more or less anxious about the impending test.

What is stopping us?

Let’s take the example of a man who is going to take a driving test to be a taxi driver. The restraining commands that cascade in the face of this stimulus are: “You’re not going to make it. You’re no good at driving a taxi. They’re going to laugh at you. You only know how to do stupid things.” All this supported by errors in his reasoning: “I will never be like my cousin Ernesto (personalization by comparison)”; “This parking thing makes me angry, therefore I’m going to do it wrong (emotional reasoning)”; “I should have practiced more (should).” But this person does something else: he creates a mental movie in which he sees himself inside the car, with the examiner next to him looking at him with mockery, making mistakes, throwing everything away when parking, being booed and suspended, leaving the exam with the head bowed as he watches the taxis go by in front of him. It is necessary to emphasize the highlights: “a mental movie is made”.

Types of imagination

We will distinguish, at this vertex of imagining, two types of imagination:

  • Reproductive Imagination: allows us to visualize, with the mind’s eye, people, animals, things, past scenes.
  • Creative Imagination: it allows us to create people, animals, things, scenes that have no real existence, at least for those who are imagining.

And to suffer you can use either of the two. With the reproductive imagination you will bring up again and again the scenes from a past that made you feel bad, like your boss’s angry face when you asked him to leave early; but you can also update the ones that made you feel good, like that sunset on the beach while you walked along the wet sand smelling the aroma of salt and iodine and hearing the sound of the waves.

With creative imagination you will be able to make yourself feel bad in advancecombining catastrophic scenes on a certain theme or would you choose to create pleasant scenes that would allow you to enjoy moments of relaxation. As you will see, you have the power to choose what audiovisual you are going to produce. If we did not imagine “anti-life” scenes, what would prevent us from achieving our goals?

How to change your life - The power of imagination

Don’t be afraid to feel

What are you feeling right now? This question does not have an easy answer. It is frequently asked of patients in a school of therapy, Gestalt, created by Fritz Perls, and the person is not always in a position to answer it. Perls famously said: “Abandon the mind (thinking) and return to the senses.”

Unfortunately, it happens that not everyone has the appropriate words to understand what you are feeling. Therefore, instead of waiting for great answers, the easiest way to start getting in touch with what you feel right now is to ask yourself: is what I feel pleasant, unpleasant or neutral? Don’t be surprised or worried if your answer is “I don’t know.”

What prevents you from feeling?

What makes it difficult for you to answer the question? The difficulty is that you are not used to get in touch with your bodyyou don’t pick up on its signals or, if you do, you can’t give it the right name. The answer to the question could have been: I feel hungry, cold, headache, tickling in my stomach, a lump in my throat, tightness in my chest, but also: anger, sadness, anguish, anxiety, guilt, joy, shame , etc.

If you look closely, you will notice that we have given two categories of answer: the first refers to the sensations and they are related to the body; the second ones are the emotions. We can discriminate, then, two “feelings” that make up this vertex of feeling: sensations whose referent is the body are FELT and emotions whose essence is mental are FELT. Both are interrelated and lead to specific actions, which are not always appropriate.

The pain, the tightness in the chest, the lump in the throat, the tingling throughout the body are sensations, messages that the body sends you; Rage or anger, sadness, joy, are emotions that you feel in your mind. The insult, crying, jumping and your screams are actions in which the body also participates and that are a consequence of the sensations and emotions felt.

Why you have to externalize your emotions

All emotions are beneficial because they all tell us what is happening to us. Some are pleasant and most are unpleasant. many people They do not recognize what they feel or do not express it because they have had neither a model nor permission from their parents to express them. This is why people block them by diverting their energy elsewhere.

For example, a person with sadness (an emotion not accepted in their family) can divert energy towards anger (which was admitted) and someone who feels anger (which was not allowed) towards depression (the whole family revolved around them). . Another who has reasons to be happy (an unfavorable emotion: “he who laughs on Saturday cries on Sunday”) becomes depressed and the one who feels love (“loving in the long run produces pain”) becomes distressed. Another who has a phobia of exams (“don’t be a coward”) diverts energy to her intestines and has diarrhea. The one who feels envy (“you’re very bad”) shows false joy when seeing a friend’s achievements (“how good you are”) and then becomes distressed (“poor thing… take a Valium). And there are those who feel resentment toward their mother-in-law (“don’t give us a hard time”) and show false affection (“dear mother-in-law, how good I see you”) so as not to cause problems by causing a headache the next day.

These are just some possible cases. If someone prevents you from expressing your emotions, tell them firmly: “I have every right in the world to feel… (this or that emotion)”. Your mind and body will thank you.

How to change your life - Don't be afraid to feel

Speaking, do people understand each other?

Communication is a process through which one person tries to convey an idea to another with the desire that they grasp the true meaning of the message with a minimum of distortion. Understanding the message with minimal distortion would show us that the communication was successful, otherwise it was unsuccessful. This failure in communication by which the meaning of a message is not fully understood is very common and the explanation lies in a fundamental fact: the interference produced by the Life Argument with your belief system. And since we all have an Argument we can conclude that all communication, at some point, will be interfered with and it will never be full.

This will lead to misunderstandings. Although all of us who share a language have a code in common, the meaning we attribute to words depends on our experience. Obviously, we all know what a “table” is. But at the moment of reading or hearing this word, each person will have a different mental representation: one will imagine their kitchen table, another the one inherited by their dead parents, another the one they saw in the shop window and that is very expensive to them.

Each person, when wanting to communicate a message, must resort to your “data bank” from which you will extract both the words and the most appropriate grammatical structure for what you want to convey. But that data bank is guided by the code of the Life Argument and its underlying ideology. This Life Argument is as different from one person to another as fingerprints: they all look alike and they are all different. Of course, the words used in the construction of the message and its syntactic structure are common to all of us, but the meaning we give to each message depends on that data bank. In other words, everyone understands what someone else says according to your own Life Argument, your Internal Belief System. This is what sanctions the message of another.

Why there are misunderstandings in couples

From here they start misunderstandings and misunderstandings. This is noticed more intensely in the couple’s bond because, through daily coexistence, the differences in codes become evident. Each person responds according to a different Life Argument, since they had different life experiences and, therefore, have a particular Belief System that, in no way, can coincide with that of the other. In a discussion about the education of children… Who can be said to be authorized to be right? Both codes are valid.

Things get quite complicated when messages are transmitted by choosing low level meaning wordsthat is, any meaning can be attributed to them. For example, someone says “you always feel those emotions when those things happen.” Here it is almost impossible to know what we are talking about, because… what are those things? Who feels them? What emotions are we talking about? Does “always” mean that there are no exceptions; that it is a universal law? Observe how many questions arise in a sentence composed of words of low meaning.

On a racetrack, a horse may have an extensive pedigreebeing the fastest during the tests, having a beautiful figure and having the best coach, but… of the six races he ran, he came last. Obviously, something went wrong. Something similar happens during the growth process. The person may challenge your misconceptionsmodify your belief system, know and alter catastrophic images, intercept your internal dialogue, identify your emotions and express them and, despite all this task, everything remains the same.

Sooner or later the real change manifests itself in external changes. The “internal-external” sequence is, according to Integrative Psychotherapy, the matrix of true change. This means that if you change what you think, imagine and feel, you can change what you communicate and what you do. The question is: does the reverse sequence, “external-internal”, promote change? That is, by changing what you say and what you do… can you change what you think and what you feel? Integrative Psychotherapy considers that change occurs when the person knows, questions and rewrites their Life Story as a consequence of an authentic desire to transcend it. To achieve this state of rewriting the Argument, a variety of resources can be used. This means, neither more nor less, that each one must follow one’s own methodsaccording to its moment. Not all answers are valid for the same question. And who better to know what each one needs than a specialist.

Stones on the path

From birth, the influence that others have on ourselves is transcendental. To such an extent that we build our identity based on the images that we believe others have of us. Later we must use a different mask depending on the occasion. It can be said that we are what the other determines us to be and this is what alienation or alienation consists of: being alien to ourselves, not knowing ourselves or, what is the same, knowing ourselves as long as there is another who recognizes us.

In the absence of that other… we do not exist. In this type of pathology and to guarantee their own existence, the person must adapt to the demands of their Social Network, otherwise they will have to pay consequences. In short: both the Network and the individual they need each other. These needs, with symbiotic characteristics, contribute to forming closing bonds. This closure means that, in this type of relationship, no progress or regress. There is no mobility, personal development, shared growth. However, there is movement.

It happens that there are differences between mobility and movement. A fan has movement, it rotates and rotates but it cannot move, by itself, from one place to another. The closing links It has a similar characteristic. Although there is no shared growth (mobility), there are stormy, melodramatic, sadomasochistic movements, where the figure of someone who pursues, another who suffers, another who rescues always appears. Found passions, offenses and revenge, abandonments and reunions. They displace a lot of air but… they are always in the same place.

So what is change?

As we have already been seeing, we call change passage from an unwanted state to a desired state. Knowledge of the Life Argument, questioning its restraining mandates and the decision to live a transcendent life enables access to said desired state. Unfortunately, things are not as easy as they may seem. Despite the desire for change being very strong, the individual resists. But the presence of this resistance tells us that there are two forces in conflict: the one that tends to keep the person within the restrictive limits of the Life Argument and the life force that drives him to transcend it. We must take both into account for the therapeutic task.

From PsychologyFor, we hope that, after this article, you already know how to change your life to be happy.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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