A Mental Trap

This episode dives into a thinking trap that gets people stuck and prevents them from healing and how you can avoid this trap. 

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Transcript

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Hey, my friends. I want to talk about entitlement today, because entitlement is one of those things that will keep you stuck. Entitlement prevents healing. It prevents happiness. Sometimes we are feeling entitled and we don't even realize it. Entitlement happens when we think that our life should be different than what it is. When we think the things that happened to us should have happened to us. And this can get sticky to think about, because sometimes when I say this, people get confused and think that what I'm saying is that bad things should happen to you or that you should be abused. And that is not the case at all, because what I'm talking about isn't about deserving or what you deserve or anything like that. What I'm talking about is what is reality and what is resisting reality. The truth is that bad things happen sometimes, and they happen to both good and bad people. Nobody deserves the bad things that happen to them, but they also don't deserve to never have bad things happen to them. Bad things happening is part of life. Nobody is so special that yet to be exempt from that. And when we think that this shouldn't be happening to us, that is what we are saying, essentially, that we should be opted out of bad things, that bad things shouldn't happen to us. And that is entitlement, and that kind of entitlement will always bring suffering. Because life is made up of peaks and valleys, and no one is exempt from that. I always say it as life is 50/50, like some of it is going to be great and some of it is going to suck, that's not optional. But what I want to point out here is that nothing has gone wrong when things go wrong. If something bad happens to you, it doesn't mean that the universe is picking on you. It doesn't mean that you've done something wrong. You're not being punished or victimized by some greater force. Bad things just happen sometimes, and deserving has nothing to do with it. But resisting reality when things go wrong, and asking why this had to happen to you only serves to create suffering and to drain your energy. Before I married my ex husband, I had dated a man, and I really wanted to marry that man. But he did not want to marry me, and so he didn't. He married someone else, and I married someone else. But I held on to that for a long time, that if only he had chosen me, then all of the bad things wouldn't have happened to me. I thought he should have chosen me. He should have been with me. He should have married me. During my abusive marriage, when things were sucking so bad in that marriage, I thought about that a lot, that he should have married me. If I had married that guy instead, none of this would be happening. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. But you know what I wasn't thinking about when I was thinking about how none of this would have happened if the other guy had only chosen me? How to actually make my life better. I was so busy resisting reality in my own head at the cost that I wasn't participating fully in my current reality. This thinking of how things should have been different in the past so that the present would be different came at cost of actually doing things to impact and make the present better. And the future better, for that matter. We have to play the cards we are dealt my friends. Sitting there wishing you held different cards, doesn't accomplish anything other than suffering. Instead of asking why, we should be asking, what's next. This happened, and what am I going to do about it? This prevents us from becoming stuck in that victim mentality. It keeps us rooted firmly in our own power and helps us actually work to make our lives better. That's one of the goals that I always have for myself, is that I'm going to make the best of every situation that I'm in. I am always going to be optimizing things for myself. Because I can't choose what circumstances I find myself in, but I always get to choose how I think and how I act. There's a quote from Victor Frankl from his book, Man's Search for Meaning. If you're not familiar with Frankl, he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, and the book was about his time in there. And the quote says, "Everything can be taken from a man, but one

thing: 6:09

the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." And that's what I want to offer you, my friends. I know life sucks, sometimes. I know shitty things happen. I know that that abuse was awful. AND now you get to choose. You always get to choose. That is your power. Don't give it up. All right, my friends, until next time, be well.