Dealing with my myths and assumptions in social situations

 Heya ^-^

I wrote a bit about myths / worries / assumptions getting in the way of asking for things you want or need or just saying no to people. This is the messy side, the side of how I am, in practice, trying to implement the information into my daily life.

Associated with the book there were a bunch of worksheets and one of them was an exercise of picking the myths that you believe in and then challenging them rationally. Unfortunately there were no examples about the rationalization.

I wrote down the myths which I recognized from the weight in my chest when reading them:

Next, I tried to challenge them by making them extreme and generalised. This was actually mentioned in the book as a practice to have when teaching about the myths. It was an interesting exercise in the sense that it made my mind go “yea… doesn’t really make sense to believe this”. Here is how my battle went:

In the book there were four ways mentioned for dealing with the myths. To my disappointment three of them are part of a section yet to come meaning that I’ll have to wait. Thus, the only option was to just try the rationalisation and see what happens. This is what happened:

To be honest, it felt nice and relieving. But maybe doing this kind of exercise once is not enough? Some widespread journaling techniques which help you increase gratitude have you make a list of things you are grateful for daily. For now I’m curious to see what changes it will make in my life if I would challenge my myths every day for a week. A potential caveat is that by doing this the mind is focusing on the negative daily. But I am an experimentalist by heart, if there is no certainty, just test it! And even if there is certainty, just test if there is no harm! This is pretty much the train of thought when I stick my tongue to small metal objects during the winter.

~<3 nu