How to Change your Mindset
Relationship is a rich ground for personal growth and insight. Intimate relationships, friendships, and business partnerships all offer opportunities to explore your mindset and see how it influences you. As you open to this mindful exploration, it’s very common to encounter habitual ways of relating you may not be aware of. Some tendencies are helpful; they draw you into deeper understanding, while other tendencies create struggle and conflict, both internally and externally.
"We become whole through relationships and through letting go of relationships"
When you become vulnerable in a relationship, you often encounter what you’ve been hiding from. This can be difficult, but it also promises to free you.
Many of your habitual tendencies hold you back from experiencing your full potential.
A big part of human development is based on what worked historically and on what was witnessed in early childhood. Most of these behaviours served a purpose at one time, and some of these modes of being are healthy frames of mind that serve a purpose now.
However, many unhealthy ways of relating live under the radar, existing a little beyond day-to-day awareness. It’s possible to unearth these scripts that limit you. By paying attention on these patterns, you can release the stuck places within and return to the self that knows you are secure and whole, without such a strong identification with the painful stories you’ve created.
"The medicine can be found within the poison"
Through careful observation of my own patterns, working with clients and students, and with the guidance of my teachers and mentors, I’ve found a few mindsets to be especially harmful. I haven’t perfected these practices, but I offer them here as one more tool to explore on your own journey.
The suggestions below are also firmly rooted in a framework that recognizes privilege limits some people more than others and is not meant to diminish the realities of privilege and its effects. Privilege can include (but is not limited to) gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. Instead, this post is meant to offer an internal psychological exploration regardless of background or circumstance.
The three mindsets below restrict your ability to see clearly. They can leave you feeling conflicted and stuck. These mindsets are closely connected to an inability to take responsibility for your contribution to your current state. This, in turn, limits your experience and the possibility of remembrance of your true nature.
"I am a victim"
This thought pattern says that, on some level, the universe is hostile. While there are times we can’t control what happens to us, we do, after appropriate grieving and processing, have the power to decide how life’s events shape us. If we use events to justify our belief that we are simply at the mercy of a cruel and unfair universe, we lose the opportunity to create meaning from our struggle.
"The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe."
When adversity strikes, we can use it as a catalyst for transformation, understanding, and insight, regardless of the details. This is an incredibly difficult step, but it’s often the most rewarding too.
"I am right"
This mindset acts as an aversive tactic, elevating us to avoid vulnerability and authenticity. By claiming no “fault” of our own, we boost our false sense of self while maintaining distance from the shadow within.
"Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, canceled, made nothing? If not, you will never really change."
Initially, distancing ourselves may lessen the pain, but this facade creates a split that actually limits our ability to experience the fullness of our being. This does not mean we allow or accept harmful actions from others. There may be times when removing yourself from a situation, or standing up for what is just, is the most healthy thing to do. But to grow through difficulty, we must let go of an identification with being right and instead hold the complex, multifaceted realities of a given situation. This requires loosening around the story of what happened or is happening, an allowance for our shame, and a connection to the heart of compassionate understanding.
"I am wrong/bad"
In contrast to feeling righteous, adopting a stance of self-denigration also limits potential. Putting ourselves down in relation to others can be a deeply ingrained and painful way of relating. Again, it may provide temporary relief from fully feeling an uncomfortable or painful present state, but because of this, it limits the full spectrum of who we are.
"There is no weapon for the realization of truth that is more powerful than this: to accept yourself."
When navigating difficult circumstances, the strength of self-love and care can offer comfort. By learning not to take life’s circumstances so personally, there is the opportunity to experience difficulty as a much larger universal truth. To be human means we all struggle sometimes, and nothing ever stays the same. When the truth of that sinks in, pain becomes our greatest ally in understanding and empathizing with others.
The difficulty with acknowledging these mindsets is that it requires us to address a paradox. We must first fully accept where we’re at before we can change. In this way, we can’t abandon ourselves or our experience prematurely for some higher ideal. Instead, we can hold our broken and imperfect selves as we navigate our challenges.
May the medicine of difficulty open our hearts and awaken our ability to love ourselves and others more fully.
