User:Jesse/Belief Work

My firm belief is that any time we feel a strong negative emotion (anger, hatred, fear, etc.) it is because we are operating under a faulty assumption of some kind. Frequently they are assumptions made by us when we were children under great emotional stress. Most often our false assumptions are about God, our parents, or ourselves. My wife and I learned from our experience that rarely is the issue really about the person that triggered our negative response.

A great example of the power that false assumptions can have over us comes from an experience my wife had when our first two children were very young. I was looking for work and was at home making phone calls. I went into our bedroom and was very surprised to find my wife literally shaking under the covers with fear with the pillow over her head.

Come to find out she was terrified of thunder and there was a first class thunderstorm going on outside. We had recently learned about working through strong emotions and so used the techniques to discover that she had picked up this fear from watching the movie, Ben Hur, as a child. She had concluded from one stormy scene that thunder was indicative of God’s displeasure.

After discovering the truth, the change in my wife was drastic and immediate. The next day, she was sitting on the porch with our children counting the distance between the flashes of lightning and the claps of thunder. Her fear was completely gone.

We discovered that the best time to ponder the root causes of our strong negative emotions is while we’re experiencing them. We trained ourselves to grab a piece of paper when either one of us got riled up. As you can imagine, this is pretty difficult habit to start, but it is certainly worth the effort.