After forgiveness and reframing, the next step in cleaning your head concerns changing your attitude. This step takes reframing to a deeper level. When you start reframing, you start changing your mental structures regarding the affair.
In other words, you move your mental furniture around. You start changing your way of thinking about the affair.
Hippies used to talk about ‘feeding your head’. When it comes to affairs, you need to ‘clean your head’.
Since attitude involves both your behavior and your emotions, you’ll be making changes at a deeper level than just changing how your thinking about the affair.
You may not be ready to change your attitude. For some of you, forgiveness and reframing are as far as you can get in this process.
When you’ve experienced deep hurts, there are limits concerning how far you are willing to go in cleaning out your head. Taking recovery to deeper levels means you face your fears, and deep seated pains.
Taking recovery to such a deep level takes you way outside of your comfort zone. At times it’s so far outside of the comfort zone, it feels alien.
In order to start the attitude portion of head cleaning, you’ll have to be grateful or thankful for the affair. This is counter-intuitive to the way many of you think.
Being thankful forces changes in your mindset and assumptions. The whole idea of being grateful for something that ruined your marriage or your life is something you are not willing to do.
The spiritual principle behind this is found in both Christian teachings and AA/12 Step recovery.
The idea is that when you are grateful, even for aspects of what happened, you begin shifting your feelings which are a big part of your attitude.
You start with expressing gratitude for little aspects of the affair. You may be grateful for discovering it, for the fact that things didn’t get violent, or for finally being able to talk about it.
You still hate the affair, this gratefulness concerns the ‘effects’ that you are thankful for. In order to remove the bitterness, you have to change the frame that you look at the affair through.
Being grateful doesn’t mean you approve of what happened. It does mean that you are seriously letting go of resentments, hurts, anger and the desire for revenge.
When you’re grateful, there’s no room for bitterness in your heart or head. Not everyone of you are ready for this step.
Many of you instead choose to have instant replays of what happened in your head and the empowerment that comes from the anger. It will give you a burst of energy.
The problem is that it is a negative kind of energy. It will mobilize you, but more often than not, it leads to negative consequences.
At first, you may have to be thankful for the little changes that the affair brought you. Perhaps it brought increased honesty, revealed the true nature of those around you, provided a wake up call to your value system, or made you take risks that you have been avoiding.
You may have chosen a better way for these changes to happen. Whether or not you wanted the changes, they happened. Now you are faced with how to best deal with them.
Being thankful or grateful is not easy, then again carrying a grudge or hatred for every aspect of the affair is a gargantuan task.
Not only is carrying a grudge or hatred a burden, it also surrounds you with negativity. Some people will avoid you due to that negativity. It’s not about them not liking you or not wanting to support you. When you are surrounded by negativity, you become an energy vacuum.
You can’t spew forth all kinds of cursing and angry raging without consequences. All the cursing and rage has consequences that you cannot cheat.
You literally begin sucking the life and energy out of those around you. When people avoid you, it’s due to their own self-preservation.
You are faced with a choice, carry a grudge or be thankful.
If you’re not ready for gratefulness, and only want an understanding of forgiveness, get your copy of the video, “Forgiveness: Stop the Pain, Tear down the walls and Remove the Roadblocks“. The video guides you through a proven method of forgiveness.
If you continue struggling with gratefulness, there may be some forgiveness issues still needing your attention.
Best Regards,
Jeff
