Hello There are some books that stay with you through the years. I’m not sure if it’s the copy or the illustrations or the insights, but some just stay with me. One that has stayed with me was the book, “Taming your Gremlin”.
In using gremlins as a metaphor for bad habits, the author brought home the point that those bad habits can be tamed. The book’s premise is that all of us have bad habits. I’m sure that you can think back to having some kind of bad habit in the past and these habits, if not tamed, will continue into your future.
The graphic representation in the book shows how a Gremlin gets created after we fail at resisting bad habits. There was something about viewing them as gremlins that helped me make breakthroughs in self-control.
As a young child I remember being fascinated with gremlins. They were funny looking creatures that could bring chaos and mayhem when not tamed .
The book brought home the point that you can learn to tame your Gremlin. If you do, it will stop sabotaging your life and start doing things to help you instead of against you.
My bad habits kept me from enjoying life and events as they happened. They kept me wondering what bad things is going to happen to take away the good times in my life.
The image of the gremlins returned to me when I considered how some of you go about maintaining your anger about the affair. You see, when your gremlins are not tamed, they sabotage your happiness.
There’s a twisted paradox in how you want to be rid of anger yet, continue habits which keep it going.
Some of you keep feeding the gremlin with anger and then wondering why you still have so much of it. The answer is that your Gremlins are still not tamed . They don’t want to be saddled on a weekend when there’s fun to be had. So they’ll “screw up” any chance you give them.
The more you keep the instant replay of the affair in front of you, the more anger you’ll encounter. Not only will you find more of it, the anger gremlin grows stronger.
Some of the ways you keep your anger going strong are replaying your hurts for sympathy. This gets you plenty of attention.
Every time it gets brought up? POOF! MORE ANGER GREMLIN. The more attention you put on the affair and how bad it made you feel, the stronger your gremlins.
When others hear what happened to you, there’s some relief in the form of support. The problem is that in order to do so, you continue replaying the hurt.
Replaying the hurt for sympathy is very different than replaying events for information purposes. The big difference between them is your motivation for replaying things and the payoff you receive.
When you replay events for information purposes, it’s because you want to know all of the facts surrounding what happened. Or, maybe you find yourself wanting to understand why your spouse acted in a certain way.
Replaying events for sympathy is different. Here you are doing it so that people will feel sorry for you and give you their support.
Another popular habit is assuming what happened in the past is what’s going on now. This is common with those of you who endured abuse or abusive situations. Your body remembers and assumes it’s happening again. Not only is it happening again, you assume the same outcome as before as well.
The mother lode for nursing anger is obsessing on memories of victimization. Playing the victim card acts like an anger accelerant. It ramps up your anger, refreshes bad memories and turns on emotions that keep the anger going strong.
The best way of getting rid of such bad anger habits is forgiveness. Forgiveness brings those memories to a conclusion. Rather than having them torment you or get you fired up, you can instead detoxify them.
The way of removing the poison from your memories is ‘forgiveness’. The video “Forgiveness: Stop the Pain, Tear down the walls and Remove the roadblocks” guides you in moving past this.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
