STOP Obsessive Thoughts-Flashbacks ~ Serenity Wellness E90

Flashbacks and Obsessive Thoughts will shrink away and Create Emotional Harmony.
Trouble falling asleep? This one is also for you!
Get out of your head.
These easy-to-use tools are here to assist.
I have taught these tools for over 25 years and use them myself.

Transcript

Hi there,

Thanks for joining me.

So happy to have you here.

Today I'm going to share with you a tool on how you can shrink a flashback or obsessive thought with the TV.

Before that I'm going to also share two other tools with you because sometimes you might need the TV method and sometimes you might need something maybe a little less to help with flashbacks in the mind but also with the obsessive thoughts.

I can't stop thinking about this and maybe the thinking about it doesn't even have like an imagery around it just might be words floating around in the brain or you might be somewhere in the in-between.

The matter of the fact is though that you are pulled away from the now.

The experience you're in in this moment based off of something from the past or based off of illusion in the mind getting wrapped up into emotion and thought combined.

So often we can get wrapped up into that loop in the mind and we might want to stop obsessing about something.

We might want to stop ruminating might be the other word that you're familiar with but it just takes us away and before we know it it is a full-time job of how much time we spend thinking about something that we don't want to think about and even we might recognize the illusion of the thought how the thought's not even real it's not even happening we're getting all this emotion based off of nothing.

So these tools are here to help you if it's at that level all the way up to if you're getting flashbacks from a previous situation of abuse even that has happened to you and it comes through and you can't figure out how to get rid of it and it takes over that emotion highway too.

These tools are here to help you with that.

I'm going to give you some examples of ways to do each of these as I talk through them and just know that I have taught these skills for over 25 years and I've also used them myself and I'm excited to share them with you because I think you might find them helpful.

The first two I'm going to talk with you about you might use independently,

You might use them as well when you're using the TV method that I'm going to talk with you about at the end here and when you're using part one and part two to build up to part three with the TV you might use them in either order.

So you might start with the first one,

You might start with the second one as a way to ground into the third with the television.

So let's start with the first example.

With the first example you're having one of those things come through anywhere up to a flashback all the way down to mind racing,

Obsessing about something,

Just can't kind of disconnect or get off the hamster wheel and you would look directly in front of you for 30 seconds maybe a minute give yourself some guided questions about what is actually in front of you,

How many colors are in it,

If it's all green,

How many different shades of green.

So think about breaking it down and what you see and you will notice you're not where you were as much in your mind and when I say as much as I mentioned sometimes we might need to use all three of these back to back and the back to back is still maybe two minutes total when you go through this if that might even be shorter.

So when I used this recently for myself there was a piece of wood directly in front of me and I looked at what was directly in front of me and I did this for about 30 seconds.

It might have been a little less than that that's just an estimate.

I looked at it and then I looked at the piece of wood like what was actually there.

Yes there is a piece of wood but beyond it just being a piece of wood what could I see in the wood?

So I was able to see the different colors.

I could also note the checking in the wood which is where the wood splits a little bit.

The only reason I know that is because I recently got some timber framing done in my house and so I know the technical term.

Basically it's like look I have a bench behind me I could show you maybe um no I don't think you could really see maybe but it's like the little where the wood breaks apart a little bit.

So I honed in on that.

How many of those did I see?

Were they different and how long were they?

So a couple guided questions to truly see and connect with what was in front of me.

When I'm doing that it's taking down the emotion part of my experience whatever it's going on in that moment.

So for me in that moment I was having a pretty intense flashback to an unexpected situation that came back to presence in my life now from a past trauma and I had to to talk about this and so I felt and experienced that coming back in in that moment.

When I'm doing that it's helping take down the emotion based off a flashback in the mind.

If you're doing that and you're having a lower level maybe anxiety or frustration that's moving up to anger or even depression it will change the percentage of where you're at with that emotion in terms of how high it is or how low it is which then factors into how we manage it,

How we move through the emotion itself.

As I mentioned you might be at a state or place with yourself that you need more than that and that would be where maybe you piggyback the three of these things.

You might start with that one or you might start with this next one if that's the place you're in.

The next one is grounding yourself physically in the space you're in.

So you do that with feet but you also do that with hands.

In the feet you're going to keep your feet planted on the floor both of them completely planted not up on your tippy toes not like on your heels have them flat on the floor in front of you if possible.

If this isn't possible with your feet that's okay it is a really great part to do both hands and feet if you have the opportunity to do that.

So you're going to have feet flat on ground you might even say a word like grounded or you might give yourself a sentence my feet are here in front of me or where are my feet right now I feel them on the floor or on the earth.

You can get barefoot out on the earth that's even better but I'm not going to get into that right here.

I've talked about it before with earthing.

Get your feet planted on the ground whatever the ground is for you but then get your hands also planted put them on the table the space your legs if that's what's there in front of you but put them flat just like the feet put your hands flat on the surface including all fingertips.

How are my hands feeling?

Where are they touching?

Where are they connecting to?

What does this table what do my pants feel like under my fingertips?

And that's going to ground the whole body it's going to help the central nervous system slow down a little bit it's going to help you connect to the space you're in and not the illusion going on in the mind.

Every time we step away from illusion mind it helps regulate emotion because even if it's just an illusion about thoughts we're racing through or about a flashback it's still creating the emotion as though it is real.

So we're bringing ourself back back to the moment of where we're at back in the space we're in in that moment.

You might start with that one and then you might go to the one that I just described in terms of looking right in front of you either one if you're wanting all three of these you're going to start with one of those go with the second one and then go to the tv that I'm going to describe here in just a moment.

You might also be able to just use that one so you might just be able to ground your feet ground your hands put your fingertips down tell yourself a mantra or a sentence or a question.

The third part is using the tv to shrink a flashback or obsessive thought.

When you're doing this what you would do you are going to do part one and part two first even if it's just for 10 seconds of each just to get the physical body grounded a bit and get a little bit of space between that heightened emotion.

Where the television comes in it's amazing technique that many people have used for the various reasons I talked about if they're having a flashback but also if they're just obsessively thinking about something can't quiet the mind down maybe they're trying to even fall asleep and the mind is racing and going.

How you use a shrinking tv you're going to close your eyes first and get a little bit relaxed so maybe your physical body's already connected to the space that you're in and then close your eyes and just take a breath cycle or two you're not trying to change your breathing at all in this moment you're just taking a breath because you might have been even holding your breath I mean we do that when we're stressed or tensed out and then in your mind the best that you can imagine a television screen in front of you once you get that television screen in your mind you're going to put whatever's going on for you inside the parameters of the television so if you're having a flashback you're going to put that image even there's often sounds associated with flash flashbacks in the mind you're going to place that inside the television if you're having more of the obsessive thoughts the rumination place it into the television as words see the words on the screen or if it's about the words are around something very specific you could see that on the screen whatever you're drawn to whatever feels right for you so you would have the television screen in the mind the image images sounds are on the screen now in your mind you have a remote control in your hand what you're now going to do is start to change what's in front of you on the screen there's no particular order that you do this I'm just going to describe what you do and then you just let your subconscious draw you to the order that feels right for you you might start to make the image real fuzzy or blurry so that you can't see it you might turn down the volume so that you can't hear it at all or turn it to a completely fuzzy screen so that you can't see the image it's not even just blurred out it's just a bunch of fuzz and maybe you have the fuzzy noise in the background because you feel like you need almost like a white noise how we might use white noise if the silent space is too much for us to feel comfortable in and then once you get to a place that you feel that you have the image distorted in some way so it doesn't look the same the words if they're just words on there you can't read them anymore they're all just like fuzzy and blurry and there's no sound associated with whatever sound was connected with the actual image or images that you've put on there now the next thing you're going to do is use that controller and now shrink that tv down real small shrink it down so you can hold it in your hand small and then decide what you want to do do you want to shrink it down further so tiny teeny tiny that you could stick it in your pocket and look at it later maybe you want to watch that later to sort through something or would you like to shrink it down so small that it just vanishes do what feels right for you and if you decide to store it in your pocket you could put it in there as long as you want or maybe you put it in a shelf somewhere and then you pull it out if you feel like it it's giving you empowerment to start building ways to move away from it because it can be feel really disempowering when we feel like the mind is in control because the mind is different than the brain not going to digress and get into all that now either but when we start to separate from this illusion stuff that's going on in the mind we're not getting the emotion imprinting from something that's not actually even happening it's keeping us in the present moment and then these techniques are letting us see the impermanence of those emotions how we can bring it down some notches that we're not getting rid of the emotion even in the vanishing of the tv we still are having emotional experience in life we're just selecting in that moment and maybe long term if we keep practicing this kind of stuff that the past can stay back there that we don't have to keep reliving our trauma to keep us on a path of healing it will happen when we dedicate that the space to healing so you can decide what one two or three of these feel right for your situation those first two that i described people use them all the time because as a society we're so wrapped up in our brain the racing thoughts the monkey mind the what it coulda shoulda the what didn't i do what could i have done the perfectionist mind the comparison mind the judging mind the goodness the guilt shame that people live through that's all this mind mind stuff find some opportunity to separate from some of that uh illusionary stuff and you're gonna be kind of surprised maybe at what you find opportunities to gather in the now that maybe you've been missing out on a bit i hope that's been helpful for you i wanted to pop this in before i got to part three of the trauma series that i've been doing in case things do come up for people as i talk through this because i realize that you're not my clients and i don't want to just leave you out there with this stuff in case you're not receiving support so i'll be getting part three out for that next week and i do just want to say real quick thank you to everyone who answered that question if you were interested in the energy therapy channel i have given it a lot of thought and what i decided to do is i'm just going to kind of segue in the new year this podcast into the energy part of what i do instead of just starting a whole new channel i already have two channels and i was getting ready to start some other ones and a friend just randomly said why are you starting a new channel why not just do what you're doing i was like oh great question i'm gonna do that i'm just gonna you know we've been in this mental health part of uh what i can offer you in terms of information for you know three years or so now and i want to kind of build upon that with some of this other information so that would be kind of segueing over in january i'll be still tying in the mental health stuff because it's all combined but i'm going to be sharing a lot more information in terms of energy therapy with you at that point i will talk to you see you again real soon and i'll get out part three for you next week have a good one

Reviews

Just found you now and this talk. Exactly what I need and was looking for on insight timer. Thank you

Thank you for continuing your practical, accessible, actionable approach.

I’ve been doing something similar to these and it works! Still working on remembering to do this even with the small things.
Excited to hear the energy work us coming soon!!! Happy New Year Nicole! 💜