cleopatra wrote:
How do you start that Journey?
Funny you should ask! We recently restored the "
Begin Your Recovery" parable to the main site. While it's not a mapped out plan (i.e., spend X time working on ABC tool before moving to XYZ tool for F amount of time) it's a good read.
That said, I would suggest picking a Tool at random (whatever sounds nicest, whatever speaks to you the most, whatever your finger lands on with your eyes closed!) and focus on it for a couple of weeks. Notice where and how you could be using that Tool to improve things. I always suggest starting in retrospect. That is to say, don't expect that because you picked Tool A that for the next two weeks, any time XYZ situation occurs, you'll just whip out Tool A and put it to work. It doesn't work that way and is really a recipe for disaster/failure. Instead, let your life unfold as it normally does but keep that tool at the forefront of your mind. After a tough situation or a meltdown occurs, pull out the tool and work with it. If you'd been able to pull the tool out before things got out of control, what difference would it have made? What might have happened differently? How might that have looked and felt?
After a while with Tool A, pick another tool and spend a comparable amount of time focusing (retrospectively) on that one, Tool B. Go through the same processes: pull out the tool and work with it. If you'd been able to pull the tool out before things got out of control, what difference would it have made? What might have happened differently? How might that have looked and felt?
The more frequently you're able to visualize and understand the impact of the Tools (retrospectively) and the ways in which they can be used, the larger your Learning Library becomes. That means to me that you're starting to train your brain to think in new ways with the retrospective work so that eventually you'll be able to stop yourself and say "Hey, this is like ABC situation and I bet if I use XYZ Tool, things will go better - let's try it!" and that, my dear, is monumental. Half the recovery battle is slowing our knee-jerk reactions down so that we can employ our tools to formulate responses (instead of wild reactions.)
The other half of recovery work is, of course, practicing use of the tools to the point that they become your "standard operating procedure" - your default protocol - your knee-jerk autopilot. With each exercise you do in retrospect, you begin to erase the old default inner self-talk tapes that tell you you're unloved, worthless, going to be abandoned, etc. and you get to start recording new inner self-talk tapes to give you a better, more solid/stable, healthy foundation for your life.