Introduction:
We are lucky to have beautiful minds that can create incredible things to positively impact the world. The risk of this gift, though, is that our mind can sometimes be an obstacle that impedes us from achieving our goal because it wants to keep us safe and protect our status quo. Rather than being a positive motivator and helping us move forward, our mind can create stories to keep us stuck. These stories play in our mind like a broken record making us believe that the story is fact. Separating the true facts from the stories playing on repeat in our mind can help us understand that sometimes obstacles are easily overcome if we manage our mind.
John had a very significant reaction to peanuts as a young child. He was never able to outgrow this allergy, but he had been safely avoiding peanuts since his initial reaction. Despite this, his mother would bring him in every summer to see me in clinic like clockwork to get refills of his injectable epinephrine and remind me how scared she was when the reaction occurred many years ago.
Before he headed off to college, John and his mother came into clinic, but this time the conversation was different. John’s mother was considering a move to be close to John’s school. She recounted once again how scared she was when he had the reaction years earlier and she didn’t want to be far from him if another emergency happened.
John’s mother had played the story of “he could have died” in her mind over and over again because she was a parent of a child with a chronic medical diagnosis. This story filled her with feelings of fear and overwhelm which made it challenging to give John the autonomy to grow into a young adult. However, the fact was John didn’t die. In fact, he never had another reaction and never accidentally ate peanuts throughout his time at home. He even taught his Boy Scout troop about when and how to us an Epipen.
I helped John’s mom manage her mind by separating the facts from her mind’s stories. The result was a shift in her emotions to a sense of confidence which became obvious when she sat straight up and teared up discussing how proud she was of her son. She realized that she had created an obstacle that was not allowing her to live her own life, but rather live a life out of fear.
Caring for your body is just as important as caring for your mind. Organizing our minds let us realize that we have a choice to believe the stories our mind is telling us. John and his mom left my office that day with more than a refill of his medication. John’s mom left knowing that the decision to move was hers to make, but this decision should be because of a confident desire to move rather than a fearful need to move.
