Quote:
Originally Posted by June_Bug
Yes, but Perna, reality in our minds is "our" reality and without it where would we begin? I have had people challenge my perception of my reality and all it did to me was set up in a state of confusion....... who's right. To base your reality on other's opinions is not an accurate picture of who you are. It's their opinion. It's a judgment, not a true fact.
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Yes, we have our reality and others have their reality but to get along in the world, it helps if we go with the consensus. You can see the sun as purple if you want and argue with everyone that the sun is purple or you can accept the sun is yellow but that you see it as purple. You then have to learn if you understand "purple" and "yellow" as others do or are literally seeing purple when others are seeing yellow. For me, I usually come to understand that I was not seeing "correctly" and what I thought and called purple was actually what everyone else sees and calls yellow. But just insisting that the sun is purple won't help you get along with others or "in the world"?
Life is about experiencing and learning. Often we take what we have learned, only at home in our youth, out into the wider world only to find that our parents were warped in their teachings?
My stepmother was an anxious woman so very controlling and I was an anxious child and learned to be controlling from her but do I want to be controlling? All behavior is learned! There isn't anything you do or way you think that you didn't have to first learn somewhere.
I left home at 22 because my stepmother called me "stupid" one time too many. Fortunately, I "knew" in my own reality that I was not stupid but I could not "prove" it because I only had my stepmother's lists of proofs I'd learned! People who did what I had done were "stupid" (or they wouldn't have done it)! The problem was, there was no room in my stepmother's world view for "mistakes". One was not allowed to make mistakes. Making mistakes was equated to "stupid". So, I had to go out into the greater world and into 30 years of therapy to learn about mistakes and how they are not stupid, nor am I (and I can prove it :-)
Find someone (my first someone was my therapist(s)) you trust and work with them hammering out what you "think" is true against what they say/think. I was anxious and thought the "sky was falling" until I realized that my T was a very calm, quiet person (like I wanted to be like) and my logic told me if she acted that way than either the sky
was not falling or she was crazy/deluded to be so calm! I decided to throw my thinking/faith in the sky-is-not-falling category and from then on, I could use that Real, personal experience to judge other scary experiences in my life and see that I could make my way through them and not have the sky fall on me :-)