Assumptions.
We get a thought. The thought inspires an emotion. The emotion is powerful. Our mind floods us with a visual. We react to the visual as though it is a fact. We act out.
The people involved feel confused and wondering what is going on.
We find out we were wrong.
All because we treated an emotionally-charged thought as a fact.
This is the power of an assumption.
Assumptions are not facts. They’re predictions we’re making about something without facts or adequate information.
Take for instance this scenario:
You have a friend that withdraws from you and is cold to you. Your brain gives you this thought, “Maybe we did something wrong?”. You feel your chest tense with anxiety and your stomach turn with a bit of dread. You start to fret and obsess about what it could be that you did.
Yet, your friend is in their world wrestling with some bad news from work about their job. The job is ending. They’ll be laid off shortly. And they cope with these shocks by pulling into themselves.
How many times have you assumed someone’s behavior was about you?
If you’re reading my blog, then likely hundreds of times.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done it myself. I still do it, although not as much.
It is a habit for us to assume things because of our programming. The abusers and
So, naturally we’d assume that someone’s behaviors are caused by us in some way and that we’re responsible for fixing those feelings.
But in reality, this was never the actual case. The abusers taught us to think this way so they could avoid accountability and emotional maturation. They didn’t want to do the hard labor of growing up, so they put it on us.
We’re adults now and we’re autonomous and free. Thriving beyond codependency demands that we start respecting one of the primary elements of Personal Sovereignty (aka Personal Autonomy): that people create their own emotions.
Yep. That friend in the example above created the emotions they’re wrestling with. Your abusers created their own feelings and displaced them on to you. You are creator of your feelings.
How do we know that we are the creator of our feelings?
It comes down to neurological programming, or what I call “emotional association”.
Have you ever experienced a shift in how you feel about someone or something? For example: you really liked a particular TV show, but then something happened in that show and you felt very different towards it afterwards.
This demonstrates emotional association and how it can change based on our point of view of it.
This demonstrates we create our emotional responses and reactions to things within and outside of us.
This is why we don’t need to take things personally anymore. We didn’t create the feelings. Their programming or emotional association told them to feel those things in response to whatever was going on.
This is also why we can transform our Governing Value of shame, guilt, emptiness, fear, or any other emotion to LOVE (which is why my HEAL Process™ is so powerful and effective).
These associations get us drawn into trusting our assumptions. Once we accept that assumptions are not facts and are not useful, we can begin to ask a new question: What else is possible here?
This allows us to stop internalizing their behavior and start externalizing it instead. This means we’re considering the situation and context of what is happening rather than making it about us.
We’re better able to make effective choices for ourselves and better able to connect with others because we see them and what is really happening.
So, today, are you willing to give up treating your assumptions as facts and start opening up to seeing the real context instead?