Page 135 - Taming Your Gremlin A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way (Rick Carson)_Neat

If you lead your life in total accord with shoulds, oughts, and musts, it’s
as if you are a computer programmed with rules that predetermine your
responses to feelings and situations. This can lead you to miss entirely the

freshness, excitement, and potential for creativity inherent in living.

Your gremlin will use shoulds, oughts, and musts to trap you into
forming a rigid, unconscious dependency on fixed or habitual response.
This can actually make you very anxious (sometimes panicky) when you
encounter intense and powerful emotions and/or situations for which your
shoulds, musts, and oughts do not seem to apply.

I rushed to Oklahoma City when I got the news of the bombing of the
Murrah Building on April 19, 1995. In a matter of hours after the bombing I
found myself responding to families of victims, some of whom had gotten

bad news; others who were waiting to hear the fate of their loved ones. But
one of the most distraught people I dealt with was a man who was
trembling uncontrollably. As far as he knew, he had no relatives or
acquaintances in the building at the time of the explosion. He was in his late
40s, clean-cut, and wearing an obviously expensive business suit. As I held
him and talked with him, it became clear to me that his crisis was

engendered not so much by the horrific event that had occurred but by his
own reaction to the powerful emotion he experienced when, from his car, he
saw the destruction. In other words, his concept of himself did not allow for
him to feel the depth of emotion he was experiencing. His concept of
himself was as an always-in-charge macho male completely in control of
his emotions. His habit for responding to strong emotions of any sort had
always been to block them. This habit was based on a firm should that

strong men do not cry.

I helped him manage his emotions by staying in physical contact with
him and helping him to allow them to flow, which in this case meant letting
himself sob deeply for a very long time. I said to him several times, in
several ways, “What you’re feeling is as natural as nighttime. Your body is
doing what it wants to do. Trust it.” I encouraged him to relax his breathing

and give his feelings lots of space. Before long he calmed down, and as we
talked, he began to understand how his image of manhood, that is to say his
concept of who he was and how the world worked, had run head-on into his