Making Peace With The Past

While attending group therapy, I discovered Dr. Burns’ book, Feeling Good, and ended my depression. However, I expected to feel happy over 50 percent of the time and not just in brief sporadic moments.

It still took me over ten more years to find the peace and happiness that permeates my life today. I gathered lots of information for trial and error experiments on myself and reality with a great deal of back and forth progress (or regression). During this emotional upheaval, I focused on learning to change my thinking, discovering truths and what thoughts made me miserable.

The beliefs that made me unhappy usually had a link to my childhood, were typically opinions masquerading as facts and conflicted with who I really am. For example, I knew information that was impossible to know, read people’s minds and communicated with animals. This was not in my parent’s reality and according to them it was defined as “crazy,” which led to my depression and self-hatred.

These unbeneficial viewpoints were not “reality” and could easily be changed when I decided on the most favorable replacement thoughts. These untrue childhood beliefs became one of my realizations for developing the self-empowering methods that I teach on obtaining inner peace.