If My Plate Could Talk: “The Power Of Your Thoughts” (Part Two)

Kaijasphere welcome to if youf Plate Could Talk. It just always feels good when we get to this part of the week. I also will acknowledge I am just excited because this is the part of the week, the part of the year where I know that rest is just on the other side of things. And I'm excited for that. I'm so glad to see so many of you starting to join in. Come in and say good morning, good afternoon or good evening to depending upon when you decide to join, of course. Let me know how is your week going up until this point, you share whatever feels valuable for you.

You can share a win. You can share a challenge that you are overcoming. You can share a need for support. Let's open it up. Good morning, Philly. And as always, thank you. Speak wonder. Of course you can share where you are. Good morning, Northern Minnesota. Hello North Carolina. Always need to make sure I rep North Carolina from the Zen den. Actually got the sign showing this time around. If this is your first time Here, welcome. I'm Dr. Charisse Johnson. I'm a licensed clinical mental health therapist, mindfulness practitioner, author, your pseudo therapist, bff, all the things.

But I'm so glad that you're here because we get together on Fridays, hello Erie, Pennsylvania, hello New York. And just talk about what's on our plate, what's happening and being able to take a really introspective look of all things life trauma and everything in between. Very sleep deprived this week. I feel you. I don't know if something was in the air, but I had multiple days where I kept waking up. I would be up for hours. Then I had a day where I took something over the counter and oh my goodness, I felt like it took.

I promise you, I feel like it took 36 hours for it to go away. But I'm awake today feeling a little spicy. Let me also give this caveat. I'm on multiple platforms of sharing and so on one of those platforms there's a more familiarity. I'm over there a lot so I can kind of be a certain way with people. Good morning, Atlanta. And then I come over into the Cadre space and in the back of my mind I'm always like, Dr. Charisse, bring it down, bring it down. There's people over here that don't know you as well and you don't want to scare anybody.

It's just my confession of the day. Anyway, let's focus. We've been talking about the power of your thoughts. For those of you that watched last week, we talked about our thoughts are our thoughts always facts and the baseline, the bottom line to that dynamic was our thoughts are always very real and how we feel about a situation is always valid. But our thoughts also come from a whole dynamic of different aspects and pieces and our beliefs and our experiences. And so I want to take us through, through the rest of this year a little bit more depth because the quality of your thoughts will also impact the quality of your well being.

You can have all the tools in the world, you can listen to all the Cadre contribute contributors there are, you can do all the therapy that you desire, but if you still have a very poor quality, a very skewed quality of thought, it will come at your own expense. So we have to find a better way of acknowledging our feelings, recognizing our thoughts, but also being able to peel back our thoughts and go, where are my thoughts? Jaded, I even I am not perfect. Far from constantly go through a process of going, here's how I thought about something.

I get in new information, I have a new experience, I recognize a new pattern in myself and go, oh, I might need to change my thought on that, because my thought on that is part of what keeps me in the same situation or might keep me attracting the same types of individuals in my life, whatever the case may be. So I share that with you to go, we're all here with a human experience. There's no such thing as perfection in our thoughts. It doesn't mean that you want to be able to get to a place where you don't trust yourself.

That's not what I'm saying. But we want to go, what are my feelings? What are my emotions? What are my thoughts around this? And now how do I step back and separate my thoughts that are subjective glimpses of my emotional experiences and then separate that from the facts and see where these two things line up and where I might need to adjust things. I had a new client and this week a young adult. I love working with young adults. Part of that is because I'm getting them right before the fully developed part of their brain goes into space.

Because the brain does not fully develop until we're 20. So if you have children that are still acting special, there's a reason. Now we act special after 26 and there's a reason, but brain development part. And this client asked a wonderful question that I hear a lot and it fits right in with our conversation. So they asked, should I remember every bad thing that has happened to me or is it better to try to let those things go now? I'm going to provide you with an invitation to share. I was almost going to say out yourself, share.

Where do you land? Are you the person that typically remembers every hard experience, every hurt, every pain? Or are you the person that processes it and has a tendency for it to fade? When I was in college training, one of my professors gave the analogy of a file cabinet and said, essentially we find ourselves in two different places where either the individual who has a long, extended file cabinet of every single thing, you know, what it smelled like, what it looked like, where you were, what you were wearing, what the other person was wearing, and everything that was happening, and you keep it lock and key.

Or sometimes there's the individual who has the file cabinet that is fairly bare. Now, what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that one is better than the other. Both come with benefits and cost when it comes to the level of thoughts that we hold on to. So are you a full file cabinet or are you a sparse, fairly empty file cabinet? That is the share, and that way we'll share in a way that if somebody's scrolling through and they haven't listened, they don't really know what you're talking about. They just think, why is everybody talking about filing cabbage?

I will fully acknowledge. Well, I'll let you guess. Tell me which one you are, and then tell me which one you think I am. Just. Just for fun. And I'm gonna take a sip of water while waiting for your responses to come through this like semi matches in a weird way. Are you the type of person that keeps the whole list going, or are you the one who kind of works through it and then you're like, I'm done with it. Which one are you and which one do you think? So I see some. I put in a file, lock it away until the cabinet burst.

Yeah. And deals with what comes out, recognizing that our children that, yes, they also have their dynamic of full cabinet. Struggles to release anything, dwells on it for a long time. Yeah, yeah. We can be a combination of both, but we still have a tendency to be one more than the other. So try to be really honest with yourself because this introspection really is helpful. And I'll give you an example of why it's important. Let me say this first. Continue to share and then guess what you think I am.

And I'll come back and tell you what I am in a moment. When we are the individual that has a tendency to be the full filing cabinet and we're keeping a log. The challenge to that is, it can lend itself toward cognitive distortions, meaning that your thoughts are often heavily influenced because your constantly moving through that file cabinet and saying cabinet and saying like, oh, this is a reminder of everything else that I've ever been through. So you're always constantly. Or you might always be seeking for similarities.

So we see that over here, you have a hard time trusting, you have a difficult time not self sabotaging a relationship. Because if somebody does something that shows a hint of something that's in the full cabinet, then you're afraid you lock up. There's a lot of defense mechanisms over here. The benefit of the memory is that when you choose to address those things and work through them, they can provide you with some very valuable insight around what is deeply bothering you. And it allows you to come up with the themes of what has wounded you or ruptured or made things difficult.

But full file cabinet means that you're constantly activated or triggered. You're more likely to be activated or triggered. You're more likely to struggle with overthinking, rumination and depression. So there, there's a heaviness. We also find that people who have a tendency to be full file cabinets in their thoughts fear looking at the files. So they keep all of them, but also go, I'm afraid to look at all of them because I don't know if I can handle it. So that's one dynamic, right? The other side, those that move through it, the benefits and the cost depends on how they work through it.

If they're the individual that says, oh, my file cabinet is empty because I'm a dismissive avoidant, I dismiss what I do and I just throw it away. That is not a skill, that is not a tool, right? That is choosing to abdicate responsibility for what you've done and what you think about yourself. And it still shows up. If it's an individual over here that moves through it in an unhealthy way and just tosses things out too quickly, they're in denial, they're masking, they're not doing as well as they say that they are.

Which means they could have some deeply underlying dynamics and refuse to see them. Or they're an individual who've been through some really hard things and they're dissociating and disconnecting because their brain feels like, I cannot take anymore. So this also has its cost benefits to being the individuals that have a more empty file cabinet. If you've worked through it in an adaptive way, then those individuals are going to have a tendency to be lighter when it comes to mindset. They have less fear going into situations because they're not keeping a log of all of these things that happened to me before.

So I'm sure they're going to happen to me again. They can be more optimistic, they can be less activated or triggered because if something happens and it feels similar, they'll just go, well, let me take a moment and think about why this is activating me. But then let me also look at how this is different than before. Right. So I would love for you to go back and really listen to those dynamics because they both have benefits and they both have costs. For those that are wondering, I am the file cabinet that moves through and out, out the window.

But in full transparency. The beginning stages of my life. Doing that was unhealthy. It was me having so many traumas happen too much, too fast, too soon. There was no time to hold on to anything. I knew if I hold on to everything that happens to me, the filing cabinet will be on top of me and just squish me. So there was a lot of areas in my life that my brain naturally itself repressed. There were other things that I suppressed as a child, as a adolescent, as an adult, or as a young adult. And then once I learned about that process, I had to take time to go, okay, so I still need to go back and find a few of those files so that I can heal them.

But my natural temperament is I. I don't hold on to things. I could be mad at you, but I don't hold onto it very long. There is just something about my natural temperament that says, I don't want that. Let's move through it. And that's different. So that being said, as we continue to center on our thoughts, I just want you to take some time to evaluate. Here's your action step. What do you do with this? I want you to take a look at maybe over the last month, what you've noticed about the quality of your thoughts, your interactions, your relationships with self, your interpersonal dynamics.

And I want you to ask yourself, am I in full cabinet mode with my thoughts, or am I in empty cabinet mode with my thoughts? And then ask yourself, what is the benefit or cost of how this is showing up for me right now? What's the benefit or cost of how I'm moving through my recent thoughts? In other words, are you holding on to any thoughts right now because you feel like, I need to hold on to this hurt? I need to hold on to this thought because I feel like it's self protective, but it's also making you feel bad and it's time to work through it.

Are you dismissing avoiding any thoughts that you need to open up for a moment, look at address and then put that file away. My hope for you and I'll get to see you one more time before we end this year is that you really decide what needs to stay in 2024, especially if you're someone that's listening to this in the moment around this December 2024 time. What thoughts, what narratives, what triggers, what activations, what awful memories? Are you ready to say I don't want to carry this any longer because you have the ability to take certain thoughts and put them to rest.

And I hope that you will choose to take anything that no longer serves you, anything that is overwhelming you, keeping you stuck and causing you to self sabo that you will address it in an adaptive and healthy way, which we'll talk a little bit about next week and then you will move forward into the new year. Lighter because I will not see many of you prior to the holiday season. For those that ascribe and celebrate holidays, Happy Holidays. I have loved every single moment that we've spent together and I know this is not the end, but I just want to acknowledge the season.

Please take care of yourself. Please rest and give yourself what you need and then we will pick back up where we left off next week. Have a good one.