We all makes mistakes, most of them we recover from fairly easily, others make us feel helpless and stuck. The later are usually the final straw type that follow a seemingly endless negative period where one thing after another is going wrong.
When we are in the midst of these bouts of bad luck our focus is on the negative and that means we are tuning out the positives in our lives.
Let me give you an example. The other day I asked I client who’d come feeling at the end of her tether and complaining of feeling strung out and anxious all the time. “If you didn’t feel stressed; what would you be able to do instead?”
She looked at me for a moment or two, opened her mouth to start to speak, changed her mind and paused. Then started to explain all the things that were making her stressed and how she didn’t want to be so stressed.
My client had got so used to focussing only on her stressed state and the reasons why she felt that way that her mind was stuck in that grove, seemingly unable to go in any other direction. It had become a deeply ingrained habit.
Habits like this and others are often the reason why people stay stuck with feelings of being helpless and hopeless.