Understand the Pattern of thinking before you regret (New Approach)
By: Starter_ Startler
Tags: New Approach, Thinking, Regret, Patterns, Life Lessons

How can you teach yourself for understanding the pattern of thinking?

There are various ways one can use to understand their thinking pattern. Here, we will be discussing the Parent-Child approach for understanding the thinking pattern so that next time when we set a goal for something and if some thoughts wall up against us, we will be having a proper analyzing scheme to win against those thoughts and reach the desired goals.

Parent-child approach

Imagine you are inside your house where you have a younger sibling who is around 9 years old. Notice, when your parents say to him/her to finish their homework before they go to play, what’s their reaction? They refuse to do so, they start throwing tantrums, start crying, show their stubborn side. And when they are allowed to do as they like then they have a big grin on their face, they sparkle enthusiasm, they dance and hop around, they just light up the environment.

Just analyze the scenario and see, the parent is the one who sets the goal, the one who is disciplined and the one who stay firm and in order. Now, if you see the child, when the child is assigned a task to complete, he/she refuses, shows and gives various excuses and try to win over the scenario. And once they are allowed to do the thing they wanted to do, they just smile, light up the environment, makes everyone feel good.

Reflect on the above-mentioned scenario and try to compare it with your thoughts!

What did you get from analyzing the above scenario?

Answer yourself!

A balanced relationship between Parent and Child

As stated above, A child cries, when it doesn’t get what it wants, ignoring all the things that it already has. A child can even be persuaded by candy for trading the merit certificates — — because it lacks to appreciate the real values.

Similarly, when we compare it to thoughts, whenever we are challenged by any sort of situation the child mind reacts immediately. Just like when someone insults you, you start defending yourself, yell at them or just make a sour face to them. Neither we want to be controlled by such automatic responses every time in every case, nor do we want to get rid of the child mind at all.

The Child mind enables us to be spontaneous, creative, enthusiastic, and dynamic. Those are the things that make us thrive, but if it starts ruling us, we are sure to go downfall.

Now, talking about the parent mind. It is the adult mind that creates restrictions for us like “ Don’t do it”, “That’s not good for you”, and so on. ” It reminds us to pause and assess the bigger picture, taking time to weigh the default reaction, decide if it’s appropriate, give values and opinions, as well as propose other options. The intelligent parent knows what the child needs versus what the child wants and can decide what is better for them for the long term.

The parent-child mind suggests that when the mind is childlike and takes control over us, it means we have failed to train our adult mind which is also to be known as the Monk mind. And we know that, when a child doesn’t get what it wants, it throws tantrums, and we tend to give in to it.

The parent mind is the mind with smarter voices, with smarter choices, if it is well-trained it shows us the meaning of self-discipline, reasoning power, makes us ask questions like, “Why am I doing this?”, “ What did I do wrong?”, etc.

Now, when there is a balance between the parent and the child mind we get nearer to the goals we have set to. But, if the parent isn’t supervising and the control is total with the child then the trouble follows. Moreover, if the parent mind is too controlling then the child turns out to be bitter, resentful which means the trouble follows.

So, what we need here is balance and give the right training to the mind. Filling it with rich information, talking to oneself for having a clearer vision and the most important one is to become Self-Aware.

What can we conclude?

The quality of our communication with the mind is based on the history of our relationship with it.

So, the first step that we need to take is understanding our minds by becoming aware of the different voices inside us. When we start to differentiate the voices, analyzing the different sort of thoughts, just doing these things will help us see the bigger picture and make us take better decisions.