You know that feeling you get when you’re beating yourself up inside your own head about some trivial thing you did—or didn’t do—and all you can do in response is bow your head and keep it coming?
Now you know what that is: it’s simply a Gremlin.
Right??
In case you’ve been hunting for them this past week, you only need one more important detail before we go any further.
There aren’t any (real) creatures in your brain.
Full Disclosure: The idea of gremlins is a construct to help us understand the parts of us that get stuck in our negative pasts, so we can do something about it.
When we go through a difficult time or situation when we’re young—that no one helps us to work through—we have to have a way to handle ourselves so we can stay safe.
Because this process is instinctive and unconscious, it often remains invisible until we look for it—or until we trigger it. Something long forgotten all of a sudden POPS UP and knocks us out: a Gremlin is only one of several ways that happens.
The Gremlin’s job is to keep your Inner Child safe—and it does that by YELLING AT YOU. Kinda like a random angry parent who emerges out of nowhere. They yell because it makes you pay attention—just like a lot of us did when we were growing up.
AND.
There’s a difference now: you’re not that little helpless kid anymore. You’ve been around the proverbial block more than once and you can take care of yourself in a variety of contexts.
Full Disclosure: The only part of you that the Gremlin can control is the part of you who got stuck—your Inner Child. That’s why we feel so helpless in the face of all that yelling. That’s why we put our head down and surrender to it and feel like crap. It can feel like there’s no way around it…
UNTIL YOU TALK BACK.
So It’s Time to Give Your Perspective a SHIFT
When we were kids, our world—and our safety—depended on the big people in our lives. It made total sense to believe everything they said. Lots of things made sense to us when we were kids that we’ve since outgrown.
The things we used to believe when we were little—they felt so real at that developmental stage—very often turned out to be something else. (Let’s not even hazard a guess about how many of them were simply part of the everyday kid variety of being gaslit—by well-meaning parents who had to keep us quiet and obedient)
- Did you believe that monsters hid under your bed or in your closet?
- Did you believe that if you “stepped on a crack (you would) break your mother’s back?”
- Did you look for evidence of the stork that brought your baby sister or brother?
- Did you put out cookies and milk for Santa?
These are the easy ones we all outgrew. Our conversation this week is to take this exact same process to update yourself and outgrow your Gremlins. All you have to do is:
- Accept that they’re there so you can identify them when they show up.
- Call them out and
- Talk back to them.
They will disappear like every monster you ever thought was under your bed.
The 411 on Our Strategy
And YES. It’s totally weird and looks exactly like sorcery to the casual observer.
More importantly, It’s totally based in the art and science of three recovery practices:
- “Name it and claim it.” The moment you put a name to something, you’re in charge of it. This is the scientific foundation for this strategy…because it works.
- The last person who speaks wins. This is why some people always have to have the last word…because it works!
- Anything worth doing well is worth repeating. This is why “lather, rinse, repeat” is how millions of people still wash their hair—even though nobody needs all that shampoo. Starting in the 1960’s that one sentence made billions of dollars for shampoo companies…because it works.
Are you ready to “OUT(grow) Your GREMLIN?”
GREAT! Next week you’ll get my time-tested recipe to do just that.
Happy Gremlin Hunting!