“I don’t get this,” said Paula, “What does this unhappy part of me want me to do?”

“Ask her,” I stated.

Paula asked and answer came. “Our work and all our activities are fine, but I need something deeper. I’ve been wanting you to open to something spiritual, but you haven’t listened to me.”

“I have tried going back to church, but that doesn’t seem to be doing it for me. This does seem to be some kind of spiritual emptiness, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

Paula had never taken time to develop a personal relationship with God. While she believed in a Higher Power, it was something “out there”, not something she connected with and brought into her heart and soul. Her soul was missing sense of deep connection and inner fullness that comes from having a personal relationship with a spirit source of love and guidance, as well as with her own inner feelings. While her children were filling this empty space, she didn’t deal with it, but now that they were gone, it was time to face emptiness that had always been there but had been covered up with mothering.

I asked Paula to close her eyes and imagine a wise and loving spiritual being, perhaps her own highest self, perhaps a relative who had died that she loved, perhaps a religious figure she felt connected with, or an image of a teacher, mentor, or guardian angel. She was able to imagine an angelic Presence that made her feel very loved and safe.

“Now bring love from this Presence into your heart and then down into empty place within. Imagine that you are loving child within in same way you have loved your children, hearing your inner child’s feelings and needs in same way you did with your children. If you also open to learning with this Presence about what is loving to your inner child, and then take loving action for yourself, you will start to fill that emptiness within you. Are you willing to try this?”

Paula was very willing to learn to create deeper connection with Self and with Spirit. She reported to me a few weeks later that she was no longer feeling depressed. Her “empty nest” was now being filled with her inner and spiritual connection.

Person A is taking it personally and is then inventing stories about situation.

Person B is just sticking to facts. Person B is not dredging up past and making things up about what is going on and is not jumping to conclusions about what this one missed phone call will mean to their future.

When you look at it like this, you see how ridiculous we can be, when we feel that someone has let us down. We search our past for every related incident and this makes us feel even worse and makes us project into future and all we can then see is that we are going to be unhappy forever more.

But in reality what has really happened is that we have talked ourselves in to becoming stressed and unhappy.

If we want to stop stressing ourselves with our thinking we need to get control of our wandering minds and instead stick to facts. With our missed phone call facts simply are 1. Someone told us they would phone at a certain time 2. They did not phone when they said they would. 3. We probably feel disappointed

So those are facts - rest of it we invent.

So next time you are getting stressed, stop a moment and consider what facts are and what you are inventing about those facts. You may even be able to stop stress dead in its tracks and laugh at how our own minds can be our worst enemy.