Ever go to a party and see other children, then get mad that your child seems like they’re so behind?
It doesn’t stop there, right?
Then you start thinking about the next decade or two, projecting more difficulty into the future.
And then depression sets in – anger, despair, exhaustion, frustration right? Let me share with you how I handle that situation.
Many years ago, these two toys this one and this one over here.
They used to anger me. They’re just such simple toys, so easy!
How could the child have trouble playing with these toys? Then I used to think, “My goodness! My daughter can’t even do a simple thing like this. How is she going to be able to do anything in life?”
And that thought exhausted me.
It was just a thought. It wasn’t in alignment with the actions that I actually took to improve my daughter’s health. I was working with great experts and things were changing. But whenever I saw these toys, I used to get so mad and these thoughts would just fill my brain and I would just literally get exhausted from my own thoughts about this simple toy.
Ok. What did I do?
I put the toys in the basement! I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t need my own thoughts to be exhausting me. There’s enough to get exhausted from! My thoughts should not be doing that. So into the basement, these toys went and I kept taking action, getting my daughter the help she needed and so much change that I literally forgot about these toys down in the basement. I didn’t think about them after putting them in the basement. I put them far, I couldn’t even see them when I went down there.
I still had some negative thoughts about the future. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t go from anger to positive in an instant, but there was nothing as quickly angering as seeing these toys. My thoughts would just go so negative.
So I put these out of sight, out of mind. I just didn’t need anything to trigger, instant negative thoughts.
Then a few years later, there was a problem in the basement and I had to move things around. And I found these toys and I remember hating them and the thoughts that would come up. And I was kind of like, let me bring them up. I’ll donate them. There’s no need to force my daughter to do things. So I brought them up. I left them on a side table and I figured we’ll donate them. Just leave it there for now and focus on the problem in the basement. And this is how funny the universe can be. I was in the kitchen cooking, and all of a sudden I heard clanking.
I was thinking, “What’s that?” And I stood there and I was like, that sounds like wood hitting wood.
Then I realized my daughter was playing with the toys! I wish I could’ve seen my face:-) Oh, my goodness! There was such relief and joy. It was like exuberance. Like energy going upwards. It was just such a relief and funny at the same time. So I tip-towed into the dining room and I watched my daughter play with the toys. I didn’t have to teach her how to play with those toys.
I wasn’t there like making this somehow into therapy. She just put the ring on the stick and it was fun. It was just so funny to watch her playing with those toys so easily!
And these toys had tormented me. But once my daughter was healthier, she could play with them as toys and not be used as therapy or a lesson or all the stress that used to come with these toys.
So notice your thoughts. Notice if you’re thinking a thought that gets you angry, resentful, annoyed, frustrated, exhausted or any other negative emotion and think about ways of softening that thought for me, I really couldn’t soften that thought. So I had to put the toys in the basement and focus on what mattered. And then we got to a point where the toys were actually toys. They were played with and enjoyed and that was the exact reason why I’d bought them.
