You Can Change History

Is someone in your life giving you a hard time?  Can you think of someone who is very abusive, or hyper-critical of you? Let’s say that your boss was in another one of her famous bad moods and screamed at you on Friday afternoon just as you were rushing out of the office to go home to finish your Shabbat preparations. Now, when these situations occur, most people re-play that internal “video” of the bosses angry face and angry voice over and over again in their minds, for days afterwards. They see the boss’s angry, contorted face; they hear his voice telling them that they’re incompetent losers and idiots; they hear the boss threatening to fire them.

This problem gets even more compounded through its being repeated so often. Each time we re-play that scene with the nasty boss we tend to believe her abusive words more and more. So now, the poor worker spends her whole weekend playing and replaying the boss’s abusive comments in her head. Who knows how many times she hears the same trash going around in her mind and all the while she increasingly believes that the nasty boss is right. After a lot of repetitions, the “external terrorist” becomes what I call the “internal terrorist”:

“The boss is right! I’m nothing!  I’m a loser! That’s why I can’t survive without him! If he fires me on Monday morning, who else will give me a job?”

Once a person starts to think this way, unfortunately, she can easily create a self-fulfilling prophesy for herself.

How can such a nice, normal, hard working mother end up believing such lies about herself? How does she get sucked into thinking about herself in the same way that her boss thinks about her when he’s having a mental breakdown? Part of the problem is that Hashem is not letting her see the whole reality because He wants her to find it for herself; so until she has enough emuna, she goes through such experiences and comes to her own very wrong conclusions about herself as a person that have nothing to do with reality.

A person’s thought process is similar to a cartographer’s map of the world. We see roughly where the country is, how big it is, what shape it is – but if we go around thinking that all of Mexico is pink, or that all of India is orange, we’ve got a big problem! The map is a crude representation of what really exists. But it’s only a very small part of a much bigger picture. The map is not the actual territory!

Whatever our lady believed that the interaction with her boss meant, can only be a very small part of reality, and it may be completely off-kilter. She doesn’t have to feel bad about these types of circumstances or have to automatically believe that she is to blame. She can choose how she wants to react when she’s in that same situation the next time.  And, the beginning of this process is to have emuna that Hashem can help her to change the way she processes her boss and to change how she’ll feel about her interactions with her boss in the future.

Here’s an example…

Picture the tyrannical boss in your head (it’s often easier to visualize things if you close your eyes.) Now, you’re going to re-imagine the scene, with some key changes. First, you’re going to put the boss in a clown suit, and give him orange hair and a big, red nose. Now, you’re going to work on the voice and poof all of a sudden, he sounds like Daffy Duck! And finally you add in some bells, whistles, put some circus music in the background, and already, your anxiety and fear have dropped way down.

 “Who is this ‘clown’ anyway?  Since when has anyone taken what a clown said seriously?”

Problem solved. The video stops there, and even if you do replay it a few more times, it won’t cause you anywhere near the same amount of grief. In fact you may even get an enjoyable chuckle whenever you recall that scene.

Amazing as it sounds, what we’ve just learnt together is the secret of changing history.

If we go back now and replay our boss yelling at us in the clown suit, we form new neural pathways that turn the whole thing into a comedy show, and now, there’s nothing for you to worry about at all.  You’ve just changed history because your personal history is nothing more than the way that you chose to remember the events of your life.  In Hebrew, there’s a word for this amazing phenomenon: it’s called bitul. We take what we thought we knew and we nullify it to some positive meaning that Hashem wants us to have about the situation. We accept that our thoughts about what just occurred weren’t real; they were just an illusion projected by the Evil One, to bring us down and try to make us feel bad about ourselves.

This is not repressing thoughts – it’s completely removing them from the scene.  Those bad thoughts are completely gone now, because they were a mirage, and they never existed in the first place. We are being renewed by the Creator every single second. Whatever miserable experiences we’ve had up until now, we can decide to start again, and to view our past with fresh eyes, and realize that those old negative meanings that we put on situations were not true.