I first came across ‘Taming Your Gremlin: a Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way’ by Rick Carson back in 2004 and it immediately struck a chord with me.
I’ve referred to it often and shared it with many clients.
Your Gremlin, put simply, is the narrator in your head.
Simply by noticing your Gremlin you are shining a light on your repetitive and habitual erroneous thoughts.
With some relaxed detachment and by observing your thinking rather than constantly analyzing you no longer need to be imprisoned by your mental chatter.
Witnessing the movements of the mind as an independent observer, you realise that you do not have to believe your thoughts – you begin to see how repetitive your thinking can become and how absurd it can be.
Your Gremlin can be and probably is cunning.
It makes things up.
It fantasizes and draws you into inevitable internal fights.
In turn this can become a form of mental torture.
This is designed to confuse you into a spiral of depressive thought processes that sap you of your energy and life.
When your Gremlin is trapping you it makes you adopt a whining, oh poor me type of attitude.
It thrives on negativity.
It leads you into inner turmoil and moves you away from the natural you.
This can often be done so very subtly that you start to convince yourself that the `natural you’, the real you, is what your Gremlin tells you rather than who you really are!
In other words your Gremlin can be so totally persuasive that you don’t always know when you are being fooled.
Simply noticing your Gremlin (or internal chatter) is a huge step toward taming it.
If you want to engage in some form of self-exploration in an upbeat format with a sense of humor Rick Carson’s book could well be just the read for you.
It contains a powerful method of helping you gain freedom from self-defeating behaviors and beliefs along with techniques for getting a sliver of light between the natural you and the ‘monster’ in your mind.
It helps you develop the extraordinary power of simply noticing and playing with options and your keys to maintaining emotional balance amid upheaval.
No time to read the whole book?
Here’s a small except which may be sufficient for you to begin Taming Your Gremlin right now . . .
You probably already know, or sense, that you are not your body, your feelings, your thoughts, your personality, or even some complex combination of these variables.
Furthermore, you are not the roles you play such as mother/father, wife/husband, friend, up-person, down-person, client, counsellor, all-around good person or low-down nogoodnik.
These are just labels to describe your style of existence at any point in time.
The real you is a pure life force and is not limited by your concepts and ideas about who you are. It is the real you that is able to experience and enjoy the body in which you dwell, the external physical world in which you live, and the thoughts, memories and fantasies your brain creates and stores.
I do not know all that there is to know about the real you, but I have experienced enough to know that the real you is beautiful beyond your most creative fantasy, and allowed to do so it will guide the evolvement of your life in a manner that will feel terrific.
The real you feels wonderful all of the time; therefore, the more you are able to allow the real you complete freedom, the more you will enjoy yourself. This may sound simple. That is because it is. But it is not easy. For while you were created capable of complete and constant enjoyment, there is within you a gremlin intent on squelching your very essence and consequently your level of enjoyment.
Your Gremlin
You already have some sense of your gremlin though you may have never focused your awareness on him or labelled him (or her).
Your gremlin is the narrator in your head.
He has influenced you since you came into this world and he accompanies you throughout this entire existence. He is with you when you go to sleep at night and when you wake up in the morning. He tells you who and how you are, and he defines and interprets your every experience. He wants you to accept his interpretations as reality, and his goal from moment-to-moment, day-to-day, is to squelch the real, vibrant you within.
Your gremlin wants you to feel bad and he carries out this loathsome pursuit via sophisticated manoeuvres, and by convincing you to waste time reliving the past, worrying about the future, and analyzing the relationships between all sorts of people and things. He wants you to believe that he has your best interests at heart and that his primary purpose is to serve and protect you. His motive is actually much less honorable. He is intent on making you feel lousy. His caution about life and living is inordinate and his methods of control are over-zealous.
Your gremlin is not just a part of your psychological make-up – he is a gremlin and his personality, like his dastardly intention, is all his own.
One thing is for certain, as you begin to simply notice your gremlin, you will become acutely sensitive to the fact that you are not your gremlin, but rather his observer. You will see clearly that your gremlin has no real hold on you. As this awareness develops, you will begin to enjoy yourself more and more.