This week on the Therapy Spot, I’d like to practice getting a bird’s eye view of our own thoughts. Luckily, you don’t need to be Superman to do this – you just need IFS!
If you’ve ever had a bad interaction with someone, you might think, “Wow, they really made me feel small and unimportant.” The idea that other people make us feel something, however, is one of the biggest myths in society today.
Well, you can’t change other people’s actions, but you can change what and how you think about them. That’s where metacognition comes in.
Metacognition is really just a fancy way to say “thinking about thinking,” which means we can examine our own thoughts while we engage in them! By practicing metacognition we can understand, adapt, change, and control our thought processes. This helps us uncover beliefs deep within parts of us that may have been kept out of our awareness.
Metacognition gives us the opportunity to update outdated beliefs and heal old hurts. There are two important steps to this process:
- We become aware of our strategies as we solve a problem
- We reflect on and evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking
Unfortunately, not all of us take the time to reflect deeply on our own experiences. Our day to day lives can get hectic and as a result, we might go weeks without examining our own thinking. Metacognition of our internal world begins by noticing our thoughts as well as the feelings and sensations that go along with them.
When we use our minds and senses in a flexible way, we can address situations from different angles. After all, using the same approach over and over doesn’t always work! So join me on the Therapy Spot this week, and let’s look at our thoughts from above.
Image Credit
“Superman!!” by Flickr user Madeleine Deaton is licensed under CC BY 2.0.