by Jaimi Roberts, Central California Women’s Facility
I’d like to think I have the bad habit of all bad habits!!! Lack of thought control…and misplacing them with my feelings. Without a healthy strong belief system this is where everything gets hairy! Yikes!
This bad habit of entertaining random or ruminating thoughts has been my ultimate set up: I’ve lost family over it, engaged in both criminal, homicidal and addictive activities. I had never given myself the chance to live presently, being all consumed with a cumulation of unresolved past baggage, a lot of it was not even my own, but hey it happens especially because we are social learning beings, so of course I picked up certain things along the way & not having any serious experiences to choose from, I took on the thoughts of those around me twisting it into my own understanding. See surviving rather than living. I lived in the reptilian part of my brain so my prefrontal cortex that you know kind of helps us out with judgement never really got put to use much however my little limbic system parts of our brain like the amygdala where emotions are avidly being bounced around was very active. Again survival mode not truly experiencing life.
Gratefully being removed from trauma of domestic violence, drug use, criminal activity, unhealthy relationships, a lot of past grief Has helped. without all the junk distracting my mind, real judgment has the time to be process and stored into my memory bank replacing all those feelings & scrambled immature thoughts I had crammed back there instead.
Though I am still around a chaotic environment, it’s still outside of myself and a distance is placed by the things I force myself to think about. If I take psychology and sociology classes in college I got no choice but to have that knowledge put in my brain, if I go to a yoga class or get in a dog program I have no choice but to be physically healthier, calmer and in a better mood\state of mind. If I go to self-help groups or keep my job as a mentor I have talking about mental, emotional and social problems all day to keep my mind on these things rewiring my brain for healthier habits, unable to have time to indulge in the chaos.
Doing it enough for long enough by the time I get out all the new learned behaviors will now be the second nature just as those beliefs I formed & stored constantly as a youngster got played out. It goes with that saying, “if you know better, you can do better!” “Practice makes perfect” is also a thing to.
When I learned I am more than my feelings worried about how I’ll survive them based around the perception & teaching of others. Instead learned we feel based off our thoughts & when I really started to take a view of addictions, behaviors.. Scientifically, or for those that have their heads in books- the bio-psycho-social aspects of a growing human being into its wholeness. I was able to see the chemical in my body react to either somethings outside of myself or other chemicals I put in it, it then acts like its hijacked and thus I have a little less control. It’s a set up for really painful decisions. wow to think I’m even talking like this is a surprise, I’m that young girl who came to prison who you could cast a whole handful of judgments on, one of those would be- oh she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed neither is she safe being so reckless and immature.
My vocabulary was nothing like this, however it goes to show now how I have retrained my mind to respond, by what I’ve put in my life to focus on. You become your thoughts.