The Clothesline, A Metaphor
Imagine a clothesline on which clothes are hanging out to dry. Each piece of clothing is attached to the line with a pin. Further, imagine that the hanging clothes are divided into colored clothes and white clothes. The colored clothes represent negative emotions like fear, anger and sadness. The white clothes represent positive and neutral emotions. The pins represent ideas that you believe, these pins support and sustain the emotions that you feel. This metaphor makes it easy to see how beliefs support your emotions. If you have been feeling emotional pain, you can be certain that the cause is a belief. It makes sense to challenge the problematic belief and ensure that it is true. One shortcut to jumpstart the process of analyzing beliefs is to assume that all painful beliefs are untrue. After assuming that all painful beliefs are untrue, then the task quickly becomes one of identifying explicitly the belief and correcting the distortion. People routinely create stories about reality that are distortions, and this is the cause of much emotional pain. Years and years of people analyzing their most painful beliefs have borne out that these beliefs are based on distortions. Cognitive therapy, a theory of psychology used with great success is based on the idea that painful beliefs are false beliefs. Byron Katie originated a useful method called The Work that helps people to analyze and correct the false beliefs that cause emotional pain. You can check out Katie’s work at www.thework.com.
