Steven Bartlett’s Chat With Marisa Peer
3 Steps To Remove Your Negative Thoughts
Steven Bartlett’s Podcast ‘The Diary Of A CEO’ is a personal favourite. He speaks to people from all walks of life and really gets deep into key life issues, challenges and problems. Steven opens his podcast each week with ‘I hope nobody’s listening, but if you are, please keep this to yourself’. I am sorry for sharing this and would urge anyone to listen to the full episode, however I wanted to comment on a few points.
Steven speaks with Marisa Peer, a world leading therapist and starts by talking about self-limiting belief’s. She works with people who think they are broken but often comes to the realisation that they had a flawed upbringing and that may have resulted in flawed parenting. Once they come to that realisation they are able to make peace with their parenting or ‘flaws.
Marisa says ‘If you look at the problem instead of the symptom you can start to observe your thoughts, for example I am not enough, no-one loves me, don’t look at me. No baby is born thinking this about themselves, so what happened to this self limiting belief? Someone chipped away at it. A teacher, a parent, a friend. Every thought isn’t a thought but it is a blueprint.’
Marisa assesses her own flaw in the episode. She explains throughout her adulthood she has always been late. Missing planes or meetings until the day she stood back and understood in her childhood she once missed the bus and her dad was so mad she had to walk home loving the attention the action brought.
‘Always treat the purpose. Imagine you are the person who binges on cakes when something goes wrong. People will mostly say what is wrong with that but I say, hey what is right with it. You’re an alcoholic tell me what’s good about it, you keep going back to it so there must be something good. People will say, now you mention it, it gives me comfort and I can always rely on it. It takes away the pain, I get comfortably numb. I can come home and just block it all out.’
Marisa treats the ‘what lies beneath’. What does it give you, why do you think it helps you, when did it start?
‘I treated a chronic alcoholic. He told me he never saw his dad but once he took him to the pub and said ‘you’re a man now’ and he began to take him to the pub every weekend. He thought it was great, his dad likes him because he was a man and they had time bonding over beer. The dad died and he continued drinking beer because he believed he was bonding with his father. What was right about drinking beer was it had a memory. He then realised the role of drinking was to keep that memory going, meaning you he was able to stand back and understand his dads memory could remain alive without drinking. His dad didn’t live in a pint of beer. If something we hate keeps coming back, you have to stop treating the problem but the cause. The role of the drinking, the benefit of the drinking and the purpose of drinking. Once you do that you can change it forever.’