Insights from Prison: AB
Posted by Anna Debenham, February 14, 2018
One thing I love about my job is I’m always learning from the people I work with. Recently a participant in my group had an insight about his life and his thinking that sparked something in me, and from it I saw something new for myself.
3 weeks into our group AB raised his hand and said, ‘I realised something a last week that has changed my life. I feel 100 pounds lighter.’
‘ What’s that?’ I said.
‘ I’ve always been a really negative person. For as long as I can remember it’s been that way. I thought that was just who I was. No way to change. I’ve always assumed I had to respond to my thoughts, that who I am is the accumulation of all my thoughts and feelings. But now I know my thoughts are just thoughts and I can ignore them and they just pass on by. I don’t have to do anything. So the last couple weeks the volume of my old repetitive thoughts started to quieten down on their own. My days started to feel lighter and I’m not feeling so heavy.
‘ So, if the past two weeks have been like that, then the whole of my past, which I just saw as negative, wasn’t really all negative at all, was it? It was just the way I was seeing it. I realised I’ve been feeling hooked into the stories of my past for three decades. So I just decided to put it all down. I see now it’s not even real. It’s all an illusion. Why would I hold onto all that, it doesn’t make sense. So I’ve just let it go. It’s so simple and I feel so much freer inside.’
I later relayed this story to a work colleague, and she said ‘…. it’s so true, you’ve just got to have siblings to realise that.’
Our past shared experiences can look so different, all dependent on our respective states of mind. I realised that memory is more a reflection of my mood at the time than whatever actually happened. The amount of old stories I can bump up against in my head about what I thought I was capable, or more like incapable, of purely based on a past experience.
Creating The Insight Alliance, working in several prisons, having a research project with the DOC… all effortlessly came into being when I stopped living in the straight jacket of my past experience or feelings. AB reminded me once again experience doesn’t exist out in the world, it’s an inside job.