Jacquie - We are all have so many feelings, like keys that can be pressed, and when pressed by outer influences such as social pressure, beliefs or things said to us, we can be played like merry or awful tune. We react to them all in various ways.
And nearly all reactions are habits, and the trick of shifting them is to start a new habit. Habits are hard to get rid of, but can be done. I remember when my first wife divorced me because I had left her I was told many things such as what a bad father and husband I was, and how could I do it to my children. So each time I visited my children - almost every day - when I left the house it felt like my world had collapsed and also I felt that my new wife was like a prostitute who had tempted me away from my children - despite the fact that they visited us almost daily. My children were so important to me that the idea that I was a bad father tore me apart. I recalled a man living down the road from us who had left his children and married again. I asked him how he managed it. He said that he had killed any thoughts and feelings about them. That was not for me.
I suffered that torment for years, messing up my life, until a dream showed me what I had been doing. I had thought the pain and misery was from some earlier trauma, but could not find one. And the dream showed me that it wasn’t a trauma but cultural programming that said that I was a bad father, and also a bad husband, both true from a certain viewpoint.
The view that I was shown by the dream was that my pain was from habits created by the culture I grew up in. I realised that I could create a new life by changing the habits of a life time. So every time I left the house and the old habits started tearing me apart again I stopped just outside the door and looked at them. I had tried positive thinking and that didn’t work. What I saw and reminded myself was that I had gone down that road a thousand times and it always led to self destruction. So by seeing it I decided to change the habit and reminding my self, not that I was a wonderful person, but that I was a human man, who did not want to make his wife suffer from my awful moods, and also I saw from the dream that we are always free to go in any direction, and that sense of freedom enabled me to start a new life.
It didn’t happen suddenly, but each day it got easier until I walked in peace. It was the recognition that my state of mind led me to self destruction every time it took that road that resolved me to change outside the door. See -
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/habits/Tony