Renewing Your Mind – Letting Go of Negative Thoughts

I was having headaches. They were the kind of headaches that would put me down for the day after work. I could not play with the children. I could not scroll through social media. I could not enjoy conversation with my husband. Some may call them migraines, but I only visited the doctor once, and when he prescribed medicine for “stress” without diagnosing the root cause, I never went back.

I tied the cause to my blood pressure which was high only at work. I began drinking plenty of water and cutting back on potato chips for breakfast. I ate fewer pickles and less pasta, but the headaches remained. It was as though, I lived at constant capacity so even the smallest of stressors put me over the edge and down for the count. I could not recover.

I tried all of the essential oils. I began a consistent exercise routine. None of it worked. The only things that gave me even the slightest solace were headache meds, and I refused to continue getting stronger and stronger meds to eliminate a problem whose cause still remained yet to be discovered.

I prayed, and I released everything I knew to release. I released everyone I knew to release. I gave God my lists of all those who came to mind who had ever offended me in any way as I listened to messages on forgiveness. Yet deep inside, I knew that forgiveness was not my current battle. While I had a ways to go in the layers of hurt, I had long healed from those battles, but my head was still hurting so there had to be more subconsciously. Therefore, I continued in prayer.

And my migraines continued, and I thought back to the days my grandmother took BC powder every day and accepted that perhaps these headaches were genetic.

I vowed to try one last allergy test and maybe a “mold” test in my classroom A/C just to be sure.

***

Then the dreams started. I was haunted nightly by the people who hurt me the most. The more I released them to God, the more the dreams came and took over my thoughts so I begged God to help me forgive. Surely, these dreams indicated unforgiveness.

And God smiled. He gave me no response…

Which of course made things worse. My thoughts raced a million miles a minute as I tried to reconcile the thoughts God refused to address. I fixated on them. I could concentrate on nothing else. The thoughts consumed me.

That is, they consumed me until I shut myself in my closet and demanded God give me some sort of direction.

I waited for tears that never flowed. I sat and waited on God as God sat and waited on me. I waited more. He waited more.

I finally begin to tell Him I had nothing left. I had given Him all I had to give. I had told Him all I had to say. Yet, here we were in this closet trying to figure out why exactly He keeps waking me up at night.

Only then did He respond, “You are healed. Now it is time for you to move on.

“You are at capacity because you spend your days trying to get back to a place that does not exist anymore…to a girl who does not exist anymore. You remember her, and you love her. You remember when you were type A. You had to have every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. You stayed up late to get the job done, and you woke up early to double check, and you want her back.

“You want girl who prayed big and believed big. You want the girl who loved big, and laughed big, and lived big, the one who was all in all the time.

“You are using up all your energy to find her so you can be her, and she was beautiful. But she’s all grown up.

“You want to erase the scars. You want to erase the memories. You just want things to be the same…if you could just get back there…to her… then perhaps you could erase the hurt and live your life.

“But you are already living your life. And it is beautiful. You are just as beautiful now as she was then. You are healed, but the scars are not going away.

“Your scars are what I used to save you – the way my scars are what I used to save you.”

***

And I let her go. And I have not had a headache since.

***

Want to know how to let go of negative thoughts?

Let go of the person you so badly want to be and accept the person you already are. Most of your negative thoughts center around beating yourself for something in life that has happened to you that you wish you could change.

You gained weight. You lived through trauma. You traded your type A for a very different type B. You lost someone you love. Your body will not do what you tell it to do anymore. You can no longer get it all done. You had control and you lost it, and you want it back.

So you berate yourself first not being who you used to be.

Let it go. Let her go. Release her to God. Release yourself to God. You have changed, and change is ok, even change that happened as a result of the worst moments of your life.

You are healed. Now it is time to live your life on different terms.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, He is a new creation. The old has gone. Behold, the new has come!” – 2 Corinthians 5:17.

***

How do you let go of negative thoughts?

Comment below or connect with me: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat: mrsbonnaffons.

Leave your email so that I can send positive thinking strategies straight to your inbox.

If you would like to learn other ways to live a positive, prayerful lifestyle, check out these additional blogs on the subject:

1. How to Make Positive Thinking Work in Your Life
2. Unleashing the Power of Positivity
3. 3 Ways to Be Positive in a Negative Environment

If you liked what you read here today, feel free to share with friends and family.