Your HD Reality
Courtney Cable
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Courtney Cable Coaching
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The coaching model I use with all my clients is what I learned from Brooke Castillo. It's called the CTFAR model, and it breaks up our experience of the world into five categories: Circumstances, Thoughts, Feeling, Actions, and Results.
So C for Circumstances, T for Thoughts, F for Feelings, A for Actions, and R for Results. CTFAR.These are the five categories that everything in our lives can fall into. So we can take anything you say and sort it into these five categories.
I’ll go into this whole process and how powerful it can be another time, but I want to pick it apart piece by piece first, starting with circumstances.
Circumstances are the facts of the situation. They are indisputable, everyone would agree, you could prove it in court or take a blood test for it.
Example:
1. So “I have a son” is a circumstance, but “I have a bad son” is not because there isn’t a blood test that would define your son as “bad” and there might possibly be someone out there in the world who disagrees with the idea that your son is bad.
2. “It is 100 deg F outside today” is a circumstance, but “It is miserably hot outside today” is not because different people might feel differently about the fact that it is 100 deg.
3. “I love roses” is NOT a circumstance because you can’t really prove it. The circumstance here might be that you have 10 rose bushes in your front yard. Someone else might have 20 and feel that THEY love roses, but you must only LIKE roses because 10 rose bushes isn’t enough in their mind for someone who truly loves roses... you get the point.
3 truths about circumstances:
Clients who come in for coaching always have a problem they want to solve. They start out by believing that the circumstance is the problem, thinking "If we can just change the circumstance, then I will be happy".
But that just isn’t true. And for us in the HD community, that is REALLY good news!
Because if you come to me and you're unhappy about you circumstance of having 46 CAG repeats, if the only way to solve that was to change the number of CAG repeats, we would be out of luck! I have NO IDEA how to do that for you, and so far science hasn’t figured it out either.
So this is good news that changing our circumstances isn’t the way to change our experience, because circumstances are very often out of our control. This means we can look to other areas besides our circumstances for solutions to our suffering.
I’m going to spend more time on this one because it was the hardest one for me to wrap my head around at first.
Circumstances are neutral because they don’t have any emotions tied directly to them.
Like I said, this part can be tricky, so I’m going to give you 3 tools that will help when a circumstance doesn’t feel neutral:
When we whittle something down to the bear-bone facts, we take off all the drama around it. Drama is just anything we surround a fact with that makes it juicy, or interesting.
If someone made a movie with ONLY facts, it would be unbelievably boring, because we would have to take out all of the juicy bits. Even documentaries have some drama in them! They draw conclusions that might be hard to prove or add in certain people’s opinions of what happened or how something works, and they make observations that might be up for debate.
We have to add DRAMA to life for it to be interesting. The reality TV programs understand that VERY well.
Going back to our examples, the “bad” son, “miserably” hot, “love” roses, those all have drama or baggage around them. It’s all that stuff we add to the facts that give extra meaning to a circumstance. It is when we take a fact and add in our opinion or perspective and all of a sudden it is interesting and meaningful!
So in order for a circumstance to be neutral, we have to remove ALL the drama
Another way to see that a circumstance is neutral is to simplify it. Even just combining multiple facts together can sometimes keep a circumstance from feeling neutral.
For example: “My boyfriend said “we should break up” on my birthday.”
This would technically be a circumstance, but you can see that just by grouping true facts together, it becomes too easy for some inherent feelings to come up, keeping it from feeling neutral. The multiple facts are only connected because of the meaning you have already put on it and therefore makes it virtually impossible to neutralize until we isolate just one of the facts.
Drawing the connection and making the associations between facts can create emotionally charged circumstances. Our brains make a specific set of circumstances mean something, but if we isolate it, we can create a scenario where it isn’t negative or positive, just neutral.
So when we are dealing with a circumstance that we think is causing us pain, it can be helpful to zoom WAY in and completely isolate it. It might not ever feel positive, but at least closer to neutral.
In our boyfriend example, it would look like separating out the facts "I have a boyfriend", "words were said 'we should break up'", and "my birthday is --/--/--". We would take those each one at a time to see that the emotion coming from the overall situation isn't coming from the facts themselves, but from what our brains are making that set of facts mean.
This is why people find mindfulness practices so helpful, because it lifts away all of the mess we have bouncing around in our heads and allows us to focus on the here and now without layering it with the past or making it mean something about our future.
Let's say you have narrowed your circumstance down to the fact “Joe went to prison” and that still doesn’t feel neutral to you, say it feels negative to you. One thing you can try is to come up with a make believe scenario where it feels positive, or at least less negative.
Like what if Joe hurt someone close to you? That might feel differently than if Joe is your brother who you think got framed.
It’s almost like reverse engineering the previous tip of isolating the facts. We zoom way in to remove our own story and then we back out again and add some pretend stories around it to show that this specific fact, this one pinch point, is not what is guaranteeing a particular feeling or overall reaction
One fun way to do this, especially if there is another person in your circumstance, is to switch out the name or identity of the person. So in “Joe went to prison” what if Joe was your friend? It might be hard to see that as neutral. Try replacing his name: “Bartholemew went to prison”. All of a sudden, it is no longer emotionally charged!
This is especially helpful when words are exchanged:
“My mom said this” or “my husband said that” can be really tender. Switch them out for a famous celebrity and it totally changes it: “Brad Pitt said this” or “Kim Kardashian said that”.
Try it, it’s like magic. It really shows us what is going on in our minds.
The third truth about circumstances is that they cannot hurt us. This comes by nature of them being neutral.
But we’ll go into more detail on that in the next installment, where we talk about what DOES hurt us and why that distinguishment is so crucial.
So now that we have talked about circumstances in general, I want to bring it home. I am going to apply this principle to HD knowing that I need to be delicate so bear with me.
Let’s try a phrase, see if it is a circumstance, and check it with all of our tools: “I have HD, the most terrible disease in the world”
Would everyone agree with it? Most likely a lot of people would, but there might be some people who disagree.
Is there a blood test for it? There IS a test for HD, but there is NOT a test for whether or not HD is terrible. And there certainly isn’t a “terribility” ranking of all the diseases in the world.
In this case, this statement is not a circumstance
This does NOT mean that you are wrong to think that. Many people do, and they have their reasons, and I am totally ok with that. For the sake of definitions here, though, it is NOT a circumstance.
In society, we have been trained to only value facts, so when I say that your thoughts are not facts, the natural instinct is to get defensive. If you want to keep your story, you absolutely can. What we do in coaching is simply to show you your story for what it is and then let you decide if you want to keep it.
How can we tweak that statement to make it a circumstance?
How about changing it to “I have HD”. Is it a circumstance now? Yes, we have confirmed that it is a fact because we haven’t added any descriptions or observations to it.
We can also quickly check the next box that this circumstance is out of our control. I don't think I need to go into much detail here.
"But Courtney, you said circumstances are neutral. How in the world can that be neutral?"
I am totally with you. Let’s see if there is any way to neutralize this tricky circumstance by using our tools: remove the drama, isolate the facts, and look for another perspective.
So after we edited this circumstance from "I have HD, the most terrible disease in the world" to “I have HD”, it doesn’t have a lot of drama to clean up. Sometimes they still feel emotionally charged even AFTER removing the drama.
Let's go to the next tool.
It is pretty isolate, but we can still try zooming in a little bit to see if that helps neutralize it.
“I have 41 CAG repeats” Circumstance? Yes Neutral? Let's look at it through a few different pairs of eyes and see what happens.
Someone with 41 CAG repeats who just got tested and has 7 grown children is likely to feel differently than someone with 41 repeats without children whose parent had 50 repeats.
So the emotion that might have come up when you heard it initially might loosen its grip a little when you see the variety of responses different people might have to that specific fact. It’s ok if it still isn’t completely neutral, but do you see how it got a little closer?
Just as side note of the importance of zooming in: Notice what happened just now when we paired that circumstance “I have 41 CAG repeats” with another circumstance “I got my test results yesterday” and “I have 7 children above the age of 30”? Now there is mess around that original fact that is really hard to separate out.
Why go through all this trouble analyzing situations and seeing if we can make them neutral?
Remember: making circumstance neutral is not about eliminating all emotion in our lives. Life without emotion would be boring and meaningless. I’m not trying to turn you into robots.
Finding neutral ground to stand on gives us a blank slate to start from as we intentionally create the life we want.
How do you want to feel? How do you want to feel about the irrefutable, out of your control, neutral circumstances in your life?
Peace? Joy? Contentment? Excitement? Sadness? Anger? Grief? Disappointment?
Important to remember that we don’t necessarily want to feel good about everything. That’s not only ok, it’s good and healthy. If you went through life cheerful as can be even when you lose your job, spouse dies, and home floods, your friends and family would be seriously concerned about you and for good reason.
It’s not about being happy about everything that happens, it’s about knowing that you have the CHOICE.
In the previous episode I talked about why the way we think about things matters. It comes down to the fact that the story we tell ourselves becomes the lens through which all of our life gets filtered. This means that any evidence that contradicts our story gets filtered out and any chances we have to change our story feel less possible to us.
If you are having a hard time seeing a circumstance as being neutral and I ask why, the answer is going to be another thought, not a fact, every time. It is going to be the story that you are telling yourself around the circumstance.
That’s the part that we pick some provable facts out of in order to get started with our work here. But remember: I'm not trying to take your story away from you.
Circumstances: are the facts of the situation. They are indisputable, everyone would agree, you could prove it in court or take a blood test for it.
3 truths about circumstances:
3 tools that will help when a circumstance doesn’t feel neutral:
When we are trying to write our own life story, it is critical to simplify the facts, find ways to remove the drama, take things one circumstance at a time.
Then you can start intentionally deciding what you want that fact to mean about your life, how much power you want to give it, and how you want that fact to impact your life.
