Mind Over Matter

Negative thoughts can trap you in the “what” of a situation, which is often out of your control. How you respond is where your power resides, and reappraisal is one technique that helps to foster resilience from adversity.

- Nikki Davies

The so-called baggage of the past that we seem to take with us cannot ever be truly released from our psyches, but it needn’t define who we are if we learn to accept the past and reappraise its influence on us. Reappraisal is an emotion-regulation strategy that involves changing your emotional response by reinterpreting the meaning of what has occurred. Defined as the use of deliberate and effortful processes to change an enduring and negative emotional response, reappraisal tries to untie us from the often debilitating emotions that can accompany life events.

It’s a process that involves recognising the negative feelings you have around an event or series of events and then reinterpreting the situation to reduce the severity of those negative feelings. By changing your negative attitude to a more positive one you can begin to modify the influence the event has had and is continuing to have on your life.

It’s important to note that reappraisal isn’t about creating a false memory or abdicating your responsibility for what has occurred. Instead, it’s about rethinking your response so it becomes productive rather than destructive. For example, reimagining a failure not as the end of your hopes and dreams or as a demonstration of worthlessness but as an opportunity or a challenge is a way in which reappraisal can help you move forward rather than stay stuck in the past.

New neuropsychological research suggests you can reshape how you emotionally process negative memories through simple instruction, regardless of whether the moment was a major or minor event in your life. For those with traumatic memories, such as victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, the research offers hope for new kinds of therapies and a way people can release themselves, as much as is possible, from the emotion attached to horrific events.