Sarah has had a difficult time with colleagues at work. She has become angry and feels hurt. She makes a counselling appointment and asks for strategies to help her stop thinking about what her colleagues did, and how distressed she feels.
I’m just angry. I trusted them and they let me down. I can’t let that go. It just goes round and round in my head. I want it to stop.
Sarah normally does many things that have the potential to help her emotionally. She exercises, sleeps well, eats well, and has tried meditation. She keeps a gratitude journal. She considers herself compassionate toward others.
But none of it is helping her with this situation. And after a while, the anger turns inward.
After a while I think it must be all my fault.
Sarah knows some strategies. She has tried them sincerely and consistently. What she was missing was a way to bring them all together so that they work for her and help her through this emotional time.
The problem was not the strategies. The problem was that without a map to show her where she was, she had no way of knowing which strategy to use, or when, or why.
Using The House Within, Sarah could see immediately where she was. The thoughts going round and round — her overthinking, the anger — that was the Upstairs floor. The spinning staircase, pulling her higher with every replay of what her colleagues were doing. And when the anger turned inward — it must be all my fault — she had spiralled down into the Basement.
Here she felt deflated. Nothing seems to work for her. What’s the point? No one values me. I am not going to try anymore. She noticed feelings of bitterness and resentment rising up inside her.
It’s not fair. I have always treated them with respect. I have been kind to them — and look how they repay me.
Sarah was moving between two floors, the Upstairs and the Basement. Spiralling up and down. Up and down. She was getting nowhere. She could not stop thinking about how her colleagues had treated her. She was exhausted.
In time, Sarah began to understand what was actually happening. Her colleagues were on their lower floors of their Houses Within — and they were stirring her up into her upper floors. Every replay of what they’d done was another step up the spinning staircase. Every moment of it must be my fault was a downward spiral into the Basement. She was in the grip of the spin. She was caught in a game of her colleagues making.
She learned that she had a choice. Not about what her colleagues did — she couldn’t control that. Not about what floor they were on — she couldn’t control that either. The only thing she could control was what floor she was on.
It meant stepping back. Showing less emotion. Not because her feelings weren’t real — they were — but because reacting from the Upstairs or the Basement was a dynamic she no longer wanted to be part of. This was a new insight for her. She did not want the behaviour of her colleagues controlling what happened inside her emotional world. She focused on her work. She let what her colleagues did go through to the keeper. She became less reactive, steadier, harder to stir.
It wasn’t easy. But she did not want to keep going round and round in her head anymore.
Using some of the tools The House Within offered her, Sarah found she could be less emotionally reactive in the presence of her colleagues — not numb, not pretending, but genuinely less pulled.
In the office things did not change straight away. Her colleagues kept trying to stir her up. But Sarah’s response to their behaviour changed. She found she could separate her feelings from what they were doing. She had moved back into her own House Within, on her own Ground Floor — rather than sharing one house with her colleagues, them in the lower floors and her vibrating fast in the upper floors.
She had her own House now. Separate from them. And she chose what floor she wanted to be on when she was at work. She was in charge of her emotions, now. Her emotions were not controlled by the behaviour of her colleagues.