Episode 0 – Introducing, Twisted Thinking! – Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome to Twisted Thinking. The podcast that helps you keep your thoughts flexible. My name is Kristin, and this is my podcasts official introduction to you.

So, a little about myself. I’m a 40 something year old American woman living in Berlin with her lovely wife of almost six years and I’m a fiction author, recently turned Blogger who wanted to explore some alternatives to blogging. Podcasts were first on my radar, so here we are.

The Twisted Thinking Podcast will focus on taking what could be considered negative circumstances or experiences in my own life and showing how I’ve been able to twist them around to make them work for me, in a positive way. I’ll be sharing real life stories, ideas, questions and just my opinions in general.

Now, because I have a finite amount of experiences to share, I’ll also be taking a closer look at some of those positivity quotes common platitudes and motivational memes that are really so popular these days.

I’m going to break those down and see how well they really hold up to scrutiny if they’re actually as positive or comforting or motivating as they may seem. If nothing else, I love playing Devil’s advocate and I think that’s something that’s going to be a lot of fun and it might help you limber up your mind and maybe rethink some of your negative experiences as well.

You can read the details about how I came up with the name and the premise of this part project and the circumstances surrounding it on the website twisted thinking.net. But I’ll sum it up here. Basically, in 2019 my wife became ill, and I got very angry about it.

That anger transferred into our everyday life so that everything made me angry, and I would take it out on everyone, including her. It was not a healthy environment by any means, and I knew I had to do something about it

Twisting my thinking around is what I ended up doing. What does that mean.

So, say I had to do the dishes as soon as I felt that frustration of having to do the dishes bubble up, I’d consciously interrupt it by thinking something like this.

Having dirty dishes means…

We have food to make them dirty.

We have a sink to fill up.

Someone had to the energy to cook.

…and that’s a good thing.

Now I tried to stay away from that popular school of thought of there are others who have it worse than me. Not because it isn’t true and not because it doesn’t work. It does in fact work because guilt is a very powerful motivator. But it’s also a very negative feeling and I did not need that.

I needed it very much to be logical and positive, and I found that thinking of people who had less than me or had it worse than me was just honestly just as bad and made me feel really terrible.

Uhm, so I ditched that pretty quickly and decided to make my statements only in relation to myself. At least as much as I could.

Uhm, over time that habit of trying to twist those thoughts around into a more positive and motivating feeling really just kind of spilled over into everyday life and it’s helped me got –

It – it’s helped get me through some really tough times.

So, in January of this year 2022 I was led to officially start the blog dedicated to telling my real-life stories and kind of sharing how I’ve been able to work these things around in my brain to and help calm some of my own inner demons and to share how that has improved my overall outlook on life.

Now, to be clear, my goal isn’t to say that this is the ultimate guide to happiness or anything like that. This is just meant as a way for me to reach my ultimate goal in life, which is to make a positive impact on everyone around me.

That’s really, that’s really all I’ve ever wanted to do. It’s what I’ve always tried to do with my fiction writing. And it’s what’s driven me to keep writing and to keep talking and keep trying to build relationships.

I enjoy creating that moment of feeling scene or of joy or laughter, or even the thoughtful introspection that leads to questioning of long held beliefs and that kind of thing. I think this is the way to do that.

I really cannot believe how excited I am about this opportunity and to be invited into your home every week to just sit down and talk to you is going to be amazing.

And aside from the sheer fun factor, I think we’re both going to learn something from one another.

That about wraps it up for this introduction. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review if something I said caught your attention and you want to talk about it, you can e-mail me at kristin@twistedthinking.net or sound off on any of my socials which you can find on the website twistedthinking.net or in the show notes.

Thank you until next time. Be blessed and stay twisted.