The Seeing Sequence meets attacks on happiness

Updated November 27, 2024

The Problem

Whenever I feel happy, I immediately find fault with it/second guess it/attack it/oppose it.

The Cause

Bitch and complain (also called “flow” or “flow-with”) the psr’s, often many times (instructions are in the examples below). The repetitions build a memory center that pulls my focus into it. While there, I don’t oppose myself by finding fault with every thought that  forms my true response (my decision).  Instead, I simply externalize it.

Good to know:

1. While my mind can go blank, it’s rare compared to my mind’s almost constant stream of thoughts and feelings. This stream causes many distractions, all day every day. I need to be good at ignoring them.
2. All loss, no matter how small, causes pain. That pain is the feeling called grief. Thus, loss causes grief.
3. Failure causes loss of what I was trying to do.  Therefore, failure causes grief. The most important failure in daily life is the failure to ignore distractions which occur at the end of my thought that forms my true response, my decision. My decision is not a psr. It’s the real true me. I call the grief from failing to ignore distractions, at the moment my true response appears, the pain of failing to ignore.
4. Everyone is born with a different intensity of the pain of failing to ignore.
5. If my pain of failing to ignore is strong, I am naturally afraid of it. Since a decision triggers the need to ignore distractions, which trigger my high pain of failing to ignore, which triggers my fear of the pain,  I’m  afraid of making any decision. When my fear of making a decision appears, I’m compelled to solve the fear. So, I find problems – faults –  with the decision and solve them. I  get the positive feeling of relief. Relief replaces my fear and so distracts me from the pain of failing to ignore. The result: I’m always editing (looking for and solving flaws), that is, problem-solving, the thoughts that form my decisions in order to get relief from my normal fear of this abnormally high pain.
6. One of these edits/problem-solving responses (psr’s) to a decision is the fantasy that the feeling of relief will make me feel like acting, feel motivated to act, on my decision. (Here lieth the source of the world’s fruitless search for motivation.) But it doesn’t work. As soon as I solve one problem, a new one appears. In fact, solving signals my brain that I want to do more solving, so I can get more relief. So, it brings me more problems. I call this constant line of psr’s “fear driven seeking of relief” or “second guessing” or “obsessing” about my decision.
7. If my pain of failing to ignore is weak, I’m  not afraid of it. Therefore I don’t produce anxiety – an abnormal fear of a normal situation, and other psr’s that mess around with my decision.
8. All emotions, including grief caused by loss of anything, big or small, will keep coming back if opposed or avoided. To solve grief, including by avoiding it, is to oppose it. As a result, solving grief causes it to come back.
9. All my problems are caused by me trying to solve/oppose the pain of failing to ignore. Culture says I should fix this pain. My brain says I should feel it, suffer it, and see how it won’t harm me if I do. This will make me ignore it by my moving on to seeing and externalizing my true response/my decision.

The Seeing Sequence, which is the sequence of  bitching and complaining /flow in order to see my true response, gets me to stop trying to solve the pain of failing to ignore. As a result, the pain, like all emotion, runs out by itself, most often in bits, not all at once.  A good but not must-read:  Why the Seeing Sequence works.

(Notice: words in brackets below mean I can choose from several wordings, or the words are instructions or blanks to fill in that fit my experience.)

How to Bitch and Complain/Flow with Psr’s using the following Example List

1.  I’m happy I escaped.

2.  I’m racing/playing well.

Example 1

 I’m happy I escaped. 

I’m  walking to school. Males are ahead on the road. They will show me sexual attraction or ask me for sex, like they have before. Some have harassed me more. I sneak into the woods before they notice me and slip past them. I’m happy I made it. Now I’m thinking I’ll fail to get by them someday and bad things will happen to me.

Step 1

Pick the thought or feeling I think is a psr.  Optional: A useful guide: The Database of Psr’s

In this example, I’ll fail to get by them someday.

Classify my emotional response to the psr using three simple classes:

“good me” for feelings that are positive (pleasure) or for feelings that I imagine will solve things fast (anger always comes with the fantasy that I can shake up the environment into going my way),

“bad me” for hurting or judging myself.

“poor me”  for fear and for feeling sorry for myself.

(NB. I decide on how many psr’s I want to b and c. It could be just one, or I could do all of them until they stop coming. The more I practice, the closer I get to one, then a ghost of one, then none. The number of practices is like learning to walk, or to play a musical instrument, or to play a sport well or to cook food well, or do anything well. It’s a large number. )

Like this:

I’ll fail to get by them someday. Poor me.

Bad me, predicting failure (PF6 in the database of PSR’s).

Bad things will happen to me. Bad me, jumping to a worst case scenario. (PF3 in the Database of Psr’s).

Poor me, now I’m afraid.

Step 2

The reversal: (find the cause of the psr’s, not by asking why, but by imagining what I would see if I didn’t do psr’s to myself.)

Because poor me if I didn’t (scare myself by jumping to a worst-case scenario),

I’m afraid I’ll see I’m in the pain of failing to ignore distractions, (which occur at the end of my thought that forms my true response; that wording is coming 4 lines below)

namely, the delay in the pleasure of getting over the grief from the loss

of momentum caused by the end of what I was just doing:

(namely) celebrating my success/riding the wave of happiness I felt about my escape.

At the end of my thought that forms my true response:

I’m already dead inside about this act of ignoring. (Dead inside means I don’t at all feel like ignoring)

But I have to ignore anyway (if I want to get to my true response, which is to get back to relishing/enjoying my success).

So start ignoring the delay by focusing on

(ignoring is done by focusing on something other than the thing I want to ignore)(I want to ignore the delay in getting over grief, so I focus on something – the next wave of happiness about my escape  – other than solving/opposing the delay in getting over grief)

mechanically

(which means without feeling like it/without motivation) (matching my external action to the action image of my decision)

going with the next wave of happiness my success created.

Step 3

Wait to see what comes into my mind.

If another psr, repeat Steps 1 and 2 until:  psr’s stop, or I decide to stop, or I run out of time and have to do something else.

If my true response, I naturally (in first-party observing self/un-self-consciously/without stepping outside myself/without thinking) externalize my true response/decision by matching my action to my action image.

In this case, I celebrate with a private fist pump, a small smile, a sigh of relief, and go on to school.

Example 2

I’m racing/playing well

I pass a few other racers fairly easily. I quickly bump a few other players who try to slow me down. I try to figure out how to get around them, when they race/play harder against me.

A good idea comes to me, and I feel happy, Then I rapidly feel let down and then scared I’ll fail. I try to fix this by trying less hard while I think about it. I’ve lost my concentration. The other players play better than me, and I fail to recover in time.

Step 1

Pick the thought or feeling I think is a psr.  Optional: A useful guide: The Database of Psr’s

In this example, I predict failure when I’m happy. (PF6 in the Database)

Classify my emotional response to the psr using three simple classes:

“good me” for feelings that are positive (pleasure) or for feelings that I imagine will solve things fast (anger always comes with the fantasy that I can shake up the environment into going my way),

“bad me” for hurting or judging myself.

“poor me”  for fear and for feeling sorry for myself.

(NB. I decide on how many psr’s I want to b and c. It could be just one, or I could do all of them until they stop coming. The more I practice, the closer I get to one, then a ghost of one, then none. The number of practices is like learning to walk, or to play a musical instrument, or to play a sport well or to cook food well, or do anything well. It’s a large number. )

Like this:

Bad me, predicting failure.

Good me, I’ll think about how to fix it.

Good me, I’ll back off my plan and see if the fear goes away.

Good me, maybe then I’ll feel like trying it.

Good me, I love the fantasy I can depend on feeling happy in order to carry out/act on/externalize my decision.

Poor me, I’ve lost the moment to act and now I’m being out-played/out-raced.

Poor me, I didn’t think things could turn against me so fast.

Good me, replay the past and try to imagine how I fix it.

Poor me, that puts me even further out of the action.

Step 2

The reversal: (find the cause of the psr’s, not by asking why, but by imagining what I would see if I didn’t do psr’s to myself.)

Because poor me if I didn’t (predict failure and replace my happiness with fear of failure),

I’m afraid I’ll see I’m in the pain of failing to ignore distractions,

namely, the delay in the pleasure of getting over the grief from the loss

of momentum caused by the end of what I was just doing:

(confirming how good my decision is with my feeling of happiness).

At the end of my thought that forms my true response:

I’m already dead inside about this act of ignoring.

But I have to ignore anyway.

So start ignoring the delay by focusing on

mechanically

(which means without feeling like it/without motivation) (matching my external action to the action image of my decision)

(externalizing my true response/decision by matching my external action to the action image of my decision/true response)

carrying out my plan to crush my opponents with my brilliant idea.

Step 3

Wait to see what comes into my mind.

If another psr, repeat Steps 1 and 2 until: psr’s stop, or I decide to stop, or I run out of time and have to do something else.

If my true response, I naturally

(which means in first-party observing self/un-self-consciously/without stepping outside myself/without thinking)

with steely execution, leave my poor fellow competitors in the dust.

Postscript 1

Happiness comes in waves. Thus it rises and falls and rises again until the brain gets used to it and no longer gives me a feeling. It’s that first quick loss of momentum that triggers the psr’s that make me think it won’t come back. If I b and c, in order to ride out the delay in the pleasure of getting over my grief at the loss of momentum, I come to this indestructible (in the moment) state: Patience. Patience. For the next wave to come.

Postscript 2

Reminder 1 to self:

To b and c or not to b and c. That is the question. To b and c is to suffer the frustration of missing the signal – a psr – to b and c an astonishingly large number of times. To not b and c is to suffer constant anxiety and the exhausting work of trying to solve it. Thus, both ways suck. Only I can decide which way I want my existence to suck in any moment, when I do catch the signal, the psr.

Reminder 2 to self:

I need to memorize these sentences or I’ll never do them. And even when I do memorize them, it will take more suffering my anxiety before I remember to do them, and even more suffering before I even decide to do them after I remember. Even then, I’ll need more practice to do it live, in the moment. That’s the easiest way? Yup.

Reminder 3 to self:

The above two reminders are about what causes change in my brain: persistent practice that builds alternate memory centers. Change doesn’t come from  judgement or punishment or encouragement or copying rules or help from another. So I’m free not to use them, and I’m especially free of needing to judge myself for not using them. To repeat in another way: the only thing that changes my brain is seeing through the tricks my anxiety plays on me to solve itself, and disbelieving them by b and c, over and over again. Only then will I have built a new memory center, a new planet, of bitching and complaining that pulls my focus into it and emits true responses.

Reminder 4 to self:

Question

Why don’t I just say what the the distraction is? Grief. The grief from the loss of the momentum caused by the end of whatever I was just doing,

Answer

Because grief would not be a distraction if it went away instantly. While grief is brief, like all emotion, it keeps coming back in waves that don’t go away instantly. Therefore, it distracts me from focusing on my true response. Thus, the distraction is not the grief, it’s the delay in the pleasure of getting it over with in the instant I have to transition, that is, change, my focus from forming to externalizing my true response. My high pain of failing to ignore that delay compels me to fix the pain. But I must not give in. I have to train myself to suffer that pain through that instant by mechanically focusing on externalizing my true response. Tall order.