Update completed November 12, 2025

I have a negative feeling. My response: I fight it. I oppose it. I treat it as a problem, which triggers my brain to solve it. Fighting is a type of solving. Opposing is a type of solving. Solving is a type of opposing. I can call my response whatever I want. But if the response is anything other than observing it, I’m solving it, usually by fighting it.

If my response to a negative feeling it to fight it, that is, if I have a problem-solving response (psr) to it, the negative feeling comes back.  For example, if I try not to be angry, I get more angry. If I try not to feel the pain of failure, I feel it more.  Why? Why can’t I control my feelings?

Answer: It’s a survival mechanism. Take for example my fear of falling, If, while I’m walking, I could solve the fear by getting rid of it, I wouldn’t try to resist gravity’s downward pull by putting one foot in front of the other at each step. I’d fall constantly without putting my hands out. Result: death by head injury.

I don’t want to die or get hurt. And because I can either go against or with my feelings, including my positive feelings,  I need to stop going in the direction – solving/opposing – that makes them fight back-  and go the other way – with them.

But there’s a complication:

feelings can be imaginary problem solving responses – psr’s. I might use anger to fight/solve/oppose fear. The anger feels real, But it comes from my memory, pulled from there by my imagination. So the anger is not real. It’s not my true feeling, my true response. Even my fear may not be real.

For example, say I’m waiting in line to vote and somebody asks me if they can go ahead of me, and gives me a good reason. My brain produces empathy for them, which creates my true response: welcome them to go ahead of me. But my brain will also experiences a tiny bit of grief at losing time I could use elsewhere than waiting in line, or at losing my sunk costs, that is, some of the value I have placed in my plan to get to the voting station.

I may have a problem solving response to that grief, that negative feeling, I may magnify it by imagining that I’ll be in line too long, which will make me feel sorry for myself, in order to get sympathy for myself. The sympathy will replace the grief. Grief solved.

Or the fantasy of the longer wait may trigger a response of fear that it will be too long. The fear will likely be small. But if I’m anxious, my brain may magnify the fear to the point where I start to panic. I could easily fight that panic with an equally strong imaginary feeling – anger.  If I’m really anxious, I may imagine I have to get the anger out in order to fight it going onward inside me and making me really anger, or worse, sad for a long time after. I will almost certainly think this sadness is because I let this person go ahead of me. I’ll magnify that into “I gave in”. In other words, I justify my anger. I’m now in a back and forth between self-attack psr’s and countering them. Not what I want.

What’s the way out?

The answer is: further in. I need to go with the psr’s, which is the same as saying I need to do the seeing sequence on them, so that I can see their fatal flaws, so that I can disbelieve them, so that I can see I’m only temporarily crazy, so that I can get back to my true response to what happened to me.

So why do the seeing sequence? I just passed the answer. I need to go get it. Starting with  Why the Seeing Sequence works.

Postscript:

What causes me to have these responses that solve and thus fight my feelings?  (see them here The Database of Psr’s, )