Why the Seeing Sequence works

Why the Seeing Sequence works to turn off anxiety.

Updated May 9/2024, March 6/2025, May 9/2025

I don’t need to know why the Seeing Sequence works in order to do it. While I want to know why, understanding will not, at all, help me change, or make me work at change.

See Summary below for the short version.

The main “why” thing to know is this: Ignoring is the pivotal event in my life.

Ignoring is the brain’s survival act. For example, if I can’t ignore the work it takes to get food, I will avoid that work and starve to death. Thus, it is important to my brain that I succeed, not fail, at ignoring. But ignoring is like hitting a ball thrown towards me. I don’t always succeed at hitting it on my first try. It takes a few tries. With a few more tries ignoring gets momentum and I can do it easily.

What happens in my brain if I fail to ignore?

If I like sunny weather, I feel pleasure when the sun comes out. My brain responds with pleasure to something that fits with me, that is similar to what I like. Pleasure tells my brain to get more of what is similar to me, in order to feel the pleasure again.

If it rains, and if rain is different from what fits me in this moment, my pleasure goes away. The brain responds to difference, which I call a problem, with pain. Pain tells the brain to stop what it’s doing and look for the cause of the problem, to see if the cause can be solved. To see if the difference can be turned into a similarity. Can I solve the rain or will I fail?

If I fail at what I try, say I try to find shelter from a storm and end up soaking wet,  this failure is another difference. This time, unlike rain, which is a difference from outside me, this is a difference from inside me: my actual try to stay dry differed from the image of success my thoughts had created. However, outside difference or inside difference: it makes no difference to my brain. My brain feels pain in response to this difference, and tries to find what caused it. Once I find the cause, I can decide if I can solve it and get relief from my pain. Maybe I hurried in the wrong direction before I looked around; and the best shelter was the other way.

There is one difference between a difference caused by something outside me and a difference I caused. My brain doubles the pain if I’m the cause. Why? Because the extra pain makes my brain work harder to solve the cause of the difference: my failed try. If I didn’t have this pain, I would not try to fix it by fixing myself and I would soon die. Yes, die.

For example, since I’m already soaked, and I’m passing a deserted beach near my home, I decide to take off my wet clothes and go for a swim. The water warms me. The rain suddenly stops. As I stand looking up at the dark clouds I see a crooked finger of lightning suddenly appear and crackle down towards the water 15 meters/50 feet in front of me. There is no thunder clap. The air simply sizzles as the yellow jagged line burns its way downward. It stops short of the water and disappears.

Cool, I think. So deadly, yet so ordinary, so undramatic. How lucky am I to see that? I walk out of the water, put on my clothes and head for home. Why did I leave the water? Because I didn’t want to be the cause of my own death if I stayed and another lightning strike hit the water and electrocuted me. The thought of me causing that difference, that failure, hurt way more than the thought of it happening accidentally while I was seeking shelter before I got soaking wet.

If the pain from my failure is mild – say I’m cold but not too cold yet – my brain tries to ignore the cold so I can focus on solving it by seeking shelter. If I fail to ignore the mild cold, I have a new failure that I caused and I feel pain again. If the pain caused by my failure to ignore the cold is not high, I don’t solve that pain. I simply try again to ignore the cold. However, if  that failure to ignore causes a  high pain, I fear that pain and I try to avoid it. How? By avoiding trying again to ignore. How do I avoid trying? By my brain trying harder to find the cause of that pain of failing to ignore, and fix that cause. If I can fix it I don’t have to face trying and failing to ignore the cold. What makes me try harder to fix, by avoiding, yet another pain of failing to ignore? I start to imagine that I’ll get really cold. I’m magnifying the problem, trying to trigger fear. Fear makes me try harder to solve.

My response to this high pain, which has tricked me into fear, is thus a problem-solving response, a psr. But there’s a problem: because I’m only mildly cold, and I want to focus on finding shelter, there is no problem, in my life, in this moment, except my high pain of failing to ignore the mild cold. As a result, I avoid trying again to ignore, so I don’t fail at it and trigger my high pain. What do I do instead? Since I have scared myself with the fantasy of getting really cold, I scramble to find shelter without first looking around for it.

How does this happen in my brain? Avoiding is a type of solving. It’s one of many kinds of solving. But it creates it’s own kind of problem. Avoiding just because I’m afraid will make others judge me as weak, inferior. From childhood I learned to avoid this judgement by appearing to solve instead of avoid. Thus my brain finds a problem in my life, mild cold, and magnifies it to really cold, to make me fear it, and solve it. The result: I have a normal fear of an abnormal pain (the pain of failing to ignore) that causes me to have an abnormal fear of a normal situation.

This abnormal, imaginary fear is anxiety. Inside my head, anxiety is my normal fear of an abnormally high pain of failing to ignore.

My anxiety is a constant engine in my head. It never stops in its readiness to find things that make me afraid, even in my dreams. There is no point in my trying to stop it.

Why is it constant?

Because ignoring is almost constantly needed for me to survive. Therefore, my high pain of failing to ignore surges throughout my days and nights.

Ignore what?

Ignore distractions.

What distractions?

My hunger, my physical pain, external noise. The list is very long and my mind cannot be closed to these distractions coming in. If I could close my mind to them, I wouldn’t need to ignore. But I would quickly die because deciding to close my mind, or not close it, is far too slow to keep up with the many things that will kill me: things like gravity which causes me to fall if I don’t pay attention when I walk down stairs or down a hill;  or infections that get out of control when I accidentally cut my skin or vehicles on the roads I have to cross. The list is long. Thus, distractions, including these threats to my life, need to be allowed to be part of the stream of my thoughts.

What’s a stream of thoughts?

There are two kinds of thought that, in any moment, help me survive, and if I’m lucky, be briefly happy throughout my day.

One is creative thought. It creates what? Creates my true responses, in other words, my decisions. These true responses appear in my mind as an image of me acting, an action image, for example, walking downhill. Once the action image of my true response is created, I need to get it out of my head and into action. I need to externalize it.

To externalize, I need the second kind of thought: matching thought or externalizing thought. I need to match the image in my head with action. I see myself look at the hill’s lower ground ahead of me for a safe place to put my foot. I see myself stepping forward and down. Now I need to match that image with action.

At that moment, everything coming into my mind that isn’t matching my action to my action image is a distraction. The main distractions are the outside things that can occur after I act. It might take me too long to get to the bottom of the hill or I might trip on a rock and fall.

But distractions can come in to my mind from inside too. I could be distracted by anger that it’s hot or snowy or muddy or that I have to work at walking. I could be sad I have to walk so far. Distractions can come often, or be strong, or both, making my brain feel like it’s running fast and out of control, or spinning.

What am I supposed to do with distractions?

My brain’s task, at the end of my thought that forms my true response, my decision, is to ignore those distractions. How?  By focusing again and again on matching my action to my action image until ignoring by focusing gets momentum. Then I can externalize my true response.

Why should I care if I’m distracted while I do anything, especially something as simple and automatic as walking downhill?

Other than the obvious result that I might fall, two negatives consequences take place in my brain when I fail to ignore distractions and my true response is not externalized in that moment.

The first is fear-driven seeking of relief.

What is that and how does it work?

Start with this observation: the brain designs emotion to run out by itself.

Why?

Because emotion contains data, information, at the end of its running out. I need that data to help me form my true response to events coming into my mind. If I’m going downhill too fast, fear tells me I might fall. Thus, I slow down. If I fight the fear, it doesn’t run out. It stays around and fights back making me more afraid of falling until, finally, I listen.

If  I imagine trying not to love when I love, trying not to be angry when I’m angry, the love or anger only gets stronger. Thus, if I try to solve the emotion that I call the pain of failing to ignore, using problem solving responses, (psr’s), instead of letting it run out, the pain of failing to ignore fights back, by producing psr’s against the  psr’s; in other words counter-thoughts. I’m now fighting with myself. I’m in a dilemma, in inner conflict, in a back and forth, in tension, and it’s often painful. This rapidly takes on a life of its own, that is to say, it gains momentum rapidly. I’m now driven, controlled, to only seek relief from the fear constantly entering my mind. This bad momentum is the fear-driven seeking of relief. It is what drives all addictions, obsessions, conflicts between people, problems of living moment to moment.

The second negative that occurs when I fail to externalize my true response: I lose identity and my mood drops. These are two negatives, but they are so tightly linked that they are one.

I am sad because I am missing from my own life. I lose identity because my yes’s and no’s, which are how I know who I am, don’t feel real because their stuck in my head.

This causes a weird, opposite result. A “yes” that’s stuck inside my head becomes a “no” on the outside. The opportunities in my life pass me by, as if I’ve said “no” to them,  because I can’t say yes to them. A “no” that’s stuck inside my head becomes a “yes” on the outside. I do things, and people do things to me, that I don’t want, that I’m saying “no” to inside my head. These cause small mood drops, or rarely, large mood drops, really, grief reactions, that add up to bigger, longer mood drops.

Okay, how do I get myself out of this wrong momentum?

The way out is to not oppose, not solve (because opposing is a type of solving), the pain of failing to ignore. It’s the same as with any feeling. The way out is by bitching and complaining it, also called doing flow. But “flow” doesn’t really depict the negativity of my anxiety.

When I’m busy doing bitching and complaining/ b and c/BNC/b & c, flow, I’m so focused on it that I can’t solve, oppose, the pain of failing to ignore.  The pain runs out by itself. There is no fear of it and therefore no anxiety is produced to solve it. I’m able to ignore distractions again and again -I’m in momentum of ignoring. Now I can get my decision out of thought and into action.

This is the right momentum, in contrast to the wrong momentum. Wrong momentum comes from the many other ways I use to distract myself from the pain of failing to ignore. I’m going to create momentum no matter what is coming into my mind. Therefore, I need to bitch and complain if I want to control which momentum I create – momentum of psr’s or momentum of focus on matching my action to my action image. When I have created momentum of focus on my decision,  I know who I am, what my yes’s and no’s are, and my mood is stable. This doesn’t last, because the pain of failing to ignore will be triggered by my next decision. But the mood stability and sense of identity lasts long enough to make the work of b&c, and surviving, worth it.

How do I bitch and complain, do flow?

I do the Seeing Sequence. See any of the “Seeing Sequence Meets” posts, like this one. How to do it. The Seeing Sequence meets procrastination.

Briefly,  I describe my psr’s and the feelings they create in me. In my description I try to see the part of my thought and feeling that is not real, that is imaginary, that is fantasy, and therefore not to be believed. (In other words, I see the cause of my psr’s. I deconstruct them.) My disbelief results in my ignoring the psr, which causes the psr to run out. If another psr comes, I do the same thing until I get ignoring into momentum. When I’m in the momentum of ignoring,  I can keep my focus on externalizing my true response.

Summary:

1. Life does or does not go my way in any moment.
2. I have a true response to it, in other words, I make a decision.
3. As soon as my mind pictures, or even senses I’m coming to, what to do, other thoughts or feelings come in, especially how the environment will react to my decision. These are distractions and they pull my attention/my focus away from my true response.
4. I need to ignore these distractions. But I will likely fail on my first few or many tries.
5. I need to try again to ignore them by trying again to focus on externalizing my true response. Ignoring is not done directly, it is a result of my focusing on something else.
6. But the pain of failing to ignore shoots up every time I fail to ignore. Remember, all failure causes pain. It’s how I stay alive.
7. This high pain, which I cannot feel directly because it rises so fast, triggers fear.
8. The fear causes my brain to:  find or create a problem I can see and point to, then magnify that problem until I’m afraid of it. My fear then causes me to solve the imaginary problem in order to get the positive feeling of relief from my fear. My brain uses this relief to offset my fear of the pain of failing to ignore. My normal fear of my abnormally high pain of failing to ignore has caused my imagination to create a problem that creates a second fear that makes me solve the imaginary problem.
9. But this solving is opposing the pain of failing to ignore. When the pain of failing to ignore senses my opposition, it fights back by producing more problem solving responses: psr’s.
10. My true response is not coming out of my head into action.
11. My mood starts dropping and I get confused about which way I truly want to go.
12. The psr’s driving this fear rapidly get momentum. I’m in the momentum of fear-driven seeking of relief. I’m in that basic pattern that underlies all my life’s problems.

The way out is to not oppose – not solve – the pain of failing to ignore. I do this by describing my psr’s and the feelings they create in me. When I’m busy doing this I can’t solve the pain of failing to ignore. It runs out by itself because it’s not being opposed. It’s now gone. There is no fear of it and therefore no anxiety is produced to solve it. But there is a second cause of the disappearance of the pain of failing to ignore: I disbelieve the psr’s that pain is causing my emotion and imagination to create. Because while I am bitching and complaining, I’m tearing apart, “deconstructing” the psr’s. This causes me to move my focus onto something I can believe: my true response.

I externalize my true response without thinking about it. And most importantly, without feeling like it. This is what it is to be un-self-conscious in getting on with my life in any moment, to be in first-party observing self. (only observing how well I’m matching action to action image). The result, in that moment, is I know who I am, what my yes’s and no’s are, and my mood is stable. This doesn’t last, because the pain of failing to ignore will be triggered by my next decision. But, and this deserves repeating, it lasts long enough to make the work of b&c, and surviving, worth it.

End of summary

Postscript:

Another reason my happiness doesn’t last as long as it should, which is still brief: I not only fight my negative feelings. I fight my positive feelings too. As soon as I feel good with how I’m walking downhill, my pain of failing to ignore spikes because I decide this feeling I’m having is happiness. To solve the pain my brain attacks my happiness and tells me “Don’t be so happy; you might fall” , or “You’re not happy enough. Go faster.” This is to get me to solve my self-attack to get the positive feeling of relief, to offset the pain to failing to ignore distractions at the end of my thought that forms my true response.

Like all feelings, the positive feeling fights back. But it fights back by making me argue with the fault I find in my happiness with walking downhill. I always lose this argument because the pain of failing to ignore keeps arguing with me until I give in to it. Thus, my positive feeling is lost in my arguing with the psr, and replaced with sadness about my failure to win the argument and thus keep my positive feeling.

I’m screwed both ways: by negative and positive feelings. It’s why I’m never happy and am always searching for relief. The way out is to bitch and complain my attacks on my happiness. Therefore:

See The Seeing Sequence meets attacks on happiness