Why the Seeing Sequence works

Why the Seeing Sequence works to turn off anxiety.

Updated May 9/2024, March 6/2025, May 9/2025, Aug 20/2025

I don’t need to know why the Seeing Sequence works in order to do it. While I may 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 of this post.

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

Ignoring is my brain’s survival act. For example, if I can’t ignore the boredom and effort in 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 or kicking a ball coming towards me. I don’t always succeed at hitting it on my first swing or kick. It takes a few tries, including a few practice swings of my stick or bat or foot, to get into momentum my focus on meeting the ball. Momentum is the state of mind in which, after a certain number of tries, like swinging to make contact with an incoming ball, I can do it easily. Ignoring works the same way. If I keep trying to ignore, it gets momentum, which then makes ignoring easy to do.

What happens in my brain if I fail to ignore?

In a word, pain.

How pain happens when I fail to ignore.

An example. If “here comes the sun”,  I feel pleasure when I’m in it.  My brain responds with pleasure to anything that fits with me, that is similar to what I like. I can also cause pleasure, by trying to create a similarity – more time in the sun – to get the pleasure to be triggered again.

If it rains, and if being wet is different from what fits me in this moment, I feel pain. That’s because my brain responds to difference with pain. I can also be the cause of pain. If I fail at what I try, say I try to find “shelter from the storm” and end up soaking wet: wet differs from the dry I pictured getting to. My brain feels pain in response to this difference.

The pain is even worse if I take a risk. For example, since I’m already soaked, and I’m passing a deserted beach near my home, I decide to 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 strip burns its way downward. It stops short of the water and disappears.

“Cool”, I think. “So deadly, yet so ordinary, so undramatic in its quiet sizzle. How lucky am I to see that? “I wade out of the water 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 came and this time hit the water and electrocuted me. It would also spoil the thrill I felt about safely observing nature’s power.  Way more than the thought of failure happening accidentally while I was seeking shelter, the thought of me causing that difference, that failure, quickly replaced my thrill with pain,

The purpose of that pain, and all pain produced by my brain, is to make me turn my focus away from everything else, and onto finding the cause of the pain. Once I find the cause, I can decide one of 3 things, 3 “ifs”:  if I can solve the cause and get relief from my pain; if I can just ignore the cause because my pain is self-limiting and therefore will go away by itself; or if I can’t solve it and can’t ignore it and therefore I have to get away from it.

The coming pain from being electrocuted: I had to get away. 

Pain from being cold but not too cold yet – my brain tries to ignore the cold.

If I start to get uncomfortably cold, I solve it. In order to focus on solving the cold, I need to ignore it.

Ignore how?

All ignoring is done by focusing on something other than the thing I need to ignore. While I’m not too cold, I ignore it by focusing on walking home. When I grow colder, I ignore it by focusing on solving the cold by seeking warmth. For example, I may focus on taking off my wet cold top, or I may start to run to create heat in my body.

But what if fail to ignore the mild cold?

What if, instead, I imagine I’ll catch pneumonia and fear rises in me? This failure to ignore, like all failure, causes me pain. If that pain caused by my failure to ignore the cold is not high, I don’t solve the pain. I ignore it by trying again to ignore the cold. However, if my failure to ignore causes a  high pain, I fear that pain and I try to avoid it. How? By avoiding trying again to ignore the cold. In other words, I avoid holding my focus on externalizing, that is to say, acting on, my decision to ignore the cold by focusing on walking home or seeking shelter.

How do I avoid trying again to ignore?

The pneumonia image. It distracts me. My high pain of failing to ignore causes me to divert my focus away from the the pain by triggering my imagination into presenting me with another problem: it magnifies the cold into causing me pneumonia. This scares me into solving the imaginary pneumonia by whatever I can do in that moment: hurry home as fast as I can. In this way, I’ve avoided acting on my decision: ignore the mild cold by focusing on my walk home. The result: I’ve avoided the high pain of failing to ignore the cold, by creating and focusing on something that scares me much less: pneumonia.

My brain’s solving response (my imagination creating an image that scares me) to my high pain of failing to ignore, is what I call a problem-solving response, a psr. Psr’s scare me into solving them so that I can avoid the pain of failing to ignore.

Avoiding is a type of solving. It’s one of many kinds of solving psr’s. (See this link for my full list of psr’s: The Database of Psr’s )

Avoiding is not always a psr. It can be a true response, a decision, when I’m faced with a real problem I can’t solve in the moment. For  example, I avoided the unsolvable problem of lightning possibly appearing again and striking the water.

However, while I’m glad I escaped a close call on my life before I had a chance to be terrified of it, I’m also glad there are few of these adventures in everyday life. Instead, a day is filled with problems that are self-limiting – they go away by themselves (like the mild cold feeling the summer rain gives me), or problems I can solve (like the cold deepening while shelter is nearby). This sounds like a pretty livable life, if it wasn’t filled with fear of these problems that can be ignored or solved.

That fear-filled life is the result of my pain of failing to ignore being intolerably high: 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 (mild cold).

This abnormal fear of a normal situation is anxiety.

My anxiety never stops in its readiness to find things that make me afraid in order to make me solve, even in my dreams. And anxiety cannot be successfully opposed, because it just fights back. So there is no point in my trying to resist it.

Why is it constant?

Because ignoring is almost constantly needed for me to survive. And because ignoring so often fails on one try, 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, what I’m doing, say, eating, before I have to transition to something else, say, stopping eating. The list of distractions is long and my mind cannot be closed to these distractions coming into it. 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 can get out of control when I accidentally cut my skin; or vehicles on the roads I have to cross. Thus, distractions, including 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 frequently, although 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, any thought 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. I could be sad I have to walk so far. Distractions can come often, or be strong, or both, When both happen, 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 feel anger when it appears, the love or anger only gets stronger. Thus, if I try to solve the emotion that I call the pain (really, grief) of failing to ignore, using problem solving responses, psr’s, instead of letting it run out, the pain of failing to ignore fights back. It produces psr’s against the psr’s trying to seek relief from it.

In other words: pain triggers solving, which triggers counter-solving,  in the form of counter-thoughts, which triggers solving, which triggers more counter-thoughts, and so on. I’m now fighting with myself. I’m in a dilemma, in inner conflict, pulled back and forth, in tension, and it’s often physically painful inside me, like in my gut, which triggers fear of the conflict getting even worse.

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, such as getting to bed on time.

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 they’re 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 stuck yes’s and no’s 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/bad momentum and into good momentum of focusing on my true response.

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. Instead of opposing, I do what I call bitching and complaining. (Historical credit:Shortly after I discovered and put it together, I was explaining this way out of anxiety to Julie Jamieson. At one point she said “sounds like people standing around the water cooler at work bitching and complaining”. ) I also call it “going with” or “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, go-with, I’m so focused on it that I can’t solve, oppose, the pain of failing to ignore.  Without opposition to fight against, the pain runs out by itself. My fear of the pain disappears before it can trigger problem-solving responses. 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, or fear driven seeking of relief, comes from the many other ways I use to solve the pain of failing to ignore. Right or wrong, I’m going to create momentum no matter what’s 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 call seeing the cause “deconstruction”. (which I explain after the summary list just below).  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’m also in the momentum of matching action to action image, that is, externalizing my true response.

Summary:

1. Life does or does not go my way in any moment.
2. I have a true response to this stimulus. In other words, I make a decision.
3. As soon as my mind pictures, or even senses I’m coming to my decision about what to do, what my response is, other thoughts or feelings come in, especially possible mistakes in my forming my true response and also how the environment will react to my decision. These are distractions and they pull my attention/my focus away from my true response/decision.
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, acting on, my true response. Ignoring is not done directly, it is a result of my focusing on something else, in this case something other than distractions.
6. But the pain of failing to ignore shoots up every time I fail to ignore. All failure causes pain. It’s how I stay alive.
7. This high pain, which I mostly cannot feel directly because it rises so fast, triggers fear of it.
8. The fear causes my brain to imagine a problem, most often an image of me failing, a prediction of failure, and then magnifies the problem, in order to scare me into solving it. Solving gives me the positive feeling of relief from my fear, (or if I fail to solve, I get the positive feeling of sympathy from myself or an imagined other). My relief from my fear of the magnified problem offsets, distracts me from my fear of the pain of failing to ignore. (When I was a kid and skinned my knee, a bandage would offset, distract me from, the pain.) 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, of failure, that makes me solve the imaginary problem in order to get the positive feeling of relief.
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, more psr’s.
10. My true response is not coming out of my head into action.
11. My mood starts dropping into discouragement, or worse, 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, a micro-panic. I’m in that basic pattern that makes me do things that aren’t truly me.

The way out is to not oppose – not solve – the pain of failing to ignore. I do b and c  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, that is, psr-driven fear produced to solve it.

This is distraction from the pain of failing to ignore. So why don’t I just do any distraction, like counting to ten or reciting a rule from a book, or meditating and so on?

Because there is a second more basic cause of the disappearance of the pain of failing to ignore: I disbelieve the psr’s that the pain of failing to ignore is causing my emotional apparatus, my memory and my imagination to create. It works like this:  while I am bitching and complaining, I’m tearing apart, “deconstructing” the psr’s, until I see why they don’t make sense and therefore why I don’t have to pay attention to them. This causes my focus to move on to something I can believe: externalizing my true response. If I just distract myself, I’m not changing my belief in psr’s . As a result, I don’t change because I don’t build a memory center that picks up on psr’s early and reminds me to bitch and complain them. For example, I can count to 10 when I’m angry for a whole lifetime and never really change to not being angry. I never see what would be there instead of anger: fear. And I never see what’s causing my fear: the pain of failing to ignore that’s triggered by my true response.

On the other hand, if I b and c, I externalize my true response without thinking about it. And most importantly, without feeling like it. This is what it is to not be 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, as compared to second-party observing self which is standing outside my self, or third-party observing self, which is watching myself through someone else’s eyes ). 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: I not only oppose my negative feelings. I fight my positive feelings too. As soon as I decide I feel good with how I’m walking downhill, my pain of failing to ignore spikes. To solve the pain my brain attacks my happiness by telling me “Don’t be so happy; you might fall” , or “You’re not happy enough. Go faster” or many other ways to find fault with my happiness. This fault finding is created in order to scare me into solving the fault. The fantasy solution is the positive feeling of relief from the fear. The relief offsets the pain of failing to ignore distractions at the end of my thought that forms my true response –  my happiness.

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 up. I’m left with my positive feeling lost 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 for more than a few seconds 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