The Seeing Sequence Meets the Reality of Change: Helping me never works

Updated April 15, 2024; January 19, 2025

The Problem

I’m thinking of a list of what to eat. I come to the end of the list. Now I need to change from picturing the different foods to choosing one. Yikes! I can’t make the change, the transition, to choosing.

I look for anything to help me:

• I list the pros and cons of each item, hoping something will stick out. Doesn’t work
• I go over the list again. Doesn’t work.
• I ask for your help. Doesn’t work.
• I just find fault with what you say, in the same way I was just finding fault with each choice of food. Doesn’t work.

The Cause

Not upbringing, not experiences. Instead, psr’s. Psr = inappropriate or imaginary problem solving response. It’s not real solving of real stuff. Ipsr is too long and doesn’t roll off the tongue well, so … psr – problem solving response.

 

The Solution, The Change

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 ask for your help in deciding what to eat.

Step 1

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

I ask you for help in choosing.

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:

Good me, ask you for help,

Because bad me, I’m predicting failure to like my choice.

Good me, I imitate your choice, or as a 4 year old girl once told me , I play “matchy-matchy” : I take the choice you tell me and match myself to it.

Good me, I then find a fault with your choice and argue with you by showing the fault.

Because, poor me, I’m afraid I won’t like your choice.

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______ (ask for your help in choosing),

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) _______ (scanning my list of what to eat).

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 eating).

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 – matching the action image of my decision with action  – other than solving/opposing the delay in getting over grief)

mechanically (which means without feeling like it/without motivation)

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

______ (choosing an item).

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)

______ (describe my true response. In this case, choose what to eat.)

Either way, I only show you my response to your help because you expect me to.

Yet, in my mind, I still haven’t made a decision, a change from, just looking at my choices. Pretending I agree or arguing is not my true response. Choosing from inside my head is my true response.

My seeking your help has a fatal flaw. It never works to produce change.

How it works, that help never works

1. I’m in the momentum of looking at my food choices, and thus feeling the pleasure of my focus automatically moving from one food to another.
2. Then, choosing comes into my mind in one of two ways: from inside my mind, or from outside it. First way: from  inside, I come to the end of looking over my choices. That momentum ends, caused by my decision to stop looking when I reach the last food on my list. Second way: from outside, you are waiting for me to choose, or too much time is passing. If the outside environment introduces choosing, and I go along, the momentum of looking ends.
3. Either way, the loss of the momentum of looking over my choices triggers a feeling of grief in me, as does all loss of pleasure in the brain.
4. I have two ways to go: solve the grief by avoiding choosing, or ignore the grief by focusing on my choice, my true response, until the grief runs out by itself. (Ignoring is a result of focusing on something else).
5. However, ignoring fails on its first few tries. This is normal, especially for any new thing I try. Old things have momentum in memory, so they are easier to decide upon. For example, choosing the same food again.
6. Until I try again and again, and ignoring gets momentum, the grief comes back. The grief needs to run its course, which can only happen if I don’t focus on it, and focus instead on my decision. Running its course takes time: microseconds to seconds, which is long in brain time. The result is a delay in the pleasure of getting grief over with. If grief was over instantaneously, there would be no need to ignore it and therefore no pain of failing to ignore. And so the real thing I need to ignore is the delay in the pleasure of the grief running out.
7. Meanwhile, the failure to ignore causes me an abnormally high pain. It’s like warm feels hot. And because I have a normal fear of all high pain, I really have only one way to go:  solve the pain – of failing to ignore the delay in getting over the grief – by avoiding choosing.
8. Now, I’ve known since childhood that if I show fear for no good reason, I will be disapproved of. So I long ago looked for and found ways to make the fear look like something else: I’ll ask you for help. “What do you think” is one of many ways to hide my fear.
9. When your help comes into my brain, I get an immediate feeling of relief from my fear of my high pain of failing to ignore. That’s because I no longer have to risk this pain by choosing, and triggering the grief from the loss of momentum of looking, and the delay in getting over it.
10. But after that I’m screwed. Here’s why. If you were not expecting me to choose, I would be free to continue to avoid loss of momentum, by looking over my choices in ever increasing detail, and thus get relief from my fear of choosing. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the fantasy that more detail will choose for me.

But you do expect me to choose. You want me to approve of your help and respond, give back, with a change in my mind:  from looking to choosing. Your help is serving you to get more of the me that you like: by getting past the indecisive me that you disapprove of in this moment. Your disapproval is normal. It’s not possible to approve of me not connecting to you. You think I won’t see your disapproval.

9. But I do see it, and even if I don’t, I know it’s there.

Thus, my act of “choosing” is to keep your approval, or more precisely, to avoid your disapproval. I appear externally to be  pointing to what I like, while inside my mind, my choosing is pointing away from my image of your disapproval. What my external choice points to makes no difference to me, because I can’t choose anyway. Only your approval counts.

10. I choose.

Whew! By appearing to choose, I created an act of avoidance of your disapproval that made it look like I wasn’t avoiding.

11. This gets me relief from my fear of three pains:  the pain of your disapproval, the pain, really the grief, from the loss of momentum of just looking at my choices, and the pain of failing to ignore the delay in getting over the grief from the loss of momentum of looking. The first two don’t count because they don’t hurt nearly as much as the pain of failing to ignore. The high pain of failing to ignore causes my imagination to  magnify the first two pains to scare me into solving them by avoiding them, which will then quickly relieve my high pain of failing to ignore.

But what does my brain record, put into the book of my identity, as the real cause of my act? It wasn’t the real me who brought out the choice. My fear of your disapproval, caused by if I didn’t take your help, brought the choice out. I moved the cause of my response outside me, onto you. I did nothing from inside me, by myself. (“Look ma, I can do it myself” is not a memory for me).

12. Responding to help, and thus placing the cause of what I do outside myself, in order to get relief from fear, is not good enough for my brain. Why?

Deciding is a type of change. But the change, when it appears in my mind, is going against the momentum I’m already in. Change has no feeling-like, no motivation, in it. That’s because feeling-like only appears with momentum. Change kills momentum until the change itself gets momentum.

Therefore, when I need to change to choosing what to eat, I must not keep going with the momentum of looking over those options. And I must not wait for your help to make me feel like going against that momentum.

If I do wait, and here’s the screwed part: help will never make feeling-like come.  As a result, I will never change. And if I never am my changed self – I choose what to eat – under my own steam, my brain misses me, grieves my absence in the outside world, and doesn’t know me. I don’t get recorded in the books of my identity. In a short time, my mood drops and my identity fragments into a muddle of confused yes’s and no’s; which I spend my life avoiding through addiction or pretending.

 good me, ask you to choose,

Distraction: the delay in the pleasure of getting over the grief from the loss of momentum of/(in) (what I was doing) looking over my choices (of what to eat)

True response: mechanically choose (what to eat)

Do I do it? Yes? Done.

No? Repeat b&c.

Distraction: grief from the loss of momentum of looking over my choices (of what to eat)

True response: mechanically choose (what to eat)

Do I do it? Yes? Done.

No? Repeat.

Ultra short version, like ods (observe, don’t solve, for details see  https://seeingsequence.com/2018/02/13/observe-dont-solve-the-easiest-way-to-get-to-sleep/ )

good me, (when I see the image of asking you)

my true response: an unaided change from scanning to choosing.

I wait to see what comes next, another psr or my true response

If it’s a psr, I say the feeling that matches it, (good, bad, or poor me). I keep it simple by choosing just one.

I wait again.

my true response: an unaided change from scanning to choosing.

Postscript

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.