(First published July 2018) Updated November 2024, October 2025.

The Problem

I depend on pleasure to distract me from huge tension triggered by my decisions.

Pleasure works better than anything else to give me relief in the moment of my tension. That’s why I call my addiction a logical choice.

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.

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 find fault with every thought while I form and carry out, externalize, a decision. In other words, since finding fault is a type of opposition, I don’t oppose myself.

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, 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

Example 1

I eat when I feel bad. I eat when I feel good. I eat before I have to make a transition, for example before I have to go out, before I go to bed. I eat when I start to prepare food. I eat when food is out and is easily within reach. I eat when I can pop food into my mouth.

I eat until I’m stuffed, until all the food is gone, until I feel bad about myself.

Step 1

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

In this case, I can’t stop eating. But I also can’t stop the other things that give me relief from my scary tension.

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, I love eating.

Good me, I love popping little foods into my mouth.

Poor me, I feel tense or sad when I decide to stop or when I come to the end of the meal or snack.

Poor me, now I have two tensions: my ongoing tension, and the tension from stopping pleasure. 

Bad me, predicting failure to get over this tension.

Poor me, now I’m a little scared; my tension is worse.

I’ll eat a little more. Good me.

Poor me, now I’m imagining I can’t stop.

Good me, I’ll keep going until something stops me, like no food and drink left, or I’m stuffed, or my stomach hurts, or others stop and I’ll be embarrassed if I don’t stop too or I feel bad about myself.

Good me, I see that I’m also addicted to, dependent upon,  feeling like stopping. 

Poor me, without feeling like it, I can’t stop, or do anything. 

(There are lots of different psr’s around eating, but I decide to stop here and go on to step 2)

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 (magnify my tension by predicting failure and fix it by eating),

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) deciding to stop eating.

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 stop 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 – stopping eating- other than solving/opposing the delay in getting over grief)

mechanically moving (my focus) on to the micro steps that I, from the inside, create to externalize my decision to stop eating and drinking: 

  • keep my hands where they are away from food,
  • wait a few seconds and suffer the immediate grief caused by the loss of momentum caused by stopping eating,
  • think of what I want to do next,
  • say a little eulogy (praise of the dead) to the death of this session of pleasure: “Good food, I knew it well”,
  • push myself away from the table, 
  • anything else I come up with.

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 will naturally externalize it. I will go through my stopping-eating routine like a professional. Or I will fail part way through and have to start over next time, and then next time and … as many times as it takes to build that new memory center.

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.