(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 addictions, my dependence, 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 (synonyms are “flow” or “flow-with” or “deconstruct”) the psr’s, often many times (instructions are in the examples below). The repetitions build a memory centre 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:
- While my mind can go blank more than a few times in a day, most of the time my mind produces a constant stream of thoughts and feelings. This stream causes many distractions, all day every day. In order to survive, (that means not die), I need to be good at ignoring them.
- All loss, no matter how small, causes pain. That pain is the feeling called grief. Thus, loss causes grief.
- Since failure causes loss of what I was trying to achieve, the loss caused by failure causes grief. The most important failure in daily life is the failure to ignore the distractions that appear at the end of my thought that forms my true response, my decision. I call the grief triggered by my failing to ignore distractions,”the pain of failing to ignore”.
- Everyone is born with a different intensity of the pain of failing to ignore.
- If my pain of failing to ignore is strong, I am naturally afraid of it. The appearance in my mind of a decision triggers the need to ignore distractions. Failing to ignore them triggers my high pain of failing to ignore, which triggers my fear of that pain. As a result, I’m afraid of making any decision. When my fear of making a decision appears, I’m compelled to solve the fear. So, I search for the cause of my fear. I find that the cause is problems – faults – with the decision and solve those faults. Solving gets me 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), in other words, problem-solving, the thought that forms my decision. I edit in order to get relief from my normal fear of this abnormally high pain.
- 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. Quickly, the problem solving gains momentum, and becomes out of my control until it becomes frightening and snaps me out of it. I call this constant line of psr’s “fear driven seeking of relief” or “second guessing” or “obsessing” or “bad momentum” about my decision.
- If my pain of failing to ignore is weak, I’m not afraid of it. Therefore, my brain doesn’t produce anxiety – an abnormal fear of a normal situation, and other psr’s that mess around with my decision. I’m free to focus on externalizing it by matching my actions to the image of me acting -my action image, that’s in my mind.
- All emotions, including the grief caused by loss of anything, big or small, will keep coming back if opposed. To solve grief, including by avoiding it, is to oppose it. As a result, solving grief causes it to come back.
- 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, that is, suffer it, and see how it won’t harm me if I do. This will make me ignore it by my moving my focus onward to seeing and externalizing my true response/my decision by matching my actions to the action image of my decision.
The Seeing Sequence is the sequence of bitching and complaining /flow/deconstructing, psr’s in order to see my true response. It gets me to stop believing my psr’s which 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 and almost must-read: Why the Seeing Sequence works.
(NB (nota bene, Latin for note well): words below, that are in brackets or separated by forward slashes, mean I can choose from several wordings, or the words are instructions, or blanks to fill in that fit my own 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. I’ve tried most of a long list: approval from others, (like a celebrity gets), drugs, alcoholic drinks, gambling, sex, work, obsessive routines, taking my tension out on others, helping others, game playing, practising physical things like sport, dance, music, body building, and more. I use whatever is easiest in the moment – that’s food.
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 a 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.
I imagine can make a big change in myself right now. Good me.
Poor me, this turns into a fantasized standard says I have to completely change myself in this moment to being able to stop eating, or I’m an inferior person.
(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 of it to go away 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 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:
(which was )
(
I fill this in using one of five possible “endings”:
1) “the end of what I was just doing, (which was): imagining my action image” (of my true response/decision);
2) “the end of what I was just doing (which was): trying and failing to match my action to my action image – for example “my failing to look at an object I was reaching for”;
3) “the end of what I was just doing (which was): feeling my happiness about my success (at forming and externalizing my true response, in other words, at matching my action to my action image)”
Or “feeling happy about what just came into my mind without me trying”. A lot of success is more passive than matching. It’s often just experiencing, that is, enjoying, receiving/observing-not-solving (not editing, not perfecting, not putting my mark on) what the environment gives me that fits me and therefore triggers pleasure.
A frequent example is something beautiful coming into my view. For this the wording is “the end of what I was just doing: enjoying, ( or I could say “feeling pleasure about”), my luck at seeing beauty.”
4) “the end of what I was just doing(which was): experiencing or observing a problem I can’t solve now or have no business solving even if I could, or both.
(Examples:)
a) your lazy consideration (of what you know I need you to consider).”
b) :experiencing bad luck, such as an accident or an unlucky coincidence.: This ending is similar to 2) above in that the end is a failure. But the difference is that it’s a failure of the environment to go my way, while 2) is my failure to make myself go my way.
c) “observing your problem.”
5) “the end of what I was just doing: being in a blank, (a state of no thought or feeling).” This can occur when I don’t know what to think in a situation. It also often occurs when I finish matching my action to my action image and I haven’t decided what to do next. The end of feeling happy is a good example. A blank is the most common cause of repeating myself, either in speech or in action or even in thought. The repeat literally fills in the blank in order to solve the psr that predicts the blank will fail to be brief or will fail to be infrequent.
)
(End of endings, now continuing with bnc)
imagining my action image: 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 my true response, which is to stop eating, out there).
So start ignoring the delay by moving my focus on to
(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 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)
______.”(I describe the action image of my true response)
doing the micro or sub 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 eating, 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 next.
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)
______ ( I describe my true response)
I will naturally externalize it. I will go through my stopping-eating routine. 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 centre.
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 centres. Change doesn’t come from judgment or punishment or encouragement or copying rules or help from another. So I’m free not to use them, and I’m especially free from 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 centre, a new planet, of bitching and complaining that pulls my focus into it and reroutes my focus to my true responses.
Reminder 4 to self:
Question
Why don’t I just say what the the distraction is? It’s grief. The grief from the loss of 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. While I’m feeling the grief, I’m distracted into checking how long it’s lasting. As a result, the distraction is not the grief. It’s the delay in the pleasure of getting it over with. That delay occurs in the instant I have to transition, that is, change, my focus, from forming my true response to externalizing it.
To take this answer back to where I started: me being distracted means I have failed to ignore when I most need to ignore. My high pain of failing to ignore is triggered by my failure. Because the pain is intense, it’s frightens me. To solve the fear, my brain is compelled to use psr’s to fix, not the fear, but it’s cause, the pain.
But if I want to avoid constantly disappointing myself by not externalizing my true responses, I must not give in to the fixing. Through more repetitions than I ever feared, I must train myself to b and c until I can mechanically focus on externalizing my true response.
Reminder 3 to self:
The above two reminders are about what causes change in my brain: persistent practice that builds alternate memory centres. Change doesn’t come from judgment or punishment or encouragement or copying rules or help from another. So I’m free not to use them, and I’m especially free from 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 centre, a new planet, of bitching and complaining that pulls my focus into it and reroutes my focus to my true responses.
Reminder 4 to self:
Question
Why don’t I just say what the the distraction is? It’s grief. The grief from the loss of 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. While I’m feeling the grief, I’m distracted into checking how long it’s lasting. As a result, the distraction is not the grief. It’s the delay in the pleasure of getting it over with. That delay occurs in the instant I have to transition, that is, change, my focus, from forming my true response to externalizing it.
To take this answer back to where I started: me being distracted means I have failed to ignore when I most need to ignore. My high pain of failing to ignore is triggered by my failure. Because the pain is intense, it’s frightens me. To solve the fear, my brain is compelled to use psr’s to fix, not the fear, but it’s cause, the pain.
But if I want to avoid constantly disappointing myself by not externalizing my true responses, I must not give in to the fixing. Through more repetitions than I ever feared, I must train myself to b and c until I can mechanically focus on externalizing my true response.
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