The Problem
This glass I just drank from, still in my hand, I think of washing.
Predictions of failure immediately come into my mind: failure to wash in one easy try, or it will be boring, or I’ll have to waste time drying my hands, or all of these one after the other.
The image of failure makes me afraid.
I try to solve the fear by first making muscles in my shoulders tight, as if I’m readying to resist some physical force , then by washing the glass harder.
I oppose these two acts of solving the fear by I then predict even worse failure, such as I’ll be doing boring tasks forever. But really, I’m editing: finding the flaw, in my muscle tightness, that it won’t fix the fear. The flaw – forever boredom, is created to scare me into solving for longer, so I can keep triggering that positive feeling of relief from the fear.
It works. My fear is magnified.
I try to solve the fear by imagining myself putting off the chore. “Later baby, that’s my motto”. Relief!
Then guilt comes in because this is the last clean dish I have. I’ve let avoiding take me too far, to a mess of dishes.
I magnify the guilt into sadness by picturing all the other unclean things in my life. Then I compare myself to the fantasy standard of a clean person, in order to make myself feel inferior.
I solve my inferiority by picturing myself washing the glass.
As I approach the sink to wash it, I picture the glass cleaned and in the dish drainer. My mood jumps up a bit.
I start washing the glass. My mind wanders away and I drop the glass in the sink. My mood falls more than a bit.
The glass hasn’t broken. My mood rises into relief.
Then my mood settles back down, but a bit too far, into negative territory: boredom.
I continue to wash the glass. My mood quickly rises as I anticipate success.
It’s then that I notice I’m in the momentum of mood swings.
I don’t like it. I just want to get through the washing without my mood jerking up and down.
But can I?
Yes.
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, I don’t oppose myself.
Good to know:
- 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.
- All loss, no matter how small, causes pain. That pain is the feeling called grief. Thus, loss causes grief.
- 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.
- 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. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. Mood swings over small everyday things.
2. Mood swings when I fail to get you to see my point of view.
Example 1
Everyday things go wrong.
Step 1
Pick the thought or feeling I think is a psr. Optional: A useful guide: The Database of Psr’s
I predict that washing this glass will not go well.
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
Bad me, predicting failure.
Poor me, scared of the failure.
Good me, fix fear by avoiding.
Good me, I love that feeling of relief.
I’ll be bored forever. Bad me.
Poor me, I feel inferior to a fantasized standard that says I have to feel like washing the glass.
Good me I’m optimistic I can wash the glass.
Bad me, I dropped it.
Good me, I’m angry, because I love the fantasy I can reverse the drop by hurting myself with the power of the pain of disapproval.
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 (do all these psr’s to myself),
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) imagining my action image (of my decision) to handle (wash) this _____ (object (I say what it is) ).
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 stop these mood swings while I ____(wash this glass)).
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 – my true response- other than solving/opposing the delay in getting over grief)
mechanically washing this glass.
Step 3
Wait to see what comes into my mind.
If another psr, repeat Steps 1 and 2.
If my true response, I will naturally externalize, that is, match the image in my mind with action external to/outside my mind.
Example 2
2. Mood swings when I fail to get you to approve of my point of view.
Step 1
Pick a thought or feeling I think is a psr. Optional: A useful guide: The Database of Psr’s
I predict that you will never approve of my point of view.
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
Bad me, self attack, using the worst case scenario (PF3 in The Database of Psr’s ) that you’ll never approve of any of my points of view.
I’m very afraid of this image. Poor me.
Poor me, my mood has swing down to sad.
I give up. Poor me.
Good me, relief (my mood has swung up) that I don’t have to try anymore to get your approval, now that I’ve given up.
Good me, I’m tense, angry at myself or you.
Good me, solve it by pleasure seeking (I am imagining eating something, or doing very easy tasks like cleaning, or watching video or going for a walk….this list of pleasure seeking is very long).
I imagine explaining why you should approve of my point of view. Good me.
Bad me, another self attack: I imagine it doesn’t work to change your mind.
My mood is swinging out of control. Poor me.
I predict it will take too much work for me to stop this bad momentum with b and c. Bad me.
(There may be many more psr’s, but I decide I’ve done most of them and I’ll be able to see my true response with 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 (get caught if fear that makes my mood swing all over),
I’m afraid I’ll see I’m in the pain of failing to ignore distractions,
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) experiencing a problem I can’t solve now: the pain, (grief. yes, there’s a second grief here) caused by having tried and failed to get your approval of my point of view ( ______(here I might want to name my point of view).
At the end of my thought that forms my true response:
I’m already dead inside about this act of ignoring.
But I have to ignore anyway ((if I want to stop these mood swings )
So start ignoring the delay by focusing on
mechanically observing this problem I can’t solve now: my pain/my grief.
Step 3
Wait to see what comes into my mind next.
If another psr, repeat Steps 1 and 2.
If my true response, I will naturally externalize it by just observing. This means suffering the pain until it goes away by itself. Amazing that the pain goes away so fast if I don’t try to fix it. I immediately see that my true response is that just because I show you myself doesn’t mean you’re obliged to see me; that all my self-expression carries my assessment and the gamble, almost always small, that I wont be seen and that pain is the price of that risk. That makes my true pain very small, and worth the gamble. I wish I’d seen this when I first wanted to make new friends, or start dating or apply for jobs, or…
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.
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