The Problem
I have been hurt by you more than you would ever imagine. It’s not that you can’t imagine my pain. It’s that you won’t and will do everything you can not to, as you always have.
The only thing that eases my pain is fantasies of revenge. In these fantasies, I hurt you as much and more than you hurt me. But my relief is quickly followed by images of everything that could go wrong with my revenge, especially images of you countering my efforts and hurting me again.
My pain has kept coming back into my days and nights.
Now it comes when I have a little pain about anything at all, and when I’m transitioning from one thing to another and thus have to give up, lose, the thing before the transition. These are times when my focus has low momentum, so there’s room for my pain to come in and be re-enacted.
Worst of all, the pain sometimes comes when I’m happy.
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 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.
(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.)(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/Deconstruct Psr’s using the following Example List
1. You hurt me bad and you knew you were doing it.
2. You hurt me a little and didn’t know it.
3. You hurt me because I deserved it. Now I want war.
Example 1
1. You hurt me bad, and you knew you were doing it.
Step 1
Pick the thought or feeling I think is a psr. Optional: A useful guide: The Database of Psr’s
For example, fantasies of revenge.
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 imagine hurting you as bad as you hurt me, or worse than you hurt me.
Good me, I’ll make you suffer the way you have made me suffer.
Good me, I’m so angry at you.
Good me, I’ll never speak to you again.
Bad me, I keep going over in my mind what you did to me, and trying to solve it.
Every counter-move I imagine is followed by a fantasy of how you would counter it. This can get wild and long. Poor me.
Good me, I’m checking to see if it still hurts. If it doesn’t, I love the fantasy that I’ll feel like moving forward.
Poor me, it still hurts.
Poor me, afraid I’ll never get over this pain.
Good me, I fantasize someone understanding my pain and that making me feel better.
Poor me, it doesn’t work or only works for a short time.
Bad me, what you did has become part of my collection of self-attacks. This means, every time something doesn’t go my way, I have a brief flash of what you did to me.
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 (keep imagining revenge),
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 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)
observing a problem I can’t solve now: that problem being this wave of my pain ending with no prospect of ever fixing it: (you hurt me and there was nothing I could do to stop you and there is no way to get justice/no way to make you pay/no way to achieve that outside similarity to my pain, in order to ease my pain).
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 out there, which is to move on to things I can solve now).
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 the delay in getting over grief)
mechanically (which means without feeling like it/without motivation) moving (my focus) on to
observing that this unsolved pain has passed again without being solved and then moving (my focus) on to observing something else that leads to me to what I can do/solve now.
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 leave the pain unsolved and move my focus onward.
Example 2.
You hurt me a little and didn’t know it.
Step 1
Poor me, what you did triggered a negative feeling in me.
Good me, I see you didn’t mean to hurt me.
I’m afraid I won’t get over the negative feeling by myself. Poor me.
Bad me, I’m predicting failure, in order to create a fear, in order to get me to solve the fear, in order to get the positive feeling of relief, in order to make me feel like moving my focus on to my true response.
Good me, I’ll hurt you back, directly or indirectly (passive-aggressively), to get that feel-like feeling.
(I have more psr’s but they are weak now so I’ll stop labelling them and start 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 (imagine revenge, in the fantasy it will take away my pain forever),
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 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)
observing a problem I can’t solve now or don’t want to solve now: this wave of my pain ending without the need to solve it because your hurt me by accident).
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 out there), which is to move on to ignore/let go of what you did).
So start ignoring the delay by focusing on
mechanically (which means without feeling like it/without motivation) moving (my focus) on to
observing the end of this wave of mild pain, and then back on to connecting to you or connecting to myself while waiting for you to connect to me.
Step 3
Wait to see what comes into my mind next.
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)
ignore your mistake that you didn’t know you were making. And, b and c, the long-standing prs’s that were triggered by the mistake. I’m touchy,.. touchy!
Example 3
You hurt me because I deserved it. Now I want war.
Step 1
Good me, I’m angry at you for punishing me/giving me a consequence, for my hurting you because I was greedy. (or any other form of my lazy consideration of you).
Good me, I’ll punish you back, which means I’m going to war with you.
And I don’t care how many times I’ve lost a war with you. Good me.
Good me, this time I’ll win by hurting you back until you stop giving me consequences.
Good me, I’ll cut you off. That’ll get me something. Relief from my anger.
I love that fantasy. Good me.
Step 2
Because poor me if I didn’t (fantasize going to war with you),
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:
(which was) observing a problem I can’t solve now: this wave of pain ending with no chance I’ll ever want to solve it in order to feel like moving on. Why no chance? Because I got what I deserved for hurting you.
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 move on after I observe this problem I can’t solve now or ever.)
So start ignoring the delay by focusing on
mechanically taking my deserved punishment.
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’ll already be externalizing it: take responsibility for hurting you with my lazy consideration, which was caused by my anxiety, and suffer my punishment without complaint. And if appropriate, that is, this isn’t the hundredth time I’ve hurt you, apologize. Then work to change the anxiety that causes my greediness by doing the Seeing Sequence as many times as the change requires. (Looks like I’ll be working at it day and night at first). What was your punishment of me? You do absolutely nothing, thus leaving it all up to me. Ouch!
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.
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