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

Updated April 15, 2024; January 19, 2025; October 10, 2025

(Short version far below)

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, most of the time my mind produces a 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, 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 find 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), that is, problem-solving, the thought that forms my decision. I edit 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, my brain 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.
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, is the sequence of  bitching and complaining /flow/deconstructing psr’s in order to see my true response. It 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 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 experience.)

How to Bitch and Complain/Flow with Psr’s using the following Example List

Example 1 of 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 while looking at the blue sky and then her blue sweater, 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:

(which was) _______ (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.)

 

Short version

 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/transitio 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/transition 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.