SPEED KILLS

Posted on April 10, 2008 by mysteryshrink

But, I need help now!

You have an idea now what it means to base your actions more on your BEST THINKING and less on EMOTIONAL PRESSURE from others or EMOTIONAL PRESSURE from within yourself.

Still . . . how? I need specifics, doc.

First step is to breathe. Leave a space between what the other person says and your response. Heck, let that other person say something, then you breathe, wait ten seconds, and THEN respond. If you’re my “other person,” you’ll look stunned and clear your ears, thinking, surely, I’d jumped right in that tiny little space with my defensive remark and he’d missed it.

Another advantage of slowing down. You can think better when you’re not rushing your response. Or, at least you can leave the impression you are thinking. That’s pretty cool. I’ll settle for that.

BAD news, GOOD news

Posted on April 9, 2008 by mysteryshrink

Okay, we’ve sucked it up and are ready to take on real change with the ONLY PERSON WE CAN CHANGE.

**Those still hanging on to the hope that you’re going to fix your insides by training other people to treat you the way you must be treated in order to stay calm, know two things. You won’t be very happy for very long. And other people will distance from you to avoid your complaints about how they treat you. Well, three things. Third is, I’m right there in the sinking boat with you. I’m still not over American Airlines switching from peanuts to pretzels. So, you know what kind of emotional maturity giant I am.

BAD NEWS: Trying to maintain self-esteem by training others is time-consuming, ineffective, and eventually humiliating. (How many times to you want to tell some one to give you a kiss?)

GOOD NEWS: You were in charge all along, and that’s attractive like a bucket of money.

Later: SPEED KILLS!

SELF-FOCUS is not SELF-CENTERED

Posted on April 8, 2008 by mysteryshrink

This is the hard part. I’ve had graduate students who, after two years on what it is to be a SELF DEFINED person, still don’t get this part. And, without being able to know, feel, get a grip on SELF FOCUS, not much else is possible.

How can you better manage your anxiety if you can’t get a grip on what you are focusing on?

How can you better manage your anxiety if you are convinced SOMEONE else is CAUSING it?

SELF FOCUS is pulling your energy back inside yourself and PAYING ATTENTION to WHAT’S GOING on inside YOU instead of investing your energy in figuring what others are doing, particularly what they are doing wrong.

To Be a Person: TAKE BACK YOUR LIFE!

Posted on April 7, 2008 by mysteryshrink

Now, it’s important here to say that no one takes our life away from us. No one slips inside our brains and chests and TAKES OVER our feelings. The only way to for another person to take charge of your life and your FEELINGS is for you to abandon yourself.

You must abdicate responsibility for your feelings; you must abdicate responsibility for your goals and actions.

You have to get out of the way and turn the steering wheel over to the other.

”You always make me feel stupid.” “Every time you say that I just give up.” I can’t stand it when you say that.” “You hurt my feelings.” “After what you said I didn’t sleep all night.” “I would have gone back to law school, but my husband didn’t encourage me.” “I’ve always wanted to write a book, but my father wanted me to stick with medicine.” “I started writing a book, but quit when I found out that no one is interested in new writers never get published.” “I wouldn’t be so depressed but my therapist doesn’t validate my feelings.”

But mostly, “YOU . . . . . . MADE ME FEEL THIS WAY.”

Thus, the first step in becoming a free woman in marriage and the world, is to take back that steering wheel. It’s not easy, we are accustomed to seeing ourselves as over-porous beings unable to do anything but soak up criticism, which wouldn’t be so bad. Problem is, we’re in the habit of taking criticism personally.

And, oh yeah. We’re even worse about praise. We take praise WAY too personally. So personally that we even believe if we could train others to give us those compliments we’d be okay. (Talk about turning over the wheel.)

Compliments are supposed to mean that we’re okay. That we’re going the right direction. That we’ve passed the audition–for now. When did we give all that power away? When did we buy that compliments said anything about whether or not we’re loved or LOVABLE?

“If he’d compliment me once in a while, I wouldn’t mind not having a life,” she said.

“Does this outfit make me look fat?”

Ladies, come on. NO . . . MORE. The question is a mistake. You are worth more than that question. NO MORE.

The first thing we’re going to do on this journey is to take back responsibility for the way we feel. “I’ll take care of my feelings, because I’m the only one who can do a good job.”

HOW TO NOT LIKE YOURSELF and get others to agree with you

Posted on March 3, 2008 by mysteryshrink

Andy (Timothy Robbins) walks into Shawshank prison, an environment most of us would see as a hopeless place to survive, much less have a life of any quality. He enters the mess hall and the yard, surveys his new neighbors, and joins the most sane group with the most balanced leader (Morgan Freeman). He works in the library, teaches inmates to read, and every single night he scoops one teaspoon of sand out of the tunnel he’s digging for his escape.

Andy chooses to be in charge of himself rather than allow his surroundings determine what goes on inside him and how he conducts himself and he has a goal.

What are you perceiving if you’re the one walking into Shawshank?

You do not simply SEE the environment. Your perception is an act of creation. You will perceive in accord with the “AS IF” world you’ve made up. You will PERCEIVE in accord to the WORLD YOU ARE RESPONDING TO, not the world as it IS.

How to talk someone else into thinking you’re fat: A newly wed couple is enjoying a meal when the husband looks into his wife’s eyes and tells her how perfect she is. The wife twirls a string of spaghetti, a shadow crossing her expression. She says, “I know you think so, but I don’t. Ever since I was twelve, I’ve always felt like my hips were huge. I felt like a fat giant in junior high. I can’t stand to think what’s going to happen as I get older.” The husband says something sweet, but when the wife gets up to retrieve something across the kitchen, where do his eyes go? How often and how many more times, in the years to come, will his eyes drift to the source of his wife’s junior high school misery?

It depends on how insistent is she that she SHOULD change the size of her derriere, and how insistent she is that IT IS AWFUL, TERRIBLE, AND UNBEARABLE to be a woman with a large (if it even is) posterior.

But now we’ve moved from PERCEIVING to INTERPRETING. Oh, baby now our EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM can really take off!

MOVIES: 1. PERCEPTION and Defining a Self

Posted on March 2, 2008 by mysteryshrink

HOW YOU PERCEIVE OTHERS and the WORLD determines, to a large degree, how much fun your are going to have in this life. Whether you are FREE or in YOUR OWN PRISON.

Sometimes when I talk about working toward a Self Defined Life, people mistakenly assume being SELF DEFINED is the same as being Self-ish. Nothing could be further from the truth. Isn’t it more selfish to run your life on some kind of “auto-pilot” expecting others to change for you? Could there be a more unselfish gift to a spouse, a friend, or relative than to say, “I’ve complained a lot about how you treat me as though it was your responsibity to see that I am happy, and that I never, ever doubt myself. That wasn’t fair, and anyway, as dedicated as I’ve been to telling you how to change so that I stay calm–YOU KEEP BEING YOURSELF. I’ve realized, ‘Babe,’ since I’m making up the world as I go along, you’ll never be able to catch up with my needs. Why don’t I work on my PERCEPTIONS instead of trying to change you? Particularly, because, according to your limited view, you’re not doing the thoughtless things I accuse you of, anyway.”

“I’m going to try something new. I’m going to take more responsibility for my feelings.” Now that’s un-self-centered.

Operating in a self-defined way means working toward having your actions more determined by your BEST THINKING and less determined by EMOTIONAL PRESSURE from others, or EMOTIONAL PRESSURE from within yourself–that is, your own anxieties and fears. Freedom is both having charge of what goes on inside your chest cavity, and having the capacity to manage your anxiety so that your interactions with others and the world are in line with BEST THINKING rather than automatic, anxiety-driven, predictable responses.

We’re going to look at four steps that go into our response to a situation. The first step is PERCEPTION.

Let’s go back to Andy (Tim Robbins) walking into Shawshank Prison on a life sentence for a double murder he did not commit. (Picture yourself at your job, class, party, dinner with family, involved in a disagreement with someone important. For my writer buddies out there, imagine yourself sitting down to pitch an agent, facing a blank page, or adding another page to your rejection collection).

What and WHO DO YOU SEE? Do they want to FIGHT? What DO THEY WANT from you? What do they think of you? How is this meeting going to go? “Which is more important? The world you can touch, or the world you’re responding to?”

This question of perception is particularly important as you approach your “Shawshank.” You don’t walk into the same prison (party, bus, job, relationship, hospital, class) as any other person, though you are entering at the same moment at the same place. Your emotions, your fears and anxieties, take a role in creating your situation. In actually CREATING THE PEOPLE.

Thus, YOU have a lot to say about how the encounters in your life turn out. (Big encounters, like marriage. Little encounters, like the one with the stranger next to you on the plane.

But, oh, I’m getting ahead. And, what kind of “woo-woo” idiot psychologist am I, to suggest that other people aren’t EXACTLY as I perceive them? I’m supposed to even be right about what others are THINKING. Since I can see inside people’s heads, I know WHY they do and say the things I PERCEIVE. I know I see reality because it FEELS like what I see is reality.

Tomorrow we return to poor Andy walking into Shawshank Prison. What will the places you’re in until then be like?

Movies: What Does a Self Defined Person Look Like?

Posted on February 28, 2008 by mysteryshrink

Before we hone our skills at driving ourselves and others crazy, a clear picture of what the non-crazy person looks like.

Let’s start with a simple test of our current capacity to manage stress. What would you do if you were sentenced to life without parole for a double murder you did not commit? Life. In a maximum security prison with no hope. Bad, bad neighbors.

Talk about a chance for your Emotional Guidance System to take charge. To what degree would you be able to manage what goes on inside your chest cavity? Me? I’m writhing on the floor tearing my hair out. They’d have to pry my teeth off the baseboards to load into the transport van. I would be “shoulding”– like crazy. “This shouldn’t be happening to me! Someone should have saved me! My parents should have raised me to be tougher! And, you, warden guy, shouldn’t be smirking like that.” As you notice, it doesn’t matter that according to law this shouldn’t be happening. When it is, it is.

Then, of course, I’d move into catastrophizing. “This is horrible! I can’t take this! This is terrible! I can’t stand to live in a prison!” Again, the conditions might be awful in fact, the point is WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT?

“Which is more important? The world we can touch, or the world we’re responing to?”

Tim Robbins, playing Andy, in “The Shawshank Redemption” makes another choice. (I know, you’re thinking, “Choice? What kind of choice does someone unfairly imprisoned for life have?” After all, Andy’s the VICTIM right? He doesn’t have any control over his situation. Andy takes on his fate in a remarkable way with remarkable results.

He thinks about his situation and arranges a fulfilling role for himself. He locates and associates with the most emotionally stable group with the most solid self leader (Morgan Freeman.) And he makes a long term goal, a plan for escape that will take many years of work and patience.

A Self Defined Person: is able to pull focus off surroundings . . . returning energy to managing anxiety and planning actions. For starters.

Practice Sentence: “This is unpleasant, inconvenient, and less than perfect, but not a disaster unless I DECIDE TO MAKE IT ONE.”

MysteryShrink

A Psychologist on the Loose

Tag Archives: self help