Monstrous

Monstrous People => The Psi Zone => Topic started by: oldbill4823 on January 04, 2009, 04:09:52 AM

Title: article about personal problems
Post by: oldbill4823 on January 04, 2009, 04:09:52 AM
I enclose a long article here about personal problems. Pretty much everyone has issues of one sort or another no matter wether they are psychic, shapeshifters, religious devotees or skeptics. I am putting this here as background reading for people who I have spoken to privately about stuff. It saves me writing it out every time.

The article below talks about how personal problems come into being, how to find them and how (in theory) to fix them.

If you want to actually fix stuff, PM me and I'll see of we can find a time to work on stuff together.




Human brains evolved from animal brains.
Animals don't have the higher reasoning abilities that we do, but they can still navigate their world without the need for language or more than simple reasoning.
That's because they operate on emotion. Emotion is really, at its basic level, something that is tied into the primal survival instincts that keep an animal wanting to survive.
The 4 F's, or the drive to fight, flee, feed, or fornicate, are the most basic survival drives, and they're called drives because they aren't just felt, they get an animal to move toward or away from something.
Obviously, we have them too.

But, let's keep talking animals here. In order to survive in a big ol' 3-dimensional world, there has to be a way of telling the animal when and where to feel these drives so that they know when to flee from a predator or where to find food.
The way this happens, according to Dr. Guiffre is that these driving emotions become associated to locations in space.
As an animal gets closer to where it remembers seeing a predator, that fight or flight instinct goes up and up, increasing the animal's awareness and either preparing it to deal with danger or subtly driving it to avoid that location.
After all, when the animal gets closer, that feeling gets stronger, but if it goes AWAY from that location, it's rewarded with the stressful feeling going away.

Now keep in mind that the brain is designed to make associations and predictions.
If the animal sees a predator, it will probably feel fear.
But that fear will also be associated to the location where the predator was found to help it avoid the predator's territory in the future.
This same kind of association can be made with other things like finding a mate or food.
The locations where they're found become associated with these certain things to help the animal find it later.
In this way, these associations help an animal navigate the world without the need to sit down and ponder it.

It also helps to understand how these associations are formed. When strong drives get triggered in a situation that is new to the animal, an association is made, like a bookmark in the memory.
This makes sense, since the only time the animal would need a new association is in a new situation.
This is also called "learning", by the way.

Now let's fast forward to people.
We have the same basic makeup, but we tend to make things more complex.
While we still have the basic drives, we developed three important abilities: language, imagination and self-control.
This gives us the ability to organize and label our world, play with alternative solutions to problems, and stop our emotional impulses long enough to choose to behave differently.
Ideally.

This is where it gets all messed up. You see, emotions STILL happen first.
They influence us the exact same way they do animals.
Of course, we have imaginations that can blow things out of proportion, and language to create reasonable-sounding explanations for why we do what we do. That's the problem.

Emotions happen first.
They influence us. They tell us what's good, and what's bad. What to seek and what to avoid. Because they happen at a level before language, all our subsequent thoughts are filtered through those drives, including our thoughts about why we're doing something and our thoughts about what we did or will do, and our thoughts about our thoughts.
We tend to label our experiences, and that label gives us a tangible sense of familiarity with and understanding of that experience. Even if that label is bulls**t.

And THEN, our imagination takes those labels and looks for associations with other things, which may call up other emotions as well.
Those emotional associations further change your behavior and your thoughts, which then lead to other emotions, and other behaviors and other associations. And soon you have this giant mess of associations that lead to different behaviors and on top of that, because we label and describe these experiences, it ends up becoming a story or personal narrative or identity that is firmly rooted in your brain as an understanding of how things work, or a belief.

Now, I'm not saying we should never have beliefs.
Far from it. I'm not saying we should give up all self-talk and reason, either. Both have their place, and that place is in helping you to reach your goals in life. What I am trying to get at, however, is that by focusing on beliefs you are focusing on the giant mess of associations that
happened AFTER the emotional drivers caused the problem.
Even if you're trying to focus on ONE belief, invoking the very idea of beliefs starts to bring up all the rationalizations and explanations you might have made for why the belief is true, which just distracts you and makes the problem seem impossible to solve because it just seems so darn REAL.

There's an easy way to fix this, however, and it's nothing particularly special. 
When you approach a new problem, just look at the feelings that first come up.
That's it.  Seriously.

The answer to the question, "What gets in the way" should NEVER be a belief, it should be a feeling. Now, this just takes a conscious effort to focus just on the feelings without indulging any need to describe them. If you look for a meaning first, you'll find the drivers that seem to fit the meaning you're looking for. So skip that, go with your gut, and just pick out the emotions that come up,whatever they are, and keep it simple. Force yourself to shut off the internal commentary and need for a rational explanation which everyone has to varying degrees  and just work with the feelings you notice there.

Beliefs showed up when some drivers didn't seem to be simple emotions and couldn't be balanced. The fix for that is pulling them out and breaking them down into other smaller drivers. These got called beliefs 'cause they usually had descriptions like "I am X".
Clearing these out SOMETIMES solved the problem, but sometimes they weren't the drivers that actually started the problem, even if they were part of it.
Those are called symptoms. From there, things degenerated into a hunt for the right "belief" in a sea of "symptoms."

Now, don't get me wrong. These things have their place. But I've found something really interesting in my work on myself and with clients lately--ESPECIALLY with clients. Simply put, if you don't ever get into beliefs, and just focus on finding at which point in the process the problem begins and note what feelings are there and just balance them, the problem gets solved without running around in circles.
It's surprisingly VERY simple, even if the problem seems complex at first.


It really is simple. Let me share something else with you that has
really helped me: my mindset.

You see, I've noticed that when I start looking for a belief first, I start looking for ways to change "me" and that brings up all sorts of things like my perception that there's something wrong with "me" and all the inadequacy and other BS that that brings up. The more I focus
on "my" beliefs, the more this sense that something being wrong with "me" gets stronger.

Now, this can seem like the natural way to go because so much of pop psychology and self-help deals with understanding and changing your "self." It's the accepted way to go. And it's a HUGE problem.

So the trick is to take a completely different approach.
What I have found that helps me is to see the problem as the result of some emotional associations that are attached to some event or place.
I recognize that that association is basically attached outside of me, somewhere in the world where the problem happens instead of being the result of a projection of some core belief from inside me.

Let me give you an example from a client of mine. He made a mistake and went to prison, and fear, loneliness, and anxiety became associated to prison. After he got out, everything that reminded him of prison, such as the thought of going out and accidentally running into someone from the company he lost a job at when he went to prison, the thought of talking to his friends about it, or the thought of meeting up with a friend he made on the inside, had those feelings
associated with them, so he was compelled to avoid them. Obviously, it's hard to avoid going out, and even harder to avoid thinking about it so there he had a problem. And the solution was simply balancing those 3 feelings. That's it.

So to go back to the keep-it-simple mindset, here's what you have to do. First of all, realize that the problem isn't about "you."
The problem is just the result of an emotional association you learned somewhere.
All you have to do is find where the problem actually begins and what emotional associations are there and balance them out.
No need to sort out beliefs from symptoms, or even figure out the problem.
Go to the beginning, notice what the feelings are (and note that they're JUST feelings, nothing more) and fix 'em so that you can live the life you want to live.

That is IT, and it's so miraculously simple. All you have to do is stop making it complex with beliefs, and focus instead on finding the right point in the process of the problem where the drivers that start the problem occur.

Now, I know this was long, and I hope it makes sense to at least some of you. This is a completely different way of thinking about problems from what people are used to.

This was written by a guy called Dave Forris. I have edited it a bit.


Title: Re: article about personal problems
Post by: Nina on January 04, 2009, 07:02:06 AM
OB, this is great! And I even think I got it! Although, Im still working on the balancing part, I think working things this way is much simpler than other stuff, and most certainly, better than not doing anything to change it. Tnx!  :wink:
Title: Re: article about personal problems
Post by: oldbill4823 on January 04, 2009, 12:02:56 PM
I have not included anything here about how to balance these feelings.
Although it is very simple to do that is best done with someone else to start.
The first couple of times anyway.