Category: Conscious Experience Described

This category covers things that relate to the experience of consciousness. It deals with the aspects of thinking that people become aware of because they directed their attention onto them, their attention was drawn to them, or because they just came to mind as a result of some underlying mental process.

My New Nighttime Integrity Battle

I have always been a dreamer, both during the day and at night. Most of my REM dreams have been things that are either the usual fluff (the seemingly random consequence of brain repair) or the symbolic chilling ones that seem to last well into the following day. I’d just assume the brain was offering up some experience that was needed to reorganize itself to accommodate something that it experienced recently. “I wonder why the hell I needed to have that experience” was often enough for me to just let go of thinking about it and just get on with the day as best I can.

But sometimes when I’m going through some sort of ego death and fundamental restructuring of identity, the dreams become battles against something that really doesn’t want to let go.

I am in one of those periods now and fortunately I have the self-awareness to know what is happening soon after I wake-up in a cold sweat thinking “what the F was that?”

Some of the dreams over the few last weeks have been particularly disturbing. Throughout most of them, I keep thinking “this isn’t on me, these people are responsible for their own actions.” Many are loaded with symbolism and others are simply the raw sensory information being perceived for the literal experience it was meant to be.

There are reoccurring ones about my Canadian schools. One batch has me running through my first Canadian grade school. I’m older in this dream, I think my current age and I’m trying to help some of the new Canadian children feel at place there. The pace is frantic and I don’t know if I’m helping. The next school dream is of my Junior high school, were I am circling a route inside it, frantically trying to get somewhere but I’m just running and running, round and round. Then there is the high school one. In this I’m not a part of the school or the people. I’m effectively isolated.

Most recently the dreams have been more about being with a smaller group of people – me and two or three other people – vs. the building of complete isolation that I was experiencing with the school dreams. We start off as a large group, with all but a few of them leaving at the end. The remain ones are unique in that we possess something that the rest didn’t. It’s tough to say what exactly it is, but the rest are returning to their old life while we remain separate and distinct.

I have had a couple of dreams about golf courses. These are significant because I don’t dream about golf and only spend time near a course the summer before and after Natalie died. They are less intense and less frequent – they haven’t happened in consecutive evening and I’m able to engage the people more effectively.

These dream reveal two things. The first is an intense and deeply seeded sense that I don’t belong – stemming from moving from Ireland when I was 9. The second is a deeply seeded sense that I am not worthy of love stemming from the fact that Natalie broke-up with me a couple of months before her life ended.

I am waiting for the final lesson / piece of information and this is the one that actually frightens me as it will have something to do with an earlier period of my life before I moved to Canada. My apprehension about it stems from the fact that EVERYTHING has gone into my brain and shaped me in some way but most of it is beyond my conscious ability to recall after almost 35 years.

Two Months On, One Month On

Two months ago my father died.

One month ago I woke-up from almost 39 years of living in a fog after giving up most of my compulsive behaviors. It was rough at times.

I loved the escape, getting out of my mind on drink and food, passive aggressive blaming, addictive relationships and a lack of authenticity and integrity. The first day was fine, the second day was tough, day 3 to 10 were a challenging detox, then things began to improve.

I never thought about starting any of it again though. I effectively stopped sleeping and was only able to get about 3-5 hours a night of cold sweating and dread. I took to sleeping with Bear again, a stuffed animal that Rachel gave me a number of years ago because I felt so alone when my eyes would pop open after 30 minutes or 30 seconds of sleep. It didn’t feel weird to take him out of the closet and cuddle him. He has personality and that seemed to give me strength.

At some point I noticed that a lot of the suffering had started to go away. I was left with some intrusive thoughts, but my therapist coached me on some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that have been extremely effective at transforming the thoughts into something else. With the proper context, I can see that something happened and am free to tell myself any story and create any feeling about it that I like. She’s very good at her job and has spared me a lot of pain, replacing it with a contentment for the average life I have lived surrounded by some extraordinary people.

I made peace with everything upon seeing the motivation of my actions, accept it, and became extremely grateful for all of my experiences.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, love began to flow. This is a powerful love that I haven’t experienced as an adult. It is more powerful than anything that I imagined I was capable of experiencing. It is hard to articulate it, but it feels like a highly focused understanding and compassion for humanity, all things living and everything in existence. A metaphysical understanding that I am the universe, that all of us are made up of pieces of the universe that have existed since everything began. Our form borrows bits and pieces as slightly more organized but utterly meaningless collections of matter. We exist as this for an insignificant amount of time and then we are returned back into the cosmos.

My spirit is restored when I realize what this means. We are all exactly the same thing, I am no different, not even different from other people. The fog is gone, and it is impossible to forget the experience of what it is like.

I can feel emotions, sense their origin, and fearlessly attack the world. I understand my essence and that my spirit is pure. I am now incapable of lying to myself or to others. I see my compulsive past as a gift, and the remainder of my life will be about fulfilling my purpose. My vitality peaks as the energy of the universe channels through my body – I have become indestructible because I have died.

Patrick doesn’t exist anymore, he never did. He was a figment of an imagination and a desire to be instead of being. People think I have lost my mind, and I have.

Reasons To Not Be Afraid

I’ve got a lot, but I am. I have been for years.

Sure, I can continue to wrack my brain, analyzing the hell out of my memories and ripping apart my actions looking for meaning, but that hasn’t gotten me any closer to the truth, happiness or to a level of satisfaction with who I am, my place in the universe and even a reason to keep going. It can’t, I’ve been lying to myself for a long time. I didn’t really realize it. When I was small I told myself a lie, a story, and I went with it. Then life became it, and finally I did too.

That isn’t good enough for me anymore. There is more to this world than these distractions I’ve been seeking and compulsively indulging.

My therapist suggested that I make 2 lists, one of the why’s and one of the what if I stop. I thought it would be tough, and it was kind of, I crumbled and cried and the self-loathing seemed to grow exponentially. But I had a lot to write and the ease at which it flowed out of me help me see that I have been ready for a sometime, but just afraid to step off the cliff and drop to my death. I liked the old me, but he was selfish, scared and offered only conditional everything. Those who knew me saw that things weren’t right, those who knew me really well would leave. My family and close friends were the only constants, and of the friends, only those who engaged me like an Adult, without judgement remain. And that was key unlocking the gate and convincing me to take the leap. I AM an Adult and it is okay to forgive myself for my past actions. Further self-judgment here is pointless.

The why’s of my compulsive behavior:

  • Predictable outcome – good or bad, I knew what would happen and there is some sense of security in that
  • It created a false me / them dynamic that helped me feel like I was different
  • It closed me off from other people, which helped me feel like I didn’t belong
  • It is wildly isolating, alienating and paradoxically not the person I presented myself to be
  • Being isolated allowed me to indulge my thoughts without outside perspective to balance them
  • It helped me feel different and deviant so not as good as anyone else
  • Doing it helped me feel a sense of shame that I could wear and feel inferior to others
  • It altered my emotional state temporarily so there was some escape for the emptiness / insecurity that I felt
  • It was childish and was a calling for some sort of love that I didn’t think I was getting
  • It was proof that I wasn’t okay and therefore not worthy of the things that others may enjoy
  • It helped me get a very nice body that I thought would compensate for my lack of confidence
  • It was easier to keep doing what I was doing vs. put the effort in to change

The what if I stop my compulsive behavior:

  • I will save money
  • My teeth, skin, and body will look better
  • I will feel my baseline, whatever that is, and be able to get the help I need to adjust that
  • I will improve my spiritual health as I become reconnected with the universe and the people on the planet
  • I will save a lot of time
  • I will feel my emotions clearly and in a timely fashion allowing me to properly engage and parse them for the information they are revealing
  • I will be free of the anxiety and guild associated with indulging compulsive thoughts
  • I will be able to recover from my fathers death more effectively
  • I will be acting with self-love and treating my body, mind and spirit with compassion
  • I will be acting more like my mentors
  • I will not be harming myself
  • I will have removed the monkey from my back and will have stopped doing something I am ashamed of
  • I will have gain the knowledge of just what these compulsive behaviors have been doing to me
  • I will be acting responsibly, I will be acting like an Adult
  • I will no longer be acting in a hypocritical way and this will restore my integrity
  • I will be thinking more clearly, my body will be functioning more clearly and I will be reducing a number of very serious health risks
  • I will be in a position for find a partner who complements my life but does not give it purpose
  • I will have a better idea of my actual worth and be able to take more effective actions to help me achieve my goals
  • My public self will match my private self and any dissonance between the two will be eliminated
  • I will not need to be living and managing two separate and incomparable lives

I looked at the lists when I was feeling absolutely crap over the last few weeks, picked an item and mediated on it. It didn’t take long for my chest to puff-up and for the fighter in me to come up to scratch. My actions are my choice so stopping is as easy as just not doing it anymore.

However, there is something going on inside my brain that this exercise was supposed to bring to light and my therapist was happy that it came out. I’m not necessarily afraid, but I am anxious.

Transactional Analysis – Part 1 – Laymans Introduction

Sean gave me another critical piece of the puzzle. I asked him if he has been pacing the information so as to not blow my mind up and he claimed no that it just hadn’t come-up. Transactional analysis is an object-oriented way to document interpersonal interactions. Each interaction is a transaction and the currency of TA are strokes. Depending upon the depth of the transaction, a stroke can have little worth “hi” or a lot of worth “I noticed that you pasted your exam, it’s great that all your hard work is paying off.” Hi is simply an acknowledgement of mutual existence. The lack of this type of stroke will be noticed MORE than it being there. The comment about passing the exam is more complicated and validating to the ego. Acknowledgement of mutual existence is there, the recognition that they exist to the other person when they aren’t in front of them (noticing that they past the exam), the recognition of historic labor efforts, and the social recognition that passing an exam is a payoff.

Ego states and Social states

An ego state is the psychological state from which ones’ comment comes. Child, Parent, Adult. The social state is the apparent state from which a comment comes. For example, it being important that we are on time is socially adult but if we direct a comment towards someone who is always late it is from a Parent psychological or ego state. These states are indicated with a capital letter.

We learn these states from our parents and other caregivers and while we may never be aware that they are there, they are, and while we may never be aware that we jump around from one to the other, we do. They are biologically hardwired through years of experience and validation and for these reasons certain behavioral tendencies are really sticky and may never go away. Your Child is going to be your Child for most of your life. Your Parent is going to be your Parent for most of your life.

The Parent automates the day-to-day stuff that makes life manageable – shopping, cooking, cleaning, going to work, looking after loved ones – because it is both controlling and nurturing. The Child allows for play because it has been cultivated with a sense of freedom. Creativity is the realm of the Child and this represents an essential piece of a human beings spirit. The Child can become overly adapted however with the wrong proportions of control and nurture:

If Parent nurturing Then Child free.

If Parent controlling Then Child adapted.

The Adult ego state is reflective and purposeful. It exists in harmony with the universe as it calls upon past experience for information and solutions but transacts with the others in a deliberate way. It has well-established boundaries and accepts that each person has the right and responsibility to manage their own life and affairs. Adults engage in coaching with enlightenment or independence as the goal.

The goal of TA therapy is to coach the client to transacted with social and psychological states being aligned as Adult. They are aware of and use when appropriate their Child and Parent states but these are tools to use vs. compulsions to serve.

Why would Sean tell me about this? Because I needed to hear it as I was lacking a visual framework from which to logically represent what I have been feeling and living through.

My last post of 2011 was about how I had to accept that I didn’t know what my motivations were in most situations and why I act the way I do. I needed to give-up my belief that I know myself in order to finally observe how I act. This is still the case, but it’s getting easier. What is remarkable about it, is that once it was understood to me it became very easy to see things happen and feel the shift in my psychological state.

For example, I was recently compared to someone I didn’t like very much. There was a moment when I thought about what I had heard and what I wanted to say and then realized I didn’t really know what the comment meant. I replied with “yes, there are similarities between me and him.” It wasn’t the Child reply that initially popped into my head. Their reply was “well, actually, this is the one similarity” which was true. He and I both have a tendency to try and solve the problems of the people we care about; not necessarily a character flaw but it can be a Parent action. MOST people have this problem. The key thing with the interaction was that I didn’t let myself slip into an automatic Child-like reply of “yes, but…” The comment was accurate because the other person made it. The inverse comment would have been equally true – that he and I aren’t very similar. That’s the thing with conversations with people, almost everything is right under some circumstances so, well, what’s the point in arguing?

I know what I need to do, I know what I want to do and I haven’t been showing a lot of control over things. When I work and play, it’s purposeful and passionate. When I am a Parent, it’s about very few things in my own life and I do have a tendency to try and look out for the people I like. When I’m an Adult I’m okay and everyone else is okay.

Negative Love Syndrome – It Can Stop Here

A few weeks ago Sharyl sent me an article. It was a .pdf of The Negative Love Syndrome by Bob Hoffman. It is fascinating and I’ve read it a few times a week since I got it. It isn’t very long and it is another layer of explanation along the lines of how people observe, learn and practice things as a child that become their unconscious adult behaviors.

With Negative Love Syndrome (NLS), just like compassionate love, children normalize the early experiences of “love” they observe from their parents / caregivers interactions with them and each other. No matter WHAT happens, it will be regarded as normal and set the baseline for all love behavior moving forward; these early experiences shape the child’s future actions so they will work unconsciously and often against their own interests to ensure the baseline experience is restored. But with NLS, the children normalize seeking loving behaviors that do not add quality of live or are simply negative.

For example, when mommy withdraws and doesn’t tell dad what is bugging her, daddy yells and then she does. The boys learn that adult females are cold and conditionally open (when they get yelled at), the girls learn to bottle things it up until her partner gets verbally abusive. Provided the boy yells, both eventually get what they want so they remain in “love.” This is in contrast to compassionate love were the women may not talk openly, but her husband accepts that she will talk when ready and will not pressure her. Children viewing this will internalize appropriate boundaries, and both the need for and respect of another person’s privacy. While the boy will not learn how to make conditionally females open, he also doesn’t learn to attack an object. He learns that women are people, with feelings and that they will talk when they need to. The lesson a girl learns from watching her mother set-up and honor the boundaries can on serve to make her more empowered.

If left unresolved NLS will manifest itself as a series of games between the adult and their future partners although little if any of this is conscious. Seemingly healthy relationships will begin to suffer as the adult works to create the relationship of their parents; which is the reason why they suffer from NLS. If their partner doesn’t realize that this is happening and remains committed to having a healthy relationship, they begin to alter their actions and play the game as well. This is why NLS relationships create unusual experiences for those who normally engage others with compassionate love.

It makes perfect sense when you reflect on it. You need and want your parents to love and approve of you so you try to do what they did. Doing something different than what they did will be tough because it goes against most of what you learned; it will feel and likely be perceived as rebellion. The assumption people make when they choose to get into a relationship is to work towards the bond that their parents had. One does not necessarily realize that this is what they are doing because they engage most parts of their life without the impact of NLS such that they may pick suitable candidates for girl or boy friends, ones who offer compassionate love, but once their own feelings of love begin to develop the negative love tendencies start to come out and degrade things quickly.

The confusing thing is that often what they are receiving is EXACTLY what they need and know they want but since it doesn’t feel like negative love it is rejected. The consequence of compassionate love being rejected tends to be a withdrawal from the rejecter – a negative love trait. So by rejecting the thing they want and need in their life, they are able to experience the thing that makes them feel normal and shittie.

People are going to be nuanced when how they manufacture a negative love environment so the games that get played can be very complex, engrossing and red herrings in terms of what is actually happening. Think about it, you are engaging someone with a very fast brain, that has automated and normalized something to the point of it falling outside of their consciousness so they are not even aware of what they are actually doing, let alone why they may be doing it. They KNOW something isn’t right, but resist all coaching in an effort to win the game.

The prognosis is good but only if the person is willing to change, so the outcome for most is poor. I have known a couple of people who have been able to find their way out of the darkness and would be confident that if someone is willing to work at it, they can get better. It takes time and a keen awareness of how you are thinking. But first it takes the person to realize that there is something wrong and a willingness to press pause, let things settle and see how the landscape looks.

Goal Oriented Action – A Great Proxy For Confidence

“You are being so insecure” was what Leesa said when she finally said anything. The timing was conversationally accurate yet a situational non sequitur. What I had been saying was revealing a huge hole in my confidence but what I had just been doing didn’t embody the complete lack of skill that said confidence would help manifest.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me when I say it out loud. Feels kind of stupid actually.” That was true. I’ve known Leesa for a couple of years and we go climbing a few times a year. She navigated her way through her recent divorce in the same way that most people don’t handle a parking ticket. There are few random movements in my life so I was suddenly getting the feeling that there was something going on under the surface.

There were a few moments spent listing the things I do well, this interested neither one of us. I KNOW what I do well. This was a game and I was feeling it.

When someone presents themselves with insecurities we can engage them in three distinct ways – like a parent and try to solve their problem or demand a change, like a child and play with them or hurt them with it, or like an adult and coach them through the issue or establish a boundary so as to not get impacted by the other (ANY interaction between 2 people will be engaged from these POV with each member shifting roles; self talk will also take on these roles).

Whatever I had said created an Adult observation with a Parent response of “you are being so insecure” for her. My reply was Adult, and in this case it was Adult, but there have been times in the past when I responded to this exact mixed reply with a Child or Parent response. It can be useful in meeting girls because everyone has something that they don’t feel 100% about and, having codependent tendencies the only way I can get someone to do something for me when they don’t want to do it is to have them approach the task as though they were a parent. In this case, I was seeking coaching so we were able to dispense with the Parent / Child roles very quickly.

Once the interaction became Adult : Adult the information started flowing from her and the conversation took flight. You have to do stuff, everyday, for weeks and months and years. The things you do need to either cultivate your intellect, your emotional intelligence or your physical being. This will begin to manifest itself as a shift in ease at which life seems to flow. This is your spirit healing and growing; the invisible piece of you that others pick-up on as they observe your interactions with the world.

The truth is, we don’t gain confidence when we are involved in goal oriented action, we lose insecurity. Focusing on the action shifts our consciousness onto the present, which is reflexive but not usually consciously regressive. Going up the wall, I’m not thinking about every fall I ever took, I’m not really thinking about the foot or handhold I just moved from and I’m not thinking about the sales goal for the week. I’m mapping out a route from where I am and where I want to be and I’m determined to close in on my target. When I come off the wall, the focus widens and life begins again.

Confidence is the knowledge that you will try something and being in the habit of trying.

Grief Is Like A Concussion

For someone who hasn’t experienced grief it is tough to get a handle on what it is like to go through.

Astounding is the amount of pain you can feel and the lack of control you have over it at times. Science covers it – the experience of grief is chemical and it is dynamic in both time and make-up such that you experience different things at different times and the interval between the spontaneous grief moments is random. You cannot expect a linear recovery when a loved on dies. Some moments will be filled with a paralyzing sadness, then you may feel a wave of guilt followed by laughing. Your wit can be sharp and draw out the humor of the situation then you can seems to chew on your words unsure of what they mean and why you are saying them. Healing from it is not like the recovery from a broken leg.

Healing from grief is like healing from a concussion as the symptoms and nature of the injury are very similar. With head trauma, the brain has been injured changing mental function and forcing recovery / adaption. With grief, mental functioning has been changed forcing adaption and an enormous revision of your world view. In both cases, other people can’t see the injury and both are all in your head.

The experience of a concussion isn’t nice. You feel wrong and dumb. There’s something missing from the way you think, it’s slower, not as sharp and the spontaneous answers seem grid-locked inside a haze. Emotionally you’re fine, then you’re crying wanting everything to be over, then the mania or elation, followed by being fine….It is crazy behavior. It feels real enough as all of it happens, but during the fine times the lows don’t seem possible.

The part of the reason why I find healing from grief so unpleasant because the pain is coming from inside me and in an ongoing way. With a traumatic body injury, a broken leg for example, there is a linear improvement once the injury has been stabilized. With grief, months later the pain can feel as fresh as the moment when you first heard the news.

Someone could get good at the grief process because it is a skill. There’s a way to manage it that reduces the stress to those around you while letting you continue to be fairly productive. But as processes go, it is one with no clear end point. Flesh and bone heal in 2-3 months, the brain recovers when all of the old functionality has been restored through reorganization and rewiring.

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong – TED Video

What does it feel like to be wrong? The answer will probably surprise you.

Another fantastic TED video, this one by Kathryn Schulz and the topic is “On being wrong.”

How does it feel — emotionally — how does it feel to be wrong? Dreadful. Thumbs down. Embarrassing. Okay, wonderful, great. Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing — thank you, these are great answers, but they’re answers to a different question. You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you’re wrong? (Laughter) Realizing you’re wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right? I mean it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny… But just being wrong doesn’t feel like anything.

I’ll give you an analogy. Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there’s this pathetic coyote who’s always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there’s a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine — he’s a bird, he can fly. But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. And what’s funny — at least if you’re six years old — is that the coyote’s totally fine too. He just keeps running — right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he’s in mid-air. That’s when he falls. When we’re wrong about something — not when we realize it, but before that — we’re like that coyote after he’s gone off the cliff and before he looks down. You know, we’re already wrong, we’re already in trouble, but we feel like we’re on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.

That resonated with me. Mistakes only feel like mistakes when we realize them to be mistakes. Until the error is realized and accepted by us we feel like we are correct. We can roll through years of life after a mistake is made before the light goes on and we change direction.

Emotions are handy. There’s a very good reason why a human being will feel confident after they make a decision. ANY decision that is made that does not injure us IS an effective action because we did not get injured. It feels wrong to make the decision to do something that we know will injure us. The spontaneous emotion (feeling wrong) tells us that there is a pattern in the immediate environment that matches something from the past in a particular way. In the absence of both an emotional response and a logical reason not to do something, we feel nothing, which is to say we feel correct.

Experts in an area understand this more than most because very often they feel the errors before they can identify them. When coaching movement, seasoned trainers will tell you what the issue is with a client before they can tell you how they know. When you ask them about this many will say that they got a feeling about the imbalance or recruitment issue and then noticed the symptoms.

Sadly though, this doesn’t just apply to work. It applies to ALL areas of life. Everything that feels right does so ONLY because you didn’t get hurt before. But this is a very low quality way of moving through life as it only helps us avoid situations that were injurious. Things that are an aggravation, cause us to remain average, or simply don’t work for us anymore don’t feel wrong because they aren’t hurting us enough to register that way.

Your Brain Talks To Their Brain

Let’s take a moment to consider what is actually happening during a conversation; we’ll take a few passes at it striping away the layers of narrative to reveal something wonderful.

Two people are talking, exchanging ideas and information.

The ideas and information are created, stored and processed by the brain. The ears and mouth are the tools the brain uses to transmit and receive information.

The sound waves are manufactured by the vocal chords based on the nerve impulses that represent the information the brain is trying to transmit. The sound waves are received and shake the ear drum of the other creating nerve impulses that are channeled into the brain for processing.

The brain is the center of all information processing, the body is a tool that the brain uses to give-out and take in information.

During a conversation, two brains are interfacing to trade information. Any other distinction we add serves only to complicate what our understanding of what is happening.

So what?

This simplifies things. The fact that you are talking to the other persons brain, and that it is actually your brain talking to it, opens-up the ability to alter the way the other persons brain processes the information. The brain does not do the same thing with all the information that comes in. First off, different parts of the brain do different things with information. These parts are all interconnected so the combination of possible routes through the brain is limitless. Next, not all parts of the brain are active all of the time – the ramifications of this are that certain types of information / information processing services may not be available all of the time. This can be due to lack of fuel, chemical inhibition, or the conscious by-passing of processes.

It also complicates things. After all the narrative stuff has been stripped away we’re left with two of the most powerful information and pattern matching machines interfacing to exchange ideas. But how often does one really consider this fact during a conversation? Rarely. For most of us, there are two people, separate from each other and their environment. They are talking, exchanging stories, facts and feelings. They likely believe that what they are talking about is important and of significance in their lives. The impact of these narrative layers is powerful and it can bias the way the information is received, twisting the way one perceives facts. Imagine, for example, the impact a volatile relationship can have on the stories one tells their brain about what the other person is doing.

What does this mean?

Well, if you have the self-awareness to realize that there’s a lot going on in your brain and that you are only aware of a small portion of what it’s doing, you’ll see that there is a big difference between knowing this to be a fact and not knowing that it is a possibility. Those that know gain insight and control over their thinking simply because they accept that the brain is a machine and that consciousness and spontaneous thought are just consequences to it being a brain. Emotions are other consequences and they reflect a match of a pattern that is significant for some reason. Pattern matching isn’t perfect, and miss pairings are very simple given the amount of sensory input flowing into the brain while something is happening. Realizing that you are your brain is liberating. We can learn new patterns / pairings, we can stop thoughts at will and direct our mind onto the things we want, we can accept that some of our automatic behaviors are based on poor information collected years ago and we can replace them by doing the things that work for us.

Those that know that they are their brain are at a distinct advantage when they engage other people because they know how the other person can approach the world – as self-aware or not. This distinction is very important when communicating effectively with others. If a person doesn’t have much self-awareness, you are talking to their mind, their understanding of the world, all the assumptions and lessons they hold. With a self aware person, you are talking to someone who realizes that their mind can add or remove the different levels of narrative (those mentioned above when describing what is happening during a conversation) so you are able to engage the each other in the most effective way – your brain talking to their brain.

The One Thing About This Year

Sharyl asked me what was the most useful thing I took out of the last year and I said “that I don’t know what my motivations are most of the time and most people have no idea why they do the things they do.” I don’t know why I’m telling you this.

It has been liberating because for most of my life I accepted that the reason why I thought I did something was the actual reason why I was doing it. In retrospect, this is ridiculous. The decision to accept that my first thoughts about a motive were accurate failed to consider that my initial thoughts about a situation tend to be emotional or reactive before they are logical and pragmatic.

My tendency to accept the first thing that popped into my mind effectively ended the search right as the more logical brain processes come on-line and the most effective problem solving takes place. Since these processes never tackled the question “why did I do this?” my initial assumption never got challenged or balanced with an alternatives. The brain assumed everything was correct and then devoted the rational thought processes to solving or engaging an erroneous assumption. This is why two people can end-up arguing passionately about something they don’t care about. It’s also why a number of people become extremely abusive during conversations or arguments.

For example, the immediate reaction to someone saying “you are asking me to do something that you didn’t do yesterday or the day before. In fact you never do what you are telling me I have to do” tends to be defensive; and sometimes aggressive.

The word “you” triggers something akin to being pointed at. Most people feel singled out when they hear it used in what they interpret as a negative situation. This feeling is automatic and unconscious, and it is chemical – it’s an emotional release in response to a match between the current situation and something stored in long term memory. The chemical make-up of the emotional release will be shaped by the earliest experiences and there is a diminishing marginal impact with further experiences – what happens later in life will have less and less impact on the automatic emotional response to similarly matched patterns REGARDLESS of increasing levels of maturity and brain development. Once the match has occurred, logical thinking will be impaired for as long as the emotion is sustained. NOTE: If ones first experiences of feeling singled out in a negative way were resolved effectively and in a way that allowed the experience to be balanced with facts, they won’t interpret “you” the same way as someone who did suffer abuse from their caregivers in response to being singled out for a negative thing.

So the statement already has them acting emotionally (illogically) and they then need to stew on being called a hypocrite (while it wasn’t said, this is what people hear). This has them become defensive and start looking for reasons why it is fair to ask you to do something that they are have not yet been willing to do.

There’s a lot of bull shit in all of that and it all has to do with trying to stop being the center of attention for negative reasons – in this case that goal is achieved when the other person is wrong in what they are saying. This is exactly WHY seemingly decent people will become raging assholes when confronted with facts about their behavior.

The next thought that springs to mind after the urge to defend (IF it is allowed to come forward) will usually be very logical. It tends to be something like “hey, I just felt the emotions float over and out of me!” then “what do I really want from this person right now and what is the request I am actually making of them?” Then maybe “yeah, I haven’t done that ever. Maybe I shouldn’t expect someone else to do it for me” or “I don’t know what I’m talking about here” and hopefully the words “I’m sorry, it isn’t fair of me to expect you to do that when I haven’t. Ultimately I’m hoping we can agree on the following….” or something like that. It’s a very different conversation.

That’s the big thing I took out of this year. My initial reaction will be defensive, as initial reactions should be. But by not taking action, I’m actual able to figure-out why I’m doing stuff because I’m not trying to dig myself out of an imaginary hole or pummel on someone to get them to say that I wasn’t wrong.