Forum Replies Created
-
well done on the progress you have already made, and remember above all, don’t beat yourself up, take it easy on yourself.
a few things I WILL say: there are lots of shoulds / coulds in your post despite saying you had eliminated these from your mind. “I should be accepting of this and that”, for example. Who said you SHOULD do that? It’s not about what you SHOULD do, it’s about what you CHOOSE to do. If you choose to accept the present moment because that is going with the way of life (instead of against the way of life) and will create happiness into your life, then cool. But you don’t have to. You can choose to resist what ‘is’, that’s an option that’s available to you too, but it comes with its own consequences of course.
You said you can control yourself. Everything? Can you control the next thoughts that will pop into your mind? Nope thoughts just pop into your head. Can you control it so you never ever get ill? Some people claim to be able to influence their health to enormous degrees but I don’t think you can control every element of ‘you’. For example a spot might appear, did you control that? Can you control it away? Nope. What you do have is enormous influence over yourself because you can, for example, choose which thoughts to believe, choose your responses to illnesses, choose whether you accept the ‘isness’ of this moment or not, and so on. So you do have a huge amount of influence and power, and you even have a lot of influence in life itself, but control? Nope, not over anybody else or even yourself in a lot of cases.
I would also argue that deserve doesn’t come into this, it’s about what you desire. “Deserve” is just a thought. But what do you actually want in life? If you change from feeling like you ‘deserve’ this or that to ‘desiring’ this or that then this may well be a positive shift for you.
as for change…When you change, everything changes. Your mind is generating your entire reality and experience, so when you change what’s being generated, the whole situation changes. What do you mean when you say you ONLY are able to change yourself? ONLY?? That’s everything! Change how you are in the face of life and your whole experience of life changes. It’s as if the world has changed. That’s the whole point. You don’t JUST change yourself, your life seems to change as you change in the face of it.
Develop more empowering perspectives and there will be no troubles here.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND These videos by Noah Elkrief that I’ve recently been watching. Just watch whichever of these are relevant for you and you will soon get the idea (or watch as many as possible, they are great IMO): https://www.youtube.com/user/NoahElkrief/videos?view=0&flow=grid&sort=p
see how much those help!
all best – take care – take it easy
Stop processing other people’s opinions about you through your own sense of self. If you co-create your “self” with other people then you give them power over you, power to determine how you feel about yourself. Can you see the huge problem with this if your goal is to be happy and independent? In order to overcome this you will realize that almost 100% of what people think of you has nothing to do with you whatsoever. It has everything to do with them – the stuff that’s going on in their life, the mood they’re in, whether they have had breakfast or not, their preferences when it comes to the people around them, etc. So see their responses to you as THEIR (responses to you), instead of (their responses to) YOU.
Realize that nothing that anybody thinks about you or says to you can change who you are, and that includes your own inner monologue. No matter what you or anybody else thinks of you, your essence remains unchanged. And remember that you are not inherently “good”, “bad”, “ugly”, “beautiful”, etc – these are judgements bestowed upon you, either by yourself or by other people, and have very little to do with who you actually ‘are’. After all, everybody disagrees – some people, for example, find me annoying, others find me very charming and love being around me. That’s life.
But here’s the catch: In order to detach from what people think about you, to stop caring about all that (think of all the neurosis it causes throughout a lifetime to be constantly self-censoring and micro-managing just to control your image, which isn’t even a real thing, just an abstract concept in the minds of others and yourself!) you can’t have it both ways. You either believe people, whether they’re telling you good things or bad things, or you don’t, i.e. you realize that nothing anybody says changes who you are, even positive stuff. The problem is, if you give them the power to build you up with compliments, you also give them the power to smash you back down with insults, and vice versa. It’s too unstable, and people are too unpredictable, for this to be a good source of emotional stability. It will just throw you all over the place like you’re being washed around by the waves in the sea.
Imagine instead that the insults, and compliments (admittedly rather counter intuitively), could be seen from a distance, like an observation. “Oh, they think that. What does that say about them?” I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine has suddenly started becoming very rude to me and dodging my calls and blocking me. Weird, right? So I was angry and wanted to reply saying, get lost or something like that. But my phone died before I had time to respond. Good thing, too, because hours later my actual response was very different: I hope everything’s ok, let me know if you’re stressed or anything, it’s good to have somebody to talk to about these things. I therefore stopped taking it personally and started seeing it as having everything to do with them. Whether they came back “why the hell would I want to talk to YOU?” or “thanks so much, I’ll call in 5 mins” is totally irrelevant to who you are and what your action meant. All that matters is your intention and your orientation in life, to yourself and to others. The way they pick up on that intention doesn’t actually matter because you can’t control that at all. It’s moreorless completely unpredictable and can be influenced by totally arbitrary factors. So give over your happiness to it and you end up being washed around by the tides of whatever random thoughts pop into their heads. Scary stuff.
Realize that NO adjective of you actually describes you, you are not who you think you are, and you’re so much more than that besides. As a natural extension of that, if even your judgements about yourself have no inherent ‘truth’, why the hell would you believe anybody else? Do you really think they’re any more of an authority on ‘who you are’ than you are?
The real emotional benefit of this shift in thinking and being takes time and is something you work on, really, I’ve done it through reading philosophy, introspection and thinking, as well as some experimenting in shifting my perspective in certain moments. Change is often slow, so keep being positive if you’re not instantly walking into the world not caring at all about what anybody thinks. It may well take years to make this transition. Either way, if every day you are getting a little bit closer to where you want to be, then that’s all that matters. You will after all one day get there. Change WILL happen if you keep applying new perspectives, trying out new stuff and being relentless in your commitment. And remember Shakespeare’s quote: “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
By the way, quick note on empathy. Compassion & empathy are not hindered by you not being overly concerned about what people think of you, actually the opposite. As you stop caring about their opinion of YOU, you move out of a neurosis-driven ego space that’s all about “me me me”. And you start caring about THEM, helping THEM rather than trying to control how they see YOU. Your whole focus shifts to them and serving them effectively, whether they appreciate it or not. Remember the great people of the past who went against the ideas of their day (e.g. slavery, racial segregation) were hated by many people. It was irrelevant because the people that hated them were not ‘right’ if equality, empathy and compassion are taken as core values. Those great people DID have those values so were unaffected by such criticisms.
Also, when you stop people pleasing and being inauthentic to make others like you, you will often end up with a slightly more polarized response. Some will absolutely love you, more than you have ever been loved before, some will despise you, more than you have ever been despised before. I’m not saying this is necessarily true but for some people it could be. The trick is to keep living by your values and realize that not everybody will ever like you. Some people may just dislike you, due to your voice, your beliefs, whatever. Who cares? What does that say about you? Anything? Nope. Some people don’t like me, and that’s totally cool. The point is, when you’re inauthentic people pleaser, everybody kind of likes you or is pretty much indifferent. When you’re bold and totally your self, authentic and grounded in your values, it’s a possibility that you will get more of a love/hate polarized reaction. That shows you’re doing something RIGHT. If nobody hates you, what exactly are you standing up for, what are you representing, who are you in the world? If nobody hates you, are you grounded enough in your values and authenticity? After all, all the best people who made big positive changes in the world were hated by a large number of people. It’s part of the game. See it as necessary conditions of playing the game of life and the stress and anxiety around it dissipates.
It’s also true that the less judgmental you are of others, the less they tend to be of you, although that’s not always the case.
And even if you could successfully achieve your aim of having 100% of the population love you, you would still be a dumb idiot who spends all their time trying to get people to like them. Your energy would be totally wasted on that instead of making a positive contribution in the world. You would be obsessed with challenging nobody. And where’s the fun in that?
The above is the way I see things and it’s not the “truth” but the perspectives I believe in. I too have made this big shift and am continuing to make it day by day. If you are familiar with mindfulness and meditation etc then you will know already you are not your thoughts. Well, you’re not anybody else’s thoughts either. 🙂
All best
Much love!It’s such an important step that you have recognized this pattern and that you can verbalize what’s happening and how you would like things to change.
I’m sorry to hear of your past story, I did not have such a childhood or those experiences, yet I am also working on this particular habit, as I too developed a habit of avoiding people I felt attracted to, and hiding my feelings.
I have a feeling this is something that will take time and practice to shift. I think if you frame it as a habit, that will be helpful. You’ve learned some perspectives and some habits – avoiding people you’re attracted to, etc etc. This isn’t ‘who you are’, it’s just what you’ve learned to do. These are learned things, you will notice some people learned to do things differently. And so can you too learn to do things differently, if you apply yourself over time to that cause. The question is: is your current strategy getting you what you want? It seems the answer is no. So clearly if you are to get the results you want, then changing the strategy / system is a logical necessity. The system I speak of is all of the habits and perspectives you have developed around this issue.
First thing to realize: getting adrenaline when you see somebody you’re attracted to, and feeling nervous, is something that many, many people have, and is therefore pretty normal. The difference is what happens next. Some people feel fear then they run away. Other people have learned to jump into situations, fear and all, and approach rather than avoid.
I’ve noticed that having forced myself to approach, I have ALWAYS had a better experience than those when I avoided. Not only that, but I’ve often felt really happy and exhilarated after having approached someone I’m attracted to and talked to them. When I avoid them, I start feeling annoyed, disempowered and upset. THEREFORE: The momentary, temporary discomfort you feel when approaching is far outweighed by the awesome feelings you get when you take positive action and start creating what you want in life. And of course, the relief you get from avoiding the person you’re attracted to is nowhere near as powerful as the sense of regret and annoyance you feel after you have avoided them. Once you can get that, you can realize that you may be trying to avoid pain, but you’re almost definitely sabotaging your own happiness in the process, and bringing on a different kind of pain, that in many ways is even worse as it results from you not living the life you want to!
You know, I feel this is something we’re both going to be working on for a while, but just knowing the shifts you want to make and repeatedly trying on new perspectives and breaking old habits will be enough for you to work through this eventually.
Oh, and one other thing: Did you know that loads and loads of people are too scared to approach the people they’re attracted to. If you approach, even if you’re still nervous, you’re doing way better than all those people that run away from the situation. So you haven’t got much to lose…
All the best working through this, I feel a sense of comfort in knowing I’m not alone here. Though our past is very different, and our present too, I feel that we have something in common here. I wonder who’ll snap out of it first? Ha ha!
Again, seriously look into mindfulness meditation, it has helped me no end. It’s the practice that can help you implement what I’ve been discussing.
You probably won’t agree with this at first, but you don’t need fixing. Here’s a concept for you to consider: You are a perfect system. Your system is perfectly set up to get the results you’re getting out of life. The problem isn’t that you’re “broken”, it’s that your system is set up to get certain results, but not the ones you want. If you want to change the results, you have to change the system. Notice: not fix, just change. You are already enough now. You are already working and functional – you are very successful right now at getting the results you’re getting. Does that make sense? The problem, as I say, is that you want to change the results. You want to become successful at different results and you want to start getting really bad at thinking about the past all the time – you want to get good at being present focused and in the future and focusing on what it is you want to create into your life. If that idea makes sense to you, then the reason it’s so significant is because it will change your approach to solving these issues.
At the moment there seems to be a bit of a victim mindset, where there’s stuff happening and you reacting to it. Bills come in, you react. Opportunities come in, you react. Instead if you switch your focus to creation, then the possibility for you to live from a more empowered stance emerges. Here’s an idea for you: You don’t receive opportunities, YOU CREATE OPPORTUNITIES. See yourself as the creator of your own life, you create opportunities for yourself to do what it is you want to do in life and to live life how it is you want to live it. That’s something you yourself proactively create into the world, and you don’t wait to be given opportunities, you go ahead and make stuff happen. Notice your phrase: creative engagement in life. Well, that’s an aspect of creative engagement, isn’t it?
And might say it’s your “dumb brain” causing all this, but firstly your brain isn’t dumb it’s just learned to habitually use thinking in a certain way (remember, that’s the old system that you set up – consciously or not!) and also, the fact you’ve called it that shows that you’ve already dissociated from the negative thought patterns, and you seem to associate in your post with what you want to create (joy, meaning, self esteem, loving relationships and creative engagement) so you’re on the right track.
Let’s look at the positive: you have great insights into what it is you want to create, you have dissociated from the negative thoughts, you are already beginning to associate with the positive realities more and more now.
And for the fourth time: I recommend taking up mindfulness meditation.
I recommend taking up mindfulness meditation. At the moment you are buying into very unhelpful thought patterns revolving around age regression. It’s totally pointless, it’s doing nothing to improve your life and it’s a waste of time. And when you do it you just feel bad. The simple solution is stop doing it. It’s as simple as that, but not doing it and instead focusing on the present moment and the reality of what ‘is’ ‘now’ is something that requires practice.
All this “could have been” is total rubbish and nonsense. What a total waste of time. In 20 years do you want to look back on when you were 59 and you could have been enjoying your life but instead you were sitting about brooding and worrying about what you didn’t do when you were younger?
Focus on the present and future, they’re the only things you can influence in any way. I’m not saying it’s totally easy to disconnect from all this obsession with the past, but I am saying that if you don’t do it then you’ll regret it. (In fact, you definitely will, cos you’ll still be looking back at the past with sorrow!!!) So WHAT INSTEAD? WELL, when you connect to the present and future and focus on how you can shape them, you become empowered, free and a master of your own destiny. As I say, look at mindfulness meditation for a place to start.
Forget all this past stuff and focus on the now and your next steps in life.
Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 