You know exactly what I’m talking about here. Those times when it seems like everything is going relatively well and then . . . BOOM, you throw a hand grenade in the whole fucking thing. And you can’t stop yourself.
Y’know, those times when it seemed like you were “getting along” with your significant other and then, six, seven, or eighty-eight words later, all hell breaks loose and you’re suddenly scrambling to find someone with a pickup truck to help you move your shit outta there! Then you calm down. And they calm down. And you mumble some BS apology at each other and then you order a pizza and it fixes things, and then you both kinda forget, but you don’t, so you wait for the next incident. And then that one happens. Then the next one. And so on.
So now you’re spending $120 a month on make-up pizza while your ass is ballooning faster than a ten-dollar blow-up bed from Walmart. And you argue about that too.
All just because you couldn’t stop yourself from saying THAT THING, the one thing you always say. The thing that fucks everything up even though you KNOW you shouldn’t say it. And you say it anyway.
So, you take yourself on, bring back those twin devils of “willpower” and “self-discipline,” try a bit harder, eat a bit better, and knock out two fields’ worth of kale in a week. Then you pull the shit-pin again, and before you know it that slice of pizza that you PROMISED you wouldn’t eat somehow magically intertwines itself in your fingers and slithers unnoticed into your mouth like the sneaky little pepperoni bastard cheese-snake that it is, right? Now the problem is pizza and the battle moves to a new front. Damn, maybe the enemy really is gluten, huh?
Maybe for you it’s that dream job that you worked so hard to get. Six months in and your feet are already getting itchy. Again. Or that time you were so proud of yourself for paying down your credit cards only to blow them wide open with a mini you’re-only-young-once-I-work-so-hard-I-deserve-it spending spree . . . again! Apparently the “only young once” mantra extends well into your forties these days. And beyond.
If you’re in your teens, twenties, or thirties, yep, you have a lifetime of this madness ahead of you too. Stick that in your LOL for a minute or so.
Ponder this: What if the point of your life (not anyone else’s, remember? YOURS) is to continually and subconsciously set up “the game” of your life, a relentless cycle of sabotage and recovery?
What if very little of how this life of yours has turned out is actually because you haven’t met the right person, haven’t found the right career/passion, haven’t had the courage/confidence/smarts/breaks, or any other reason to which you have turned to explain yourself? What if your life really is a quite intentional and eerily familiar setup for the same results over and over? A conversational trap that you get yourself into but are unable to see, so you spend your life looking in all the wrong places, seeking some kind of answers, but it’s all subconscious and you invariably stay stuck?
“When the imagination and willpower are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.”
—Émile Coué
When Coué, a nineteenth-century psychologist, spoke of the imagination, he was referring to our subconscious. By “willpower,” he meant our conscious, cognitive thoughts. Where these two conflict, the subconscious wins. Always.
So, if the subconscious always wins, and we are wired to constantly play the same game of sabotage and recovery over and over again, are we just terminally fucked? I know this initially sounds pretty grim, but you need to understand what makes human beings so successful. Survival.
SURVIVAL OF THE OBVIOUS
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the strongest nor the fittest nor the smartest who survive.
Dinosaurs alone showed us how wrong that theory is. Some of them were strong, some were smart, but none of them saw extinction coming!
Who, then, is it that survives?
The predictors. Those who can most accurately predict change can adapt to change and therefore survive. The good news is, you are a prediction and survival machine. It’s the single reason why we as a species have stayed around as long as we have. Our ability to see things before they happen allows us to adjust and stay safe. We do that by remembering, by keeping score of what’s good, what’s bad, what’s right, what’s wrong, what works, what doesn’t work, and all via a massive trench of memories stored in the banks of our subconscious for reference and guidance. You have spent your entire life keeping track, looking for familiar keys to where things are headed, and following a life of the familiar.
Every Monday morning looks the same because you are already predicting how it will go before it even starts. This prediction-ism is absolutely everywhere.
That first date who showed up late and didn’t dress well enough?
Prediction? “Ugh, clearly they don’t care. Imagine a life with THAT! Nope . . . bye-bye.”
That’s it? They walked in fifteen minutes late wearing sneakers and you’re done? Yep!
Your ability to predict gives you a greater shot at survival. In this case, you’re out to quickly weed out the ones who are a complete waste of your time or sanity before marriage or a long-term relationship. And your tip-top record in pairing yourself with the perfect mate is testimony to your rapier-like accuracy in this field.
Suuuuuuure it is . . .
You predict your relationships, your finances, the weather, politics, your health, your career, you name it. You have an opinion about how all of that (and more) is going to go.
It’s all automatic, spun out by your subconscious in an instant. Hell, there are even things in life you won’t take on because you’ve already determined they’re a waste of time for you. Predictably.
By your using that same drive to predict and therefore survive, there goes that book you’ve always wanted to write (prediction: don’t know what I’m doing, therefore sure to fail), that new business you wanted to start (prediction: too risky and I’ll lose everything I have), the dream to move to Bali (prediction: now isn’t the right time, it won’t work unless I get more money), the new career (prediction: one day I might be ready for the responsibility, but it would be too hard right now for someone like me), that perfect relationship (prediction: I won’t make the same mistakes again, so not until I meet “the one”). There’s no end to the possibilities you’ve written off with nothing more than a series of auto-response triggers in the confines of your head.
“It’s too hard.”
“It won’t work.”
“I can’t do it.”
“I don’t know enough.”
“There’s no point. It won’t make any difference.”
In terms of survival, what better way to live a long and relatively safe life than to continually barf up the same kinds of issues and problems and then apply the same tired and useless solutions? Your own personal Matrix of old emotions, old complaints, old experiences. Your “no reality” reality.
Every day is a new day, right? No, every day is the freaking same day.
I mean, at least you always know what’s coming. You also know that you’ll survive it too, even if it sucks! No unknowns, no uncertainty, nothing out of left field, no threat to you, just a single, predictable line of engagement. You apply the same eyes and ears to every situation life throws at you and spin in your own mini tempest of the same old dramas and upsets. Circumstances may change, but what stays the same is you and how you see them, as well as how you deal with them and ultimately how you participate in life. The problem here is that it’s often hard to see those automatic predictions we’re making every day in an effort to survive. It’s hard to uncover the themes and story lines that underlie our life events.
But humans are funny creatures, and we’re often not content to live a safe, predictable life. We want excitement! Adventure! Passion! And that’s the crossroads where human beings exist. Pulled to predict life and stay safe, yet at the same time thirsty for the new and its tempting allure of a better existence. Wanting and
lusting after change while gripped by the anxiety of keeping life safe, certain, and survivable. Minimize the judgment, minimize the failure, crush the pain and the uncertainty and the chaos of real change. Safety eventually wins. Survival is the victor.
That’s what we call a life. Wanting new; addicted to the familiar. Even when the familiar is as dull as dishwater. When it comes down to it, you’ll willingly trade in what you want for what you know. You’re doing it right now in your life!
Often when people are stuck in unhappy relationships or unwanted careers, this is what they are really dealing with. It’s the trade-off. Underneath it all, it’s not about the kids or the family or the money or the risk or the judgment of others. It’s all survival. Safety over aliveness. Predictability over joy or love or freedom or the life of your dreams.
What makes it so hard to see is that you never fully witness the trap you are stuck in. You only get to live with the consequences of that trap. Your entire life to this point has been a series of actions subconsciously driven to trap you in the same bubble of life.
Take a minute to allow yourself to take stock here. What has been the underlying experience of this life of yours? When it’s all said and done, when you look at the struggle and determination, the victories, the defeats, the sorrow, the drive to be happy and content, the seemingly never-ending hunger for something better—better job, better body, better partner, better family, better house, better society, better clothes, better social life, more passion, more purpose, more followers, more whatever, on and on and on—what are you left with?
Pause here for a moment and honestly answer that question for yourself.
Well?
When I ask my clients this question, they mostly have the same answer. “I’m exhausted.” Sometimes it’s worse.
Sometimes they say, “It’s okay.”
Fuck!!
Reminder—this works only if you pause and populate this conversation with your own circumstances, your real-life situations and cycles of self-sabotage, to start to draw some sense from what I am saying and how it applies to your life. Do the work here. Start to see the issues of your life through the lens of what I’m saying—your repetitive and destructive behaviors are supposed to be that way! Your life was set up to repeat them. They’re also what keeps you being that familiar you, living with the same constraints, weighed down by the past, always in the same, tired struggle for a better day but occasionally sedated by a glimmer of hope or optimism.
Keep in mind, if you really are after some kind of new life, some new and unprecedented result, that will require risk on your part. That will require you to push through your predictable self-talk, your all-too-familiar emotional freeze-frame, and reach for the unknown.
You can’t do new without risk. Period.
04
The Magic Little Sponge
You’ve deadened yourself to the crap.
By now, you should be able to see that it’s not as if you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “Okay, this is the day when I find crippling fault in my friendships and end them” or “How can I screw with my finances today?” or “Things are great between me and my partner; how can I wreck my marriage?”
If you are saying those things to yourself, this book won’t save you. Try yoga.
If you’re not consciously screwing with your own success, if you’re not waking up in the morning and actively planning to undo what you’ve been building, all on a whim or some deviant master plan, then how did we get here? I’ve come to realize it must be subconscious. The temptation, the urge, the compulsion, whatever you might call it, driven to the surface from the cellars of your mind and acted upon.
It’s not a lack of something on your part. It’s more like the presence of something in the shadows. Something you’ve never really understood that comes to life at moments. Something that shows up like that weird uninvited neighbor to your Fourth of July party.
Let me stop right here and explain a little something about your subconscious. This isn’t some self-help, psycho-neuro faffle-babble. It’s real, it’s there, and it’s working you like an old sock puppet.
David Eagleman, author, neuroscientist, and adjunct professor at Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, says, “The conscious part—the ‘me’ that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning—is only a tiny bit of the operations.” Basically, we are being operated on a level we’re not even aware of most of the time.
And the thing about our subconscious is that it starts off wide open and malleable, yet, over time, becomes set. Rigid. Predictable. How did this happen? Let’s take a look.
IT’S ALL OKAY
You weren’t always this way, the way you are now. You weren’t always making the BS of your life so “okay” that you’ve become numb to it. You’ve deadened yourself to the crap. You just shrug your shoulders as if it’s “just the way it is” and stumble ahead.
There was an (admittedly brief) life of sunshine and rainbows before this bullshit.
Ask a first grader what they want to be when they grow up. There’s not a one among that bright-eyed bunch of future astronauts and superstars who’ll testify to their unquenchable, burning desire to be divorced, broke, and unhappy with a withering thud of low self-esteem or a tendency to trash all that’s good in their life . . . yet here we are, folks!
Where did it all go wrong for you? How did you end up in this trap of sabotaging your life? As with most people, it probably didn’t happen overnight. It was a series of seemingly unconnected events in your life where you made some important shifts in your perspective until they all came together and left you with a very distinct experience of being alive. Your experience of this life, what it is to be you and live life this way, was constructed by you. Period.
The problem is that you had no real sense of doing such a thing. You were just getting on with life, making your way, solving problems, going for it, but the reality is that you formed and shaped yourself through this process of living.
You got yourself here to this point in your life, and I’m going to show you how you subconsciously did it. How you fucked yourself. And how to dig yourself out.
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
Let’s take this back. Way back.
Not so much when you were born but rather what you were born as.
When you arrived on this earth, you hadn’t yet developed a subconscious, let alone a personality. There was no repetitive, fundamental, guiding internal dialogue pushing you this way or that. You had no self-defeating opinion of yourself, no suspicious eye for others or resignation about where your life had been or was headed. There was no self-sabotage.
Surely, you’ve heard of kids being referred to as “little sponges,” right? And you’ve probably seen how kids seem to soak up language and new experiences like thirsty little sponges. Well, in many ways, that’s true—we are sponges.* Think about how a sponge works. It absorbs what it comes into contact with, expanding and expanding until it’s full of liquid. Then what happens if it’s left out to dry? It hardens, trapping any junk that might be left inside of it.
Now, try on the idea that you were born as one of those pristine magic sponges, going through the early stages of life soaking up this thing, squeezing out that thing. As life went on, you never really noticed that the “juice” was drying up, life was becoming more predictable, a little more parched of the new and exciting, until one day that moist magic little sponge within you had hardened. And trapped within its various holes, nooks, and caverns were the items that could never quite seem to be squeezed out. Stained. Locked in there forever. That’s how our subconscious works. In the beginning it’s clean and untainted, malleable and not yet defined. But now it’s set in place, immutable, with a very specific purpose now secured into its very core. One that you can’t yet see.
Think about the behavior of babies. Outside of their immediate concerns, babies and infants just don’t have a care in that little world of the
irs. When I think of my own kids’ early experiences of life, it is amazing to think of how little of a damn they actually gave. I was way more fucked up about their lives than they were. They weren’t neurotic or depressed, they didn’t procrastinate or overanalyze or, in fact, be troubled by anything: they were too busy living the lives they had been thrown into. And their lives were, for the most part, magical. Just like yours was.
I’ll never forget the memory of my oldest son, when he was two, jumping into the pool, climbing back out, jumping in again, climbing back out, over and over and over, his face lit up with joy and excitement and adventure. He could not get enough of that one thing, and it never got old.
Until it did. When he got older.
Now, I’m not telling you to become two years old again. This isn’t about drooling on your shirt, picking your nose, or stomping your feet when somebody makes you do something you don’t want to do either. I know you still do some of that stuff, but that’s another thing entirely. There’s nothing cool about picking your nose.
What I am talking about is how, back in your early life, everything was new, everything was exciting and pristine. And man, you were curious about all of it. From the smallest thing to the most grandiose, you were all over it. That magic sponge was soaking it all up, filling each crevice, having no idea of the ever-increasing threat of drought. Until the day when everything was set and dried and a life of sabotage unfolded, with a firm commitment to keeping you in a constant struggle.
OF LIMITED BUT VAST POTENTIAL
While you weren’t quite born a completely vacant little sponge, since you were born with certain inherited genetic possibilities and thrown into very distinct circumstances (which we’ll get into more in the next chapters), there was clearly a massive range of untapped, unwritten ways in which you could have turned out. You were certainly born as a something with a wide-open field of possibilities for who you could be. A something with a wide and vast potential.
Stop Doing That Sh*t Page 3