That’s what you need to consider here. And the only way to do it is with a thorough examination of your own experience of being alive. This is where you need to do the thinking.
Right now, get straight with yourself. Take a look behind all the BS, all the hope, all the wants, needs, and plans for the future. Forget the past, forget the reasons, justifications, and excuses—what is the underlying dilemma you face with yourself? This isn’t about money or your lifelong obsession with becoming a hand model (specializing in thumbs). Dig deeper. Take a long, hard look at those times in your life when you’re most struggling, most tested. What is it that comes up for you? You cannot move from this chapter until this is solid.
Do you avoid parties or social settings and say it’s because you don’t like them? Or is it really because you are driven by the discomfort and pressure that arises from the conclusion “I don’t fit in” or “I’m different” or “I’m not enough”? The fear of being revealed can do that to a person.
Did you choose your job because it was the right job for you? Or are you there because “I’m not smart enough” has locked you into a predictable career and life path?
Is your love life nonexistent because you’re too busy with work, haven’t met that special someone/anyone/seriously-I’ll-take-anything-that-has-a-pulse-and-can-talk, or because you have an underlying conclusion about not being attractive enough or “not wanted” or “not lovable?” Is your current relationship on the rocks because it’s not a good fit or because your conclusions have been running all over it and you’re continually picking that person to death to confirm your own subconscious reality?
It’s hard to tell now, huh!?
What are the automatic, reactionary thoughts you have when you suffer setbacks in life? What popped into your head when you got fired from that job or passed over for that promotion?
What was on your mind when you broke up with your last girlfriend or boyfriend or when you let that someone down or spent that money you knew you should have saved or ate that bag of fries when you should have opted for the salad?
Again, set aside all the surface stuff. What do you say to yourself about you in those situations?
Okay. There yet?
Once this is absolutely clear for you, you have the first critical piece of this important jigsaw in place. One of the reasons you self-sabotage is inextricably linked to this piece. We are not going to do anything with this right now but rather post it here like a flag in the ground.
PERSONAL CONCLUSION—“I’M _______________________.”
Go ahead, write it in here. Use a pencil if you’re too embarrassed to ink your innermost secret about yourself on the page of a book. No really, go get a pencil. I’ll wait right here.
People often ask me how I’ve been able to be successful without sabotaging my life, to maintain balance and be joyful while continuing to create health challenges and goals.
This is how. I am crystal clear about what I have concluded about myself.
What that thing is, how it feels, how it influences my moods and my outlook and the potentially devastating impact it can have when left to rampage its way through my life like Mad Max on steroids when I’m not on top of it. When I’m not being responsible for my default, most ordinary self.
I have awareness of this mechanism, and that awareness allows me to live a life outside of its grip. I can hear myself when I’m deep in it; I am intimately aware of the thoughts, the emotions surrounding it; I can actually feel this thing in a physical sense when I am about to go down the rabbit hole with it.
You can too, but we’re not there yet. We have work to do that will allow you to master the unseen and finally take your life back.
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO
Now we have something to build upon, to start to make you fully aware of and responsible for what has been lurking in the shadows of your subconscious. But we’re not done yet. Far from it. There’s more to this picture that you need to uncover for yourself.
Get your nose out of your belly button and look out around you. You live this life not on your own but with . . . ?
PEOPLE!
You share your life with people! That includes the people you don’t talk to anymore. Remember those people, the ones you melted away from or cut out, the ones who still leave a little bit of an open wound in your mind? Yes, you are still sharing your life with them too. I mean, you might not speak with them, you might not have seen them for five, ten, or twenty years, but they continue to exist in your internal and external dialogues. They come up from time to time, either in spoken conversations or in the ones you have with yourself.
Look, they’re even “here” right now—you have them in mind!
Even if you consider yourself a complete loner, you get to be a loner only against the backdrop of other people. Even your privacy is public. You are publicly private. Privacy is a very public statement to others. To keep out, to stay back.
“Dammit!”
I know, you thought you were doing so well with your reserved and withheld self too, didn’t you? Sorry, but everyone is watching.
The next step as we fill out this picture of yourself is that you’ll need to do some work to unveil what you have concluded about people. Not just some people. All people.
09
Them
It takes as much effort to live a crappy life as it does a great one. And you’re the only one who can choose which you want to live.
The first of the three saboteurs, your conclusion about yourself, is, unfortunately, just the first piece of this unholy trinity that leads to self-sabotage.
“The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life.”
—C. G. Jung
The second saboteur is what I call your “social conclusion,” or the fundamental lens through which you see and interact with other people. Like your personal conclusion, this was absorbed into the magic little sponge at an early age too. However, this baseline criticism about other people arose through your various interactions with your family, your friends, and your neighbors, as well as with teachers, pastors, and anyone else of significance with whom you came into contact in the formative years of your life.
From all of those life experiences, THIS is what you have concluded about other people. This is who they are for you. Again, not who they actually are or who they could be but rather who they definitively are to you.
The most important thing to get here, like everything else in this book, is that this is not something that was done to you. You’re not a victim of your own past. I’m not saying people don’t become victims to their past; I’m saying you are not one until the moment in time you decide you are.
If that annoys you, just realize you’re currently getting triggered by your insistence on being called a victim. You are fighting for a label you’re going to spend a lifetime trying to get over. Victim or no victim, only you get to say. In this case, you and you alone have made your life what it has become. Again, this isn’t about who is to blame but is rather a way of you finally understanding yourself that empowers you rather than embitters or hardens you.
The good news is, if you accept that you made the mess, you are also accepting that you can unmake it. I often have to remind people of their power. It takes as much effort to live a crappy life as it does a great one. And you’re the only one who can choose which you want to live.
Your social conclusion is the perfect mode of survival. Remember, we’re all striving for safety and security in life, and other people are one of the least predictable parts of life! By coming to conclusions about people, we bring a feeling of certainty to the g
reat unknown and threat that people represent.
Unfortunately, you’re often focused on surviving events in life that just don’t need to be survived!
Sometimes you’re worried about “making it” in a relationship, or on a first date, or when speaking to people at a meeting, or calling up your credit card company, or talking to the leadership group on a conference call, or facing the prying eyes and ears at a wedding, or standing in line at the supermarket. You’re stuck in a swirl of your automatic instinct to survive some old thoughts and emotions. But do you really need to be in survival mode about those things? You’re stuck on surviving what you concluded about people. And it’s all so fucking real.
So, what do these social conclusions look like? In the previous chapter, we touched on the inherently negative nature of conclusions. We saw this to be true when it comes to the negative conclusions we land on about ourselves. And it’s the same for the conclusion you’ve made up about other people.
This is stuff like “People are controlling” or “People can’t be trusted.” In reality, all it takes is one or two life incidents for these conclusions to seep into that magic little sponge of yours. And as we all know, there are plenty of things that interrupt the innocence of a childhood, from the particularly shitty—maybe you were beaten, molested, neglected, or ignored—to the mundane. No matter the severity, we all have conclusions that run deep. Keep in mind, whatever you resist about your life persists by virtue of that resistance. You are swamped by your conclusions in the same way everyone else is by theirs.
I’ve also had many clients over the years who had seemingly idyllic childhoods and could not understand why their adult lives had gone so spectacularly off the rails. Until I introduced them to their own conclusions.
God forbid that your parents might have been lost in the escapism of the TV when you were pleading for their attention or drove off into the distance with you far behind, still screaming in the arms of the babysitter! You can see why being separated from Dad in a department store for just a minute or two could start to give rise to the kind of profound conclusion that eventually embeds itself into your young and eager subconscious. How easily that one incident could soak into your magic little sponge and become “People will leave,” “You can’t trust people,” or “People don’t care.” Thereafter follows a lifetime of gathering evidence to support your view.
What!!?? That’s all it takes? Being separated from your dad for a few minutes in a store? It can be, yeah. At least that’s how it can start. It doesn’t take a Flowers in the Attic childhood to produce a mad, mad, mad world kind of adulthood!
Once those conclusions are made, you’re a done deal. That little sponge eventually hardens when the wispy, watery memories disappear, leaving only the stains and marks trapped inside, forever. Trapped in your subconscious. No amount of fucking existential Goo Gone can wipe that clean. You can’t meditate your way out of it, either.
This takes a self-realization, a WTF kind of awakening, just like old Ebenezer had.
As we move on to adulthood, these conclusions stick with us, forming the baseline for how we relate to and interact with everyone we meet. And I mean everyone.
We’re constantly viewing the people around us through the lens of these conclusions.
Meanwhile, we’re manipulating and shaping ourselves—how we act, talk, dress—to keep people from exposing our most painful truth, that which we have concluded.
We do this because for each of us, these conclusions, these saboteurs, would make us seem weaker or unwanted by the larger group, so we hide them.
THROUGH THE FILTER THEY GO
As with the previous saboteur, the conclusion about yourself, let’s make this real for you. When I say that we view people through the perspective of our conclusion, what we’re also doing is testing them to see how they measure up to what we’ve concluded. Do they conform? Do they conflict?
As an example, let’s say you have the conclusion “People will use you.” Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly running the people you meet through your internal filter to see if they fit the “Are they a user?” bill.
Always at arm’s length, of course.
Did you catch them lying? Oops, they fail the test. “Are they really trying to flatter me in exchange for a favor?” Fail. “Talking behind my back?” Another fail. That voice in your head is in a constant state of judgment and pass/fail.
Hell, you can always fall back on the “vibe” test. “There’s something about them I just don’t like.” It’s inescapable.
It’s just so damn easy for people you’ve just met to fail and the ones you’ve known forever to keep failing. Your “pass or fail” mechanism is always on. You’re like a permanently lit barcode scanner at Target. Beep, beep, fucking beep. No one. Stands. A. Chance.
And once something sets off that little scanner, you go right into autopilot, gathering more evidence that puts that person further and further in the hole. Once you get your evidence, you write them off completely. Then they’re really fucked. The problem is, so are you.
Because once you write someone off, you’re going to ride that train until the end. There’s almost nothing that can get them back in your good graces, barring a miracle or cataclysm. They’re in the box, trapped, never to be released. Whether with your family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers or in your love relationships, that trigger, that fundamental conclusion about people, is there. Unfortunately, you are as trapped by your own conclusion as they are. You get to know and receive people only at that surface level.
But some people still manage to pass the test. The ones who “passed” are the people who are in your life now—at least the ones you’re closest with.
Your best friends, they’re in, your spouse or partner, they’re in (for now), and you probably have some acquaintances who haven’t quite passed, but they haven’t quite failed either. Arm’s length would be the best way to describe those relationships. Neither in nor out, but you never know, they might come in handy in the future.
And even with these people who somehow manage to pass your test, approved by your filter, they are forever skating on thin ice. Because you know it takes only one meaningful incident for them to go right back into the failure pile.
But for all the others who didn’t pass the test, they were written off. Out.
Often family are the first to go. The writing-off process is a little different for everyone. Some of us just write people off silently over a period of time, within ever-decreasing circles of connection and affection. The death of love and affinity.
Sometimes the other person doesn’t even realize it’s happening, and often the person doing the writing off doesn’t either! But there are subtle clues (that make sense later) in how we act around them. It starts with being a little slower than usual in responding to texts or phone calls until we eventually just stop communicating and reorganize our lives to avoid them.
Of course, then there are those relationships that are killed off in an instant.
The problem with all of this is that you’re never quite seeing people for who they truly are or even who they could be. You’re seeing them only through the lens of your own conclusion. The test isn’t fair. They’re set up to fail.
Don’t even get me started with how you’ve collected agreements from certain friends while huddled around your chai lattes and orange muffins or clasping your ever-so-well-branded Heineken with your crew. “But they agree that my boss is the worst!” They’re not only confirming your conclusion; it’s all fucking gossip too. While we’re at it, cut that shit out too.
Gossip is not fucking harmless or funny. You’re peddling in negative, self-righteous BS. Stop talking about other people. It’s a distraction from owning and changing your own life.
Remember, you are the nature of what you talk about.
When you indulge in gossip, you are becoming the kind of human being who gets off on throwing other human beings under the bus. You might wan
t to consider new friends or starting a revolution of bare-bones decency and engaging in the kind of talk that makes things happen rather than the kind that just shreds others in that shallow connection of human asshole-ness.
I’m also not a blind idealist here. I know people do shitty things. I am well aware that people will cheat, lie, manipulate, steal, and do whatever they feel is in their best interests, regardless of the cost. That’s not what this is about. This isn’t about payback. This isn’t about them. This is about you.
Payback? I don’t have enough time for that shit. If you’re making your life about payback, that’s NOT karma. That’s being angry and spiteful and vengeful.
Karma doesn’t take sides.
You might find that a painful discovery of your own one of these days when indulging your retribution. Resentment is a burden you bear on your own. Sure, you might make that “okay,” like all the other BS in your life, but be left in no doubt, the burden is real and it weighs you down in ways you can’t even imagine.
What’s the alternative? Well, for a start, I don’t tolerate other people’s bullshit. That’s on them. I don’t waste my life hanging onto their shit either. I’m up front, judgment-free, authentic, and open. When I say “judgment-free” I really mean that. I’m in no place to judge anyone in this life; everyone has their own choices to make. I do, however, get to say how this goes.
If you wanna hang with me, here’s the rules. If you don’t, I got it. When you’re ready, here’s where I am. If you’re never ready to play that way: Oh well. To each their own. It’s all meaningless anyway. Ten, twenty, or fifty years from now, barely anyone will even remember you were here, let alone which upsets you devoted your life to.
Whatever someone else does to you, it doesn’t mean you automatically change who you are, because when you do, you become a smaller human being. You become a lesser version of yourself when you get angry because of their anger or resentful because of their resentment.
Your love, your self-expression, are there to be broadcast to the world, not shut down, manipulated and controlled in the ruins of a once blooming friendship or relationship. Resentment is for fools and the unaware.
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