Moving to a stress-free reality

How are the gardens coming along?

Leave a comment

How are the gardens coming along?

by Robert S. Vibert

In life, we are surrounded by people and situations.  Our interaction with each can be seen as a garden, an area in which the various aspects of our relationship with those other people can flourish or whither, depending a great deal upon how much we tend to the garden.

If we neglect a garden, it will most likely deteriorate from what we want it to be. Forgetting to water it or ensure that there are nutrients for the various plants and organisms growing there is a recipe for failure.

This principle also applies in our relationships with other people.  While some relationships require little tending due to the nature and depth of our involvement (a simple hello and smile for the cashier in a store we visit regularly is probably enough), others require that we invest more of our time and effort. Engaging in magical thinking that the other person will tend for us the garden we share rarely works very well.

Successful gardens and relationships require active engagement and that means we are investing in them regularly, as well as paying attention to the dry patches that need some more water, and the parts that need specific care.


What keeps us  from being good gardeners?

While some might argue that being a good gardener / participant in a relationship requires us to learn how to do it, there is an important factor which might not be so obvious – self sabotage.

In today’s world, it is very common for people to have the notion that they do not deserve to be happy, to have a successful relationship garden, to be successful at what they do. This notion is encouraged by marketing messages which tell us that we need to buy X  or do Y in order to be happy or to be liked/valued/cherished. These messages bombard us daily and it is not surprising that many people take on the hidden concept that they are not good enough to have what they want.

With this “I’m not good enough” worldview permeating their thinking, usually at a level that they are not aware of, people tend then to unconsciously act in ways to make their gardens match up with the worldview. They neglect to tend to the garden, and when it does not flourish, they can tell themselves that this is the result of some defect in the garden or other person, when really, they have sabotaged it themselves because deep down they do not believe they deserve a beautiful lush garden.

Because the “I’m not good enough” concept is one that would cause much discomfort in someone who actually said it aloud, it rarely is seen as the source of much of the pain in our lives.  It is far easier to blame other people, our finances, our social status, etc., etc. for our current situation that to look closely at what we do to ensure that we do not achieve the success and happiness we want.

One way to verify if this “I’m not good enough” concept is present in our lives is to imagine ourselves in a situation that we say we want. With all the details we can include, we imagine that we are there now, living, breathing, being in that successful context we want. As we continue imagining being there, we pay attention to the BETIS (our way of talking with ourselves).  We notice our Body sensations, our Emotions, our Thoughts, our Images in our mind, our Sounds in our heads (words or other sounds we hear inside).  If any of the BETIS are anything but positive, that is a sign that we are not truly comfortable with being in that success we want.

When we feel uncomfortable imagining ourselves in a successful future situation, it is normal for us to avoid that discomfort by ensuring that we do not get there. We will sabotage our own efforts to ensure that we stay safely in our current reality. This sabotage is often subtle, like showing up late, forgetting to do something, giving up early on a project, being “too busy”, etc.  All of these actions are intended to make the achievement of that success more and more difficult.  The same thing happens with our relationships – in the end, the garden will not flourish and we can blame that on the weather.

Short-circuiting the self-sabotage

The first step to reducing the incidents of self-sabotage in our lives is to become aware of it. By paying attention to what is happening to us and our internal world, we can notice how we talk to ourselves, how we act, how we react, how we are. Noticing does not mean judging – it is simply neutral observation.

Any time we notice that we are feeling uncomfortable about some future success or glorious garden, we can look for internal signs of that “I’m not good enough” concept. Seeing it, we can then release it, using a conscious approach such as AER.

I have seen so much damage caused by that concept and so many unhappy people that I decided to make the MP3 recording of the AER process to release “I’m not good enough” freely available. You can download it from this link. Save the files to your computer and follow the steps indicated.

Releasing the “I’m not good enough” concept from your life will open doors and make it much easier to achieve the success and lovely gardens you desire.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin
– Voltaire

 

Copyright  2014 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved.

[print-me]

Healing and our Brains

I feel X, so you must Y

Leave a comment

I feel X, so you must Y

by Robert S. Vibert

Anyone who interacts with other humans is likely to run into what I am terming impositional logic. This is peculiar form of logic in which one person imposes an expectation on the other as the result of a feeling.

Here’s a simple example – someone feels sad, and so expects that others will do something to cheer them up. I’m not talking about wanting or hoping for something – with impositional logic there is an actual expectation involved, and often negative fallout is directed at the other person when that expectation is not fulfilled.

This negative fallout can range from pouting to outrage to outbursts to severed relationships, all because the expectation was not fulfilled, or not fulfilled in a “timely” fashion.  Often, the expectation is not verbalized – it is simply expected, as a right.

 Where do we get such ideas?

This concept that we have the right to expect something from another human just because we are experiencing a feeling might come, in part, from our childhood. Before we can express ourselves in language, we must rely on others (especially primary care-givers) to interpret our current emotional state and provide us with what we need (food, diaper change, tucked in for sleep, etc.). After some time of having our unexpressed needs met almost automatically, a habit or worldview of expectation can become part of our way of moving through life.

When a relationship is one of adult and infant, this sort of expectation can be “normal”. However, as people become more mature (supposedly) and interact on a more peer-to-peer basis, then unspoken expectations enter into the realm of impositions.

Sometimes we can impose expectations on ourselves. When this phenomena of impositional logic and expectations became apparent to me, and that little voice inside said “write about this”, there was an expectation that I would find the words I needed to compose this post. Fortunately, my self and my inner voice get along pretty well, so the process of writing was not fraught with implied doom if I did not succeed in this project. Meanwhile, the inner critic is watching the progress right now, and chuckling at how “rusty” the writer is, having been away from these sorts of written commentaries for several years.

But, enough about me – I expect that you are still reading at this point… even though I had not actually said that, yet. Now the cat is out of the figurative bag (much to his relief, I am sure).

Some expectations I have observed

The following is a short list to illustrate the concept of impositional logic a little more:

  • I feel happy, so you should feel happy too
  • I feel angry about ABC, so you should also feel angry about ABC
  • I feel angry at you, so you should feel sorry
  • I feel hurt, so you should beg forgiveness
  • I feel love for you, so you should feel love for me
  • I feel upset, so you should restrict your activities
  • I feel threatened by BCD, so you should protect me from that
  • I feel insecure, so you must compliment me
  • I believe in the Easter Bunny, so you must also

When we fail to fulfill

I mentioned above the negative fallout that often arises as a result of not meeting an unspoken expectation. In the world of impositional logic, the fact that the expectation is not communicated is somehow irrelevant. A corollary logic is “if you loved me, you would know…” which is equally absurd, but quite commonplace.  The negative fallout represents punishment for failure and is actually coercive in nature – the person who has not “complied” with the expectation may end up over-compensating in the future to anticipate and prevent being subjected to the fallout. They will attempt to guess what is expected of them and provide it, even though they eventually come to realize that the expectation is not always the same and the rules keep shifting.

How to deal with this?

No clear cut solution has appeared in front of me yet, but I remain slightly optimistic. I’ve tried telling people that I flunked mind-reading which sometimes buys me about 1 day of grace. I ask for all needs to be clearly communicated in advance or at least at the time, but that has a poor track record so far. The number of hours I have invested in trying to decipher unexpressed expectations in other humans has exceeded my counting, and still I get blindsided regularly.  Perhaps one day the answer will be revealed, but I best not get my expectations and hopes up.

Copyright  2014 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved.

[print-me]

Healing and our Brains, Moving to a stress-free reality

Stressed out from wanting things to be a certain way?

Leave a comment

As we grow up, we absorb and create a worldview based upon the various cultural and environmental influences to which we are exposed. This worldview evolves as we develop, as we are exposed to new information and particularly as we have emotionally charged experiences. This worldview then becomes part of our perception of how the world is and how it should be. And, that is one of the main times when we start to experience stress.

Each day, we look at the world through the filter of our worldview, and when it does not conform to that worldview, a certain amount of discomfort arises in us. For example, if we expect that people will be polite to us when we buy something, and the person who serves us a coffee is curt and seems uninterested in us, we can think that there is something wrong with them. We may start to feel upset, disrespected, indignant, etc. All of these feelings arise as a response to the conflict between our expectations and what we encounter. It is the rare person who realizes that one’s expectations may be totally different from the “normal” behaviour of the other people we interact with.

This default response of feeling discomfort when we encounter a discontinuity between our expectations and the outside world is often due to the sense of insecurity which can be triggered – we come to a shocking conclusion: the world is not what we expect and feel safe with; it has become an uncertain place.

People can invest an enormous amount of time, energy and resources in creating a level of perceived security. We build houses with strong doors, security systems and live in gated communities. We establish routines for commuting and working to follow each day. We put on good luck charms, talismans and clothing which we associate with safe prior experiences. We eat the same fast food at home and when we travel to other countries. All of these actions and more are designed to help us feel safer, and that seems to be a fairly normal human desire. Stress is generated when this sense of security is disturbed by some element of the outside world. Our indignation about the “rudeness” of the coffee server is actually a maladaptive attempt to restore “order” to the world. We attribute the responsibility for our feelings to the outside world when we really are just reacting because of our internal emotional triggers. We think “if only the people around us lived up to our expectations, then we would feel safer, as all would be as we expect and in fact need it to be.” The reality of our daily experiences is that change is constant and the world does not live up to our expectations. And yet, we hang onto our expectations for dear life.

Why do we hang onto these unrealistic expectations?

Given the constant exposure we have to new experiences and information, it would be reasonable to expect that our worldview should evolve constantly, and as a result we would have little if any stress from unmet expectations. That does not seem to be the case. We form the various pieces of our worldview early on and seem to cling to it desperately, with an ever increasing amount of stress being generated as we struggle to reconcile what we expect and what we encounter. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we keep expecting the world to work the way we want it to and resisting that it does not.

Brain research has shown that we actually will override what we are seeing with what we want to see. And, I’m sure you’ve had an experience of someone telling you (probably in other words) “Don’t confuse me with the facts – I’ve made up my mind!”

There are two main reasons why we hold onto our worldviews:

The first is our need for security mentioned above. Humans are designed to seek out homeostasis and therefore resist change. Our systems are always trying to return to a state of comfort. We can try very hard to overcome this, but basically we tend to evolve from one state of stability to another, and we want the transition to be as quick and painless as possible. People do experience major changes in perspective, particularly after very intense events and near death experiences. If we were to examine their systems, we would find that almost all have moved from state X to state Y, both of which seem safe to them. The transition process itself may have been very dramatic, but we humans usually end up in a new state of perceived safety and well-being which may be radically different from the prior state. We could be living as a fiercely free spirited individualist one day and be settled into a long term committed relationship the next week.

The second reason we cling to our worldview regardless of the evidence to the contrary is the emotional glue that holds our expectations in place. Much of our belief system and opinion collection is based upon a series of experiences during which we form beliefs and ideas/opinions. These experiences will have emotional content for us and this is what glues the memories and beliefs and worldview together.

Here’s a simple test – think of 5 important events in your life, any 5. You may want to write them down to make it easier to track. For each one, imagine yourself back in that event, as if you were having the experience now. Notice what you were seeing, what you were hearing and what you were feeling. Do this for each event in turn. It is extremely probable that for each important event you will have had at least one strong emotional response. Perhaps for one you felt really happy and for another very sad. The exact emotion is not that critical – for each one that you easily recalled and were able to imagine, there was a strong emotional component. This is what I call the emotional glue that holds those memories in place. You probably can recall a lot of details of each event and even feel the corresponding emotions as you revisit them.

You can test the opposite of this – take yourself back exactly 3 weeks to one of the meals you ate. If you can’t remember much about that meal, it was most likely that it had nothing very emotional happen during it. It was more than likely just like so many other benign events of your life – ones that came and left without any real impact on you.

This emotional glue is a double-edged sword. It holds in place all those memories of positive events from our past, but it also holds in place all those negative ones as well. All of these events, the feelings that arose in them, the thoughts that were formed and the resulting beliefs and opinions all helped to create and to shape your worldview. And, after a while, each new experience tends to reinforce your worldview. Every time that worldview and its component expectations are not in alignment with your current experiences, you will tend to become stressed as you go through the process of reconciling the two.

Sometimes, we can become aware of parts of our worldview which do not really serve us anymore. We may have a vague sensation about the futility of our constant negative reaction to people who do not do what we expect. We may want to be more tolerant. The challenge then is to move from where we are to where we want to be without triggering all of our self-preservation mechanisms, To make this move, we need to let go of the emotional glue which holds the old and unresourceful expectations in place.

Fortunately, it is fairly easy to release the emotional glue which no longer serves us. Humans are fully capable of releasing any emotional glue and the attached beliefs and opinions and reactions, even though it may seem like something a bit out of the ordinary to do the first time or two. The heightened speed of change in the modern world, as well as the bombardment of negative news stories has created a more intense than normal climate of fear, and in a fearful environment, we tend to hang onto everything, including that which no longer serves us. The process of releasing is greatly enhanced by a facilitation process such as AER.

The process of letting go of the emotional glue that holds in place an unresourceful expectation is actually quite straightforward. First, one notices any time when one is feeling frustrated, for example, with a low-intensity life event such as standing in a line-up at the grocery store. One pays attention to the feelings which come up with the frustration, and then when the time is convenient, one lets go of those feelings, one by one, using AER to facilitate the release process. There is neither censoring nor judgment of the feelings which arise – they are noticed, accepted and released. Any analysis of why one might feel anger and sadness mixed with the frustration, for example, is left until after the feelings are released and one can think clearly.

As one releases the accumulated emotional glue, an amazing thing happens – expectations become softer and more in tune with what is actually there. No effort is needed, as there is no resistance to the world nor any struggle to reconcile an expectation with what is happening. Are you ready to let go of some of your old emotional glue, unresourceful beliefs and ideas?

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved

Comments by Robert S. Vibert on life, emotions, and stress elimination that works