How upset would you be if I told you that most of who you are, is really just coping mechanisms?
The things you learnt to do to avoid conflict (or resolve it, if you prefer fight to flight…), minimise stress, manage other people’s bollocks, survive the life you have.
That maybe 95% of you is reactionary conditioning that keeps you exactly where you are in life. Because ironically/unfortunately/conveniently, that’s exactly what those things are meant to do. Keep you safe, make you right. But that’s another blog subject…
So, if we step back and look at what we do and who we are at the core of this maze of conditioning, what do we see? Yes, I know and I’m sorry, that’s a really hard thing to do. Totally worth it though.
I spoke last week about paying attention to the characters or things you are drawn to, because they can tell you a lot about who you might really be. Those can be hints to the deeper sense of self that most of us wish we knew better. They can be examples of ways of behaving, modes of being that help us find clarity in our own thoughts and actions and give us ideals to follow. What you choose is going to have some value to you, because why else would you choose it?
Now, obviously some of those things might appeal to you because of these conditioning and coping mechanisms. Like pursuing money because you had none as a kid, so you find drive towards that when you're older. Or dismiss it as unimportant because that was what was shown to you when you were younger. You didn’t have any, so it must not be that big of a deal. But if those points of appeal are genuinely working for you, is that really such a bad thing? I’d argue no, but it also depends on a few things about what you genuinely want for yourself and what it will take to get there.
(Yes, yes, I know... How very unlike me to be splitting hairs about far fetched abstract concepts involving speculative and subjective sciences prefaced on potentially made up or archaic characters based on embodied archetypes or ideologies. I’m sorry for all the lingo post-sarcasm too…)
The short version is to ask a simple question: Are the ways you deal with challenges in your life, regardless of how life is going, what is keeping your life hard/boring/unfulfilling/awesome?
How much of that conditioning was made by an uninformed child that didn’t know how to make sense of the world? And then bought so hard into it as a survival mechanism that you barely even know where that stuff came from any more it’s become so automatic. You’re just seeing the ripple on effects of that naïve decision that the core essence of you made so long ago. Are those rippled behaviours helping you out these days? Or making life harder…
How much was it made by reacting to people who had literally NO idea about how their actions might be influencing you from a young age. (There are always exceptions, but your parents didn’t really mean to make you as fucked up as all that. It’s… complicated. They learned that shit from somewhere too you know.) What were you told was important as a kid that informed you of what you might like later in life?
Now, I could get into a very technical conversation about neuroplasticity right now, and that would explain why these things we got taught stay with us, but I’ll streamline that by saying that our body and brain really REALLY likes shortcuts. It doesn’t want to have to deal with all that ponderous, energy consuming, time wasting thought involved in every micro-decision (Every. Single. Day…) that basically boils down to “Why am I doing this? How does this make me feel? How will this serve me?”
Put it this way, would you want to have to ask those questions of yourself before you wiped, post toilet interface?.. Yes, Phil, you are exactly right. Don’t be so freaking stupid WAS the correct answer. So, our brains shortcut stuff.
But how far do we want this to go? How much are we missing of what we do all day every day because we put literally NO effort into figuring out why we do some of the dumb shit we do? And this is the trick.
I mentioned stepping back from ourselves (or maybe a better way to say it is step back from our lives to look at it properly) earlier. This is when it matters. If things aren’t the way you want them to be, is that old autopilot stuff still serving you? I also asked the question of is that stuff doing the opposite of what you want, keeping you down and out.
As an example, consider what you know of your relationships up to now. Did they work? If they ended, what happened? What part did you have to play in that? If you have a certain way of dealing with a situation that came up in the relationship, and your partner had a very different one, what happened? Did they understand your way? Did YOU even understand your way? If you didn’t know, how on earth would they? Were both parties feeling misunderstood and confused? How did that work out?... Was the argument legendary? Is it now referred to as “that time when Scott needed to shut up in ‘08”?
Is it making sense yet? We ALL do things based on reactive shortcuts, and sometimes (or quite often...) they make things WAAAAY worse. Would you like to make some different decisions about how you respond to the world and the people in it?
If you said no… Well, good for you. Stick to your guns. Hope it works out for you. Keep winning.
If you said yes, then do your best to accept that you are more automated than you might really want to be. Then, have a good hard look at who you feel like you are, and what you might want to aim at (if you want to change anything, anyway). Then have a double hard look at where the old dumb stuff came from, and then invest some effort in finding new and shinier coping mechanisms to replace the old dumb stuff.
Now, this stuff is very very easy to say, and demands a huge amount of practice. An awful lot of people end up paying very much moolah to have someone help them figure this out while laying on a couch talking about their problems in said helpers office. But, if you are honest enough, and motivated to be honest enough, you can make a significant dent in that old dumb stuff. You make enough dents in anything, you can start to shape the dents and turn it into something resembling what you actually do want. (Hopefully that analogy made sense…)
Be kind, be smart, be your best you. No bar fights.
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” Abraham Maslow
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