I haven't had much time to check in lately, but I just read your post before last. Oh my gosh... It is so good that you are realizing all of this. You are on one serious, life-changing journey. I'm so happy for you. I'm impressed by your determination to dig deep, know and understand yourself, and yearn for change.
You are awesome!!!
Hope you have a fun vacation. Laugh and let yourself out of that shell!
It has taken me a lot of "Thinking", a ton of emotional pain, lots of IC and a small mountain of self-help books to really understand this. I know who that little boy is and where the feelings of inadequacy and fear of rejection come from - and frankly they are all bullsh*t . They may have made sense at the time -- I was a 4-year old with a missing father and an emotionally withdrawn mother and whose leg brace kept him from keeping up with the other kids on the playground -- but they are completely irrelevant today!
That's not me any more!
I know that now!
But the gut level emotional reactions still show up, and these are the emotions that are preventing me from really enjoying my life. To paraphrase Coach, they are preventing me from being the best man that I can be.
And that's the WORK that I need to do. And that's the work I am doing.
Believe me, it's not easy.
I can relate Thinker. One thing that helped me grow was to love myself. I realised and realise that I matter. Sounds kinda simple but it was big for me. You are responsible for your happiness. Understanding your emotions helps you think thru them and then attacking your negative beliefs about yourself. Good for you taking on those snakes. You are handling it. Cheers Coach
M22,H45,W45 S21/18D12 Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties and at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
Good Christian Man Friend, who is also an avid consumer of techno-thriller books, used an example you "might" appreciate. In "The Hunt For Red October," in the story's climax the two boats -- Dallas and Red October -- sort each other out by pinging. GCMF said that, now that you've started down your new path SP old boy, WAW is not getting the "return ping" that she expects
Moral of the story stop "pinging" and start living like you are meant to. \:\)
Quite the contrary! Moral of the story -- change the boat, change the return ping, change WAW's POV.
What GCMF was getting at was that in marriage we quickly get conditioned to certain things -- I say X, she does Y -- happens all the time. (And this is in the _DR_ book somewhere where MWD asks if the reader knows how to get the spouse upset, the answer being "of course I know what upsets spouse".)
So if Thinker changes the configuration of the USS Thinker, then WAW doesn't get "back" what she expects -- and, I was suggesting, what she in fact NEEDS in order to continue rationalizing her course of action.
So -- and this is something the old self-help guru Tony Robbins used to talk about -- disrupting the pattern MUST perforce disrupt the Walkaway's logic, rationale, and reasoning. And, ideally, make her/him THINK.
I also have a huge amount of confidence in my own abilities - probably too much at some times. I have always thought that I could do anything, learn anything, accomplish anything that I wanted to, and I have always been successful in school, the military, as a professional executive, etc.
My toxic feelings of inadequacy show up and hit me in social situations -
I had that thing for a long time, too; since a kid, everyone else seemed to know what to do in social situations. What -- I miss a memo?
I don't think that I "got over" it -- I just stopped doing it.
I heard Tony Robbins speak on the teevee one Infomercial Night, and the part that caught my ear was his admonition to find someone who was getting the results you wanted to get and "mirror" that person (by which he meant, essentially, mimic). My XO at the time was the Social Lubricant -- though his initials weren't K and Y -- everywhere we went. He just glad-handed his way through a room. Texan, you know. They're like that. And my Safety Instructor Pilot was another Texan and Ever So Much More So like that.
I noticed that they were always welcome everywhere they went. So, Tony Robbins in ear, I just started copying them. Literally. I'd say the things they said when meeting someone for the first time. I'd shake hands the way they did. And, like the XO, I'd essentially pretend everyone I met was a new crewman. So I had to have my mojo working, right? Like a real O does.
And one day it wasn't mimicry anymore -- it was just me.
After that I read How To Win Friends and Influence People -- the Original Self-Help Manual -- by Dale Carnegie and added those principles in to the mix. Cliff's Notes version: Ask people about to talk to you about themselves, and you'll be the most popular guy in the room.
And on a DITY-move from one coast to the other I listened to an audiobook version of Boothman's How To Make People Like You in 90 Seconds Or Less, which is really an elaboration of Carnegie, full of mirroring like Robbins.
"Cognitive Dissonance. I forget who brought that up in one of my earlier threads. But I can see why it's important -- indeed, though it's never made explicit, it's at the heart of the DB technology." Indeed.
"Cognitive Dissonance. I forget who brought that up in one of my earlier threads. But I can see why it's important -- indeed, though it's never made explicit, it's at the heart of the DB technology." Indeed provided the brain of the WAW has not been cast in concrete.
Indeed provided the brain of the WAW has not been cast in concrete.
I can tell you that my W is scared, hurt, confused, in denial, avoiding conflict and running / hiding from problems, but definitely not cold or cast in concrete.
Me 42, W 39, S8, S6, S2 M 11y, A & ILYBNILWY 11/08 Walking away from a bad situation.
