Playing and Control
Many people want success, but they are not sure about the work involved. In some cases it’s wise to just start, but momentum is hard to build and it’s easy to quit. There are also questions about what is authentic when one has been on a wrong path with a goal or they feel that they are simply making another person’s dreams real but not their own. The reality in psychology is that it all starts with a basic autonomy of a self that can make authentic choices, and no matter what, there will always be some exploration, trial and error, before finding a sliver of authenticity. That sliver involves some feeling in the body that a person likes or dislikes, and is not covered over by a disguise.
At some point an exploration has to begin with an initial exploratory movement. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in particular focused on the “spontaneous gesture” where theoretically a child is able to first begin and develop their true self. There is a playful quality to sensing the boundaries of one’s body, being alive, feeling real, and learning about oneself through the activity of exploration. Exploration also feels like a combination of playing and experimentation. In fact, for all articles on psychology, or meditation for that matter, there needs to be some action on the part of the subject and an honest account of the feelings and sensations in the body, for learning to happen. Without that, there is no aliveness, playing, or exploration. Winnicott found this beginning to play, and the continuation of playing, to be the most reliable sign of health, and so much so that he also believed that “if a child is playing there is room for a symptom or two, and if a child is able to enjoy play, both alone and with other children, there is no very serious trouble afoot. If in this play is employed a rich imagination, and if, also, pleasure is got from games that depend on exact perception or external reality, then you can be fairly happy, even if the child in question is wetting the bed, stammering, displaying temper tantrums, or repeatedly suffering from bilious attacks or depression.”
Play often involves some exertion of control on the environment and for Winnicott there’s a basic sense of survival mixed in with play. The child recognizes this when “…the child values finding that hate or aggressive urges can be expressed in a known environment, without the return of hate and violence from the environment to the child. A good environment, the child would feel, should be able to tolerate aggressive feelings if they are expressed in more or less acceptable form.” Mastering an environment also reduces anxiety, but if the environment cannot be controlled then the anxiety leads to searches for addictive consumption, and manifests as a regression towards familiar habits that are easier to access. There is a hunting mind in each human that looks for a catch, an animal skin, a treasure, etc., and if it can’t find it in one place, it won’t wait and will be quite happy to find it somewhere more familiar and comfortable. Play can be pathological when it’s “…compulsive, excited, anxiety driven, and more sense-exploiting than happy.”
Some of this can go in dangerous sadistic territory that Freud talked about in Beyond The Pleasure Principle. He used an example of a child being hurt by circumstances in an environment, and then using those circumstances to learn about power and to trade places with the circumstances to put oneself in the power position. Unfortunately, this is usually done to someone who is not in a power position, so an easy target is scapegoated in order to regulate emotions. “If a doctor examines a child‘s throat, or performs a small operation on him, the alarming experience will quite certainly be made the subject of the next game, but in this the pleasure gain from another source is not to be overlooked. In passing from the passivity of experience to the activity of play the child applies to his playfellow the unpleasant occurrence that befell himself and so avenges himself on the person of this proxy.”
War Pt. 2: Beyond The Pleasure Principle: https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html
This desire to control the environment is often how underhanded methods of control spread throughout society. This can easily be seen in bosses who repeat bad behaviors with underlings, because they went through the same when they were powerless. It’s the feeling of reciprocity like it’s their turn now to exert control. Then when you add the fact that these methods may be the only methods they know that work, and in a desperately competitive environment, the tools of power and control spread throughout society via imitation of what works, which fosters tyranny. Tyranny is very clever at understanding the emotions of others, and through many experiences of exerting control, a tyrannical person can use your likes and dislikes against you, through the manipulation of leverage, and your negative emotions become connected to their feelings of security and emotional regulation. When you feel bad, they feel good. When you lose energy, they gain energy. Yet when we are playing in a blameless way, it’s blameless because the control on the environment we apply provides a satisfaction that doesn’t drain others, or it follows some socially agreed upon exchanges, rewards, and punishments, that appear to be fair.
As we feel out the environment, through trial and error, partial success leads to partial feelings of satisfaction with an uneasiness that motivates one to complete a task before quitting. Breaking down hard parts of a problem and inching towards success can make a difference in the amplification of the reward. There’s a tradeoff when choosing to do something hard with an anticipation of a larger reward emotionally, and also larger rewards in the outer world. On the other hand, controlling what can’t be controlled leads to stress if the challenge is too difficult at the current level of skill. The more difficult the task the more persistence and mindfulness is required to get to the finish line. There is an undeniable fact that mental rewards are higher when people complete difficult tasks, such as winning an Olympic gold medal. Pleasure comes from the ego matching the ego-ideal for a time, and there’s also a secondary relief in putting down the burden of always needing to practice and prepare, because the big event is now over. The effort can now relax.
The False Self – Various Authors (Narcissism 2 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gth6h-the-false-self-various-authors-narcissism-2-of-4.html
Regardless of the obstacles, there are many benefits that come with the risks associated with playful exploration. “It is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health: playing facilitates growth and therefore health; playing leads into group relationships; playing can be a form of communication in psychotherapy; and, lastly, psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others.” Therapy becomes a play area that allows the stuck patient to return to a playful learning mentality so they can develop new momentum with renewed action, ideally coming mainly from one’s own ideas. “The significant moment is that at which the child surprises himself or herself. It is not the moment of my clever interpretation that is significant…Interpretation outside the ripeness of the material is indoctrination and produces compliance…This playing has to be spontaneous, and not compliant or acquiescent, if psychotherapy is to be done.”
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
With the spread of modern meditation practices there are certainly options now for people to do it themselves and for them to succeed at staying in the present moment, playing, experimenting, and possibly approaching something Olympic in difficulty. Alan Watts provided an example of this in the kitchen. “In our culture we make a strictly rigid division between work and play…The art of washing dishes is that you only have to wash one at a time. If you’re doing it day after day, you have it in your mind’s eye an enormous stack of filthy dishes which you have washed up in years past and an enormous stack of filthy dishes which you will wash up in years future, but if you bring in your mind to the state of reality which is only now, you only have to wash one dish. Instead of thinking ‘have I got it really clean’ as my mother taught me with an angry voice, that I have to get every little scrap off it, instead you turn the cleaning movement into a dance, and you’re not under compulsion all the time.”
Work as Play – Alan Watts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWx7cqiSJI
The Power of Concentrated Action – Eckhart Tolle: https://youtu.be/c8lRV0rqYd4?si=p2JZiuynNkqKM_4M
Of course, this is correct in that one has to have concentration, but part of anticipatory pleasure comes from imagining small parts of a future task that one can do right away and then moving through each part to experience consecutive spells of satisfaction, as Watts describes. Winnicott also hinted that there needs to be some vision. Imagination of the task and the mysterious encounter with reality. “Playing is always exciting because it deals with the existence of a precarious borderline between the subjective and that which can be objectively perceived.” The great thing about play is that unless there is action to encounter reality, there isn’t really an attempt at play, and this forces many out of magical thinking, complacence, and procrastination. Watching players play soccer from the bench is being a spectator, not playing. Some initial forcing and effort to control has to be present to start a back and forth communication between the participant and the environment. Slowing down to reflect on feedback is a way to regulate emotions away from instant reactivity and rash judgments. Like in a soccer game, strategies have to be adjusted to confirm lessons learned so performance can improve in the next half: A playful control of reality.
Shame
It’s important to control expectations with promises of what psychology can offer because environments in the real world are not always accommodating. There are micro-managers who are sending waves of shame and contempt the employee’s way, regardless of their sense of presence with a stack of dishes. There is also a requirement to imagine longer time periods for the actual work itself. Many people do jobs much more complicated than washing dishes and have to ruminate far in advance. There are also customers and clients who require ever higher standards and it’s easy to fall short from time to time. Bullies also eliminate a sense of control by shaming at every opportunity and blocking important growth, and accordingly, any access to future pleasure from work in that particular environment. In the imperfect world, jobs will change with regularity as politics, obsolescence, and health issues arise. Any situations of emotional pain will require those tools talked about in my past meditation posts, and especially the Otto Rank installment that suggests that one should balance mindfulness with a normal expression of emotion. Many will also need to process anger in legal ways, and if bullying from employers is so egregious, then legal action, joining a union, or looking for another job may be necessary. There also has to be a fair self-assessment of one’s own quality of work when criticism is accurate. It has to be accepted that work will never completely match up with pure play. Healthy expressions of anger involve present moment defenses against real threats, but anger related to past victimization has to be met with mindfulness in the body, because of how historical impulses can erupt with unfortunate timing. When met with mindfulness, the source of the anger has to be traced to what needs to be learned from in the past so that the brain doesn’t have to make endless predictions, preparations, and ruminations about how to control the future. The endless rumination comes from denial of those problems and avoiding the development of those needed skills to solve or cope with said problems.
In my experience, those who had anger over bullies and bossy sadists in the workplace usually had to get really good with money as a solution, because the anger is connected with fear of losing one’s home, relationships, and addictive pursuits. The typical story is of a person who tolerated years of derision at work to finally be able to retire and “flip the bird,” to their old company or department. Those who were angry about past intimate relationship failures dealt with that by learning about what they truly wanted as a lifestyle and chose partners based on a mutual support of each other’s pursuits, so that their goals wouldn’t cancel each other’s out. If something was really repressed deep down, then longer meditations mixed with deep therapy, can bring out some of those buried causes and effects from the past.
A good test I tried was recently going for a mindful walk in the city center. This meant that I was relaxing thinking and scanned my entire body to find tensions to relax. Loud sirens, loud people talking, harsh speech, harsh body language from others, really pushes you to react if you’re sensitive. It’s easy to detect that feeling of anger and boundary violation and see how rapidly it effects you. Usually I would feel a quick response to want to retaliate to maintain some control. Good mindfulness though, gives you that pause that you need as an adult so that you can choose your response better or to just acknowledge the emotion while letting it decay naturally as you get on with you errands. It’s when there’s a stimulus and you’re not mindful where old repressed templates explode. This is why it’s a hard practice to regulate emotions, because mindfulness is needed to see emotions from a distance. If there’s no distance then the expression of the emotion will have all the momentum. Mindfulness also has a benefit in that it already acknowledges the feelings because they are being listened to at the moment of contact. Once they are listened to, understood in the context of whether it came from the past or the present, mindfulness of the body provides enough space for a more considered response. Long periods of mindfulness will also clearly illuminate any dents, fractures, or cavities in one’s self-esteem or shine a light on any long standing feelings of shame.
Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvsf5-object-relations-otto-rank-pt-2.html
How to express anger – Gabor Mate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljtNq7uDPaM
Feelings of shame can originate outside of the workplace, and they can can readily destroy beliefs that one can learn and improve in any environment. Not believing that one can learn is self-sabotaging and a self-fulfilling prophecy because inaction is already failure. Part of the problem of stigmatized identities that go along with the feeling of shame is the rush of stress that rises up when a shame-prone individual tries to learn something new. There is also an infantile wish to quit and have an authority figure provide relief by stepping in and taking control. Shame really extinguishes attempts at willpower. It’s easier to go into regression and familiar territory than to feel those feelings and persist with new experiences. For example, a 2008 study looked at the effect of rumination induced with “..negative autobiographical recall,” on already nascent “dysfunctional cognitions.” One amplifies the other so the dysfunctional thoughts about incompetence continue to influence. Exploited by an unscrupulous bully, much damage can be done to those who lack knowledge in psychology and don’t already have a flexible learning mentality. All a bully has to do is the typical narcissistic dog whistling, by guessing at possible weaknesses, sins of the past, or deficits of intelligence, that are quite common and familiar to so many, to set off a reaction of one kind or another in the victim. Even worse, all people have some weaknesses or imperfections which make this kind of abuse effective on almost all people.
By reminding targets of their past dysfunctional behaviors it reinforces a toxic identity. A wave of the past rises up and nothing new is learned. Probably the worst thing a narcissist can do to someone is to make them believe that they can’t develop or improve, and they can potentially be the biggest influence on self-sabotaging voices in a victim’s mind. Sam Vaknin has a good summary in the links below, and it will be familiar to what many know about the Super-ego if they’ve read Freud and other psychoanalysts. The brain copies all forms of pleasure automatically in the mimetic/imitative side of the brain. Pleasures can be of a higher level, which includes more peace and well-being, and of a lower level with intense pleasure disguising very real wear and tear on the body and mind. The supposedly “cool” aspects of any pleasure can be picked up on and turned into a voice in the mind or an image of oneself taking part in the “coolness.” The self-sabotage of course is hidden in the desire’s drawbacks. Many trip over themselves even when all they are trying to do is have a good time.
Sam helpfully explained his condition of narcissism and the absence of a true self, where the Ego is not operating fully, and one is living through the Super-ego and Ego-ideal. It’s like watching yourself as another person while at the same time still being in the body. Like a movie reel, or a role playing video game, the sense of being a self in the actual world is dormant. The Super-ego false self is powerful and can operate experience like an automaton, so any knowledge of narcissism and the condition doesn’t provide an instant cure through catharsis because the felt sense of being a self-in-the-world is so underdeveloped. The muscle of the Ego-ideal is so strong that it speaks mental scripts automatically in the foreground of consciousness and daydreams the narcissist back to automated behaviors.
Because of Sam’s childhood abuse, the pain of going into the remnants of his self-in-presence was too painful of a process and if there was a choice to survey all the vicissitudes he went through, it has instead been more comfortable to rest in goals and ideals. Sam then informed his viewers that the narcissists in their life are trying to bring that object-relational world they have into their minds so as to complete their process of separation-individuation, which is a childhood process of separating from the mother to become psychologically independent, but according to Sam, it’s a repeated failure.
Whether the metaphor René Girard used, about how a narcissist wants to be god-like, to worship idols, or from an atheistic perspective, they want to be an autonomous self that they see others are able to embody, the pathological consequences are the same. There’s an envy directed at people who have an Ego that can savor independently from social control, motivating narcissists to one-up a victim for a thrill of superiority and mastery, to come up to the victim’s level and get a taste of that bliss of self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, no ego skills are developed with this tactic, because it’s still about gaining a Girardian “look” from victims and feeding on it. It’s not an autonomous pleasure like engaging in a harmless hobby. At the other end of the abuse, the victim is left with an overactive shaming super-ego self-critic program that follows a deconstruction code against their ego-reality structure: A draining inner conflict much like what a narcissist experiences regularly. Like a computer virus, it has to be faced and rooted out for a victim, that still has some remaining sense of self to develop, to feel like they did before the abuse. They have to reconnect with their autonomous ego that acts in the real present moment. Ideally, one embraces a comprehensive connection with reality, or one finds that one can learn to love reality as it is. The super-ego then begins to look ridiculous to the ego because of how unrealistic it is, as Helene Deutsch pointed out. The super-ego deflates and the mind quiets down.
Deprogram the Narcissist in Your Mind – Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/bCKm2lywhZg?si=Ag_E58A2z1hR5QCe
Narcissistic Abuse Recovery: First Separate, Individuate – Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/95QBUV9CR_4?si=HZAhpxuV_HCopcba
Hijacked by Narcissist’s Serpent Voice? – Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/fT7pQ35LYlU?si=uxZnWEq6Cp13E3t8
Get Parasite Narcissist Out of Your Colonized Mind – Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/mVxzztuv96Y?si=eRFv2ZNxtitmY1gw
Love Yourself: Here’s How – or, The Four Pillars of Self-love – Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/2vzBf9QvClo?si=xlBWf6eypk6S5ZYK
How I Experience My Narcissism: Aware, Not Healed – Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/pIOKzEM1ijI?si=VrhRTpTYA8Zt8LmZ
Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v2yepky-object-relations-helene-deutsch-pt.-2.html
I also agree with Sam that there are lots of gurus and self-help people that are implanting a similar magical thinking super-ego headspace in a client’s mind like the narcissistic shared fantasy, in order to get them addicted to unrealistic dreams in their ego-ideals like a fish hook, so they cough up their hard earned money made in the world of reality. For example, with past life regression therapists, there is a danger of implanting false memories based on auto-generated imagery in meditation or hypnosis, and also imagery suggested from some therapists, by accident or on purpose. This magical thinking process will be discussed later. The problem of losing the Ego is losing all the emotions related to reality so the juiciness of present moment aliveness is tragically dried up. It’s also a good question as to whether the memory and history of the realistic ego is damaged in some way. Is it possible anymore to feel a Proustian wistfulness for beautiful times gone by, when all one is thinking about is an inaccessible future self? It ties up neatly with Buddhist values towards equanimity, Upekkhā. Equanimity is not as boring as the translation sounds like. It relaxes reactivity long enough to allow the sense of wonder that anything exists at all, which also connects with Heidegger’s philosophy on the value of wonder and appreciation.
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html
Self-help leaders and psychology popularizers regularly over-generalize dense scientific material so their suggestions and advice only sometimes apply to your particular life. It also makes it easier for these professional speakers to make more money because they can attract larger audiences. That’s why videos of people like Jordan Peterson in front of a big crowd seem so general, but look much more specific when he’s talking to patients one on one. Each patient is walking on general paths some of the time but they are also hacking out paths in dense jungle in other areas of their lives. Solutions for one person will always look more or less different than what is good for another. Even these posts, which are still quite dense, are just pointers for people to help them find their own way. For example, self-esteem problems related to shame can manifest in different ways for different people in different circumstances. General information is a good starting place, but for many, therapeutic results will more likely happen when they encounter something specific that works for them. This is why many people like psychology books with specific examples. If a reader is lucky, they may find an example that mirrors closely their situation.
7 Phases of Shared Fantasy: Why Narcissist Needs YOU – Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/Kp3YFC0OQfU?si=t5ReCtoMXaQrQFvF
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html
Equanimity – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/12307/
Parmenides: https://rumble.com/v1gsvkl-the-presocratics-parmenides.html
Mira Kelley (and HER abundance with YOUR money in a jar!): https://youtu.be/oDmSJF_EKyQ?si=BURycfjHjZeaSy7U
Self-help grifters unite to “Change the World” – Keyas World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Bu5H9dVSM
How To Find a Therapist – Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH4FNW0TqZE
If you explore enough psychology books, you will find that they are rife with examples of childhood and adolescent shame that make up these waves of narcissistic injury and self-sabotage. Many examples in these books are of childhood and adolescent rape, caregivers raping, parents raping, and the garden variety ingestion of drugs or imitation of violent behavior leading to catastrophic escalations and criminal mistakes. In childhood many are taking in shame narratives from authority figures and voices are operating automatically in their minds, coaxing them to repeat bad behaviors through identification. The identification comes in when there is an agreement with those voices to the point that the identification feels authentic as a stand alone thought, but usually all that’s needed is a cursory investigation of this advice to uncover distorted voices that support self-sabotage, which means authenticity can be ruled out. Some common examples of mimetic contagion found in modern society are suicidal contagion, addictions, violent copycatting, etc. Even worse, older generations can successfully pass on their pleasure templates with the same feelings of shame and self-limitation. For example, if someone had a difficult period in their life where they behaved shamefully, it’s easy for them to assume they are not worthy of future redemption and they may give up on themselves. Needless to say, a success template that includes moral perfection is not possible or realistic after reading a certain quantity of psychology. Most people have to wrestle with some impostor syndrome or they may get mired in shame narratives as they attempt to put closure on their past to clear their conscience for future projects.
Talk To Me trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLAKJu9aJys
Transcanine Model banned from OnlyFans: https://www.ibtimes.sg/knottyfairy-self-proclaimed-transcanine-model-fired-job-banned-onlyfans-posting-sex-acts-68539
The reality is that people who are successful are hardly perfect people, but they are almost always successful at the disguise. Therapists have their work cut out for them to be the one person that believes in their patient’s ability to drop imitations of old patterns and to support clients in their transformation to become more independent. Usually the first step is to recognize what was imitated, to not solely take all the blame for the invention of addiction, or the initial discovery of the sex act, or the simple realization that anger can be destructive, etc. The next step is to look at boundaries, and through the power of visualization, a power which advertising has long distorted to break through customer boundaries, to visualize those rarely advertised drawbacks that go along with many pleasures. Old templates of pleasure potentially have at one time or another violated another person’s autonomy, at different degrees of severity, so some shame is healthy, but it can easily solidify into a limited recognition of identities where people double-down on behaviors because they believe “it’s who I am. I’m bad.” Therapists have to be that person that understands the mistakes people make and foster that all important learning mentality and to heal the all-or-nothing splitting that happens when a patient is stuck in perfectionism. Many of the goals of therapy are about teasing out persistent inner conflicts to resolve them and free up energy. When the mind is more quiescent in a patient, a path forward is easier to commit to.
One area that requires some looking into is the notion of forgiveness. So many speakers tell people to forgive, even when it goes against the grain. Desires for revenge can drain energy and often disguise an unconscious need to be satisfied through the abuser. Like Rupert Spira says about forgiveness, awareness has already forgiven so there isn’t a need to do anything dualistic. Even trying to effort “forgiveness” is just another push and pull from the same aggressive side of the mind. Cutting ties with people, so they aren’t needed, and seeing the already present peace residing in basic awareness, can also free up energy that is needed for getting on with life. The final stage of making a therapeutic change is when a person can do what the therapist does for themselves.
Mystics & Masters: A Course in Miracles meets Rupert Spira, Part 2: https://youtu.be/_m_IHnlPNEA?si=n0XKuPppW3fO-2M9
The next path is how to emotionally regulate so that satisfaction can be found in daily life. Emotional regulation is a long lasting journey with endless goals. As soon as things are fixed in one area of life, like at work, many people will find goals popping up, like changing a diet and introducing exercise, for example. On top of that, there are a myriad of relationship goals causing overwhelm. Development has to be taken in one step at a time. There’s only so much daydreaming and acting-on that can be completed in a day before you’re exhausted. Combating old impulses and identities requires more than presence and mindfulness, but also a positive mood to lubricate activity to keep it from rusting. In a study on different kinds of meditation, a positive method called Twin Hearts, was compared with classic mindfulness to see which was faster at regulating emotion. “Participants were constantly instructed to desire good things for the Earth and for all humanity, invited to imagine the Earth in front of him, to place his hands toward her and then to repeat positive words and phrases to himself. In this meditation, attention is directed toward this exercise of gratitude…[In the Mindfulness practice, participants aimed their attention] to the observation of [their] own thoughts, perceiving their arrival and letting them go….without reacting or being affected by them. Throughout the meditation, the participant was invited to keep attention in this focus, returning whenever…distracted.” Their results found positive meditation more effective because “it seems that the content of the thoughts during the meditation matters, i.e., a positive emotional-based meditation can be used as an efficient tool to produce immediate effect in the emotional modulation.”
Twin Hearts Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N884jNJJpGc
Jordan Peterson – fixing small life problems one by one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOJxcLyg3-Q
From personal experience, I would add that regular mindfulness does take time to work but it’s not really content free. There is content in the mind all the time and as the person becomes more relaxed the content can at times unexpectedly release repressed negative emotion, but by continuing to acknowledge negative emotions, and let them go there can be a deeper rest. When that peace permeates experience, the content that arises becomes more positive, often leading to “a-ha” and “eureka” moments about positive things to plan and act on in the future. It makes sense that if one purposefully puts positive content in the mind then the positive effects would happen faster than waiting for positive content to arrive naturally. Though, one could then make an argument about authenticity and being willing to wait for a sense of rest to manifest those positive ideas when the faculty is ready. Of course, in this fast paced world, there has to be a balance between expediency and authenticity.
Despite all this sifting, there’s still a lot of potential for working with the negativity that bubbles up. Options to express emotion, discharge into catharsis, and opportunities to gain an understanding of the causes and effects of the past, can all be used for the good. A simple way to create new goals from that negativity is to look what past behaviors were disliked and create goals that are in the opposite direction. Knowing what is a mistake illuminates the opposite. When coupled with repeated positivity, the psyche can develop a buffer against depression when goals fail or there are disappointments along the way. A strong buffer means that a person will pick themselves up from a failure and return to goal orientation much sooner than someone who ruminates endlessly for every setback.
For those who hate positive affirmations, it’s possibly because so many of them ignore boundaries and the skills needed to hold oneself accountable as well as others. Life is full of demands for reciprocity and responsibility, not just unconditional love for the planet and all the flora and fauna, including flora and fauna that engage in conflict naturally. Alternative content for a creative person making their own affirmations would be to include more cognitive therapy principles, especially throughout the day. The following list of CBT reflections can smooth out some of those contradictions during a non-dual meditation or even in daily life:
- Asking if the thought and image is true.
- Practicing reality testing. Confirm and validate opinions and suggestions.
- Following images of a feared future beyond the worst point until a realistic stable point is reached.
- Changing future actions in an automatically generated fear-image with realistic better choices that you will more likely do.
- Imagining using coping skills that one is already aware of. Many of us have tools but we are not using them.
- Practicing coping techniques so that one is prepared when one really needs to be.
- To counter catastrophizing one can ask oneself what realistically will happen.
The Work by Byron Katie: https://thework.com/instruction-the-work-byron-katie/
Approach and Avoidance Goals
Content streams in the mind can also be monitored by investigating their goals and what they are trying to achieve. Goals informed by psychology are more effective because they reduce self-sabotage and are pro-social. In a nutshell, there are two large categories in the psychology of goals with subtypes: Approach goals and Avoidance goals. They have two general motivations: The Need For Achievement or Thriving, and the Fear of Failure. The Handbook of Approach and Avoidance Motivation, has an exhaustive review of these different types of goals, and they all can land differently in emotional experience. “Avoidance goals are concerned with survival, and approach goals with thriving. Or to state it another way, if one doesn’t reproduce or seize an opportunity today, one can try again tomorrow; but if one doesn’t survive today, there will be no further opportunities.” All goals involve some risk and to find a balance between approach and avoidance goals is necessary because they are often mixed in the same overall goal. This is one of the ways one can choose goals that create that feeling of Flow and well-being when skills match with challenges. Approach goals are more exciting, but avoidance goals provide a counter-pleasure related to mental peace. Everything involves survival, but the emphasis is more on thriving and abundance vs. achieving only a minimal survival.
Flow psychology: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
From the point of view of researchers in the text “greater well-being results from experiencing more frequent pleasant and less frequent unpleasant affect and from having personally meaningful experiences in life.” Since both approach and avoidance goals connect with overall well-being in different ways, one has to ask, “what are the promised thriving benefits of this goal? What are the risks, dangers, and preparations required to achieve this goal?” Down to the nitty gritty details is the optimum balance which may have to be adjusted more heavily to avoidance goals when the task is very dangerous as well as difficult. Avoidance goals can save lives when there is a big delta between skills and perils. “Which goals are most likely to promote well-being? A combination of both approach and avoidance goals is important for adaptive functioning. We have argued that the extent to which individuals should pursue more approach than avoidance goals is influenced by the desirability and feasibility of these goals for a given individual. Individuals for whom approach goals are desirable or feasible may experience greater well-being if their goal pursuits are heavily skewed toward approach goals. This, however, is not the case for individuals for whom avoidance goals are desirable or feasible. Such individuals may not necessarily benefit from pursuing approach goals and may even benefit in certain ways from pursuing avoidance goals…No single mix of approach and avoidance goals is optimal for the well-being of all individuals. Instead, to maximize well-being, individuals may need to find the mix that fits them best.”
Subtype goals include different aims that have important emotional consequences to consider. “Mastery goals are focused on the development of competence or the attainment of task mastery; performance-approach goals are focused on outperforming others; and performance-avoidance goals are focused on not performing worse than others.” Typically, mastery goals are about practice and learning and involve the “try and try again if at first you don’t succeed” attitude that reduces stress. They are also motivated by the Need for Achievement, which focuses on well-being for the mind and body. One cannot stand still because the body has to be fed and taken care of and there are many culturally prescribed goals that tantalize one with very real possibilities and lifestyles. Regardless, all goals involve stress and effort, but some goals increase the sense of alarm. Fear of failure more closely associates with a performance-avoidance goal. Being realistic, most of the world of work and money is highly measured and steers people towards performance and threatens the withdrawal of rewards if there’s failure, so the feeling of wear and tear from work involves the stress of doing the work as well as stressful rumination on the consequences of failure: Extrinsic motivation. Mastery goals are more associated with internal motivation where failure is just a learning opportunity. This is why preparation is so important for goals because it can support that sense of confidence that reduces stress when one is inevitably found caught in an avoidance reaction. As people become more confident with their skills, because they are more automatic, and require less effort, they find graded performance less threatening. There is also a benefit in saving money and investing, because it can buffer that fear of rejection because one has enough financial freedom and time to look for something more appropriate.
The problem with all these studies is how abstract much of the research is, even though there are emotional consequences being measured. That is why meditation is so important for people so they can assess for themselves how things feel in their phenomenological experience. A biological baseline of sensitivity and reactivity will vary from person to person and each goal involves a different balance between thriving and safety. To bridge that gap between a mastery orientation, like in a hobby, with that of a performance orientation in running a business, requires, as Elon Musk stated, a “high pain threshold.” All the main meditation practices require a surrender, which isn’t usually achieved in regular meditation, due to it resembling a safe hobby, and that surrender when it is engaged in is often described as a feeling that is like letting go of survival-defenses. It’s scary. Sooner or later, a meditator has to realize that their meditation benefits are only working in one area of life and compartmentalized in the hobby category. As soon as the chips are down, when there’s an emotional investment, only a devil-may-care attitude of surrender, mixed with a scientific learning mentality on what works, can manifest as an actual experience of letting-go in difficult times. Many mastery goals are different from performance goals because a “back to the drawing board” quality of pursuing skill development is pervasive. Avoidance-performance goals have an all or nothing attitude and spur on feelings of having to quit to save face or induce a strong desire to escape. Pride and a learning mentality are on opposite poles. Regardless, both types of goals require some measurement so as to at least know what “mastery” is supposed to look like, and in turn allow consciousness the chance to assess if there is any progress. Through trial and error, an assessment of one’s level, and further training, real experiences in consciousness can create enough feedback to inform the original self-belief and bring it back to a realistic foundation.
The Anapanasati Sutta: 4 stages of meditation: https://rumble.com/v1gon6r-the-anapanasati-sutta-4-stages-of-meditation.html
The Pain Threshold: Elon Musk: https://youtu.be/H3GVC2RObuk
In a competitive environment, a mastery oriented person has to take in criticism and measurement as something to learn from and to apply what was learned with renewed attempts, regardless of any contempt coming from others, and regardless of any unfairness that pops up from time to time. And even further, the question can be asked as to whether external criticism is always reliable? This is why some people have to test unfavorable opinions like a scientific experiment if they want to move independent of authority figures and excessive compliance. Critics should be included in the mastery goals because they are just another indicator that provides information and feedback. There is also the phenomenon of Freudian prestige and the aura that surrounds these so called experts, who can be misleading from time to time. A great deal of people don’t deserve the gravitas of being considered an “expert,” and a little reality testing is often all that is needed to prove that. Experiences of vindication also make one more independent minded because truth is found in a search for facts, and trusting experts will only expand horizons to their level. Important events and facts that go beyond compliance and regulation can point to newer horizons. If there is a stripping away of all external critics and fame, what is still left of this independence at work, or with loved ones, is what many would find a pathway towards intrinsic motivation. For researchers like Edward Deci, that means acknowledging the needs you feel in your body, and having the freedom to pursue that satisfaction with the skills required, and belonging with important others and loved ones. To begin to include rules and regulations from others that you find reasonable is to look at the WHY of the task which helps to match self-interests between the individual and the group, so as to harmonize social goals.
Group Psychology – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html
Jordan Peterson – Why can’t you let go of unfair treatment?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaN9F1q-Fn0
Self-Determination Theory – Edward Deci: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6fm1gt5YAM
Self-regulation and Magical Thinking
Like most psychology subjects related to motivation, it’s full of assumptions that the reader can self-regulate in a world full of technological diversions: social media, gaming, texting, e-mailing, etc., and a myriad of addictions and magical thinking traps. The modern world is not like that of an ancient farmer. Farming would have been for survival and it also would be more interesting in a world where there was not much else to do. Normally, there is some form of pleasure arising when there is a challenge that is at the appropriate level for a person’s skills, and then after besting that challenge, the brain releases mental rewards followed by some rest. On the other hand, many others are faced with something that is too challenging, so their experiences would be different, full of ruminating in a fight or flight mode. In Self-Regulation as the Interface of Emotional and Cognitive Development, researchers defined self-regulation as “…a process through which one system or domain of psychological functioning modulates the level of another in order to maintain an adaptive balance or equilibrium in response to internal or external stimulation…[It’s] an adaptive process whereby system set points are modified over time in order to meet anticipated or expected demands. When expected demands are well within the range of systems’ capacities to respond to them, these systems are healthy and function at optimum set points; they are able to react in response to stress and then return to basal levels once the challenge has been met. Through repeated adjustment in high stress environments, however, adaptive set points are thought to reach basal levels that are not optimal for stress responding and that are ultimately injurious to the organism, resulting in physical and mental disease due to the toll, or wear and tear, they exact on the body’s various systems.”
When people are desperate and reactive, the acting out and decisions made afterwards tend to be more pathological and self-destructive. To self-regulate a person has to be able to pause in the midst of reactivity to relax and choose to use the skills that were learned for the purpose, or choose to learn new skills if necessary. In very challenging situations, it may be necessary to change goals to more skill-appropriate ones. Either way, challenges are endless and much of what needs to be done is simply to choose which challenges are the best ones at the right level of understanding. To learn new skills, there has to be a realistic expectation of how long it will take. Some skills will take considerable time and many will need to abandon personal goals to make room for a new priority. This is also true when changing careers, which always requires new entry-level training. It’s hard to develop rarefied skills from scratch, maintain them, and replace them if they go obsolete, which is why difficult jobs command such high wages. Without extrinsic rewards like high pay and generous benefits, people will typically avoid those challenges. High paying jobs usually demand huge cognitive resources, reliable behaviors to be demonstrated by the candidate, responsible attitudes, and an acceptance of accountability, which can be full of conflict in a modern workplace where blame regularly is aimed at everyone by everyone.
Part of the reason why people like the idea of a virtual world is because the challenges are easier to modulate. In a video game for example, a gamer can identify as a king with treasure chests full of gold coins. The book Getting Gamers, posits that “‘self-determination theory’ offers a framework for understanding why people are motivated to keep playing games. We do it to satisfy needs for ‘competence, autonomy, and relatedness.'” The virtual world has difficult tasks but they are adjusted to become more addictive so that a full life can be achieved in 100 hours. Real life is much more difficult, so virtual worlds are tempting to regress into, which I think many self-determination researchers would point to as a reason not to choose video games as a replacement for life. It’s at best a pastime. There’s also the fact that video games involve less risk because if players die in the game they can just try again. In the real world there is evil, unfairness, and many do not get second chances. In the comfort of home, gamers can:
- go to work, save money, and buy a house in a short period of time.
- decorate a house.
- express socially unacceptable sadism with no consequences.
- have intimate relationships with non-player characters (NPCs) that are better looking than many deserve.
- adopt children if a player is really lonely.
- save the world.
- resurrect if the player dies in the game.
5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying To Get You Addicted: https://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html
When people feel they are in a trap of regulating emotions in the wrong places, they usually go into meditation or other spiritual practices, only to find it can be the same thing when there’s avoidance, or spiritual bypassing. Many of the online meditation popularizers remind people that presence can be recognized with eyes open in the midst of people and the instruction then is to take that “holy” spiritual practice, that avoids dirty things like relationships, work and money, and to include those things in spiritual practice, to not compartmentalize the benefits of meditation. The disadvantage is that regulating emotions with something hard takes much more persistence and patience. The advantage is that hard goals usually provide more rewards, and emotions tend to be stronger when it’s believed that something real and important happened. This is why reality is not as boring as some people make it out to be. To achieve things in reality is to take it out of magical thinking and to build a real story of a real self in the real world. A thriving person would likely have a balance of goals actuating in the real world, including the pursuit of face-to-face social rewards, and they would feel alive in more areas of their day to day living. There would also be less procrastination, because forcing oneself to just start is often like how one begins a concentration meditation. A little effort at the beginning goes a long way, and with the Zeigarnik effect, there is now a bothersome desire to finish what one has started. Over time people can get a taste for the real and naturally abandon fantasy rewards. Usually the answer to most questions about what to do is repeated concentration, relaxation, combined with conscientiousness.
Spiritual Bypassing and Inner Bonding: https://rumble.com/v1gpm57-spiritual-bypassing-and-inner-bonding.html
The Zeigarnick effect: https://www.thoughtco.com/zeigarnik-effect-4771725
In psychology, no one is acting outside of object relations. One is also dealing with an internal ego-ideal full of role models to imitate in an imaginative world-scape. René Girard talked about one of the consequences of magical thinking, which was hating the distance between oneself, which is the Ego in reality, the presence that is working with things in reality, and the Super-ego which is full of abstract future fantasies. That hating for Girard starts off as a self-hatred, he called a being-disease, which was also dramatized by Dostoyevsky in Notes from Underground. The distance between Ego and Ego-ideal causes masochistic self-hatred, in the form of various self-sabotaging actions as described above. In extremes it can lead to suicidal ideation or actual suicide. If it doesn’t go in that direction, or when one is sufficiently bored with self-sabotage, then sadism begins a campaign against society through politics and scapegoating.
Girardian Underground: https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/girardian-underground/
Notes from Underground – Dostoyevsky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679734529/
The advantage of regulating emotions by balancing the Super-ego and the Ego is that the Super-ego can now rest in the backseat and instead provide “a-ha” intuitive interpretations for the ongoing action, and learn from feedback loops full of the real obstacles everyone faces in Ego-reality. Without the action, the Super-ego commentary is more like a movie with satisfying moments of emotional regulation in fantasy, but nothing concrete has happened. Audience members were just sitting down and eating popcorn while time passed. It’s important to realize that there are ways to find satisfaction in fantasy, and the proof of that is in all those movies, video games, and novels that are enjoyed by many. It’s a contrived world consumers want to live in and in fact many producers in the world of entertainment make a litmus test for success by measuring how interesting the world is, in a script for example, and decide if it’s enough to make profit in movie houses.
This is the difference between a good and bad coach, a good or bad psychologist, or motivational speaker, and can be measured by seeing how much truth and reality is allowed in a coaching session. The ever present hammering of The Law of Attraction, which is mimetics mixed daydreaming, can exacerbate narcissism in any potentially healthy population. It’s true that the Super-ego can provide a conscience and intuitive guidance, when there are healthy scripts in the mind, but most people in a modern digital dungeon don’t have a weak Super-ego. What is refreshing is development in the world of reality and the energy expenditure there. Reality is painful when one wants to avoid it, but it can be more enjoyable if there is a learning mentality. Reality can be a foundation so that people can find real goals and develop real skills that fit their real circumstances. If a patient is stuck in a hole, at least they can stop digging as a start.
Magical thinking in contrast taps into those B.F. Skinner type studies of timed rewards with pigeons that influence those birds to create strange rites and rituals in their effort to magically manifest more food. Freud also associated this behavior to obsessive compulsive patients. It uncomfortably digs into any prayers for abundance and success many have made in the past. Many can be stuck in that mode until the ritual finally registers as ineffective, which is what behavioral psychologists call Extinction. By then there may be debt from an expensive university with a degree that provides little value, for example. Extinction commonly happens when people are burnt by following bad advice from authority figures. In many situations, an expert was never needed. Many people know what to do but their problem is that they are not motivated to do it.
Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
The imaginary world created in the mind provides psychological rewards more quickly than engaging an uncertain long-term goals. Imaginary worlds also remove as many real obstacles as possible, or imagine skills many don’t have, in order to artificially intensify the satisfaction of the mental movie. This isn’t to say that all magical thinking is useless. Some of the magical thinking can reduce stress, like in a meditation, because at least rumination is being interrupted by a pleasant fantasy, and some forms of prayer, like asking for help from angels, can improve intentionality and concentration, but only if there is an effective action following. The confusion is believing that the Law of Attraction, or some other new age theory, requires no effort on the part of the subject. At least some playful minimal control is required to start, with an even stronger effort to repeatedly approach goals until success.
In the end, the Law of Attraction is really just advertising mimetics, and the helpful magical universe that the theory talks about is a stand-in for the economy, especially when you provide loving service or passionate work that is attractive, hence attraction. Magical thinking can also lead to inventions if there is a bridge built between fantastical dreams and reality. Viewing from another angle, magical thinking could also include the activity of play as a healthy form of it, if it leads to reality testing, attempts to start a project, and renewed attempts to develop the momentum usually required for something challenging and difficult. If there is a useful takeaway from the The Law of Attraction, is that one should focus not on the goal as a means to an end, but on the emotion that one will repeatedly enjoy in each completion of a sub-goal of the overall goal. This allows you to be open to what feels good and to look at opposites that you learn about when something inevitably feels bad. What is bad has an opposite and one can make goals out of them all the time. If there’s a need for preparation or responsibility, it’s better to look at the feeling of preparedness, peace, or confidence, than treating those goals as different forms of drudgery that have to be forced into submission.
Stage Play Scene – Beau Is Afraid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3mdT6lXChY
5 Signs You’re Self-Regulating Through Future Fantasies – Heidi Priebe: https://youtu.be/mvHoF0tOsmM?si
Jessie Ware – Begin Again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd3C69lVU5w
Practice the Pause – The Holistic Psychologist: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/m1cl5ZV6GaU
Case Studies: The ‘Ratman’ – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html
Developing a growth mindset – Carol Dweck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiiEeMN7vbQ
Abraham Hicks – ‘Feel’ into love; not the Object of Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLlLiad8_JY
On the other hand, T.H. Ogden, in his On Three Forms of Thinking described the worst aspects of magical thinking. “…Instead of generating genuine psychic change, [Magical Thinking] subverts thinking and psychological growth by substituting invented reality for disturbing external reality. The omnipotent fantasying that underlies magical thinking is solipsistic in nature and contributes not only to preserving the current structure of the unconscious internal object world, but also to limiting the possibility of learning from one’s experience with real external objects.”
Even more difficult is how to take in new behaviors, the same way old ones were acquired. If it were only so easy. Otto Kernberg’s definition of introjection is very technical but it provides a clue. “Introjection is the reproduction and fixation of an interaction with the environment by means of an organized cluster of memory traces implying at least three [memory] components: (i) the image of an object, (ii) the image of the self in interaction with the object, and (iii) the affective coloring of both the object-image and the self-image.” The affective coloring is whether something is likeable or unlikeable. This affects motivation. Even further I would say that the image of the person has to look believably skilled enough to attain this object or goal and that is why there have to be many approach goals, attempts to play, and real time experiences to make the new self-image feel more skilled and familiar. The improved skills and familiarity can now increase confidence and provide energy for challenges that are increasingly under control. There has to be a lot of directed repetition of this kind of imagery mixed with actual experiences, and progressively improved skills, as can be seen in sports psychology research.
Repetition Compulsion
At some point, there has to be a separation between the people who managed to make big changes in their lives from those who didn’t. Theory has to be informed by the actual results. The reality is that all these ideas have already been explored by various researchers, authors, and communicated from experiences people have had, yet so many do not change. Some of this has to do with acts of God, uncontrollable environments, or rigid pathologies, and some of it is just common ignorance of how the brain works in actual experience. People are easily distracted and there are habits that bend the mind back to what is familiar. Like any addiction or pathological “safe” homeostasis, the mind causes uncomfortable feelings to arise for long periods of time to get patients to return to old familiar ways. Some of the structure of the brain is universal, and Jordan Peterson accurately describes this difficulty of persistence in goal orientation. There’s only so much food that can be chewed at one time. “The basic schema consists, first, of perceptions of point a—the undesired beginning-state—and point b—the desired end-state; and second, of motor actions designed to bring about the transformation of the former to the latter. Individuals perceive objects and events relevant to the current schema; those assumed irrelevant fade into nonexistence. Human beings are low-capacity processors, with an apprehension capacity of fewer than seven objects. Our perceptions, tuned by our motivational systems, are limited by our working memory: A good goal thus requires consideration of no more things than we can track. Perhaps it is in this manner that we determine when to deconstruct a task into subgoals—all goals are motivated; all reasonable goals are perceptually and cognitively manageable.”
Some warnings from Theravada Buddhist Thanissaro Bhikkhu seem to connect with this. When allure is in the mind there’s not much room left to pay attention to drawbacks. The short-term brain can be filled up with desire in chunks of mental processing and be carried away. If the brain capacity equivalent of a 7-digit phone number is filled with advertising, suggestions, influences, etc., it’s believable how a person could find themselves in a state of regression. Furthermore, something new in experience is not mapped out totally and there’s much risk and uncertainty. Past hobbies, interests, or addictions, are easily understood and there is euphoria to put down a current burden, and return to those smooth reliable paths. That deep understanding of how a familiar pleasure operates can demolish any new goals. That is the gold standard for motivation because it’s readily apparent to anyone that people don’t need to schedule time to engage in their favorite activities. They just get up and do it. Yet many avoid good diets, exercise, or smart decisions, because the habitual short-term worlds are easier to understand and derive gratification from. New big goals have to be broken down into small bite sized ones to tap into new motivation. It’s persistence in developing enough familiarity with a new skill, so that there’s increasing habitual control over results, that potentially moves a new skill into an area where pleasure is finally experienced. If there are big enough rewards in this new path, the short-term brain can start to bend in that direction for some people and a sense of purpose can return. When coupled with a practice to put the mind on drawbacks on purpose, the mood, atmosphere, and motivation can reduce excitement for those less healthy goals. Because of an affinity for freedom, many people will instead accept that they will die of one thing or another, so they may be at peace with their addictions by saying something like in the Elbow song Lunette, “I’ll still want a bottle of good Irish whiskey and a bundle of smokes in my grave.”
Limitless (movie) – You’re not one of those kind of guys, are you Eddie? We lose you if there’s a screen in the room?: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1219289/quotes/?item=qt2494127
The Allure of Sensuality – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2018/180719_The_Allure_of_Sensuality.mp3
Fly Boy Blue / Lunette – Elbow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLxqGar-lxA
Peterson differs from Buddhists in that the drawbacks can also be a way to learn new skills and master something, not just something to avoid and stay resting in repose. “When chaos threatens, confront it, as quickly as possible, eyes open, voluntarily. Activate the neural circuitry underlying active exploration, inhibiting confusion, fear, and the generation of damaging stress responses, and not the circuitry of freezing and escape. Cut the unknown into pieces; take it apart with hands, thumbs, and mind, and formulate or reformulate the world. Free the valuable gold from the dragon of chaos, transform leaden inertia into gilded action, enhance our status, and gain the virgin maiden—just like the first of our tree-dwelling ancestors, who struck a predatory snake with a stick, chased it away, and earned the eternal gratitude of mother and group.” That circuitry of freezing and escape, or a sense of being daunted, also occurs when there is exclusive focus on drawbacks, or obstacles, for too long, or a dwelling on the entire scope of the long-term goal to the point of being depressed or demotivated. New goals won’t stick that way. When challenging a difficult hike, it’s better to look at the overall trail only from time to time, but when attempting it, it’s more comfortable to focus on the next change in the trail, for example, and in my experience this was especially true when I was exhausted and depleted and I could only muster one step at a time.
Concentration is also important when there are many distractions in a busy environment. Being interrupted when concentrating on a goal creates frustration and allows an opening to that burnout that happens when there’s major organizational changes. Focusing on one part at a time will move one closer to a goal than being frozen in stress with nothing getting done. Opportunists also pounce during these times of chaos with divide and conquer tactics to make themselves look like the one who will restore order to the organization, further adding competitive stress. Values also have an element of specialization in that an individual human life has a limited span and it’s hard to accumulate all the wisdom of the world in a short period of time. There’s going to be a trial and error period before one gets older and assimilates lessons that are relevant for oneself. Stress and avoidance is also another area that prevents people from growing into a more well-rounded personality.
One of the main theories of repetition compulsion comes from patients who experienced trauma some time in their life. Part of how something becomes unconscious is because a trauma is unpleasant to think about. That content then gets buried in the background of the mind, but those traumatic frights will bubble up again. Reminders and triggers of the past bring up a myriad of escapism methods that were conditioned with prior attempts at coping. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous has an acronym HALT (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired), and I would add another T for Traumatized, which are common triggers to get people to drink again. The T for Tired could also include boredom for those people who have lost a sense of purpose. In treatment, some patients benefit from the awareness of these mechanisms driving their behavior, but not everyone. When it does work it’s usually because the patient went deep enough into the past trauma, understood the causes and effects, didn’t attribute an adult responsibility to the child that they were in the situation, and dis-identified through understanding. A simple meditation practice I have been reviewing from Pema Chödrön’s books is to simply scan the body and notice how thoughts feel in the body and usually the awareness of the pain is enough for the short-term brain to realize it’s hurting itself, and it willingly discontinues the resistance. This may be too close to the surface, but a longer meditation that is intent on uprooting and dis-identifying these painful thoughts can provide much of the same material to work with.
Freud did later posit that many patients had pathological desires, starting with the Oedipus Complex in childhood, unconscious wishes found in dreams, and other conflicts with authority figures that prevented satisfaction. Transferences can arise in therapy onto new people who appear to be similar obstacles, including the psychologist. Treatment here is similar but one now needs to look at downsides to those wishes and desires and try to aim at more realistic goals that provide enough love, purpose, and satisfaction. If those new goals fail at providing fulfillment, there’s a risk of regression to more infantile templates and repetition. The literature is filled with examples of old fetishes, addictions, and superstitious rituals that resurface again and again.
Another view of repetition relates to trauma that motivates the desire for mastery over the unpleasant stimulus. Transferences can be a form of rehearsal and practice in order to deal with similar dangerous people or situations in the future. The mind in the world of survival could match up with Peterson’s description of using chaos as a challenge to develop oneself with. Whether there is a revenge motive or there’s a desire to improve skills, the patient may return to traumatizing environments to get used to them and master them, but the problem here is that the patient may never truly master a toxic environment and getting used to an environment like this means that healthier environments may feel more uncomfortable than they should. The treatment for this is to see what things are like when the patient is out of that environment and to make sure that there are enough rewards and peaceful rest so that the new situation is preferred. This can be complicated by patients with low self-esteem who feel they don’t deserve a better environment and a complex web of self-hatred has to be teased out to eliminate any illogical self-defeating beliefs. When out of a traumatic environment, that place is still powerfully wired into the mind and follows the patient wherever they go. When a person has healed many of their past traumas, there should be enough calm to allow in more goals and activity away from repetition.
The Default Mode Network and Psychedelics
One area that is more universal to human kind is what most people call the comfort zone. The loud voices in the mind, the music, the advertising, the suggestions, the personal labels that many give each other, etc., don’t just vanish and leave the mind in peace. The imitative part of the mind, the Super-ego is not going to take a backseat to the Ego so easily. For those with weakened egos, they may have to work with every tool in the box to start moving in the right direction. This may include experiences of withdrawal symptoms, anger, resistance, low expectations, fear of obstacles, and counterintuitively this can happen even when people are making changes that are healthy. It’s more comfortable to live in the same place than to go through the stress of a big move, even if it’s for the better. Many as a last resort turn to psychedelic substances mixed with spiritual practices to tap into undeveloped areas of the mind that are so hard to access through the layers of trauma and noise.
This activity that is automatic, even when at rest, is often associated with the Default Mode Network (DMN). So much of psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, and many other modalities, aim to sneak past the DMN to extract new self-knowledge and to activate different behaviors. For most competitive people, sports psychology is one of the substance free modalities that are frequently used. Some popular sport psychology book recommendations include, The Champion’s Mind, Endure, and Relentless. Much like the study above on positive content, athletes find that positive self-talk is as important as training the body. A mind and body approach is always needed. A weak body won’t perform no matter how positive someone is, and a trained body will choke on game day without a good mindset. When in training, sports psychologists also like precise self-talk that mentions the precise movements the body is supposed to perform in a particular way. This may also include imagining people you admire and harnessing them as a symbol of the correct performance to enact. All emotions are used, including anger, to behave in a constructive manner.
Because competition is very distracting, sport psychologists also recommend intrinsic motivation via competition with oneself whenever possible to keep performance high. “In competition, rather than worrying about what will get recorded on the score sheet, emphasize your mental game stats, such as attitude and hustle. Doing so will keep your motivation at a higher level and lead to more in-the-zone experiences. Always compete. Always battle. Never settle in the quest for your personal best, and outer success will soon follow you.” Anybody who has watched their favorite team play an away game around a hostile crowd know that there has to be an internal compass that is independent from the need to manipulate reactions from the audience. Even some players relish the opportunity to silence the home crowd, but in the end the individual performance has to be compared to one’s personal best. The benefit of this kind of competition with oneself is that feelings related to actions taken, can be used as guideposts for intrinsic motivation. All the reading and writing, or the mental talk, can’t replace the real felt experience. The felt experience also connects with limitations in reality and there has to be an acceptance of those limitations with realistic attempts to move beyond obstacles, or to change goals.
One of the main realizations is that one has to make some effort just to start. “Motivation will always fluctuate, but it is irrelevant at the moment of truth, when you actually act. So act as if you are motivated—that is, increase your ‘motive-action’—to keep your feet moving forward and defeat any potential resistance, whether that resistance is mental or physical. You’ll discover that full motivation usually shows up during a good workout, not beforehand.” Positive self-talk plus some effort leads to momentum and a chance to get into Flow states. There’s also a need to be in the present moment to avoid that overload that Jordan Peterson was pointing out. “Practice is not about going through the motions with our body while our mind and spirit reside elsewhere. Rather, practice is about focused effort with our entire being. This engrains habit and skill into our unconscious self. The goal of being in the now during practice is to create an unconscious competence within our mind, body, and spirit…A great tool I use for bringing back presence is to imagine a teacher, a coach, or a monk standing over my shoulder. When I start thinking about or connecting with anything other than the task at hand, my guide shouts at me, ‘Be here now!’ Then I get back to the task at hand with my full being…The obvious goal of athletic competition is to win. However, I find that focusing too hard on attaining the win weakens our ability to perform. It is comparable to finding the perfect man or woman, or filling your bank account with cash. If you only focus on the result, you stay single and poor. Instead, we must focus on the higher goal: uncovering our authentic, best self…Competition exposes the core of our emotional, spiritual, and psychological being. Rivals act as an extreme, external motivation that helps us go deeper to find our best and worst qualities. In competition and challenge, we find our inner truth. How hard are you willing to work on competition day? How skilled are you? How well did you prepare for the day? What stops you from displaying your best self? What does it feel like when your best self shows up? Observe your behaviors and take note. Noting your reactions to outside inputs will give you the important questions needed for improvement. Then ask your coach, sports psychologist, or spiritual mentor. Exploring these questions will give you more strength for practice, your next competition, and life after sport…If you search for your authentic, best self during competition, you will find it. Victory often comes along for the ride as a pleasurable side effect…[For example,] I expected the Olympics to be bigger than life and my nerves to be supersize. Instead, the games were surprisingly close to normal. They felt like just other races. Initially, my familiarity and comfort felt weird; then it scared me. To cope, I needed to remove judgment of my reaction and trust that my body has a wisdom that is greater than the intelligence of my analytical brain.”
When starting from scratch, skills are nowhere near where they need to be, so a humble attitude is required to let in the learning through trial and error, especially when there’s uncomfortable criticism from others. “…No matter how experienced at the sport I became, I remained coachable. Those around me contributed greatly to my success.” Again, the external motivation can return and a competition with oneself has to be reinstated. “I didn’t set out to beat the world; I just set out to do my absolute best.” With that in mind, many people can work backwards from the present moment activities that are needed and realize that just starting is often the best option for finding motivation rather than overthinking leading to procrastination. Some of the authenticity can return when this forced start has a scientific curiosity to see how the current performance compares to before. “Trust yourself. Decide. Every minute, every hour, every day that you sit around trying to figure out what to do, someone else is already doing it. While you’re trying to choose whether to go left or right, this way or that way, someone else is already there. While you’re paralyzed from overthinking and overanalyzing your next move, someone else went with his gut and beat you to it. Make a choice, or a choice will be made for you.” Taking action can help to find out which voices are present and their effects on motivation. “It’s time to stop listening to what everyone else says about you, telling you what to do, how to act, how you should feel. Let them judge you by your results, and nothing else; it’s none of their business how you get where you’re going.”
Even with these common sense tips, many people will not find this is enough. The wounding in the mind is so deep, so unconscious, and the low self-esteem is so habituated, the DMN pulls one back into regression and repetition. The fact that people need to create a momentum in the first place and then work to maintain it means that peak performance is something that is hard to habituate and easy to lose. When compounded with rigid voices in the mind, the personality can harden with age, and change seems impossible. When people hit a brick wall like this, often in middle age, there’s a desire to slow down life and take extended periods of time off to complete a personal inventory. A lost job, a divorce, a bout of depression, etc., leads to literal soul searching. When talking therapy, positive affirmations, etc., fail to produce long lasting results, testimonials from people who have experimented with psychedelics, like Ayahuasca for example, tempt people to try a new avenue.
I find the book, Psychedelics and Psychotherapy, strikes a good balance between what substances can do, but it also informs the reader of their limitations. Like any other modality, there can be a lot of hype and false promises to hook you. “Plant medicines and other psychedelic treatments can reveal the psychological baggage that you have carried all your life, and when you acknowledge this baggage, you realize it is not an inevitable and inextricable part of yourself. You can finally put it down. All the pain and all the meanings that you have created from that pain, all the ways you see yourself, and all the interpretations you have made of the world because of early experience can drop away, and you can just be in the present. That’s very powerful. Psychedelic experiences may also reveal, or at least allow you to glimpse, your full potential as a loving and connected human being. Having a deep experience of your true self can be tremendously healing, so it’s not surprising that some people working with these medicines come to realizations through these experiences that go deeper than their usual consciousness permits. When we find a way to reach shut down parts of ourselves, when we recognize our deep sources of suffering and what we are running away from, or when we realize ourselves as a meaningful and genuine part of a larger unity that is unshakeable no matter what, we have connected to a core self. In the right context this is a very deep experience…Underneath that fear, there’s the connected self who knows no fear. What is there to be afraid of when you are connected to everything?”
Typically when people are running away, it’s usually into one form of addiction or another. Being able to trace the addiction to an uncomfortable feeling, and to feel it fully and understand what the fear is pointing to, can reveal important information, even outside of deep states of meditation. There are many experiences that people want to avoid, and that can be a window of opportunity to choose a different behavior that isn’t part of the DMN. For many, there are benefits from long meditation retreats where the feeling of missing out (FOMO), on one activity or another, can be felt repeatedly, and let go of, so the practitioner can consciously follow the panic and sense it slide gradually into release and relief. It’s not the end of the world if one doesn’t act. With momentum, there’s a reconnection. “In addictions we use the word recovery, which means finding something that you have lost. Whatever you find couldn’t have been destroyed, and it must have been there all along otherwise you couldn’t have found it. What people recover when they recover from addictions is themselves. How do we lose ourselves, why is it so difficult to reconnect, and how do these plant experiences facilitate this reconnection? That question leads to the very essence of trauma because it is trauma that makes us disconnect in the first place…This loss of connection is often hard to recognize, because it doesn’t happen all at once. It can happen slowly, over time, and we adapt to these subtle changes sometimes without even noticing them.” Typically addictions are used to regulate emotions as a quick way to feel better. “If it is so painful to be myself, I better disconnect. If it is so painful for me to be aware of my gut feelings and to be able to assert, manifest, and declare them, I better disconnect.”
Because of human nature, conflict is so common and when so few people look to therapy or even try to read material like this, societal structures take the blame. With most of these texts, there’s a knee-jerk reaction to blame capitalism for all ills, for example, but I think that is a weakness in the humanities where there is a pervasive political and economic deficit in wisdom. “The capitalist economy depends on your false sense of self. That’s why even those people who do the work of reconnecting with themselves while in ceremony with a substance or practice discover that the real difficulty is not in having these experiences but in manifesting their insights in daily living when the world is so intent on robbing them of the very truth of things.” One could also add that money is connected with the fear centers in the mind, as Marxist psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel concluded. If money is good, there is well-being. If money is bad, there’s discomfort. The only problem with this is that fish hook of believing that there can be a system that doesn’t behave this way. If you remove money, which is only a medium of exchange, people will still think about the abundance or lack thereof of resources and still be stuck looking for a panacea from work and subsistence. There are also differing levels of intelligence, skill, and experience in any population. It’s universal for people to demand reciprocity, no matter their politics, and because there are so many people and moving parts in any economy, it’s impossible to eliminate all unfairness or negative emotions related to power differentials. Power structures have the same results in the psychology of any human. History shows that most humans cannot withstand power without a lot of temptation to increase entitlement and consumption, and they will fight tooth and nail to avoid losing that power. Any progressive improvements in the political economy will have to be incremental, decentralized, and prove themselves by their fruit. Closing the loop on the belief in utopia can also be healing because the patient can then focus on their own development with the tools at hand instead of waiting for the politics to change in one direction or another. It’s very possible for people to wait their entire lives for a politician to “finally get it right this time.” Even if they do a good job, individuals have to self-parent enough so they can benefit from the economic opportunities when they are available. Your favorite person could be in power but you miss the boat anyways.
Dr. Gabor Maté on Having Sympathy for Trump and Healing an Insane Society: https://youtu.be/6VVOs1ZylFU?si=q2HHjWHjeQmOAb8b
Tucker Carlson Ep. 19 – Debate Night with Donald Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMUPRLYmxs
Slavoj Žižek: Donald Trump is a Postmodernist: https://youtu.be/olAaZZXkXns?si=JsFICtXPyHah5SoS
School Board Calls Police on ‘Unrecognized’ & ‘Trumpish’ Citizens! – James O’Keefe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ1S7M5Tfcw
Is Donald Trump a Fascist? | Robert Reich: https://youtu.be/9XTJNy_OrjE?si=efYVq90UWWQAQ_yv
Joe Biden Looked Like A Dictator Last Night | Dave Portnoy: https://youtu.be/Ar2HgqMwx5U?si=I-0ecrxQIBaiMPdB
The process of integration of those psychedelic insights, requires self-parenting and a handful of deep experiences will not be enough. “Integration following an ayahuasca ceremony consists of the practice of catching ourselves when we fall into old patterns of thinking and feeling and choosing to respond differently.” There is a need for “repetition…through journaling, ritual, art, song, prayer, and the Jungian technique of active imagination…If we outsource our healing and growth to psychedelics without making the effort to support and integrate these experiences, abdicate responsibility, and adopt a passive stance toward our unconscious, we are taking an enormous risk in allowing unprocessed experiences to dictate our choices and our life trajectory. To genuinely transcend our wounds, defenses, and early conditioning, it is essential to maintain our responsibility of bringing back the gifts of the imaginal world into a relationship with everyday life…We need to be aware of how these states have the potential both to facilitate psychospiritual growth and to undermine that very process through psychedelic bypassing. A psychedelic experience can leave people in a state of ego inflation with a defensive attachment to these states. It can leave people possessed by archetypal energies in a way that separates them from their true nature and can create a dependence on expanded states for filling the void of an unsatisfactory life, which then stalls any movement of change in the real world. While psychedelic experiences are certainly not short of creative and healing potential, in the therapeutic space we need the maturity and clarity of occupying a space that bridges the split between the proponents and the opponents of these substances if we are to truly serve those that require our support.”
Therapists also have to preserve their boundaries when patients look to them to be a surrogate Jesus that will cure all their ailments and book a ticket for them to fly to Shangri-la where heaven is a passive experience of delight. There are also ethical boundaries where self-help gurus can take advantage of people and make promises of a cancer cure, for example, leading to bitter disappointment. One example of a therapist in the book “…made it clear [to an ailing client] that no spiritual energy healing, or substance could be guaranteed to cure him, prevent, or treat his condition, and a sacred medicine facilitator should never make such specific claims.”
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer and Mira Kelley Vancouver I Can Do It – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2pTGdeekG0
Abraham Hicks – After Death Message from Wayne Dyer: https://youtu.be/KQARkWXluYQ?si=C75qDosRxYA1NOHJ
Abraham talks about what’s next for Jerry Hicks – Esther Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV9pPIkRcy0
Like a meditation, relief comes from “clearing your resistance to the universal flow of energy in your life, allowing the source of existence to flow through you unobstructed by your conditioning and self-identity. This is analogous to the shamanic practice of nondoing. Nondoing is not the same as inaction; it is about ceasing to micromanage everything by thinking, analyzing, and forcing action, about no longer working your will on life…The essence of the practice of humility means being completely present and releasing attachment to outcomes.” To bring this to reality would also need to include an acceptance of death because for many people reading these teachings at this point in time, they may be at that final stage in life already, and all that remains is letting go of everything.
For those who are healthier and have more years to live, meditation, visions, and psychedelia, bring up symbols and images from the unconscious. Through an admittedly subjective interpretation on the part of the patient, those symbols have to bridge the unconscious to reality by first realizing that these symbols are coming from one’s mind, ideally without suggestions and heavy influences from a therapist or healer, and can be internally trusted as authentic. Expressions from the patient can be manifested into various art therapies to express those symbols, to own them. Then those symbols can be visualized and used as a motivation to act on developing new skills, to reduce that feeling of being compelled by an authority figure or to be compliant. The therapist creates a holding space so that the patient is free to express themselves, but like with Winnicott’s advice, surprises are allowed and the patient can feel that they are generating what is particular for them. For example, anger is processed in violent scribbles and drawings. The therapist can ask what each piece of content means to bring out the patient’s internal resonances. Questions are asked about how the body feels to reconnect people who have been disembodied for long periods of their life. Obstacles in life are also visualized, just like in any coaching practice, and realistic solutions and approaches are brainstormed to meet those challenges with intention. Symbols and images can also be recalled easier after art therapy and are a source of memory that connects with those feelings of play and engagement. Recalling those symbols can bring up feelings of motivation.
The integration challenge then has to be brought into the real world of jobs, deadlines, and expectations. Lowering expectations in the traumatized world and understanding them better, reduces the chances of re-traumatization, because shocks are less of a surprise. Each person then has to work backwards again from an idealistic recovery goal where the answer to most questions is continued periods of activity and rest. This then replaces the need for the therapist. The book has a tentative list that many could add or subtract to depending on the circumstances of their life. Recovering patients try to reconnect with
- positive friends and community
- passions, hobbies, and interests
- journaling
- goals by outlining and tracking them
- the breath and inner truth via meditation and breathwork
- nature via walking, hiking, or camping
- creative expression through music and visual arts
- dance or movement arts
- a coach for accountability and support
The Default Mode Network will repeatedly try to reassert itself and the solution again is to aim and move towards the agreed upon compass for life. “He or she also needs to watch out for any temptations that arise because ‘you are doing so good’ and ‘you deserve something’ or ‘you can now handle something.’ Dedication will be tested, but overall, this phase is characterized by the recovery process being smoother, more natural, and less arduous. The more the person commits to new passions and interests and positive communities, the harder it will be for addiction or other chronic states of suffering to creep back in again.”
In the final instalment of Fear of Success, I will be exploring methods of control that the powerful can exert on populations and the imposed limitations that are not easy, or in some cases, impossible to control. There will also be a preliminary review on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the economy, how technology can be leveraged by the powerful against the less powerful, and what strategies critics and researchers recommend for people who want to keep their balance.
A Happy Life Is About This – Teal Swan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxk5BYWNsH8
The Language of Winnicott: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855754324/
Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-based Syndromes: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780826166722/
Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond by Judith S. Beck: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780898628470/
Handbook of Approach and Avoidance Motivation by Andrew J. Elliot: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780805860191/
Your Heart’s Desire – Sonia Choquette: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780749920128/
Kuehner, C., Huffziger, S., & Liebsch, K. (2008). Rumination, distraction and mindful self-focus: effects on mood, dysfunctional attitudes and cortisol stress response. Psychological Medicine, 39(02), 219.
Valim CPRAT, Marques LM and Boggio PS (2019) A Positive Emotional-Based Meditation but Not Mindfulness-Based Meditation Improves Emotion Regulation. Front. Psychol. 10:647
Skinner, B. F. (1992). “Superstition” in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121(3), 273–274.
Ogden, T. H. (2010). On Three Forms of Thinking: Magical Thinking, Dream Thinking, and Transformative Thinking. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 79(2), 317–347.
Malancharuvil, J.M. Projection, Introjection, and Projective Identification: A Reformulation. American Journal of Psychoanalysis 64, 375–382 (2004).
Repetition, the Compulsion to Repeat, and the Death Drive – M. Andrew Holowchak and Michael Lavin: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781498570503/
The Self-Sabotage Cycle: Why We Repeat Behaviors That Create Hardships and Ruin Relationships – Stanley Rosner, Patricia Hermes: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780275990039/
Psychedelics and Psychotherapy by Tim Read, Maria Papaspyrou, Gabor Maté: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781644113325/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/