How do we get stuck in life – unable to move or grow?
Many of us get stuck in life situations from which we may never emerge. The situation might be one of never establishing a full and satisfying sexual relationship; constantly feeling hurt by the actions of others; existing in a state of depression or anxiety; forever having to seek activity or company to deal with ones own inner emptiness; experiencing enormous jealousy or anxiety in a relationship – the list could be endless.
Orthodox medicine, recognising how difficult it is to help people move from such mental emotional prisons has turned to chemical attempts to shift the person’s inner state. Overall this sometimes seems to aid, but is not a universal answer to the human condition. There is however a self help path we can take that can radically change such situations. The first step is to recognise how we personally hold such inner conditions in place. Maybe we might even ask the question as to why we maintain such an awful relationship with life. The answer to that question might very well reveal the most powerful process that freezes us in our difficulty.
Example: I had an insight that I had got into a negative feedback loop. Because I had got stuck in this place, then I feared I was stuck there in reality, which produced the certainty I was stuck, which produced the inability to move out. We feed back to ourselves images of failure and feelings of unattractiveness, and all the other negative feelings we all meet during the week. Instead of looking at them and seeing them as passing feelings, we take them as impressions of reality and drown in them. We accept them as true and start to live them. When that happens we see conformation for the negatives, and so it goes on.
I tried to find the way out of the loop. The only way out I could find was the realisation that the loop has no end, like the figure eight. There is only one thing to do, stop it playing. Grab it and stop the crazy record or habit carrying on.
To help with this, to help grab the thing and kill it, we obviously have to realise it is untrue. If we still believe the loop to be playing a truth, then we only strengthen the action. So for its cessation we need to realise that our sense of self is a constantly moving fragile thing that has no stable reality. We aren’t ANYTHING – stable, so how can we be a failure, or a success, or great, or of no account, or any thought or feeling? No thought or feeling represents our reality. No feeling, or sense of ourselves, is anything more than a sense, a feeling, it is not us. So how could this feeling represent some sort of permanent personal reality?
You are building a hell for yourself by your beliefs, and thoughts. You need to recognise the power of these thoughts and in recognising them, say to your self, “I have taken this path of thoughts so many times and it always leads to the same place – emotional pain and turmoil – so why do I keep pushing this crazy button over and over”?
Example: I suffered torment for years, messing up my life, until a dream showed me what I had been doing. I had thought the pain and misery was from some earlier trauma but could not find one. And the dream showed me that it wasn’t a trauma but cultural programming that said that I was a bad father and also a bad husband, both true from a certain viewpoint.
The view that I was shown by the dream was that my pain was from habits created by the culture I grew up in. I realised that I could create a new life by changing the habits of a lifetime. But every time I left the house and my children the old habits started tearing me apart again. I stopped just outside the door and looked at the awful feelings. I had tried positive thinking and that didn’t work. What I saw and reminded myself was that I had gone down that road a thousand times and it always led to self-destruction. So by seeing that I decided to change the habit and reminding myself, not that I was a wonderful person, but that I was a human man, who did not want to make his wife suffer from my awful moods, and also I saw from the dream that we are always free to go in any direction, and that sense of freedom enabled me to start a new life.
It didn’t happen suddenly, but each day it got easier because I knew the attitudes and feeling that led to my misery and so tried another life direction. The direction was the recognition that my state of mind led me to self-destruction every time it took that road and that resolved me to change outside the door.
The tremendous meaning and possibilities of that are amazing. Through the manipulation or observance of our own images, we can discover, trace, change our own innermost processes. See
https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/#OpeningSee Conditioned Reflexes or Responses
A Great Power is Self Justification.
I recently asked a man who had experienced enormous pain through, as he felt, being misused by a woman friend. When I pointed out that this was the woman’s normal behaviour that he himself had described to me, so why was he hurt by it, he said that she should have been more caring for his feelings.
I then asked him if perhaps he was asking her to act like an adult while he maintained the emotional level of response normal in childhood – namely blaming someone else for his hurt. In response he again justified himself by saying that it was normal to feel hurt from such an action.
Such justifications, and the statement that it is normal to feel pain in love, at the death of someone close, at the twisting and turning of life events, or because of the unthinking remarks of someone, are the chains that bind us to that misery.
Carl Jung wrote, “If we could fully meet our shadow, we would be immune to any moral or verbal insinuations. We would already have seen this for ourselves.”
To meet our shadow – to acknowledge our own follies – to see our own childish behaviour – we need to be self aware. Of course that path is not for the weak hearted. It means to stop the continual justification of why we feel and respond in the way we do, and instead, to pull back what we hide from ourselves to reveal the underlying causes of our responses and behaviour. It lies in taking ourselves by the scruff of the neck and perhaps saying, “I am still responding to this as if I am a three year old. Come on, time to grow up, and stop justifying myself for feeling angry, jealous, afraid, and ill.”
Growth is an innate urge in us. If we stop holding it back we will emerge from childhood and our countless justifications. See
Avoid Being Victims – Martial Art of the Mind – Water Wonderland – A Way Through – Meeting yourself see them by pasting each heading in the search box in Dreamhawk.
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