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A couple of conversations here and what I’ve been thinking about today kind of melded until I got to pondering what it is that I really want that I’m not getting and how does that drive my feelings and behaviors.
#1 Answer: Respect.
A lot of people crave love, acceptance, belonging and all of that. They’re nice, but I can be happy without them. The one thing that I really need, and feel the lack of most keenly is respect.
I can deal with being disliked, even hated without the slightest concern. I can handle not fitting in just fine Hell, I even take pride in it sometimes. I’m even find with being on my own without any kind of support from others, once again, I take some pride in my ability to stand on my own.
What really brings that demon up is when I feel disrespected. I know that this shows somewhat of an external locus of control, but I’m working on that.
What really gets me is when someone is able to act like I am beneath them, they are better than me, or they are able to exercise power over me and I can’t stop them, or breach one of my boundaries with impunity. Oh, and I really hate having my flaws and mistakes pointed out. Especially if they have a point.
Why does all of that piss me off? Because if someone else can disrespect me without consequences, it makes me doubt that I am worthy of my own respect of course.
A lot of my dissatisfaction with my marriage stems from the fact that while I know my wife loves me, I feel that she does not show me any respect. Her behavior IS often out of line, but this is why it bothers me so much. When she’s in Mrs. Hyde mode, she speaks like she’s so far above me that she has the right to treat me however the mood strikes her no matter how small the issue is.
Come to think of it, a better way to put all of this is that I REALLY don’t like feeling inferior to others, or even feeling that I maybe might be inferior to any one in any way. -
Running a test loop of Dragon Emperor Stage 2 as we speak. As well as being stage two of DR, I’ve added Furious Ascent, Fearsome, Eagle Eye, and Eye of the Storm. I just want to see how this one hits before I officially get into the swing of it and add RICH back in.
- First loop of stage two complete. During the run, I felt that usual kind of dizzy, kind of out of it feeling I get on a new sub. I got a lot of energy movement too. It felt denser and closer in to my body than when I started stage one. Good feeling though.
A couple of hours afterwards I was thinking about taking an oral board interview, which I will probably have to do for the hiring process I’m in. Normally, that causes me at least minor trepidation because they have been nerve racking for me in the past, and were the usual failure point for me. This time, the thought brought a “hell yeah, let’s DO this” type of reaction. That was a surprise after only one loop. I suspect Furious Ascent on that. That’s some strong Whiskey (as opposed to weak tea) right there.
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And I thought about The Demon. The mental answer was “ah FUCK The Demon” with a mental chuckle.
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I’m actually feeling really good. Happy, borderline euphoric.
It’s called being treated with contempt, lowering your status to elevate themselves, and it pisses you off because you think you deserve better. Now look at that statement I just typed, and you decide if it’s true. Keep in mind that some people might be pointing something out to help you. I do that on here. But believe me, I feel only desire for your success and happiness.
You forgot the upper case D… maybe its power is weakening. I think the Dragon is going to take over after it shrinks the demon.
That’s definitely what it is, the issue is that my mental reaction to it is WAY out of proportion to most of the offenses, and while I don’t do anything about it, I get way angrier for way longer than I should. This bothers me, not whoever disrespected me.
I hate to admit but my internal reaction to someone trying to lower my status uncomfortably reminds me of some of the gang bangers I dealt with when I worked in the prison system. With them, maintaining status was a matter of life and death so such an extreme emotional reaction made sense. In my case it has no effect on my life if someone I won’t ever see again says something rude to me.
I might also be seeing disrespect in places where none is intended.
These are great insights! I’ve found DR is greatly reducing my reactions…
So I think you have something more to look forward to.
- I wrote the following on @subliminalguy’s journal.
The most freeing thing I’ve ever realized was that my parents were royally effed up before I was born. Their mental crap had nothing to do with me, I was just born in the line of fire. It isn’t my responsibility to fix problems that I didn’t cause.
My parents were both very damaged people, and a lot of the issues I’ve delved into trace back to how they acted and related to me.
The thing is that all of that was them acting out issues that they had long before they brought me into the world, and they’d have acted them out on me no matter what I did or who I was. Nothing to do with me.
- Something popped into my head when I mentioned my parents. I’ve mentioned that one of my subconscious problems is (going on was) a deep seated expectation of failure which came from my parents expecting me to fail. Well, how did I get that in my head?
A big part of that came from my father. He was (he’s a bit better now) the most negative person I’ve ever met. He was not subtle about expecting me to fail. He said things like “when you fail at this” and talked like it was an inevitability and just matter of fact like the sun was going to rise in the morning. When I succeed at something, he acted really weird. He showed a lot of overblown enthusiasm that reeked of fakeness. Then would say something that made it clear that he knew it was a fluke, or that it was too easy to be a real success.
Now, why did he do that? Because he cared about me and wanted me to succeed in life.
Seriously.
I’m not joking.
I don’t know where Dad got the negativity stuck in his head, but it really came out when he lost his longtime job and my Mom discarded him in the same month when I was five. After that, he fully expected everything he cared about, everything he hoped for to end in absolute disaster. The more he cared about anything, the surer he was that the worst possible outcome was assured. This is the exact same pattern of thinking that I’m unraveling as we speak. Because I was exposed to that in a very unadulterated form by someone I naturally trusted and admired just as I was learning to think about things, it transferred to me without me having the chance to counter it or realize what was happening.
It’s great that I saw this. It wasn’t my pattern, wasn’t my issue, and once again, had nothing to do with me.
- It’s been a few hours since my loop for tonight. I feel weird. It’s very peaceful, but theres a sense of emotions that I’m not used to feeling swirling beneath the surface. Nothing bad, and the volume is low while the variety is great. I can’t really identify anything, I’m feeling it but detached from it at the same time.
I played some songs that remind me of the last ex I got messed up over. I do that periodically as a test. I didn’t feel nothing like last time, but I was completely at peace with what I did feel. Not that I can describe it really.
These are big insights! Wow! You are on your way to a better mind set mate!
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I woke up feeling very positive today. The feeling has come and gone all day. It’s a pretty mild version of that tingling euphoria feeling I sometimes get from subs, butthat doesn’t usually happen while I’m going through the course of my normal day.
I had a lot of energy too, and I’d say I had the drive to get things done. However, it didn’t really feel like drive, I just thought to do things and did them as a matter of course.
For instance, I had the dishes from cooking dinner done and put away before I went to work today and it didn’t seem like an imposition on my time. -
No insights or anything like that so far today.
- I have noticed something really interesting the last couple of weeks. My brain works better. I don’t necessarily mean I’m smarter, it’s just that things run smoother.
I especially notice that I remember things at the time I’m supposed to. For instance, before I went to work, my wife asked me to stop for milk. Before, there would be a good chance that I’d forget it in the intervening eight hours. I did set a reminder on my phone, but I didn’t need it. Things like that have been pretty consistent, but it was so subtle I didn’t really make note of it.
Also that test I took seemed much easier than I’m used to, and I was much more sure of my answers.
I’ve noticed this too. I think when DR removes the mental trash, the brain works smoother. Less inner conflict and noise.
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Today I learned that I passed that test I took a few weeks back. I’m not at all surprised, matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I got a perfect score.
Now comes the real test. I’ve got one of those panel interviews set for the end of the month.
At the moment I have a different attitude towards the whole thing. If I get it, awesome. If I don’t, it’s not really a big deal. I will try to maintain that throughout. I will carefully observe how I’m thinking and feeling as the time approaches. -
@subliminalguy said something very interesting in his journal. He said that feeling the things he wanted to felt foreign and therefore scary. I’ve really been trying to pin down the whys and wherefores of my “success ceiling” and fear of success. That might be the most basic piece of it. It might just be that I’m not used to having success, or more importantly feeling successful that it feels really strange and somewhat frightening when I start to feel like I’m achieving it.
I’m just used to operating in a certain range, at least as far as how successful I feel goes. If I exceed that range, I’m in uncharted territory, and while on a conscious level that’s where I wanted to be, my subconscious doesn’t know how to deal with it or what to do. That causes a lot of discomfort and it guides me to get back below the line in order to get back to familiar territory and relieve it. That is fucking stupid, but it’s very ingrained.
That explains what happened when I got the job I wanted. As I said, it was a massive surprise when I got it. Then, as I got into it, I started feeling more and more uncomfortable, overwhelmed, and like I shouldn’t be there. I actually remember fantasizing about a job that was extremely easy and where I could just sit there and think. Exactly like the one I have now. (Why the FUCK does manifestation work like a charm when I DON’T want it to?)
I think you are sounding like a different person than even 2 weeks ago! Congratulate yourself!
- Something snuck up on me. It began a few months ago when I got sick of leaving my clean laundry in the hamper and dumping the dirty stuff on the floor. Messy closet and clean stuff got hard to find. I cleaned the closet. Nothing new here, I do that periodically and let it get messy again. I started putting my clothes away in an organized fashion after washing them every week (Big accomplishment right?). Then I cleaned up the cat area, which I usually let go way too long. And I’ve wound up doing that every week too without thinking about it too much. And this week, I realized that I’ve vacuumed the floors three weeks in a row.
Damn, I’m suddenly developing good habits, and I wasn’t even trying.
**Stage 2 Cycle 1 Week 1**
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Here we go. I’ve had some trepidation about stage two, but I made a plan at the beginning of this journey and I’m sticking to it. I could say I needed more re time on stage one which seems to deal with things on a logical rather than emotional level, and that might be beneficial, but it would be bullshit. If I’m afraid of dealing with my emotions, that’s probably exactly what I need to do. I said twelve weeks per stage, and thats what I’m going to do. Since I ran three loops last week, I’m going to start at two loops of DE st 2 tonight, and maybe add another loop and add RICH back in sometime this week.
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I had a further thought about my last post. It seems to me that those good habits crept in the same way bad ones usually do.
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My original intent in running DR was to make a direct frontal assault on my “success ceiling”. I think I’ve made a lot of progress on stage one from just figuring out exactly what thinking patterns are causing me not to allow myself to succeed beyond a certain level, which is very low considering my actual intelligence and capabilities. DR has helped me analyze a lot of the beliefs I had about myself, realize where they came from, recognize that I was thinking about them incorrectly (or in an unhealthy way) and find a better way to think about it which leads to better assumptions.
So far, the reasons that I deny my self the success that I’m capable of achieving that I’ve been able to identify are:
- I was always told directly and indirectly that I was incapable, inferior, never going to amount to anything, ect. It came from my parents and when I got to school, from everyone there. The message seeped in over the years because it was so consistent and became part of how I thought i and reality worked. We tend to call that low self esteem. Naturally, my behavior became consistent with my view of myself, and it was a self reinforcing cycle.
Here’s the thing about that. My parents behavior toward me had nothing to do with me. They were both fucked in the head, with among other things, low self esteem long before I was born. They both felt a need to prove to themselves that they were superior to someone. They weren’t able to just think themselves superior either, they had to show their superiority to that person by running them down and controlling them.
This lead me to think that I can’t succeed because I was incapable of it.
There was only one person either of them were able to do that to who couldn’t fight back or get out of the situation. It would have happened to any child they had and no matter what they did because it was their own issues being acted out. - Despite a really messed up relationship, I was very close to my father and I idolized him. That is because when I was five, and supposed to be idolizing him, his life fell apart. In the same month, my mother divorced him, and he lost the good middle management job that he’d worked into over his entire career. That devastated him. His entire worldview, at least what he showed me altered. I assume he had a pretty good case of imposter syndrome before that, but after that, he viewed himself as a complete and utter failure at life. He became the most negative person I have ever met.
I think that the stage of my development at the time had a lot to do with the effect it had on me. I was at the age when you are supposed to model yourself off of your father, and he started saying that he was a failure and a worthless person. I didn’t know it of course, but my natural development as a man told me that that’s how a man is supposed to be. Bad thing. It got embedded in my subconscious that I’m not supposed to succeed greatly. - To make matters worse, Dad started leaning on me for his emotional support. I was six, and had no clue that this was not how it was supposed to be, no idea of how to handle it, and unable to mature emotionally with that kind of weight on my shoulders. It got into my head that I was responsible for his emotional state in both the short and long term. That translated to it being my fault that he was depressed, had a rage problem, couldn’t see himself putting his life back together, and being generally miserable. Not only that, but it was my responsibility to fix it. Before worrying about myself.
The impression that this drove into my deep subconscious was that if I were to be successful, or feel successful at any rate, I would be betraying him and leaving him behind. (Please note, this impression is mine, not my father’s). As well as not fulfilling my primary responsibility in life. I was not aware of these things for most of my life, but it manifested as an undefinable sense that I was doing something wrong when I started to succeed at anything. - At the same time that that sense of wrong at success was being formed, Dad also instilled a terrible fear of failure in me. He was actually terrified that I’d “end up as a failure like him”, so he tried to push me to perfection. The only way he knew how to do that was react as harshly as possible to any mistake, accident, imperfection of any kind. Any imperfection was a failure, and any failure meant that I was an irredeemable failure. That left me in a bit of a conundrum. I wasn’t supposed to succeed, but failure of any kind was unacceptable.
My mother, for her part would use any flaw or weakness she could detect in me to tear down and hurt me as much as she could. I later figured out that she did this because she hated and feared men, especially strong men. She was terrified of me becoming one, and figuring out that she wasn’t superior to me.
My solution was to withdraw and be passive. I was afraid to try anything that involved risk of failure. - I got the impression from somewhere that I was “unlucky” or that God or the universe or whatever would never let me succeed. I’m not sure exactly where this one came from, but I know now that reality appearing to bear it out is a result of the notion being there in my deep subconscious and having strong natural manifestation abilities. Oops. Knowing about it seems to have alleviated the problem to some extent.
- We had the first major spring snowstorm today. It once again struck me how much calmer I am driving in this crap than I was this time last year. I’ve always been good at it, but the difference is that now I know deep down that I’m good at it. I used to feel stressed out as hell from start to finish. Today, I went through intermittent white out passed dozens of stuck cars, and felt just as calm as if it was a normal day. The difference was I have real faith in my skill and ability.
This makes me think of “Quantum Leap”! 
Right there with you
- I felt that slight pulsing dizziness that tells me that I’m listening to a new sub that my subconscious isn’t used to during my loops tonight. Its not an unpleasant sensation and just serves to tell me that I am hearing something, and it is starting to do something. It usually fades away as the sub really starts to penetrate.
Other than that, I noticed nothing out of the ordinary during my loops or in the hours since. We’ll see what happens after I sleep.