Yeah, I’ve got it, but at the moment I’m just keeping things focused. I’ll let it happen on its own for the time being.
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- Ok, I’m going to recap here. Mostly so I can organize my thoughts on it and see where to go from here.
The events of my childhood caused me to feel very negative emotions on an extremely consistent basis, and to develop thinking patterns and beliefs that were closely associated with those feelings. I normally say thought proceeds emotion, but since these things were both caused by the same external input, it’s not a relevant distinction.
Since my mind was developing at the time, it accepted this state as normal because it had nothing else to compare it to. It became my emotional balance point so to speak. Anything that was different from that felt unbalanced to my subconscious and therefore made me (a subconscious part of me anyway) feel very uncomfortable. It’s very similar to how the brain and body get used to the presence of a mind altering substance and get messed up for a time when it’s withdrawn.
As I grew up and the situation that I initially caused that emotional state faded. That caused me subconscious discomfort (more discomfort than the anxiety itself caused, that’s messed up), so my subconscious started to produce thoughts that caused a similar emotional state. Those thoughts caused manifestations and influenced my behavior in ways that caused more events to happen that put me in that same emotional state that felt “balanced”. I have always avoided success and stability because it put me in an emotional state that could not exist at the same time as the one I was addicted to.
That’s what I think is the root cause of my success ceiling in an admittedly very long winded nutshell. That is a messed up cycle.
Now that I see it, what can I do about it? I think that the key is to get my subconscious to crave a positive emotional state as much as it used to be hooked on the negative one. Hopefully that’s one of the things that Stage 3 will help with. As far as action, I should be really trying to mentally connect with times that I did feel really good as vividly as possible.
Since all this came into my head, I suspect that the addiction is well on its way to being dealt with. I just have to replace it with something healthier so it can’t re assert itself.
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I think I heard some where that shock, indignation, and disgust could actually create a dopamine release. Now if that is true, and if dopamine excess might be addictive, then I can understand how what you are saying above could be true.
Do you use Brain Wave Entrainment?
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I have in the past. Not recently.
I was thinking that it was cortisol. Like my brain has gotten used to a certain level of it, and if I go below that I become uncomfortable. It could be that too though.
- I had a talk with the wife about our financial situation this morning. Things are not currently looking good. I’m no longer going to be able to hold off on paying some of the things that I was able to for a while. We’re in trouble if I can’t get something to come through soon. I can’t say I’m not feeling stressed, but much less so and it feels different. Not as bad somehow. I’m not spending as much time vividly catastrophizing what might happen. I just acknowledge what’s going on and I’m looking for ways to fix it.
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Your emotional progress is noticeable and admirable! I hope you find a practical solution soon.
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Thanks brother. I will because I have to. I’ve been pulling miracles out of my rear end for the last four years, I can keep doing it.
What I’m hoping for is this time I can get something going where we’re not just hanging on a little longer, but get to a position that we can pay the bills without worrying about it, and can start to work up from there. I’m tired of treading water.
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I concurred!
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- I went to bed about three in the morning and snapped awake at about six forty five. There was no going back to sleep either. That’s annoying. I’m feeling pretty low energy today and my body is telling me to rest. I think that the subs and the working out both took a toll. I’ve got two nights off of both though, so it’s good.
I think I’ll just get the weekly tasks done today and otherwise relax.
- Despite getting only two hours of sleep last night and feeling like I was going to fall on my face all day I did all of my housework, all of my yard work, baked a fairly complex dessert, and cooked a homemade dinner. I never would have done even a fraction of that before if I felt even a fraction this tired. I’d have blown most of it off and probably napped a good part of the day. I have become a fucking machine.
That’s been changing for quite a while, but I didn’t really notice it completely until now.
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- The wife and I have collaborated on cooking for the last two nights. She didn’t yell at me or try to boss me around either time. We worked together, and when I was cooking my meal she just helped out as I asked her to and vice versa. We’ve successfully worked together like that several times recently, but this is the first time I’ve really made note of it.
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Woah! Noice!
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**Stage 2 Cycle 2 Week 5**
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That was quite the weekend. The cooperation between my wife and I lasted until she didn’t like where I happened to be standing. She yelled “move” and flapped her hand in my face. That’s unbelievably disrespectful. It hit me that I put up with that too much in my life and I don’t have to. I calmly but very firmly checked her. There was a different quality to my response, it’s hard to describe.
She of course kept going at me the rest of the night and this morning. I don’t know what she was expecting to have happen, like I admit I was wrong when I’m not or something? This having to win every disagreement is getting very old.
The one change I’m really noticing is that the divide between her good side and her bad side is increasing. I don’t know what that means but it probably means something. -
This is my last active listening week for Stage two. The internal changes in the first two stages have been nothing short of incredible. I feel more confident in all areas of my life. Things that have bothered me all my life no longer are, and I have a firm understanding of why they bothered me.
I have never felt better about myself, even though the external circumstances of my life haven’t changed that much.
I am way more assertive than I’ve ever been and I feel comfortable about it. Before, I was often able to say no to things like sales pitches, but I felt a very uncomfortable, almost physical “push” sensation when someone was trying to get me to do something that I didn’t want to do. A couple of encounters with door to door salesman have shown me that that’s completely gone, and I have no issue drawing a hard line. The pushed feeling is completely gone.
I have had no problem developing good productive habits and have gotten rid of at least one bad productivity killing one. I feel a lot more competent, energetic, and a lot less fearful than I did five months ago when I started this journey.
That’s just from getting negative stuff out of my way. From reading the sales copy, it seems to me that Stage three is all about adding positive stuff. One and two get you back to a good baseline and three gets you to soar above it. I’m expecting a real increase in the execution of Emperor on it too. I’m excited to get going.
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I’m feeling a bit of impatience for the needed financial breakthrough this morning while listening to RICH. There’s a part of me that likes to think that that means that my subs aren’t working, but no, anyone would feel at least a bit anxious in my current situation. This is normal. I’m not sure how this is all going to turn out ok, but it will.
As far as RICH goes, I wish I could think of a way to open more channels for manifestations, but at this point, everything involves overtime at work or things that would take money to make money. Money I don’t have at the moment. This is going to take either something coming out of the blue, or the wife’s disability coming through pronto. I’m open to either or both. -
My thoughts from the time I wrote the above until now when I’ve arrived at work were very interesting to observe. I got some negativity during and after my RICH run right after waking up. That changed by the time I was driving to work to some pretty good daydream visualizations of having made it and the problem finally being solved. I actually had some real feeling with those.
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In general, my current stack is doing a good job of keeping me from slipping into the dark pit of spontaneous high emotion negative visualizations and catastrophization. Considering the situation, that’s amazing in and of itself. That habit of thought, I know now is one of the major ways that my subconscious fed its addiction to the feeling of impending doom. Before I got good subs in my life, that’s often where my mind lived.
There’s enough of that left in my mind that I know that that pit is still there, but I can and do choose not to slip into it.
It’s kind of a similar place to where I’ve been on a competitor’s subs where I’ve got part of my mind trying to manifest a positive outcome and part trying to manifest a really bad one. Those times, it showed through external results, but this time I can see the internal process a lot more clearly. It pretty much ended in a draw then with a good enough result that we didn’t lose everything, but not so good that we weren’t still in trouble eventually.
Now, I think that the good side has the upper hand. -
Bigger picture, DE seems to have eliminated the pervasive pessimism about the future that I’ve always lived with. It hasn’t replaced it with strong optimism yet though. I don’t feel really good or bad about the future right now. There is an odd neutrality there.
From the ad copy, I’m thinking stage three will get the ball rolling on that.
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WARNING: Extremely wordy. I wrote this all out to get it clear in my own head.
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I figured out before that the lack of a sense of direction I’m feeling on DE is because I was almost entirely negatively motivated up until this point. In other words, the purpose of most of my decisions and actions was to escape or avoid something bad rather than to get something good. My father pointed out when I was a kid that I was a lot more likely to do something when threatened with punishment than when offered a reward. Now that I think about it, that’s true.
That fits in with that addiction to the feeling of impending disaster again. If I felt threatened with something horrible, I’d act to prevent it or hold it off. If I let it happen, the disaster would no longer be looming and I’d get out of that mental state. Plus disasters kind of suck when they actually happen.
The sense of directionless drifting on DE is largely because this addiction to anxiety has been removed leaving me without one of the major driving forces in my life. -
But Wait! There’s more! As I was thinking about that, I realized that there is at least one more emotional state to which I am addicted.
I said that I wasn’t reward motivated and that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that I didn’t REALLY WANT things because I did. A lot. The thing is that I very rarely got what I really wanted. This was an overarching theme throughout my childhood and adolescence. I wanted a bunch of things that other kids around me had, and which would make me sound very petty if I were to list them now. Remember I was a kid and wanted kid things with an intensity matched only by the sex drive of a teenager.
There was one problem. It was named Mom. She only allowed me to have things that she approved of. I don’t mean that there were certain things that she didn’t like and wouldn’t let me have, It was most things that kids growing up when I did liked, a lot of which it was kind of taken for granted that we all had. The more I wanted something, the less likely I was to get it. That included times when I saved up enough money to buy it myself. It was still no. (Message I got here was that if you work for what you want you’ll still be denied, so don’t bother thats a problem). Don’t get me wrong, I got plenty of things, it’s just none of them were what I really really wanted. I figured out years later that Mom was like this because she hated and feared powerful men. Keeping me under that kind of control was her way of proving to herself that she was more powerful than any male.
That left me in a state of intensely wanting something and fantasizing vividly about having it for a long period of time. That sounds great for developing manifestation skills doesn’t it? It would have been, but I also caught on really fast that I had to make due with the fantasy because it would be prevented from happening in reality. A while ago, I thought that one of the themes in my life was “you can’t have it”. This is why I thought that way.
Just like the previous emotional addiction, I got so used to having those strong emotions present that I felt subconsciously uncomfortable without them.
Holy Shit! This is “The Negator”!!! I described an effect a few weeks ago where when I try to visualize something good, or just have a daydream about it, a little voice in my head says “nah, that’s just a fantasy. This is why that’s there. If I were able to use my manifestation ability with any consistency, that messed up part of my subconscious wouldn’t get that mix of want and intense frustration that it thinks it needs.
That explains that pattern with my love life where I’d remain painfully obsessed with the object of my last relationship for a long time after it ended. Thats also why I’ve been unable to get the job I really wanted despite so much trying and screwed it up instantly when I found a way to override the self sabotage programming that this thing I’m describing caused. -
So I had at least two emotional state addictions working behind the scenes. One caused me to be a lot more motivated to get away from something than go toward anything and to keep myself in a constant state of anxiety and fear. The other caused me to stop myself from achieving any major goal or getting anything I really wanted with any level of intensity. Those two things make up the success ceiling that I dedicated this year to destroying. Damn, DR drills deep.
This also explains why I had a porn addiction for quite a while. That gives the you can’t have the real thing even though you want it SOO badly so your stuck with fantasy thing in spades.
The fact that I spontaneously quit says that this underlying issue is greatly diminished if not gone.
Those seem to have been at least largely removed, which leaves me drifting without much sense of where I want to guide my life. -
So these addictions have been removed. That left kind of a hole in my psyche. That’s why I’ve had kind of an empty feeling lately.
Even though it’s not a distressing feeling, that hole needs to be filled. My system is going to crave some emotional state or another. Now I have to show my system that it can have what I consciously want, and the feeling it gets from that is what it should be expecting in order to feel normal. I need to show it that anticipation of good things rather than dread of disaster is the norm, and I am allowed to achieve those good things in reality and enjoy them while choosing new good things to expect and achieve. It seems like that process has already started under the hood. Bring on Stage 3!!! -
I am running two loops of DE2 for the rest of the week. I want to make sure I get everything I can out of st2 and I have next week off to process.
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Actually, there is a third emotional state addiction. That one is the powerless rage that comes from being treated like shit but being unable to do anything about it. I might get into that later, but I’ve typed enough for now.
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Good to know. I put in my St2 custom, but haven’t looked for it. I’d originally bought it to discourage escaping (mentally and physically)…and while thinking about that–I AM very, very conscious of this old habit. Very conscious, meaning daily and sometimes hourly. I’m finding I have new choices to make.
Lethally effective is a very accurate description for Eye of the Storm.
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Great progress!
Great insight!
Great humor!
Wow!
I’ve lost count of your insights in your 2 most recent posts. Wow!
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I took some action on making sure that we can pay the bills for the next few months. It involved liquidating an asset, so I hate to do it, but it is necessary.
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Since I will be receiving a large amount of money, I am going to bump up my version of RICH to get the name embedding and to focus it more on the goals I need to accomplish right now. I need to use every tool at my disposal right now.
I’m going to go with.
- RICH Core
- Debt Annihilator
- Wealth Limit Destroyer
- Financial Success Reality Shifter
- Wayfinder
- Secret Source
The rest of the money is for paying bills.
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-
I had a major sustained bout of very positive thinking from about the time I finished my RICH run until I got to work. I kept thinking about our financial situation turning out well at the end of the year, and things starting to go really well from now until then.
I didn’t detect any activity from The Negator at all. I was specifically thinking of a scene where I’m writing my last entry for the year of the Dragon Emperor. I was writing that all of the problems were solved and that things just started going our way starting in June and got progressively better until by December we were in a stable position, had no worries and were eagerly planning to move things onward and upward in the next year.
I can say that I actually believe it too. There were no detectable contrary thoughts.
This may not be as much of a fight as I thought it would be. -
I think I’ve reached the bottom of the what was wrong with me area of things. I’m amazed that in the end it’s this simple.
There’s something in my head that tries to maintain emotional equilibrium. If you get too used to negative emotional states, especially very young, it sees that as the balance point, and if you start to feel positive things instead it reads that as unbalanced and adjusts your thoughts, behaviors, and events in your life to bring you back to that really sucky balance point. It’s just like having the thermometer in your thermostat calibrated wrong. It’ll maintain what it thinks is a perfect room temperature, while its keeping you uncomfortable as hell because you’re too hot or cold.
I think that my thermostat is well on its way to being recalibrated.
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