- I just spent an hour or so doing homework. Homework that no one assigned me, and I didn’t HAVE TO do. Fifteen year old me is aghast.
What I did was write out a statement and then use all 14 patterns from Slight of Mouth to counter it.
It didn’t seem much like work either, actually kind of fun. I can also see how putting the work in to master this will directly improve my quality of life.
Something is going on with this, it was easy and everything clicked. I could certainly have done that a year ago, but something tells me it would have been harder. My brain seems to be working better. I also feel inordinately proud of myself for such a small accomplishment.
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Have you noticed which of the pattern(s) seem to “flow” most smoothly for you?
My personal “favorites” arethe Hierarchy of Criteria and Another Outcome.
I’d love if SubClub figures out how to get SLOM into a sub like they did with PCC and the 48 Laws.
The only one I’ve used is Hierarchy of Criteria, but that came out right after I’d read about it. Works better than the Your Bloody Wrong pattern that’s always been my go to.
Let’s both put that in the suggestion box, shall we?
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- I just figured out at least part of why this thing keeps having me visualize scenes from my past and editing my response. Take the one from last night. I told ex #2 “ok, see ya” when she was ending the relationship instead of spending the next couple of years wishing I had her back and obsessing on it. Here’s what I should have learned.
I had done the same thing with ex #1 until I met ex #2. I did that because I was a late bloomer in the dating world, and by the time I met #1 I was convinced that I was never going to get a girl. So I thought #1 was the best I’d ever do, ect. Pathetic in and of itself, but somewhat understandable. Where I showed myself to be slow was that I reacted the same way to #2. The fact that there was an ex #2 (not to mention a good number of hookups and casual relationships in between) should have shown me that I could find another good relationship if one ended. The hookups and multiple girls who obviously wanted me (I was captain clueless on a lot of them) should have shown me that I was extremely desirable. Instead I chose to be depressed and desperate for long periods of time instead of moving on and enjoying life and new possibilities.
I think part of what is happening here is the mental damage from feeling that way for so long is being erased by showing me that it was all being based on a false premise in the first place.
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- While last night was one of those nights where the sub clearly had my subconsious’s full attention, tonight is at least starting out as a night where I just seem to have some water noise going on in the background.
I did wake up tired this morning, but not as bad as the first time I ran this sucker. Probably a result of upping my loops. I’m going to do two tonight, and maybe try three tomorrow.
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-
I went ahead and ran a third loop since I’m running this on a schedule and I’m eager to find my sweet spot and get up to my cruising speed with it. I feel really good after my third loop, but I am expecting to feel dragged out when I wake up.
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During my second loop, I started to feel that kind of butterflies in the stomach feeling. I was thinking that it was reconciliation causing me to be nervous or anxious about something. Thing is, there was no issue on my mind that would cause that. Then I realized what it was. Energy radiating from my chest area and going throughout my body. A lot of it. I think I’ve made that mistake before, of thinking I was nervous and finding something to focus on when it was actually an energy surge. As soon as I realized that, it stopped being at all unpleasant and was kind of a warm tingling.
- I did my “homework” with Slight of Mouth again. It flowed much easier this time. I also ordered two books on securing the specific type of job that I’m going for, and spent some time on a video site that I paid for that deals with the type of interview that I have to do.
I seem to be shifting my focus in my idle time at work from fighting boredom to more productive things.
fo rjob interviews, I’d recommend using anchoring techniques.
I interviewed at a tech-ish job once, and when it was my turn to ask questions, I used anchoring based on something I saw from Kim McFarland and Tom Vizzini.
I had my pen on the table, and I asked “What’s your idea of the ideal employee for this job role?”
He listed off all this stuff:
“Able to learn”
“On time”
and as he said each thing, I tapped my pen almost imperceptibly…to anchor whatever was going on in his head
After all that, I said “So it seems like you want people who are coachable.”
I tapped the pen again as I said “Coachable” to anchor all those previous things to that new (to him) term.
Then I said “Well, I hope I’m THAT GUY” (tap pen)
“I hope I’M THE COACHABLE (tap pen) person you’re looking for for.”
“Well, we have others to interview also”. (the usual lingo).
I got a call the next day to say the job was mine.
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That would be very useful in a normal corporate interview. What I’m going to be doing is a formal panel interview. With panel members who notice EVERYTHING, and are highly attuned to body language. I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if many of them weren’t well versed in the type of techniques you are talking about.
I suppose if the recognized what I was doing, they might be impressed, but really, the only way to do well on these things is to do well.
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I am considering what to put into a custom ultima to be played before this kind of interview. Any suggestions?
Merger of Worlds and Intuiton Enhancer could be good for that.
Good idea.
So,
Commander
Merger of Worlds
Dragon Tongue
Intuition Enhancer
Iron Frame
Alpha Body Language
Should help.
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- I’m having some great conversations with my fellow travelers on the Path of the Dragon (that is delightfully cheesy) @Brandon and @subliminalguy that got me thinking about the reactions of others to the changes that we’re making on these subs. It’s been apparent for a while that when I start making progress, my wife has some kind of subconscious reaction. So does our roommate. Whenever I’ve been on a dominance/status/confidence sub and it’s started working, she became more domineering and critical.
I think that this is a fear reaction caused by several things. First, fear of change. I’m part of their environment and I’m changing which makes them feel uncomfortable and uncertain. Second, I think that the wife is afraid that I’m becoming “better than” her. This probably sets off her insecurity in that she doesn’t want anyone to be “better than” her, and also that I might outgrow her.
I haven’t noticed it that blatantly while on DE (I suspect that something in DR prevents it) but I have noticed external resistance in one way, and I don’t seem to be the only one.
I am getting the urge to clean up my living space. However, when I do, the wife and roommate have re messed whatever I cleaned so badly that it looks worse than when I started within 24 hours. I’m not sure how to deal with this.
Those conversations also got me thinking about how to deal with people I care about who are in the kind of misery I used to live in. There does seem to be a kind of crabs in a pot type of effect when it comes to people improving how they see themselves, and I have kept myself in the muck for quite a while out of guilt for “leaving someone behind”.
It was especially profound with my father. I love him, but he is the most negative, pessimistic, and consequently miserable person I’ve ever met. I actually just realized that I kept myself miserable for years because I would feel guilty if I moved out of it without him. I was in danger of the same thing with my wife who in large part has just given up on herself as her MS got worse.
I made a decision about this though. I am not able to drag anyone out of the pit if they’re not willing to climb with me. I didn’t put them there, and I have a right to get out myself if I put in the effort. No more guilt about other peoples’ misery.
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I’ve been enjoying our conversations dude, very enlightening and I’m glad it has struck some realisations for you.
This right here is going to change your life forever, and for the better. You can’t want it for other people. Only yourself.
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- I felt a bit of sub hangover as well as a bit tired when I woke up this afternoon. That faded quickly, and I felt really good today. From one day, I’d say I get better results on three loops than I did on two, so that’s what I’m going to run tonight.
That’s not what I was expecting from a single sub with two really big and difficult cores, but I am pleasantly surprised. I might try four tomorrow, but I don’t think I’m going to push it beyond that. I get the feeling that things are getting up to speed with this one now.
- DR continues to bring up things from my past. Not just the traumas, but the lessons that they teach are becoming clear. Guilt about other people’s misery. That’s what got me into relationship #4. The one I really never wanted to be in, and really wished I hadn’t.
(If you don’t feel like reading a drawn out story of my past, don’t worry about it. I am mostly writing for myself here so I can really get the lesson solidified in my mind)
I met #4 through #2 who I thought I was in love with at the time. I didn’t realize it at the time, but #2 was trying to foist me off on #4 so she wouldn’t have to feel bad when she made a commitment to this other dude who she only saw at this event once a year, and or so I would neatly go away. (If this sounds like a hot mess to you, that’s because it is)
#2 was mildly attractive, and realized early that she had could jerk nerdy guys with low self esteem around by benefit of having the right parts, and giving access to them sometimes. She was a manipulator who put off neon lighted red flags. Which of course twenty year old me ignored. (This was the one I had the vision of saying OK see ya to last night)
Of course things didn’t go as planned. I liked her at first, but didn’t want to get involved. #4 for her part was an even bigger mess than #2. She had the emotional maturity of a toddler, and extreme difficulty telling the difference between the fantasy novels she read and reality. The first time she met me, she somehow decided that I was her soulmate and we were destined to be together… #2 kept inviting her to our college (she lived on the other side of the state) and pretty much trying to force us to hook up. It didn’t happen. Even I could sense those red flags, but she kept getting more and more obsessed with me. And the emotional blackmail started. She kept saying how miserable she was without me, and got to the point of implied suicide threats.
When I moved home for a year, she didn’t stop. She called all the time and showed up on the doorstep unannounced. Mind you, she lived like three hundred miles away, so that wasn’t normal.
Then I moved to the other side of the country to go back to school. She still didn’t stop.
I had a brief relationship with #3 which left me much more devastated than it should have. And #4 kept at it.
Here’s where that guilt came in. I was obsessing on someone and depressed. I understood that that’s how she felt about me (true or not) and decided that I couldn’t be the source of that kind of misery. BIG ERROR. She visited a couple of times and eventually when I got an apartment, I let her move in.
To make a long story short, it was a disaster of a relationship, wound up being very expensive, and cost me friends because, well, she turned out to be a horrible person. I could probably have lead at least a little better of a life if I hadn’t gotten into that, and I got into it because I felt guilty over someone else’s pain that I didn’t cause. Lesson learned.
- That’s one mental block torched and an understanding of how it’s hurt me. There’s more, but that’s a big obvious one. Yes, I’m sure it’s gone. This sucker works
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This is a LOT to process at once. I am humbled that you can be that coherent in your journal after all that.
Keep it up, my man
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- The story wasn’t hard. After all, I was there. I just realized the reasons and meaning behind it. And that took quite some time to write. Perhaps Sacred Words is helping me though.
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-
I woke up this afternoon about the time I would set my alarm for anyway. No back pain, and I didn’t feel that tired. I did feel what I again thought of as the physical feeling of anxiety. That butterflies in the stomach feeling. My mind went looking for something to be anxious about, I guess to make the feeling make sense. I stopped it though. I realized (again) that that’s not what that was. It was my energy system running at a higher level than I’m used to. The tingling, warm, energy seemed to be radiating from my center chest area. I’m not sure if the fact that it feels like nervousness means that I have a block there that the Dragon Fire is trying to work through (not s surprise), or if it’s running clearer and at a higher level, and I’ll get used to it.
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I had some minor, I guess you could call it recon today. Negative thought patterns and thoughts of a negative potential future re appeared. They were a bit hard to get rid of, but they don’t really worry me that much because they lacked any real emotional force. It was like they were playing at low volume.
I think what is happening here is that DR found (I know that it’s me doing it, I just say DR does things for convenience) where those habitual thoughts were hiding on a deeper level and is rooting them out. It found pushback but the push back is very weak. I have to remind myself that my bad days now are better than my good days were before I got serious about sub use. -
One thing that kept coming up is resentment of my wife. About half of these negative thought patterns are mental arguments with her. She more or less treated me like crap from the beginning of our relationship to very recently, and still relapses sometimes. Now though, due to her disease, she is completely and totally dependent on me, and has left me to financially hold up an entire household as well as doing most of the work. I know thats not her fault, but I still blame her in my mind when I’m feeling petulant.
The truth is that if the me that existed today got into that relationship, I wouldn’t have stayed past the first hypercritical tirade.
I stayed in the relationship because being treated that way was my normal. I subconsciously sought out a relationship that mirrored both the way my parents treated me, and the way my mother treated my father before she discarded him.
I could do no right in either of their eyes, and they took all of their anger at the world out on me. They seemed to find any shred of self esteem in me an affront and did all they could to destroy it. It is a testament to how strong of a person I really am that I was as normal and functional as I was when I began my self improvement journey. However, my “love map” was pretty damn messed up when I got into this relationship.
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