A Psycholgist on the Loose
Posts tagged life
The Fettucinne, No Brain Connection
Jan 9th
Okay. 
We’ve had lots of examples of the EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM messing life up for us. So where does the THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM come in?
And what does it have to do with fettucine? 
Everything!!!
The THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM is:
The part of our brain which can TOLERATE ANXIETY.
The part of our brain which can GATHER and USE FACTS in decisions.
The part of our brain which can SLOW DOWN and consider, WHEN I TOOK THIS CERTAIN ACTION BEFORE, HOW DID THINGS WORK OUT?
The Fetteccinne Incident, a move made thousands of times a day. I’m working at a hotel and it’s four in the afternoon. I haven’t had lunch, so I grab coffee. This routine (thoughtlessly) is repeated until nine-thirty. I’m at the bar having a cool glass of wine before calling it a night. Boy am I starving! I order fettuccine alfredo to take up to my room. After all, I haven’t had a meal all day. The fettuccine was terrific.
OPTIMISM SIGHTING: That little readout at the bottom of a television ad that suggests you look up their advertisement in some random magazine.
But the heartburn at midnight was awful. At two, I got up and stumbled down the hall for a Coke hoping that would help. I didn’t get much sleep at all. NOTE: I’m not suggesting that “not eating” is good and holy and “eating fettucine or any other lovely food is bad.” Just as many people “don’t eat” under rule of the non-fact-based EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM as people who “eat” on decisions made by the same system.
The point is, the EMOTIONAL SYSTEM doesn’t pay attention to the FACTS. The EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM ignores past experiences. You can bet that wasn’t my first lonely midnight heartburn.
Why Change Is Hard: The Fettuccine Incident
Jan 8th
Later today. My fettuccine confession. MY EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM wins again.
Yep. Another night stuck with info-mercials. Could be I’m the only one messing up like this. There’s always the option of learning from Dr. L on the radio. Apparently, she makes no mistakes.
Not so with this psychologist, defeated again by fettuccine. 
The String Bikini Incident
Dec 30th
Motto for 2009: “You know, I’ve been thinking. I’ve decided I would look GREAT in a string bikini!”
Yep. The very thought is beyond ridiculous if I’m talking about what someone else would think. I’m not sure I could talk a salesperson into letting me try on, 
much less purchase a string bikini. I chose the string bikini statement because someone who loves me very much just the way I am said that once spying a string bikini on a store manikin. He couldn’t have been more wrong. And I’m not being coy. I would look ridiculous in a string bikini, then and even more now. But not according to him.
The only way we’re going to get our lives back is by producing our own feedback channels run by that part of ourselves that’s like that guy who said I’d look great in a string bikini.. You can go to FOX News for the conservative take, NBC for a more liberal take. And to your own channel for the best take for you. This is the channel run by that director who is absolutely CRAZY about you. We are not tuning into the channel manned by others. 
Alert!! CRAZY and unwise are not the same. Remember best thinking over emotionally based decisions is what we’re going for. The reason no comments have been shown on this site is that I haven’t sorted through the thousands and thousands of spams. I’m trying to catch up now and must say—Buying more exercise machines, male organ size enhancements, and God forbid, those all-in-one girdles–is not the kind of CRAZY that goes into having a better life. It’s the kind of crazy that keeps everything the same except you have less money.
The crazy we’re going for is the kind that gets you to submit that short story, write that novel, paint that picture, run that race, because if you’re not crazy confident you’ll talk yourself out of it. Crazy confidence is not about buying easy-sounding solutions. It’s about DOING something that changes your life. I know, kind of confusing. Manana.
WHY IS SOMEONE ELSE’S WAY OF SEEING YOU MORE REAL THAN THE WAY YOU CHOOSE TO SEE YOURSELF?
It’s not like their opinion is right. It’s JUST THEIR OPINION.
This year we are going to LAUGH, LAUGH, LAUGH. And anytime anyone doubts us, most particularly ourselves, we are going to have this sentence pop out of our mouths: “You know, I’ve been thinking about it and I just realized I would look great in a string bikini.”
And when others scoff, pass out or threaten to have us picked up by the men in the white jackets, we’ll ask, “Which is more important? The world I can touch? Or the world to which I AM RESPONDING?” To which others will say, “You’re crazy.” And you’ll say, “Great. 
It’s working.”
**The unbelievable optimism from the federal highway department: On the endless nothingness of IH 8 between Yuma, Arizona and El Centro, California, along the shoulder are signs saying, “No parking except in case of emergency.” Now there’s optimism. Someone’s going to park there for a picnic?
HOW TO NOT LIKE YOURSELF and get others to agree with you
Mar 3rd
Andy (Timothy Robbins) walks into Shawshank prison, an environment most of us would see as a hopeless place to survive, much less have a life of any quality. He enters the mess hall and the yard, surveys his new neighbors, and joins the most sane group with the most balanced leader (Morgan Freeman). He works in the library, teaches inmates to read, and every single night he scoops one teaspoon of sand out of the tunnel he’s digging for his escape.
Andy chooses to be in charge of himself rather than allow his surroundings determine what goes on inside him and how he conducts himself and he has a goal.
What are you perceiving if you’re the one walking into Shawshank?
You do not simply SEE the environment. Your perception is an act of creation. You will perceive in accord with the “AS IF” world you’ve made up. You will PERCEIVE in accord to the WORLD YOU ARE RESPONDING TO, not the world as it IS. 
How to talk someone else into thinking you’re fat: A newly wed couple is enjoying a meal when the husband looks into his wife’s eyes and tells her how perfect she is. The wife twirls a string of spaghetti, a shadow crossing her expression. She says, “I know you think so, but I don’t. Ever since I was twelve, I’ve always felt like my hips were huge. I felt like a fat giant in junior high. I can’t stand to think what’s going to happen as I get older.” The husband says something sweet, but when the wife gets up to retrieve something across the kitchen, where do his eyes go? How often and how many more times, in the years to come, will his eyes drift to the source of his wife’s junior high school misery?
It depends on how insistent is she that she SHOULD change the size of her derriere, and how insistent she is that IT IS AWFUL, TERRIBLE, AND UNBEARABLE to be a woman with a large (if it even is) posterior. 
But now we’ve moved from PERCEIVING to INTERPRETING. Oh, baby now our EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM can really take off!
MOVIES: 1. PERCEPTION and Defining a Self
Mar 2nd
HOW YOU PERCEIVE OTHERS and the WORLD determines, to a large degree, how much fun your are going to have in this life. Whether you are FREE or in YOUR OWN PRISON.
Sometimes when I talk about working toward a Self Defined Life, people mistakenly assume being SELF DEFINED is the same as being Self-ish. Nothing could be further from the truth. Isn’t it more selfish to run your life on some kind of “auto-pilot” expecting others to change for you? Could there be a more unselfish gift to a spouse, a friend, or relative than to say, “I’ve complained a lot about how you treat me as though it was your responsibity to see that I am happy, and that I never, ever doubt myself. That wasn’t fair, and anyway, as dedicated as I’ve been to telling you how to change so that I stay calm–YOU KEEP BEING 
YOURSELF. I’ve realized, ‘Babe,’ since I’m making up the world as I go along, you’ll never be able to catch up with my needs. Why don’t I work on my PERCEPTIONS instead of trying to change you? Particularly, because, according to your limited view, you’re not doing the thoughtless things I accuse you of, anyway.”
“I’m going to try something new. I’m going to take more responsibility for my feelings.” Now that’s un-self-centered.
Operating in a self-defined way means working toward having your actions more determined by your BEST THINKING and less determined by EMOTIONAL PRESSURE from others, or EMOTIONAL PRESSURE from within yourself–that is, your own anxieties and 
fears. Freedom is both having charge of what goes on inside your chest cavity, and having the capacity to manage your anxiety so that your interactions with others and the world are in line with BEST THINKING rather than automatic, anxiety-driven, predictable responses.
We’re going to look at four steps that go into our response to a situation. The first step is PERCEPTION. 
Let’s go back to Andy (Tim Robbins) walking into Shawshank Prison on a life sentence for a double murder he did not commit. (Picture yourself at your job, class, party, dinner with family, involved in a disagreement with someone important. For my writer buddies out there, imagine yourself sitting down to pitch an agent, facing a blank page, or adding another page to your rejection collection).
What and WHO DO YOU SEE? Do they want to FIGHT? 
What DO THEY WANT from you? What do they think of you? How is this meeting going to go? “Which is more important? The world you can touch, or the world you’re responding to?”
This question of perception is particularly important as you approach your “Shawshank.” You don’t walk into the same prison (party, bus, job, relationship, hospital, class) as any other person, though you are entering at the same moment at the same place. Your emotions, your fears and anxieties, take a role in creating your situation. In actually CREATING THE PEOPLE. 
Thus, YOU have a lot to say about how the encounters in your life turn out. (Big encounters, like marriage. Little encounters, like the one with the stranger next to you on the plane.
But, oh, I’m getting ahead. And, what kind of “woo-woo” idiot psychologist am I, to suggest that other people aren’t EXACTLY as I perceive them? I’m supposed to even be right about what others are THINKING. Since I can see inside people’s heads, I know WHY they do and say the things I PERCEIVE. I know I see reality because it FEELS like what I see is reality.
Tomorrow we return to poor Andy walking into Shawshank Prison. What will the places you’re in until then be like?
MOVIES, “Psycho” and Defining a Self
Feb 19th
“Which is more real? The world you can touch, or THE WORLD YOU ARE RESPONDING TO?”
Talk about your family issues. Anthony Perkins in “Psycho” is definitely a person with a problem staying calm around his mother. In fact, his Emotional Guidance System rules his behavior so thoroughly when he’s around his mother, he becomes his mother. The view his mother’s subjective view, based on her fears, has become his view. When he has thoughts unacceptable to his mother’s view of him as an innocent little boy, he punishes himself.
And, there was that unpleasantry in the shower. Janet Leigh screaming, her bloody hands streaking down the tiles. Actually, his mother (who was dead and drying in the main house) slashed up the beautiful blonde. She was just trying to help. Just trying to keep her/his view of the world steady.
Isn’t this what all of us are trying to do when we tell people the way they see the world, the way they do things is wrong. We’re only trying to help. Right? Actually, like Anthony, what we’re doing is trying to calm our own anxiety. When someone presents a view that doesn’t fit our picture of the “way things are” our anxiety goes up and we go into a defensive mode trying to get comfortable by convincing the other to change.
Hopefully, we stick to arguing, dismissing, or avoiding rather than murder. But murders happen everyday between family members unable to accept disagreements in world view. If I can bully you into agreeing, then you have to go. For those folks, the cut-off method may be the best they can do to manage anxiety.
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