Making Things Better — Nuance, Beliefs, Circularity, and Choice

Making Things Better — Nuance, Beliefs, Circularity, and Choice — We step out of the patterns of our lives by first noticing them, and then shifting out behaviour. Nothing changes until you do!

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It’s a hard lesson—what you believe to be “so,” (or want to be “so,”) often isn’t.
This is “so” because we refuse to see the difference between fact an opinion. 

Dar­bel­la at one point had this as her e‑mail signature:

“Every­thing we hear is an opin­ion, not a fact.
Every­thing we see is a per­spec­tive, not the truth.”

And this goes both ways: what I do with everything I see and hear is my opinion, my perspective. It’s neither true, nor a fact.

We tend, in gen­er­al, to have a pri­ma­ry belief sys­tem that was shoved down our throats. For our own good, of course. It’s usu­al­ly about as sub­tle as a Mack truck. 

It’s a sys­tem of absolutes. “All women are … “No son of mine … ” “Work until you drop.” “Some day, my prince[ess] (or Jesus, or Moham­mad, or the Bud­dha) will come…”

Then, we add our own absolutes which are based upon our primary belief system, and upon our interpretation of the experiences we think we’ve had. 

“No one ever lis­tens to me … ” “Every time we talk, you always … ” “No one loves me, every­one aban­dons me…” 

Or anoth­er odd one I’m hear­ing a lot late­ly: “I’m des­tined for greatness!”—spoken by peo­ple who are wait­ing for great­ness to appear by mag­ic—because they cer­tain­ly are not doing great things.

Such rules take on a life of their own

Our beliefs, which we invent, become self-ful­fill­ing prophesies. 

We assume that our opin­ions and per­spec­tives are true, and then we defend them by fit­ting all the data into what we expect to find. 

We bend real­i­ty (ongo­ing, actu­al events) to fit the fan­ta­sy (our inter­nal stories.)

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Yet: Things are not as they are. Things are as YOU are.

I wrote about this in one of my books. it’s the sto­ry of a woman hav­ing sex (on the pool table) and declar­ing it love. 

Inter­est­ing­ly, I’d seen her 6 months ear­li­er. Her issue?

Her fiance had had sex with a friend of his. My client had imme­di­ate­ly dumped him, and came in for ther­a­py loud­ly declar­ing that “Sex is pre­cious! He betrayed me!”

She let me know that, a month back, they’d got­ten back togeth­er. And then… sex on the pool table.

I remind­ed her of our pre­vi­ous time togeth­er, and how she’d dumped her fiance for the same thing (minus, on his part, the pool table. She was aghast.

“Not the same thing! He did it out of lust. I did it because I think I love the (pool tble) guy!”

I won­dered, “How would it be to sim­ply state, ‘I was horny and I had sex.’?” She replied, “I’m NEVER horny! Good girls have lov­ing feel­ings.… down there!”

I know you’ll be sur­prised to hear that thetapy went nowhere, and she did end up dump­ing her fiance. 

Yeah. Right. She was so conflicted about her purely sexual feelings that she was willing to end her engagement, rather than admit to getting turned on.

We are all of what we feel, think, plan, and do. Notice the word, “ALL.” When I get angry, for exam­ple, or sad, (more like­ly for me,) that’s me, feel­ing cold, tight, and shut down. That’s me, stomp­ing off, hit­ting a mat­tress, or curl­ing up in a ball. That’s me, think­ing that the world is com­ing to an end, that no one loves me, that I NEVER accom­plish any­thing worthwhile.

She was bending the world to match her preconceived notions.

I sug­gest­ed that she look at how she was see­ing things—what judge­ments she was mak­ing. In short, I asked her to begin tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for her own world view.

A look of shock crossed her face. She said,

“If I buy what you are say­ing, I’ll have to change every­thing I believe, every­thing I’ve been taught, all the rules I’ve been given.”

I said, “How hap­py are you with your life?” She replied, “I’m miserable.”

I said, “You have a set of rules about sex­u­al­i­ty, and rather than explore them, rather than explore what your body is feel­ing, you shut down and blame others.”

I con­tin­ued, “How about we have a look at the rules, see which ones serve you, and con­coct some new ones to over­ride the ones that no longer are helpful?”

She said, “What you are say­ing makes sense, but not for me. I’m not will­ing to change–I just want a pic­ture-per­fiect rela­tion­ship. You want me to be self-respon­si­ble, and I can’t.”

In the end, what we actually see of life is a perfect mirror of what we already believe (preconceived notions.)

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In my book ‚Liv­ing Life in Grow­ing Orbits, I present 52 weeks of lessons, along with dai­ly exer­cis­es. The very first is “Rock.”

Rock beliefs are foun­da­tion­al beliefs—the very first things we were taught by our “tribe(s).” In the “Rock” chap­ter, I sug­gest that our first “job” is to unpack the beliefs that form our self-view and world view. 

This is a painful process, as we strip away the veneer of “truth” that others have given to the concepts that we use to define ourselves and how we view the world.

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Things are not as they are. Things are as YOU are. Whom, then, do you CHOOSE to be?

While it’s nice to have a bank of mem­o­ries so that we know, for exam­ple, not to lean our hands on the red coil on an elec­tric range, there real­ly are no reli­able “all the time” rules regard­ing our inter­per­son­al relationships.

What’s going on in our relationships, as we communicate, as we interact with each other and the world, is often in the nuance. The glance. The tone. The glimmer.

Here’s an exam­ple. Let’s say we assume that when some­one uses an angry tone of voice anoth­er used, then the present user is angry too. We may miss the telegram she is hold­ing, the start of a tear in her eye, the catch in her voice. 

All we hear is the shout­ed (we judge, “angry!”) tone, “Leave me alone!!!”

And then we find our that the telegram announced that her grandmother died.

What I am talk­ing about is not sim­ple, obvi­ous, nor plain.

It’s vapour. It’s nuance. Grab for it, think you own it, and it is gone.

This walk is about pay­ing atten­tion all the time, to every­thing. To the big pic­ture, but espe­cial­ly to the hints. The sub­tleties. The nuance.

I often watch the body lan­guage of those I’m with. The way the per­son is breath­ing, walk­ing, stand­ing, hold­ing them­selves, speaks vol­umes. I also spend a lot of time ask­ing peo­ple what they mean by what they say or do, as I only know what say­ing or doing some­thing means to me. Again, the truth is in the nuance.

The more one knows, the more one com­pre­hends,
the more one real­izes that every­thing turns in a cir­cle.
~~~ Goethe

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Circularity

What brings peo­ple in for coun­selling is just the oppo­site of this sense of cir­cu­lar­i­ty. Clients come because life has final­ly become too full of seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed tri­als and traumas.

For most, life seems to be an end­less series of obsta­cles, each unique and uncon­nect­ed to what has gone before.

Most mar­i­tal dif­fi­cul­ties, for exam­ple, are often described this way—as a shop­ping list of dis­ap­proved of behav­iours per­pe­trat­ed by the spouse.

Such a lin­ear approach to life hap­pens because we choose to see each of the stick­ing points in our lives as being unrelated. 

Instead, a bet­ter ques­tion is, can I learn to see the pat­terns, and then choose to behave differently?

The events of our life follow patterns.

Life is about remem­ber­ing whom we are and what we’ve for­got­ten. The lessons we get help us remem­ber. The lessons we need to learn repeat and repeat. All that changes are the details, the players. 

The base issue(s) remain(s) the same. Forever.

Until we notice. And choose to do something different. Each and every time.

As soon as we notice how we are stuck, what our per­son­al pat­tern is, we see that far from liv­ing a life where each prob­lem­at­ic issue or rela­tion­ship is dif­fer­ent, we are actu­al­ly caught repeat­ing the same behav­iour in dif­fer­ent ways, with dif­fer­ent people.

When we notice that, we begin to see that we are actu­al­ly revis­it­ing the same issue over and over. We find wis­dom when we real­ize that if we keep react­ing to what we con­front in the same way, we’ll ALWAYS get the same results. We’ll be caught, for­ev­er, in the same loop.

Is there a way out? But of course!

In prac­ti­cal terms, when we see our pat­tern com­ing around again, we can choose to do things dif­fer­ent­ly. As soon as we do, the sit­u­a­tion changes. We move through it, learn from it, take the les­son with us. 

We will then loop around, expe­ri­enc­ing oth­er, sim­i­lar, chal­leng­ing things. As we come back to the old issue, and it will rear its head again, but we will approach it dif­fer­ent­ly. With grace. With understanding.

And we will remember that to escape (this time!), we must actually change what we are doing.

If you will exam­ine your life care­ful­ly, you will see your own repeat­ing pat­terns. You will notice that, far from hav­ing a ton of issues, you have one or two that play out in many sit­u­a­tions. And your life will sud­den­ly appear to be a cir­cle, as opposed to an end­less line of unre­lat­ed events.

From there, you can begin to look for alternative ways of being and seeing.

As you find them, rather than just think­ing about them, you can apply them in your life. The sit­u­a­tion will then seem to change, but what has changed is YOU. And your life will appear to be a spi­ral. Around and around. Learn­ing, adding, grow­ing, tran­scend­ing, includ­ing. And then you will see that there are infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, and get­ting stuck is a choice.

And why, oh why, would we ever choose to be stuck?

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