About Being Chained – 12 Ideas

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About Being Chained – I must take full respon­si­bil­i­ty for my choic­es, deci­sions, and direc­tions. Just as there is no one to com­pare myself to, there is no one is to blame for any choice I have ever made.

Back at point 1, I sug­gest­ed the idea that you are the cen­tre of your own uni­verse. I wrote about “get­ting” that how we relate to oth­ers is sort of myopic. We think we are see­ing clear­ly, but for­get the glass­es on our face.

I’d like to sug­gest anoth­er per­spec­tive for this idea, and it goes like this:

Every sin­gle aspect of what is hap­pen­ing in your life right now is the result of the choic­es you have made.
100% of the time.
Who you are, where you are, and how you are, it’s all deter­mined by you, moment by moment.

If you want something different, you must start from where you are.

This seems log­i­cal, until you unpack the implications. 

We have been trained since birth to look out­side of our­selves for both sat­is­fac­tion and some­one to blame.

Start­ing from where you are means accept­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for the choic­es you made, and are mak­ing to get to this state — to this moment — to this condition. 

Let me say it this way: this approach is not magical, not indirect, and not superficial.

Many peo­ple think that ther­a­py is about “mak­ing things all bet­ter,” as in “no problems.” 

Only one client has ever said this aloud, in New Age-speak, when she said, “I need my affir­ma­tions fixed. I’m not get­ting what I want.” 

But many clients expect that doing ther­a­py is going to “eas­i­ly fix the world.”

They think that their internal tightness and emotional issues are externally caused.

I insist that how you are is how you are.

If your per­son­al­i­ty tends toward cheery, that’s how you are. If toward melan­choly, that’s how you are. These ten­den­cies are not caused by exter­nals — rather they colour our default response to exter­nals.

The hard work of life is learn­ing to accept that “the way you are is the way you are,” and then work­ing from there.

Once you get this small idea, the doors of opportunity are thrown open.

Most peo­ple spend their lives try­ing to change the world, and try­ing not to be them­selves. We insist that life is far bet­ter lived through acceptance. 

By accep­tance I do not mean sub­mis­sion. I mean what the word means. I start from here, from right now, and accept that 

“I am where I am and I know what I know based sole­ly upon what I have cho­sen to learn, to absorb, to assim­i­late and to find with­in myself.”

Notice the “to find with­in myself.” That’s the accep­tance of the base­line of your self part. As I said above we all have cer­tain over­ar­ch­ing ways of deal­ing with our­selves and the world. Call them predilec­tions. Defaults. Yet, despite this, there is free­dom in the following:

I may have a predilection to act in a certain way, but I always have complete freedom of choice regarding my next action.

Blam­ing your genes, your par­ents, your “Uncle Louie,” the sys­tem, or any­thing else for who you are and where you are is a waste of your time. Even if by some stretch some­thing in the past, in your child­hood, “caused you” to be a cer­tain way, and even if you have been act­ing that way for decades, noth­ing com­pels you to behave that way this time.

Noth­ing.

Most peo­ple are resis­tant to shift­ing their way of being. They’ve per­fect­ed their approach over years, and quick­ly turn sug­ges­tions to the con­trary upside down. 

For exam­ple, a per­son might lean toward depres­sion. I’ll sug­gest two things:

1. accept that your nature is to lean toward depres­sion, and
2. as you feel that way, give your­self per­mis­sion to feel it ful­ly, for a lim­it­ed time, say 15 minutes.
3. Do what you need to do: wail, moan, cry, com­plain. Then, stop, and ask, “OK, now what do I need to do dif­fer­ent­ly, this time, regard­ing this sit­u­a­tion?” You then act.

One friend heard me describe this process. She dis­card­ed 2/3s of it, and thought I said, “Just stop doing it.” Yikes.

The rea­son she did this was:

1. to defend her belief that she is, and always will be, depressed,
2. to stay stuck until some magi­cian comes along and per­ma­nent­ly removes her depression,
3. to resist con­scious­ly imple­ment­ing her symp­toms, and
4. to stay stuck in behav­iours that, in the past, have got­ten lousy results.

So we repeat, end­less­ly: if you want to do your life dif­fer­ent­ly, you have to:

1. accept that how you are right now is how you are right now, and
2. shift a behav­iour in the direc­tion you want to go.

This requires the assimilation of an entirely new way of seeing things.

I believe that every­one already has with­in them all of the tools, resources, and under­stand­ings nec­es­sary to be whole and to cre­ate excel­lence. The prob­lem is that we have lim­it­ed our choic­es in the extreme, have blocked our­selves from the innate knowl­edge of our selves, and have designed a pic­ture of our­selves that is way too small.

Thus, the depressed per­son, above, focus­es only on expe­ri­ences that con­firm her depressed-ness, and does what she does to stay with­in that small frame. 

Our approach is to acknowl­edge that this, indeed, is “how things are, right now.” Fight­ing against what is, is a waste of time. Then, we open to door to doing “the next thing” (and the rest of life, one moment by one moment) dif­fer­ent­ly.

Through carefully thought out and enacted choice.

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