avoidance

It all comes down a bus schedule. Actually, 120 of them. I have been procrastinating and avoiding one aspect of the blood and soul project because it is TEDIOUS and BORING and AGGRAVATING.

But it has to get done.

Mix in with this the horrors of formatting eBooks and the fickleness of mobile phones and my head just feels like it is going to explode.

But progress is being made. Of course, not so much on the big hunka, hunka text that has to go around all of it  - but in due time. Fortunately, I have built the type of life that allows me to procrastinate and avoid just willy-nilly and all over the place while still getting things done.

The catch, however, is that eventually everything has to come together again and when it does, the conflict between what has been worked on steadily and that which was avoided can be great.

I just got done reading a very interesting book, "When Good People Do Bad Things" by Debbie Ford. You can find it just about anywhere and it mostly deals with the whys of self-sabotaging behavior. Like that other book I read a while back it brings up the fact that sometimes, in fact more often than not, unless you are aware of the core reasons of why you have come to be the way you are nothing you do will permit you to escape an ever more serious pattern of self destruction. Serious meaning subtle. Obvious self-sabotage lies in drinking, drugs, promiscuity, embezzlement and so on. Serious and subtle self-sabotage can take the form of needing outside validation to prove worth, or maybe it is a certain form of status - a job, an award, a recognition - that has become needed in order to "prove" to yourself self-value and existence. Depending on the core root of the need the complexity that arises is in the misguided efforts to gain something to prove worth, that very proof of worth may then also be rejected because it conflicts too much with the core message.

Ms. Ford's view is that at some point during early childhood we begin to dissociate from our natural selves and to create a second self - a self of masques, to convince both ourselves and others of "whatever." The natural self continues growing but is divorced from the life that is being lived. The masqued self, in a way, provides us with an ability to counteract our beliefs about our true natures, which we fear other people seeing (and often contain a lot of falsehoods as well). Self-sabotage occurs when the masque worn and the action taken are so opposite to the deeply held self-belief that the false self must be destroyed in order to fulfill the negative perceptions of the "secret" self.

Its for this reason why the typical cognitive approach of "acting opposite to emotion" does not help some people, or if it does help, why it doesn't for very long. If the person is not consciously of their deeply held beliefs about themselves (valid and invalid) they will not know what it is they truly feel and cannot behaviorally retrain themselves by counterbalancing what they feel with what they do. They don't get a chance to build a body of evidence to prove to themselves who they really are because the evidence they are gathering is, literally, from someone else's life.

I really recommend the book however, be aware that Ms. Ford is a particularly direct person. Some of the descriptions of the exercises she does in her workshops with people, while understandable, is cringe inducing.

But mind you, I might incorporate some of them into my own next series of workshops.


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