Fred
Has anyone ever (rather unkindly) told you just to "snap out of it"? I know I've had that said to me when I just couldn't seem to rise above my unhappiness. I've even said it to myself.
It feels like you're being kicked when you're already down, doesn't it? Everyone experiences pain in their life, but many people, when they feel good, forget what feeling really awful is like, and they can't help, they can only give useless advice. It happens.
Wouldn't we love to be able to 'just snap out of it'? Well, I want you to know that we can. Not absolutely perfectly; not absolutely 100 per cent of the time (remember, that's what they promise in the expensive complicated program ... this is just the cheapskate easy one). We are after progress and not perfection here.
OK, Pip, so how can we snap out of it? It sounds too simplistic.
First, some background to the matter of why we need to
snap out of it at all.
Dr Pavlov and the Etch A Sketch
An important discovery by the Russian Nobel prizewinner
Ivan Pavlov holds the key to this. Have you heard of him? In case you haven't, here it is in a nutshell (and you can find a multimedia explanation by clicking here):
In brief, Pavlov discovered what we now call conditioning. His famous experiments with dogs showed some very important things that explain a lot about how you and I feel.
He knew that if he showed a hungry dog a piece of meat, the dog salivated. Each time the dog was shown the meat, it drooled. What Pavlov did next was this: when he showed the dog the meat, he rang a bell. He did this over and over again. Quite soon, all Dr Pavlov had to do was ring that bell, and the dog would salivate, with no meat in sight. The dog's brain now associated the sound of the bell with food. This is conditioning. Pavlov also showed how such conditioning could be replaced or removed (extinguished, as it's known).
(There's a Pavlov's Dog game to play at the
Nobel e-Museum. But do it after class, OK kids?)
This deceptively simple experiment laid the basis for much of modern psychology. The doctor had shown that a stimulus, such as meat, could produce a response, such as salivation, and that the stimulus-response process could be transferred to another stimulus, such as a bell.
What has that got to do with us? One of the basic beliefs contained in this manual is that it has everything to do with our feelings.
When we were young, we were almost like a blank Etch A Sketch® ... I'm sure you have seen the kids' toy at some stage. The poor man's laptop.
We come into the world with certain attributes, but in the main, all that we are today is what we have learned during our lives. And by and large, that happened to us in a Pavlovian way. Our experiences etch themselves onto our beings.
As we become adults, we have freedom of action in the world, but much of how we feel and think comes from our childhood. Often we are quite unaware of the processes and dynamics that inform our lives, because we have forgotten the original events by which we learned them. Here are two simple examples:
Fred gets reprimanded by his boss. He goes home, shuts the door of his room, kicks the cat, plays a computer game, mutters obscenities under his breath, eventually feels a little better, and emerges some time later in a slightly better mood;
Frederina finds that she has lost the lottery ticket that would have won her $10,000. She phones all her friends and pours out her heart, then she goes for a walk and looks at the flowers in the park until she feels a bit better.
It's another of life's illusions
Fred and Frederina habitually cope with disappointment, frustration and hurt feelings in their own conditioned ways. That's because when they were toddlers
– perhaps even before they could talk – each was subconsciously conditioned into a series of emotions, thoughts and behaviours that ended with them feeling OK. (They have the power to extinguish that conditioning, however, and that's what we shall learn next chapter.)
As a small child, Fred was reprimanded by his mother, his source of sustenance -- his boss, in fact. She was baking biscuits and he grabbed at her apron, so she snapped at him. He went into his room and slammed the door, kicking the cat along the way. He played with his toys, saying horrible things about Mother, and after a while, he felt better and came out of his room. Unconsciously he learned that if he goes through a series of behaviours and emotions (which I call a ritual), he comes out the other side feeling OK. Consequently, without knowing it, his brain and body believe that he needs to go through that ritual before they can find relief. Frederina's behaviour is a similar case in point.
What is important to realise is that baby Fred's brain believed a falsehood, an illusion. It believed that he felt better because he had gone through a certain series of emotions
– which became Fred's Ritual Number 176. In fact, lots of other things could have made Fred feel better, and more quickly, such as his Mother's hug and apology, or if his brother had taken him outside and distracted him with a ball.
Today, not only does Fred's entire nervous system go through R#176 when he is reprimanded by anyone at all, it even goes into R#176 completely unawares whenever he smells baking biscuits.
Sometimes there are biscuits baking in the same street while he's asleep. The familiar aroma wafts in through his bedroom window and he wakes up feeling lousy. He goes to his therapist and says, "I don't know, doc, I musta got out of the wrong side of bed today; I've been irritable all day at work. I yelled at my secretary. I felt so lousy I ate two chocolate bars. I feel like my life is going down the gurgler." (Therapist replies "Hmmmm" and says that in next week's $100 session they will explore his antipathy towards the opposite sex, and the phallic nature of chocolate bars.)
The brain can be tricked, as our illusions in Chapter 3 demonstrated. In the case of our Fred and Frederina, their brains have believed that the series of things they did is actually the cause of their feeling OK. This is much like believing that if we buy milk in the supermarket, that's where it's made. You and I don't believe that -- but maybe when we were 18 months old we might have. Our rituals are repeated so often in childhood that they are etched deeply enough to seem to constitute unchangeable personalities. Indeed, some things in us will likely never change, but in order for you to get the most out of this manual, I hope you will believe that personalities are not rigid and immutable as is almost universally believed.
By understanding, we can change it
Our two heroes' conditioned responses were etched deeply years before the reasoning headquarters of Fred and Frederina's brains were formed. The brain, unconsciously and habitually, is quite convinced that the OK feeling comes only after a series of less appealing feelings has been traversed. The sad part is, Fred and Frederina don't even know it, unless someone tells them (as I'm doing now, which is exercising the power of explication). And those processes, for Fred, Frederina, Pip and you, are so strongly etched in our beings that they are usually only extinguished partially, and haphazardly (by chance). Over time, new experiences extinguish old rituals. That's why people mature, and why older people have usually had most of the 'rough edges' ground off them. Now, you and I can do it more scientifically and deliberately.
Although much of what we feel, think and do is completely determined by our adult decisions, I believe that we largely inhabit bodies, and think with brains, that unconsciously repeat the rituals we learned as children. We are an Etch A Sketch with all these rituals etched on our beings. After one of life's inevitable setbacks, we feel lousy for longer than is necessary because our brains believe that we have to go through our ritualistic series of feelings to end up at the good one.
Wouldn't it be fantastic to find a way to 'snap out of' these rituals of emotion so that we can feel bad for seconds or minutes instead of hours, days or even years? In my recent experience, this is possible, and this is what I do most of the time now. The techniques take less than 30 minutes to learn, less than a month to become skilled at, and less than a year to become habitual. On the other hand, they take a lifetime to master. I make no other promises, for it depends on how much we practice. Just like basketball and the saxophone.
Unetching
In case the story of Fred and Frederina sounds like a gloomy diagnosis, let me tell you that knowledge is power. We don't even need to know what the original conditioning is. So navel gazing isn't necessary in this program. We don't need to tell anyone our life's history, nor even our symptoms of unease, although it certainly won't hurt to do so, and some extinguishment will occur accidentally if we take to the confessional or the shrink's couch.
(This happens because in a setting with a sympathetic host we feel a new and more comfortable emotion while bringing uncomfortable images to our mind's eye and our nervous system, thus creating a new, sweeter conditioned response. The image of a past hurt is now associated with a good feeling, the one associated with acceptance and caring from the practitioner.)
However, we don't need to tell our narrative, we only need to know how to extinguish our conditioning
– how to un-etch our Etch A Sketch. That's a more direct route than haphazard extinguishment via counselling or life's experiences, although these will also work. Direct extinguishment is a simpler process than 99 per cent of people know. We can, in fact, snap out of our conditioning.
I have chosen the 'poor man's laptop' as my analogy, not only because our conditioning is like a drawing etched on the frame of the toy. My other reason is because of the way we un-etch it. Do you remember how, as a kid, you cleared an Etch A Sketch? Easy: you shake it vigorously.
Dr Pavlov had an interesting thing happen to him. Rather, I should say, his mutts did. Over a weekend, when no one was at the lab, it rained like crazy. The river rose and inside the kennels the dogs had water lapping around their muzzles. Scared??!! The poor pooches went ballistic!
And here's the remarkable thing: when the doctor and his staff came back on Monday morning, they discovered that none of the dogs would salivate at the sound of the bell any more.
Like an Etch A Sketch, each conditioned dog had been shaken up vigorously enough to lose their patterns (a word more or less interchangeable with rituals, and reminiscent of the pictures drawn on the kids' toy). Not all, but much of this program, is about shaking the Etch A Sketch, abruptly turning off the channel of our patterns, and switching to a new channel. I hope I'm not confounding you with mixed metaphors, but I'm sure you get the picture. 
Have you heard of alcoholics who try everything to stop drinking for decades, until they have a 'rock bottom', then suddenly they put down the bottle and never drink again? Something has happened to them, something so profound and psychically explosive, that their ritual (I feel bad, I drink, I feel good) is extinguished. At this point they become receptive to new, healthier patterns of behaviour, and it can happen as if by magic.
This magic is available to us, because we are in the driver's seat of our lives. From this chapter on, whenever we discover ourselves in those many familiar spaces in which we feel and think in discomfort, with our minds operating poorly, we can figure out ways to shake up our Etch A Sketch and snap into a feeling that we choose.
And those methods are what we'll be looking at next chapter.
Abundance and gratitude,
Pip
Next |  |
Comment on the Manual 
See what others have to say
Pip's trip tips
