We don’t receive wisdom.
We must discover it for ourselves
after a journey than no one can take for us
nor spare us.— Marcel Proust
Some general principles to guide your personal research
- Subjective experience is state-dependent — that is, phenomena such as perception and motivation are greatly influenced by your current emotional state. When you are feeling threatened, your perceptions and motivations are biased differently than when you are feeling confident.
- State-dependent biases are always invisible when they affect you, yet you can often recognize the distortions in hindsight [anger always seems justifiable at the time, but often seems ridiculous in retrospect].
- State-dependent biases are always invisible when they affect you, yet you can often recognize the distortions in hindsight [anger always seems justifiable at the time, but often seems ridiculous in retrospect].
- Your subjective reality is your creation: You are not responsible for your biological givens, psychological history, or current social environment. However, now that you are an adult with access to good cognitive abilities, you are responsible for getting the creature you inhabit to act in accord with your interests and principles — despite encounters with stressors and temptations that motivate you to defect.
- Perseverance is the key to good outcome. Training the creature to respond mindfully in emotionally provocative situations takes patience and perseverance.
- Research shows that people with high self-efficacy can tolerate discomfort and set backs without giving up. People with low self-efficacy tend to abandon the effort as soon as they run into discomfort or setbacks.
- Some people with Emotional Disorders feel incompetent in managing their emotions, and so are vulnerable to abandoning this— or other strategies of change based on skill development—prematurely. To become independent you have to stay with the training long enough to develop the requisite skills. If this is an issue for you (and it likely is) please review the side note: Perseverance and Self-Efficacy.
- Changing what you think. Some beliefs and perspective are both invalid and harmful. An unfortunate attribute of negative beliefs is that they tend to be self-confirmatory, which gives them a Darwinian advantage. Once you buy into a handicapping belief the resulting impaired performance confirms the belief and enhances its credibility. However, if you could step outside of yourself and observe your thinking from an outside observer’s perspective, your might recognize some of these beliefs as completely nonsensical. [Here is a list of Popular Thinking Errors. Becoming familiar with them in advance will make it less likely that you are taken in by these seductive cognitive distortion mechanisms when they arise. So it is highly recommended that you review the list when you get the chance].
- Changing how you think. In order to recognize thinking errors you have to get outside your thought processes so you can observe them. This requires the awareness that it is your nervous system, not the objective truth, that generates the beliefs and perspectives you take for reality. While you have to have a perspective and set of beliefs to function in your environment, the ones you use at any particular moment may or may not be helpful. The Cause-and-Effect Research Tool will focus on the unhelpful ones— those that repeatedly result in bad outcome.
The biggest payoff comes from catching those thinking errors that are both self-sabotaging and self-confirmatory. These daemons will continue to exert their destructive influence on your life and the lives of those around you until you know yourself well enough to exorcize them.