Clean up your act

If you've been told to clean up your act, good luck with that. You may have tried repeatedly and discovered you cannot clean up your act in ways that last for more than a day or two.  That's not a copout or an indication that you're not trying hard enough. There is no solution at the level of how you're acting.

People, who tell you to clean up your act, need to clean up their own acts. They're assuming the ways you're acting can be cleaned by trying. They are showing signs of matching luggage with you. They may be assuming they don't need to change, only you do. They may be projecting on to you what they find offensive in themselves. It's easier to find fault in others than to find what's bugging us deep down inside. They've opted for what's easy by taking cheap shots at you. There may be some truth in putting you down, but no exemplary conduct by them about taking responsibility, looking within or solving their own problems at the proper level.

We cannot clean up our acts because the ways we are acting are fallout from the two-sided condition of our minds. We're torn up about lots of things and not capable of getting it together. The solution integrates the opposing sides. That usually seems unattainable or a very long ways off. It's far from obvious how to change our minds in ways that better behavior falls out naturally. The kinds of thinking we're doing preclude seeing how to change our minds.


For starters, here's some ways to visualize our minds when they are divided against themselves. We may be:

• full of pride, conceit, hot air, arrogance or over-confidence
• fixated on cause-effect, linear explanations while deny the cycle we're in or the ways we're feeding the chronic problem
• finding fault with others as if they bear no relation to what we'll find inside ourselves or where we're coming from 
• oscillating between two extremes which continually overcompensate for having gone to the opposite pole of the dichotomy 

There's something missing when our minds function like this. Dr. Dan Siegel offers many possibilities from cognitive neuroscience in his book: Mindsight:

• the prefrontal cortex may be under-developed for detaching and observing the flux of thoughts and emotions
• the body may flood the mind with panic reactions when touched in ways that evoke painful incidents
• the left brain and hippocampus may have been precluded from forming an episodic memory of a traumatic incident
• the right brain may be impaired by an adaptation to significant others' coldness, indifference, intolerance or perfectionism
• the left brain may address relationship problems with pure logic and rationality
• the right brain may cling to unresolved dependency, power and respect issues
• the brain stem and amygdala may overtake the left brain when hyper vigilant about hidden dangers

Fortunately our brains demonstrate amazing plasticity. They form new connections and integrate what's missing as long as there is blood flowing in our craniums. By using our brains differently, we change our minds. Our acts get cleaned up in the process. We've found the level below how we're acting where lasting changes can be made.

Getting into the flow

This morning I spent some time exploring how the trouble with bubbles that I explored yesterday fits into time-bound and timeless experiences. For over two decades, I've been fond of the possibility that there is a vertical dimension that intersects our horizontal time-space plane. It's been my understanding that the vertical axis is timeless, outside the steady progression of clocks and the measured progress on timelines. Where having a vertical experience when an experience seems endlessly boring, repetitious, or taxing on our patience. We've also "gone vertical" whenever we're so absorbed in an activity that we lose track of time. The vertical axis divides our experiences of time between the past that's already happened and the future that has not happened yet. The vertical axis gets divided by horizontal time into endlessly negative and timelessly positive experiences.

Our uncreative minds want to keep us safe and ensure our survival. The future is of no use for these purposes. Our uncreative minds simply deal with the future by making predictions about what will happen based on past experiences. It's in the past that we learned unforgettable lessons about what is really dangerous, what consequences are inescapable and what trouble we can get into when we're minding our own business. Thus, most of us are living on the left side of these four quadrants. Our past experiences confine us to oscillating between bubble trouble and the pits of despair.

Our creative minds naturally explore unknowns, learn disturbing new perspectives and make useful mistakes to refine methods. Our creative minds also make great use of our imaginations to envision better futures, desirable outcomes and fresh possibilities for us to experience first hand. When we have negative experiences on the right side of the map, we're struggling to achieve what we've envisioned. It's not going as easily as we imagined. We're running into obstacles, setbacks, and dead ends. We learning the hard way how to succeed in this unfamiliar territory. We're traversing a terrain of life experiences to get where we want to go in our future.

When we're immersed in positive experiences on the right side of these four quadrants, we also free of the past. We're being someone new, different and fascinating. We're in the flow of one good thing after another. We exuding gratitude instead of an attitude with so much falling into place in our favor.

With this map in mind, we can discover where we're at and get to a better place. We can get to the Now Moment where there's nothing to do until an inspiration provides perfect timing, methods and objectives. It's from that Now moment that we can get into the flow most easily.

The trouble with bubbles

We all find early in life that there are things we are especially good at doing It doesn't matter to us whether the thing is safe, productive or valuable to others. Some of us find we're good at things that society judges at criminal, addictive or self destructive. All that really seems to matter to us is that we're good enough at to succeed, get our way or do better than some others.

Whatever we have that works for us usually gets us into some trouble. We may become overconfident in our abilities and proven successes. We may idealize the thing into being the very best. We may get the idea we can do this thing flawlessly and meet perfectionistic standards of approval. We might even think there are not no limits to what we want do successfully or accomplish according to our plans. We may assume the satisfaction in this comes from others' approval, admiration and payment.

Any of these misconceptions is a "bubble". We become full of ourselves and extremely inconsiderate of others. We've inflated our expectations of how much of life we can control and which consequences we can escape. We become conceited about thinking we're right while assuming we're merely confident in our outlook. We're stuck on ourselves as if nobody else matters to us. We're overcompensating for another side of our personality that we refuse to admit to ourselves.

Whenever we've got caught up in a bubble, we're asking for the kind of trouble that will burst that bubble. We're need of a slice of humble pie or someone to knock us off our high horse. We could benefit from a reality check to deflate our expectations. We could use some feedback about how we come across to others and what impression we make on them.

When our bubble gets burst, the "meanie" who did it to us seems inconsiderate, malicious or vindictive. There's no way they we're acting as a friend, had our best interests in mind or saw how to help us get around a blind spot in our awareness. We experience our confidence getting shattered, our thinking getting refuted and our ambitions getting trashed. We typically fall into the pits of despair from what proved to be very shaky ground. It's dark down there in the pits as if we have become nobody in the midst of nowhere with nothing to do. We wallow in self pity or indulge in depression. We experience this place at painfully empty and frighteningly out of our control.

Some us of never get out of these two places. We go through life oscillating between inflation and deflation, more bubbles and getting each one burst. There's seems to be no alternative worth considering or within our reach. We opt for continually experiencing the trouble with bubbles.

There are many ways to stop going back and forth in bubble trouble and get into a new way to live. I've explored many of alternatives here:

• Taking a broader perspective to consider what incidents mean to you personally, how they show you new possibilities to consider or indicate a change to work on.
• Getting out of a stuck place by making a move at a deeper level
• Taking an interest in others' interests to really relate to things they care about, get motivated to explore further and enjoy even when nothing comes of it
• Becoming a different person by discovering how much freedom you already have to see, choose and respond differently to present circumstances
• Playing different roles among the people you know as if everyone is continuing to learn about themselves and others
• Becoming more aware of our baggage to find the purpose it served and others ways to satisfy its objectives
• Create some sensible winning to get ahead in ways to seem more personally significant and valuable than mere conquests

Each of these strategies, and many others, will bring an end to the trouble with bubbles in your life.

Internalizing negative experiences

There are many ways to characterize the origination of a new piece of emotional baggage. We may endure a traumatic experience that we cannot forget or resolve in our minds. We may get into some frightening amount of trouble for doing what we thought was the right thing and end up with a disturbingly unresolved issue about right and wrong. We may experience a devastating loss which becomes a deep seated fear that a similar loss will happen again. We may get betrayed, exploited or abused in profound ways that change our beliefs in what we deserve and what will always happen to us.

In all these cases, we internalize the negative experience. We do not: write the incident off to experience, let it go for our own good or see how to outgrow it. We take it to heart and take it very personally. We get into a stuck place. We see no way out of the entrapment of our thoughts and feelings created by the negative experience. There appeared to be no choice to avoid internalizing it at the time. Taking it in very deeply simply happened to us, just like the negative experience itself.

It's usually comforting to note that we also internalize positive experiences. We become big believers in our successes. We assume we can repeat what worked out well for us previously. We take issue with exceptions to those victories because we've made up our minds that we deserve to win and expect it to happen routinely. We only maintain unresolved issues about losing or failing because we've internalized positive experiences.

The fact that we internalize both positive and negative experiences suggests there is a process in our minds that we can trust. There's nothing wrong with internalizing experiences. The trouble results from the negative experiences that get taken in too deep. With this perspective, we can choose to internalize the positive experiences and seriously question the negative ones. We can work at getting our reliable process of internalizing experiences working in our favor. We can give this process positive experiences to assimilate and keep the poisonous ones out of our system.

Leveraging baggage-laden incumbents

Our emotional baggage does not make everything impossible to do - just the stuff that would make the world a better place. We can do the same thing every day like a reliable machine because we're living inside a stuck story. We can endure getting set-up to fail by blocking out the evidence of our doing more harm than good. We can overreact to what happens and show others we're not totally indifferent, distant or depressed. We can set-up subordinates to look like they're keeping busy even if it does no good at all. We can thrown money at problems that really need a better diagnosis and a proactive response. We can deliver goods and services that create the illusion of value while exploiting the ignorance and vulnerabilities in people and the environment.

All these dynamics create robust ecologies which persistently maintain costly problems. They also create phenomenal opportunities to launch disruptive innovations, authentic value propositions and new ways of getting work done. The baggage laden incumbents won't see it coming, will over-react to late and end up being their own worst enemies. But the breakthroughs won't happen if the innovators are equally laden with their own emotional baggage. They will join the crowd that maintains the misery and misdiagnoses the problems. They will inadvertently think like the incumbent enterprises that cannot disrupt themselves rather than leverage the opportunities create by baggage-laden incumbents.

Emotional baggage talks us out of being an innovator. It gets us thinking:

• "I cannot defy conventions, question authority, deviate from legacy practices or risk making a fool of myself"
• "I do not want to feel the urge make a change or to get motivated to start something new"
• "I don't know how to succeed at this, make a significant impact or see a project through to completion"
• "I'm no different from everyone else who is enduring the status quo, complying with policies and meeting others' expectations"

When we've resolved our own emotional baggage, the incumbents look like opportunities to leverage all this negative self-talk. We become free of those alluring pitfalls that could tempt us to merely do the opposite of the thinking induced by baggage. We embrace the process of changing our minds easily and allowing for that exploration to take some time, setbacks and learning. This transition process gets us thinking:

• "I cannot overcome entrenched power by direct assault, but I can ambush the incumbents with what they regard as inconceivable, impractical and far-fetched"
• "I do not want to chase after extrinsic rewards which mess up my creativity and self motivation, but this project generates an abundance of intrinsic rewards"
• "I don't know how to succeed at this yet, but I've got the curiosity to find out how and the confidence to learn from experimenting and failing early"
• "I'm the same as everyone else, gifted with unique attributes and experiences that spawn new ways to serve others and co-create value with them"

In other words, we're in a good place to go for it with a nuanced and strategic sense of the opportunity created by baggage-laden incumbents.

Getting to a panoramic place

Emotional baggage gives us the experience of having a very full plate. We're loaded with worries about what's going to happen to us, based on what already occurred. We're rehashing the past episodes as if it will somehow get better by replaying it over and over. We're also trying to cope with our present situation that typically expects us to act like nothing happened to worry about and rethink endlessly.

With this very full plate, our awareness is very limited. Baggage keeps us in a place where our outlook is tunnel-visioned. Other people seem like insignificant or overwhelming things. We have no spare capacity on the plate or space in our outlook to consider others more insightfully. The prospect of others having different purposes, feelings, issues and outlooks seems overwhelming to consider. We cope with our inner torment by simplifying how others appear to us.

The path out of that tunnel-visioned place ventures into significant understanding of many others. Our outlooks become panoramic as we get into this better place. We become of aware of what we've failed to consider when we were coping with a very full plate. We open up our minds to accommodate others living in different realities. We begin to see them dealing with different pressures, coping with varied past histories and foreseeing different opportunities.

In the process of getting their stories understood, we get a much better sense of our own stories. We see how we differ and how those differences could make a positive difference. We realize our story is a work in progress with many chapters to go. Our panoramic outlook embraces all the varied stories getting changed by further experiences. We see ways to help others accept and enrich their stories with the ways we're different in a good way.

Settling for middle ground

Emotional baggage puts us in the mood to go from one extreme to another. We fruitlessly try to escape a stuck place by tormenting ourselves. We assume the middle ground between our favorite extremes is altogether boring, stagnant and deadening. Thus, we appear to avoid balance at all cost when we're burdened by our past.

Here's are a few of the typical patterns of wild oscillation induced by emotional baggage:

• Going on erratic rampages then acting extremely well behaved
• Chasing after dangerous thrills then withdrawing into extremely safe isolation
• Indulging in spending sprees then pinching pennies, returning items to the store and reusing worn out items
• Making a show of superiority to intimidate others then displaying one's insecurities to get their sympathy

When we're going from one extreme to the other, the middle ground appears to be neither enticing alternative. It's presumed to be a "no-man's land" or worse. It offers no appeal when we're in that desperate frame of mind maintained by emotional baggage. We spell relief: "EXTREME".

The middle ground appeals to us when we've obtained peace of mind. We have forgiven others and ourselves. We've accepted what happened with losing confidence in the process. We have gained self assurance, self reliance and self respect. Our emotions have settled down. We settle for the middle ground between those overly familiar extremes.

The middle ground looks different once we settle for it. It turns out it's not boring, stagnant and deadening. It's a better combination than going to either extreme. It gets better results than any act of desperation. The experiences in the middle are more satisfying and reassuring. We become a better judge of unfamiliar situations because were looking for both sides of every alternative. We get the sense we've made wise choices, good decisions and reliable estimations of consequences. We're in a very good place between those extremes.

Coming from a place of wonder

When we're carrying emotional baggage, we're full of opinions. We've made up our minds about our fate, bad luck and even how we've been cursed. We've decided for "good" what will always and never happen to us, for us or with us.

We opt for this rigidity to keep a "lid on the kid". Our inner children are unhappy and prone to tantrums. With emotional baggage comes storms of negative emotions. Rather than "flip our lid" whenever we feel like it, we rely on an opinionated thought system to inhibit that costly exhibition of our dark moods.

When we're free of our emotional baggage, we're no longer served by that array of rigid opinions. We're feeling better and benefit from expressing how we feel. We're in a place of wonder where we're wary of assuming incorrectly, jumping to conclusions and making snap judgments. We presume we don't know everything and don't have this current situation entirely figured out. We consciously burst any bubble of over-confidence, hubris or conceit.

In this better place, it feels good to wonder about what's missing, unknown and mysterious. We approach life as an adventure to explore rather than a struggle to endure. We start something new with a sense of what we don't already know. We routinely formulate new questions, hypotheses and theories. We go looking for answers, contrary evidence and more nuanced insights to validate or upgrade our explorations. We enjoy learning far more than could ever happen sitting in rows of desks.

Getting the right impression

We acquire emotional baggage from unforgettable experiences that give us the wrong impression about ourselves, our lives and our freedoms. These negative experiences convince us to feel unworthy, dangerous, deficient, powerless, mistaken or worse. We internalize these wrong impressions into negative self concepts that profoundly limit what we think we can accomplish successfully.

Resolving emotional baggage occurs when we get the right impression about ourselves, our lives and our freedom. We realize we are not what happened to us or how it made us feel. We have always been free of all that in spirit and can keep that freedom in mind. We can let go of the past memories, grudges and self pity. We can get over the negative self concept and move on as if we've become complete with what happened and grown to be big minded about it.

These right impressions are difficult to come by. The wrong impressions are extremely convincing and contagious. They give everyone touched by the experience the sense to do the wrong thing. Some get the urge to compound simple problems into unsolvable messes. Others get enticed to fall into one or more pitfalls. Some opt to endure unresolved issues that spawn reenactments of abuses, losses or other crises. Others find collaborators who mutually distance, manipulate or control their compatriots. None of this makes it easy or obvious how to come by the right impression.

We are one step away from the right impression when we can sense the wrong impression it made on us and all the ways that error compounded itself. We can see that we were not perceived as who we are. We can recognize the error in how we were talked to, opposed and mistreated. We can perceive the others' sense to do the wrong thing resulting from their getting the wrong impression about themselves. We can then extract ourselves from the contagious nightmare with the right impression. We can exercise our freedom and then keep it in mind hence forward.

Changing our minds with ease

Resolving our emotional baggage calls for changing our minds in many ways. A change in heart (feeling) follows the conscious change in what we're thinking and seeing. When we've resolved an issue, we've changed our minds about:

• what actually happened to us and how it affected us
• why it happened and how it could not repeat itself
• who do we think we are and how that compares to others
• how do we deserve to be seen, related to and treated
• what can possibly happen to us, for us and with us now
• what's similar and different about our new situation
• what reactions/responses are appropriate in this new situation

Changing our minds with ease comes about amidst lots of other changes. When we've fallen for any of the pitfalls on the path to resolution, it's very difficult to change our minds. We're missing the ingredients that make it possible to change our minds with ease. The pitfall messes up our mood, inclinations and access to:

• entertaining lots of possibilities, points of view and frames of reference
• exploring others' interests, perceptions, projects and purposes
• balancing reliable routines with less predictable adventures, explorations and experiments
• immersing ourselves in conversations and collaborations with others who are growing and changing

This perception of the challenge shows us a way to get out of any pitfall by changing our minds:

• We can get off our one track mind by getting side tracked with other ways of seeing things, situations and ourselves
• We can open our closed mind with contradictory perceptions, explanations and predictions
• We can disrupt our functioning on auto-pilot by messing with our habits, routines and addictions
• We can expand our awareness of others who seem weird, inappropriate or wrong to our way of thinking

Each of these strategies invoke the pattern of increasing returns. A little change brings about more changes, The wealth of resources for changing with ease increase naturally.

Pitfalls on the path to resolution

I spent most of yesterday working on the material that will become a series of animated videos to support anyone seeking to resolve his/her emotional baggage. One facet of yesterday's developments was a framework of ten pitfalls that entice our downfall on the path to resolution. Here's a summary of those foreseeable setbacks in any attempt to get over what happened and get on with one's living a life free of the past.

1. Oversimplifying the challenge - Emotional baggage is complex, organic and fully capable of retaliation. When we presume that baggage is either mechanical, straightforward or easily fixed, we've fallen into the pitfall of oversimplification. We'll learn the hard way how defiant the complexity of emotional baggage can be when it gets mistaken for a simple thing.
2. Misdiagnosing the symptoms - When we're plagued by unwanted urges, moods, and overreactions, we've got baggage. When we figure out the problem is something wrong with us, we've figured wrongly. We've failed to discover how useful, functional and purposeful those symptoms are to much deeper dynamics.
3. Escalating the inner conflict - Baggage sets us up to be at war with ourselves. We're torn between being respectable and urgent. We've fallen into another pitfall when this inner torment goes from bad to worse. Our attempts to stop having the problem can get into sleep disorders, nightmares and chronic anxiety.
4. Covering up the deficiency - We make a better impression on people if we don't appear damaged. We assume the baggage might clear up on its own if we act better already. We try to "fake it until we make it" only to find nothing has changed on the inside. We've postponed the resolution of our issues instead of working them through gradually.
5. Errors of omission - It's a lot easier to pay attention to what happened than to what didn't happen. Yet, lots of baggage gets formed by unmet dependency needs, a lack of love and other's failure to listen to us, respect us or understand our feelings. We've fallen into another pitfall when we dwell on those tangibles of what people said or did to us.
6. Missed opportunities - Baggage closes our minds for safety's sake. We face a new situation with our minds already made up about what this is, what can happen and what never occurs. We fall for our self righteous opinions instead of opening to unforeseen possibilities.
7. Conflating facts and meaning - We've fallen into a pitfall when we stick to the facts. We assume incidents can be taken literally, at face value or as they objectively appear. We fail to read into them, see them through several lenses and realize how subjective viewpoints played a part in what happened. We're a poor judge of characters and situations which gets us into more trouble than we bargained for.
8. Rotten thinking - Our thinking can get carried away with itself and begin to stink. We're prone to idealizing, awfulizing, catastrophizing and demonizing. We over-generalize sporadic incidents into facts of life that always happen and never happen differently. We rule out reality-checks and get over-ruled by fears when we're in this pitfall.
9. Analysis paralysis - The complexity of baggage and the overwhelming nature of its consequences can lead to stagnation. We become immobilized from taking actions, going exploring, making a slight change or getting creative. We become so enthralled with figuring this baggage thing out were left out of vibrant experiences that had our name written on them.
10. Designer luggage - We can milk our emotional baggage for all its worth. We use our obvious damage to manipulate others, control situations and take others hostage to our neediness. We identify with being the self-absorbed victim in need of endless sympathy, commiseration and consideration. We've dug a hole deeper than the pitfall we fell into originally.

Each of the pitfalls hit bottom far below our higher ground. There's plenty of room to maneuver within each pitfall that gives us the impression we're not really trapped, stuck or confined. We operating in the dark until we realize we've fallen for some temptation that proved to be our downfall. We'll find our way out once we become disenchanted with the pitfall's lures.

Getting to a better place

When we're trying to get to a better place, we've got to start where we're at. Emotional baggage favors keeping us in a stuck place unaware of where we're at. The psychological dynamics of baggage seeks to minimize our pain, avoid repeats of unwanted experiences and improve our chances of survival. However, it does all this at a very high cost. It keeps us trapped inside a mediocre, boring and predictable place.

When we want to get to a better place, we usually know what's wrong with where we're at. We've got complaints about it, objections to it and dread about it continuing unabated. None of that helps us know where we're at in order to get to a better place. In effect, the complaints perpetuate the persistence of our same old story. What we resist persists.

It works to approach this challenge with a different strategy. Imagine the better place we want to get to is a far out idea. It's suddenly time to envision a perfect end result. We can inhabit the better place to get a feel for it, discover what all it offers, and appreciate all the changes it introduces into our lives. Then it's possible to work our way back to where we're at from the far out idea. Making all those connections sets up the migration to the better place.

We can also change our tune about where we're at. We can appreciate the good it's doing, the purposes it serves and the value it provides. We can reverse the complaints, objections and resistance into insights, respect and letting go. Then we'll find in really in a place with a partial solution. The better place is another solution with some added advantages. We're making a slight change from one solution to another, instead of going for some big turnaround, escape or conquest.

In short, we can get to a better place by first getting where we're really at and why we've been coming from there for a long while.

Breaking emotional stalemates

Emotional baggage often creates a standoff with others. "They don't want to go where we're coming from and we don't want to go to where they're at". These emotional stalemates appear to be irreconcilable when the participants do not have matching luggage. Neither side wants to give in or give up their own stance. Both sides are emotionally invested in their status quo.

Taking a closer look at the stalemate, we can observe how each side is coming from a very different place. The baggage-laden place feels powerless, helpless, needy and insecure. It's seeking collusion and commiseration to alleviate anxieties about being abandoned, unacceptable or the only one with the problem. It asks the other side to "feel my pain", "get where I'm coming from" or "join my pity party".

The opposite place feels confident, productive and powerful. It's seeking solutions to problems, progress that's readily available and actions to stop acting stuck. It's feeding its confidence, productivity and power to make progress and solve problems. It asks the insecure side to "stop moping around" or "feel better about yourself by getting something accomplished".

To go from powerless to productive creates a nightmare experience for anyone burdened by emotional baggage. Their worst fears are coming true. It proves they are abandoned, unacceptable or the only one with the dreadful problem. There's no escaping the evidence of their being deviant, defective and deficient. Their insecurities get magnified and self-confidence becomes ever more elusive. The chronic stalemate seems preferable to making a unilateral concession to the the productive, powerful and confident opposition.

Stalemates like these get broken by seeing them the way I've just described them. When participants can see the stalemate from the sidelines, they can disrupt their own reactions inside the vicious cycle. Each can see from above or afar what they are doing to themselves, selfishly asking of the others and contributing to mutual misunderstandings. With this new perspective, both sides can get to a better place. The underlying anxieties and nightmare experiences get alleviated. The baggage-laden assumptions get disputed and the chronic reactions get disrupted. Instead of forcing oneself to become productive or to collude with the misery, both become much more understanding of the assemblage of interests. The desired outcomes of confidence, power and productivity emerge from the collaborative understanding.

Getting out of a stuck place

When we get into a stuck place, it's especially difficult to get out of that place. They don't call it "stuck" for nothing! With this new approach of using spatial metaphors to embrace the complexity of emotional baggage, I got a picture of where stuck places are at that makes sense of the difficulty of getting out of them.

Imagine a place next to a stuck place that is easily accessible, but very unappealing. We can go there, but don't want to. Our experiences with leaving the stuck place and ending up there have seemed worse than staying stuck. We talk about this place next to a stuck place as:

• Going from the frying pan into the fire
• Leaving our comfort zones to experience major discomfort
• Entering the lion's den in search of safety
• Going from a constant mood to becoming anxiety-ridden, tormented and restless

When we've moved out of the stuck place in this way, we've only made a first order change. We've remained on the same level where the problem was created. We've gone for a ride on the merry-go-round. We've opted for oscillation instead of resolution of the opposing tensions. We're using cognitive strategies that work great for routine actions, but suck at getting unstuck. We've become as reliable as a rubber stamp or cookie cutter, instead of creatively thinking outside the box.

The situation calls for making a different move at a deeper level. It's time to drop down instead of moving out of the stuck place. Down below there are other changes we can make before trying to get unstuck. Here are a few to work though with the support of others who have been there:

• Letting go of opinions about people, incidents and prospects to consider lots of varied interests, connections and interactions
• Abandoning positional stances to explore the underlying function of a literal form, the inherent essence of an explicit desire and the intrinsic significance of obvious facts
• Dismantling fixations by adding complications, nuances, criteria and refinements
• Translating idealized, perfectionistic goals into more feasible, practical and implementable objectives

When we go there, different exits open up. We can leave the stuck place through the openings created at this deeper level. We delve below what we're clinging to and insisting upon to end up in a much better place. We give ourselves a gift of freedom with a little help from true friends.

What's been eating you exactly?

Once there was a rabbit that made a daily visit to a vegetable garden with a corner full of cabbages. On every previous day, he would nibble on some cabbage leaves and then assimilate what he ate. The cabbage leaves turned into more rabbit. It seemed there could be no other way for assimilation to happen. The cabbages did not have mouths, teeth or digestive systems. Empirical evidence assessed by modern scientists confirmed that the process of assimilation was asymmetrical. But on that day, the rabbit got assimilated by the cabbages and became more cabbage. When other rabbits asked him "what's been eating you lately?", he truthfully answered "those cabbages". Assimilation proved to be a symmetrical process, a two way street.

We assume we're using a figure of speech when we say that something is eating us. We convey that same metaphor with expressions like "it's been gnawing at me lately" or "it left me feeling devoured". What we're saying in so many words is that we've got some emotional baggage. We've been through a negative experience that convinced us to change our minds in a big way. We're now convinced that we're no longer safe, trustworthy, smart, capable, worthy of respect, or some other disqualified quality we had valued in ourselves.

It initially seems that we internalize the negative impression of ourselves. We have a new way to get on our case, to be critical of ourselves and to express unhappiness with our conduct. However, as time passes with no relief in sight, it's more appropriate to imagine that we've been internalized by the experience. We're like the rabbit that turned into the cabbage. We've been assimilated by the negative experience and turned into more of it. It's still gnawing at us. It's exactly what's been eating us.

When we've been eaten by an experience, we are living a confined life inside it. We cannot get out of it. Trying to be different or to get over it once and for all cannot succeed. We're trapped inside a story that offers no escape on the level of what happened, what continues to occur and what cannot happen otherwise. We can only deny the experience, pretend it didn't happen and wish it would go away, all the while remaining deep inside it.

There is a way out of the negative, internalized experience. It calls for some heavy-duty cognitive dissonance. We need a series of contradictory, convincing experiences to shatter our predictions, preconceptions and predilections. We need persuasive proof that we've definitely got it wrong about ourselves, what really happened and what's possible from now on. We need to internalize a new deal that eliminates the old one. We then complete that initial process of assimilation with elimination of what's been irrefutable on the inside. We find we've moved outside of everything that's been inevitably true and unavoidably persistent. We're in a new place with a lot more space to explore.

Depending on the emotional investment

Only ten or fifteen percent of the soldiers in a violent series of encounters get PTSD. The others get over the horror and get on with their lives. Likewise, not every victim of a felony assault gets traumatized for years after the episode. Not every incident of domestic violence or abuse creates lasting emotional scars.

One pattern I observed in the Frontline documentary: The Wounded Platoon, connected the impact of emotional investments made by soldiers to their experience of trauma. Those that had bonded emotionally with comrades and leaders were far more traumatized by the violence and impossibility of showing compassion for their fallen comrades. They had set themselves up with more to lose which made their losses more devastating. Those soldiers that remained aloof, numb or focused on the job to get done -- were better able to take the horrors in stride. Soldiers give "emotional investment" a bad name.

That pattern may repeat among female sex workers and college coeds. Most sex workers are not emotionally invested in the clientele, their own inviolability or their reputation. An encounter that could be considered "rape" in other contexts, would get written off as one episode of "rough trade" amidst several encounters on a given night. Their emotional detachment makes it easy to forget about it and move on. The same abusive encounter with a female college student could traumatize her into extreme isolation and avoidance of all sexual interest in her. She would be haunted by the memories, routinely flooded with dark moods and paranoid when walking on campus. Her deep investment in her own inviolability and reputation would set-up the emotional scarring. Like the soldiers, rape victims give "emotional investment" a bad name. Both punishments from emotional investments seem to eliminate any other better options.

Here's how our full spectrum of emotional investment options look to me when arranged in space:

When we make an emotional investment, we've moved onto shaky ground. We're no longer in control of our experience. We are depending on other people or happenstance to feel okay about ourselves. We're eager to please and anxious to make things right. We're neither confident or in charge of what is deemed to be pleasing and right. We're coming from a place that makes us appear clinging and needy to others.

When we're on shaky ground, the only alternative in sight is even worse. We can go into isolation and wallow in self pity. We become emotionally withdrawn and unavailable. We put up walls to defend ourselves from feeling our feelings again. We appear to have become" lifeless zombies" to others. In this place, we cannot show interest in others or endure others' interest in us. We've invested heavily in emotional safety at all cost.

There's a far better place to get to from shaky ground that does not open us up to getting hurt the same way all over again. We move onto solid ground from shaky ground and feel very differently about ourselves. We can make a different kind of investment.

When we move onto solid ground, we restore our own control over our experience. We get to call the shots and frame the evidence by trusting our own lenses. We've withdrawn the kind of emotional investment that can make us needy, insecure and dependent on others' opinions. We're invested in our own confidence, efficacy and freedom. This solid ground gives us the feeling that we can let go of whatever happened in the past. We feel we are now a different person now with many different resources, outlooks and experiences. We are looking forward to a very different future than the one defined by the troubling past incidents.

Getting to solid ground usually requires a support system. We need convincing experiences of getting respected for living according to our self respect. We cannot go their alone or talk ourselves into solid ground. It comes about by coming from a better place that then comes across some common ground with like-minded others.

Rethinking emotional baggage

Last week I watched the excellent new documentary from PBS/Frontline: The Wounded Platoon. It explores the staggering increase of post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD) cases among the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The interviews with soldiers, psychiatrists, lawyers and high ranking military officers gives us several different looks at the problem, attempted solutions, side effects of those attempts and some policy implications.

All this brought back to mind all my 52 previous explorations of emotional baggage here. As I made more connections between the different facets of the problem, I became overwhelmed by the complexity. It seemed that any workbook I could create would over-simplify the issues to the point of being useless. I became discouraged that I had only provided expanded awareness of the complexity, rather than access to transformational changes.

As I most recently explored the uses and implications of actor-network theory here, I've acquired some new capabilities for handling complexity. Actor-network theory allows situations to be extremely complex without explaining them. It attends to the complexity without forcing it into conceptual categories or confining models. It shows us a way to be in the complexity that transforms the complexity and gets transformed by it. This has given me a way to rethink my approach to emotional baggage.

"Emotional baggage" gives the illusion of substance to essence. It misplaces concreteness and causes unnecessary problems. It indulges in the Cartesian error of objectivity and modernism. It "makes a thing" out of no-thing, complex processes and interdependent functionalities. It spawns lots to describe and analyze but not much to do. There's an underlying process of internalizing convincing experiences. This process works in our favor when we're safe, succeeding and realizing desired results. It produces lingering symptoms when we're in danger, failing or doing more harm than good. This process gives us lots to do and much less to analyze.

I've also been pondering the implications of communicating with spatial metaphors. This is something that the Prezi presentation software makes very accessible. I've had several hunches that emotional baggage will be transformed by speaking of "going there", "getting through this", "getting turned around", "coming from a better place" and many other ways of speaking spatially. Spatial metaphors naturally convey connections between and assemblages of interests. They experience processes as moving around and exploring directions rather than as labels of things.

All this suggests that I will soon revisit what I've previously called "emotional baggage" with this new outlook.

Mind of a control freak

I've known many control freaks among consulting clients and spouses of my married friends. As I've been exploring emotional baggage of late, I've realized what drives those people to control others. Briefly, here's the likely dynamics of their inner world that comes out as controlling others.

• Control freaks are prone to outbursts of their stockpiled negative emotions. They have a lot to keep a lid on.
• They experience themselves as easily provoked, upset or outraged by others. Their hot buttons seem to get pushed by a gust of wind.
• Keeping themselves under control is a tenuous affair. Their ability to keep a grip on their emotions is not reliable.
• Control freaks experience themselves as dangerous to others and their relationships when they lose their grip.
• They automatically seek to improve their chances maintaining self control, to minimize this danger.
• They frequently experience others as upsetting them and provoking them by appearing "out of control".
• What appears as "out of control" to control freaks is merely spontaneous, fun-loving, experimental or exploratory to others.
• The control freaks urgently react to get others "in control" before the control freaks reach their own flash point.
• Their need to control others and situations is structured to be relentless, insatiable and insensitive to others.
• Control freaks have no choice but to act controlling since that alleviates the problem of how dangerous they are.

There is no solution at the level of how controlling they are or how "out of control" others appear to them. Their stockpile of negative emotions drives the entire pattern. Control freaks will only become more tolerant, flexible and accommodating as they resolve how they are feeling about their past history.

For a newer look at this issue, see my Mind of a control freak - redux 8 March 2010

Sorting out a tangled mess

When two people become a pair with matching luggage, most of what's happening occurs below the surface. What obviously gets said and done can be very misleading. What gets talked about is usually talking about something else entirely. The only way to stay on track without getting derailed is to wonder about the underlying significance of what is immediately obvious.

When half of a pair accuses the other of bringing emotional baggage into the relationship, s/he will say things like "get over it", "let it go" or "stop taking things so personally". Meanwhile, that person will use the relationship as a dumping ground for acting out negative emotions, internalized abuse or personal insecurities. The other will be getting upset, getting his/her hot buttons pushed and getting provoked by reenactments of personally painful past episodes. There is a constant barrage of experiences in the relationship to get over, let go of and stop taking personally. There's no relief in sight because both are hardwired to what's happening on the outside.

When one blames the other for "making him/her feel a certain way", no responsibility is being taken for how one feels. Blaming merely announces a toxic dependency on the other to feel good about oneself. Left to one's own devices, the blamer feels inadequate, inferior, defective or dangerous to oneself and others. Rather than point out his/her personal flaws, blaming another provides a useful cover. Choosing how to feel is kept off the table. It remains legitimate to say things like "you upset me" or "you depress me".

When half of pair tells the other s/he has a problem, it takes one to see one. The person pointing fingers has the same problem. The problem is getting pointed out to have more in common, to get understood or to stick together when fears are driving each other apart. There's no opportunity to support each other's successes, growth or expanding self awareness. "Misery loves company" becomes the only companionship option. Making the other miserable enough to commiserate takes control of the relationship. Eviscerating the other's self confidence and independence insures more clinging and hanging together out of neediness.

When we can discern these underlying dynamics, relief is in sight. We can recognize the pattern in what happens. We can read the subtext in what gets said. We can break the cycles that ensnare us in constant reactions. We can choose how we feel regardless of what's happening. We free ourselves from what our own baggage dictated, necessitated and perpetuated.

Raising the level of suspense

This morning I've been working on how storytelling may be a useful approach to resolving emotional baggage. If you've been reading this ongoing series of posts, you know I've previously explored facets of emotional baggage through the lens of storytelling in Revising your past history, Trapped inside a story, and Authoring a new story.

Baggage kills the suspense in our lives. The pain we've hung onto keeps the same things happening over and over. There's nothing to look forward to when our baggage is running the show. Our baggage is keeping us safe from danger and locked into successful routines as if there is nothing new to learn, to reconsider or to adopt as a replacement. Baggage driven lives are boring. The same old victim story (what happened to me) gets retold a thousand times.

Today I'm wondering if restoring suspense to lives via suspenseful stories might create the desired transformations in these storied lives. Here's how stories generate suspense that may potentially become infectious in the baggage-burdened lives of an audience:

• When stories take the characters into an unusual world, we are held in suspense about their eventual return. Will Alice get back safely from Wonderland? Will the Darling children accept life in London as normal after their adventures in Never Never Land?
• When stories reveal the "back stories" of the main characters, the level of suspense gets raised by not knowing how their past history will influence their current conduct. Will the characters have enough motivation from what happened to them before to see this new challenge all the way through to completion? Will the insecurities and weaknesses acquired in the dreadful past episode subside as the characters go on this new quest?
• When the protagonist gets pitted against an antagonist, we're left hanging by the evenly matched contest. Will the heroics overpower the villain in the end? If the enemy gets the upper hand, will this strengthen the resolve of the good guys?
• When the predictable chain of events gets disrupted by a twist of fate or reversal of fortune, we're left in doubt about the final outcome. Will the plot get back on track and reach it's desirable conclusion? Will the characters get back to making progress after recovering from the discouraging setback?
• When we get set-up by a story to expect a particular payoff, outcome or resolution, we're held in suspense by the promise made to us. Will the story deliver what we're expecting or leave us hanging after it ends? Will the promise prove to be sincere or just another scam to mislead us to jump to false conclusions?
• When the main character reveals a pattern of inner torment, we're left in a lurch by the uncertainties. Will the character's dark side get the better of him/her? Will the character overcome the negative emotions which have been sabotaging his/her heroics in order to save the day in the end?
• When the climax calls for traits we've not seen displayed before, we're left wondering if everything can work out for the better. Will the main character discover there is no escape but to face the challenge with increased resourcefulness and resolve? Can the central character summon enough courage, compassion, creativity or cleverness to transform the entire situation?

Each of these storytelling devices seem to have the potential for captivating and transforming anyone who wants to resolve their emotional baggage. I've got my work cut out for me to apply these to the workbook.