Focus on the Tangible

For a month’s worth of posts, I (Scott) am critiquing my own past blog posts. I’m viewing this as an experiment in being willing to admit when I’m wrong, change my mind, and to do so publicly.

If we're content to react to whatever is beneath our surface unconsciously then we miss the opportunity to listen to ourselves, deal with pain, share the pain, and find community.

Our unconscious reactions are rarely directed towards the true source of our frustration, disappointment, or whatever.  What I mean is:  when we react to what is beneath the surface unconsciously then we're not actually addressing what is beneath the surface.  We are addressing something altogether unrelated and, generally, dragging innocent and vulnerable people down into our misery.  

We maintain control through exerting ourselves on something more vulnerable than ourselves.  When we're confronted with powerlessness our bodies intuitively seek something else to be in control of.  We will find a situation or person less powerful than ourselves that we can push lower to keep some (false) sense of internal balance.  We intuitively and unconsciously believe, wrongly, that subjugating something or someone else helps us feel like we are maintaining control in the midst of great uncertainty.  

Tomorrow we get real practical.

Future Scott vs. Past Scott:

I don’t really think in terms of subconscious processes anymore because I’m not really sure how helpful it is and I don’t think there’s any way to really get to the bottom of subconscious processes anyway. So I prefer to talk in terms of what is (today). 

When I say what is I mean things that are tangible. When we take our frustration out on someone, that’s very tangible. We can own that incident and make amends. And, if we’re frustrated at a high enough level on a regular enough basis, we may need to work on mindfulness of our emotions so that we can pay attention to things we might be overlooking. 

The bottom line point might be the same regardless: If we’re not acting like ourselves, we might want to explore that.