The patient comes to the doctor, sits down and starts knocking on the knee. After a while he says: "Doctor, if I knock my knees with my fingers, it hurts!" Then the doctor said: "And it didn't occur to you to stop, and then it won't hurt?" "Hmm ..." the patient wondered. - "But then why would I come to see you?"
People try to solve problems that are not there by telling stories that never happened, and looking for solutions that are not needed. Here are 10 problems that most people don't have. And he doesn't have to have them.
1. What will others think about coaching me?
You don't know and in 99% of cases you won't know because you're neither a telepath nor you have influence over other people's thoughts. Dealing with matters that are beyond your control is frustrated by the fact that you do not have control rather than the actual suffering that causes it.
For example, you imagine what a co-worker thinks about you, whom you see maybe once a week, with whom you have no deeper relationship and who, in fact, doesn't care much for you. To paraphrase the Pareto principle (according to which 20% of employees generate 80% of the company's revenues), it can be said that 1% of people in our lives are responsible for 99% of negative emotions.
In addition, the projection mechanism works here - we imagine what someone is saying about us, not knowing that these are our own judgments about us. It has been proven that frightened people perceive others as more dangerous than they really are, and submissive - as more dominant. So we talk to ourselves, blaming others for it. What others think about you is not your problem and you have only limited influence on it. But when we try to win the positive opinion of others, we often betray ourselves and lose something much more important: what we think about ourselves. And you have influence on it.
2. Will others accept me?
Probably not, especially if you do something outside the broadly understood norm. The desire to impress others, seek their acceptance or love, try to get someone - this is a way to nowhere, causing loss of concentration and betraying your ideals. The world is full of different people. Some of them are extremely resistant to change and expecting acceptance from someone fixed on their own beliefs is a waste of time and energy. There will always be those who recognize that you are not what you think they should be, and want to change you so that they match their imaginations.
Husbands changing wives, wives tempering their husbands' character - these are trips that often lead to conformity and life contrary to their own views. Wanting that others like us, we subconsciously become gray and average, and people without expressive personalities are not remembered. Focusing on what you have to do in your life, you stop playing the role of a green dollar, which everyone has to like, and you start to create your own fate based on heart and intuition. If, in addition, your action conflicts with a particular cultural current, then you have to face widespread criticism that you have no influence on.
3. My partner is not what I imagined him
I will never be. Anyway, you probably didn't bond with him because of that. And it is due to differences that partners can develop and if it wasn't for this contrast, they would be bored staying in the stabilization zone. The desire to change a partner to match your own imagination usually ends in two ways.
The first is, unfortunately, the achievement of the above goal - because the partner changing because of the other party's demands usually does it against himself, thus losing self-respect and ceases to be an appealing challenge.
The second option is to cause conflicts, because the ego, which is changed by the partner, feels rejected and attacked - it enables defense mechanisms. Such a change is at some level a rape in acceptance and evokes a sense of mismatch. And this image is often idealized - either by stories about a romantic prince from a fairy tale, disseminated by grandmothers disappointed by his grandfather, or the expectation of being loved by a partner as well as by his own parent.
Meanwhile, looking at it from the perspective of a parent, no man will love his daughter like her father, who changed diapers in childhood and unconditionally idealized the child. Similarly, no wife has a chance with her mother-in-law, having a distorted picture of her son. It is much more mature to understand that people change themselves when they show the benefits of thinking and acting in a different, more effective way, by their own example.
4. I don't understand why anyone could do this
You don't understand because you don't have access to other people's motives: personal history, beliefs, motivations, thinking and acting. By not doing something alone, we find no reason why someone else should do it, especially when the action is contrary to our worldview.
Serial killers, such as Henry Lee Lucas, explain their killings by the fact of poor upbringing, while others (Jeffrey Dahmer) blame for the "lack" of a certain part of themselves or imprisonment (Carl Panzram). Post hoc rationalization allows the mind to create any convincing story, which explains the reasons for our actions (an example is finding out why we buy products that we do not need in practice), although we are rarely aware of it, and even less often other people are able to understand these reasons.
It's the same with lies - every liar has a perfectly convincing reason why he lies, and even if he condemns himself, he still sees more profit in lying than telling the truth. Proposal? You will not always understand why someone did something. And you don't have to. All you have to do is recognize the facts and refer to them without judging.
5. I'm not what I should be
And you probably never will, but is that it? The process of human evolution never ends, and the more ambitious you are, the greater the gap between who you know you can be and who you still are. Bigger problems and bigger demons come to overcome.
The smarter you are, the more stupid it hurts (it never hurts when you are stupid, because only the wise can see it). The better you know your potential, the less you tolerate laziness and postponing the achievement of your goals. Trips to the perfect self-image (perfectionism) only confirm that "the maximum is not optimal" - just because your car will drive 250 km / h does not mean that it always has to drive so much. Weather conditions can force driving 40 km / h and if it is optimal, it will be the most effective at the moment.
Especially nowadays, when human value is defined through the prism of successes (diplomas, money, skills), it is easy to fall into the trap of permanent self-rejection and habitual thinking: "I am not where I can be yet". Such success is toxic. The conviction will help: "I'm OK and I can get better."
6. The world is bad
This belief is frustrating because it is based on cognitive dissonance, which is the difference between the expected and current state. The world is as it is, humanity is, as always, at a certain level of consciousness development and - depending on the reference point - is developed or primitive.
Looking from the perspective of today's worldview, drowning women in the Middle Ages for being alleged witches was primitive, just as future generations would not be able to believe that we once judged our value as people through the prism of the number of collected items or that we identified with thoughts.
The moral, most often imposed by religion or culture, splitting the world into "good" and "bad" leads to extreme views and a lack of acceptance of a certain order and course of things, characteristic of the evolution of each species at every stage of its development. What was once good is not necessarily good now, and what is good for me will not necessarily be for you. The amount of evil is always proportional to the amount of good, and it is much easier to live when it is based not on extreme opinions but on facts, and takes adequate action.
7. I will avoid problems
You can't avoid it because problems are more often created by your own mind than by the outside world, and you can't escape yourself. There is no stimulus in nature that can kill, but people who are driven by their own imaginations can even commit suicide.
For example, although the risk of death in an airplane accident is 1 in 11 million, being killed by a shark 1 in 3.7 million, and death in a car accident 1 in 5,000, still more people are afraid to fly planes than drive a car. Problems are always more dangerous in the imagination than in reality and avoiding them causes more difficulties than confronting them.
The strategy of losing benefits to eliminate problems (e.g. I will not fly in planes to lose my life) does not work, and the number of life problems always remains the same. The poor complain about the lack of money, and the rich are afraid of losing it. The Brazilian model has more complexes than the toothless inhabitant of the Central Station in Warsaw, but her quality of life is incomparably greater. Regardless of what you have and how many you have, the number of problems will always be proportional to the number of benefits. Your perception of your own life situation is much more important.
8. Others irritate me
Not others, but your conviction that they should be some - exactly what you imagine. Mental trips in "if only X would change" lead nowhere, because X will not change, or someone else (Y) will appear who will behave similarly. Statistically speaking: it's easier than changing the world to change yourself.
In addition, it is not others who are responsible for your emotional reactions, because it is your judgments of their behavior that generate specific experiences. For one, a screaming child is a reason for frustration, the other looks at it calmly (caused by the belief that children of this age have normal behavior as well), and for the third it is a reason to be proud that the child is expressing his own opinion.
Instead of saying, "X irritates me," say, "My interpretation of his behavior irritates me," and you'll regain control. Jews in the Kabbalah say: Don't be the result of the world, but the cause of the phenomena. This allows you to regain control that gives you responsibility.
9. My life does not meet my expectations
And it won't be until you take care of it. Complaining, whining, blaming others for lack of specific results, complaints to politicians for bad governance of the country, to the boss for not paying enough, to God for lack of happiness in life or to parents for bad education - all this leads to loss of responsibility for their own fate. If you don't like politicians - open your own party. If the boss pays you too little - change it. If you don't like the country - move out, etc.
No one else but you is responsible for your life, and if you haven't realized it yet, there are very few people in the world who care about your life. The immediate family - yes, but for all the other inhabitants of the earth we are an unknown category (man, Polish, old man, etc.) and until you take the helm of life in your own hands until others will manage it. We never regret that we tried and failed, but that we didn't try even though we know we could and should have.
10. Why did this happen to me?
Why did this happen to me? Why did my wife leave me? Why did I get cancer? And in which model of understanding the world do you want to receive an answer? If Buddhist - you earned it in your previous incarnation and that's your karma. Catholic? Because that's what God wants. Intellectual? Because this is the effect of a specific cause. Take care of what you can control and leave the rest to Tao / God / karma / destiny.
The truth is that some things are out of our control and we have no idea why certain phenomena are taking place (vide felerny flight 370 Malaysian aircraft). Maybe one day you will find out, maybe not, but until you know it, you have no way of influencing certain seo situations. By abandoning resistance and the desire to control, you can adapt faster and take adequate action for the future.
"So what pills will you give me to stop my knee pain?" - continued the trainer patient.
The doctor was silent for a moment, he was reminded of the joke that his colleague had told a long time ago. A patient complaining of eye pains came to the ophthalmologist. All possible examinations were performed, including brain tomography, and nothing was shown. It took several months, the patient spent a lot of money, specialists devoted a lot of time to finding the cause. At one of the meetings the doctor enlightened ... He saw that the patient was drinking tea without removing the teaspoon from the glass.
"You are all right, dear sir. Long live well. "