Originally Posted by Parthon  smilingaway: I'm going to lay something flat.
You don't want to change. Like you said, you've been to a tonne of therapists, and you've got a BA in psychology, I bet you've even psychoanalysed a few other people including yourself, and have reasons for why you are the way you are. Your inner child, your super ego, your id, your past, your beliefs, whatever you want to call it. But you know, deep down, beneath all that surface knowledge, that what you know really isn't making a difference. I bet you know that all that knowledge you've collected hasn't really freed you up for anything. All this discovery and all this knowledge has turned out to be so much mental masturbation in the end. What you are missing, is a plan, right?
Now this is the tricky part, noone ever wants to change. Change is hard, change is difficult. Self discovery is easy, and psychoanalysis is a picnic compared to fundamentally changing who you think you are. The catch is that the billion and a half reasons you have for being the way you are aren't doing squat to get you out of the situation. If figuring out who you are hasn't helped, and you really want to be different and shift the way you act and the results you are getting, then perhaps you haven't figured out who you are: or more specifically, who you are isn't what you've figured out. Who you are is a creation, a decision, a choice. Who you are doesn't stem from what you know, or what you've done, but on what you plan and what you do next. Who you are is not where you've been, it's where you are going. So .. how do you change where you are going?
You have to root up old values and replace them with new values, and you have to practice living in alignment with them, rather than in alignment with all your old junk. If you want to progress, the first thing to do is write down a list of those things that are important to you, those things that you really want. Dig deep and go really down into it. Really feel your emotional connection to each goal, and if you can't summon the passion for them, then ask yourself, "Is it really a goal I want?" If the answer is no, then drop the goal, without even looking back. It's not for you, and it never should have been. Then using that list, make another list of the things currently in your life that are stopping you from obtaining those goals. Things, people, personality quirks you have, and beliefs you are ingrained with that hold you back. Ask yourself, "I want <blah>, what's stopping me?" then write what you think of. You will end up with two lists, the first representing a path to plan out, and the second representing those parts of yourself to discard, and by that, make the conscious choice to honour the first list over the second. Every time you catch yourself on the second list, think of something on the first list you are more empowered by. There's of course way more to it than this small review, but you can see what I'm getting at.
After all this psychoanalysis, you have it all figured out, but you haven't got a path, no destination, and the traps under your feet are still there. Until you have something pulling you up and out, forward into the life you want, your past will mire you down. Until you make the choice to leave the past in the past where it belongs, and decide to create a different future, filled with things that are important to you, then the past will continually slow you down.
So, what's important to you? |