Stop Doing That Sh*t

Gary John Bishop

• Verlag: Thorsons
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780008344429
• Thema: Crescita personale
• Thema: Salute mentale e benessere

From the author of the New York Times and international bestseller Unfu*k Yourself Gary John Bishop presents a no-holds-barred guide to breaking through our cycles of self-sabotage to get what we want out of life.

05

A Throne of Throwns

Ultimately, who is to blame solves nothing. All it does is explain and keep you stuck.

So, you were born a willing and eager magic little sponge free of preconceptions and ready to soak up the exciting adventures of whatever life has to offer. How do we get from there, from that thirsty and enthusiastic stage, to sabotaging ourselves over and over and over?

We are going to start uncovering what got sucked up into those thirsty nooks and crannies of your subconscious. There are two pieces that set the stage for how we come to live a life of sabotage, how that magic sponge becomes heavy and weighted by significance. We’ll talk about the first piece in this chapter. And it starts by looking at what you had NO say in.

“HAD NO SAY IN!? Doesn’t that make me a victim?”

Well, yes . . . and no.

Look, I know there is stuff in your life that you were either blind to, coerced into, or forced into or any number of ways in which you don’t feel as if you had much of a choice in the matter. Fine. You’re still on the hook for the quality and success of your life in the aftermath of that stuff. Period.

It might not have been your doing, but it’s on you from this moment forward.

What I’m referring to is based on something Martin Heidegger called “thrown-ness.” These are the things in your life that you didn’t choose, didn’t pick, but were thrown into. Basically, they existed before you did, and you had to adopt them and adapt to them pretty damn quickly.

Let me explain.

I was born Scottish (we did this already, remember?). I didn’t choose that. You might have been born American, Canadian, French, Chinese, or Yemeni. No one gets to choose where or when they will be born. Nor on that fateful day had we chosen our parents or our race or our gender. There is a litany of things you had zero say in but your life is modeled around.

All of that is part of your particular thrown-ness.

Your genetics—how tall you are, what color your hair is, how far apart your eyes are—that’s part of your thrown-ness. The era you were born into, whether you’re a child of the forties or the nineties (or, God forbid, the zeros!), the financial and social status of your family when you were born, the culture, the customs, the language, all of it. Even the very notion of being a human being you had no say in. The fact that there are a sun, a moon, and stars, that there are such things as trees and a society and laws and cars and science and school and that life revolves around seasons—you were thrown into all of it, had it rammed up your nose the minute you were born, and ever since then you have had to wrestle with it to make sense of this madness!

It’s all part of your thrown-ness!

That magic little sponge of innocence arrived with a slap and a scream and was thrown into the tide of humanity and the hypnotic trance of “making it.”

You had no say in any of this, yet it doesn’t matter if you think it’s fair. It doesn’t matter if you like it, loathe it, resent it, or appreciate it. You’re here, and you’ll have to deal with it like everyone else before you and everyone after you. This is where the road to peace of mind begins. Acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t mean you agree or give up; it means you accept something for what it is and what it’s not. Period. You actually can accept what you were thrown into and live a life free from its grasp.

Acceptance is the gateway to real change. It’s also something you need to give some real thinking to. You need to deal with yourself and what you haven’t really accepted and what you’ve burdened yourself with by not accepting things as they actually are.

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Either way, you’re going to embrace all of it (every single, last drop) or you’re going to be a victim to it. There’s no in-between. Either you’ll own it or it will own you. Not all victims look like helpless souls sitting by the wayside of life and pleading for help. Many of them are successful and driven and would balk at the idea of even being called a victim.

Let me break this “thrown-ness” down a bit more. If you’re physically bigger (or shorter or wider), you might have found yourself steered to participate in certain activities at school—say, basketball or arm wrestling (okay, maybe not arm wrestling)—and encouraged to like them. If your brain is wired so that you are great at recollecting lots of data, you were most likely someone who was thrown to participate more academically.

Environmentally, maybe you’re the kid who got picked last in a sports-centric culture or struggled painfully at math in an academia-centric one. If you grew up in sunny California (the lucky location you were thrown into), you might’ve spent your childhood surfing or skateboarding with certain biases and dos and don’ts, while the kid who grew up in perpetually gray and cloudy Glasgow was inside watching TV or playing football (yes, it’s football; it’s a ball and you use your feet, for the love of God) in the pouring rain, with an entirely other set of dos and don’ts about life, people, and what’s possible.

How in the hell was any of that fair? You didn’t choose to be unathletic, or bad at math, or stuck under a giant angry cloud in Glasgow, and you certainly didn’t select “bullied” as one of your life choices either as a kid, did you? No, you didn’t, but you were thrown in there anyway. No matter where you grew and expanded, each environment was slowly shaping and molding you, and while you could see and explain some of that influence, there were other huge swathes of conditioning you were completely oblivious to. Again, no say in that either. That magic little sponge had a lot of “juice” to choose from. And boy, did it choose.

TREES? WHAT TREES?

There’s another thing you were “thrown” into. Conversations.

When I say “conversations,” it’s not just the general ones of society but also the ones specific to your family and your early environment, the ones handed down from generation to generation about every aspect of life you could care to imagine. A giant, meandering forest of opinions reaching back God knows how long into the past, and you’re so deep in it you can’t even see it. What were people talking about before and immediately after you were born?

What were the critical conversations going on around you as you grew up?

If, for instance, your parents didn’t have a lot of money (and most likely neither did their parents), you were born into their views and experiences of finances as a scarcity mind-set.

On the one hand, that might have taught you the value of a dollar and to be thankful for what you have. There are plenty of people who break out of that conversational trap and produce great wealth, but it’s far more likely you’re struggling financially within the same kind of framework your parents were in. Their struggle became part of your conversation.

You might be doing better, but you’re currently embedded within a group of unspoken financial rules and limits that you had no say in putting together. You have agreed to them, though. No one made you do that.

What if you have now become conditioned by your own agreement, to a “glass ceiling,” a limit of what you can and cannot do with money? What if your adult life is spent trying to reach for that ceiling, not only financially but in every area of your life? What if none of that “trying” was designed to actually get you there?

Self-sabotage is often what shows up when someone starts to hover near financial breakthroughs, when they’re getting close to the point of realizing their dream. At this point they realize they’ll have to figure out a new, unrecognizable life. Somehow, by seemingly (to them) bad luck or coincidence, they stumble at the last minute and begin to undermine their progress and make the kinds of choices that undo all they were striving for. They return to living within that inherited range of what’s possible. The range of the certain.

I’ve had clients who have built fortunes many times over. A lifetime of trying to get there, fleetingly getting there, and then crashing, over and over. You’ve had your own version of this in your life too.

Human beings are much more engrossed with the task of getting to the goal than actually achieving it or, God forbid, facing the horror of having to permanently deal with life AFTER they’ve done the something they’d always wanted to do.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, as a group we are seemingly drawn much more to the struggle than to the prize. That’s why, after you succeed, back into the struggle you go. At least that also might start to explain why some people, after accomplishing great things, the fulfillment of long-held dreams and fantasies, follow a path of self-destruction in one way or another to return themselves to their own personal struggle. The history of Hollywood scandal bulges with such tales.

An old coach of mine once asked me, “How good can you stand it?” I couldn’t answer him; I had never really considered the idea that there was a “good” beyond the one I was aiming for.

So, how good can you stand it? You might well shock yourself with the answer to that one. If you can tell yourself the truth, that is. The life you currently have would be a clue.

THE SINKING OF THE USS CONVERSATION

Those conversations you were thrown into covered every subject of life and, unbeknownst to you, became an important part of what ultimately set the tone for your life of self-sabotage.

Relationships, love, friendships, success, what’s good, what’s bad, politics, sex, race, faith, you name it, and all fully in existence before you even got here. Some of it was healthy, some of it unhealthy. Some of it was appropriate, some of it wildly inappropriate. Whether your family talked about these subjects openly and in detail or hardly ever or in very vague terms, they all played their part in shaping who you are to one degree or another. As you’re probably now realizing, that kind of experience has had a huge impact on you. The impact continues and is still happening every minute of every day and in every area of your life.

You’re not unique in this regard. It’s the same for every human being on the face of the planet and the ones yet to come.

The adults (and some of the children) from your childhood inadvertently rained wisdom down on your young ears, a wisdom that you turned either for or against yourself. But where is all that stuff you heard located? I mean, most of your childhood is all just a blurry mess of thoughts, dreams, and smells that occasionally spring to life when you pass the old neighborhood donut shop or hear your dad’s voice when he shouts at the TV. So where did it go?

It sank. It was gulped beneath the waves of your conscious thinking and was swallowed up by the unimaginable depths of the Mariana Trench of your subconscious. And there it all sits. To this day.

I mean, right now it just seems that you’re living your life—acting on what’s in front of your face, getting things done, watching TV, fiddling around on the internet, meeting people, paying bills (or not), driving your car, going on vacations, making friends, playing sports, reading, writing, daydreaming, getting high, getting drunk, getting off, getting mad—and that none of this old stuff is impacting you at all.

There’s plenty of information out there about the degree to which your everyday life is lived at a less than conscious level. Most of it points to the idea of your everyday actions being driven by some unnoticed and subconscious urge or drive for anywhere between 95 percent and 99 percent of the time.

In a paper published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences,^* a group of researchers, led by associate professor of psychology Ezequiel Morsella of San Francisco State University, took on the question of exactly what consciousness actually is—and came up with a decidedly gloomy view: It’s pretty much nothing. You barely control your conscious thoughts at all; it’s the unconscious that’s really in charge.

Carl Jung, considered by many to be one of the fathers of modern psychiatry and psychology (I prefer to see him as a philosopher and visionary, but hey ho), would have referred to your subconscious as the unconscious. It sounds a bit different when you say you’re unconscious for most of your life, huh?

Like you’re checked out.

In other words, you’re running around on autopilot almost all of your day, even with those “mindfulness” practices you’ve been taking on! It seems like you are in charge, you feel like you’re a conscious being, but the reality is, you’re not. You’re in a haze of automatic thoughts and behaviors masquerading as awareness. T...