At Bikram this morning, I worked on shifting the bottom of my left rib cage forward and out to the side. The sequence has been moving the right hip to the left using the psoas and obliques, then shifting the right hip to the left targeting the sits bone, putting more pressure on the center of the bone rather than the right side, and then opening up the rib cage on the left side. All this is part of the unwinding of my spinal curvature. I continued to work on changing the alignment of my left foot. This is causing some discomfort between the left big toe and the arch of the foot. I am assuming it is muscle strain from the different position and will resolve itself in time. It doesn't bother me at all when I am not walking.
I had a telephone appointment with my therapist at 10 am. The thing that came to mind was the little third-grade girl I am working with who is frightened of making a mistake. I know my fear. It stops me from doing so many things. With her, I worked on her fear that someone will kill her if she never learned to read, specifically her mom. She feels that her mom yells at her a lot. I have no way of verifying it, but I know how Mike and Randy's memories of their family life differ and how subjective perspectives can color reality. In helping this little girl, I don't have to know the truth. All I have to know is that she is scared. (I checked that there is no physical abuse.)
I developed a process for calming that fear over thirty years ago. Don't ask me how I came up with it, but I looked at it from the perspective of evolutionary psychology and found a solution to excessive fear. The procedure is simple.
Step 1: tell the student I am going to ask a stupid question.
I point to the front of the forehead and ask the stupid question:
"Does this part of your brain think your mother, father, teacher, etc. will kill you if you never learn to read, do math, dance, etc.? "
If the student looks uncertain, I say I am asking this part of the brain (pointing again to the front of the forehead), not this part (pointing to the back of the head). This procedure lessens the problem and often resolves it.
The basis for the question is discerning the difference between what the conscious mind knows and what the nonconscious mind thinks/believes. The students have never made this distinction before.
Step #2: Once I have established that the conscious mind is confident that they are not in danger, I tell them to picture a' little you' sitting around where the soft spot on their head is. I instruct them to have the 'little you' at that spot facing toward the back of the brain and tell every cell in the back of the brain that their life is not in danger. This may sound like the silliest thing you ever heard of, but I have had a great deal of success with it. Children generally report feelings of relaxation. They don't have to believe it works. They don't have to do anything but what I instruct them to do. It requires some imagination, but nothing else.
The only caveat to this prescription is an individual who has had their life threatened by another human being or anyone who cannot believe their life is not in actual danger. I am in that class of people. Members of my family are survivors of the Holocaust. I know in a way that bypasses the intellect that people may seek to kill me for some arbitrary reason.
I worked with a young Vietnamese man whose family went through the war. He knows that people may seek to track him down and kill him even though he wasn't born at that time. That memory was silently passed on to him from his parents and grandparents. We know it can be done through epigenetics. You can tell me and him that we are not in those circumstances now, but we understand that the circumstances are greater than some local conflict. This belief has to do with the human condition. All circumstances hold the potential of ultimate danger. Your friendly neighbor can betray you or clap their hands in relish as you are carted away. People who have this in their historical background may not respond as well to this process as those who have not. It is imperative that the person believes with their conscious mind that they are not currently in danger, and specifically not for some current failing. If someone says their conscious mind doesn't believe it, I never push it. For those who think they are safe from death despite some failing with their conscious minds, this process does wonders.
I figured if this student came to mind, it suggested something that I could work on. Fear, fear of failure, which interferes with performance or even effort. As a child sitting with my father, I can remember as he helped me with my homework, crying, "I can't do it." I know now there are many times when that feeling wells up in me, and I walk away from a task that I know perfectly well I can do. When I do healing with a client, I start by asking the person to share whatever comes to mind even if it doesn't sound relevant, or what has been most annoying recently. It always connects to something more profound.
The therapist asked me what does it feel like. I said it feels like something is welling up in my stomach, like a burp or repeating food. I so dread the feeling that I will avoid the task, preferably for FreeCell. If it rises high enough, it reaches my throat; it feels like a tightness there. I sat with that feeling.
(The following describes what was in my imagination, like a waking dream.)
When just watching that tension rise up in me, I experienced some release of the tension. It felt as if wispy smoke was coming up through my mouth. Then I said, "I release anything negative about this feeling and keep anything positive or anything I still need." With that, large blue solid objects, the shape of bolts of lightning came up. My stomach gurgled. That's always a good sign. It means there has been some relaxation; relaxation implies change. Whatever I was doing, it was working.
While the bolts of lightning came from my stomach area, a troll-like character appeared at my waistline. (Note: all these bizarre thoughts are in my imagination. I do not think they are real.) This character was one angry dude, filled with hatred. (I will expound on my theory behind this character in the musing section.) The hatred was for all humanity that didn't affirm me, approve of me, give me what I want, etc. It's the "me, my precious" part of me. It's there to protect and defend me in a hostile world. I sat with the anger.
Once I was consciously aware of the troll, I realized that I would not allow that part of me to damage others. Then that anger wasn't so scary. When I see my little girl self again, I have to show her that she will not do damage to her mom, no matter how angry she gets.
After therapy, I got to work dealing with problems with I am having with Square. I have received a few payments via debit card through them. I could find no record of the payments. Winds up, I had used the local bank instead of Raymond James. Winds up also that the bank charges me $6.00 for each direct deposit. Square made a trial deposit for $.01 to check if it worked. That cost me $6.00.I don't think so. I was able to change the account for direct deposits to Raymond James. This was one of the chores I have been putting off forever because it seemed overwhelming, even though I knew damn well I would solve it, which I did.
I spoke to an old friend from Ohio, who is a wonderful source of support for me. I also talked to Judy, who checked up that I was still alive after not speaking to me since Sunday.
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Musings:
When I spoke to my therapist about negative thinking being more prevalent in people who spent time alone. I asked her if she thought this fear was found only in people who needed therapy or more people in the population suffered. She thinks, as I do, that most people are vulnerable in this way.
As some of you already know, I view the human psyche through the lens of evolutionary psychology. This belief does not mean that I think we are ruled by our brain construct, but that we have to have an accurate view of how it works to modify or control it without doing damage to ourselves or others.
So the question came up, "Why do we sink into negative thinking when we are or feel isolated." During hunter-gather times, we all lived at a basic survival level, not unlike the way a soldier lives in combat conditions. In those circumstances, you never want to be alone. You need someone to cover your back or pull you to safety. Danger can come from anywhere.
Being alone means something is wrong. You have made a technical mistake, gone in a wrong direction, or committed a social blunder, done something that offends your group's members.
In survival circumstances, behavioral rules are very narrowly defined. There's not a lot of room for diversity. Everyone has to act in unison or else put everyone's life in danger. You can put the lives of others in danger by not conforming. Under those circumstances, the only option is for the group to press the deviant into shape or get rid of the person. The survival of everyone else depends on it. It makes sense that someone who finds themselves alone would start thinking about what they did wrong to solve the technical problem or the social one. A social threat has a more significant effect on our psyches than ones emanating from nature. We can't argue or negotiate with nature. Nature isn't judging us; nature just is. It is people who judge us as inadequate, insufficient.
A primitive man must have been scrambling to figure out what he had done wrong and how to get himself back into the good graces of his tribe. On the other hand, the tribe was posing a threat to this person's life. This threat activated our primitive minds and revved us up to fight. Anger is the evoked emotion. So while the ingrate may have understood why he/she was being reprimanded, banished, or threatened with death, they were also furious. They couldn't help but be furious as we all would if someone means us harm — a reasonable response. Therefore, the troll.
While in the modern world, many of us experience social isolation by choice: we choose to live alone; we choose not to participate in group activities. There is plenty of evidence now that social isolation is not just bad for the psyche; it's terrible for our physical health. We stop thriving.
While there is no one knocking on our door telling us we failed the most basic test of the tribe, being alone triggers this feeling. Yes, I am proposing that just being alone can do this to us. If a primitive man found himself alone, he knew he was in trouble and had to figure a way out. Being alone – or feeling socially isolated -is a trigger for negative thinking. It's our primitive brains getting to work figuring out how to get us to perform the right actions so we can get back in with the tribe and assure our survival.
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