Dear James:

About feeling awkward about blaming your parents- my goal is only to promote seeing the truth for what it is because seeing it will help your mental health. Seeing the truth for what it is will heal you. If you don’t – nothing will.

It is necessary to look at what messages your parents gave you so to understand the messages that still run you, that subconscious you referred to. These messages that run your life (and not to your advantage!)- are the same messages given to you by your parents. This is so because you were not born with messages. Your brain was a clean slate. Then came the messages by the most important people in your life, those who handled you when your brain was forming.

You wrote a couple of posts back: “Whenever I consider any activity that involves other people… I feel the vice around my chest and my muscles tense up (they’ve also started uncontrollably twitching at times, which I think is stress buildup). Not just a little either, the pressure is overwhelming, and only grows if I don’t back down. But there’s no thought associated with it, it’s all subconscious. Which is troublesome. I’m trying to fight back against it, but there’s nothing to fight against.”

This is what I understand from this paragraph, and let me know if I am correct or where I am not correct:

When you consider an activity- other than the most mundane, the messages activated in your brain automatically (without “hearing” the words) are: “You are not going to do it right. You are going to mess up. You are going to fail. It is going to be terrible, failing. Danger!” Following that message, you experience the fear: your muscles tense up, you twitch, you feel pressure in your chest, a growing pressure.

There is no way to fight it. It is like having a child who is scared of doing a particular thing. If you tell the child: stop being scared! Just do it! – that won’t be effective. The child is still scared, feeling in danger, and the child will not calm down until you back down and NOT make him do what scares him.

What will work- over time- is “hearing” the messages, noticing the words, the origin of the messages (your parents), examining them for truth, learning.. The best place to do this is with a competent, caring therapist. I think Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with Mindfulness will do.

What do you think?

anita