Dear CuriousGeorge,

A few questions for you.

Do you have any friendships? People who are purely friends, mates, buddies… Do you have a social circle?

You say until recently, you did not enjoy your own company, because of dark thoughts. Is this improving?

You know your own faults – (stubborn as hell, impulsive, and irrational), so are you taking any steps to remedy these faults?

What was your childhood like, who were your role models and what were they like?

These questions might help us to understand you a bit more, and suggest ways to help.

best wishes,

Jay

Hi again, George,

Sorry it’s taken me so long to reply.

It sounds like your early experiences of life have led to the way you are and behave now, even though time has moved on.

Time can move on from living through those experiences (and some of yours sound pretty hard to have dealt with) but we can get stuck in that time warp forever. If this happens, then we continually go back and do the same things over and over again, even though we know it will not improve our relationships or our lives as a whole.

Are you having, or have you had, any quality psychotherapy or any help from a counsellor so that you can deal with those things in your past that are affecting your present way of dealing with things?

Have you taken any steps to try and erase those voids you see in your life?

I hope you can come back to me on these questions, and maybe I can help further.

Best wishes,

Jay

Hey Curiousgeorge.

First, love the name, nice choice.

One of the things that helped me a lot which you may/may not have across already is learning about & practicing recognising that your emotions are separate to you, your identity.  It may sound weird but by doing so you become increasingly aware of the gap there is between feeling something and re-acting to it. E.g. for me, if I am feeling anger or upset, I know the best thing for me is to go take a walk, calm down, get some space. That way I can then choose how I want to act – not just react to the emotion at that time.  As I’ve practiced more, the need for physical space gets less and I’m able to be aware of the feeling without necessarily accepting it as ‘true’. It’s then possible to evaluate it, see if it’s telling me something useful or not.  Look at it from different perspectives as nothing is ever black/white.

Part of being able to do that means having a good idea of what I value, what I would like to achieve. Mark Manson’s blog has some great articles on this for free, though his reading style may not be for everyone.  I can go into this more myself if you think it would be helpful.

Take care – it’s a great step to be reaching out and looking to grow.

Dear Curiousgeorge,

Wanting to grow as a person is a great thing, but before working on your habits, you need to have a basic understanding of yourself.

You yourself have express the thought that you are uncomfortable with acknowledging your emotions; your thoughts originate from your base desire. Unfortunately, emotions is one of the fundamental basis that makes up a human being. So ignoring your emotions is more detrimental than beneficial.

Your negative thoughts are not unusual, but because you fear the roots of it, you instead let them push you towards impulsive actions. Actions are spurred on by either desire or thoughts, though desire tend to take precedent more than thoughts. And most of your actions seem to stem from the fear of losing your relationship, or something along those lines. But you simply acknowledge your impulsive actions as something you do because that’s the sort of person you are. That sort of thinking can be dangerous because once you’ve labeled an identity to yourself, then you’ll likely cling to that identity regardless of how detrimental it is to you. It’s safer after all, to have an identity to describe yourself; because without it, how empty would you be?

You call yourself stubborn, impulsive and irrational, but human beings were irrational to begin with, you are not alone in that aspect. Now, what separate each person’s irrationality is motive and desire. People tend to emphasize on different things for survival or what they instinctively believe is crucial to their survival. Then they seek for those object/subject by way of their environment because it’s simply easier to seek subjects like affection or approval from other people as you might be able to actually see it lived out from them to you. But always depending on others for their affection send certain messages to them, one of which is that their value in the relationship is based on whether that person can continuously provide you a show of affection. If they can and do, then you feel that it is enough so give yourself to them in exchange. In doing so, you effectively bury yourself into being their something, an identity that you apparently take pride in. Yet, in the end, you cannot avoid the fact that you are an individual with your own needs. No matter how much you might tolerate other people’s demands, there is still a certain limit you won’t be able to pass. And when it gets to be too much, the question becomes ‘how will you act out’.

You are an irrational human being like anyone else, but that doesn’t stop you from ignoring your irrationality and rationalizing your emotions, which is what is spurring on the choices/decisions you make. There’s a difference between knowing you are irrational to accepting that irrationality. You might even use that irrationality as an excuse to not change. After all, you’ve already acknowledged that you are irrational, what more can you do? But that’s just one perspective that you may cling to. Though whether you can acknowledge that there are different ways to look at it is entirely dependent on you.

What people find the hardest to do is probably what they need to do.

Get to know yourself; acknowledge your emotions, the good and the bad. Try to not rationalize them as you being irrational, stubborn or impulsive. Emotions are simply emotions; it is your being that act on them, it is you that give them meaning. Your negative thoughts are scary, but they are your thoughts, get to know them as a friend giving another friend their shoulder and listening ear. Your thoughts do push at your insecurity and fear so you decide on how to response to them.

You can’t just change your habit, you must first change your perspective.